Franz Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20, No. 3 (1772)

Franz Joseph Haydn composed string quartets for the better part of his career, and in the almost 70 such works he added to the repertoire, he provided models for composers who followed. In Haydn’s quartets, others found artistic strategies they could emulate, new means to communicate in new ways. For to communicate, to convey emotion, had become fashionable in the mid to late 18th century as the Sturm und Drang movement gathered momentum. Music such as Haydn’s third quartet of his Op. 20, replete with drama and rapture, realized Sturm und Drang’s proto-Romantic ideals in music as surely as Goethe, in his 1774 novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther, realized them in prose. Haydn developed his approach to the string quartet thanks to the happy circumstances of his employment. As palace music director for Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, he enjoyed a secure job, leisure to write, and freedom to experiment. From that freedom emerged the six genre-defining quartets of his Op. 20, works that treated the quartet’s four voices as equals, that exhibited a new sense of how instrumental textures could combine or stand independently, and that exploited formal design to concentrate the thrust of musical narrative. This was in 1772. The string quartet would never be the same again. 

The quartet opens with a confident, decisive phrase free of the angst and gravity usually implied by “minor,” and in just seconds it modulates into the major mode. The second violin sings sweetly, beginning a phrase that the first violin completes. After all the voices join in a flourish that brings momentum to a halt, the first violin proposes that they continue. The short exposition ends and is repeated. In the development, after sudden silences as the music stops, the work’s opening phrase attempts to reassert itself but is overshadowed by variations on the material it introduced in the exposition. Following the shortest of codas, essentially a final recollection of that confident opening, the movement ends. 

The grave minuet is an elegant dance for spirits, violins keening above a somber accompaniment in the low strings. In the middle section, the first violin introduces a quivering upbeat figure, while to the accompaniment of the second violin he exchanges phrases with the viola and cello. The movement seems to end in mid-phrase.

The Adagio is a glorious hymn, the heart of the quartet and an example of the license Haydn gave later composers—Beethoven, for one—to create the kind of direct emotional appeal that would cement an immediate bond with listeners. Viola and cello sing together in a kind of duet that unfolds in tandem with (not beneath) the violins, the melody unrolling bar after bar in an endless scroll, and while the first violin is assigned soaring lines, everyone in this movement participates as an equal. With a descent into the minor, the violins plead while the low strings provide reassuring calm. Reemerging from this, the first violin leads the way to the movement’s close.

In its many starts and stops, the aggressive finale is reminiscent of the first movement, and in fact its opening phrase recalls the very beginning of the quartet. Without a flourish or coda, the music simply ends, an understated gesture filled with the jolting power of reticence. 

Alban Berg
String Quartet, Op. 3 (1910)

Together with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Anton Webern, Alban Berg formed the triumvirate we know as the Second Viennese School, three composers who in the early 20th century abandoned tonality and blazed a new musical trail—a trail that diverged from the one established by their forebears of a first Viennese school, composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. That later group of composers, Schoenberg and Webern and Berg, faced a problem the earlier ones for the most part skirted. Audiences avoided this new music, accustomed as most audiences were to tonality, to tunes, and to musical certainties that assured them what they were hearing emerged from a world they recognized. Discussions of the Second Viennese School will invariably tell you that Berg, alone among the trio intent on reshaping music, determined to find an audience, meant to serve his listeners, strived to use the “school’s” methods to create works that aimed for the heart. Compositions such as Berg’s Violin Concerto, and his operas Wozzeck and Lulu, have indeed taken their place in the repertoire and are programmed with a frequency that might have dismayed Schoenberg and Webern. That said, no one should expect easy listening from Berg. Using novel techniques, he voiced the trauma of a society that had begun to question old complacencies, a society fraught with political upheaval, growing awareness of how psycho-spiritual turmoil could determine and even shatter lives, and a gathering militarism that would erupt in the Great War, itself a prelude to catastrophes such as no healthy mind should have been able to conceive. Berg’s music did in fact mirror a world, a world altered, one that audiences had no choice but to recognize. 

Berg’s Op. 3 Quartet, dating from 1910, is the first string quartet composed in an atonal language. Musicologist Kai Christiansen lauds its “rich expressivity…[which] speaks in a brave new language evoking a new realm of feelings”—or feelings long embedded in the human heart but not until then acknowledged in music. 

For those unfamiliar with this quartet, I can think of no better approach to it than what Christiansen suggests. Noting that the first movement “has often been described as sonata-form with contrasting themes and recurrent motives, development and a recapitulation,” he acknowledges that “this layout is difficult to discern without listening many times. Initial encounters might simply savor the visceral feelings noticing a few short musical motives that recur kaleidoscopically throughout.” Good advice, which I will follow in my comments. 

