It is perhaps because of the Opus 50's intellectual character that other sets among Haydn's mature quartets have received more attention from performers.

[4] Haydn conceived of what became the Opus 50 set in a letter to the publishing house Artaria in 1784, although he then put the project on hold for the Paris symphonies and The Seven Last Words of Christ.

[5] The history of the publication of Opus 50 set betrays one of the more remarkable examples of Haydn's financial and commercial impropriety.

Meanwhile, in August, he had offered the set to the English publisher William Forster, who duly printed the six quartets before Artaria did.

After a concert at the festival, a woman presented the manuscripts in a plastic shopping bag to the conductor Christopher Hogwood.

[7] The Haydn scholar Georg Feder, who was visiting Australia at the time, then verified the scores to be the authentic original manuscripts of the four quartets.

It emerged that the woman who presented the manuscripts to Hogwood had inherited them, through successive generations, from an English colonel who had purchased them at an 1851 auction before emigrating to New Zealand.

The colonel's heirs were evidently unaware that they owned the only original versions of the quartets in Haydn's pen.

[13] In 1793 the poet Gabriele von Baumberg set the movement's theme to words, for inscription on a monument honouring Haydn in the composer's home town of Rohrau, Austria.

[15] In the trio, Haydn uses off-beat entries and second-beat sforzandos to disrupt what would otherwise be a regular and conventional triple metre.

[16] The fourth movement, in sonata form but with characteristics of a rondo, is replete with Haydnesque false recapitulations and conclusions.

In one example, the music lands in the tonic at the end of the recapitulation and apparent coda, and is followed by two measures of complete silence, creating an illusion of finality.

[20] The movement's central section also features a five-measure passage of sixteenth notes for the cello, perhaps specially written for the opus's cellist dedicatee.

Its movements are: This is a concise work, in terms of its duration, the economy of thematic material presented, and also the narrow registers within which the four parts operate.

This would have been a common technique earlier in the eighteenth century that, in this instance, is liable to confuse the unknowing listener looking for the statement of the first phrase of the theme in the tonic.

The coda involves the statement of the main theme in the tonic that the listener might have been expecting, and it does so after two measures of pointed silence.

Sutcliffe argues that the perfunctory major-key conclusion is not a "happy ending" but an "uneasy truce" that paves the way for the remainder of the quartet, the finale of which concludes in a minor key.

[29] The minuet features a startling harmonic shift: its second half is suddenly interrupted by a fortissimo D-major chord, far remote from the home key, before a chromatic passage leads back to the dominant of C♯ major.

[31] The musicologist Donald Tovey, writing in 1929, described the fugue as "tragic" on the scale of Beethoven's String Quartet No.

The movement continues to feature subtle textural conversation between the violins, viola and cello that is not resolved until the coda.

The first violin plays the leading role throughout,[13] although the movement is characterised by rich textures between the four parts created by compositional devices such as contrary motion.

[36] Haydn also toys with metre towards the end of the minuet: it moves into, and concludes, essentially in duple time.

[30] Sutcliffe refers to the finale as the "one disappointing movement" of the Opus 50 quartets, arguing that it is "too straightforward structurally", lacks "internal tension", and might have been the product of the composer's rush to finish the work, which was holding up publication of the whole set.

The first movement opens peculiarly: the first violin starts on an E, and proceeds to play a four-measure phrase that concludes with a D major chord.

[40] The minuet is the shortest among those of the Opus 50, but the trio features an exceptionally long second section,[39] which uses drifting melodies, a fermata and a pair of two-measure pauses to create a sense of timelessness.

The minuet ends with a perfunctory reprise of its main theme and the trio draws out its final cadence with a chromatic passage marked "diminuendo".

Again, Haydn reinforces the interconnectedness between the movements with an explicit direction to the performers for an immediate segue from the reprised minuet to the finale.

The resulting strange pulsating effect is the consequence of an open string having a quite distinct timbre (louder, more ringing) from a fingered one.

The sound of unison bariolage has reminded some listeners of a croaking frog, and is what earned the quartet its nickname.