Although accounts left by visitors to the Esterházy estate indicate that the quartets were completed by 1797, an exclusivity agreement caused them not to be published until 1799.
[1] Correspondence between Haydn and his Viennese publishers Artaria reveal confusion as regards their release: Haydn had promised Messrs. Longman Clementi & Co. in London the first publishing rights, but a lack of communication led him to worry that their publication in Vienna might also be, unintentionally, their first appearance in full.
76 quartets are among Haydn's most ambitious chamber works, deviating more than their predecessors from standard sonata form and each emphasizing their thematic continuity through the seamless and near-continual exchange of motifs between instruments.
Charles Burney wrote to Haydn praising these innovations:[3] ...they are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before.The set is one of the most renowned of Haydn's string quartet collections.
This same melody is known to modern listeners for its later use in the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied, which has been used since Austria-Hungary and the Weimar Republic.
The musicologist Laszlo Somfai suggested (1986) that the opening notes have an extra-musical origin: they represent the initial letters of "Gott erhalte Franz den Caesar", assuming the license of using the original Latin spelling for "Kaiser" ("K" does not designate a musical note).
[7] The second movement, in G major cut time, is in strophic variation form, with the "Emperor's Hymn" as the theme.
Samuel Adler has singled out this work's second movement as an outstanding example of how to score for string instruments, observing of the movement's final variation: This is a wonderful lesson in orchestration, for too often the extremes in the range are wasted too early in a work, and the final buildup is, as a result, anticlimactic.
The other formal factor to notice is that the entire structure is an accumulation of the elements which have slowly entered the harmonic and contrapuntal scheme in the course of the variations and have become a natural part of the statement [i.e.
In measure 7, the same instruments sustain a dominant seventh chord while the first violin again plays a rising solo on top.
In measure 22, all instruments reach forte, and allegro con spirito character is apparent through the sixteenth-note movement and lively staccato eighth notes trading off between the parts.
In measure 37, the opening sunrise theme returns, this time with the solo in the cello and the sustained chords in the violins and viola.
The lively sixteenth-note section returns in measure 50, beginning with sixteenth notes in the cello which move to the viola, and finally, the violins.
When the pianissimo is finally reached in measure 105, the retransition to the recapitulation begins, ending on the dominant seventh chord (F) of the original key, B♭ major.
In measure 135, the allegro con spirito sixteenth-note section returns in the 1st violin, punctuated by staccato eighth notes in the other instruments.
After this, the opening theme returns again, with the solo line beginning with the cello and moving up through the viola to the 2nd violin.
In measure 162, the staccato eighth-note trade-off section returns, in the tonic key and piano dynamic.
The tonic returns in measure 181, with a brief teaser of the staccato eighth-note theme, to be replaced by the sixteenth notes played by all instruments in the fortissimo dynamic.
[12] "[It is] called the Graveyard Quartet because the second movement … is often played at burials," writes Sonia Simmenauer in her book Must It Be?
[13] "The focus and core of the work is the extended Largo in the unusual and remote key of F♯ major," comments German music journalist Felix Werthschulte.
Werthschule adds that the movement "is still sometimes played at funeral services, because this music not only sounds sad, it also gives comfort.
According to Keller, author of The Great Haydn Quartets, the composer quotes in a different key his own second movement from Op.
Additionally, in both pieces, the viola and cello play in slurred succession the notes in the 3rd, 4th, 3rd and 1st, 2nd, 1st scale degrees, respectively.