Goethe’s famous description of the string quartet as a ‘conversation between four intelligent people’ neatly characterises the essence of the medium around 1800, the time of Haydn’s last and Beethoven’s first quartets. By then, thanks above all to Haydn, the string quartet was acknowledged as the most elevated form of chamber music, and a supreme test of a composer’s ‘taste’ and inventiveness.
There had been occasional divertimentos for two violins, viola and cello before before Haydn but no earlier composer showed any interest in exploring the potential of the quartet as a conversational medium. And it fell to Haydn who, by his own admission, stumbled on the form ‘by accident’ to raise the string quartet from its modest origins in the al fresco serenade to a vehicle for the most sophisticated and challenging musical discourse.
Haydn’s string quartets are among the marvels of civilized art, endlessly unpredictable in their strategies and structure, dazzling in the speed of thought, breathtaking in their expressive range. Yet too often they are treated as mere warm-up acts for supposedly meatier 19th century fare. The festival, unique as far as we know, offer Haydn undiluted with all 68 of his string quartets, plus the quarter arrangement of the sublime, mystical meditations on the Seven Last Words, composed for Cadiz Cathedral.
Listeners can experience sometimes within a single concert, the vast creative distance Haydn traveled over nearly half a century, fomr the delightful, breezy, little divertimentos of Op 1 and 2, via the quartet’s coming of age in the glorious Op 20 and the dazzling comedies of Op 33 to the panache of Op 76 and 77 with their rustic revelry, profound lyrical tenderness and Wordsworthian voyages ‘through strange seas of thought alone’. |
