Haydn

The Hungarian connection

“I am only sorry that I have to leave with my baggage full,” said Bartók to his doctor shortly before his death in New York in 1945. In that baggage was a Seventh String Quartet which had been commissioned by Ralph Hawkes a few months earlier but which, with the Third Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto still incomplete, he had scarcely had time to begin. There are a few sketches for it but nothing so extensive as to give much of an idea of what the work might have been like. Indeed - although the composer had accepted a generous advance from Boosey & Hawkes and clearly took the project very seriously - it is difficult to imagine any kind of successor to the Sixth Quartet, which now seems such an appropriate and definitive ending to a series of masterpieces started half a life time earlier.

Bartók’s interest in the string-quartet medium goes back even further than that. An early list of works includes two String Quartets, both of them dated 1896, and a Quartet in F minor from two years later survives in manuscript.There is nothing in the F minor score, however, that reveals the composer’s Hungarian identity, while it is the development of that essential aspect of Bartók’s creativity that gives the six published quartets not only their distinctive personality but also their shape as a coherent series. It is true that, until the entry of “The Peacock flies” in the last movement, there is not much that is Hungarian in the First String Quartet, which leans towards Wagner and Reger on the one hand and Debussy on the other. But the beginning of the peasant-music influence - which Bartók absorbed from any ethnic region he investigated, not just Hungary - is certainly there. Its culmination, or its sublimation, is represented by the Sixth Quartet where, after period in which it forced out of the string quartets any aspect of the classical musical language that did not coincide with its harmonic and rhythmic implications, the two are most movingly reconciled.

Haydn too was fascinated by the string quartet for much the greater part of his career, from the so-called “Fürnberg Quartets”of about 1760 to the sadly incomplete Quartet in D minor of 1803. While he was not obsessed by it, he was also interested in East-European folk song. As Bartók himself observed when he drew attention to the similarity between the Croatian song “Oj Jelena” and the main theme of the finale of the Symphony No104 in D major. Living not in Vienna but, for many years, in Esterháza, Haydn must have heard not only touring gypsy bands - whose influence is evident in several of his string quartets but in none more than Op54 No2 - but also genuine peasant music itself. Whether or not such startling inspirations as the rustic Trio section in the Menuetto of the “Sunrise” Quartet derive from the same “clean, fresh and healthy” source as Bartók’s harmonic innovations, but more than a hundred years earlier, is a fascinating area for speculation.