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‘The Most Interesting Genre of Music’:1 Performance, Sociability and Meaning in the Classical String Quartet, 1800–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2012

Mary Hunter
Mary Hunter*
Affiliation:
Bowdoin College
*
Email: mhunter@bowdoin.edu
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Abstract

It has long been recognized that journalistic discourse about the string quartet in early nineteenth-century sources stressed its elevation and seriousness in comparison to other genres, and that the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were described as ‘classical’ very early in the century. Less well known is that the idea of performance is embedded in this discourse – particularly around the question of the group dynamics of ensemble performance. The tendency to blur the roles of the parts and the roles of the players are evidence of this, as is the discussion of the relation between first-violin-centricity and the ideal of free and equal contribution by all four parts/players in ‘true’ or ‘classical’ works. This ideal, I argue, is distinct from the longstanding metaphor of ‘conversation’ to describe the relations of the parts. The first part of this article explores these broad topics. The second part of the article focuses on a single measure in the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 59 no. 2 and argues that in various ways it raises and thus exemplifies the issues of the distribution of power, of musical initiative or the ‘genius of performance’, and ultimately of differing subjectivities in the early nineteenth-century notion of the quartet.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Theoretical and Critical Contexts in Nineteenth-Century Performance Practice , June 2012 , pp. 53 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

1

Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat (AMÖ) 8/12 (27 Mar. 1824): 45.

References

2 John Gingerich addresses the question of ‘classical’ quartets in ‘Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Beethoven's Late Quartets’, The Musical Quarterly 93 (2010)Google Scholar: 492.

3 Finscher, Ludwig, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts I: Die Entstehung des klassischen Streichquartetts: Von den Vorformen zur Grundlegung durch Joseph Haydn (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1974)Google Scholar provides the classic account of the way four-partness was valued. See also Adams, Sarah Jane, ‘Quartets and Quintets for Mixed Groups of Winds and Strings: Mozart and his Contemporaries in Vienna, c. 1780–c. 1800’. (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1994)Google Scholar.

4 The magazines most involved in this discussion are the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ), the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (BamZ), the Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf dem österreichischen Kaiserstaat (AMÖ), and François Fétis's La Revue Musicale. The aesthetic issues most often addressed include seriousness or canonicity, part-writing, ensemble concerns, technical difficulty, and the qualities of a good performance. Other issues, like the harmonic language, structural cohesiveness, and general sentiment(s) of a work or movement are also regularly addressed, but unlike the previously-mentioned ones, these are not peculiar to, or especially characteristic of, writing about quartets.

5 Pleyel's 1802 edition of the Haydn quartets was the first published full score of string quartets, and Beethoven's late quartets were the first to have a full score come out at more or less the same time as the parts.

6 Carpani's famous characterization of the different voices, known now through Stendhal's plagiarized Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, trans. Richard Coe (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972) is quoted in Sisman, Elaine, ‘Rhetorical Truth in Haydn's Chamber Music: Genre, Tertiary Rhetoric, and the Opus 76 Quartets’, in Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin and Sander Goldberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007): 301–302 Google Scholar. See also the excerpt by A.B. Marx, below, p. 64.

7 See the excerpt by C.F. Michaelis, below, p. 58. Wheelock, Gretchen, ‘Engaging Strategies in Haydn's Opus 33 String Quartets’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (1991): 1–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the role of the audience in relation to Haydn's witticisms.

8 See, for example, Somfai, László, ‘Notational Irregularities as Attributes of a New Style’, in Variations on the Canon: Essays on Music from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Rosen on his Eightieth Birthday, ed. Robert Curry, David Gable and Robert Marshall (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008): 27–38 Google Scholar; Hunter, Mary, ‘Haydn's String Quartet Fingerings: Communications to Performers and Audiences’, in Engaging Haydn: Context, Content, and Culture, ed. Mary Hunter and Richard Will, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, William S., ‘Beethoven's Fingerings as Interpretive Clues’, The Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 171–197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Gingerich, ‘Ignaz Schuppanzigh’, 450Google Scholar.

10 One example by Haydn is the slow movement of op. 74 No. 2, where the two violins completely switch roles for an entire variation. The independence of the parts in Beethoven's late quartets has long been taken as a sign of a kind of both compositional and psychological democracy. See the excerpt by A.B. Marx, quoted below.

