String Quartet in G major, Op.64, No.4 (Hob.III.66) [1790]

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

String Quartet in G major, Op.64, No.4 (Hob.III.66) [1790]

Allegro con brio

Menuetto: allegretto

Adagio

Finale: presto

Haydn’s six String Quartets Op.64 are dedicated, not very glamorously for a set of such masterpieces, “to wholesaler Tost.” Before he became a businessman, however, Johann Tost was a principal violinist in the orchestra at Esterháza and - as is no less clear from Op.64 than from the Op.54 and Op.55 Quartets that were also written for him - Haydn had great respect for him as a musician. If by 1790 he was inclined to indulge Tost’s musicianship rather than his virtuosity, he made an exception in this particular work, where the starring role of the first violin requires extensive resources in both those respects.

As well as introducing the first subject of the Allegro con brio, the first violin busily leads the way in presenting a close variant of it as the second subject, joins the second violin in an unsettling episode of rhythmic syncopations in D minor and, after another busy passage of semiquavers, closes the exposition with a new theme to be played “sopra una corda” - which in this case means on the G-string. Although the development begins as a canon on the closing theme, the first violin clearly has no time for such democratic activity and hastens to detach itself from its admiring colleagues. Its enterprise in diverting the recapitulation into G minor gives it another opportunity for bravura display as it readjusts the tonality to accommodate one last appearance of the main theme in G major.

The Menutto offers little pretence of equality, least of all in the serenade-like Trio section where an entertaining first-violin part is supported by respectful pizzicato accompaniment on the other three instruments. The role of the first violin in the C majorAdagio is different. It is no less prominent and, indeed, it is no more generous in sharing the melodic interest with the rest of the ensemble. This time, however, it is a matter not so much of agility as of taste in phrasing, sensitivity in colouring and fluency in melodic decoration - qualities which Haydn could always rely on Johann Tost to produce in a slow movement. They are all the more important in this particular example, where just one melody is repeated and progressively embellished in the outer sections and minimally reshaped in the C minor middle section.

The consolation for second violin, viola and cello is in the entertainingly contrapuntal development section of the Presto Finale. The first violin, although it is occasionally joined in parallel thirds by the second violin, is clearly the dominant personality in setting the pace and introducing the carefree melodic material in the exposition. Saving the best till last, just before the end of the movement Haydn briefly but wittily acknowledges Tost’s facility in the higher positions on the E-string - as he does at some point in most of these works - by chasing his left hand to the very top of the fingerboard.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

String Quartet No.1, Op.7 [1908-1909]

Lento -

Allegretto

Introduzione: allegro -

Allegro vivace

Bartók began his First String Quartet as a romantic and ended it as a modernist. He was suffering at the time from the trauma of rejection by Stefi Geyer, a young violinist with whom he was hopelessly in love and for whom he had just composed a two-movement Concerto in, as he described it, “a narcotic dream.” That work - which she never performed and which remained undiscovered until after her death in 1956 - was written between July and December 1907. In February 1908, just a few days after he finished the orchestration, Stefi wrote to the composer definitively breaking off the affair, such as it was. The composition of the First String Quartet, which was completed eleven months later, proceeded in parallel with his immediate reaction to that event and the beginning of his recovery from it.

Why he chose the string quartet as the medium for such a message is not entirely clear. It seems likely, however, that Bartók and Kodály, who were working closely together at this point, had agreed that they would have their respective first string quartets ready to spring on Budapest at the same time. Certainly, the two works were first performed within two days of each other in March 1910 by an ensemble, the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, specifically formed for an occasion that turned out to be “the double birthday of modern Hungarian music.” Kodály not only influenced the final form of his colleague’s Quartet but also knew all about the intimate circumstances in which it was conceived: “It contains an inner drama,” he said, “a man’s return to life after travelling to the very borders of non-existence.” If that statement seems to be over-dramatising the situation, it is no more of an exaggeration than Bartók’s own confession to Stefi that the first movement “is my funeral dirge.”

The opening Lento is not just a self-indulgent lament for a lost love, however. It is true that the sadly falling sixths interlinked on the two violins in the opening bars derive, as Bartók himself pointed out to Stefi, from the first theme of the second movement of the Violin Concerto he had recently written for her. There is no question of “a narcotic dream” in this case, however: it is clear from the slow and contrapuntally orientated first movement and the progressively quicker tempi of the succeeding movements that Bartók had Beethoven’s Op.131 firmly in mind as a classical precedent. His texture in the opening Lento is not fugal like Beethoven’s in his opening Adagio but the elaborate imitative development sustained by two intertwining pairs of instruments - the violins on the one hand and the viola and cello on the other - is no less thoughtful and, in its way, no less accomplished.

Bartók is also thinking on the longer term here. The quicker middle section, introduced by a gruffly articulated drone on the cello and an emphatically passionate statement from the viola, anticipates at least two themes that will become prominent later in the work. It is with the same concern for continuity that he takes the last three notes uttered by violin and cello at the end of the movement and, in a seamless transition into the Allegretto, transforms them into a motif which is to assume more and more importance as the work goes on. For the moment, however, the function of that motif is to act as an ostinato accompaniment as the second violin introduces the waltz-like first theme of the Allegretto. It is a curiously unsettled movement which seems to be taking shape as a sonata-form construction but which is diverted from its course by a variety of distractions, including an increasingly dramatic treatment of the accompaniment motif and an eery whole-tone melody drawn by first violin over an obstinate pizzicato on the cello.

In the end it is the accompaniment motif that emerges as the most significant material. After a transitional passage (marked Introduzione) linking the second and third movements, it is definitively presented on viola and cello in unison as the main theme of the Allegro vivace. This theme, with its grotesque parody of the languishing falling sixth of the first movement, is Bartók’s way out of his emotional trauma. It is also his way out of the romantic impasse in that it readily lends itself to an idiom he was just beginning to develop. Actual folk themes - like the wonderful “Peacock” melody he had recently collected in Transylvania and which he twice quotes in broad Adagio episodes here - he would not in future attempt to integrate into his quartets. But, as the entertainingly imaginative treatment of the main theme in the middle section confirms, a language derived from the rhythmic and harmonic features of Hungarian folk song has infinite possibilities. The joy of that discovery was probably as much an inspiration in this joyful finale as the composer’s “return to life” from suicidal melancholy.