String Quartet in C major, Op.54, No.2 (Hob.III.57) [1788]

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

String Quartet in C major, Op.54, No.2 (Hob.III.57) [1788]

Vivace

Adagio -

Menuetto: allegretto

Finale: adagio - presto - adagio

Although Haydn might have suspected Johann Tost’s integrity as a businessman even before he left the orchestra at Esterháza for the wholesale trade in Vienna, he always had great admiration for him as a violinist. It was not so much his technical accomplishment that Haydn admired - he could even be a little satirical about Tost’s rare facility in the highest register of the instrument - as his wit and the quality of his imagination. That much is clear from the trust he placed in his comic timing in the Finale of Op.54, No.1, and in his expressive spontaneity in the extravagantly scored slow movements of Op.54, Nos.2 and 3. Haydn was perhaps less wise in entrusting him also with the responsibility of taking Op.54 and Op.55 to sell to a publisher in Paris: they were immediately accepted by Sieber, for publication in 1789, but on what terms Tost was curiously reluctant to say.

While the six Quartets of Op.54 and Op.55 are not actually inscribed to Tost, incidentally, it is evident from the distinctive nature of the first violin parts and the parallels between them and those of the later Op.64 set, which is specifically dedicated “to wholesaler Tost,” that they were written with him firmly in mind.

One of the many attractive aspects of the twelve Tost Quartets is the composer’s eagerness to share a joke with the violinist. Haydn sets one up at the beginning of the first movement of the Quartet in C major where each the two opening statements of the main theme on first violin is followed by a bar’s rest. Reserving the punch-line till later, Haydn plunges without modulation into A flat major and projects his violinist through a strenous series of modulations before arriving, by a round-about route, at G major for the second subject. The participation of viola and second violin in the melodic interest here provokes Tost’s violin into a characteristically showy ascent to the far end of the fingerboard. All four instruments, however, take a virtuoso part in the short but dramatic development - which, in its turn, provokes the punch-line: recalling the opening theme at the beginning of the recapitulation, the first violin fills in the rests with a mischievous echo of the preceding bar an octave higher.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Tost’s musicianship is Haydn’s gift to him here of two extraordinary slow movements. The C minor Adagio is particularly remarkable in that, having introduced its seriously thoughtful theme over chorale-like harmonies in the rest of the ensemble, the first violin leaves the melodic line to be carried by second violin - not out of modesty but, on the contrary, to weave round it an opulently decorative commentary of a sort which, with its written-in hesitations and rubatos, Haydn can only have learned from the improvisations of gypsy fiddle players.

The regular progress of the Adagio, which proceeds like a passacaglia in eight-bar cycles, gives way without a break and without a proper ending to the Menuetto. It is as though the Adagio had been a preparation for the minuet rather than a slow movement in itself - although in that case it would be a disproportionately long and expressive prelude to a minuet movement which, in spite of its C minor Trio section, is no more serious than most of its kind.

So, having disorientated structural expectations in this way, Haydn takes the opportunity to present an unprecedented finale construction. Surely, this C major Adagio, his contemporaries must have thought, is a prelude to a quicker main section. It too might seem rather long for that purpose and, as its harmonies turn to C minor, too expressive but, sure enough, the tempo does indeed change to a sprightly Presto. That C major Presto turns out, however, to be no more than a brief interlude in a finale that ends in the Adagio tempo and the contemplative mood in which it began.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

String Quartet No.5 [1934]

Allegro

Adagio molto

Scherzo: alla bulgarese - Trio - Scherzo da capo

Andante

Finale: allegro vivace - presto

Elizabeth Sprague-Coolidge’s commission for a string quartet, to be first performed at the Library of Congress in Washington, was well timed. Having written little more than arrangements in the three years since he had completed his Second Piano Concerto in 1931, Bartók needed some such stimulus to undertake another major work. Mrs Sprague-Coolidge might have been “completely deaf,” as Diaghilev ungenerously remarked to Stravinsky but, as Stravinsky realistically replied, she did have the advantage that “she pays.”

