1785 – The Music part 2 - Opus 42 Quartet: A polished gem

Hob. #	Genre		Key	Number		Instrument(s)		Notes
03:43	Quartet		d	35		2 Violins, Viola & Cello		Possibly sole survivor of a larger opus commissioned for Spain

Original Hoffmeister 1st Violin part - 1785

Joseph Haydn: International Man of Music! In this year of the 'Paris' Symphonies, we are certainly not limited to France in our travels. The works listed here represent commissions from Spain and England, as well as Vienna, and something for the home-front too.

[To ARTARIA & Co., VIENNA. German]

Estoras, 5th April 1784.

Nobly born, Most highly respected Sir !

Although I have always received more than 100 ducats for my quartets by subscription, and although Herr Willmann promised to give me this sum, I agree to your offer of 300 fl. with following stipulations; first, that you are patient until July, though all six should be finished by then; secondly, I demand either 12 copies or my choice of the dedication. If this proposal is agreeable to you, I shall await your draft of a contract, those quartets which I am at present working on, and of which half are finished, are very short and consist of three pieces only; they are intended for Spain….

(H.C. Robbins-Landon – The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn 1959 pg. 45)

In the event, the first quartets referenced here, the ones we now call Opus 50, didn't end up on Artaria's presses until December, 1787. The second works mentioned, which I have bolded above, are now presumed to be the germ of our present Opus 42. I will tell you something here and now; I wish I had access to the original of this letter, so I didn't have to rely on someone else's translation. I'm sure Robbins-Landon was a highly competent translator, probably even of 18^th century Viennese as well as German. But his use of the English word 'pieces' here is tremendously ambiguous. It didn't take any time at all for every interpreter since then (including Landon himself) to have taken this to be saying 'an unstated number of works, each consisting of three movements…". I, however, read this as saying 'there are three works, very short; intended for Spain…" How one extrapolates 'movements' from 'pieces' escapes me. I have given you the original translation by Landon though, so you can make your own judgement.

If you will stipulate three quartets, compact but otherwise standard, one then doesn't need to go through various gyrations to justify the presence of a minuet in Opus 42. In my own view, Haydn sent off the three commissioned quartets to Spain, where they no doubt delighted the intended recipient, and sadly were eventually lost by great misfortune. End of that line of the story. But he kept a copy of the d minor quartet, for any of many possible reasons, the most likely being 'he liked it' or 'he saw another opportunity for it', and when his friend, Franz Anton Hoffmeister, solicited a work to help start off his new publishing business, Haydn sent over a copy of this one, along with the overture Hob 1a:4, both already written. Mozart sent over K 499. Occam's Razor leans heavily in favor of this sort of solution rather than, for example, the one proposed by Grave & Grave, which requires retrofitting a minuet and adjusting the harmonic contours to match those of the other three movements. This retrofitting requires making adjustments to the surrounding movements, so that, for example, the first movement ends on a D major chord, so the minuet transition can happen smoothly. If this is so, how then did Movement 1 end when it transitioned directly into the current third movement, the Adagio e cantabile in Bb? In my proposed scenario, it never did that, and so the problem goes away with no further explanation needed. Of course, this bit of iconoclasm is brought to you on the basis of Landon's published translation being correct. Which brings us back full-circle to 'I wish I had access to the original of this letter…'

I	Andante* ed Innocentemente	d	2/4
II	Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio	D / d	3/4
III	Adagio e cantabile	Bb	2/2
IV	Presto	d	2/4
	*originally 'Allegretto', but scratched out by Haydn and replaced by 'Andante'

As far as reception goes, we have 19^th century Haydn biographer Carl Pohl, among others, to thank for the downgrading of this work for many years, since its slight stature seemed to indicate it had to be an early work, thus without much value (werth). Even Karl Geiringer, an early and influential champion of Haydn, in his 1932 first edition of Creative Life in Music called it a "foreign body in the firm suite of quartets up to now". Later commentators, though, recognized this work for the jewel it is. Tovey pointed out that the beautiful slow movement, Adagio e cantabile, is nothing more nor less than a cavatina, an operatic form of aria, and says that if Haydn had only had the luck or cunning to name it that, then people would have had a different perception of it. It took Beethoven, forty years later, to again realize that placing a cavatina in a string quartet (Opus 130 in Bb 5^th movement (Cavatina: Adagio molto espressivo)) might be a good idea.

This has always been considered to be a great work for amateur quartets, it's fifteen and a half total minutes being enough of a challenge for the non-professional. However, don't be deceived by this; it is a beautiful work with enough challenge for professional interpreters to trip over, and opportunities to win over an audience. Haydn is good that way!

Next time we will look at accompanied sonatas, and also at accompanied arias.

Thanks for reading!