String quartet

The string quartet was developed into its present form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, whose works in the 1750s established the ensemble as a group of four more-or-less equal partners.

Since that time, the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form; writing for four instruments with broadly similar characteristics both constrains and tests a composer.

String quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert each wrote a number of them.

Some string quartet ensembles play together for many years and become established and promoted as an entity in a similar way to an instrumental soloist or an orchestra.

There had been examples of divertimenti for two solo violins, viola and cello by the Viennese composers Georg Christoph Wagenseil and Ignaz Holzbauer; and there had long been a tradition of performing orchestral works one instrument to a part.

A very early example is a four-part sonata for string ensemble by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri that might be considered an important prototype.

[3] By the early 18th century, composers were often adding a third soloist; and moreover it became common to omit the keyboard part, letting the cello support the bass line alone.

Thus when Alessandro Scarlatti wrote a set of six works entitled Sonata à Quattro per due Violini, Violetta [viola], e Violoncello senza Cembalo (Sonata for four instruments: two violins, viola, and cello without harpsichord), this was a natural evolution from the existing tradition.

[4] The musicologist Hartmut Schick has suggested that Franz Xaver Richter invented the "classical" string quartet around 1757,[5] but the consensus amongst most authorities is that Haydn is responsible for the genre in its currently accepted form.

The string quartet enjoyed no recognized status as an ensemble in the way that two violins with basso continuo – the so-called 'trio sonata' – had for more than a hundred years.

[6] During the 1750s, when the young composer was still working mainly as a teacher and violinist in Vienna, he would occasionally be invited to spend time at the nearby castle at Weinzierl of the music-loving Austrian nobleman Karl Joseph Weber, Edler von Fürnberg.

Haydn's early biographer Georg August Griesinger tells the story thus: The following purely chance circumstance had led him to try his luck at the composition of quartets.

[6] After these early efforts, Haydn did not return to the string quartet for several years, but when he did so, it was to make a significant step in the genre's development.

The opportunities for experiment which both these genres offered Haydn perhaps helped him in the pursuit of the more advanced quartet style found in the eighteen works published in the early 1770s as Opp.

Clearly composed as sets, these quartets feature a four-movement layout having broadly conceived, moderately paced first movements and, in increasing measure, a democratic and conversational interplay of parts, close-knit thematic development, and skilful though often restrained use of counterpoint.

[9] Certainly they offered to their own time state-of-the art models to follow for the best part of a decade; the teenage Mozart, in his early quartets, was among the composers moved to imitate many of their characteristics, right down to the vital fugues with which Haydn sought to bring greater architectural weight to the finales of nos.

20, it becomes harder to point to similar major jumps in the string quartet's development in Haydn's hands, though not due to any lack of invention or application on the composer's part.

He notes a change in string quartet writing towards the end of the 1760s, featuring characteristics which are today thought of as essential to the genre – scoring for two violins, viola and cello, solo passages, and absence of actual or potential basso continuo accompaniment.

This old and otiose myth not only misrepresents the achievements of other excellent composers, but also distorts the character and qualities of Haydn's opp.

"[12] That Haydn's string quartets were already "classics" that defined the genre by 1801 can be judged by Ignaz Pleyel's publication in Paris of a "complete" series that year, and the quartet's evolution as vehicle for public performance can be judged by Pleyel's ten-volume set of miniature scores intended for hearers rather than players – early examples of this genre of music publishing.