The noble string quartet is one of the most private and personal of musical genres. Really the best way to experience it is to join up with three others and play one yourself, but string quartet playing, as a leisure-time activity, has diminished in popularity until it ranks somewhere down there with lawn croquet.
To some degree we've all been professionalized to death: why scratch through a quartet at home when we can hire the Emerson Quartet to do it for us, via our faithful iPod or CD player?
One could bemoan the demise of home-made chamber music, but there's not much point. After all, via recordings we're still hearing chamber music in our chambers, a.k.a. living rooms, just as intended. We've just changed personnel. Our quartet performers, first autopsied into a gazillion 1s and 0s, then reconstructed, Frankenstein-ish, into electrical impulses that pummel loudspeaker diaphragms into some semblance of sound waves, definitely lack the spontaneity of live performance. On the other hand, they're always there when you want them, nor do they require feeding or bathroom breaks. It's a pretty good trade on the whole.
Papa Joseph Haydn is typically credited with the 'invention' of the string quartet. Whether Haydn was really and truly the first up with the genre is debatable; what is sure is that his first set of "divertimenti" for two violins, viola, and 'cello were the first to become popular and widely distributed. Haydn's first twelve string quartets (Op. 1 and 2) were popular enough, in fact, that a fellow cooked up a copycat set which was long attributed to Haydn (Op. 3) and can still be found in older editions and recordings.
Haydn wrote string quartets throughout his long compositional career; the first ones appeared around 1757 and the very last one, Op. 103, came out in 1803. He published them mostly in sets of six, with some exceptions. Critical to the history of the quartet was the six-quartet series published Opus 33; in a lot of ways these are the first truly modern string quartets in which the four instruments — two violins, viola, and 'cello — are each given equal weight in the texture, and in which the quartet becomes a unique genre in its own right, leaving its origins as a miniature symphony behind.
One could describe the Opus 33 quartets as trippy given their broad humor, frequent flashes of the unexpected, compressed energy, and sleek sexy construction. As in so much of Haydn's music, a gracious and appealing surface generally masks an underlying intellectual rigor, but sometimes Haydn lets the fangs show just a bit. You could wind up a bit confused, in fact, if you don't pay careful attention.
Later quartets continue the development; by the time the 1790s had come around and Haydn was putting out Op. 77, he was probably incapable of writing anything even remotely second-rate. Even as old age began to rob him of the physical stamina for regular composition (although his mind remained as sharp as ever), he continued to work on a final quartet, Op. 103, which remained (alas) unfinished. By this time, Beethoven had already written his first sets of quartets (Op. 18) and thus the transmission of the genre was secured.
The sheer quantity of available recorded Haydn quartets could easily overwhelm. Here are a few recommendations, all available either on disc or as downloads from iTunes, Amazon, ClassicsOnline, etc.:
- The Angeles String Quartet offers a complete set of the quartets on Phillips, at an extraordinary budget price.
- Emerson Quartet: The Haydn Project is a three-CD set from Deutsche Grammophon which collects seven quartets from various periods in Haydn's life and contrasts those with quartets from later composers such as Dvorák and Bartók.
- The Kodaly Quartet offers the complete Haydn quartets in a boxed set from Naxos.
- The Tátrai Quartet also offers a complete set on Hungaroton, but you can pick it up divided into sub-sets. Download seems to be restricted to ClassicsOnline.
Of interest: the New Esterházy Quartet continues its cycle of the complete Haydn quartets on Saturday, June 21 at 4:00 pm at St. Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco. They'll be playing one quartet each from Opus 20, 33, 54, and 76.
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