Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartets op.74 CD Track Listing

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Franz Joseph Haydn String Quartets op.74
When the impresario and violinist Johann Peter Salomon came to fetch Haydon to England in December 1790, the composer naturally searched his shelves for works which the British public had not yet heard. Among the compositions Haydn took with him to play at their subscrip;tion concerts of the 1791 season, were six new strikng quartets known to us as Opus 64. These beautiful and sophisticated works figured largely in the Haydn-Salomon concerts given at Hanover Square, and evidently their success was a motivating factor when the couple came to plan the programmes for the 1794 season in London.\n\tIn his travelling cases for this season, Haynd brought one whole symphony (n. 99), parts of two others (Nos. 100 and 101) and six new string quartets, soon to be known as Op. 71 and Op. 74 (issued in two sets and hence each provided, wrongly, with a separate opus number). The quartets were commmissioned by an old friend and patron Anton Georg, Count von Apponyi (1751-1817), but in this case Haydn obviously intended the works not only for the limited circle of the Count and his friends in Austria, but also for the London concert rooms.\n\tThese 'Salomon' quartets are the first works of their genre by any of the three Viennese masters of the form - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (who though born, like Salomon, in Bonn may be considered a Viennese by adoption and inclination just as Salomon became an Englishman by the same process) - to have been composed deliberately for the public concert hall. As such, they are entirely different from the leisurely, more 'detailed' and much more intimate works which Haydn had previously written for the Austrian connoisseurs.\n\tSalomon was undoubtedly a greater vilinist than Luigi Tomasini, the leader of Haydn's band at Eszterhaza: and certainly the German was a more international musician and aware of the latest technical devices just then being imported into London by the Parisian refugee Viotti. Salomon's virtuosotechnique and his skill as the leader of the quartet must have been greatsources of inspiration for Haydn. The quartets are, in a very real sense,'Salomon's quartets': they bear the unmistakable imprint of his strongpersonality. To a certain extent therefore, these great and powerful worksare an excursion from the normal path of Haydn's development as a quartet composer. Quartets were, from the time Haydn invented the form as we knowit, designed for the minority but also expressly written for a famous violin virtuoso.\n\tAlthough these quartets represent the apex of Haydn'sclassical, humanistic, popular chamber music, there are definite tendenciesin the harmonic breath of his language as well as in specific formal effects that presage, in a striking fashion, the world of German Romanticcomposers. The great 1793 quartets are clearly the watershed, in the chambermusic of the Austrian Classical school, between what is known as 'high Classical' and the early Romantic movement with which Haydn would beclosely allied when he returned to Vienna to become a doyen of European music in 1795. That these quartets were not only huge public success in the London concert hall of 1794 but also treasured by young composers, is attested by a touching letter of 10 October 1794 from the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Cimador (born 1761) to a friend in Italy, enclosing the Largo from the 'Rider' Quartet, and saying of it: ' here, my dear friend,is apiece which would awake the enthusiasm of all the adorers of that divineman who penned it...'\n\nH. C. Robbins Landon
This classical cd contains 12 tracks and runs 71min 28sec.
Freedb: a510be0c

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