NEXT to pianoforte music for amateur musical entertainments, the quartet for stringed instruments was the favourite form of chamber music. The performers were occasionally highly cultivated amateurs, but more often professional musicians, thus giving scope for more pretentious compositions. The comparatively small expense involved enabled others besides noblemen, even those of the citizen class who were so inclined, to include quartet-playing among their regular entertainments.[ 1 ] Jos. Haydn was, as is well known, the musician who gave to the quartet its characteristic form and development.[ 2 ] Other composers had written works for four stringed instruments, but the string quartet in its well-defined and henceforth stationary constitution was his creation, the result of his life-work. It is seldom that an artist has been so successful in discovering the fittest outcome for his individual productiveness; the quartet was Haydn's natural expression of his musical nature. The freshness and life, the cheerful joviality, which are the main characteristics of his compositions, gained ready and universal acceptance for them. Connoisseurs and critics, it is true, were at first suspicious, and even contemptuous, of this new kind of music; and it was only gradually that they became aware that depth and earnestness of feeling, as well as knowledge and skill, existed together with humour in Haydn's quartets. He went on his way, however, untroubled MOZART'S INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC. by the critics, and secured the favour and adherence of the public by an unbroken series of works: whoever ventured on the same field was obliged to serve under his banner.
The widespread popularity of quartet music in Vienna could not fail to impel Mozart to try his forces in this direction. His master was also his attached friend and fellow-artist, with whom he stood in the position, not of a scholar, but of an independent artist in noble emulation. The first six quartets belong to the comparatively less numerous works which Mozart wrote for his own pleasure, without any special external impulse. They are, as he says in the dedication to Haydn, the fruit of long and earnest application, and extended over a space of several years. The first, in G major (387 K.), was, according to a note on the autograph manuscript, written on December 31, 1782; the second, in D minor (421 K.), in June, 1783, during Constanze's confinement (Vol. II., p. 423); and the third, in E flat major (428 K.), belongs to the same year. After a somewhat lengthy pause he returned with new zeal to the composition of the quartets; the fourth, in B flat major (458 K.), was written November 9, 1784; the fifth, in A major (464 K.), on January 10; and the last, in C major (465 K.), on January 14, 1785. It was in February of this year that Leopold Mozart paid his visit to Vienna. He knew the first three quartets, Wolfgang having sent them to him according to custom; and he heard the others at a musical party where Haydn was also present; the warmly expressed approbation of the latter may have been the immediate cause of Mozart's graceful dedication, when he published the quartets during the autumn of 1785 (Op. ü).[ 3 ]
The popular judgment is usually founded on comparison, and a comparison with Haydn's quartets was even more obvious than usual on this occasion. The Emperor Joseph, who objected to Haydn's "tricks and nonsense" (Vol. II., MOZART AND KLOPSTOCK. p. 204), requested Dittersdorf in 1786 to draw a parallel between Haydn's and Mozart's chamber music. Dittersdorf answered by requesting the Emperor in his turn to draw a parallel between Klopstock and Gellert; whereupon Joseph replied that both were great poets, but that Klopstock must be read repeatedly in order to understand his beauties, whereas Gellert's beauties lay plainly exposed to the first glance. Dittersdorf's analogy of Mozart with Klopstock, Haydn with Gellert (!), was readily accepted by the Emperor, who further compared Mozart's compositions to a snuffbox of Parisian manufacture, Haydn's to one manufactured in London.[ 4 ] The Emperor looked at nothing deeper than the respective degrees of taste displayed by the two musicians, and could find no better comparison for works of art than articles of passing fancy; whereas the composer had regard to the inner essence of the works, and placed them on the same footing as those of the (in his opinion) greatest poets of Germany. However odd may appear to us—admiring as we do, above all things in Mozart, his clearness and purity of form—Dittersdorf s comparison of him with Klopstock, it is nevertheless instructive, as showing that his contemporaries prized his grandeur and dignity, and the force and boldness of his expression, as his highest and most distinguishing qualities. L. Mozart used also to say, that his son was in music what Klopstock was in poetry;[ 5 ] no doubt because Klopstock was to him the type of all that was deep and grand. But the public did not regard the new phenomenon in the same light; the quality they esteemed most highly in Haydn's quartets was their animated cheerfulness; and his successors, Dittersdorf, Pichl, Pleyel, had accustomed them even to lighter enjoyments. "It is a pity," says a favourable critic, in a letter from Vienna (January, 1787), "that in his truly artistic and beautiful compositions Mozart should carry his effort after originality too far, to the detriment of the sentiment and heart of his works. His new quartets, dedicated to Haydn, are much too highly spiced to be palatable for any length
of time."[ 6 ] Prince Grassalcovicz, a musical connoisseur of rank in Vienna,[ 7 ] had the quartets performed, as Mozart's widow relates,[ 8 ] and was so enraged at finding that the discords played by the musicians were really in the parts, that he tore them all to pieces—but Gyrowetz's symphonies pleased him very much. From Italy also the parts were sent back to the publisher, as being full of printer's errors, and even Sarti undertook to prove, in a violent criticism, that some of the music in these quartets was insupportable from its wilful offences against rule and euphony. The chief stumbling-block is the well-known introduction of the C major quartet—[See Page Image]
the harshness of which irritates the expectant ear. Its grammatical justification has been repeatedly given in learned analyses.[ 9 ] Haydn is said to have declared, during a dispute over this passage, that if Mozart wrote it so, he must have had his reasons for doing it[ 10 ]—a somewhat QUARTETS, 1785. ambiguous remark. Ulibicheff[ 11 ] undertook to correct the passage with the aid of Fétis,[ 12 ] and then considered it both fine and pleasing; and Lenz[ 13 ] declared that Mozart in "this delightful expression of the doctrine of necessary evil, founded on the insufficiency of all finite things" had produced a piquant, but not an incorrect passage. It is certain, at least, that Mozart intended to write the passage as it stands, and his meaning in so doing, let the grammatical construction be what it will, will not be obscure to sympathetic hearers. The C major quartet, the last of this first set, is the only one with an introduction. The frame of mind expressed in it is a noble, manly cheerfulness, rising in the andante to an almost supernatural serenity—the kind of cheerfulness which, in life or in art, appears only as the result of previous pain and strife. The sharp accents of the first and second movements, the struggling agony of the trio to the minuet, the wonderful depth of beauty in the subject of the finale, startling us by its entry, first in E flat and then in A flat major, are perhaps the most striking illustrations of this, but the introduction stands forth as the element which gives birth to all the happy serenity of the work. The contrast between the troubled, depressed phrase—[See Page Images]
has a direct effect upon the hearer; both phrases have one solution:—
and the shrill agitated one—[See Page Images]
The manner in which they are opposed to each other, and the devices by which their opposition is thrown into strong relief, are of unusual, but by no means unjustifiable, harshness. But the goal is not reached by one bound; no sooner does serenity seem to be attained than the recurrence of the b draws the clouds together again, and peace and the power of breathing and moving freely are only won by slow and painful degrees.[ 14 ]