String Quartet in E Flat Major, Hob.III:31, (Op.20 No.1): 1. Allegro moderato
Joseph Haydn (31 March or 1 April 1732–31 May 1809) was a leading composer of the Classical period, called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn Read Full BioJoseph Haydn (31 March or 1 April 1732–31 May 1809) was a leading composer of the Classical period, called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent most of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Eszterházy family on their remote estate. Being isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer at the court of Archbishop-Prince Hieronymous von Colloredo who also had in his employ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and father Leopold Mozart. Haydn had a third brother, Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor singer.
Joseph Haydn was born in 1732 in Rohrau, Austria village near the Hungarian border. His father was Matthias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother, the former Maria Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Neither parent could read music. However, Matthias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp. According to Haydn's later reminiscences, his childhood family was extremely musical, and frequently sang together and with their neighbors.
Haydn's parents were perceptive enough to notice that their son was musically talented and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain any serious musical training. It was for this reason that they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Franck, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Haydn be apprenticed to Franck in his home to train as a musician. Haydn thus went off with Franck to Hainburg (ten miles away) and never again lived with his parents. At the time he was not quite six.
Life in the Franck household was not easy for Haydn, who later remembered being frequently hungry as well as constantly humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. However, he did begin his musical training there, and soon was able to play both harpsichord and violin. The people of Hainburg were soon hearing him sing soprano parts in the church choir.
There is reason to think that Haydn's singing impressed those who heard him, because two years later (1740), he was brought to the attention of Georg von Reutter, the director of music in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was touring the provinces looking for talented choirboys. Haydn passed his audition with Reutter, and soon moved off to Vienna, where he worked for the next nine years as a chorister, the last four in the company of his younger brother Michael.
Like Franck before him, Reutter didn't always bother to make sure Haydn was properly fed. The young Haydn greatly looked forward to performances before aristocratic audiences, where the singers sometimes had the opportunity to satisfy their hunger by devouring the refreshments. Reutter also did little to further his choristers' musical education. However, St. Stephen's was at the time one of the leading, musical centers in Europe, where new music by leading composers was constantly being performed. Haydn was able to learn a great deal by osmosis simply by serving as a professional musician there.
In 1749, Haydn had matured physically to the point that he was no longer able to sing high choral parts. On a weak pretext, he was summarily dismissed from his job. He evidently spent one night homeless on a park bench, but was taken in by friends and began to pursue a career as a freelance musician. During this arduous period, which lasted ten years, Haydn worked many different jobs, including valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition". He laboured to fill the gaps in his training, and eventually wrote his first string quartets and his first opera. During this time Haydn's professional reputation gradually increased.
In 1759, or 1757 according to the New Grove Encyclopedia, Haydn received his first important position, that of Kapellmeister (music director) for Count Karl von Morzin. In this capacity, he directed the count's small orchestra, and for this ensemble wrote his first symphonies. Count Morzin soon suffered financial reverses that forced him to dismiss his musical establishment, but Haydn was quickly offered a similar job (1761) as assistant Kapellmeister to the Eszterházy family, one of the wealthiest and most important in the Austrian Empire. When the old Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, died in 1766, Haydn was elevated to full Kapellmeister.
As a liveried servant of the Eszterházys, Haydn followed them as they moved among their three main residences: the family seat in Eisenstadt, their winter palace in Vienna, and Eszterháza, a grand new palace built in rural Hungary in the 1760s. Haydn had a huge range of responsibilities, including composition, running the orchestra, playing chamber music for and with his patrons, and eventually the mounting of operatic productions. Despite the backbreaking workload, Haydn considered himself fortunate to have his job. The Eszterházy princes (first Paul Anton, then most importantly Nikolaus I) were musical connoisseurs who appreciated his work and gave him the conditions needed for his artistic development, including daily access to his own small orchestra.
In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. He and his wife, the former Maria Anna Keller, did not get along, and they produced no children. Haydn may have had one or more children with Luigia Polzelli, a singer in the Eszterházy establishment with whom he carried on a long-term love affair, and often wrote to on his travels.
