String Quartets, Op. 20 (Haydn)

• 1. Introduction

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  Haydn's String Quartets, Op. 20, composed in 1772, are among the works that gave Joseph Haydn the sobriquet "the father of the string quartet". Six quartets in all, they stand as a milestone in the history of composition. The techniques Haydn developed in them would define the medium for the next two centuries.

  At forty years old, Haydn was already Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, one of the most powerful musical patrons in Europe. He presided over operas, oratorios, symphonic concerts, and chamber music, writing a constant stream of new works for the prince's amusement. And yet, behind the busy routine of court life, something was gathering. Tensions were rising in Haydn's personal circumstances. New philosophical ideas were sweeping Europe. The emotional climate would leave its mark on every note of these six quartets.

  Musicians and historians have debated for generations what exactly makes Op. 20 so remarkable. Was it the audacity of the fugal finales? The newfound independence given to the cello? The structural sleight of hand that kept even attentive listeners off balance? Sir Donald Tovey wrote that every page of the six quartets "is of historic and aesthetic importance". Writer Ron Drummond compared their impact on musical possibility to that of Beethoven's Third Symphony. The questions the quartets raised have never fully settled, and the music has never stopped sounding fresh.

• 2. Life at Eszterháza

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  Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy had built his Eszterháza palace southeast of Vienna roughly eight years before these quartets were composed. The palace itself was magnificent enough to be called the "Hungarian Versailles". But it had been constructed over a large swamp. A penetrating north wind blew in from the north throughout the year, and the damp made the residence miserable for the court musicians.

  Haydn and his colleagues spent most of the year at Eszterháza, far from Vienna and from their families. The musicians, unlike Haydn as Kapellmeister, were required to leave their wives and children behind for months at a time. Discontent was widespread. Haydn himself suffered from illness and bouts of depression during this period.

  Analysts see the atmosphere of Eszterháza woven through the emotional texture of Op. 20. The term "affettuoso", meaning deeply felt, appears twice in tempo directions for slow movements, and one musicologist, Geiringer, proposed that the word could be applied to the entire opus. Haydn chose minor keys for two of the quartets, an unusual decision for chamber music of this era. The fifth quartet, in F minor, sits in what Cobbett called "a key that predisposes even Haydn to sombre thoughts". The conditions of the palace haunt the music, whether Haydn intended them to or not.

• 3. Sturm und Drang

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  Beyond the personal miseries of Eszterháza, 1772 was a moment of broader intellectual ferment across Europe. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was expounding a philosophy of human freedom and a return to nature. Poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller were driving the new Sturm und Drang movement, which exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment's cult of rationalism. Ideas that would eventually spur the Romantic movement were taking root some thirty years before it fully arrived.

  For Haydn, these currents meant a conscious break from the galante style, the courtly, simplified, somewhat slender musical language that had been dominant. Analysts trace specific musical choices in Op. 20 directly to this rejection. The minuet movement of the D major quartet, number 4, is replaced by a frenetic gypsy air titled "alla zingarese", filled with offbeat rhythms. Geiringer connected this directly to Rousseau's "back to nature" movement, which had sparked renewed interest in national folk music.

  Most strikingly, three of the six quartets end with fugues. Counterpoint, the dense and learned style of the Baroque, had fallen out of fashion with galante composers. By reaching back to it, Haydn was making a pointed statement. Geiringer described it plainly: "To emphasize his rejection of rococo lightness, Haydn reverted to Baroque features." The fugues are not decorative. They are a declaration.

• 4. The Innovations

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  Haydn writes his annotations directly into the scores of Op. 20, which tells listeners exactly what he is doing and why. At one point in the finale of quartet number 2, he marks "Al rovescio" where the fugal melody is played in inversion. In the finale of number 5 he writes "In canone". The finale of number 6 he labels "Fuga a 3 Soggetti", a fugue with three fugal subjects. These are not merely technical instructions. They are a composer asserting that the old, formal world of counterpoint is not dead.

  Before Op. 20, the first violin generally dominated a string quartet, with the viola and cello playing an accompanying role. Haydn changed this. The second quartet in C major opens with a cello solo, the accompanying instruments playing beneath it rather than above. In the fourth quartet, the slow movement is a set of variations in D minor; the first variation is a duet for viola and second violin, the third is a cello solo. Tovey argued that counterpoint itself was the mechanism for achieving this equality, since fugal texture naturally distributes the musical argument across all four voices.

  Haydn also pushed the sonata form further than it had gone before. Traditionally, the recapitulation in a sonata movement closely restated the original exposition. In the F minor quartet, Haydn instead embellishes the original theme in the recapitulation, rearranges the material, and builds tension toward the coda. In the G minor quartet, the recapitulation is so transformed that it barely functions as one. Haydn also developed what has become known as the "false reprise": in the D major quartet he offers the listener what sounds like a return to the main theme, then veers back into development. He does this not once but several times before the real recapitulation quietly arrives.

