What’s in a name? When the members of the Balourdet Quartet – who open the new season for Market Square Concerts on Wednesday, 7:30, at Market Square Church – were wondering what to call themselves, they considered many options. As cellist Russell Houston explains it (in the video header for the previous post in this series), since three of them had met at the Taos Music Festival, they wanted to take a name from the festival as a way of honoring the inspiration they’d found there. So, at the end of their first semester at the Shepherd School of Music, they were at Russell’s locker when a business card fell out of his shoe (having been a student once, I can relate to his filing system) – a card for Antoine Balourdet “who really was a lover of life and a lover of music… and he was the chef of the Hotel St. Bernard where the Taos School of Music used to be held. One of the main things about that festival is that they have this amazing French food. We sort of all became a community through the shared love of food and music; we were always reading chamber music late into the night. As a group, one of the things that brings us together is our love of food. When we’re on the road, it’s a chance for us to catch up on how we’re living life and what’s going on with us outside of just rehearsing. We get to share meals together and it really brings us together as a group.”
In this post, we’ll hear about Haydn’s Quartet known as “The Lark.” I’ll save György Ligeti’s 2nd String Quartet for one last post.You can read the earlier post about Smetana's 1st String Quartet, "From My Life," here.
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Haydn (in London), 1791
Speaking of names, the average listener might wonder why this particular Haydn quartet is called The Lark.
Given the large number of nicknames among Haydn's works, it’s almost a necessity to tell one of his 68 quartets from another. (First of all, some sources list 83 quartets, but that includes a number of spurious works (“attributed to Haydn”) as well as arrangements of other works of his (arranged by someone not Haydn) and not originally string quartets. Usually, they’re referred to by Opus Numbers rather than various other catalog numbers: the quartet the Balourdet opens their program with is the String Quartet in D Major, Op. 64 No. 5; or it could be the String Quartet No. 53; the String Quartet FHE No. 35; the String Quartet Hob.III:63. It’s so much easier just to call it “The Lark.”
First of all, the lark in question – I’ll skip the dad joke about “he was just larking about, calling it that...” – would probably be the Eurasian Skylark, a songbird well-known to Europeans. Since the nickname didn’t originate with Haydn, he didn’t wake up one morning to a bird singing outside his window and become inspired to begin writing this quartet. Who came up with the name is unknown: one of the musicians, or maybe the Prince’s valet? Or perhaps a publisher or critic later on who, looking for something descriptive to say beyond “a pretty melody” decided it resembled a bird singing – “maybe a lark?”
According to one modern-day writer I found on-line, “the violin melody that opens and dominates the first movement soars and sings like a bird on the wing. Why a lark? Because unlike most birds who sing only when perched, larks sing while in flight, and their cheerful song is extraordinarily melodious.” Though our friend captured here, aside from being grounded, would seem to be more chatty than “melodious.”
Nonetheless, larks would go on to inspire other composers: for instance, Ralph Vaughan Williams and his popular “Lark Ascending” for violin and orchestra. And, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony aside, there’s Messiaen’s famous use of birdsong which may be more realistic: in his Réveil des oiseaux (The Awakening of the Birds), the solo piano opens with an extended solo for a nightingale as, eventually, other birds join in the “morning song,” each bird delineated in the score.
But, as usual, the cute nickname assigned to Haydn’s delightful work deals with basically one single element of the whole piece: it could just as easily be known as “The Hornpipe Quartet” after the presto finale which brought to mind a lively sailor’s dance (not sure how many jaunty sailors used to hang out in Vienna in 1790, though…).
As one writer described the quartet, “it’s an entertainment in four acts: a story, a song, a dance, and a party.” Works for me!
Here’s the Balourdet Quartet performing Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 64 No. 5, better known simply as “The Lark,” recorded recently at a concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth.
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Listening to this quartet – indeed almost any work by “Papa” Haydn – one would have little sense of what was going in his “real” life. In the start of 1790, Haydn was in Vienna (Prince Esterházy divided his time between the Winter Season in Vienna and the rest of the year at his country estates along the present-day Hungarian border) where he got to hear Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and attended various musicales and “quartet parties,” enjoying being a celebrity among the Imperial Capital’s musical circles. But when the prince decided to leave Vienna in February (prematurely, Haydn felt), the composer found himself writing to one of his many Viennese friends about sitting here “in my wilderness – almost without human society, full of the memories of the glorious past. When will those days return?” (His “past,” here, referred to the “past few weeks.”) Back on the job, he was beginning to feel the toll of the thirty years being in service to the Esterházy Family, whatever his position, and the future seemed to have little to offer him in the way of any challenges or new goals he could set for himself.
But the Prince’s wife died at the end of February and Prince Nikolaus was disconsolate. Perhaps these quartets were intended to help keep up the Prince’s spirit that summer, but as his own health deteriorated, the Prince himself died on September 28th, 1790.
Now, Prince Nikolaus was a wealthy man – in fact, he was reputedly richer than the Emperor – but when his brother Anton inherited the title and all the estates, it made no difference to Haydn: Anton had no love of music and, as a “cost-saving measure,” he disbanded the orchestra and the theatres, putting Haydn on a pension (rather than just laying him off). He lived only four more years before the title and the estates – and Haydn – passed on to his son, Prince Nicholas II, but that’s a story for another time.
