The Jasper Quartet, Part 2 – Prokofiev and Two Works Written in the Last Ten Years

The Jasper Quartet, lounging (courtesy of WRTI's Fanfare)

(This post covers the rest of the program the Jasper Quartet will perform on Sunday at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg. You can read about the Haydn here.)

It is difficult to put young(er) composers into the same kind of context as “the classic canon.” First of all, not only have they (obviously) not finished their course trajectory but many of them are still in what traditionalists would call their “First Period” if we go by the standard “Early-, Middle-, and Late-Periods.” With composers like the two who are not Haydn and Prokofiev on our program, looking at when their works were composed, we’d see Gabriella Smith (born Dec. 26, 1991) who graduated from the Curtis School of Music in 2013 and wrote Carrot Revolution when she was 23. It would be safe to say she’d still be in her “Early Period” at the time. Jungyoon Wie (born in 1990) earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2020, a year after she composed Han: she would’ve been in her late-20s then, so five years later (now) she may well be facing the traditional 30-Something Style-Change Transition experienced by so many composers, most famously by Beethoven (who went from the Haydn-inspired String Quartets of Op. 18 to the world-shattering Eroica Symphony three years later and in the meantime realized he was going deaf), or by Igor Stravinsky who, forced into extra-musical influences courtesy of World War I, put The Rite of Spring of 1913 behind him for a sparer approach with Neo-Classicism with Les Noces which he began in 1914 when he was 32. Speaking of context…

Who knows, if we could fast-forward 20 years or so from now, where we might find Gabriella Smith or Jungyoon Wie and what their music then might sound like in comparison to what we’re hearing today?

Gabriella Smith (New York Times) She is "a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (LA Times), her music "exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (NY Times).

Gabriella Smith described the genesis of her “Carrot Revolution” (speaking of attention-grabbing titles):

“I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture. While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution. I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.”

Coming right after the Haydn, this will show you more about “what can a string quartet be?” over the course of intervening centuries. Where it might be fair to say composers like Haydn were limited in the musical choices they might hear that could inspire them, and that writing a dance in the Gypsy Style in the scherzo of his Op.20/4 Quartet was not only noteworthy but also bold for his day, as composers opened themselves up to the folk music of their own ethnic backgrounds (think Smetana and Dvořák or the Russian Five), these days, what sounds couldn’t possibly influence young composers today, seeking to find their creative identity? As Ms. Smith explains, “Early music strains meet bluegrass, jazz, rock, raspy electric guitar riffs, and the post-minimalist thrill ride of John Adams’ Shaker Loops. The voices of the string quartet emerge anew, occasionally with jubilant shrieks and earthy percussiveness.”

Here’s a performance of “Carrot Revolution” by the JACK Quartet (who’d performed an amazing program for us at Temple Ohev Shalom in 2011), one of the leading ensembles in the performance and promotion of the Newest Music:

 

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Jungyoon Wie. "Themes of identity, family, and personal story have been the center of her compositional journey."

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jungyoon Wie is a composer, educator, and pianist based in San Francisco. 

Her family came to the United States when she was 16 when she began taking her first composition lessons before earning a Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory and Composition, then receiving her DMA in Composition at the University of Michigan in 2020. Her mentors include Gabriela Lena Frank (whose 4 Folk Songs we heard at our March concert with Trio Gaia).

About a more recent work of hers, written in 2021, she writes about her own feelings as an artist in society: “In my personal life, I seek a balance between being an individual and being a part of a community. I believe there is a way to have them both without compromising each other. There's been a lot of violence and hatred recently toward others whom we think are different from us. As a composer, musician, and citizen, I often times feel helpless. However, this piece is my way of showing how we can create something beautiful while preserving our own individuality. I invite you to listen to this piece and also the stories of people around us.

This applies just as well to the work that opens the second half of the Jasper Quartet’s program, the first of four-movements from a work called “Han” which she wrote in 2019. It is based on a Korean folk song called “Saeya, saeya, parang saeya” or “Birds, birds, blue birds.”

