Haydn, unfinished quartet in D minor, Op. 103

Last night, I read through the last of Haydn's string quartets, the unfinished Op. 103.  Originally, Haydn had been commissioned to write a set of six quartets for Count Lobkowicz, but he completed only two, in G major and F major, and the middle two movements of a quartet in D minor, before becoming too old and ill to be physically able to continue composing.  The two complete quartets were published as Op. 77; the incomplete one later as Op. 103.

This was the last quartet in another way: with this reading, I have completed my goal of playing all 68 of Haydn's quartets, a goal I set for myself early in 2011, when I'd played only a couple of them.  This has been an incredible musical journey.  I can't express how much I've learned, and how much greater an appreciation I now have for Haydn as a composer.

I think the most impressive thing about Haydn is, that as long as he lived, and as much music as he wrote, he never "phoned it in": he was always exploring new ideas, new ways of writing music.  His productive life spans most of the classical period, and in some ways it seems to me that it was Haydn's spirit that was pushing forward to Romanticism.

To take just one example of Haydn's development over his career: one of the ways people suggest for telling the music of Haydn from that of Mozart is chromaticism; Mozart's music tends to be more chromatic than that of Haydn.  And that's true for most of Haydn's life, but by the end, he incorporates more and more of the spirit of Mozart in this way.  Listen to the minuet of Op. 103: it practically slithers!

Another amazing thing about Haydn is just how varied his music is, and in how many ways he was ahead of his contemporaries.  Four-bar and eight-bar phrases are pretty standard in Western music, but Haydn's phrase-lengths are much more variable.  I doubt you could dance to any of the minuets in his string quartets!  And we all learn about sonata form in school: first theme, second theme, exposition, development, recapitulation.  And that holds well from Mozart to Mahler.  But so many of the Haydn movements that are supposed to be in sonata form don't hold up to this model; there's no second theme, or the themes are scrambled in the recap.  Haydn makes it all work; maybe it's just his genius that later composers found unable to imitate, sticking to a closer adherence to the model.

In any case, I recommend the Haydn project to any string quartet player (although you could start with Opus 9 and get most of the enjoyment out of the process that I did, without annoying your cellists :-)  And I'd like to thank all the players who helped me achieve this goal!