Brentano Quartet on Haydn’s Quartets

Aug 29

Written By Sara Danner Dukic

HAYDN OP. 33 NOTES BY BRENTANO QUARTET’S MARK STEINBERG AND MISCHA AMORY

Reprintable only with permission from the author.
Joseph Haydn’s opus 33 string quartets are widely held to be the first set wherein the composer displayed full maturity in his mastery of the form – this in spite of their brilliantly experimental opus 20 precursors. The opus 33 quartets are dubbed “Gli Scherzi”, a reference to Haydn’s replacement of the more usual Minuet movement with a lighter, quicker Scherzo in each work.
Opus 33 no. 1 is set in the rare key of B minor: rare for Haydn, and almost unique within the entire standard quartet canon. This oddness seems to affect the music from the very outset of the first movement, the opening bars at first unsure whether to proceed in major or minor. The progress of the entire movement is beset with difficulties: moving in fits and starts, stuttering at times, halted by eloquent pauses, often changing its mood on impulse. It is rhetorical rather than melodic music, questing in nature, and is over as soon as it reaches firm ground, almost by definition. The second movement is a very brief Scherzo, alternating a clever main section with a luminous Trio in B major. Following this, the slow movement evokes the world of a stately, quiet dance – perhaps in reparation for the missing Minuet – which proves both adventurous and beautiful as it unfolds chromatically through many modulations. The Finale, a breathless Presto, is an exciting romp which places the first violinist in the virtuosic spotlight, requiring swift arpeggiation, fiddle-like string crossings, and a constant ranging over all registers.
Oct, 21st 2008
Note by Misha Amory
Reprintable only with permission from the author.
Haydn must have been a great babysitter. You know, the one who picks up three unpromising looking Lego blocks and builds a functioning helicopter, the one who uses the toilet plunger to pick up odds and ends around the house, the one who swaps his white powdered wig for a frizzy brunette one and looks oddly like your aunt, and then appears around corners when you least expect him. In a quartet nicknamed “the Joke” one might expect as much. The nickname of the E-flat major quartet Op. 33 No. 2 refers to the ending of its last movement, but Haydn plays at being a delightful trickster in three of the four movements.
In the opening movement Haydn sets forth a fairly balanced, jovial theme. Even here for the performer there is a slight cognitive dissonance: he gives the performing direction “cantabile,” singing, but much of what makes up this theme is more a good belly laugh than any kind of bel canto. The diva cannot take herself too seriously. And the chuckling pretty much takes over the proceedings. In fact the entire movement is made up of the elements heard in that first statement. It is a fun sleight-of-hand, never even hinting at monotony, a whole meal somehow conjured out of a scrap of bread. When Haydn uses a chain of chuckling motifs to suggest progress it instead leads to a kind of slapstick stuttering. The pitch that leads where we are going arrives on top in the first violin, but it gets stuck there and desperately repeats as the harmonies underneath shift around. In order to regain a sense of dignity, rather in the vein of Sam the Eagle of the Muppets, Haydn takes the rhythm from the chuckling motif and uses it to puff up the quartet. The quartet does its best playing at being an orchestra. Of course it is absurd play, and all is merrily shrugged off when the curtain is lifted on the great and powerful Oz to reveal a humble wizard. Haydn loves to keep us off balance and the movement even ends with the same three notes that introduced the whole piece, the figure that introduces becoming the one that closes, a sort of pun.
Where Haydn would have written a Minuet movement in his earlier quartets he puts a movement marked “Scherzo,” joke, in each of the Op. 33 quartets. Here in Op. 33 No. 2 we get a rather pompously stomping dance that again and again sheepishly looks around filled with doubt, wondering whether any toes have been trampled. This kind of self-referential rhetoric is one of the wonderful hallmarks of Haydn’s style. The music comments on itself, much to the delight of performer as well as listener. In the trio one can almost hear the rust on the strings, the hurdy-gurdy on its last legs. The first violin tries so hard to be elegant and suave, but what can be done when dancing on banana peels? Again there is a moment of attempted dignity and orchestral build-up, again coming up woefully empty-handed. Suggestions of orchestral grandeur appear in each of the movements; in the fast movements they seem to grow more preposterous each time.
