Charles Burney, the industrious chronicler of 18th-century music, lauded Haydn’s Op. 76 quartets as “full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects.” By the time the set was published in 1799, such tributes to the composer’s seemingly unaging creativity were commonplace. Since the death of his longtime patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in 1790, Haydn had taken out a new lease on life, spreading his artistic wings and writing in a more extraverted, crowd-pleasing style that reflected the growing public demand for his music. Although his phenomenal productivity was slowing down, the six Op. 76 quartets, composed in the mid-to-late 1790s, betray no sign of flagging energy, much less invention.
The Op. 76 quartets are more or less contemporary with Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, and like that masterpiece, are notably adventurous in their handling of thematic material, harmony, texture, and timbre. The C-Major Quartet takes its name from the popular “Emperor’s Hymn” that Haydn wrote for the 29th birthday of Emperor Francis II, which was celebrated at Vienna’s Burgtheater on February 12, 1797. The composer was so enamored of his little tune that he used it as the basis of a set of variations in the slow movement of his quartet. Contemporary listeners would have known by heart the text that begins, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (“God save Emperor Francis”).
The terse C-major theme of the Allegro is answered by rising scales in crisp dotted rhythms, and the interplay between these two ideas provides abundant fodder for this playfully ingenious sonata-form movement. Somewhat unexpectedly, Haydn repeats the second section, no doubt aware that it contained an embarrassment of riches. (Listen for the folk-like passage just before the recapitulation, complete with hurdy-gurdy effects.) In the slow movement, the four instruments take turns playing Haydn’s noble G-major hymn, while the others entwine it with intricate variations. The Menuetto is enlivened with snap rhythms, syncopations, and an unusually substantial trio section. The bravura Finale starts in high tragic mode, with slashing C-minor chords and plenty of Sturm und Drang, before making its way back to the home key through an extended interlude in E-flat major.
Bartók was born in Transylvania in 1881 and died 64 years later in New York City. In a manner of speaking, he was exiled twice—first from his homeland, and later from his time. Although Bartók’s music is rooted in Middle European folk traditions and late–19th-century Impressionism, it was forged in the crucible of early–20th-century modernism. Many of his early works are suffused with the melodies, rhythms, and colors of the Hungarian and Balkan peasant music that he collected as a pioneering ethnomusicologist. By contrast, his boldly expressionistic masterpieces of the 1930s and ’40s, such as the Violin Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra, exude the restless, tormented spirit of W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety.
The six quartets that Bartók composed between 1908 and 1939 chart a course from the warm-blooded exuberance of his early period to the bleak pessimism of his later works. His First Quartet was so far ahead of its time that it had to wait nearly two years for its first performance. The Second Quartet won acceptance more readily: Completed in 1917, it had its premiere in Budapest on March 3, 1918. Both performances were given by the celebrated quartet led by Hungarian violinist Imre Waldbauer, an ensemble that championed Bartók’s music long before others took it up. Published in 1920, the String Quartet No. 2 was recorded in 1925 by the Amar Quartet, in which Paul Hindemith played the viola. It was the first of Bartók’s quartets to be recorded—and the last for many years thereafter.
A richly imaginative essay in instrumental colors and propulsive rhythms, Bartók’s Second Quartet reflects both his early impressionistic style and his fascination with the folk music of his native Hungary. The structure of the work is an asymmetrical triptych: Two somberly lyrical outer panels of disparate dimensions frame an expansive, dancelike Allegro that pulses with raw energy. The opening Moderato has a haunted, otherworldly quality. The plaintive, arching melody that the first violin introduces at the beginning serves as a germinal motif: Listen for its characteristic intervals throughout the movement. The middle Allegro is a tour de force of quartet writing, with its kaleidoscopic sonorities and textures and hyperkinetic, ever-changing rhythms. The muted Lento picks up where the Moderato left off; the music hovers delicately between dissonance and consonance, much as the quartet as a whole hovers over, but never quite settles into, the tonal centers of A and D.
Beethoven’s 16 string quartets have long been regarded as the Mount Everest of the genre, the pinnacle to which other composers aspired. The five quartets he composed between the summer of 1824 and the autumn of 1826 occupy a special place in his oeuvre. If the six early Op. 18 Quartets advertised his debt to his esteemed mentor Haydn, and the five quartets of his so-called middle period are steeped in the “heroic” idiom of the Third Symphony and the “Appassionata” Piano Sonata, Beethoven’s late quartets—Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135—stretched the formal and expressive language of the Classical string quartet almost to the breaking point. In these knotty, inward-looking masterpieces, passages of great tenderness and lucidity are juxtaposed with lacerating eruptions of raw emotion.
In the spring of 1825, shortly after the premiere of his Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127, Beethoven was laid low by a severe intestinal ailment. Although a strict dietary regimen soon put him back on his feet, this uncomfortable intimation of his mortality clearly made a profound impact. No sooner was the composer on the road to recovery than he applied himself to writing what he called a “sacred song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the divinity.” This deeply felt slow movement is the focal point of the A-Minor String Quartet, a work of majestic proportions and startling contrasts that anticipates the radically innovative musical language of Beethoven’s Opp. 130, 131, and 135 (all of which were completed after Op. 132).
Beethoven’s deafness had forced—or perhaps freed—him to compose with his inner ear, and it is this quality of Innigkeit, or “inwardness,” that gives the slow movement of the A-Minor Quartet its exceptional emotional intensity. The Molto adagio consists of three statements of a broad, hymn-like melody in the archaic-sounding Lydian mode (F major with B-naturals instead of B-flats), each more elaborate than the last in terms of rhythm, harmony, and voice leading. Interspersed with these spiritual meditations are passages of a more rhapsodic, almost febrile character. “Feeling new strength” (as Beethoven’s marking in the score has it), the invalid’s pulse quickens, the music now surging forward, now pulling back, until it finally comes to rest on a peaceful F-major chord. The Molto adagio is framed by a pair of sharply contrasting fast movements in A major, the first a playful Allegro, notable for the evocation of a droning hurdy-gurdy in its midsection, the second a jaunty little march that leads to an incongruously dramatic “recitative” declaimed by the first violin. The quartet’s two outer movements, both firmly anchored in A minor, mirror the soul searching of the Molto adagio. A somberly mysterious prelude, dominated by the interval of a rising and falling half-step, sets the stage for the opening Allegro, a densely argued and somewhat elliptical movement, by turns lighthearted and grimly fatalistic in mood. The final Allegro appassionato is an agitated rondo in triple time. Beethoven had once considered using the principal theme in the heroic finale of his Ninth Symphony. Here, too, the struggle between light and darkness culminates in a life-affirming, major-key ending.
—Harry Haskell