11 For other commentary on this essay see, for example, Nancy November, ‘Haydn's Vocality and the Ideal of “True” String Quartets’, (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2003); Dörte Schmidt, ‘“… In vierfach geschlungener Brüderumarmung aufschweben”: Beethoven und das Streichquartett als ästhetische, politische un soziale Idee in der zeitgenössischen Publistik,’ in Der männliche und der weibliche Beethoven: Bericht über den Internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress vom 31. Oktober bis 4. November 2001 an der Universität der Künste Berlin, ed. Cornelia Bartsch, Beatrix Borchard and Rainer Cadenbach (Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2001): 350–69; Gretchen Wheelock, ‘The “Rhetorical Pause” and Metaphors of Conversation in Haydn's Quartets’, in Haydn & Das Streichquartett, ed. Georg Feder and Walter Reicher, Internationales musikwissenschaftliches Symposium: ‘Haydn & Das Streichquartett’, Eisenstadt, Mai 2002 (Tutzing: Schneider, 2003): 67–88.

12 Nancy November identified this author in ‘Haydn's Vocality’, 129.

13 AMZ 12 (16 May 1810) column 514. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

14 See Finscher, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts, 287f. The most thoroughgoing recent work on the string quartet and conversation includes Parker, Mara, The String Quartet, 1750–1797: Four Types of Musical Conversation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)Google Scholar and Bracht, Hans-Joachim, ‘Überlegungen zum Quartett – Gesprach’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 51/ 3 (1994): 169–189Google Scholar, but it is discussed more briefly or assumed as a metaphor in innumerable studies.

15 See, for example, November, ‘Haydn's Vocality’; Sarah Adams, ‘“Mixed” Chamber Music of the Classical Period and the Reception of Genre’, in Music, Libraries and the Academy: Essays in Honor of Lenore Coral, ed. James Cassaro (Madison, WI: A-R, 2007): 3–19; James Webster, ‘Haydn's op. 9: A Critique of the Ideology of the “Classical” String Quartet’, in Essays in Honor of László Somfai on his 70 th Birthday: Studies in the Sources and Interpretation of Music, ed. László Vikárius and Vera Lampert (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005): 139–57.

16 AMÖ 8/81 (9 Oct. 1824), 321.

17 BamZ 3 (16 Nov. 1826), 382.

18 La Revue Musicale 2 (1828): 607–8.

19 November, ‘Haydn's Vocality’, 53, cites the intimacy of quartet performances as associated in eighteenth-century writings with the complexity of part writing in the genre and the need for audiences to be physically close to appreciate this.

20 Gingerich, ‘Ignaz Schuppanzigh’, 454Google Scholar.

21 AMÖ 7/30 (12 Apr. 1823), column 237.

22 BamZ 6 (28 Feb. 1829): 69–70.

23 See Parker, The String Quartet 1750–1797, Chapter 2, for a survey of the social context of quartets in London, Paris and Vienna in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

24 ‘Ueber Quartettmusik’, column 522.

25 AMZ 4 (May 1802), column 536.

26 Gingerich, ‘Ignaz Schuppanzigh’, 453Google Scholar, makes the same point.

27 It is hard to ignore the resonance of ‘Dreieinigkeit’ (the Holy Trinity) in this term. Petiscus was, after all, a theologian.

28 AMZ 12 (May 1810), column 520.

29 BamZ 6 (21 Nov. 1829), 376.

30 BamZ 6 (21 Nov. 1829), 376.

31 La Revue Musicale 1/7 (Mar. 1827): 190–91.

32 Baillot, The Art of the Violin (Paris, 1835), trans. Louis Goldberg (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963): 463Google ScholarPubMed.

33 BamZ 17 (24 Apr. 1830): 135.

34 BamZ 2 (12 Jan. 1825): 16.

35 AMÖ 7/56 (July 1823): col. 448.

36 Gingerich, ‘Ignaz Schuppanizigh’, 25Google Scholar.

37 I deal with this concept at length in ‘“To Play as if From the Soul of the Composer”: the Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005): 357–98.

38 Pierre Baillot, The Art of the Violin (1835), 479Google Scholar. This is unchanged from the same passage in the 1803 Méthode de Violon.

39 Hegel, ‘The Execution of Musical Works of Art’, Aesthetics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975): 956Google Scholar.

40 Of course, ‘personal’ and ‘communal’ associations are not mutually exclusive or fully distinguishable from each other.

