The Calidore Quartet Returns: Part One, Mozart and Beethoven

The Calidore Quartet crosses the street.

The Calidore Quartet returns to Harrisburg with a performance at Temple Ohev Sholom on Wednesday, September 25th to begin Market Square Concerts’ new 2024-2025 Season. The performance, which begins at 7:30, opens with the third of Mozart’s Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn; continues with the last quartet written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold after a decade spent writing film scores for Hollywood; and then, after intermission, concludes with the first of Beethoven’s three “Razumovsky” Quartets. This first post is about the Mozart and Beethoven quartets; you can read the second post, about Korngold and his quartet, here.

When the Calidore Quartet was here in April, 2018, performing Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich, I wrote: “When music ensembles like a string quartet get together and look for a name to call themselves, the easy way out is simply to name themselves after the first violinist or their location. More challenging is to come up with a musical term that sounds... well, catchy would be good but I'll settle for “not silly.” Others prefer to honor a favorite author or painter – the Emerson or the Escher come to mind – or even a violin-maker like Guarneri. The Cypress Quartet took their name not from the tree but from a set of works called Cypresses for string quartet by Antonin Dvořák that was part of their core repertoire when starting out. There's even a Lark Quartet which, presumably, takes its name from Haydn's “Lark” Quartet.

"Formed in 2010, the Calidore Quartet explains their name this way: Using an amalgamation of California and doré (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.” (Points, here, for uniqueness.)

"Looking over the roster of string quartets crisscrossing the world performing gems of the chamber music repertoire and, occasionally – but more frequently, now – adding new works for the future, you might wonder “where are all those young quartets coming from?” Depending on your tone of voice, you might wonder “what's happened to all those great quartets I used to hear?” We forget that, at some point, the Guarneri and Cleveland Quartets were “young quartets” and who knows who the next generation's Juilliard and Emerson Quartets will be?

"In the historical line of things, remember all those winners of the Cleveland Quartet Prize we get to present to you? This is a prize founded by the Cleveland Quartet to foster excellence in the wide-open and highly competitive field of new quartets. And the Emerson Quartet mentors young quartets itself – like the Calidore.”

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Usually, in these posts, I like to give you the “biographical” background to the music you’re going to hear with some information about the composer’s life at the time it was written. Part One is about the Mozart and Beethoven since their “stories” don’t need a lot of detail. Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his music may not be as familiar to the average listener, so I’ll go into more detail in Part Two which I hope to post soon. Like Mozart, he too was a prodigy and it’s a fascinating story when you might sit there wondering “where does this music come from?” Eventually he succumbed to the siren song of Hollywood and wrote mostly film scores at which he proved very successful. Then, in his late 40s when he was less in demand for the Silver Screen, he returned to writing “concert music,” including the 3rd String Quartet. As they say in radio, “stay tuned.”

Before we begin, here are three samples from each piece on the program. A video of the complete work will be included in the “chapter” about each composer.

Here is the Guarneri Quartet in their 1992 release of Mozart’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, K.428, playing the first movement:

Rather than go in “program order,” I usually like to do things in “chronological order,” since the stylistic development is often interesting in itself. After all, Mozart composed his quartet in 1783 when he was 27 and Beethoven wrote his in 1806 when he was 35. Korngold, who, by comparison would sound quite modern, completed his 3rd Quartet in 1945 – he was 48 – almost 140 years later. A lot happened musically – and historically – in between.

The Emerson Quartet plays the finale of Beethoven's Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1, with its "Russian Theme."

And here, the Doric Quartet plays Korngold's finale which was composed at a time news from Europe indicated the end of World War II (and Hitler with it) was now a certainty.

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN MOZART’S LIFE WHEN HE COMPOSED HIS “HAYDN” QUARTETS?

The Winter of 1782-83 began a stretch of about three years when Mozart’s focus was primarily writing piano concertos (there would eventually be 14 new ones). He'd been 25 years old when he arrived in Vienna in March of 1781, a free-lancer now after having quit (or gotten himself fired from) his job at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg where his father Leopold had been Assistant Kapellmeister, a composer-in-residence, violinist and teacher who never advanced further up the courtly ladder of success. Away from his father’s dominance, Mozart met and, against Leopold’s advice, married Constanze Weber on August 4th, 1782. Their first child, named Raimund Leopold, was born on June 17th, 1783, but died barely two months later. They would have five more children but only two of those survived infancy.

