Haydn Quartet Project, Op. 50/1 and Op. 2/6

Sometime early in 2011, I formed the idea of playing all 68 of Haydn’s string quartets.  With the help of a lot of willing, wonderful musicians, I’ve made faster progress than I ever thought possible.  I had started 2011 with two of Haydn’s quartets played; I ended the year with 54!

I wish I had been blogging during this project, because I found the experience fascinating.  One might not think that there could be that much variety in so much music, for the same combination of four similar instruments, written by a composer perhaps more famed for his quantity than his quality.  Perhaps all areas of life, if studied closely, would enable one to become a connoisseur.  But I’ve been continually struck by Haydn’s inventiveness; each quartet is unique, often in surprising ways.

There are many reasons to love Haydn’s string quartets.  Of course, his humor is paramount.  I seldom laugh while playing any other composer’s music; I laugh all the time playing Haydn.  And all the quartets are mature music: none written before he was twenty, and half of them after he reached the age of fifty.  As I get older, I find comfort in the idea that, like Haydn, my best years could still be ahead of me, rather than behind.

The first quartet I played this year, the morning of New Year’s Day, is a wonderful example of what makes Haydn great.  Opus 50, No. 1, in B-flat, written by 1787, the first of the set of six nicknamed “Prussian”.  The first movement starts with a theme that only Haydn would be brave enough to use: eight identical quarter notes by the cello alone.  When the other three instruments enter, they form a dissonance with the cello, which keeps repeating the same note; the others eventually resolve.  This minimal motive gets passed around from instrument to instrument, tying the whole movement together.

The second movement is one of Haydn’s gems, a simple melody, increasingly embroidered, supported by beautiful lower-string sonorities.  The Trio of the Minuet (has anyone ever counted how many minuets Haydn wrote?) has a rhythmic trap for the players that we fell into repeatedly as we tried to read it.  I think we got it right in the end, but it took some work.  And laughter.

The final movement is an absolute gem.  A silly little rondo-like theme, but when it comes back, all of the sudden we have a fugue.  And finally, Haydn gives us one of his famous head-fakes: a three-bar rest, followed by the first violin giving three eighth-note pickups to one more iteration of the silly theme.  I was almost on the floor, laughing.

The quartet Op. 2, No. 6 isn’t up to the level of the later ones.  Haydn himself expressed the opinion that his earliest quartets shouldn’t be included in the complete collection.  They tend to be very light pieces, and the viola and cello in particular don’t have much to do.  There’s a lot of passage work where the viola and cello are in octaves, or even in unison, very difficult to pull off, but not very rewarding.  Still, there are moments of beauty, and many unexpected phrases and ordering of themes.

One amusing thing about Op. 2/6: the second minuet is in B-flat major, but the trio is in B-flat minor without any notated change of key.  Perhaps Haydn didn’t want to scare off potential players by having five flats in the key signature.