During the nearly thirty years that Haydn worked in the Eszterházy household, he produced a flood of compositions, and his musical style became ever more developed. His popularity in the outside world also increased. Gradually, Haydn came to write as much for publication as for his employer, and several important works of this period, such as the Paris symphonies (1785–6) and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Christ (1786), were commissions from abroad.
Around 1781 Haydn established a friendship with Mozart, whose work he had already been influencing by example for many years. According to later testimony by Stephen Storace, the two composers occasionally played in string quartets together. Haydn was hugely impressed with Mozart's work, and in various ways tried to help the younger composer. During the years 1782 to 1785, Mozart wrote a set of string quartets thought to be inspired by Haydn's Opus 33 series. On completion he dedicated them to Haydn, a very unusual thing to do at a time when dedicatees were usually aristocrats. The extremely close 'brotherly' Mozart-Haydn connection may be an expression of Freemasonic sympathies as well: Mozart and Haydn were members of the same Masonic lodge. Mozart joined in 1784 in the middle of writing those string quartets subsequently dedicated to his Masonic brother Haydn. This lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than a deistic one.
In 1789, Haydn developed another friendship with Maria Anna von Genzinger (1750–93), the wife of Prince Nicolaus's personal physician in Vienna. Their relationship, documented in Haydn's letters, was evidently intense but platonic. The letters express Haydn's sense of loneliness and melancholy at his long isolation at Eszterháza. Genzinger's premature death in 1793 was a blow to Haydn, and his F minor variations for piano, Hob. XVII:6, which are unusual in Haydn's work for their tone of impassioned tragedy, may have been written as response to her death.
The London journeys
In 1790, Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by a thoroughly unmusical prince who dismissed the entire musical establishment and put Haydn on a pension. Thus freed of his obligations, Haydn was able to accept a lucrative offer from Johann Peter Salomon, a German impresario, to visit England and conduct new symphonies with a large orchestra.
The visit (1791-2), along with a repeat visit (1794-5), was a huge success. Audiences flocked to Haydn's concerts, and he quickly achieved wealth and fame: one review called him "incomparable." Musically, the visits to England generated some of Haydn's best-known work, including the Surprise, Military, Drumroll, and London symphonies, the Rider quartet, and the Gypsy Rondo piano trio.
The only misstep in the venture was an opera, L'anima del filosofo, which Haydn was contracted to compose, and paid a substantial sum of money for. Only one aria was sung at the time, and 11 numbers were published; the entire opera was not performed until 1950.
Final years in Vienna
Haydn actually considered becoming an English citizen and settling permanently, as composers such as Handel had before him, but decided on a different course. He returned to Vienna, had a large house built for himself, and turned to the composition of large religious works for chorus and orchestra. These include his two great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and six masses for the Eszterházy family, which by this time was once again headed by a musically-inclined prince. Haydn also composed the last nine in his long series of string quartets, including the Emperor, Sunrise, and Fifths quartets. Despite his increasing age, Haydn looked to the future, exclaiming once in a letter, "how much remains to be done in this glorious art!"
In 1802, Haydn found that an illness from which he had been suffering for some time had increased greatly in severity to the point that he became physically unable to compose. This was doubtless very difficult for him because, as he acknowledged, the flow of fresh musical ideas waiting to be worked out as compositions did not cease. Haydn was well cared for by his servants, and he received many visitors and public honours during his last years, but they cannot have been very happy years for him. During his illness, Haydn often found solace by sitting at the piano and playing Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which he had composed himself as a patriotic gesture in 1797. This melody later became used for the Austrian and German national anthems, and is the national anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Haydn died in 1809 following an attack on Vienna by the French army under Napoleon. Among his last words was his attempt to calm and reassure his servants as cannon shots fell on the neighbourhood.
Character and appearance
Haydn was known among his contemporaries for his kindly, optimistic, and congenial personality. He had a robust sense of humour, evident in his love of practical jokes and often apparent in his music. He was particularly respected by the Eszterházy court musicians whom he supervised, as he maintained a cordial working atmosphere and effectively represented the musicians' interests with their employer; see Papa Haydn.
Haydn was a devout Catholic who often turned to his rosary when he had trouble composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective. When he finished a composition, he would write "Laus deo" ("praise be to God") or some similar expression at the end of the manuscript. His favourite hobbies were hunting and fishing.
Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed throughout most of his youth. Like many in his day, he was a survivor of smallpox and his face was pitted with the scars of this disease. Haydn was quite surprised when women flocked to him during his London visits as he did not consider himself to be handsome.
About a dozen portraits of Haydn exist, although they disagree sufficiently that, other than what is noted above, we would have little idea what Haydn looked like were it not also for the existence of a lifelike wax bust and Haydn's death mask. Both are in the Haydnhaus in Vienna, a museum dedicated to the composer. All but one of the portraits show Haydn wearing the grey powdered wig fashionable for men in the 18th century, and from the one exception we learn that Haydn was bald in adulthood.
Works
Haydn is often described as the "father" of the classical symphony and string quartet. In fact, the symphony was already a well-established form before Haydn began his compositional career, with distinguished examples by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach among others, but Haydn's symphonies are the earliest to remain in "standard" repertoire. His parenthood of the string quartet, however, is beyond doubt: he essentially invented this medium singlehandedly. He also wrote many piano sonatas, piano trios, divertimentos and masses, which became the foundation for the Classical style in these compositional types. He also wrote other types of chamber music, as well as operas and concerti, although such compositions are now less known. Although other composers were prominent in the earlier Classical period, notably C.P.E. Bach in the field of the keyboard sonata (the harpsichord and clavichord were equally popular with the piano in this era) and J.C. Bach and Leopold Mozart in the symphony, Haydn was undoubtedly the strongest overall influence on musical style in this era.
The development of sonata form into a subtle and flexible mode of musical expression, which became the dominant force in Classical musical thought, owed most to Haydn and those who followed his ideas. His sense of formal inventiveness also led him to integrate the fugue into the classical style and to enrich the rondo form with more cohesive tonal logic, (see sonata rondo form). Haydn was also the principal exponent of the double variation form, that is variations on two alternating themes, which are often major and minor mode versions of each other.
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn Read Full BioJoseph Haydn (31 March or 1 April 1732–31 May 1809) was a leading composer of the Classical period, called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent most of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Eszterházy family on their remote estate. Being isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer at the court of Archbishop-Prince Hieronymous von Colloredo who also had in his employ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and father Leopold Mozart. Haydn had a third brother, Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor singer.
Joseph Haydn was born in 1732 in Rohrau, Austria village near the Hungarian border. His father was Matthias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother, the former Maria Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Neither parent could read music. However, Matthias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp. According to Haydn's later reminiscences, his childhood family was extremely musical, and frequently sang together and with their neighbors.
Haydn's parents were perceptive enough to notice that their son was musically talented and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain any serious musical training. It was for this reason that they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Franck, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Haydn be apprenticed to Franck in his home to train as a musician. Haydn thus went off with Franck to Hainburg (ten miles away) and never again lived with his parents. At the time he was not quite six.
Life in the Franck household was not easy for Haydn, who later remembered being frequently hungry as well as constantly humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. However, he did begin his musical training there, and soon was able to play both harpsichord and violin. The people of Hainburg were soon hearing him sing soprano parts in the church choir.
There is reason to think that Haydn's singing impressed those who heard him, because two years later (1740), he was brought to the attention of Georg von Reutter, the director of music in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was touring the provinces looking for talented choirboys. Haydn passed his audition with Reutter, and soon moved off to Vienna, where he worked for the next nine years as a chorister, the last four in the company of his younger brother Michael.
Like Franck before him, Reutter didn't always bother to make sure Haydn was properly fed. The young Haydn greatly looked forward to performances before aristocratic audiences, where the singers sometimes had the opportunity to satisfy their hunger by devouring the refreshments. Reutter also did little to further his choristers' musical education. However, St. Stephen's was at the time one of the leading, musical centers in Europe, where new music by leading composers was constantly being performed. Haydn was able to learn a great deal by osmosis simply by serving as a professional musician there.
