Quatuor Modigliani - Haydn: Quartets, Op. 76 No. 1; Op. 50 No. 1; Op. 77 No. 1 (2014) [Official Digital Download]

With sixty-eight works to his credit, Joseph Haydn was not only the founding father of the string quartet, but also an undisputed master of the genre. While his influence was of decisive importance for his direct successors, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, it continued to be felt in the Romantic period and right up to the twentieth century, notably in the composers of the Second Viennese School. His music in perpetual ferment is an unceasing source of wonder, dispensed to us, generation after generation, by ensembles the world over. Impish, inventive, radiant, full of humour, it offers inexhaustible joys to all who listen to or play it.

As Marcel Marnat has written: ‘The eighteenth century saw a movement towards order borne by a rare spirit of adventure. What some discovered, others codified, while others again – with Joseph Haydn foremost among them – embodied both tendencies with a casualness and charm that leave one speechless with admiration. . . . In the case of Haydn everything combines to create this effect: the agreeable atmosphere, the reassuring virility of tone, the absolute security he inspires, and also that honesty which makes him immediately recognisable among the myriad purveyors of affected emotion or intimacy. Haydn says exactly what he thinks; he does not want to give the impression that he thinks either more or less, and this moral rectitude engenders an emotion, a sympathy so deeply felt that the spiteful attitude of the Romantic era did not manage to obscure it. Haydn does more than confide to us his meditations, his visions, his cheerfulness, his enthusiasm: he arranges things in such a way that all the advantage is for us, that we are never overwhelmed by his grandeur (Symphony no.104), his gravity (“Nelson” Mass), his cosmic prophetism (The Creation, The Seasons), or his infallible power of fascination in the domain of pure music: the quartet.’

In the course of the twentieth century a number of quartets left a lasting impression on Haydn’s œuvre. After the Pro Arte Quartet in the 1930s, the veritable pioneer in the field, the Schneider and Budapest Quartets in the 1950s, and later the Aeolian, Amadeus, Juilliard, Tokyo, and Hage Quartets, especially, all marked their respective eras, leaving posterity interpretations brimming with elegance and vigour. The Modigliani Quartet, with the stylistic rigour for which it is well known, now adds its contribution to this tradition. Each of the three quartets it has chosen to couple here has an interesting background attached to it.

The Quartet in B flat major, op.50 no.1 is one of a set of six composed in barely nine months in 1787, just after the success of the ‘Paris’ Symphonies and The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. The published edition was dedicated to Frederick William II, King of Prussia and amateur cellist, whence the nickname of ‘Prussian’ Quartets they share with Mozart’s last three string quartets (composed in 1789/90). But it would appear that the dedication came after the composition, and therefore that, unlike Mozart’s works, they were probably not written with the specific idea of flattering the sovereign’s talents as a cellist. Though stimulated by his discovery of recent works by Mozart, Haydn nonetheless continues to follow his own path, showing that he has lost none of his intellectual freshness and inventiveness, nor his supreme concern for clarity, concision, and logic. Built on the now well-established model in four movements, the Quartet in B flat opens with a fascinating Allegro, a sort of acme of the genre, the entire rhythmic and melodic basis of which is contained in the initial few bars. An Adagio non lento in theme-and-variation form and a Menuetto in a highly contrapuntal style precede a joyful, exuberant Finale. By this time Haydn kept control of publication of his instrumental output, retaining a certain ‘freedom’ in terms of ‘exclusive’ contractual obligations; he sold the same set of quartets first to Artaria of Vienna, then to Forster of London!

Composed ten years later, at the same time as The Creation, the Quartet in G major, op.76 no.1 belongs to the last cycle of quartets completed by the composer. It is dedicated, like the other five of the set, to Count Joseph Erdödy, who retained exclusive rights to the works for two years. They were enthusiastically received. Haydn’s eminent English admirer Dr Charles Burney wrote that he had ‘never received more pleasure from instrumental music; they are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before’. Haydn does indeed display here a profusion of novel effects, contrasts, liberties, and surprises, with the ease of someone who has nothing more to prove. In the opening Allegro con brio the composer gives us the quintessence of his string writing at its most vocal, before leading the cantabile melodies of his Adagio sostenuto through profound, beseeching modulations. A Menuetto typical of the composer in its terseness precedes a Finale in G minor that plunges the work into a universe already foreshadowing Schubert, while reserving one of those surprises of which Haydn had become the leading exponent, with a liberatory modulation in the recapitulation that restores G major.

In the same year as the length of the metre and the weight of the kilogram were definitively fixed (1799), Haydn embarked on a new cycle of six quartets. However, at this dividing line between two musical epochs, eighteenth-century Classicism and nineteenth-century Romanticism, he stopped work less than halfway through the set. Exhausted by the composition of his oratorio The Seasons, Haydn completed only two quartets, with the third – later published as op.103 – remaining unfinished. The Quartet in G major, op.77 no.1 (1799-1800), strictly contemporary with Beethoven’s first six quartets, shares the same dedicatee as those works, Prince Lobkowitz. The autograph manuscripts of op.77 have survived and are now the property of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. These masterpieces of calligraphy reveal an exceptionally subtle style of writing, reflecting the spirit of his music and his wealth of imagination. ‘Every detail speaks’, said the musicologist Alfred Einstein of this sumptuous apotheosis, which at once crowns the efforts of a whole life and looks far into the new century.

Tracklist:

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

01. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 76, Hoboken No. III. 75: I. Allegro con spirito
02. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 76, Hoboken No. III. 75: II. Adagio
03. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 76, Hoboken No. III. 75: III. Menuetto
04. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 76, Hoboken No. III. 75: IV. Allegro ma non troppo
05. Quartet in B Major No. 1, Op. 50, Hoboken No. III. 44: I. Allegro
06. Quartet in B Major No. 1, Op. 50, Hoboken No. III. 44: II. Adagio non lento
07. Quartet in B Major No. 1, Op. 50, Hoboken No. III. 44: III. Menuet
08. Quartet in B Major No. 1, Op. 50, Hoboken No. III. 44: IV. Vivace
09. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 77, Hoboken No. III. 81: I. Allegro
10. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 77, Hoboken No. III. 81: II. Adagio
11. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 77, Hoboken No. III. 81: III. Menuetto
12. Quartet in G Major No. 1, Op. 77, Hoboken No. III. 81: IV. Presto

Personnel:
Quatuor Modigliani:
Philippe Bernhard, violin
Loïc Rio, violin
Laurent Marfaing, viola
François Kieffer, cello