In the slow movement Haydn puts aside his clown’s garb to don the enchanted robes of a magician. Starting from the simplest horn call derived melody for the viola and cello he weaves a spell of wonder. As the violins sing their version of the tune the cello murmurs an unassuming oscillating figure, soughing water or wind. Throughout the movement this figuration adorns and illuminates the proceedings gently and tenderly. The moments of orchestral weight here come as foreign declamatory chords, revelations and admissions of darkness. But the slashes in the aural texture do not rent the fabric of the charmed song. Instead they are covered over, healed like a wound that becomes part of one’s life story only as anecdote. The movement departs with a series of silvery sighs evaporating into the ether.
The finale is a merry romp of a rondo, quicksilver and pure good spirits. Toward the end, pompous, regal music announces itself. The movement steps outside of itself, taking on the role of narrator, of explicator, and makes a last ditch effort at stately dignity. This is the final, most farcical of the futile orchestral tropes. Laughing it off, what happens next leads to the joke of the piece’s nickname.
Surely you didn’t expect me to reveal the punch line!
Sep, 27th 2012
Note by Mark Steinberg
Reprintable only with permission from the author.
When Haydn published his Op. 33 quartets and claimed he had written them in a “new and special style” it was neither an empty boast nor necessarily particularly newsworthy; every new work the master wrote seems to reveal further, unforeseen facets of his fertile imagination. Haydn, often lauded for his considerable wit, is a prestidigitator extraordinaire, fully conversant in misdirection, taking delight in, and exploiting fully, ambiguities of form and function. He lives in the Newtonian world of expected relationships, but as soon as one peers more closely quantum weirdnesses start to crop up.
He wastes no time in toying with his audience and players in the opening of the Quartet in C Major, Op. 33 No. 3 (“the Bird”). A primary task at the start of any tonal work is to establish the key of the piece, to provide context, to set the stage upon which the action of the play will transpire. It takes at least three notes to make a chord, the lowest of which, in the normal positioning, is called the root, and lends the key its name: here, C Major. This quartet starts with only two notes, which could plausibly be part of two different simple harmonies, one major, one minor. In fact, the root is there, but in the higher position, uprooted, as it were. Haydn buries the lede. It is only with the entrance of the third note, which appears above, drawn from the air, that resolution and recognition of the scene becomes possible.
The entrance of the first violin is akin to the appearance of Ariel in The Tempest: Ariel is beholden to the laws insisted upon by Prospero, yet he is able to enchant and conjure, affecting the presentation of the world in which he is captive and in which these laws pertain. The sense of expectation is further heightened, theatrically, by the exquisitely delicate pulsations in the opening measure, the texture of time and anticipation itself, unadulterated possibility. The repetitions of a pitch here also propel the first violin melody, albeit more patiently, now adorned with grace notes that evoke the chirping of birds, one of several details in the piece that may be responsible for its nickname.
By the time the ‘cello also joins, and provides, at long last, the root in its proper position, the phrase is already hurtling toward its own vanishing: a wink, a flutter, a series of acrobatic leaps ending with a fancy dismount into the sea. No sooner does the music situate itself than it disappears, and immediately, with the second phrase, calls into question the plausibility of the first statement; perhaps we are in the presence of an unreliable narrator. The first moment in the piece where the quartet properly delivers a completely unambiguous C Major chord, which would logically suggest a solid foundation and an unchallenged sense of place, the chord heralds, paradoxically, a bridging, transitional idea. Haydn starts on his way toward the so-called second theme, usually providing contrast and, thus, dramatic tension, in a sonata form movement such as this one. The dismount motive, used at first to end a thought, is punningly remolded into a propulsive idea, eventually intermingling with the chirping, birdlike initial first violin idea just before the arrival of the second theme, a shuffling of the deck. But, lo and behold, after the shuffling we find the card drawn at the beginning of the movement materializes again, resurfacing at the top of the deck.
The second theme starts almost identically to the first theme, albeit twice as fast and with a small alteration in the interval of the grace notes. Birds of a feather, I suppose. Further transmutations await. In the development section, where the composer reexamines and refashions earlier ideas, using them as vessels on which to sail and explore, the “chirping” figure turns dark and moody, haunted, self-entangled, with a melancholic cast: the shadows, now, of ravens and crows. Clouds dissipate, and we find our way back to the opening idea, but as we arrive at the anticipatory pulsations we know from the opening we may be startled to realize they are not where we should expect harmonically. On the return home, the plane descends through layers of clouds and suddenly the landscape we expect to recognize seems terra incognita. Of course it is a feint, a fleeting mirage, and a quicksilver bit of harmonic manipulation situates us correctly, at home. Don’t get comfy, though. The second phrase again starts in disguise before revealing its true, original identity. Doubleness abounds. The movement ends in high spirits, at long last providing closure to the phrase that started it all.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Op. 33 quartets is Haydn’s decision to replace the expected Minuet movement with movements entitled “scherzo,” literally “joke” in Italian. The minuet was already a potent template within which Haydn could jest, as it was a rather quotidian dance with clear presuppositions that could be cleverly thwarted to comic effect. In the case of Op. 33 No. 3, the title, itself, seems a form of misdirection, as the dusky, undulatory murmurings and susurrations of all the instruments under the breath and in their lowest registers seems more akin to prayer and introversion than pleasantries and wisecracks. In fact, the scherzo proper serves as a foil for the bright and strutting, if perhaps vainglorious, trio section, in which the violins perform a pompous dance, a feathery frolic, all twitter and hop. The lower instruments silently observe, binoculars at the ready!