If there is any signficance in the apparent references in the Adagio molto of the new work to the Molto adagio of Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op.132, it is that Bartók was grateful not only for the payment from the commission but also for the restoration of creative energy that came with it. Certainly, the composition of the Fifth String Quartet in just over four weeks, in August and September 1934, was phenomenally quick work - even if he didn’t have to spend very long on devising a structural plan for it. All he had to do, in fact, was take the concentric five-movement pattern which had served him so well in the Fourth String Quartet in 1928 and adapt it. In the earlier work the centre piece is a slow movement, with a scherzo on each side of it; in this case the centre piece is a scherzo with a slow movement on each side of it. As in the Fourth Quartet, an Allegro first movement is reflected in a matching finale. If the thematic organisation in the Fifth Quartet does not have the monothematic rigour of the Fourth it is because of an apparently more relaxed attitude to tunefulness for its own sake.

It is true that the percussive B flats at the opening of the first Allegro are neither relaxed nor tuneful. But, although the theme that grows from the repeated notes in ever widening intervals on the two violins is the more important feature, a hint of a dance tune below it on viola and cello suggests that a more tuneful element might develop. A transitional passage, including what amounts to a new theme bouncing up and down over wide intervals in vigorous syncopations, does not seem to encourage that notion. And the second subject, which follows an even more emphatic reiteration of the first, while it is gently coloured and sinuously phrased, is cramped into narrow, mainly semitonal intervals. But in the very middle of a tense development section there is a liberated passage where the dance jumps into the foreground, in fortissimo octaves first on the two violins and then on viola and cello, against the bouncing syncopations in the other parts. In the recapitulation, where the main themes are recalled in reverse order and in inversion, it reverts to its former modest status.

The Adagio molto, the first of the two related slow movements, mingles one of Bartók’s most poetic studies in night music with veiled but surely deliberate allusions to Beethoven’s Op.132. The first melodic entry, after the quietly trilled nocturnal whisperings, is an inverted version of the first four notes of the Quartet in A minor and, although the hushed chorale is a regular feature of Bartók’s night music, the one that now follows could, in this context, be taken as a parallel to Beethoven’s “hymn of thanksgiving from one who has recovered from an illness.” Later events are in the central development section, where even more atmospherically scored night-time colouring is allied with more specific melodic allusions to Beethoven’s Molto adagio, seem to confirm that impression. The chorale is briefly recapitulated and the nocturnal introduction is reflected in a muted closing section that finally slides into silence.

The Scherzo alla bulgarese exploits an aspect of East-European folk song of particular interest to Bartók, the so-called “Bulgarian rhythm” that divides the beats in each bar into unequal groups.Here is more of the tuneful element promised at the beginning of the work - if not in the first theme, neatly synthesised out of minor and major thirds and introduced over the cello’s pizzicato definition of the uneven metre, then certainly in the second theme, a dance tune that makes its entry on first violin with a refreshing lack of inhibition. The central Trio section, in a different Bulgarian metre, proves no less attractive as the tempo accelerates to greet a melody to be shared by viola and cello throughout (and, perhaps, to echo the bagpipes episode in the equivalent movement of Beethoven’s Op.132). The Scherzo da capo is no literal repeat of the first part, least of all when it takes to syncopating the Bulgarian rhythms and contradicting the bar lines in a canonic treatment of the dance tune.

The Andante, a variant of the Adagio molto, retains something of the night-music atmosphere of the earlier movement but discards the Beethoven allusions. The proportions are different too: the nocturnal introduction, eerily coloured by pizzicato glissandi, is longer in this case and the chorale, now transformed into quietly shuddering chords on all four instruments, is shorter. The central section develops material which seemed to have little significance in the Adagio molto but which here, after a dramatic recall of the shuddering chorale, is carried to a sustained climax on the two violins over a buzz of chromatic activity on viola and cello. The closing section restores the chorale to something closer to its original form on the two violins, reduces it to a spectral rattle of wood on strings and abandons it to a series of rising pizzicato-glissando chords on the cello.

The Finale is a rondo so rigorously organised at first that its early episodes are based on variants of the relentlessly pressurised rondo theme. Eventually, however, it accommodates a fugal passage based on a version of the first theme of the first movement and even a capricious scherzando episode. So, after the tempo slows for a climactic recall of the repeated notes from the beginning of the first movement, it must be time for the tuneful element to reassert itself. Bartok’s answer to that mistaken expectation is an ironic, crudely harmonised barrel-organ imitation which, as it winds down in tempo and slips out of tune, is impatiently swept away by an uncompromisingly serious, ever faster coda.