Haydn, String Quartet in F, Op. 74/2; Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 1 in C, Op. 49; Mendelssohn, String Quartet in a, Op. 13

One of the wonderful things about being an amateur chamber musician is that pretty frequently you have an evening of exceptional music.  To use a term from engineering, you get a positive feedback loop going, where somehow the fact that the other players are playing well helps you to play well, also.  That's what happened last night.  I had three wonderful musicians visiting me at my house, and everyone seem on top of his or her form.

We started, of course, with a Haydn quartet, the F major, Op. 74, No. 2.  A typical Haydn quartet, and, boy, did we sound good.  And we had a fun time doing it: you should have seen the smile on the first violinist's face when she played the cadenza in the last movement.  But this quartet made me a little sad, as do all six of the Op. 71/74 set, and the reason is in the first few measures.

See, I'm very firmly an amateur musician, and one of the things that draws me to chamber music is that it has a strong thread throughout history of being music for amateurs to play together.  Schubert's early string quartets were written for his family quartet (Schubert on viola, his brothers on violin, his father on cello).  Brahms dedicated his string quartets to notable amateurs.  And Haydn's string quartets started out as amateur music: as I recall, there's no evidence that any of his quartets were performed at Eszterhazy while he was in charge of music there.

But when Haydn visited London, he composed the six quartets of Op. 71/74 specifically for public performance.  All six of them start with an attention grabber, an introduction that supposedly gets the audience to quiet down before the real quartet starts (although in this quartet, the introduction's theme shows up again at the end of the movement).

So with this set of six quartets, Haydn launches the thread of quartets-as-public-performance-pieces.  And that's what makes me a little sad; I would have preferred that string quartets remained amateur music forever.

After the Haydn, we read through Shostakovich's first string quartet, the Op. 49 in C major.  There are three things that stand out in Shostakovich's quartets for me.  First, he writes great tunes. :-)  Second, he writes the most amazing viola parts.  You'd think, given all the classical composers who played viola (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak) that the viola would get more prominence in string quartets than it does, but nobody before Shostakovich really seems to get the viola.  The third thing I love about Shostakovich is his willingness to write thin textures.  You often get trios, duets, or even extended solos in his quartets, something which very seldom happened before.  Listen to the second movement of this quartet for an example of all three points.

Finally, we played one of my favorite quartets, the Mendelssohn Op. 13.  This lecture goes into detail about what makes this an amazing piece, but briefly, Mendelssohn, eighteen when Beethoven died, decided to emulate the larger-than-life composer, but not the early or middle quartets, but the late ones, at a time when many people agreed with Louis Spohr that Beethoven's late quartets were "an indecipherable, uncorrected horror".  The way Mendelssohn brings in elements from so many other genres of music, as Beethoven did, is thrilling.  And it's such a romantic piece, beginning and ending with a quote from Mendelssohn's song "The Question".  It's a good thing we were the tiniest bit ragged on the ending (we were all tired!) or I probably would have started crying.  And tears aren't good for the viola!