At some point – the facts are a little vague – Mozart met Haydn, regarded as one of the greatest of living composers. According to reliable witnesses (who recalled these events years after Mozart’s death), it probably was in December, 1783, when both composers had works performed at the Tonkünstler-Societät ("Society of Musicians"), fairly normal for Haydn, but a point of recognition for a newcomer like Mozart. 

Haydn & Mozart playing string quartets at a party

As often happens with musicians, rather than socialize like “normal” people they get together and play music. A friend held a party and among the guests were Haydn and Mozart, along with composers Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Johann Baptist Vanhal, who played string quartets. Now, none of these were primarily performers on their instruments: Haydn was never much of a performer and was probably a proficient violinist while Dittersdorf had at least more experience as a player of the violin. Vanhal was a cellist (he wrote cello concertos) and Mozart, though primarily a pianist, had played the violin well enough to perform all of the violin concertos he’d written while working at the court in Salzburg. He preferred, however, to play the viola not because it was traditionally an instrument handed to less proficient violinists (it was, even before “viola jokes” were a thing, referred to as a “third violin”) but because it placed him in the middle of the melody in the violins and the bass line in the cello so he could listen to everything going on around him. We assume, because of Haydn’s reputation as a composer he would’ve played first violin but in terms of his proficiency he might have deferred to Dittersdorf’s more advance technique and played second.

Another of Mozart’s early friends in Vienna was Baron Godfried van Swieten, a diplomat and librarian to the Emperor Josef II. In addition to creating the first card catalogue – what old people used before Google – Swieten was also a collector of old manuscripts, particularly Bach and Handel, then generally unknown or certainly overlooked. Examining some of these, Mozart began to study not just counterpoint – the art of combining independent voices both melodically and harmonically – but how it was used in the more complex textures of the Baroque. This would reach its high-point in, say, the seemingly effortless but incredibly complicated final moments of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.

We usually think of Mozart as this genius from day one, like a latter-day Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus. He had no known teacher – and his father, no Zeus, was a pretty mediocre composer who might’ve been able to teach him the basic clichés of music but that doesn’t explain the level of perfection, as we regard his music today, which he eventually achieved. Even if Haydn was an ineffective teacher for Beethoven, what Beethoven learned was basically from studying Mozart’s music.

And what Mozart learned without studying with a “master teacher” (much less attending an accredited music school) was from absorbing the music he came in contact with, especially as a traveling child prodigy. One of the earliest and most significant influences was Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian’s youngest son who, in his day, after settling in London, had become a more acclaimed composer than his father (at the time). Mozart arrived in London when he was 8 and the family spent over a year there, during which he met (or was paraded before) every potentially influential musician and aristocrat who might facilitate the Boy Wonder in landing a position at the Royal Court. We know Mozart played some of J.C. Bach’s keyboard works in public performances and we know at some point the two met. There was a report that Bach took the boy on his lap and “they played alternately on the same keyboard for two hours altogether, extempore, before the King and Queen.”

At some point during that visit, between 1764 and 1765, Mozart heard some symphonies by J.C. Bach and decided he would write some symphonies himself. The first one, in E-flat K.16, was written while his father was ill and for a period of several weeks the the boy suddenly found himself free from being bandied about like a trained monkey (when the symphony was eventually performed in a concert, there, Leopold complained he had to write out all the parts himself rather than spend a shilling per page to have them done by a professional copiest).

His earliest keyboard concertos are all arrangements of other composers’ solo keyboard pieces – a standard assignment for a young student if he’d had a master teacher – including three based on sonatas by J.C. Bach. It was one way of absorbing technique, by finding out how other composers handled the rigors of theory, not just harmony but also structure and style. The idea was, eventually, to sort all of this out and find your own way.

Mozart would continue “absorbing” the music of composers he would meet on these trips with his father, giving him an opportunity to become acquainted with music (and musicians) he would never have met had he spent his entire childhood stuck in Salzburg (which he loathed) doing hackwork for his father. While people often remark how these years on the road had been a failure – Leopold never did succeed in landing a job for his son, even in later years – what he learned in the process however is quite probably the reason we have the Mozart we know today.

So naturally, coming across music by a man regarded as the Greatest Composer Alive, Franz Josef Haydn, it was no surprise he would start to absorb how Haydn wrote not only music but specifically symphonies and string quartets. By the time Mozart escaped from Salzburg, he was already familiar with Haydn’s Op. 17, Op. 20, and Op. 33 sets, and it was most especially the latter, published in 1781, the year Mozart arrived in Vienna, that inspired the now 25-year-old Mozart to “absorb” Haydn’s quartet style, his “new and special manner.” Not by writing imitative works “in the style of Haydn,” but by studying them to find out as much as he could find and then write his own original quartets. Whether this project was inspired by actually meeting Haydn or not is not known, so far as I can tell, but before he actually did become personally acquainted with The Great Man at that December 1783 concert, Mozart had already completed the first three of the proposed six quartets he’d already mentioned to his publisher.