She writes how the Korean term han originates from the Chinese character (恨) for pity and regret, and “amalgamates two different characters, one that denotes the mind and the other the state of limitation or stagnancy. This idea of impasse in one’s mind is central to the concept of han in Korea, a feeling of unresolved anger, grief, and regret that has been prolonged and accumulated over time. It has been identified that han, like trauma, suffers from its delayed manifestation which results in its ambivalent, paradoxical, and transgenerational quality.”

The traditional Korean folksong, heard at the beginning, “is both a lullaby and an elegy. It was sung to commemorate Bong-jun Jeon, one of the leaders in Donghak Peasant Revolution (1894-95), an armed rebellion in Korea by aggravated peasants against the corrupt government. It was also sung by the widows of the Jeon’s army as a lullaby for their babies. I found that these historical qualities of the original melody resemble the complexity of han that encompasses grief, regret, and hope. The original melody is stated at the beginning, and its fragments appear in different shapes and emotions, sometimes peaceful like a lullaby and other times explosive and pleading.

Her most recent works include A Prayer for Peace (2024) for string orchestra exploring different emotional progressions in her journey of immigration and Starlings (2025) for the Kronos String Quartet and string orchestra. For the 2025-26 season, her ongoing projects include a new work for the Del Sol String Quartet inspired by her experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

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Prokofiev, 1940s

And, speaking of context, who knew what would happen to Sergei Prokofiev when he was in his late-20s?  

He was only 26 when the Russian Empire fell and eventually became the Soviet Union following the October Revolution of 1917. When he was writing works considered “revolutionary” in their own right (completed in September, 1917, most of it written when he was 25, even his Neo-Haydn “Classical Symphony” was a “modernist” idea), who would’ve guessed many of his colleagues would flee for points west – like Rachmaninoff – or that he himself would finally give up a year later (his real excuse, he said, was that he did not have the peace to compose in a country torn apart by civil war), and head not for Paris but, going east, eventually reaching San Francisco (there being no ships headed from Vladivostok to his preferred destination, South America)?

And while Rachmaninoff could barely compose at all in his new home – with rare exceptions – Prokofiev produced, for instance, the opera The Love for Three Oranges before realizing the United States was not that interested in what he was writing. Eventually, he ended up in Paris where initial indifference led to momentary acclaim: 1923 was a particularly good year and he chose to stay, having given up on the indifference of the American public: hostility, he’d said, was better than indifference… But his style was changing as he not only matured but faced the reality that followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution: the acerbic harmonies and rhythms began to include mellower textures in his Third Piano Concerto, not that his “steel fingers” couldn’t still produce the old effects. Sketched in Russia, begun in America, completed on a French beach during a holiday, it was premiered in Chicago (ignored) and performed a year later in Paris (acclaimed) – he was 32.

But he decided to visit Russia – or rather, the Soviet Union – where he found a sense of “the prodigal returned” that still took four years to finalize. After shifting back and forth between Paris and Moscow, he opted for Moscow in 1936 – he was now 45 and if his style wasn’t changing on its own, it would change because of Stalin’s ideas about art and music. In the West, there was a lot of discussion about all of this, and questions about how you’d view, say, his Fifth Symphony, an undoubted masterpiece, and propaganda like the 1939 cantata, Hail to Stalin. Was “Peter and the Wolf,” one of the first works he completed after his return, a communist allegory? (Shostakovich had similar issues – all you need to do is read about the context behind his Fifth Symphony. And for every masterpiece, critics would point out, for instance, his cantata, Song of the Forests, praising Stalin’s reforestation project, and proclaim him a “party hack.”)

Let’s focus, instead, on how his 2^nd String Quartet came about.

In the summer of 1941, Prokofiev, recuperating from a heart attack a couple of months earlier, was staying outside Moscow, enjoying the countryside, working on some scenes from the ballet Cinderella, when the grounds-keeper’s wife ran up to him with news the German army had just invaded the Soviet Union. Immediately, the composer in him recalled pages from Tolstoy’s great novel about Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and he realized he must write some kind of opera based on War and Peace.