In 1749, Haydn had matured physically to the point that he was no longer able to sing high choral parts. On a weak pretext, he was summarily dismissed from his job. He evidently spent one night homeless on a park bench, but was taken in by friends and began to pursue a career as a freelance musician. During this arduous period, which lasted ten years, Haydn worked many different jobs, including valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition". He laboured to fill the gaps in his training, and eventually wrote his first string quartets and his first opera. During this time Haydn's professional reputation gradually increased.
In 1759, or 1757 according to the New Grove Encyclopedia, Haydn received his first important position, that of Kapellmeister (music director) for Count Karl von Morzin. In this capacity, he directed the count's small orchestra, and for this ensemble wrote his first symphonies. Count Morzin soon suffered financial reverses that forced him to dismiss his musical establishment, but Haydn was quickly offered a similar job (1761) as assistant Kapellmeister to the Eszterházy family, one of the wealthiest and most important in the Austrian Empire. When the old Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, died in 1766, Haydn was elevated to full Kapellmeister.
As a liveried servant of the Eszterházys, Haydn followed them as they moved among their three main residences: the family seat in Eisenstadt, their winter palace in Vienna, and Eszterháza, a grand new palace built in rural Hungary in the 1760s. Haydn had a huge range of responsibilities, including composition, running the orchestra, playing chamber music for and with his patrons, and eventually the mounting of operatic productions. Despite the backbreaking workload, Haydn considered himself fortunate to have his job. The Eszterházy princes (first Paul Anton, then most importantly Nikolaus I) were musical connoisseurs who appreciated his work and gave him the conditions needed for his artistic development, including daily access to his own small orchestra.
In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. He and his wife, the former Maria Anna Keller, did not get along, and they produced no children. Haydn may have had one or more children with Luigia Polzelli, a singer in the Eszterházy establishment with whom he carried on a long-term love affair, and often wrote to on his travels.
During the nearly thirty years that Haydn worked in the Eszterházy household, he produced a flood of compositions, and his musical style became ever more developed. His popularity in the outside world also increased. Gradually, Haydn came to write as much for publication as for his employer, and several important works of this period, such as the Paris symphonies (1785–6) and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Christ (1786), were commissions from abroad.
Around 1781 Haydn established a friendship with Mozart, whose work he had already been influencing by example for many years. According to later testimony by Stephen Storace, the two composers occasionally played in string quartets together. Haydn was hugely impressed with Mozart's work, and in various ways tried to help the younger composer. During the years 1782 to 1785, Mozart wrote a set of string quartets thought to be inspired by Haydn's Opus 33 series. On completion he dedicated them to Haydn, a very unusual thing to do at a time when dedicatees were usually aristocrats. The extremely close 'brotherly' Mozart-Haydn connection may be an expression of Freemasonic sympathies as well: Mozart and Haydn were members of the same Masonic lodge. Mozart joined in 1784 in the middle of writing those string quartets subsequently dedicated to his Masonic brother Haydn. This lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than a deistic one.
In 1789, Haydn developed another friendship with Maria Anna von Genzinger (1750–93), the wife of Prince Nicolaus's personal physician in Vienna. Their relationship, documented in Haydn's letters, was evidently intense but platonic. The letters express Haydn's sense of loneliness and melancholy at his long isolation at Eszterháza. Genzinger's premature death in 1793 was a blow to Haydn, and his F minor variations for piano, Hob. XVII:6, which are unusual in Haydn's work for their tone of impassioned tragedy, may have been written as response to her death.
The London journeys
In 1790, Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by a thoroughly unmusical prince who dismissed the entire musical establishment and put Haydn on a pension. Thus freed of his obligations, Haydn was able to accept a lucrative offer from Johann Peter Salomon, a German impresario, to visit England and conduct new symphonies with a large orchestra.
The visit (1791-2), along with a repeat visit (1794-5), was a huge success. Audiences flocked to Haydn's concerts, and he quickly achieved wealth and fame: one review called him "incomparable." Musically, the visits to England generated some of Haydn's best-known work, including the Surprise, Military, Drumroll, and London symphonies, the Rider quartet, and the Gypsy Rondo piano trio.
The only misstep in the venture was an opera, L'anima del filosofo, which Haydn was contracted to compose, and paid a substantial sum of money for. Only one aria was sung at the time, and 11 numbers were published; the entire opera was not performed until 1950.