The silken slow movement is a tender aria, charming and charmed. replete with sighs and florid arabesques. Gentle singing, suffused with warmth and comfort, cedes way now and then to music rather more playful and enchanted, dancing around the singer. The song spins itself out more or less placidly, despite occasional nods toward exotic harmonies that haunt the periphery. The movement circles around itself, reexamining the same landscape with fresh eyes each time.
The finale of the quartet might have been titled by Bartók, a century and a half later, a “teasing song.” Here is the trademark call of the cuckoo, named from the sound of its cheep. Of course the cuckoo is also beloved of clockmakers, and just as the quivering opening of the piece seems to make audible the texture of time, giggling repeated notes here return to the idea of measuring the progression of moments. The four “g’s” that the first violin intone at the start of the work are here doubled, hitting that pitch eight times in the tune. All is good-natured ribbing and tickling. Twice the childlike provocations are cut off by Turkish inflected Janissary music, begging for drums and cymbals. But the more naive and lighthearted music wins out, and the piece in its final moments evaporates with an insouciant wink, the first violin floating away while accompanying with the same repeated note on which it first appeared. We could easily loop back around to the opening of the piece, but instead the balloon is let go into the sky, lighter than air, to be amongst the birds.
Apr, 29th 2023
Note by Mark Steinberg
Reprintable only with permission from the author.
As a young man, Joseph Haydn took a job improvising for a comic actor, a sort of vaudeville performer, and was called upon to illustrate musically the character’s antics and physical comedy, apparently with great success. He was a man of the theater. At the time that the quartets of Op. 33 were published it had been nine years since Haydn’s previous set of quartets, and he, famously, announced that the publication of the six quartets of Op. 33 heralded a “new and special style.” (“New and improved,” might have been the marketing lingo today.) The intervening years had seen Haydn preoccupied largely with comic opera, and the new set of quartets arrived replete with clever amusements galore, awash in the misdirections and other assorted shenanigans of opera buffa.
In addition, Haydn’s writing is much indebted to the patterns of rhetoric and the charms of punning, delighting in deliberate confusion and manufactured ambiguities of meaning and function. An example of both of these qualities, theatricality and grammatical whimsy, is found in the very first gesture of the Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 33 No. 4. The piece enters on tiptoe, precarious and in the spirit of rhetorical provocation, figuration evoking an ending more than beginning, only to erupt — peekaboo! — with a start. That eruptive chord is held as if a deer in headlights, before being tossed away in a sea of giggles, a miniature aviary of trills. Doubleness abounds: the piece fashions beginnings out of traditional closing figures; the accompanimental repeated notes that tiptoe in become a central concern of the movement and often occupy the foreground; the movement crafts its progress through reiterations of material that should draw the motion to a close; each confident ending immediately has its bluster deflated with a doubtful rejoinder.
Perhaps Haydn would have smiled to read Gertrude Stein: “There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / to beginning.”
There are structural rhetoric feints, as well. Where the movement should find itself back home in the opening idea, it instead appears in the wrong key, confident in its arrival until the realization kicks in that we’ve taken a wrong turn. A quick reorientation solves the problem, and the music continues innocently until getting caught in a long preparation for an ending that stutters along in repetitions of the material that, near the opening, builds continuity out of final gestures. When the passage finally manages to resolve and cadence in the home key, fulfilling its long-promised role, that resolution, which should herald the closing material of the movement, loops back around to the opening idea before relenting, then once again gets stuck in the opening gambit before banishing it with a series of final exclamation points infiltrated with winking asides. The movement has a flirtatiously entangled narrative trajectory that would make Calvino or Borges proud. (Or, for that matter, and closer to his time, Laurence Sterne.)
