PROGRAM NOTES

String Quartet No. 60 in G Major, Op. 76, No. 1

Joseph Haydn

Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna

In 1795, Joseph Haydn returned from his second visit to London and settled in Vienna to live out his remaining years as music’s grand old man, the greatest living composer. Mozart, whom he had so greatly admired, had died too young four years before, and Beethoven, who was to be the leader of the next generation (and of the entire next century), was only the musical season’s best debutante. England had showered wealth and honors on Haydn, and he had lingered there for two months after his last concert, before going home to the Continent. By the standards of the time, Haydn was an old man, 63. What no one knew was how different the work of his last years would be from what he had written before. He had written more than a hundred symphonies, but after the dozen masterpieces that he had composed expressly for his London audiences, he never wrote another. Yet with the new knowledge of Handel’s oratorios that Haydn had acquired in London, he modernized and revitalized that form in his own oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons. He also wrote six masses and some other sacred music for the princely Esterházy family for whom he had served as staff conductor and composer for 30 years. Haydn’s greatest music until this time had always been found in his instrumental works, but in his last years, he wrote little except a few string quartets, music that summed up a lifetime of supreme invention.

In 1797, he composed six quartets, Op. 76, works with controlled freedom and rich instrumental texture so modern some historians said they anticipated Brahms. Count Joseph Erdödy, Chamberlain and Privy State Counselor to the Emperor, commissioned the Op. 76 Quartets and, of course, Haydn dedicated them to him. The Erdödys were an important family, noble and musical, related by marriage to Haydn’s former employers, the Esterházys. Count Ladislaus Erdödy is listed among the subscribers to Mozart’s Vienna concerts in l783, and Beethoven dedicated his two Trios, Op. 70 (1808), and two Cello Sonatas, Op. 102 (1815), to his pupil, Countess Maria, wife of Count Peter Erdödy. Haydn began another quartet in 1803 but gave up after two movements, which he allowed to be published in 1806 with the apologetic message, “All my strength is gone; I am old and weak.”

In this first quartet of the series, Haydn appears to be consolidating ground he had newly gained in the string quartet form; here everything is condensed and intensified, and Haydn’s expression has become more direct and personal. The first movement, Allegro con spirito, begins with a cello announcing the opening theme after powerful, triple introductory chords. Until this time, it had been traditional for the first violin to declare the opening theme, although occasionally other voices were substituted. Here Haydn emphasizes all three of the lower voices before allowing the first violin to enter in a contrapuntal line. This movement is very vocal sounding and is built from the quiet and casual cello melody, which the viola answers. After Haydn works with two voices, he brings the other two in to join in a quartet. A deceptively simple melody that sounds like a folk song turns out to have contrapuntal implications that he exploits with great wit and technical skill. Throughout the movement, Haydn juxtaposes the sonorities of the full quartet against those of the vocal-sounding independent lines of counterpoint, especially dominant in the development section with the music of enormous variety. In contrast with the complex counterpoint, he has created powerful passages that are played in unison and octaves. Sudden changes in dynamic level as well as in texture add power to the expressivity of the music.

The second movement, Adagio sostenuto, features a marvelous song written in a very free rondo form in which modulations alternate with the melody. Arthur Cohn notes, “the manipulation of offbeats” originally gave this quartet a nickname, the Farmyard, which has “fortunately not stayed with the quartet, because of its almost cackling effect.” The third movement, Menuet, a Presto, has two parts. The principal section is actually too quick for a minuet and is really almost a scherzo, anticipating the music of Beethoven, with its witty irregular phrases, instead of the usual courtly minuet found in this position. The contrasting trio section has a calmer pace and is a ländler, a peasant dance that Haydn often used in other quartets and in his symphonies, with accompanying guitar-like plucked chords. The last movement, Finale — Allegro ma non troppo, has a dominating triplet rhythm. This movement begins in G minor, but Haydn does not write it in the minor tonality to alter the dominant mood of the composition; rather, in the second half of the movement, he returns to the major mode so that the quartet begins and ends in the same key. Although during Haydn’s time, it was customary to end a quartet in a major key if the first movement began in the minor, here Haydn is playing with that tradition. He sets contrapuntal textures in contrast with strong unisons, and as the music flashes by, powerful rhythmic figures turn into simple melodies. Perhaps he is trying to make the listener aware of the fresh coloration of the final tonality when the main theme returns over a pizzicato accompaniment. The quartet ends with the same three chords that had begun it.

String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3

Robert Schumann

Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich

Robert Schumann’s father was a small-town bookseller who encouraged his son’s inclination toward the arts. At the age of 6, the boy began to play the piano and compose. By the time he was 14, he had begun to write poetry, and some of his works had been published. At 18, he entered Leipzig University as a law student, but the call of music was too strong for him to resist, and in his third year, he abandoned the university, determined to become a great pianist. When his hand was permanently injured from the too strenuous and incorrect use of it, he gave up the hope of a career as a performer, turned to composition, and wrote several brilliant collections of short, descriptive, and atmospheric piano pieces that established his position as Germany’s leading composer.

