Goethe’s famous description of the string quartet as a ‘conversation between four intelligent people’ neatly characterises the essence of the medium around 1800, the time of Haydn’s last and Beethoven’s first quartets. By then, thanks above all to Haydn, the string quartet was acknowledged as the most elevated form of chamber music, and a supreme test of a composer’s ‘taste’ and inventiveness.
There had been occasional divertimentos for two violins, viola and cello before Haydn. But no earlier composer showed any interest in exploring the potential of the quartet as a flexible, conversational medium. And it fell to Haydn who, on his own admission, stumbled on the form ‘by accident’, to raise the string quartet from its modest origins in the al fresco serenade to a vehicle for the most sophisticated and challenging musical discourse.
Haydn’s quartets are among the marvels of civilised art, endlessly unpredictable in their strategies and structure, dazzling in their sheer speed of thought, breathtaking in their expressive range. Yet too often they are treated as mere warm-up acts for supposedly meatier nineteenth-century fare. This MRT festival (unique, as far as we know) offers Haydn undiluted with all 68 of his string quartets plus the quartet arrangement of the sublime, mystical meditations on the Seven Last Words composed for Cadiz Cathedral. Listeners can experience, sometimes within a single concert, the vast creative distance Haydn travelled over nearly half a century, from the delightful, breezy little divertimentos of Op. 1 and 2, via the quartet’s ‘coming of age’ in the glorious Op. 20 set and the dazzling comedies of Op. 33, to the pinnacle of Op. 76 and 77, with their rustic revelry, profound lyrical tenderness and Wordsworthian voyages ‘through strange seas of thought, alone’.
Three of the performances of the Seven Last Words are held in the church of St Mary Magdalen, a 15th-century church six to eight minutes away on foot.