There is, as well, a charmingly ridiculous passage in the middle of the movement that is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A virtuosic passage in the first violin, buoyed by the ebullient repeated note figure that starts the movement, travels through a too-long sequence of harmonies, an ouroboros, a dog chasing its tail, an Escher staircase. The 11th (!) iteration is the same as the first; it is as in Alice in Wonderland: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.” Again and again, Haydn chuckles along, conflating motion and stasis, beginning and ending, progress and the impediments that frustrate that progress.
The Op. 33 set is also known for Haydn’s decision to replace each Minuet movement with a Scherzo, literally a “joke.” In this particular quartet it almost seems a joke to entitle it so, as the movement has all the hallmarks of a well-behaved Minuet. After the complexities of the first movement, the second charms through its simplicity and straightforward joie de vivre. The Scherzo proper is all hop, the minor key trio section in the middle, all glide and interrupted, stealthy slither. Together they seem light and dark incarnate.
The glowing, E-flat Major slow movement beguiles, hesitantly hopeful and singing. The first figure, which reappears throughout, lifts gently upward and seems an echo of the similar figure that follows the initial eruption of the first movement. That figure then becomes linked to itself to form a longer unit that travels. Only once in the movement does this set of fused figures sigh downward rather than reach upward, and the moment offers a tender consolation. Such a small change, with such a touching result. The upward reach of hope is answered by the downward drift of acceptance, Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds. The final moments offer an after-echo of this descending idea, further distilled, just a memory.
The last movement plays on the repeated note idea from the first, all laughter and hijinks. This ebullient and mischievous finale might well be summoned as an example to illustrate the adjective “Haydnesque,” with its sparkling wit and good humor. Returns of the opening idea are varied with warbling or with unpredictable, hiccoughing leaping notes, all athletic prancing of a tipsy acrobat. Contrasting sections offer, first, a gently playful riff on the initial three notes of the movement, while a later section erupts in gypsy-inflected faux-fury, crackling with energy. Each return seems gleefully unaffected, happy to bounce along as before. The movement ends with an adorably insouciant surprise, another signature move.
In the 1760s German critics castigated Haydn for “debasing the art with comic fooling.” Decades later we find him, as evidenced by much in this work, still at it, and thank goodness for that!
Feb, 8th 2023
Note by Mark Steinberg
Reprintable only with permission from the author.
1781, the year Haydn gifted the world the six quartets of his Op. 33, saw, as well, the publication of another great and influential work: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Of course Haydn would not have known that treatise as he was composing his quartets; still they seem to explore similar preoccupations. Whereas Kant tends to cloak his ideas in complex, sometimes turgid language, Haydn is the master of thoughtful lightness, of offerings that delight through their clever misdirections. Both speak of the way we perceive and attempt to understand the world and its manifold ambiguities.
Kant questions whether our faculty of reason can wrest the true, intrinsic meaning from objects in the world. Against this possibility, he claims that the categories and concepts we hold in our minds condition and shape what we are able to know. These are inexorably intertwined; our concepts extract meaning, and are containers to be filled, where the knowledge obtained must take on the form of its container. The opening movement of Haydn’s Quartet in G Major, Op. 33. No. 5, plays, as well, with the doubleness of intrinsic and imposed meaning. Within the hierarchical tonal system that organizes Haydn’s language (important to say, akin to Kantian categories), the first gesture heard is one that concludes, that creates an ending: “and so it was.” It is as if we have stumbled into a room only to catch the last words of a story, having missed everything that led us there. And yet, here it necessarily functions as an introductory gesture, opening the gate in the direction we would expect it to close. (In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen says to Alice “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Here we have a perfect illustration of remembering something we’ve yet to experience. It seems to me that Lewis Carroll and Haydn would have gotten along quite well!) The figuration, itself, could be merely formulaic, but as the piece begins (again) in a more continuous vein we see that it is used motivically; what was first presented as a fait accompli is now looped with itself to create continuity and then, only after all other options have been tried, at long last as a closing figure. Impossible to trust that it has its own, inviolable meaning. Rather how we read it depends on our own expectations and how we perceive it in time and harmonic space. The ambiguity delights, as it does in a good pun. (Even in bad ones, I might argue.) When a second, contrasting theme appears after a stop in the proceedings, it goes nowhere, rather quickly reverting to the opening material. And the exposition (first major section) of the movement ends with attempts to begin again, the first two notes of the main theme orphaned from their continuation. When the first section is repeated in performance, the initial gesture disappears. Instead, the attempts to begin find their connection to the theme, enabling reentry.