After laying siege to Leningrad, the Germans declared “the road to Moscow was open” and, as a result, many of the composers and other artists based there were transported to the safety of the interior – it was more difficult to get Shostakovich out of Leningrad (you can read about his experiences there and the symphony he had also been inspired to write by current events).

Prokofiev joined his friend, fellow-composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, on a train for the Caucasus, specifically the town of Naltchik on the northern edge of this mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. It was a small city – town, more like it – and the capital of what is now called the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, an autonomous state within the Russian Federation, located north of the former Soviet republic of Georgia and just northwest of the region occasionally referred to as “the break-away Republic of Chechnya.” It’s also home to the highest mountain in Europe, Mt. Elbrus.

Anyway, in 1941, they weren’t sure what to do with all these famous personalities arriving there: one thing, a local government official suggested, was that these musicians should acquaint themselves with some of the regional folk music and use them as a basis for one of their compositions. He arranged for them to hear “field recordings” and to bring in some of the local musicians to play for them.

Prokofiev later told a friend, "I felt that the combination of new, untouched Oriental folklore with the most classical of classic forms, the string quartet, ought to produce interesting and unexpected results."

And that result was his String Quartet No. 2 in F Major which he completed quickly in less than a month. Myaskovsky, meanwhile, also wrote a string quartet (his 7th) also in the key of F Major – did he use any of the same tunes Prokofiev did? did they compare notes as if divying up which tunes they’d use? – and then did Prokofiev one better, completing his Symphony No. 23 in A Minor based on Kabardinian themes by late-December.

Whatever the local official might’ve felt – “well, at least Myaskovsky wrote us a symphony…” – even if Myaskovsky’s works may not be that well known outside Russia today (or inside, for that matter; I don’t know), certainly Prokofiev’s quartet’s international fame did help put his little corner of the Caucasus on the musical map.

In three movements, the opening of Prokofiev’s quartet unfolds in a lively standard classical sonata-form complete with three themes. The first is “a bold, jaunty march,” a Kabardinian folk theme one writer described as “combining childlike naiveté with menacing belligerence.” The middle movement is both a haunting slow movement based on a Kabardinian love-song interrupted by a dance-like scherzo which “transforms the love song utilizing a kinetic motif from the folk dance Islamey,” which also inspired Mily Balakirev to compose his Oriental Fantasy in 1869. The finale returns to the opening’s energy with a mountain folk dance complete with solo cadenzas. Prokofiev “manages to create a synthesis of authentic folk materials, skillful classical forms and the colorful swagger of the composer’s own personal originality.”

When I can, I like to include “videos with scores” sometimes because those are also good performances and decent-enough recordings, and several viewers who are not musicians find it interesting to “follow along” even if they can’t read music. Others miss the elements of a live performance. In this case, I’m going to include two different ensembles: the live performance is with Russia’s State Borodin Quartet; the second, with score, uses the Emerson Quartet’s recording. Take your pick!

In the previous post, I’d referred to Haydn as a “Germanic” composer rather than a German composer and not, as some have pointed out in the past, an Austrian. “Germany” as a nation did not exist until 1871, and Austria was, in Haydn and Mozart’s time, only part of the “Holy Roman Empire” until 1806. The Austrian Empire was more Hungarian and Balkan but it was the ethnic German Austrians who ruled these lands and dominated those cultures.

The same had happened in Russia. As the Russian Empire grew from the days of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th Century to what turned into the Soviet Union after 1917, it absorbed lands of various ethnic groups from Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States in the west to the wide open ranges of Central and Far Eastern Asia, even for a while colonizing Alaska – but all of this was not only ruled but dominated by ethnic Russians, regardless of the local culture. With the creation of the “union” that became the USSR, it became important to be aware of the difference between Russians and “Soviets.” I remember many phone calls from a Ukrainian friend back in the ‘90s (many of my readers may recall the Harrisburg Symphony's former concertmaster, Irene Palashewskij) when I worked at a classical music radio station who would remind me that “Russian” and “Soviet” were not synonymous, that Khachaturian was Armenian, not Russian – a Soviet composer – and that while Prokofiev was Russian, he was technically a Soviet composer; Rachmaninoff, who emigrated to the United States after the Revolution, remained a Russian composer – but did he ever really become an American one?

