Takács Quartet

Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in C major, Op. 54, No. 2, Hob. III:57
By 1788, when Haydn composed the quartet we hear this afternoon, his music and his fame had spread far beyond the Hungarian marshes and the palace of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, where he served as music director. Paris especially could not get enough of Haydn. In 1787, he began a set of six string quartets intended for that city’s music lovers. When he completed them the following year, he turned them over to Johann Tost, who proved the ideal agent. Tost, a virtuoso himself, was leaving his post as leader of the Esterhazy orchestra’s second violins. He was headed for Paris, where he hoped to start a new career as a soloist. Tost was a shrewd negotiator and sold Haydn’s quartets to the Paris publisher Sieber, who released the works as two sets of three, Haydn’s Opp. 54 and 55. For the obvious reason, these are called Haydn’s Tost quartets. (A third set of Tost quartets, Haydn’s Op. 64, is dedicated to the violinist.)

This C major quartet, like the Beethoven quartet that concludes this program, is filled with much that was new for its time, but in Haydn’s compact package those novelties and beauties come in inverse proportion to size. Haydn begins here with a virtuosic 
figure in the first violin. After pausing twice, the music continues with an abrupt key change—at about 20 seconds into the piece, this was indeed an oddity for 1788—when we’re catapulted into a bright, dancelike movement. Why that key change? Often, Haydn inserts new ideas just because he can—to show what music can do, and to keep audiences’ ears fresh.

The Adagio that follows is reflective and dirgelike, but also a showpiece for the first violin, which meanders above the dirge in a song that rises into the highest registers. Almost before we know it, the music ends, as though suspended.

The Minuet seems a conventional dance until the middle section, where we encounter a sound such as listeners in 
the late 18th century would not have expected, dissonant keening variants of the first section’s theme. No less expected would have been the Finale. Here audiences would have looked for fast music. What they got was an adagio, reflective and calm, then spelled briefly by a speedy presto episode before the slow music returns to close the quartet.

Benjamin Britten
String Quartet No. 2 in C major, Op. 36
Just as Beethoven revered Handel as a musical god, Benjamin Britten esteemed his 17th-century forebear Henry Purcell above all composers. In 1945, he contributed his String Quartet No. 2 to a concert commemorating the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death. The quartet came shortly after the triumphant premiere of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. But although the quartet is so much smaller in scale than Grimes, Britten believed it represented the greatest step forward he had yet made as a composer. “It has given me encouragement,” he said, “to continue on new lines.”

The quartet is serious and reflective, elemental stuff, perhaps a prelude to the music Britten would compose in the remaining 
31 years of his life. For in work after work, 
he fashioned a concentrated, meditative 
language, deliberate and powerful and designed for journeys of probing introspection. Consider the first movement of this quartet. It is a search, the character of the music shifting constantly and abruptly, seeking solid ground, some base. Perhaps the best way to listen is to give yourself to the music, ride its current, for so emotionally charged is it that analysis fails to do it justice, let alone help the listener. In the simplest terms: Over an organ-like drone in the viola (possibly modeled on Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note), the other players intone a wavering theme. The pace increases suddenly, then, with an abrupt halt, the music descends into an indeterminate passage that sounds as though the instruments are tuning. From this odd texture, the first violin emerges in a variant of the opening music, introducing a tutti section. The sonic texture here is rich and varied and in a way quasi-orchestral. The texture thins. The drone-like music returns, and above this come high whoops of sound. Again the texture thickens, each player contributing turns no less disturbing or angry for the virtuosity demanded. Quiet ruminations return in 
an extraordinary coda that anticipates the work’s final moments, though the tranquil atmosphere here will become assertive later.

The second movement, not quite four minutes long, is something out of a fevered dream. In the pace Britten requests and in the extraordinary sounds he asks for, this music is hugely difficult to play. Commentator Roger Parker has likened it to Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Britten called his finale Chacony, a spelling such as Purcell would have used to label a chaconne, variations over a repeated bass. The variations here are grouped into four sections, the first three sections each concluding with a solo cadenza—for cello, then viola, then first violin—and the last with a tutti coda. Roger Parker advises against trying to listen for each variant and suggests 
instead “listen[ing] on a larger scale to the alternations between solo passages and increasingly complicated ensemble textures.”

The movement opens with the “theme”—stated in long, slow sentences, meandering, seeking direction. Throughout the 21 variations that follow, the music is yearning, searching, ecstatic. Toward the end, tremolos in a long ethereal passage create a sense of levitation. All four members come together in a broadly melodic hymn, culminating in great slashes of C major chords, ending the work with a sense of deep fulfillment. “After the equivocation of the first movement and the eerie violence of the second movement”—Parker again—“and the stately progress of the third-movement Chacony, suddenly, and against the odds, we seem to have arrived somewhere—a victory, or perhaps a home-coming, is grandly declared.”

Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet in F major, Op. 59, No. 1, 
Razumovsky
The Beethoven literature tends to treat his string quartets with a reverence and a solemnity that has surely scared many potential listeners. Will they grasp just what makes this most revolutionary, most serious of composers so revolutionary and so serious? Anyone nervous about getting the message can set aside those anxieties in the presence of this, the first of Beethoven’s three Razumovsky quartets. Yes, this music is revolutionary, and it’s serious. But forget that while you listen. Because this is also among Beethoven’s most exuberant, life-affirming works, the sort of thing we need especially today, at our current juncture of history.

Count Andrei Razumovsky, Russia’s ambassador to the Viennese court, was a patron of Beethoven’s. With Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, he shares the dedication of the composer’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies. He was also a musician, with chops that enabled him to play the second violin part of the three quartets he commissioned from Beethoven when they were introduced in 1807. The Razumovskys were not received well, not by the public nor by the other members of the ensemble that performed them. No quartet such as the one we hear this afternoon had been heard before, and surely not one 40 minutes long. Neither the innovations nor the length need concern us. Beethoven knew what he was up to. This was music, he told one puzzled player, “for a later age.”

That earworm of a first theme, played 
by cello above the pulsating strings of his partners, sings with an optimism and a nimbleness that never flags throughout this propulsive movement, whose duration seems paradoxically shorter because of how much Beethoven packs into it, how much he gives us to focus on: the ever-changing shapes of the main theme, surprises such as a recapitulation that starts but veers immediately into the development, a fugue that balances the lightness of the opening, and a sonority of almost orchestral richness. Despite what those first listeners and players thought, this is music to be enjoyed.

The scherzo—sempre scherzando, always joking—alternates between the nervous, taunting jabs of the first bars and a longer, swaying melody. What follows in the Adagio could not be a greater contrast. The long meandering melody is a lament, and Beethoven proceeds to explore its deep expressive possibilities. Some commentators have compared this music to the funeral march of the Eroica Symphony. The tragedy expressed here is on a more human level. After some 13 or 14 minutes the first violin is spotlighted in a virtuosic passage that hints at something lighter. The cello introduces a new theme that triggers the finale, a deliciously upbeat dance based on a Russian folk tune, in homage to Count Razumovsky. The spirit of the first movement returns, and again the marvel is the variety of color and texture Beethoven creates with four instruments. In the playful coda, dynamics suddenly drop and the pace slows. Then, with an outburst, the work gallops to the end.
—Larry Rothe

Larry Rothe writes about music for Cal Performances and San Francisco Opera. Visit larrytrothe.com.