41 ‘Ueber Quartettmusik’, columns 521–22.

42 AMZ 30 (1828) columns 485–95 and 501–09. Reproduced in Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, ed. Stefan Kunze et al. (Laaber: Laaber, 1987): 560–75.

43 BamZ 5 (1828): 467–8.

44 Schmidt, ‘“… In vierfach”’ 357f, describes the masculinist as well as political implications of this passage.

45 Schmidt, ‘“… In vierfach”’ notes the difference between this and older metaphors of conversation, but still subsumes the kind of interaction described by Marx under the concept of Gespräch. I would be inclined to make a sharper distinction.

46 Schmidt, ‘“… In vierfach”’ makes a similar point. Parker, The String Quartet 1750–1797, divides her repertory into ‘the lecture, the polite conversation, the debate, and the conversation’, while Hans-Joachim Bracht, ‘Überlegungen zur Quartett-Gespräch’, starts with social conversation and debate but ends by positing a philosophical rather than social model for the musical interactions in classical quartets.

47 AMÖ 8 (11 Dec. 1824) n.p.: This excerpt differs from the famous Giuseppe Carpani /Stendhal description of the different (abstracted) ‘characters’ of the parts (see note 6 above), in that it describes musical qualities rather than social ones, and the context is not salon conversation, but a concert series devoted to intellectually elevated aesthetic experiences.

48 See Gingerich, ‘Ignaz Schuppanzigh’, 33, for a table of the premiere dates of the late quartets.

49 See, for example, Radcliffe, Philip, Beethoven's String Quartets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 118Google Scholar.

50 Carl Czerny, On the Proper Performance of all Beethoven's Works for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura Skoda (Vienna: Universal, 1970)Google Scholar: 9. Quoted a.o. by Solomon, Maynard, ‘Some Romantic Images in Beethoven’, in Lessons in Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998): 232Google Scholar.

51 See Cooper, Barry, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 296 Google ScholarPubMed. Cooper points out that Beethoven found the passage in the Wiener Zeitschrift of 1 Feb. 1820, and copied it into his Conversation Book the next day.

52 Mason, Daniel Gregory, The Quartets of Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947): 111Google Scholar.

53 Kerman, Joseph, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Norton, 1978): 128Google Scholar.

54 Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets, 67Google Scholar.

55 Solomon, Maynard, ‘Some Romantic Images’, 232Google Scholar.

56 In response to the usual rhetoric about the complete novelty of these works, James Webster has pointed out their many stylistic and tactical continuities with the quartets of Haydn and Mozart. See ‘Traditional Elements in Beethoven's Middle-Period String Quartets’, in Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. Robert Winter and Bruce Carr (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1980): 94–133. The indubitable presence of many traditional elements does not prevent this moment from being novel.

57 November, ‘Haydn's Vocality’, discusses the intersections of ‘vocal’ and ‘instrumental’ ideologies and practices in the string quartet prior to 1800.

58 Schwindt-Gross, Nicole, Drama und Diskurs: Zur Beziehung zwischen Satztechnik und motivischem Prozess am Beispiel der durchbrochenen Arbeit in den Streichquartetten Mozarts und Haydns (Laaber: Laaber, 1989)Google Scholar devotes her first chapter to tracing the lineage of the notion of durchbrochene Arbeit, which is often equated to thematische Arbeit. See Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (London: Faber, 1971): 115–117 Google Scholar for an elegant discussion of this device in Haydn op. 33, no.1/i.

59 The slow movement of the Fourth Symphony (op. 60) has a similar conjunction of dotted accompaniment and long-breathed tune, but the orchestral texture makes the issues of group dynamics among the parts much less immediate, and the fact that the tune and the accompaniment start together also denies this accompaniment the interruptive power it has in the quartet.

60 Gerd Indorf, Beethoven's Streichquartette: kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte und Werkinterpretation (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2004): 275Google Scholar, however, does call this figure a countersubject.

61 From Virgil, Eclogue 3 Line 59: ‘[Sing alternately] the Muses love alternate verses/strains’.

62 Petiscus, ‘Ueber Quartettmusik’, column 516.

63 For example, op. 74, no. 2/ii, bars 53f., where the second violin has the tune in a high register, and rather than doing a typical first-violin filigree around it, the first violin plays a typical second-violin part. See note 10 above.