“Haydn’s quartets . . . please equally on the Danube and on the Thames, on the Seine and on the Neva, and are as treasured across the seas as in our own part of the world. Original and abundant ideas, deep feeling, fantasy wisely controlled by penetrating study of the art, skill in the development of an idea basically simple, calculation of effect by clever distribution of light and shadow, pouring forth of the slyest humor, and easy flow and free movement: these are the qualities that distinguish Haydn’s earliest and latest productions alike.”

Georg August Griesinger made an astute assessment when he began his 1810 biography of Haydn with the above observation, for Haydn’s sixty-eight surviving essays in the form he virtually invented, spanning nearly four decades of his prolific creativity, are attractive to the least experienced listener, yet offer connoisseurs innumerable subtle delights. Of the opus 20 quartets (often called the “Sun” quartets, since the title page of a contemporary edition of 1774 depicted a rising sun), the eminent English musical scholar Donald Francis Tovey opined that “every page is of historical and aesthetic importance. . . Perhaps no single collection in the history of instrumental music has achieved so much.” Among their striking features are an intensely contrapuntal focus—three of the quartets end with fugal movements—and a new level of equality among the various parts. Both of these attributes are exhibited to great advantage in the F minor quartet of Op. 20, published as the fifth member of the set but probably written first. Of particular interest is the tightly-controlled fugue a due soggetti (“with two subjects”), the first of which is nearly identical to the themes of Handel’s Messiah chorus “And with his stripes are we healed” and the Kyrie from the Mozart Requiem. Haydn directs the movement to be played sotto voce throughout until its explosive finish.

*****

When he composed his Second String Quartet in 1933 at the age of thirty-six, Erich Wolfgang Korngold had already enjoyed a career spanning a quarter century. His father, the well-known music critic Julius Korngold, had recognized his son’s prodigious talent as both pianist and composer early, convincing Vienna’s prestigious Universal Editions to sign a publication contract when Erich was only eleven. By the time he was twenty-four, his works were known well beyond the confines of the Austro-Hungarian empire into which he had been born, and his spectacularly successful opera Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) had been performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.        

But by the 1930s, Korngold’s unrepentant embrace of the extended tonality espoused by composers such as Gustav Mahler, Alexander Zimlinsky, and Richard Strauss had put him at odds with the modernist Second Viennese School that adopted Arnold Schönberg twelve-tone method. Korngold often painted his effusively luxuriant post-Wagnerian harmonies on scaffolding of popular-sounding melodies, such as those heard in the Intermezzo and Valse movements of the Second Quartet. In 1934 he was invited to California by Warner Brothers to provide a score for his friend Max Reinhardt’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” amplifying Felix Mendelssohn’s 1826/1842 incidental music for Shakespeare’s comedy, and providing additional music of his own. Although Korngold briefly returned to Europe in 1937 to conduct and resume his career as a composer of art music, another Hollywood invitation brought him and his family back to the United States just before Germany’s Anschluss of Austria in 1938. He won an Oscar in 1939 for his score to “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and received nominations the following two years for “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” and “The Sea Hawk.” This success allowed him to remain in America—he took U.S. citizenship in 1943—and thus escape the Holocaust.

The Second String Quartet was first performed by the Rosé Quartet, led by Mahler’s brother-in-law Arnold Rosé, which over its 55-year career had given premieres by many other composers, notably Brahms and Schönberg. Korngold’s work may be seen as somewhat Janus-faced, certainly looking backward towards the height of Viennese early-20th-century Romanticism, but also hinting at the extravagances of the film world he would soon inhabit.

*****

I am still young.

I beg you, go on without laying your hand on me!

(Death)

Give me your hand, you gentle and beautiful creature,

I am your friend, and will not harm you.

Be courageous: I am not wild,

And in my arms you shall gently sleep.

Despite the concentrated power of this movement, and of the more aggressive pieces that surround it, the D minor quartet did not immediately find universal favor. Schubert’s author friend Franz Lachner, who hosted the first public performance of the quartet in 1826, two years after its completion, recalled that on that occasion the first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh,  to whom Schubert dedicated his A minor quartet, expressed himself to the composer as follows: “Brother, this work is nothing. Let well enough alone—stick to your songs!” At this, Lachner goes on to relate, Schubert “quietly packed up the music and locked it away in his desk, with the self-abnegation and modesty that one looks for in vain with the majority of our contemporary [1881] composers . . .” Another report of an apparently earlier incident involving Schuppanzigh and the work sheds some interesting light on the work’s originality:

“One day Schubert brought to the at that time famous Schuppanzigh Quartet his newly-finished D minor quartet, with the request that they read it through for him. The players put the music on their stands and began to play, but after several vexing mistakes stopped in the middle of the first movement and refused to go on, Schuppanzigh declaring that the writing was not made for string quartet, and that the work was consequently unplayable.”

The D minor quartet was first published posthumously in 1831. Five years later, Robert Schumann, reviewing a mini-festival of quartets played in the small hall of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, spoke for many of his contemporaries when he wrote: “Only the excellence of such a work as Schubert’s D Minor Quartet—like that of many of his others—can in any way console us for the early and grievous death of this first-born of Beethoven. In a few years he achieved and perfected things as no one before him.”

—Kenneth Slowik