Final years in Vienna
Haydn actually considered becoming an English citizen and settling permanently, as composers such as Handel had before him, but decided on a different course. He returned to Vienna, had a large house built for himself, and turned to the composition of large religious works for chorus and orchestra. These include his two great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and six masses for the Eszterházy family, which by this time was once again headed by a musically-inclined prince. Haydn also composed the last nine in his long series of string quartets, including the Emperor, Sunrise, and Fifths quartets. Despite his increasing age, Haydn looked to the future, exclaiming once in a letter, "how much remains to be done in this glorious art!"
In 1802, Haydn found that an illness from which he had been suffering for some time had increased greatly in severity to the point that he became physically unable to compose. This was doubtless very difficult for him because, as he acknowledged, the flow of fresh musical ideas waiting to be worked out as compositions did not cease. Haydn was well cared for by his servants, and he received many visitors and public honours during his last years, but they cannot have been very happy years for him. During his illness, Haydn often found solace by sitting at the piano and playing Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which he had composed himself as a patriotic gesture in 1797. This melody later became used for the Austrian and German national anthems, and is the national anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Haydn died in 1809 following an attack on Vienna by the French army under Napoleon. Among his last words was his attempt to calm and reassure his servants as cannon shots fell on the neighbourhood.
Character and appearance
Haydn was known among his contemporaries for his kindly, optimistic, and congenial personality. He had a robust sense of humour, evident in his love of practical jokes and often apparent in his music. He was particularly respected by the Eszterházy court musicians whom he supervised, as he maintained a cordial working atmosphere and effectively represented the musicians' interests with their employer; see Papa Haydn.
Haydn was a devout Catholic who often turned to his rosary when he had trouble composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective. When he finished a composition, he would write "Laus deo" ("praise be to God") or some similar expression at the end of the manuscript. His favourite hobbies were hunting and fishing.
Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed throughout most of his youth. Like many in his day, he was a survivor of smallpox and his face was pitted with the scars of this disease. Haydn was quite surprised when women flocked to him during his London visits as he did not consider himself to be handsome.
About a dozen portraits of Haydn exist, although they disagree sufficiently that, other than what is noted above, we would have little idea what Haydn looked like were it not also for the existence of a lifelike wax bust and Haydn's death mask. Both are in the Haydnhaus in Vienna, a museum dedicated to the composer. All but one of the portraits show Haydn wearing the grey powdered wig fashionable for men in the 18th century, and from the one exception we learn that Haydn was bald in adulthood.
Works
Haydn is often described as the "father" of the classical symphony and string quartet. In fact, the symphony was already a well-established form before Haydn began his compositional career, with distinguished examples by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach among others, but Haydn's symphonies are the earliest to remain in "standard" repertoire. His parenthood of the string quartet, however, is beyond doubt: he essentially invented this medium singlehandedly. He also wrote many piano sonatas, piano trios, divertimentos and masses, which became the foundation for the Classical style in these compositional types. He also wrote other types of chamber music, as well as operas and concerti, although such compositions are now less known. Although other composers were prominent in the earlier Classical period, notably C.P.E. Bach in the field of the keyboard sonata (the harpsichord and clavichord were equally popular with the piano in this era) and J.C. Bach and Leopold Mozart in the symphony, Haydn was undoubtedly the strongest overall influence on musical style in this era.
The development of sonata form into a subtle and flexible mode of musical expression, which became the dominant force in Classical musical thought, owed most to Haydn and those who followed his ideas. His sense of formal inventiveness also led him to integrate the fugue into the classical style and to enrich the rondo form with more cohesive tonal logic, (see sonata rondo form). Haydn was also the principal exponent of the double variation form, that is variations on two alternating themes, which are often major and minor mode versions of each other.
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String Quartet in E Flat Major Hob.III:31 : 1. Allegro moderato
Franz Joseph Haydn Lyrics
No lyrics text found for this track.
The lyrics can frequently be found in the comments below or by filtering for lyric videos.
The lyrics can frequently be found in the comments below or by filtering for lyric videos.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Leonhard Euler
1. Take care over the word ‘inspired’ which is as absurdly over-used as it is mis-used by the ‘many people’ to which you referred.
