Haydn comes to call Severall Friends plays his string quartets
SEVERALL FRIENDS PLAYS HIS STRING QUARTETS
Franz Joseph Haydn is revered by music lovers as the Father of the Symphony, and indeed he was the first figure to achieve greatness in that genre. But about the time he began writing symphonies, he was also fathering what were likely the world’s first string quartets. At the end of his long life, he told his biographer that when he was eighteen, he and three friends — two violinists, a violist, and a cellist — assembled for musical get-togethers at a baron’s estate outside Vienna, and that he composed the music for these gatherings. That would have been in 1750. At the outset, string quartets were sometimes viewed as equivalent to lightly scored symphonies, not requiring wind instruments and using a string “section” of one player per part. In fact, Haydn’s very first published music appeared under the name Six Symphonies or Quartets-in-Dialogue for Two Violins, Alto Viola, and Obbligato Bass, the obbligato bass part referring to the cello.
His earliest published quartets were uncomplicated pieces, not different from what were often peddled as divertimentos. But in 1771 and 1772, he published three collections, each consisting of six quartets, that set the course for what would become chamber music’s most prestigious genre — his Op. 9, Op. 17, and Op. 20. That last group will be the focus of a program this weekend in which the musical organization Severall Friends presents three of the six Op. 20 quartets, as internationally acclaimed violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock is joined by three colleagues from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Haydn turns the musical world upside down. He liberates the genre of the string quartet from previous expectations and opens new possibilities of how the ensemble may behave.
Blumenstock, who lives mostly there but part-time in Cerrillos, has previously performed in Severall Friends concerts. A leading advocate of historically informed performance, she has appeared frequently as soloist, leader, or concertmaster in the concerts and recordings of the Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra, the American Bach Soloists, the Italian ensemble Complesso Barocco, and the Göttingen International Handel Festival in Germany. She has worked with her three collaborators here — violinist Kati Kyme, violist Liana Bérubé, and cellist Robert Howard — in different Bay Area performing groups. “Haydn,” she said in a phone interview, “is actually a ‘late’ composer for me,” but she nonetheless includes him on her list of top five favorites, along with Handel, Bach, Rameau, and Purcell.
She approaches Haydn’s Op. 20 Quartets from the perspective of what came before them. “His earliest quartets include lovely melodies,” she said, “but on the whole, the pieces are brief, cute, pretty, immediately accessible. Then in Op. 9 and Op. 17, he injects elements of surprise — say, by shortening musical statements that you expect to be longer or by sticking together bits of phrases that end up sounding quirky. That’s one of his stocks in trade. He developed it early on and he never lost it.
“But with Op. 20,” she said, “he reaches a different order of magnitude. The themes are more interesting, there’s a greater sense of consequence. Whereas the earlier quartets almost always emphasize the first violin as the leading melody instrument, in Op. 20 he uses the four instruments in a far more democratic way.” She cites the Quartet in C major (Op. 20, No. 2), which is the first piece of the set she encountered as an emerging musician some decades back. (It will close the group’s concerts this weekend.) In any earlier quartet, the opening theme would have been assigned to the first violin, and the other players would have underscored the harmony. Not so here. At the piece’s beginning, the principal melody is bestowed on the cello, in principle the lowest instrument in the ensemble. The mid-range viola plays the bass-line (normally the cello’s domain), the second violin offers an accompaniment pitched lower than the cello, and the first violin sits out the first six measures entirely.
In such a moment, Haydn turns the musical world upside down. He liberates the genre of the string quartet from previous expectations and opens up new possibilities of how the ensemble may behave. Blumenstock said, “His advances in this set — his approach to themes, development of
melodies, subtle phrase structures — combine to create the string-quartet texture that will be emulated by everybody.”
The complete set of six quartets would run about two and a half hours — too much for one concert — so the ensemble decided to play the first three of them that Haydn composed: Op. 20, No. 5, in F minor; Op. 20, No. 6, in A major; and Op. 20, No. 2, in C major. That is how he ordered them in the catalogue he kept of his compositions, but when they were published, he placed them in a different sequence, apparently to highlight contrasts among the works. If Haydn’s previous quartets had adhered to a style that was personable, uncomplicated, and galant, these three are distinguished by a common feature: Each of their finales is cast as an intellectually challenging fugue, a multi-voiced process of interlacing lines whose counterpoint was a summit of achievement for 18th-century composers. In a basic fugue, the principal theme (or “subject”) is played by the various instruments, not simultaneously, but in overlapping ways that adhere to strict rules. Haydn raises the stakes. In the F-minor Quartet, his finale is a fugue with two subjects — so two independent themes passed among the voices in complicated counterpoint. In the A-major Quartet, he works out a fugue with three subjects, and in the C-major Quartet, he creates a musical Rubik’s Cube using four independent subjects, which he weaves together in a breathtaking array of permutations.
Notwithstanding this similarity, the three quartets in this program display entirely distinct temperaments. Having reason to assume that Blumenstock considered these pieces to be her musical friends — she leapt to agree that they were — we asked her to imagine inviting them to dinner. How would she describe them to the other guests, by way of preparation? She responded without skipping a beat.
“Well,” she began, “the F-minor — he is an intense character, filled with gravitas. He takes a serious stance on things. You would have to exercise some forbearance with him as a dinner guest. You might want to call the other guests in advance and warn them about his vehement mood.” This, she suggested, may reflect Haydn’s own state of mind when he wrote the piece in the remote Hungarian palace of Eszterháza, where he complained of being isolated from city life, felt excluded from the mainstream of the court, and was suffering through a bad marriage. “F minor is usually a dark key,” she noted, “a difficult key to play in, often suggesting anger, lamenting, or melancholy.”
The A-major Quartet, she felt, would be “a joker, bright and bubbly, a lot of fun — a real party person. He never gets very serious, even after a few glasses of wine. In some ways, he is the most superficial of the three, but he is utterly charming. He has charisma.”
And the C-major? “You will find him to be the most delightful, agreeable dinner companion you ever had — until you get him going on some topic that sets him off. Then you might find him a bit daunting to be around. You might even worry for his sanity, but then he will recover himself and mellow out. He talks with such lively skill and knowledge — a man of parts. He never overstays his welcome.”