Compared to his earlier quartets, no doubt written for household use for the Prince-Archbishop and perhaps not approached with the same kind of seriousness he would apply now that he was trying to earn a living in Vienna, these “Haydn” Quartets as they’re generically called show a world of improvement in his melodic writing, his harmonic inventiveness, his grasp of stylistic and structural nuance, and above all the independence of the individual instruments (again, counterpoint, perhaps absorbed from the works of Bach and Handel he’d studied in Swieten’s library).

After writing a series of piano concertos for immediate use – for concerts to earn money – he took some time to compose these quartets more leisurely. Examining the original manuscripts, they also show he took considerable pains, making corrections, rewriting passages, something he rarely did (many of his works amaze us simply because he seemed to be writing them down so effortlessly, these were not “first drafts” but completed works). 

Mozart in 1782

The first one, K.387, is dated December 31st, 1782. The next two are undated but Constanza recalled later how he’d been working on the D Minor Quartet, K. 421, one night while she had gone into labor with the birth of their first child on July 17th, 1783, and that the third of the set, the E-flat Quartet, K.428, was being written around the same time, judging from evidence with the paper and ink Mozart was using. (Imagine writing a string quartet while your first child was being born! At least it gave him something to do rather than pace the floor…)

After a break (which included five more piano concertos, some miscellaneous chamber pieces, and a batch of dances), Mozart resumed work on the second set of three quartets, the first of which he completed on November 9th, 1784; the last two were entered into his handwritten thematic catalogue in January of 1785. There were two private performances in Haydn’s presence, the first three on January 15th, 1785, and the second three on February 12th. Leopold Mozart was visiting in February, and Haydn informed him after the concert, “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name; he has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.” 

High praise indeed, and one wonders what it meant to Mozart who never received that kind of support from his own father.

The dedication to Haydn may not have been part of the original plan. Clearly, Haydn’s quartets were the inspiration for them. Ignaz Pleyel, however, had just dedicated a set of his own quartets to Haydn, much in the way composers would dedicate works to their teachers or to influential musicians more as a marketing tool or a kind of political act in a very competitive world, not just to wealthy patrons thanking them for the commission or hoping for a future one. So given Haydn’s approval of Mozart’s new quartets, perhaps the idea of dedicating them to his “inspiration” – it was after all the result of a form of studying with him – was the logical next step. All six were eventually published on September 1st, 1785, with a dedication to Haydn. And have always been referred to ever since as Mozart’s “Haydn Quartets.”

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN BEETHOVEN’S WORLD WHEN HE COMPOSED HIS RAZUMOVSKY QUARTETS?

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1794, three years after the death of Mozart, it was a city of grand stone palaces and large, open parks enclosed within the old city walls built in the 16th Century to keep out the invading Turks. But as Napoleon’s Empire swept across Europe in a series of ever-expanding wars, the question now was would these walls keep out the French?

In early November, 1805, there was an encounter between the French and the Austrian armies (along with their newly arrived Russian allies) at Hollabrünn, about 33 miles from Vienna. At the moment, I’m rereading Tolstoy’s War & Peace and, almost 300 pages in, the current scene is set at this small skirmish en route to Austerlitz (about 100 miles north of the capital) which, on December 2nd, would prove a decisive victory for the French. But Napoleon had already occupied Vienna: rather than fighting, the government decided to surrender to the French generals who presented their demands and, on November 13th, 15,000 French troops entered the city.

So, what impact did this have on Beethoven, you ask? He was in the midst of rather contentious final rehearsals for his opera, Fidelio (or, as it was still called, Leonore; by opening night, it would be renamed Fidelio over Beethoven’s protests), hurrying to compose the overture (this would become known as the “Leonore Overture No. 2” despite the chronological order in which they were composed), and dealing with a case of chronic colic pains (comparable to that caused by kidney stones).

A week later, the opera premiered to a largely empty theater, populated mostly by officers of the French army who were hardly sympathetic toward a work that, years earlier, might have had fans of the French Revolution cheering. Needless to say, along with a rather lackluster performance and dim critical reviews, Beethoven’s only opera was a failure and, revisions in early-1806 (and a new overture – No. 3) notwithstanding, withdrawn. And buried in a desk drawer.