So, with the evolution of a Soviet state, Stalin felt the need for an inclusive Soviet culture that would reflect the vast ethnic diversity of the USSR. The government officially encouraged its composers and artists to use music and images associated with these “ethnic minorities” in their music to create not an imposed Russian culture but an amalgamated Soviet one. This made Prokofiev’s use of Kabardinian themes in his quartet a double purpose: recognizing the contribution of the people of the Caucasus, an homage to his hosts during his 1941 evacuation there, much the way George Gershwin returned from France with his musical souvenir, An American in Paris; but also creating a work that including the Kabardinian identity into the Soviet cultural sphere.

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Given the recent Russian Invasion of Ukraine, I thought it might be interesting to examine a bit of the history where Prokofiev found himself as Hitler’s army moved across Russia in 1941. The region of the Caucasus had long been a challenging stronghold full of mountains and valleys filled with different tribes and small tribal principalities. Generically known as “Circassians” to Russia and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Kabardinians were one of 12 tribes of this Turkic people who called themselves the Adyghe, already established in the region by the 4th Century, and Christianized by the Byzantines. Later, in the 17th Century, many of them converted to Islam through the neighboring Ottoman Empire in return for military security against invading Tatars. Then, in 1714, Peter I (known to the West as “the Great”) formulated a plan to conquer the Caucasus.

This is also the area that 18th Century German “racial theorists” – treading on tenuous ground here, these days – determined was the “Home of the Caucasian Race” and that the Circassian people had a “superior beauty” which, they felt, “was how God intended the human race to be.”

All that aside, as the Russian Empire’s expansion that also saw the colonization of Alaska, the army of Catherine the Great invaded the Caucasus in 1763 and ignited a 101-year war that ended, finally, in the defeat of these proud and heroic warriors – not to mention the fact the mountainous region didn’t make it easy for the Russian troops. Battles waged and victories and defeats alternated back and forth, renewed after the Circassian Army was nearly annihilated in a 1806 battle. Not much is known of this war in today’s history books: by the time Nicholas I officially annexed the region in 1864, it would be officially glossed over following the Circassian Genocide, an example of “ethnic cleansing” in which the Russians either killed or expelled between 95-97% of the Circassian population, most of them fleeing to the Ottoman Empire. Russian and Soviet state officials have gone so far as to claim the conflict "never happened" and that Circassia "voluntarily joined Russia in the 16th century."

Another Russian figure associated with this region was the poet, novelist, and general “social misfit” which glosses over the controversy of his poem about Pushkin’s death which landed him in the Caucasus for his first exile. He would fight hand-to-hand combat during the Circassian War in 1840. His novel, A Hero of Our Time, would place him in the forefront of Romantic Russian Literature. However, he died in a duel at the age of 26.

Another figure would be the composer Mily Balakirev, more famous in the West as the Founder of the Mighty Handful, five Russian nationalist composers. Balakirev made three visits to the Caucasus between 1862 and 1868, and during one of these – note the timing with the end of the war – he says he met “a Circassian prince” who played several folk songs on “his instrument, very much like a violin.” One of these became the main theme of his “oriental fantasy,” Islamey for solo piano, one of the great knucklebusters of the 19th Century and hence a favorite of Liszt’s. The dance is a traditional lezghinka better known as a “saber dance” not necessarily to be confused with The Saber Dance by Aram Khachaturian, but a dance “with swords” originating from the same region of the Caucasus. The lyrical contrasting theme was one sung to him by an Armenian actor “from the Crimea” who was working in Moscow at the time. He completed the piece in a month – rare for Balakirev – in 1869.

One of Prokofiev’s main goals was to avoid any of Balakirev’s overt “orientalisms” – Myaskovsky did not succeed in that, judging from the finale of his Symphony No. 23 – and simply to incorporate the music he’d heard and enjoyed in Nalchik during a very trying time, all the while he was primarily focused on writing his opera based on War and Peace.