Beethoven’s Opus 18 was absolutely not inspired by Mozart, nor anyone else - it was a standard commission as will be explained below, and was written at a time Beethoven felt both competent and confident to tackle the genre.
2. There are significant elements of Mozart and Haydn - in very different ways - in Beethoven’s DNA, so inevitably, there are occasional moments that may be described as reminiscent at best of his two greatest predecessors, and also obviously, evidence of what he had studied and learned from them.
3.Both Haydn’s Opus 77 and Beethoven’s Opus 18 were commissioned by the same person - Prince Lobkowitz - at almost the same time.
Haydn was busy with The Seasons - which basically finished him off - and he had not the strength to continue with the commission after completing the oratorio; he managed just two of the projected set of six.
Beethoven completed his six by 1801.
HC Robbins Landon has suggested that Haydn in fact did hear Beethoven’s Opus 18, and then decided to quit the field to the young pretender; cue lots of speculation and conjecture along the lines of his alleged retreat from opera after hearing Mozart’s later operas.
4. Almost all Beethoven’s first published efforts were startlingly new - the Opus 1 piano trios, Opus 2 piano sonatas, 1st symphony, and Opus 18 quartets for example.
Whilst he had clearly been studying Mozart and Haydn quartets prior to writing Opus 18 - including copying out Haydn’s Opus 20 No 1, and Mozart’s K464 - Opus 18 is clearly at the dawn of a new age.
It was not ‘…inspired by’ or any such silly nonsense, but Opus 18 does show that he has assimilated much of Mozart and Haydn, but also that he had his own new ideas, and very original musical language.
5. Regarding recurring motifs in Beethoven, this was a key idea he took directly from Haydn.
The intensive working-out and development of thematic and motivic ideas is a common thread between Haydn and Beethoven.
Their shared technique of building larger scale movements out of small cells, and through-composition and cyclic integration - which were taken in new directions by Beethoven - all had their origins in Haydn, indeed they were worked by him to extraordinary levels as early as Symphony 45 (‘Farewell’) in 1772, and in terms of the string quartet, this was the ‘…composed in a new and special way’ of Opus 33 in 1781.
Hope that gives a little food for thought.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Timothy Thorne
A few pointers:
1. Check out Christian Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkust (Characteristics of musical keys) of 1806.
An English translation is easily available if you Google it, and it will give you a fascinating insight into the thinking of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven into the widely understood characteristics of each tonality at the time.
2. That said, I think there is clear evidence that composers had certain keys that were special to them and inspired some of their most personal thoughts.
Mozart - g minor
Haydn - f minor
Beethoven - c minor.
3. All three of these composers wrote many sets of works - three’s as in Mozart’s Symphonies 39-41, Haydn’s 76-78 and 79-81, or Beethoven’s piano trios Opus 1 and piano sonatas Opus 2; or sixes as in most of Haydn’s string quartets, his ‘Paris’ symphonies, Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets, and Beethoven’s quartets Opus 18.
There is a whole raft of other examples, including by other composers.
Obviously, each work in each set was written in a contrasting tonality, usually included minor key works, and they had very different characters.
In short, I’m not sure E flat was particularly a favourite* key, more that the understood characteristics of the key provided a contrast with adjacent works in tonality, mood, and character.
* HC Robbins Landon suggests that f minor was in fact Haydn’s favourite key, but it was by no means his most frequently used tonality; beware the dangers of thinking most commonly used = favourite.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Serge Smirnoff
You are quite right about Opus 9 (1768/69) being the first set of ‘proper’ modern string quartets.*
Haydn wrote 68 in total, but the first ten - often listed as Opus 0, 1 and 2 - are five movement ‘divertimenti a quattro’; the remaining 58 - from Opus 9 (c.1769) - forward were to define what was a string quartet, and from Opus 20 (1772), they are without exception an unprecedented, and unbroken chain of masterpieces.
Additionally, Opus 9 and Opus 17 also contain some very fine works, and none of them are not worth repeated listening - the minor key work in each set being particularly memorable.
