Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

String Quartet in F, Op.77, No.2

1 Allegro moderato

2 Menuetto. Presto ma non troppo - Trio

3 Andante

4 Finale: Vivace assai

April 1798 saw the first performance of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation. It was the crowning glory of his career, yet it left the sixty-six year old composer exhausted. He now confined himself to Vienna, composing a series choral works that were to round off his composing life. During the same period came a request for a set of six quartets from the young Prince Lobkowitz, who was to become one of Beethoven’s most important patrons. Indeed, two years later, in 1801, Beethoven published his ground-breaking Op.18 Quartets, also commissioned by the Prince and it is intriguing to think that Haydn worked on his Op.77 Quartets at the same period. In the event, only two of the projected six Quartets of the Op.77 were completed. Written in the year 1799, Haydn embarked on the commission with enthusiasm creating two quartets that represent a summit in his output and the quartet repertoire generally. 

The reason usually given for Haydn not completing the remainder of the set of quartets is the exhaustion he experienced after the completion of The Seasons in 1802. However, as the Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon has observed, this more likely stemmed from, “his first direct confrontation with Beethoven as a composer”. Although Haydn had maintained an uneasy relationship with the younger man since their lessons together some years earlier, the younger man had not previously directly encroached on Haydn’s territory. Haydn could not fail to have been aware of Beethoven’s quartets and admitted that he did not understand some of his music. By the time he attempted to write the third quartet of the set, in 1803, Haydn now found himself incapable of the concentration required and, after completing the two movements that constitute what is now known as his Op.103 Quartet, he added the words: “Gone is every ounce of strength; old and weak am I.”  

In the present F major Quartet, there is no sign whatsoever of such a condition; it is, in the view of many, the richest and most satisfying of all his works in this medium. The Quartet is marked by richness, clarity of texture and daring in its key relationships. It had to wait until after the publication of Beethoven’s Quartets and eventually appeared in print in 1802. 

Innovatory to the last, the forthright “march” idea that opens the quartet (Allegro moderato) also turns out to be its secondary theme (with a new idea heard against it in the first violin). The central development is amongst the boldest that Haydn ever conceived, its enharmonic changes creating an effect not unlike the skewed perspectives of Escher’s drawings or the equivalent of musical vertigo. 

Boldness also lies at the centre of the second movement Menuetto (Presto ma non troppo). Despite the marking at the head of the movement, the old minuet has all but disappeared and against its background is a sharply incisive scherzo-like movement (the technically minded will note that Haydn combines a sense of a 2/2 metre against that of 3/4). The slow third movement (Andante) commences with a duet for violin and cello, its courteous old-world style masking a radical combination of variation and rondo forms. The finale (Vivace assai) manages to combine a sense of intellectual energy with Haydn at his most relaxed and rhythmically inventive: a most satisfying and not remotely valedictory conclusion to a great journey.

CD: Kodály Quartet. Naxos 553146 (a set of all two Op 77 Quartets)

1 Allegro non troppo

2 Andante moderato 

3 Quasi Minuetto, moderato - Allegretto vivace

4 Finale: Allegro non assai

Brahms waited until the age of forty to publish his first two string quartets. Like Beethoven before him, he regarded the symphony and string quartet as the most elevated of musical forms and it was only after many years of thought and revision that he felt able to put his essays in these forms before the public. Brahms claimed, apocryphally maybe, that he had written twenty or so quartets that were destroyed before arriving at what we know today as his first two quartets, of which the present work is the second. Like the great classical composers before him, he made his debut as a composer of quartets by publishing a set of them, though not six, as in the case of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, but two. Yet for all their compositional mastery, Brahms never seems to have been wholly at home in the world of the string quartet. The two Op.51 works are earnest in character and he only returned to the genre once again, with the magnificent B flat Quartet, Op.67. 

It seems likely that the two Op.51 Quartets were already well advanced in their composition by the late 1860s and, in mid-1869, we find Brahms writing to his publisher, Simrock, to let him know that he was rehearsing some quartets in order to “make one or the other passable” for publication. The two quartets were eventually completed, for the second time (as Brahms noted) in the summer months of 1873 and after further revision, following a private performance, that they reached publication. They are dedicated to Brahms’s friend, the surgeon and keen chamber music player, Theodor Billroth, to whom the Second Symphony is also dedicated. 

The A minor Quartet is more lyrical in character than its predecessor but also more contrapuntal with, particularly, a wealth of canonic writing. It is in four movements of which the first (Allegro non troppo) sustains a mood of disturbed lyricism which, although it prevails throughout, is subject to quickly boil over into moments of passionate drama. The first four notes of the opening melody present a motif from which much of the quartet is derived. Embedded within it is the young Joachim's motto FAE (Frei aber einsam - free but lonely). Brahms countered this with a motto of his own, most notably in the Third Symphony: FAF (Frei aber froh - free but happy). We can only wonder at what the private significance of what Joachim’s motif in the context of the A minor Quartet might imply.

The second movement (Andante moderato – A major) opens with a warmly lyrical melody that Schoenberg later admired for the ingenuity of its motivic construction. A more dramatic episode briefly darkens the landscape, but its mood is quickly dispelled. The third movement (Quasi Minuetto, Moderato) looks back to the minuet form, though it is quite unlike any classical minuet. Inhabiting a strange twilight world, it is more a memory of a minuet. It frames a central scurrying quicksilver section (Allegretto vivace). The finale (Allegro non assai) opens with a strident Hungarian-style dance, eventually culminating in a tranquil duet (in canon) for the first violin and cello before the final hectic bars bring the work to an invigorating close.

Notes © Peter Reynolds

 

The members of the Benyounes Quartet hail from England, Wales and Ireland and are united by their love of chamber music and enthusiasm for communicating with audiences. They met at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2007, where they were recipients of major prizes for string quartet. Winners of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious Julius Isserlis Scholarship, the quartet continued studies at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève with Professor Gabor Takacs–Nagy. Here they were awarded the conservatoires most esteemed Prix d'Exellence for their final diploma.

The Benyounes Quartet holds the Richard Carne Junior Fellowship for String Quartet at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. They are also Quartet in Residence at Bangor University. Recently chosen as Park Lane Group Young Artists, the quartet gave their Purcell Room debut in January 2012.

The quartet has appeared in recitals for music societies and festivals across the UK and Europe. In the summer of 2010, they were invited to perform an exciting new collaborative work by young British composer Charlotte Bray in Verbier Festival, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and Aldeburgh Festival. They were invited to Dartington Summer Music as string quartet in residence, and have appeared at West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Bellerive Festival, Switzerland. Other notable performances in the 2010/11 season included recitals at the Bridgewater Hall, St James Piccadilly and a tour of South West Scotland. 2012 holds performances at St. Martin in the Fields, LSO St. Luke's and the Southbank Centre, and they will perform a collaborative project for British Dance Edition.

The quartet have studied on the ProQuartet-CEMC program offering them the opportunity to work with Eberhard Feltz and members of the Alban Berg quartet. They were selected to attend IMS Prussia Cove and the Britten-Pears International Academy of String Quartets, and have participated in masterclasses with György Kurtág, Andras Keller, David Waterman and Christoph Richter. The quartet also receives regular coaching from Quatuor Ebene. 

The quartet continues to broaden its repertoire by initiating collaborative chamber music and cross-arts projects, and has recently founded Quercus Ensemble, a mixed chamber music group based in Northern Ireland.

 

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