Haydn earned his reputation as the “father” of the string quartet the hard way: Throughout the course of his long life, he wrote no fewer than 68 quartets, as well as a number of quartet arrangements. Just as his career neatly encapsulated the Classical era, so his music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose, tempered with a playfulness and often earthy humor that have delighted audiences ever since. Blessed with a sanguine disposition, and largely unburdened by financial worries, Haydn composed with equal aplomb for amateurs and professional-caliber musicians alike. His 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. In Haydn’s hands, however, 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, thus laying the foundation for the quartets of Mozart and Beethoven.
From the time he joined Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s musical establishment in Hungary in the early 1760s, Haydn devoted the bulk of his time to composing symphonies, operas, and large-scale vocal works for performance at the court. When he took up quartet writing again in the early 1780s, after a break of some 10 years, he was motivated in part by a growing desire for international recognition and financial independence. Haydn dedicated his six Op. 33 quartets to Grand Duke Paul of Russia, hence their nickname, the “Russian” quartets. The set dates from 1781, two years after the increasingly restive composer had wriggled free of the exclusivity clause in his employment contract with the prince and began marketing his compositions directly to the public. In advertising his latest quartets to prospective customers, Haydn described them as having been written in “an entirely new, special manner.” (The works’ innovative, crowd-pleasing qualities were not lost on his young protégé Mozart, who responded by modeling his six “Haydn” quartets of 1782–1785 on Haydn’s “Russians.”) In his earlier Op. 20 quartets, the cello was still assigned a mostly supporting role. By the time Haydn wrote the Op. 33 set, however, the bass instrument had become a full and active participant in the musical argument.
Although Haydn’s sense of humor is comparatively restrained in the D-Major Quartet, he clearly had a great deal of fun playing around with the evolving conventions of the still-new string quartet genre. For example, the gracefully swinging theme of the opening Vivace assai, in 6/8 time, consists of two four-bar phrases, the second an embellished version of the first. So far, so familiar. It’s when Haydn proceeds to break the theme down into its constituent elements, combining and recombining them by dint of his inexhaustibly fertile imagination, that things start to get more complicated and interesting. The D-minor slow movement is similarly inventive, with the first violin’s long-held notes blossoming into florid tendrils of melody that are supported by plangent harmonies and dissonances in the lower voices. The Scherzo, impeccably mannerly yet ever so slightly bumptious, leads to another variation-form finale—this time a set of double variations (A-B-A-B-A) in which each of the two alternating themes returns in varied guises.
Op. 33, No. 1 stands apart as the only one of the six quartets in a minor key. (In fact, the B-Minor Quartet was No. 3 in the first edition of the Op. 33 set, leaving some doubt as to Haydn’s intentions with regard to ordering.) As a result, the two outer movements in particular are exceptionally dark and weighty in tone. In other respects, however, the work exhibits all the hallmarks of Haydn’s “new, special manner,” above all the easygoing repartee among the four players, each of whom gets a slice of the thematic pie. The quartet abounds in surprising juxtapositions, such as the abrupt dynamic shifts in the Allegro moderato and the first violin’s explosive outburst of virtuosic passagework in the Finale, for which the movement’s low-key opening has left us totally unprepared. Haydn sprinkles the score with momentary pauses and hesitations, often in unexpected places, that interrupt the music’s momentum and teasingly thwart the listener’s expectations. The propulsive Scherzo is another novel feature (most of the dance movements in Haydn’s Op. 20 quartets are labeled minuets); the modulation from minor to major in the middle section is accentuated by the contrasting characters of the triple-time themes, the first bouncy and angular, the second smooth and sedate.
The sobriquet traditionally attached to the C-Major Quartet, “The Bird,” is usually said to derive from the chirping grace notes that adorn the two principal themes of the opening Allegro moderato. (None of the quartets’ descriptive nicknames, it should be noted, originated with Haydn, so any extramusical associations should be treated with due caution!) But the avian connection could just as well have been suggested by the perky trills in the middle section of the Scherzo; by the sweetly warbling coloratura in the Adagio ma non troppo, an extended arioso in F major for the first violin; or by what the Brentano Quartet’s Mark Steinberg identifies as “the trademark call of the cuckoo” in the rollicking finale. The latter, along with the last movements of the quartets in E-flat Major and B-flat Major, attests to Haydn’s success in exploiting the popular appeal of rondo form, in which a short, catchy refrain alternates with music of a more elaborate character. Like the other five works in the Op. 33 set, the C-Major Quartet partakes of the antic spirit that Haydn had cultivated in the comic operas to which he had devoted much of the preceding decade: the bravura finale ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The opening Allegro moderato of the B-flat–Major Quartet is once again characterized by unpredictable twists and turns, with its crisp, mock-martial theme, playful starts and stops, and vivid contrasts of dynamics and articulation. The second-movement Scherzo could more aptly be described as a comically lumbering waltz; the incongruous midsection, in yearning B-flat minor, anticipates the sunnier, more relaxed lyricism of the ensuing slow movement in E-flat major. Listen for the cello’s undulating 16th-note figures in the Largo, which form a restless and vaguely ominous current beneath the placid surface of the slower-moving upper voices. The zestful, rondo-form Finale abounds in boisterous high-spirits, more thwarted expectations, and another whimsically unconventional dénouement. (Spoiler alert: It involves the use of plucked strings, or pizzicato.)
The Vivace assai of the G-Major Quartet begins and ends quietly, with a rising four-note motto that greets us like an upbeat “How do you do?” (In this case, the popular nickname only makes sense in four-syllable English.) Thereafter the theme’s distinctive melodic and rhythmic profile pops up again and again throughout the four-voice texture, darting from voice to voice and register to register before transforming itself into a restful valedictory in the final unison cadence. Haydn reverses the customary order of the two middle movements, beginning with an impassioned and highly soloistic Largo in G minor—complete with a written-out cadenza near the end—in which the first violin alternately scales the heights and plumbs the depths of its range. But the pathos of the slow movement is saucily subverted by the Scherzo, which derives much of its off-kilter energy from the metrical ambiguity of the main theme. The Finale, a set of variations on a lilting triple-time tune, unfolds in a leisurely succession of eight-bar phrases that culminates in a final presto sprint to the finish line.
The first violin starts the ball rolling in Op. 33, No. 2, with an amiable melody in E-flat major whose signature motif—a brisk upbeat figure comprised of two rising 16th notes—will underpin the Allegro moderato as a whole. With characteristic economy, Haydn ingeniously varies and extends this simple thematic idea, transferring it from one voice and register to another in a lighthearted game of hide and seek. The jovial Scherzo is equally sophisticated in its unassuming way: Haydn plays with the eight-bar phrase structure by periodically inserting “extra” bars that disrupt the pattern of predictable symmetry and regularity. The Largo sostenuto in B-flat major picks up on the Scherzo’s triple meter, but now in a radiantly lyrical vein, with sudden dynamic contrasts and sharply accentuated syncopations injecting a hint of drama. Haydn further turns convention on its head by having the two lower instruments introduce the sweetly majestic theme of the slow movement. Listen for the half-step oscillations in the accompanying voices, which provide another subtle thematic link to the Scherzo. The high-spirited Finale is the first violin’s show from start to finish, right up to the whimsical “false” endings that give the quartet its nickname, “The Joke.”
—Harry Haskell