Shortly after he completed his quartet, Prokofiev moved to Tblisi, the capital of Georgia (then a Soviet republic), in November. The following May, film director Sergei Eisenstein who was staying in Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan invited Prokofiev to join him so they would work on music for his film, Ivan the Terrible. I haven’t found anything implying any other reason for this change of location, but I noticed this, checking out the history of Kabardinia: as part of the impending Siege of Stalingrad, located on the Volga River just north of the Caspian Sea, Hitler planned to take control of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942, which he called “Operation Edelweiss.” By August, one of the Nazi battalions planted the Swastika flag on top of Mt. Elbrus which was only an 84 mile drive from Nalchik.

But by then, Prokofiev was over 2,000 miles away, safely close to the border with China, and didn’t return to Moscow till 1944 where he wrapped up work on War and Peace, Cinderella (finally) and composed his triumphant Symphony No. 5 which was premiered to a glorious reception. After everything that had been happening during the war, Prokofiev was now at the peak of his career.

A week later, Prokofiev apparently suffered a spike in his chronic high-blood-pressure and fainted, hitting his head on some furniture and suffering a traumatic brain injury. Fellow composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, visiting him in the hospital, found him semi-conscious and left him, assuming it would be the end. Though weakened and dealing with the after-effects, Prokofiev lived until March of 1953 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on the same day as Stalin, his death barely noticed during the dictator’s official mourning.

– Dick Strawser

The Jasper Quartet, Part 1 – Here's Haydn

Franz Josef Haydn (c.1770)

The Jasper Quartet, winner of the prestigious career-starting Cleveland Quartet Award in 2012, have gone on to be acclaimed as one of the leading quartets of the century, and they return to Harrisburg Sunday afternoon at Temple Ohev Sholom with a program that looks varied on the surface – Haydn (Germanic/18th Century), Prokofiev (Soviet/20th Century), and two 21st Century composers, Gabriella Smith (American) and Jungyoon Wie (Korean) – but is more deeply unified by the inspiration of folk music that is both playful and rustic. 

 The concert begins “standard” enough with Haydn and concludes with what many of our audience might recall had once been called “contemporary,” written in 1941. (You can read the second installment about the works not by Haydn, here.)

In this case, the Haydn quartet is one of those usually considered an “early” quartet and not as familiar to the general audience as the more famous later ones. They’re generally underrated and as a result often deemed “less important.” Also, it seems odd to refer to these Op. 20 String Quartets as “Early Haydn” since he was 40 when he wrote them and, after all, at that age Mozart would’ve been dead five years…

However, we’re concerned only about one of them on this program, the fourth of the set which is in D Major. Here’s a complete performance with score from a recording by the Doric Quartet (who’ve also appeared in past MSC seasons). The slow second movement, marked un poco adagio affetuoso, begins at 11:15; the scherzo – I’m sorry, minuet – at 21:02; and the light-hearted finale, what one would expect from Papa Haydn, the Presto scherzando (there it is, out in the open!), at 22:43. Incidentally, the Doric players interpolate a few embellishments of their own as performers would’ve been used to in the hey-day of the Baroque era, but it’s pure Haydn coming down to the finish line when – uhmm – the final cadence just sort of vanishes. Nothing “faster and louder” (or expected!) about this ending!

(Seriously, if you’re hearing this music for the first time, did you not smile a little at that ending?)

“Early,” in this case, refers not to the composer’s age but to the age of the String Quartet itself. While Haydn is often mentioned as “The Father of the Symphony,” he was also paternally involved in the development of the string quartet. There is no journal where Haydn jotted down his day’s achievements by writing “And today I created the string quartet.” In fact, when he entered the six quartets of Op.20 into his “Complete Works Catalogue,” he wasn’t even sure what they were, listing them as “6 Divertimenti.” Only later when they appeared in print were they identified as “Quartets.” Yes, they were works written for four string instruments, but the idea of a more serious “form” (genre would be more appropriate) called a String Quartet didn’t come about until later. 