Even the very early works Opus 0,1, and 2 are professionally composed and lovely music - there is no such thing as immature, or ‘early’ Haydn.
* Mozart took the trouble to study these works, and noted the contents carefully as is clearly evidenced in some of his own works.
Serge Smirnoff
Gérard Begni, below is quote from booklet of Op 9 from Festetics-recorded set of quartets.
LÁSZLÓ SOMFAI (Author of text)
Opus 9: Haydn s first genuine String Quartets
The aged Haydn is supposed to have told Artaria, his Viennese publisher, when he was about to publish the collected string quartets, that the series should only include the quartets from no. 19 onwards. By that time, in fact, there had already been a kind of a collected edition in parts printed by Pleyel in Paris, in which three early sets of six works each (known today as opus 1, opus 2 and opus 3) were followed by no. 19, the first quartet of the set opus 9.
This statement from Haydn is of utmost importance. Although the 70-year-old composer s memory was failing rapidly and he was sometimes unable to tell whether a particular work from his early days was written by himself or not, the exclusion of the first 18 quartets in the Paris edition should have served as a warning to posterity. Unfortunately it was not taken seriously. <...>
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László Somfai is a significant figure of international musicology, a dominant personality of domestic musicology and professional training first of all by his Haydn-researches.
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LaVell Thompson, Jr.
As a general rule of thumb, I tend to steer clear of writing remarks/comments on YouTube postings. HOWEVER, in the case of this piece, I thought it worth mentioning something VERY IMPORTANT (for those not already in-the-know). While listening to this piece recently, I discovered that Antonin Dvorak was inspired by this piece!
Dvorak's String Quartet no. 4 in E-minor has a second movement titled "Andante religioso." And, if you listen to THAT movement and the THIRD movement of this Haydn work, you'll hear a VERY CLOSE SIMILARITY in color, texture, counterpoint, and I (believe muted strings with both).
I'd not been familiar with the Haydn before hearing the Dvorak. And after discovering the Dvorak quartets (which are ALL AMAZING, FYI...if you're not familiar with them), I instantly fell in love with the 2nd movement of the 4th. So much so that I played it a million times. Anyway...my point is that when I required myself to start listening to the Haydn quartets (since I was not familiar with them...mostly for learning purposes and to see what he does with strings), once hearing THIS piece's 3rd movement, I had to do a double-take because I thought I was listening to Dvorak for a split second! It's very clear that Dvorak must have enjoyed Franz Josef Haydn's writing, too. :-) Clearly, Haydn--being a composer of the Classical period--wrote his music a century before Dvorak's late Romantic music.
Confession: I actually like the Dvorak version better. But, then again: I am a little biased. I'm not exactly a fan of Classicism (with many isolated exceptions). I mostly prefer all things 20th Century (with some exceptions). I also like the Baroque period. O.k. That's enough. lol Thanks for reading (for those who did). Feel free to comment, if you like. Here is a recording of the very piece I'm referring to with an interpretation I like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiBv-GptHV8
Lucas Zavaluentie
This quartet always makes me imagine being on a dark road at night in a car while listening to this.
Elaine Blackhurst
Whilst listening to this magnificent quartet, it’s worth thinking about why Beethoven in 1794, chose to copy out the whole work for study purposes.
It’s interesting that in a work already nearly a quarter of a century old, Beethoven felt he could learn something new.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Leonhard Euler
1. Take care over the word ‘inspired’ which is as absurdly over-used as it is mis-used by the ‘many people’ to which you referred.
Beethoven’s Opus 18 was absolutely not inspired by Mozart, nor anyone else - it was a standard commission as will be explained below, and was written at a time Beethoven felt both competent and confident to tackle the genre.
2. There are significant elements of Mozart and Haydn - in very different ways - in Beethoven’s DNA, so inevitably, there are occasional moments that may be described as reminiscent at best of his two greatest predecessors, and also obviously, evidence of what he had studied and learned from them.
3.Both Haydn’s Opus 77 and Beethoven’s Opus 18 were commissioned by the same person - Prince Lobkowitz - at almost the same time.
Haydn was busy with The Seasons - which basically finished him off - and he had not the strength to continue with the commission after completing the oratorio; he managed just two of the projected set of six.
