Franz Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2, Lobkowitz

Franz Joseph Haydn, as prolific as composers come, wrote almost 70 string quartets. For Haydn, composing seems to have proceeded as inevitably as respiration. Consider the spontaneity of his last quartet, which opens this concert. Haydn composed it in 1799, the first of a pair of quartets for Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, the music-loving patron who proved so important a supporter of Beethoven.

A celebratory sense reigns in the Allegro moderato, which opens with an upbeat, sing­able tune that never strays far from the surface. Even the movement’s contrasting sections wear their more serious mien lightly. Seemingly effortless, this allegro is concentrated music, not a note out of place or wasted.

We think of the minuet as a courtly dance, but this one could provide background to a rustic scene, perhaps as envisioned by Pieter Breughel the Elder. Imagine this music as accompaniment to William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Dance”: “In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,/the dancers go round, they go round and/around, the squeal and the blare and the/tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles/tipping their bellies,…/their hips and their bellies off balance/to turn them….” In the rhapsodic central section, the dancers take a break, maybe also a sip.

In duet, the first violin and cello state the Andante’s elegant theme, and soon all four members are examining this music, varying it but never straying too far afield, so it remains recognizable throughout. This movement is a lovely example of how Haydn distributes his material equally among four independent voices, something we take for granted in string quartets but which was not a given before Haydn.

The vivacious finale is a nonstop romp, feelgood music of the highest order, a beast to play but pure delight for listeners.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel
String Quartet in E-flat major

Abraham Mendelssohn liked to say that he was best known as the son of his father, philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and as the father of his son, composer Felix. Fanny Mendelssohn, Abraham’s daughter, has suffered a similar indignity, since she is generally introduced as Felix’s older sister. But Fanny was a composer, too, author of more than 450 works (primarily songs and piano pieces), and she possessed such taste and artistry that her brother leaned on her for advice and criticism. Fanny’s gender was not the only thing that sabotaged her musical ambitions. As a member of upper-class Berlin society, she was expected to pursue only two roles, those of wife and mother. She filled both, but she never stopped composing, not after her 1829 marriage to painter Wilhelm Hensel—an enlightened man who encouraged her artistic career—nor after the birth of their son, Sebastian. She also remained her brother’s closest musical confidante and his soulmate, and when a stroke suddenly ended her life, the despairing Felix survived her by only six months.

The E-flat major String Quartet is Fanny’s sole venture into the genre. She much admired Beethoven’s late music, whose many oddities may have led her to break with convention. She does not feel bound by the rules of sonata form or tradition, and here she opens her quartet with an adagio. After a few introductory bars the first violin introduces a keening figure taken up by the others. Even as the mournful music assumes a faster pace, it remains reflective. With brief forays into the major mode, the poignance hidden beneath the surface becomes explicit, but nothing is dwelt on for long, and just as the movement reveals its vulnerability, it withdraws into silence.

The scurrying Allegretto is still anchored in the minor. Passion grows in a fugal passage, from which the music develops a new level of intensity. Like the first movement, this one refuses to overstay its welcome.

The lamenting Romanze, in G minor, is the quartet’s longest movement. After a somber opening, a songlike passage follows, and from this grows an oscillating figure explored by all the players. They pursue it until it crests in a climax. Calm returns with a reprise of the opening statement, and at last the music subsides in a serene denouement.

The final Allegro molto vivace is all sunshine in the major mode. It opens with a virtuosic run for the first violin, a passage tossed back and forth between the players. This is at last joyful music, the breathless kind that Fanny’s brother loved.

Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 127

In 1825, the year of Beethoven’s Op. 127, the composer was a very old 55 and had only two more years to live. The works from late in his life emerge from the interior world of a man totally deaf, and on that canvas of silence he now conceived of ways to push music’s expressive possibilities even further than he had already pushed them over the past three decades. The results speak for themselves, never in obvious ways. Consider Beethoven’s five late string quartets. Since they first appeared, they have puzzled and fascinated musicians and lay listeners. In length and structure, in their strangeness, passion, beauty, and invention, in what they ask of performers and listeners, and in what they repay those who grapple with their demands, the quartets are like no music heard before them, and whether they have gained peers over time is a question I am not equipped to answer.

The late quartets have led many commentators to speak of them in terms you might encounter in philosophical inquiry, as though the music addresses issues of the spirit. Timothy Judd tells us that the slow movement of Op. 127—the first of the late quartets—is filled with “a sense of aching emotional intensity, lament, and cosmic mystery.” “For Beethoven in the late quartets,” writes Mark Steinberg, “the self is dissolved into a broader and more inclusive vision. Effort is replaced with acceptance and the profoundest love.” Everyone who loves music will recognize such reflections, yet how music leads to them is unclear. We all have our ways of perceiving what the sound creates, our individual ways of trying to grasp what lies beyond the notes. Beethoven’s late string quartets are ideal for such an exercise, for each of them is somehow larger than itself, which is to say that we want this music to possess meaning and we believe it does. To our search for what that meaning might be, we bring as much experience and attention as we can muster, developing a relationship with the music just as we get to know others, growing to love them, or not. Art offers the possibility of forming a bond with it. And what we hope for from that bond is what we hope for from any relationship, a way of discovering truths about ourselves.

Op. 127 opens with a grand statement that immediately retracts its promise, for while it leads us to expect majesty, it introduces a serenely dreamlike theme. Pay attention to this theme, for in various though always recognizable forms it will dominate the Allegro. With a passage marked by nervous energy, the movement’s blueprint is complete. The music moves between the dreamy and the agitated, punctuated by returns of the grand opening gesture. Serenity has the final say.

Beethoven gave his late string quartets hymnlike adagios, and this sort of music has led many commentators to conclude that the composer was focused on an otherworldly or extra-worldly realm that only he could perceive. For all their beauty, these late adagios can seem meandering on first acquaintance, their felicities episodic. A few careful hearings will reveal not just the music’s logic, but also the consistency of its quiet and concentrated splendor. The adagio of Op. 127 is a case in point. If you want to know what rapture sounds like, listen now.

Led by the cello, then the viola, then violins, this slow movement opens with a drone, from which a glorious tune emerges. The tune is explored in a series of variations. First the theme’s lines are deconstructed, seeming to lead in different directions, as though seeking to expand the melody. With a change of tempo the mood turns playful, suggesting a country dance. The dance gives way to deliberate and searching music—I want to use that word hymnlike again—tricking us into believing that time can be suspended. The mood lightens and the music begins a steady pace against the constant throb established by the cello and taken up by the higher voices. The coda, itself made up of two further variations, begins slow and trancelike, then gathers momentum, the theme becoming all but obscured. A throbbing returns, and the movement closes as the music falls silent.

The scherzo plays with a four-pulse theme now frenzied, now whispered. This is Beethoven the prankster at work, injecting the humor that, like the jokes in Hamlet or the knocking on the door in Macbeth, tempers the lofty with the sinew of wit, a strategy that makes the late quartets sublime.

An arresting gesture opens the finale, the kind of fanfare-like announcement that began the quartet. It leads here to music of immense resolve and thrust, the energy as present in the quiet moments as in the more assertive passages. A sudden drop in dynamics signals the coda, volume and energy developing gradually until the end, which recollects the fanfare that launched the work.

—Larry Rothe

Larry Rothe writes for Cal Performances and the San Francisco Opera and has written about music for the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Visit www.larryrothe.com.