He had premiered his famous 3rd Symphony in April, 1805, having originally dedicated it to Napoleon but then, after the Revolutionary Hero of the Enlightenment had crowned himself Emperor of the French on December 2nd, 1804, he changed the name to reflect a more generic Hero. He would call it Eroica but, he wrote to his publisher, “it is really Bonaparte,”using the last name of the earlier Hero as opposed to the current tyrant Napoleon. 

Beethoven in 1806

On May 29th, 1806, Beethoven’s brother Karl married Johanna Ries (their son, Karl, the future famous nephew of the composer, would be born on September 4th, 1806 – do the math…). The next day, Beethoven began work on the first of three string quartets commissioned by the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Count Andrei Razumovsky. He was an avid amateur violinist, often sat in on performances by his “house quartet” – musicians-in-residence led by violinist Ignaz Schupannzig – and he wanted something new. In fact, he’d wanted to study the art of quartet writing from Beethoven already in 1800, shortly after the premiere of his six Op. 18 Quartets (Beethoven suggested he contact Aloys Förster instead). Back then, Beethoven, even as he approached 30, was still in awe of his former teacher, Haydn, then still master of both the symphony and the string quartet, but six years later, Haydn’s health was in decline, his career was essentially over, and Beethoven, following the Eroica, was in a whole new place, creatively.

Andrei Razumovsky in 1810

Considering his nationality, representing the Russian tsar at the court of the Austrian Emperor, the count requested Beethoven employ a Russian melody in each quartet, not something he was prone to doing (in 1803, he’d turned down a commission from a British publisher for six sonatas based on Scottish themes by suggesting a fee far too high for the publisher to accept). Given a book of suitable choices, he found two: in the 1st Quartet, it becomes the basis of the finale; the one in the 2nd Quartet is more familiar to us because Mussorgsky later used it in the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov. There is no Russian Theme in the third quartet: there is no comment about it (did Beethoven give up on the idea?) nor is there any reaction I can find from Razumovsky about its absence.

By August, Beethoven was writing to his publisher he had finished the first of his quartets for Razumovsky. By the end of the year he would have completed or nearly completed not only the remaining two quartets, presumably by early-September, but also his Violin Concerto (premiered on December 23rd), most of his 5th Symphony (with which the Harrisburg Symphony opens its new season on September 28th and 29th) which he interrupted to write a freshly inspired 4th Symphony, and, by the end of the year, his 4th Piano Concerto.

Clearly a busy and productive time in Beethoven’s career, despite the political and social turmoil of the French Occupation! Oh, and by the way, after his victory at Austerlitz, the French Emperor signed a “treaty of friendship” with Austria on December 15th. Follow a concert at the Schönbrünn Palace (where Napoleon had been living much of this time), the French agreed to leave the city on December 27th, much to the relief of the Viennese. Including, one could easily imagine, Beethoven.

Things would not go quite so smoothly the next time Napoleon occupied Vienna. That would be in 1809 but this time, there was a siege complete with a bombardment before the city capitulated. A bomb fell and exploded in a yard next to the school where a 12-year-old Franz Schubert was attending classes; Franz Josef Haydn was dying – Napoleon posted a guard of honor outside his house to protect him; and Beethoven, unable to escape the city like his aristocratic patrons and the Imperial family, hid in the basement, covering his ears with pillows to protect his delicate hearing from the noise of the bombs and artillery.

Which brings us to one other thing that everyone knows about Beethoven: he was deaf.

His deafness was not complete (as we’d normally assume) until years later, the notebooks where people wrote down their part of the conversation since Beethoven could no longer hear them, weren’t used until 1818. His first symptoms began to appear intermittently around 1798, later impeded by a form of tinnitus. But during the summer of 1802, while working on his 2nd Symphony, these symptoms became so bad, he wrote the heart-rending Heilgenstadt Testament in which he described his despair over eventually becoming totally deaf, even contemplating suicide (“Oh Providence, grant me but one day of pure joy – it is so long since real joy has echoed in my heart”). And yet, during those weeks, he was writing this…

Four years later, he would write those three quartets for Count Razumovsky. Fortunately for us, he chose not to commit suicide and continued writing until the last year of his life 21 years later – including, when he was totally deaf, those last incredible “Late” Quartets!

Here is a performance recorded by the Emerson Quartet, with the compete score, of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59 No. 1:

 

Part Two and the 3rd Quartet of Erich Wolfgang Korngold will be posted soon.

Dick Strawser