ABOUT THE MUSIC

String Quartet in A major, Op. 20 No. 6

Allegro di molto e scherzando

Adagio

Menuetto

Finale: Fuga a 3 soggetti

When, in 1779, the publisher Hummel of Berlin issued the second edition of Joseph Haydn’s fifth set of string quartets, he added a flourish. On the front page of the score, amidst Grecian urns and lyres, he printed a little picture of a smiling sun. It was a printer’s stock image; a piece of 18th-century clip-art, if you like. But to this day, the six quartets that we now know as Haydn’s Op. 20 are still referred to as the “Sun” quartets. It just seemed right.

Haydn wrote these six quartets in 1772, and he was already thoroughly familiar with the combination of two violins, viola and cello. But in the decade since his Op. 1 quartets of 1762, he’d pushed its possibilities progressively further. Op. 20 takes this quiet revolution to a new level – liberating the lower instruments of the ensemble, and inviting them to join the musical conversation. It doesn’t sound much, but the potential was (and is) limitless.

Just listen to the results in this final quartet of the set, cast in the bright key of A major. Twelve months earlier Haydn might have opened with a brilliant first violin flourish. Instead, the three lower instruments comment on the off-beat while the first violin appears, briefly, to lose its footing and tumble downwards. Poise is quickly recovered, of course; this was an age of elegance. But we know, the other players know, and Haydn knows: he’s headed the movement scherzando – “as if joking”. The whole movement – sometimes flowing, sometimes terse, always graceful but often rippling with laughter – becomes a conversation based on the assumption that we’re all in on a shared joke.

This shared understanding lends a wry lilt to the operatic second movement. The first violin is the most courteous of prima donnas, but as it pauses to elaborate on (and perhaps doubt) its own song, its three comrades keep tactfully (and knowingly) in their place. The Menuetto glints as it catches the light; in the central Trio, Haydn tells all four performers to play sopra una corda (on the same string), for added richness and soulfulness of tone.

It’s an exquisitely-gauged set-up to the astonishing finale, headed Fugue with Three Subjects: Baroque musical learning doesn’t get more solid and scholarly than a wellwritten fugue. But Haydn has something different in mind here. Even while he deploys every technique of contrapuntal mastery, he directs that it be played sempre sotto voce –“always whispered”. Learning, here, becomes barely-suppressed laughter in a conversation as light and as intricate as filigree – until the very end: the movement’s one and only forte as everyone arrives, joyously, at the same happy conclusion. If you know, you know…

The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapuncti I-IV

On the evening of 7th May 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach – aged 62 - arrived at the Prussian royal seat of Potsdam. Without even the chance to change out of his travelling clothes, Bach was summoned directly to the royal palace. A Berlin newspaper described what happened next:

[The King] went, at [Bach’s] entrance to the Forte-piano and condescended to play a theme for Kapellmeister Bach, which he should execute in a fugue. This was done so happily that His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction, and all those present were seized with astonishment.

In front of his court, the King then asked Bach to improvise a three-voice fugue, a six-voice fugue, and so on. Musical contests of this sort were an occupational hazard for an 18th-century composer, though for an organist, especially, improvisation was a basic professional requirement. Bach’s ability in this sphere fascinated his contemporaries. Add to that the fact that eminent baroque musicians often published works intended to expound their own prowess, at the same time as serving an educational function, and we can start to understand why Bach, for at least the last decade of his life, worked on a treatise designed to lay out the full scope of his mastery in the most complex and learned form of composition – the Fugue.

A Fugue is often mistaken for a fixed musical form: a single ”subject” (theme), taken up consecutively by two or more “voices” (different musical lines), is woven, through ingenious and imaginative counterpoint, into a musical texture of increasing richness and complexity. In fact (as Haydn would demonstrate so brilliantly) it’s less a rigid form than an imaginative process; an endlessly adaptable creative technique, and in The Art of Fugue, Bach demonstrates its potential over some 20 fugues (each described as Contrapunctus), all based on a single subject.