That opening (closing!) figure populates the movement, in all of its guises. Carroll’s Cheshire Cat says “the proper order of things is often a mystery to me,” and so it seems here. There is even a strange, dilated and exotically altered version that almost halts and derails the narrative, falsely promising something darker and more fraught, in minor. So such thing, as it is a misdirection that further highlights the levity of refusing, again and again, to let much be taken seriously. When the stuttering, sputtering first-two-notes-only material reappears it, only now, and after a rhetorical silence, leaps back to using the closing idea as a point of entry before becoming reintegrated into its theme. Most typically in a movement of this structure, by this point we are more or less repeating what was heard earlier, with small alterations that allow contrasts of key to be resolved (so that what was sensed as a bit farther away can return home). There is a need of recomposing the transition between themes in order for this to work out, and here Haydn expands that moment of transition and inserts playful banter based on only the quick notes at the end of the opening/closing gesture. So the end of the beginning/end is used for continuation, not long after we’ve had the beginning of the real beginning used as an ending, or at least sort of becoming one. Curiouser and curiouser!
After a moment of suspension, there is a sudden, startling loud upbeat that sends us careening into a version of the main tune in the wrong key, pompously self-assured when it has no reason to be so. When we do find our way back to the correct, resolving key, it is with a smile and two winks; that very first figure heard now twice, and upon its repetition we understand it to say what it seemed to want to mean at the start: this is the end. (More Lewis Carroll: “ ‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!’ ‘You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, ‘that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!’” Indeed.)
Ambiguity colors each of the quartet’s other movements, as well. The second movement is a darkly passionate aria for the first violin, amidst turbulent waves in the second violin and time somberly measured by the lower two instruments, a sort of “woe is me!” lament. A fateful and severe figure is first whispered by the first violin before being taken up in unison by the group, a statement of great rhetoric strength, such as might be offered by the chorus in a Greek tragedy. The first violin takes on the role of tragic heroine, wailing, exhorting, daring to hope. There is even a sort of written out, emotive accompanied cadenza that searches and pleads. All might be a revelation of true melancholic depth, were it not for the final cadence, in which the Greek chorus statement is punctuated by a wink and a ridiculous final unison played by all with a jangly pizzicato. In one fell swoop all that comes before is called into question, the listener awakened, the spell broken.
And immediately the chortling scherzo gallops in as if to mock gleefully what has just transpired. Is it organized in three beat units, or two? Haydn plays here with rhythmic ambiguity in the organization of the first violin part (the lower voices playing their cards close to their chests by repeating the same note on each beat, thus offering no allegiance to any underlying pattern), so that it bounds along energetically before righting itself. When that happens, the phrase seems on course to finish symmetrically and satisfyingly, in a bigger grouping of eight bars, typical scansion for the time. It would take only one note more than Haydn wrote to round out the phrase thus, but, Haydn being Haydn, that promised note is replaced by a silence, that silence followed by a quiet, eyelash fluttering aside which finishes the sentence late and which destroys the rhythmic set up with delight. (Sort of like a limerick with an extra line.) He repeats this trick several times and, rather than grow tiresome, it retains its charm even as we learn to anticipate its arrival. Oscillations between two beat patterns and three continue, as well, such that we rarely feel grounded or certain, which thrills like a carnival ride. The contrasting trio section is a foil to the scherzo’s shenanigans, far more regular, if not without nods in the direction of the two vs. three confusion.
The ambiguity of the final movement, a set of variations, derives from the expectation of what might be varied, and the thwarting thereof. The rather naive tune seems a perfect template for morphing into new and unexpected shapes, ever more abstracted and disguised. (This tune, and the movement overall, are surely the inspiration for Mozart’s more profound variation movement at the conclusion of his Quartet in d minor, K421.) Instead the promise of constant metamorphosis is thwarted. At first there are minor ornamental changes, clever and enchanting, but eventually the tune reverts to its original form, only placed in new environs, with fleet passages in the viola and cello lines dancing alongside. As if realizing it is somewhat stuck, the theme, in a final transformation, sprouts a new ornamentation, the tempo lifts, and the movement scampers toward a bright and optimistic finish.
Haydn is a philosopher indeed, whose quasi-Kantian explorations of how we perceive and organize our perceptions abound with wit and great jouissance. And I like to think that he, too, like Lewis Carroll’s Queen, is the master of believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
May, 20th 2024
Note by Mark Steinberg
Reprintable only with permission from the author.
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.
Oct, 19th 2024
Note by Misha Amory