  Phrase structure, too, was territory Haydn was willing to disrupt. The opening theme of the G minor quartet is built of two phrases of seven measures each, not the four- and eight-measure chunks that convention dictated. The minuet of the same quartet divides into two phrases of five measures each. Haydn strayed so far from the standard minuet form in these quartets that in his next set, Op. 33, he stopped calling them minuets altogether and used the word scherzos instead.

• 5. Six Portraits

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  Each quartet in Op. 20 has its own personality. The first, in E major, hides the return of the main theme after the development section behind a series of transpositions, finally slipping back to it when least expected. The slow movement is an aria in A major marked "Affettuoso e sostenuto", with the first violin carrying the melody throughout.

  The G minor quartet, number 3, prompted musicologist William Drabkin to call it "among the more enigmatic pieces in the repertory". Haydn makes dramatic use of silence in the finale: the opening four-bar theme breaks off suddenly for a half-measure pause, an interruption that recurs throughout the movement. The quartet ends in G major, descending from piano to pianissimo.

  The D major quartet, number 4, is, according to Tovey, the most publicly recognized of the six. Its second movement, a set of variations in D minor, was described by one analyst as containing something of three centuries: the seventeenth-century Baroque, the eighteenth-century Classical, and the nineteenth-century Romantic. The gypsy finale employs the gypsy scale, a minor scale with raised fourth and raised seventh, along with flashy virtuoso passages in the first violin.

  The fifth quartet in F minor is the most emotionally intense. Haydn runs phrases together without the usual cadential breaks between them, so the music flows almost without interruption. The main fugal subject in the finale appears elsewhere in music history: it is found in Handel's Messiah. The entire first two thirds of the fugue remain sotto voce before the first violin erupts suddenly to forte, then falls back again into piano, before a second fortissimo leads to the close.

  The sixth quartet in A major, last as published but second as Haydn originally conceived the set, is the most conservative and the most optimistic in character. Its minuet is one of only two in Op. 20 that actually follow the rules of the traditional dance form. The theme of the minuet is a variation of the first theme of the first movement, making it one of the most explicit uses of cyclic form across Haydn's work.

• 6. Legacy and Debate

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  The first known publication of these quartets came in 1774, by Louis-Balthazar de La Chevardière in Paris. A later Viennese edition appeared from Artaria, probably in the 1780s or 1790s. The set became known as the "Sun" quartets, because of the image of a rising sun that appeared on the cover of an early edition. The most commonly used scholarly edition today is the Eulenburg Urtext, published in the 1880s.

  The quartets drew scrutiny not only from listeners but from Haydn's successors. Before writing his own first set of string quartets, Op. 18, Beethoven studied the scores of Op. 20, copying them out and even scoring the first quartet for string orchestra. The relationship between Beethoven and Haydn was a complicated one: Haydn had been one of Beethoven's teachers, and Haydn's criticisms of the younger composer's early work stung Beethoven deeply. Yet in a letter written in 1812, three years after Haydn's death, Beethoven wrote: "Do not rob Handel, Haydn and Mozart of their laurel wreaths. They are entitled to theirs, I am not yet entitled to mine."

  Johannes Brahms owned the autograph manuscript of the Op. 20 quartets, studied and annotated them carefully, and at his death bequeathed the manuscript to the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, where it remains today.

  Not every musicologist has accepted the consensus view of Op. 20 as a singular founding document. Roger Hickman has pointed out that other composers were already writing string quartets in the modern form, featuring two violins, viola, and cello with no basso continuo accompaniment, before or alongside Haydn. His conclusion: Haydn may be the father of the Classical string quartet, but not the creator of the string quartet genre itself. Euna Na, meanwhile, has argued that Mozart's string ensemble language owed more to Michael Haydn, Joseph's younger brother, than to Joseph, pointing to linguistic similarities between Michael's works from 1773 and Mozart's later quartets. Professor David Wyn Jones at Cardiff University's School of Music has noted that in Salzburg, Mozart was writing in a shared musical language, and many of its features appear in Michael Haydn as well as Joseph.

  Haydn himself, when he published his Op. 33 quartets ten years later, described them as written in "an entirely new and particular manner". If Op. 33 was the culmination, Op. 20 was where Haydn worked out what the string quartet could be. The autograph manuscript that Brahms once held and annotated still sits in Vienna, a written record of how one composer spent a damp, difficult year at a palace built over a swamp, and in doing so changed the course of chamber music.