Bach seems to have worked upon the collection from the early 1740s onwards, struggling against worsening eyesight (he is now thought to have suffered from diabetes, and at the end he was almost blind). The final Contrapunctus tails off, mid-flow – forever unfinished at Bach’s death on 28th July 1750. By now, Bach’s contrapuntal mastery was becoming unfashionable: solemnity was less popular than wit. But in the 1780s connoisseurs began to rediscover this music. Haydn and Mozart’s friend Gottfried van Swieten performed Bach fugues at select musical gatherings in Vienna, and there’s concrete evidence that both composers sat up and took notice.

Bach wrote each fugue in “open score”, with one musical line to each stave of the score. While it’s generally accepted that he conceived this music for the harpsichord, this has left performers’ options gloriously open, and Mozart was among the first to arrange Bach’s fugues for string chamber ensemble. And so today’s arrangements have a distinguished pedigree: not the only way (there can never be a definitive version) but certainly a deeply satisfying medium through which to engage with the brilliant, deeply moving final thoughts of one of music’s most beautiful minds.

String Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 13

Adagio - Allegro vivace

Adagio non lento

Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto - allegro di molto

Presto

Don’t be fooled by numbers. This Quartet, Mendelssohn’s Op. 13, placed second in the collected editions, was actually the first string quartet that Mendelssohn considered fit for publication. Completed in Berlin in October 1827, it pre-dates his Quartet No 1. Op. 12, by nearly two years – a big, imaginative experiment in the form; hardly what one would expect in any composer’s first serious attempt at a string quartet, let alone from an 18-year old boy! Take its key, for example. The Quartet begins and - as we’ll see - ends in A major; but for much of its course it tends towards a melancholy A minor. Beethoven’s A minor Quartet Op. 132 was published in 1827, and there’s every reason to suppose Mendelssohn knew it - the main theme of his finale is a nearquotation of Beethoven’s.

But having received his creative license from Beethoven, Mendelssohn does something utterly personal. He opens his quartet with an Adagio introduction - a warmly harmonised quotation from his own song Frage (Question), dating from that spring:

Is it true? Is it true that over there on the leafy path, you always wait for me by the vine-covered wall? And that with the moonlight and the little stars, you inquire about me also?

The message could hardly be clearer: we’re in a Romantic universe now, and Mendelssohn is clearly in love with shape of his melody - listen in particular to the rhythm of its final phrases. With a sudden, chilly swirl of semiquavers the key switches to the minor, and the Allegro vivace speeds off with a theme whose rhythm and shape derive from that same tune - though how different it sounds! Even that first gust of semiquavers - such an evocative natureeffect, two years before the Hebrides overture - turns out to have a crucial role in driving the movement’s windswept central development section.

The connections continue in the Adagio non lento. While never quoting directly from earlier themes, the first and final sections of the movement frame a melancholy central episode which, as it builds in speed and intensity, refers back to the Allegro. The Intermezzo is a lilting foretaste of Brahms and Schumann, with a brilliant central interlude of purest gossamer – not for the first time, young Felix is on his personal hotline to fairyland.

And finally: melodrama! With a sudden tremolando and an impassioned recitative for the first violin, Mendelssohn launches his finale in high Romantic style. He quotes Beethoven, and launches a series of stormy ideas, all half-echoing the themes from the preceding three movements, and all (in turn) derived from the Frage introduction. So when Mendelssohn ends the quartet with a quiet A major restatement of that entire introduction, the circle is closed. The Op. 13 Quartet is nothing less than an extended, rigorous and passionate exploration of everything that, for Mendelssohn, lay behind and within that little melody - a wholly original self-portrait of the artist as a young man.

Some years later, Mendelssohn attended a performance of the Quartet in Paris. While the finale was playing, one audience member - unaware that he was sitting next to the composer - turned to him during the finale and whispered “That theme’s in one of his symphonies, too!” “Whose?” asked a bemused Mendelssohn. “Why - Beethoven, of coursethe composer of this quartet!” Praise indeed, if back-handed. “This”, mused the composer, “was bittersweet”.

Richard Bratby