His first set, published as Op. 1 when he was maybe 23 or so (now, that’s early), dates from the mid-1750s and were received so favorably by his employer, Count Fürnberg, he wrote some more, and, as a result, Fürnberg recommended him to Count Morzin who was looking for music director for his palace. After Morzin experienced financial difficulties in 1761 and had to make serious cuts to his musical staff, Haydn was offered a job as assistant to the old and established (read “cantankerous”) Kapellmeister of Prince Esterházy, the family who then employed him for the rest of his career.

Haydn did not immediately begin writing more quartets – in fact, he produced his first forty symphonies instead. But in 1769 he wrote six quartets published as Op. 9, and then, two years later, another set of six, Op. 17.

But things were changing in the wider world of Classical Music. The old-fashioned Baroque Style Haydn had grown up with had basically become passé by the time Bach died in 1750 (Handel died three years after Mozart was born), and the New Style (which we call Classical) was still trying to figure out what it was. For one thing, it needed to be more than the opposite of the past: yes, simplicity and a more accessible approach to the general public which the Germans called liebhaber (the equivalent of “amateur”) those who “have love” of music, as opposed to the kenner or those who have “knowledge” of music.

Rather than counterpoint and dry stuff like fugues, they said, let’s have a beautiful melody with a simple accompaniment. And let’s have more contrasting moods – music can be emotional (if the sewing machine hadn’t been invented yet, it couldn’t describe the way many people probably played the old stuff).

Around the late-1760s, there evolved an almost extreme form of “emotionalism” the Germans called Sturm und Drang (basically, “storm and stress”) and suddenly the “accessible” style where everything should be “pleasant” (imagine these as “air-quotes”) was suddenly assaulted by turbulent textures in (horror) minor keys. And Haydn complied: he started writing minor-key symphonies like the famous “Farewell” Symphony which is best known for its famous joke at the end but which otherwise, in the dark key of F-sharp Minor, is a classic example (pun intended) of a Sturm und Drang symphony at its best. He wrote it in 1772.

Now, the whole point of the “farewell” in this piece was, at the conclusion of this tempestuous finale, a “second” finale began as the musicians packed up and left the stage, one by one or in pairs, until, variation after variation, only two violinists were left. The joke had been, since his musicians were complaining about being kept too long at the Prince’s summer estate at Esterháza and kept away from their wives and families living in the palace at Eisenstadt, it was time for the Prince to likewise pack up and return home. Though only some 30 miles away, it was not considered an easy commute when you’re always playing Haydn symphonies for your boss. (And, seriously, is Wikipedia making that up when it says the current palace in Eisenstadt was built by "Prince Paul I, the 1st Prince Esterházy of Bum Bum"???)

That same year, Haydn composed his set of quartets, Op. 20.

Everyone says they are a milestone in the development of the String Quartet (even though he still labeled them divertimenti in his big book) – but was there some reason, some non-musical impetus behind their inspiration? What if – and again, this is only conjecture because we have nothing in writing from Haydn or anyone else saying this is what happened – because he needed music to entertain the Prince, he started to supply him with something requiring only four players as opposed to twenty to thirty in the orchestra? And, this is a key point considering the change in musical style, if the Prince enjoyed the meatier substance of a symphony, perhaps Haydn should be supplying chamber music with more fiber to it as a replacement, rather than the empty calories of something meant purely to delight? Something, shall we say, for the kenner?

And what did Haydn do in these quartets that’s so different? First of all, it’s impossible to go back to 1772 – Mozart was only 16, Beethoven not yet 2 – and pretend we’ve never heard everything that came afterward (and not just Mozart and Beethoven or even “late-Haydn”). What this must've sounded like to a guest of Prince Nikolaus' visiting Esterháza, we'll never know. We don’t hear anything new and startling in these Op.20 quartets because they essentially set the standard as Haydn proceeded to produce more and more advanced quartets: the fact that it was four players, not just one playing to an accompaniment of three others; the fact the elements of contrast and emotion could be more of a focus; even the fact that – liebhaber beware! – he wrote fugues for three of the six finales!