Beethoven completed his six by 1801.
HC Robbins Landon has suggested that Haydn in fact did hear Beethoven’s Opus 18, and then decided to quit the field to the young pretender; cue lots of speculation and conjecture along the lines of his alleged retreat from opera after hearing Mozart’s later operas.
4. Almost all Beethoven’s first published efforts were startlingly new - the Opus 1 piano trios, Opus 2 piano sonatas, 1st symphony, and Opus 18 quartets for example.
Whilst he had clearly been studying Mozart and Haydn quartets prior to writing Opus 18 - including copying out Haydn’s Opus 20 No 1, and Mozart’s K464 - Opus 18 is clearly at the dawn of a new age.
It was not ‘…inspired by’ or any such silly nonsense, but Opus 18 does show that he has assimilated much of Mozart and Haydn, but also that he had his own new ideas, and very original musical language.
5. Regarding recurring motifs in Beethoven, this was a key idea he took directly from Haydn.
The intensive working-out and development of thematic and motivic ideas is a common thread between Haydn and Beethoven.
Their shared technique of building larger scale movements out of small cells, and through-composition and cyclic integration - which were taken in new directions by Beethoven - all had their origins in Haydn, indeed they were worked by him to extraordinary levels as early as Symphony 45 (‘Farewell’) in 1772, and in terms of the string quartet, this was the ‘…composed in a new and special way’ of Opus 33 in 1781.
Hope that gives a little food for thought.
Leonhard Euler
@Elaine Blackhurst Many people think that Beethoven op 18 was inspired by Mozart Haydn quartets but i think it has a more direct relation to Haydn's op 20. Im not sure wether Haydn got to hear Beethoven's op 18 but i would asume he would be proud that he was able to master the form around the same age Haydn was when he wrote this piece.
Beethoven's c minor quartet is probably the direct "child" if you will of op 20 no 3, they both have reoccurring motifs throughout the piece.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Timothy Thorne
A few pointers:
1. Check out Christian Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkust (Characteristics of musical keys) of 1806.
An English translation is easily available if you Google it, and it will give you a fascinating insight into the thinking of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven into the widely understood characteristics of each tonality at the time.
2. That said, I think there is clear evidence that composers had certain keys that were special to them and inspired some of their most personal thoughts.
Mozart - g minor
Haydn - f minor
Beethoven - c minor.
3. All three of these composers wrote many sets of works - three’s as in Mozart’s Symphonies 39-41, Haydn’s 76-78 and 79-81, or Beethoven’s piano trios Opus 1 and piano sonatas Opus 2; or sixes as in most of Haydn’s string quartets, his ‘Paris’ symphonies, Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets, and Beethoven’s quartets Opus 18.
There is a whole raft of other examples, including by other composers.
Obviously, each work in each set was written in a contrasting tonality, usually included minor key works, and they had very different characters.
In short, I’m not sure E flat was particularly a favourite* key, more that the understood characteristics of the key provided a contrast with adjacent works in tonality, mood, and character.
* HC Robbins Landon suggests that f minor was in fact Haydn’s favourite key, but it was by no means his most frequently used tonality; beware the dangers of thinking most commonly used = favourite.
Timothy Thorne
Now I'm curious as to why Haydn, Mozart and (particularly) Beethoven chose Eb as one of their favorite keys to write music for string quartets and orchestral works. It's not as intuitive a key in writing for strings as G, C, or D for instance and can present difficulties for string players.
Hans H. Staal
Wonderful light-footed performance. These postings are an endless source of musical pleasure, especially in these quasi-quarantaine corona times.
Gérard Begni
This is the first one of the first actual series of quartets by Haydn, the so-called "sun quartets" because of the drawing in the first page of the publication. Most of its final movements included a fugue, which is not the case here.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Timothy Thorne
The spurious Opus 3 string quartets often mistakenly attributed to him, are absolutely and categorically not by Haydn.
Timothy Thorne
@Elaine Blackhurst there's also an Opus 3 set of quartets listed in the catalogue of Haydn's quartets; there is some fine music in this set, which many believe is of questionable authenticity as compositions by Haydn.