String Quartet in D major, Op.20, No.4 (Hob.III.34) [1772]

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

String Quartet in D major, Op.20, No.4 (Hob.III.34) [1772]

Allegro di molto

Un poco adagio affettuoso

Menuetto: allegretto alla zingarese

Presto scherzando

Once celebrated as the “Sun” Quartets - primarily but not only because of the illustration on the frontispiece of the edition published by Hummel in Berlin in 1779 - Haydn’s Op.20 is now seriously overshadowed by later sets from Op.33 and, particularly, Op.54 onwards. It is not, however, eclipsed by them. Having established the basics of the modern string quartet form and texture as early as 1770 in his Op.9 set - as the composer himself was to acknowledge towards the end of his life - and having in the meantime added the Op.17 set, by 1772 all the components of the mature Haydn string quartet were in place.

Perhaps the most striking quality of the first movement of the Quartet in D major is its economy. The rhythm of the first four notes of the main theme - four Ds heard on all four instrument in unison in the opening bars - echoes throughout the construction. In spite of vigorous efforts on first violin and cello to break free of it, the four-note rhythm keeps returning and, indeed, is so persistent in its quiet way as to leave no opportunity for the introduction of a distinctive second-subject theme before the end of the exposition. The development begins with it and, although the second violin now joins the first violin and cello in their efforts to escape in flights of triplets, the development ends with that rhythm too. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the last four notes of the movement are four repeated Ds.

The slow movement is a theme and variations as resourcefully scored as many later examples of the form in Haydn’s string quartets. The first violin introduces the theme in D minor but then retires into the background for the second violin and viola to engage in an elegantly phrased dialogue in the first variation and for the cello to elaborate an eloquent line in the second. The first violin returns to the foreground to present the theme in an even figuration of triplet semiquavers in the third variation and in it original form in the fourth - not, however, to end the movement that way but to extend it in a surprisingly emotional and even dramatic development.

Anything but a minuet, the Menuetto is an early example of Haydn’s interest in Hungarian gypsy music, its bold cross rhythms and syncopations effectively offset by an aristocratic cello solo in the Trio section. There is more of the gypsy idiom in the Presto scherzando finale, which is so cheerfully spontaneous in its choice of material, one bright idea setting off another in a different direction, that the exotic colouring in the closing theme of the exposition seems not at all out of place. With its racy staccato figuration on first violin, it ostinato rhythm of quavers on the cello and its shrill offbeat chords on second violin and viola, it also secures a brilliant ending.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

String Quartet No.2 [1915-1917]

Moderato

Allegro molto capriccioso

Lento

Bartók’s Second String Quartet was written between 1915 and 1917 - which, although domestic life was happy enough for the husband and father he had become by then, was a bleak period for the composer. Disappointed by the general lack of interest in his opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and by the collapse of the recently founded New Hungarian Musical Society in 1911, he had withdrawn into seclusion at Rékoskeresztúr to concentrate on folksong research and teaching rather than composition and performing. Then the war intervened, severely limiting the area of his research through the inevitable travel restrictions. He did, on the other hand, have the time to make arrangements of folk material he had already collected and it might well have been this work - in the course of which he absorbed more and more of the peasant idiom into his own musical language - that encouraged him, gradually, to return to composition.

Of the three most important compositions he completed before the end of the war - the one-act ballet The Wooden Prince, the piano Suite Op.14 and the Second String Quartet - it is only the last that reveals the desolate state of mind he was in at the time. It is also the first score in which his newly developed language is applied to a major classical form.

The opening theme of the Moderato, rising and falling on first violin over an irregularly throbbing and anxiously dissonant accompaniment, was adumbrated at the end of the Suite, Op.14. But here it is part of the fabric of the whole, closely unified work. It is true that its distinctively Magyar fourths might be expanded, as they are when the cello takes up the theme in dialogue with the first violin, but the three-note rhythm that goes with them remains the same. It is true also that the second subject, introduced molto espressivo by the two violins in octaves over double-stopped harmonies on viola and cello, is based on thirds and fifths and is clearly in F sharp minor. But the two themes are in fact related, as is the lyrical closing theme of the exposition floated on violin and viola set two octaves apart. After a fiercely argumentative development section devoted largely to the first subject and after a much altered recapitulation - most prominently featuring a nostalgic version of the closing theme over pizzicato chords on the cello - a reflective coda demonstrates just how the second and third themes are related to the first.

Unlike his self-consciously Hungarian colleague Zoltán Kodály, Bartók was open to “any influence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source as long as it is clean, fresh and healthy!” The savage Allegro molto capriccioso of the Second String Quartet derives in part from his memories of North Africa where he had been collecting folk-song examples from the nomadic Arab tribes of Biskra in 1913. The grotesque opening gestures are synthesised out of tritones. The main theme on first violin, with its drumming accompaniment and its chromatically slithering cadences, is an organic growth from Arab folk song. Its function here, although it never appears in the same form twice, is to act as a kind of rondo theme. The intervening episodes are devoted to developments of the tritonal introductory material, which presents itself in a variety of forms, including an ironically tuneful one, before a whispered prestissimo version of the main theme expands into the emphatic final bars.

The final Lento begins with a painfully attenuated echo on the two violins of the end of the previous movement. As the cello considers the thematic implications of these opening bars, the first violin clearly, though quietly and very slowly, alludes to the main theme of the first movement and a little later compresses its fourths to minor thirds to provide an alternative version. So now, starting with a dolce new melody introduced by first violin and incorporating both the foregoing allusions to earlier movements, the search for reconciliation can begin. The middle section is based on a muted chorale which, in spite of the passion it inspires in the first violin, can find no light in the melodic material it has inherited. The main theme of the first movement returns in its melodically compressed version for further scrutiny but with no more conciliatory effect than a brief and inconclusive recall of the dolce melody on first violin and, finally, two minor thirds in bleak pizzicato on cello and viola.