So basically, in the autumn of 1790, Haydn found himself without his patron’s support and essentially unemployed (or at least his usual work assignments no longer required). Naturally, then, when Johann Peter Salomon, the impresario from London, showed up (again) and offered Haydn a season in the British capital, what was going to hold him back? He said “yes,” and arrived there on January 1st, 1791. He had recently completed the last of the six quartets which would soon be published as Op. 64 – they were written for the Prince but had their first performances in concerts for the London public – and with that, Haydn’s life changed. He wrote another six quartets for London, not to mention a dozen symphonies, six for the first tour, and six more for the second tour in 1794, the famous “London Symphonies” which quickly became the most famous symphonies in Europe.
By the way, when Haydn was beginning to feel his life trapped in a corner in 1790, he was 58 years old. Little did he know what glories would lie ahead for him over the next five years!
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The six quartets of Op. 64 were written for Johann Tost in 1790. Typically, a dedication could be a way of thanking a patron for financial support or out of gratitude for a favor. In this case, Johann Tost was a former principal 2nd Violinist in Haydn’s orchestra at Esterháza between 1783 and 1788. After retiring from Prince Esterhazy’s employment, Tost traveled to Paris where he sold several of Haydn’s works to French publishers including his latest quartets (Op. 54 and Op. 55) and two symphonies, including the popular No. 88 in G Major. Among the works he sold there were apparently some he’d surreptitiously taken out of the Esterháza library and a few that weren’t by Haydn but passed off as Haydn’s. Some sources say Haydn wrote these works for Tost; other sources say Haydn gave him copies of these works so Tost could find a publisher for them in Paris.
Regardless, the Op. 54/55 set is often referred to as “The Tost Quartets” even though they were not written for him or dedicated to him (it is said, when Tost had them published, he wrote in the dedication to himself on his own). To make it more confusing, the six Op. 64 quartets of 1790 are officially dedicated to Tost but are only occasionally referred to as “The Tost Quartets.” When these works were first released, Haydn was in London on the first of his two tours. Curiously, considering some of Tost’s previous disingenuous behavior, it’s interesting to note that, for the second edition in 1793, Haydn had the dedication removed...
So, considering Johann Tost is, shall we say, intimately involved with no less than a dozen Haydn quartets, just who is he? I thought this would give you a chance to see what it was like behind the scenes of the music you’re hearing: not just who wrote it or performed it, but who, in the matter of being a supporting patron, helped bring the work into being.
After leaving Esterháza and settling in Vienna, Tost married Maria Anna Jerlischeck in 1790, a former housekeeper with the Esterházy family (Mlle Nanette as Haydn referred to her in his letters). Haydn also wrote his Piano Sonata in E-flat Major (Hob.XVI:49) for her though it’s a long story since it was intended to be a gift for the wife of Prince Esterhazy’s physician, so he discreetly dedicated it instead to the housekeeper who’d “requested” it, not the woman who was actually a close friend of Haydn’s and for whom it’s thought he, er… well, “had feelings,” hence the subterfuge. After all, why would Haydn dedicate such a grand work to a housekeeper?
In reality, Maria Anna Jerlischeck was a moderately wealthy woman who served as the prince’s housekeeper much the way members of the lesser nobility formed the household of some higher ranking nobility or members of the ruling court. In that sense, when former musician Johann Tost married Miss Jerlischeck, he was indeed the “servant” and his wife more than a mere “housekeeper” in our eyes (to those of us tuned into the world of Downton Abbey). Haydn may have been the most famous living composer in Europe, but to Prince Esterházy’s court, he was still a servant, he still wore livery like a servant, and he ate downstairs with the other servants.
Anyway, with the help of his wife’s fortune, Former Servant Tost soon built up a wholesale empire to become a newly rich merchant. To maintain this new social lifestyle, the Tosts threw well-attended musical soirees. In 1791, Tost apparently commissioned Mozart (who was having worse-than-usual money problems at the time) to write his last two String Quintets (K.593 and K.614). Whatever the reason, Mozart did dedicate them to Tost.
Though most of this lies in the future, by 1795 Tost was already known as a wine merchant; then, around 1800, he opened a state-of-the-art cloth factory to produce military-grade uniforms in his home town of Iglau in Bohemia (later to become the birthplace of Gustav Mahler). Unfortunately, Napoleon’s 1809 invasion of the Hapsburg Empire (later resulting in his second occupation of Vienna) also brought Tost’s factory to a standstill from which the business never fully recovered.
In 1812, Tost was one of twelve founding board members of Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music, serving two years on the Executive Committee. Despite the downturn in his business, he was still actively involved in Vienna’s musical scene, playing in several charity concerts, and, among other works, commissioning the then leading composer Ludwig (or Louis) Spohr to compose a Nonet and then an Octet for his musical soirees in 1813 and 1814. Plans to establish a music conservatory never materialized after he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1815. I can find no references to any events for the remainder of his life: his wife had died in 1797, but Tost himself survived until 1831, dying at the age of 71.
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