by Andrew Gillett | 10 Oct 2021 | blog
I may have given the impression in the previous post that Haydn’s Op 76 No 4 is full of angst. Don’t let this put you off. There is lightness too. Everything is in balance. Towards the end of the last movement suddenly a melody shoots off on its own, like a cheeky schoolboy running off laughing in the playground. http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Game-2.mp3 How Haydn asks for it to be played is even more cheeky. Instead of being played by one instrument, Haydn effectively challenges all four players to have a game with it, taking it in turns to play fragments of the melody. It’s a speed jigsaw, the notes up for grabs and needing to be put in the right place at (and in) the right time. http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/3_YouCut_20211001_074008384-1.mp4 It is a tricky game to play, but great fun. Haydn offers so...
by Andrew Gillett | 8 Oct 2021 | blog
Haydn’s quartet op 76 no 4 (written c. 1798) is known as ‘The Sunrise’. Sunrise? It is not a nickname attached to the quartet by Haydn himself. It is very likely that the association arose because Haydn was writing his oratorio The Creation around the time that he was writing the quartet and some people saw a relationship between the opening of the quartet and the inspired depiction of sunrise near the beginning of the oratorio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc4DORlzLY4 And yet…this quartet surely begins not tentatively like the first inkling of morning light but with a matter of fact held chord over which the first violin sets off on a dreamy, rising melody. Basically the chord acts as a pause, over which the violin extemporises. A pause at the beginning of a piece! What is going on? There are several pauses indicated by Haydn in Op 76 No 4 – nine in all, not including implied pauses like the opening chord. One in particular is most unusual: It is at the end of the first section of the first movement, before the usual repeat is indicated, implying a proper break in the flow of music – a settling before re-establishing that opening chord. Sunrises don’t have pauses in my experience. There’s surely much more going on. Looking at the opening a little closer: after the placing of the first pause-chord, the first note that the 1st violin plays is dissonant and this dissonance happens each time similar pause-chords appear in the piece. http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Haydn-opening-2.mp3 After the first section is repeated, the pause-chord appears again, firstly in minor mood http://www.divertimento.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Haydn-after-double-bar-1.mp3 followed by another...
by Andrew Gillett | 2 Oct 2021 | blog
Could there be anything better to do on your honeymoon than write a string quartet? I am sure that Cécile, Felix Mendelssohn’s wife, did know what she was letting herself in for, marrying the foremost musical celebrity of that period (in Frankfurt, at the French Reformed Church, where her father was the minister – the building was sadly destroyed in the Second World War.) They really did the honeymoon in style – seven weeks in the Rhineland and Black Forest in 1837. The Rhine, bearer of ancient myths and symbolic of the connection with the wider world must have helped to stimulate their romantic souls. Surely they also debated the relationship between their respective Lutheran (Felix) and Calvinist (Cécile) backgrounds, that would also have involved reference to J.S. Bach no doubt. Somehow Felix found the time and focus to work on his string quartet in E minor Op 44 No 2. They had five children – not all during the honeymoon, I hasten to add. Ten years later, Felix was dead, completely at a loss after his sister Fanny’s sudden death. Cécile was to die of tuberculosis six years later than him, aged 36, her family torn by tragedy. Cécile is remembered primarily as a helpmate for Felix, in rather passive terms, as if this is what was expected of her, and it is clear that this is the ideal norm of that time and society. We hear little about her views or interests. It is all about Felix. The music speaks volumes though, of their love. The slow movement of...
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