Joseph Haydn earned his reputation as the father of the string quartet the hard way: Over the course of his long life, he wrote no fewer than 68 quartets, as well as a number of quartet arrangements. Unburdened by financial worries for the most part and blessed with a sanguine disposition, he composed with equal aplomb for amateurs and professional-caliber musicians alike. Haydn’s earliest quartets, dating from the 1750s, are closely related to the string sonatas, sinfonias, and lightweight divertimenti adored by fashionable European audiences of the day. In these works, the cello was still largely confined to continuo-style harmonic accompaniment, but in Haydn’s hands, both the bass line and the two inner voices became increasingly independent. In the democratizing spirit of the Enlightenment, he gradually worked out a style in which the four instruments were more or less equal partners.
From the time he joined Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s musical establishment in Hungary in the early 1760s, Haydn composed chamber music alongside symphonies, operas, and large-scale vocal works for performance at the court. In the late 1780s, he wrote a remarkable number of string quartets, turning out three sets of six in quick succession, culminating with Op. 64 in 1790. Haydn’s service effectively came to an end when his employer died that fall. Released from a position that had become more of a burden than an honor, he snapped up an invitation from impresario Johann Peter Salomon and embarked on the first of two extended trips to London, from which he would return in 1795 to close out his days in Vienna. The six Op. 64 quartets were published in England in 1791–1792 and first performed under Haydn’s direction on Salomon’s popular concert series.
Like audiences today, Haydn’s contemporaries warmed to the mixture of wit and sophistication that characterizes the Quartet in B-flat Major. The first and last movements are based on two versions of the same rollicking theme, built around a pattern of three smoothly gliding eighth notes that ends in a snappy melodic curlicue. And both are propelled by a pulsating rhythmic figure that lends a deceptive air of regularity to music that continually threatens to run off the rails. The two middle movements are no less richly stocked with invention. The Adagio features a broad, foursquare melody in radiant E-flat major; when the theme returns, after a brief excursion into the minor mode, it is subtly transformed by triplet rhythms—a contrast that Haydn echoes in the impishly displaced downbeats of the Menuetto.
Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Nas and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Latin Mass for the Dead. The 2022–2023 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago under the rubric Proximity.
Shaw describes the first installment of Microfictions as “a set of six short musical stories, in the tradition of imagist poetry and surrealist painting, inspired in part by the work of Joan Miró and the short science fiction of T. R. Darling.” Like the microfictions Darling publishes on Twitter, Shaw’s musical vignettes are based on one or two simple musical ideas and designed, in Darling’s words, “to inspire the imaginations of others.” As for Miró, he, like Shaw, was a musical magpie. A recent exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was accompanied by soundtracks selected by the artist’s grandson, an eclectic playlist ranging from Monteverdi, Mozart, and Felix Mendelssohn to Stravinsky, Satie, and Stockhausen. The Miró Quartet’s eponymous artist testified that music and nature were the wellsprings of a new stage in his work that began in 1939: “It was about the time that the war broke out. I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.”
In its extreme compression and economy of means, Microfictions harks back to Webern’s revolutionary Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1909. As Darling points out, coming up with ideas is the easy part; squeezing them into the microfiction format is “like Cinderella’s sisters trying on the glass slipper.” Shaw’s quartet comprises six movements of contrasting textures, energy levels, and sonic densities. In the first, the top three voices move in synchronized homophony, while the cello lays down a hollow-sounding foundation of open fifths. The second movement features throbbing eighth notes in all four parts, while the third is an essay in looping arpeggiations, its midsection characterized by Shaw’s distinctive multilayered rhythms. Her fourth “musical story” contrasts static sustained chords with brief, firefly-like flickerings. In the fifth movement, the lower strings’ relentlessly descending eighth notes seem to pull against the first violin’s soaring melodies. Microfictions ends with a slow-paced sequence of chords in which the players’ bows are first pressed tight against the strings, then slowly released, like wheezing breaths.
The period during and after Antonín Dvořák’s three-year residency in the United States, from 1892 to 1895, was conspicuously happy and productive. The popular success of his two “American” chamber works—the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, and the String Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 97, both dating from 1893—inspired him to write two more quartets in quick succession after returning to Prague in 1895. If the Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105, celebrates the composer’s homecoming in its hearty embrace of the Czech idiom, the intricate rhythms and rich harmonic coloring of the G-Major Quartet betray lingering traces of his fruitful immersion in the folk music of the so-called New World.
The opus numbers of Dvořák’s last two quartets are the reverse of their chronological order. He began sketching the Op. 105 Quartet shortly before he sailed from New York in April 1895. Once home, however, he found it difficult to concentrate, even in the seclusion of his rural retreat outside of Prague. “Here at Vysoká,” he confessed to a friend, “I grudge the time and prefer to enjoy the beauties of the countryside.” Not until that fall, after he had begun teaching again at the Prague Conservatory, did Dvořák get back to work in earnest. The composition of Op. 106 occupied him for most of November and into early December, at which point he picked up the “earlier” Op. 105 Quartet and polished it off by the end of the year.
At its premiere in Prague on October 9, 1896, the G-Major Quartet was immediately recognized as one of the composer’s greatest works, a dazzling exhibition of musical invention and technique. The vivacious Allegro moderato sets the tone: Dvořák keeps three themes in the air like a juggler, manipulating them with inexhaustible ingenuity and rhythmic verve. (At one point the instruments play four different pulses—two, three, four, and five notes per beat—simultaneously.) The expansive Adagio ma non troppo rings variations on a passionate, dark-hued theme in E-flat that flits restlessly between major and minor. The third movement is a slightly demonic scherzo in B minor, with a luminous midsection in D major reminiscent of Dvořák’s “American” style. In the Czech-flavored Finale, marked Allegro con fuoco, Dvořák brings back two themes from the first movement and juxtaposes them with fresh melodic material to generate a thrillingly paced climax.
—Harry Haskell