Haydn: String Quartet in D major, Op.71 No.2 (Hob.III:70)
In Nomine Domini
Adagio – Allegro
Adagio
Menuet: Allegro
Finale:- Allegretto – Allegro
On 23rd June 1792 Haydn left London after a stay of over eighteen months, during which time his music had created something of a sensation. Although this success in England had also heightened his fame at home his return to Vienna passed largely unnoticed, the general public no doubt being preoccupied with news of the current war between Austria and France.
Haydn was now feeling old and tired, but by the Autumn he was already at work again, the chief products of this period being the gloriously sonorous E flat symphony (No.99) and two sets of three quartets for Count Anton Apponyi, Opp.71 & 74. It is highly likely that he still had the sound of Salomon’s London orchestra ringing in his mind; and indeed these quartets would appear to be the first to have been written specifically for the public concert hall, rather than for domestic music-making. Not surprisingly, they are capable of an almost orchestral sonority – which occasionally even reveals the composer straining for more sound than the medium could comfortably provide at the time. If this makes them more problematical in performance it might also go some way towards explaining why the Op.71 quartets in particular have suffered relative neglect over the years (the fact that they were not admitted into the two familiar green volumes of “Haydn’s Celebrated Quartets” must also have contributed). However, the D major betrays this feeling of strain to a far lesser extent than do its companions – helped perhaps by its naturally resonant key – and so could justifiably be considered the most successful and immediately accessible of the three. All six Apponyi quartets share a somewhat unusual feature in that each begins with a short call to attention; in Op.71/2, it is a genuine slow introduction of the type found in so many of his later symphonies, but which he otherwise never used in a quartet.
After such a noble beginning the main Allegro springs into life with a series of vigorous octave leaps which throughout engender the tremendous rhythmic drive of this magnificent movement. If the song-like Adagio is one of the most heartwarmingly sublime of all Haydn’s slow movements, then the menuet is surely one of his most hilarious and bucolic, ideally contrasted by its faintly wistful trio. For his finale he abandoned the usual rondo or sonata-allegro; the replacement heimprovised is basically a simple ternary structure with a quick coda, but incorporating a variation technique which manages to continue the monothematicism of his sonata movements – so successfully, in fact, that he used the formula again in the first movement of his next and final D major quartet (Op.76/5).
Haydn can rarely have composed a more consistently joyous or radiant work than this quartet, so its gradual emergence from obscurity (thanks originally to compelling advocacy by the one of the great ensembles, the Griller Quartet) was inevitable and highly welcome.
© Alan George
All Alan’s articles
