J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

had a dual significance for Haydn. On the one hand, it was an important means for the
development of his style and technique, allowing him to explore the consequences of
the extreme democratisation of part-writing it implied. On the other hand, it may also
have been a stop-gap, allowing him to fulfil his compositional commitments when
inspiration or energy flagged.
STRING QUARTETS
As we have observed, it was Haydn’s string quartets that broadcast his name
the furthest. Although Prince Nicholas seems to have received a command
performance of each set as it was composed, string quartet-writing was largely
tangential to Haydn’s official duties as Kapellmeister. A gap of about a decade
separates the early sets (c.1757-c.1762) from opp.9, 17, and 20 (c.1770-72), and there
was a similar gap between this group and op.33 (1781). Given the stylistic advance
each new group showed, it is tempting to infer some conscious mustering of resources,
the same sense of screwing up courage to tackle this demanding genre which is
demonstrably true of Mozart and Beethoven. The explanation is probably much
simpler—a musician as busy as Haydn had little enough time to spare for music which
was quite outside his job-description. Nevertheless, by 1768 or 69 he had probably
consolidated his relationship with the prince sufficiently to enable him to cultivate his
reputation outside Esterháza.
The Haydn of op.9 was now a very different, and much more earnest, composer
from the Haydn of opp.1 and 2. 30 As Landon observes, perhaps deliberately echoing
Haydn’s much debated letter of recommendation for his op.33 quartets: ‘op.9 was
30 He was of course literally a different composer from that of op.3—Roman Hofstetter, whose works
found their way into the Haydn oeuvre more or less by accident. It is curious that, superficially at
least, Hofstetter’s quartets show precisely the level of stylistic development we would expect to find
if they had been in fact by Haydn, neatly straddling the gulf between op.2 and op.9.
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