The quartet is cast in two movements of roughly 10 minutes each. It unfolds as an extended lament, furious manic passages alternating with dirgelike episodes, always tense, on edge, tightly wound. The first movement, Langsam—slow—opens with a five-note figure that in various guises dominates the movement, and listening for those guises can help you get your bearings. The wailing violins, supported by the lugubrious viola and cello, generate white-hot passion. This cools about three-quarters of the way through, and in a reflective passage the focus narrows onto the first violin and viola, who trade plaintive phrases that echo the opening, the music gradually dying as the movement ends.

An impassioned outburst launches movement two, Mässige Viertel—moderate fourths—after which the various voices imitate each other in wistful passages that some will hear as dreamlike and others as nightmarish. About halfway through, passion gathers to a head, only to recede into a passage, quiet and slow and searching, that descends almost to silence. From this quiet the ominous final section emerges, tortured, ever more agitated, and at last filled with a defiance summed up in the unison slash of sound that ends the piece. 

Johannes Brahms
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2 (1873)

In 1873, after writing and then burning almost a dozen string quartets in his effort to master the genre, Johannes Brahms at last produced a pair that met his standards. The two quartets of Op. 51 are rigorous, carefully argued compositions. Do not blame your ear if you find their felicities outweighed by their self-conscious attempts to establish a place in the Classical pantheon. The second especially uncloaks its beauties slowly, as a much-practiced though still-shy lover hesitates before revealing the supple skin. 

Forward-looking and challenging like its companion quartet, Op. 51, No. 2 reminds us that Brahms the Romantic was also a serious intellectual who saw himself as heir to a tradition. Think Johann Sebastian Bach, and Bach’s most illustrious predecessors and successors. Under that heavy mantle, Brahms moved slowly. The genre of symphony, dominated by Beethoven, proved a summit Brahms would not scale until the age of 43. The string quartet, dominated not just by Beethoven but also by Haydn and Mozart, might seem more manageable. Yet a string quartet offers a composer no cover, nowhere to hide, no brass fortissimos or timpani rolls behind which to disguise a lapse of inspiration. A quartet measures not just your power to create beauty, but your power of thought. To Brahms, a piece of music was both, all or nothing, its beauty reflecting intellect and its intellect itself a beauty. No genre so exemplified this ideal as the string quartet. A symphony had broad appeal. A string quartet was for the connoisseur. The connoisseur to whom Brahms dedicated Op. 51 was his friend Theodor Billroth, a brilliant surgeon and an amateur musician of enormous talent whose musical opinions Brahms took to heart. That dedication alone tells us how much its composer thought of his Op. 51.

In their analysis of the Op. 51 quartets, Klaus Kropfinger and Leon Botstein offer ways to approach this music, suggesting we follow Brahms as he “[makes] incremental steps in the development of an opening musical idea that eventually result in a radical transformation—that is, the creation of a new group of thematic ideas.” About what can seem an almost manic shift of moods in the quartet, they point out Brahms’ focus “on how music can utilize radical contrast without sacrificing structural coherence. The tradition of sonata form dictates that main and subordinate themes should be contrasting, and every composer struggles with how to achieve a sense of contrast without compromising the integrity of the whole.” Contrast, they explain, “may emerge through close derivations and resemblances.” Attention to such derivations and resemblances is key to listening to this quartet. “Brahms’ emphasis on thematic transformation, variation, and musical strategies of reconciliation,” they conclude, “was particularly suited to the quartet and its strict limitation to four voices. In Op. 51, Classicism and the impulses of musical Romanticism find their magical reconciliation.” 

The opening Allegro begins with a melancholy lullaby, poised and elegantly balanced, gradually morphing into a major-mode waltz-like theme, sweetly reflective. This rises to a height of passion followed by a serene denouement, ending with a recollection of the opening lullaby. The exposition, now complete, is repeated. The development—stormy, halting, hesitant—deconstructs the exposition’s elements until the waltz-like tune returns in its initial guise. What seems headed for a literal recapitulation of earlier material leads instead to a knotty coda, the lines interweaving with and struggling against each other.

The song that opens the Andante brings relief after the first movement’s stormy close, but soon the song grows pensive, punctuated by thrusts and retreats. Agitation and lyricism alternate as almost imperceptibly Brahms leads us into a central section. Recollections of the movement’s opening song recur throughout until it is reprised outright to close the movement. 

Beneath a searching theme in the high strings, a dark sonority adds to the mystery in which the third movement opens. The central section is fleet and lighter than air, but spirits are never in danger of turning high. 

Aggressive gestures interlock and repeat obsessively in the virtuosic Finale and bring tension to a boil until lyricism returns, the tempo slows, and the music dies to near inaudibility. A restrained, mournful passage follows, disrupted by a sudden outburst that closes the work. 

At last allowing two string quartets to appear after so many false starts, Brahms might have been expected to exercise his mastery of the genre and write many others. But he would add only one such work to his catalogue again, three years later, a quartet more relaxed than either of its Op. 51 cousins, and soaring with tunes: the product of a master, surely, one with little left to prove.

—Larry Rothe

Larry Rothe’s books include For the Love of Music and Music for a City, Music for the World. For more about these and other works, visit www.larryrothe.com.