In 1838, Schumann wrote to Clara Wieck, who was later to be his wife, “The piano has become too limited for me.” He confided that he had begun working on ideas for string quartets. In 1839, he mentioned quartet writing again in letters to a friend, adding that he was “living through some of Beethoven’s last quartets.” In 1840, the year of his marriage, he wrote almost nothing but songs, more than 130 of them, in a great outpouring of love. His attention was diverted to the orchestra in 1841 when he wrote four symphonic compositions and the first movement of his Piano Concerto. In 1842, he finally put other work aside to concentrate on chamber music. That April, he ordered scores of all the Mozart and Beethoven quartets available and then studied them for two months. In a furious burst of creative energy between June and October, he composed three string quartets, a piano quartet, and a piano quintet.

The quartets are Schumann’s only chamber music without a piano. He finished the first one on June 24th and the second on July 5th. By this time, the third quartet must have been very nearly fully formed in his mind; it took only a few days after this for him to set it down on paper. On July 22nd, the quartet was complete. On September 13th, Clara’s 23rd birthday, four friends came to the Schumann home in Leipzig to play through the set of three quartets. Ferdinand David, the concertmaster of the Gewandhaus (“Draper’s Hall”) Orchestra, for whom Mendelssohn would later compose his Violin Concerto, took the first violin part. At David’s house, on September 29th, the three quartets were repeated for a little audience of friends, Mendelssohn among them. After each reading, Schumann made minor revisions, and in February 1843, the quartets were published with a dedication to Mendelssohn. Ten years later, Schumann made a gift of the sketches for these works to his young disciple, the 20-yearold Johannes Brahms, who left them, upon his death, to Joseph Joachim, the great violinist who had introduced him to Schumann.

Quartet No. 3 is the largest of the three and, for many listeners, the most accomplished. It opens with a few, slow introductory measures, Andante espressivo, in which a vaguely questioning fragment of a melody is played three times and then is answered in the main section of the movement, Allegro molto moderato. The falling two-note figure from the introduction is an important element of the new melodic material here. It becomes one of the most important musical ideas discussed at length in the course of the movement’s development. Next comes a fast movement, Assai agitato, with the function of a scherzo but in the form of a theme, variations, and coda. The subject, first heard restlessly syncopated, is not plainly stated until the slow contrapuntal variation. The slow movement, Adagio molto, is one of Schumann’s tender, passionate expressions, an extended song heard in alternation with contrasting material. The Finale, Allegro molto vivace, is a vigorous, free rondo.

String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11 (“Accordion”)

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg

As a young man, Tchaikovsky seemed to be destined for an undistinguished career as a low-level bureaucrat; he did not start to study music seriously until he was 21 years old. Two years later, Nicolai Rubinstein helped find him some beginning pupils, so that he could devote his full time to music, and by 1866, he was well enough trained to join the faculty of the new Conservatory that Rubinstein started in Moscow. Before long, he was also working on such large- scale compositions as his first symphony, an opera, a piano sonata, and the first version of Romeo and Juliet

After a very expensive trip to Western Europe in 1870, Tchaikovsky decided to take Rubinstein’s suggestion that he try to make some money by giving a concert of his own music. He engaged some locally popular singers to perform several short works, but decided that the instrumental music would be represented by a string quartet that he would write for the occasion since he could not afford to engage an orchestra.

He went to work immediately on this, the first string quartet he would write, completing it in February 1871. At the March 28th concert, it was performed in public for the first time by four of the composer’s colleagues on the conservatory faculty. The concert’s greatest success, however, was in public relations rather than in music. Ivan Turgenev, who was considered to be one of the greatest Russian writers, although he had lived abroad during much of his adult life, made an appearance at the concert. He arrived too late to hear the quartet, but it was said that he had come because of Tchaikovsky’s high reputation in the West. The quartet later had another famous literary admirer in Leo Tolstoy, who sat beside the composer at a concert performance given in 1877. “Probably never in my life as a musician,” Tchaikovsky reported, “have I felt so flattered and so proud of my work as when Tolstoy, sitting beside me and listening to the Andante, burst into tears.” Later, alas, the composer was perturbed to discover that the great Tolstoy reportedly had terrible taste in music.

Interest in this quartet has long centered on the almost too-popular slow movement, which now exists in hundreds and hundreds of versions. Its main theme is a Russian or Ukrainian folk song that Tchaikovsky had first noted during the summer of 1869 when he heard it sung by a workman at the country estate of a relative. The original words are said to have begun, “Vanya is sitting and smoking.” In some versions, he is said to be drinking. In either case, it was an activity that hardly seems to be as highly charged with emotion as it is given in Tchaikovsky’s version of it. Later, Tchaikovsky’s benefactress, Nadezhada von Meck, with whom he carried on a strictly epistolary intimacy, wrote that it affected her as a glass of strong drink might, and when she played it on the piano, “at the end, this music sent a shiver through me from head to foot.”

Elsewhere in the quartet, Tchaikovsky was striving to write in the spirit of his idols, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, the romantic Classicists, and the classical Romantics. The first movement, Moderato e semplice (“moderate and simple”), runs its course with two themes whose pulses are so flexible that one quickly loses track of meter and rhythm. The themes are developed with power and skill and then brought back again.

The second movement is the famous Andante cantabile already mentioned. Its contrasting second theme with the pizzicato accompaniment is one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest inventions. Next comes a lively Scherzo, Allegro non tanto, with a contrasting central section; the quartet closes with a grand Finale, Allegro giusto, which is a classical rondo-sonata combination using original tunes in folk character to make its way to the grand closing coda, Allegro vivace

— Program notes © Susan Halpern, 2023