Joseph Haydn And The String Quartet

The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn

Renowned music historians Floyd and Margaret Grave present a fresh perspective on a comprehensive survey of the works. This thorough and unique analysis offers new insights into the creation of the quartets, the wealth of musical customs and conventions on which they draw, the scope of their innovations, and their significance as reflections of Haydn's artistic personality. Each set of quartets is characterized in terms of its particular mix of structural conventions and novelties, stylistic allusions, and its special points of connection with other opus groups in the series. Throughout the book, the authors draw attention to the boundless supply of compositional strategies by which Haydn appears to be continually rethinking, reevaluating, and refining the quartet's potentials. They also lucidly describe Haydn's famous penchant for wit, humor, and compositional artifice, illuminating the unexpected connections he draws between seemingly unrelated ideas, his irony, and his lightning bolts of surprise and thwarted expectation. Approaching the quartets from a variety of vantage points, the authors correct many prevailing assumptions about convention, innovation, and developing compositional technique in the music of Haydn and his contemporaries.

Haydn, String Quartets, Op. 50

The Op. 50 string quartets contain some of the purest writing Haydn ever accomplished. In this first full account of these six quartets Dean Sutcliffe evaluates the Op. 50 in relation to Haydn's more frequently performed quartets and considers their relevance to the composer's wider output. A lucid and accessible discussion of the music emphasises the unity of each quartet: not only motivic unity, but unity also of texture, articulation, harmony and syntax. Each quartet is described in detail. The informative background provided by Dr Sutcliffe includes a brief history of the string quartet, and an assessment of Haydn's earlier works in this genre and of his role at Esterhaza. The description of the composition and publication of the Op. 50 quartets is based on the evidence of Haydn's surviving letters and the recently discovered autograph copies of Nos. 3 to 6 - a discovery which is vividly documented here for the first time.

Haydn, the Innovator