Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Born in Rohrau, Austria, 1732
Died in Vienna, 1809

String Quartet in G Major, Op. 54, No. 1 
String Quartet in E Major, Op. 54, No. 3

Joseph Haydn started writing for an ensemble of two violins, viola, and cello in the early 1760s, when he was tasked with entertaining the wealthy and musically insatiable Esterházy family. He eventually capitalized on his growing fame to secure a more flexible contract that allowed him to sell his music on the side, and as of the 1780s he was making inroads in the lucrative market for published sheet music, including string quartets that amateurs could play at home.

In 1788, Haydn sold the three new string quartets that made up Opus 54 to Johann Tost, a violinist-turned-entrepreneur who had formerly played in the Esterházy court orchestra. Tost was not the most scrupulous agent — he had a habit of selling scores by minor composers as Haydn originals — but he was an effective middleman who helped boost Haydn’s star power abroad, paving the way for major ventures in Paris and London.

The String Quartet in G Major that comes first in the Opus 54 set is a quintessential example of the style that earned Haydn the nickname “father of the string quartet.” In the vigorous opening movement, bold contrasts in dynamics and articulations push the music onward with ceaseless energy and variety. The slow movement is an anomaly, pulsing along at an Allegretto tempo with slow-moving harmonies that heighten the tension between the stable home key of C major and the yearning dissonances that arise, creating a proto-Romantic effect that points toward the forthcoming quartets from Haydn’s erstwhile student, Beethoven. 

Haydn had a habit, as in the third movement here, of infusing the French minuet with the rustic energy of the Austrian Ländler dance, and he used the contrasting trio sections to introduce extra whimsy. In this example, he gives the cello a perpetual motion theme that bounces through a wide range of pitches. In the finale, rapid 16th-notes push this music right up to (and probably past) what amateurs could have handled, proving that Haydn, even as he conquered the sheet-music marketplace, was secure and self-reliant enough that he could afford to take risks and keep stretching the limits of a genre that he did more than anyone else to define.

One of Haydn’s signature tricks to build anticipation was to start with a slow introduction, and it might seem like that is what’s happening in the String Quartet in E Major that comes third in the Opus 54 set. But it is a deceptive start that masks an Allegro tempo, which only becomes clear when the first violin starts coursing through rapid triplets. Truly slow music doesn’t come until the dignified Largo cantabile second movement, with its double-dotted rhythms and ornamental curlicues evoking the bygone style that Haydn was born into as a child of the Baroque era.

In the third movement minuet, the recurring gesture of a short note slurred into the next one is like a chortling snicker that can’t be suppressed. The finale is a master class in defying expectations, as we keep waiting for a return of the main theme that gets dangled and then retracted through surprising silences and key changes. 

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born in Zwickau, Germany, 1810
Died in Endenich, Germany, 1856

String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3

In the spring of 1842, Robert Schumann stayed home in Leipzig for six brooding weeks while his wife, Clara, toured Europe as a superstar pianist. He busied himself with the study of Bach’s counterpoint (much of it produced right there in Leipzig a century earlier) as well as string quartets by Haydn and Mozart, efforts that inspired him to compose three quartets that summer, the first chamber music in any form that he had completed since a modest group of quartets in his teens. He published them the next year with a dedication to his friend and fellow Leipzig resident Felix Mendelssohn, who along with the Schumanns was instrumental in rekindling the dying art of chamber music as mastered by Haydn and Mozart. 

In the first movement of the String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, a Haydnesque slow introduction leads into the fast body of the movement, with both sections marked by a two-note phrase that slumps downward over an unstable harmony. Listeners have long heard in this lovesick refrain the name “Clara,” and even though Schumann never defined it as such, it adds a personal resonance to hear that cherished name in each of the many returns of the defining motive. The second movement serves the function of a scherzo, except it comes as a set of variations based on a minor-key theme that teeters on a precarious rhythmic footing, with all of the emphasized notes falling on the off-beats. 

The very slow and “always expressive” slow movement serves as a reminder that before turning his attention to chamber music in 1842 (and the orchestra before that in 1841), Schumann’s greatest compositional leaps came in the realm of songwriting, as evidenced by the 168 Lieder he wrote in 1840, the euphoric year he finally married Clara. The accompaniment figure of dotted rhythms that serves as the heartbeat of the slow movement returns in a snappier tempo for the finale, and like the second movement, it plays a daring game of placing accents on the off-beats. These broad-scale details of unity and cohesion show how well Schumann had absorbed the lessons of the Classical masters, helping him to advance his craft beyond the poetic piano miniatures and short songs that played to his natural strengths of spontaneous invention.

© 2025 Aaron Grad