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Haydn Quartet opus 33 #6

In 1781, Haydn published his opus 33 string quartets, which he advertised as “written in a new and special style”.There has been plenty of debate about what he meant by this: do these quartets really present a departure from his earlier work, and how? Or was it just a sales pitch for this new work, coming after his quite successful and widely circulated opus 20 quartets?Certainly one can perceive new trends in the opus 33: a lightening of tone, an abandoning of the learned fugues that ended several of the opus 20, a replacing of minuet movements with fleeter, cleverer “scherzos”.Witty and innovative as he always was, in the opus 33 he sharpened his attention in this department, finding new comedic timings, sudden stops, reversals of the expected order of events, funny ways of chopping up and jumbling his melodies.

The final quartet in the opus, number 6, announces its “chopped-up” nature right from the opening: its main idea consists of a series of little gestures, courtly bows where nobody can decide who will walk into the room first.The first minute or so of the movement has a surprising number of “ending” moments: apparent attempts to come to a conclusion, when the music has only just begun.This is a favorite trick of the composer, imposing roadblocks and spinning his musical carriage down the road in spite of them.Often the snippet of music that attempts to conclude will become the germ of the new idea, to its own surprise.In the second, developmental section of the movement, Haydn does just that, launching the section with a reversal of the gestures from the beginning, so that the final gesture is now answered by the opening one — a reimagining of that conversation.A few bars later, the entire playbook of sonata form is thrown out of the window, as the moment of return happens in the wrong key, with an appearance of enormous confidence.Hurriedly, the correct key turns up in the second phrase and dismisses the impostor, trying to assure all onlookers that things are under control.But clearly the disturbance has created waves, as the music enters into an extended doubtful passages, modulating and exploring various other keys, working out its issues till it finally re-emerges in the home key — almost stumbling across it! — able to confirm matters with authentic conviction this time.

The slow movement follows, a dark and sorrowful aria in d minor redolent perhaps of Gluck, and strikingly like the slow movement of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, composed in the same year.The movement showcases Haydn’s love of melodic ambiguity: at the opening, and several more times, the first violin holds a long sustained note while the other voices play figures that might be murmuring accompanimental patterns or might be melody.Always this relationship is on a knife-edge — does the first-violin note evolve into the “true” melody of the passage, does it continue to stand by, does it get subsumed into the accompanimental rhythms?All of these things happen at one point or another, the melodic role sliding between voices as the music works its way through a richly chromatic landscape. This protean sliding-around — the refusal to assign fixed roles, melodic or accompanimental, to the four parts — is central to the movement’s beauty, a shared grieving whose source of eloquence remains shifting, unclear.

The third movement, the Scherzo for this quartet, begins elegantly enough, with an idea that leans gracefully on downbeats, and is imitated by all the voices as they enter.However, almost right away everybody gets a case of the hiccups, and the wrong notes start poking out.(Or is Haydn laughing at all of us string players who struggle to control our bowstrokes?) By contrast, the middle Trio section, introduced by the cello, doesn’t wait to become wrongfooted: right from the start the melody places its highest, most dissonant note on the upbeat, which makes it hang in a pleasingly awkward, unbalanced way.Once more, lemmings as ever, the other voices jump in and hop around in this unbalanced dance.

In some ways, the Finale is a departure for Haydn.Normally the master of the fake-out — irregular phrase lengths, sudden pauses, elisions, and order-reversals — here he serves up a movement that is utterly regular, almost to the very end.It is a kind of round dance in a comfortable, even jolly Allegretto tempo, alternating major-key and minor-key sections.In the opening section, the melody features a bouncing downward leap, a kid jumping off a slightly too high ledge for fun.The spiky good cheer of the major sections alternate with a smooth, mournful cast in the minor ones.As the movement progresses, the composer weaves embellishments into each section as it returns, triplets and catchy offbeats.We are disarmed by the simplicity of this succession, unceasing until three bars before the end, when — Haydn being Haydn — he drops in just one unexpected silence when the players seem to forget their lines; and then he finishes off the piece in one glad swoop.

Note by Misha Amory