Mozart’s first serious quartets (at 17, we can hardly call them “mature”) were written in Vienna in 1773. While he’d’ve had access to the Op.9 and Op. 17 quartets, and considering the Op.20 set weren’t published until 1774, did they influence Mozart then? Anyone who’s ever been confused about the Mozart Haydn Quartets (what, a collaboration?) knows the role Haydn’s quartets played in the development of Mozart’s writing for the string quartet, but those date from 1782, the year after Mozart arrived in Vienna as a free-lancer.

Keep in mind, Haydn – born of the lower classes and from the age of 6 spending his life geared for the service of the aristocracy – had become the Leading Composer in Europe by that time. But considering his job as the Prince’s Kapellmeister (basically, “music director”), everything he wrote belonged to the Prince. It was only in 1779 that Haydn negotiated a new contract with the Prince where he could now accept commissions from outside the palace and sell his music to publishers, both Austrian and foreign. It was something of a paradox that he was not only a successful “free-lance” composer, now, something Mozart longed to be, but he was still an employee of the Esterházy family and still required to supply music for his employer (if Downton Abbey had an orchestra, Haydn would still be taking his meals downstairs with Carson and Mrs. Hughes).

The Prince had built his country estate, Esterháza (separate from the palace in Eisenstadt), in what was basically a Hungarian swamp. The Esterházy family was ethnically Hungarian and Hungary was then part of the Austrian Empire. They’d also owned an estate in Galanta now in Slovakia not far from the Hungarian border (Kodály fans should know this Hungarian composer spent many summers there as a child, and incorporated some of the folk dances he’d heard there in his famous Dances of Galanta). So perhaps taking up some Hungarian rhythms in a more typical Gypsy sound (hence the zingarese in the so-called minuet’s title, a scherzo in everything but name) was a way of paying homage to his employer's roots? It’s almost as if two of the players can’t quite get in step with the others, perhaps the equivalent of an old “Mosquito-slapping Dance.” (Try tapping your foot to that!)

There are many examples of “new ideas” in these six quartets, not necessarily evident in all of them: two of them are in minor keys which was even less common in chamber music than symphonies especially among works meant purely for entertainment (like divertimentos). As I mentioned, three of them end with fugues. Words like affetuoso, a term of expression beyond what one might find in old-fashioned Baroque music, appear twice. The slow movements are much more lyrical and emotional than typical of the new style, especially the incredible Adagio of No. 5 (note especially the prolonged cadence at the end, beginning at 4:48).  

While there are movements that are certainly “violin solos” with simple accompaniments, other movements contain passages where ideas are thrown around between the different instrumental voices, something we’re quite familiar with from later-Haydn and especially Beethoven, but compare the 5th’s Adagio to the opening of No. 1 with its pairings and, eventually (say, 4:38), imitation of fragments in different parts.

By the way, the whole set is often referred to collectively as “The Sun” Quartets, though none of them have any individual nicknames (certainly none supplied by the composer) – and they’re not to be confused with the “Sunrise” Quartet of 1797, Op. 76 No. 4. Op. 20’s moniker can be traced to the 1779 edition of the Amsterdam-based publisher Johann Julius Hummel (not to be confused with the London-based publisher, Adolphe Hummel; and probably not related to the famous pianist and composer of the day, Johann Nepomuck Hummel). It seems Mr. Hummel, for whatever reasons, adorned his cover page with the image of a sunburst and as a result, commentators have forever after suggested it was because these quartets represented a new birth for a new art form, the String Quartet. Well… sure, why not?

By the way, if you want to find out more about the Op.20 quartets, check out Dave Hurwitz and his “Ultimate Classical Music Guide.” 

Of course, I could write a lot more about the importance of these quartets – listening to Op. 20/4’s Minuet, can you not hear, say, seeds for the scherzo from Beethoven’s last published quartet, Op. 135? – so I will continue with Part II, covering music written between 1941 and 2019, which you can read here.

– Dick Strawser