Haydn's Late Quartets

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 30-40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Haydn’s late quartets

A. By the time he came to write the String Quartets published as Opus 76 and Opus
77, Haydn was undoubtedly the most famous living composer in the whole of
Europe. He had recently returned from the highly successful second visit to England,
for which he had composed his last six symphonies, culminating in the brilliant and
festive Drum Roll Symphony (No. 103) and London Symphony (No, 104). This is
public music, full of high spirits, expansive gestures and orchestral surprises. Haydn
knew how to please his audience. And in 1796, following his return to Vienna, he
began work on his largest and most famous choral work, the oratorio, “The
Creation”. In the succeeding years, till 1802, he was to write a series of other large
scales religious choral works, including several masses. The oratorios and masses
were also public works, employing large forces for dramatic effect, but warm and full
of apparently spontaneous religious feeling. Yet at the same time he composed
these 8 quartets, in terms of technical mastery and sheer musical invention the equal
of the symphonies and choral works, but in their mood and emotional impact far
removed, by turns introspective and detached, or full of passionate intensity.
B. Once again, as in the early 1770s when he appears to have been going through
some kind of spiritual crisis, Haydn returned to the String Quartet as a means to
accomplish a two-fold aim: firstly to innovate musically in a genre-free from public
performance requirements or religious convention; secondly to express personal
emotions or philosophy in a musical form that is intimate yet capable of great
subtlety and complexity of meaning. The result is a series of quartets of astonishing
structural, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic variety, inhabiting a shifting emotional
world, where tension underlies surface brilliance and calm gives way to unease.
C. The six quartets of Opus 76 differ widely in character. The opening movement of
No. 2 is tense and dramatic, while that of No. 4 begins with the soaring
long-breathed melody that has earned the nickname of “The Sunrise”. The minutes
to have moved a long way from the stately court dance of the mid-eighteenth
century. The so-called “Witches Minuet” of No. 2 is a strident canon, that of No. 6 is a
fast one-in-a-bar movement anticipating the scherzos of Beethoven, while at the
heart of No. 5 is a contrasting trio section which, far from being the customary
relaxed variant of the surrounding minute, flings itself into frenetic action and is gone.
The finales are full of energy and grace. We associate with Haydn but with far less
conscious humour and more detachment than in earlier quartets.
D. But it is in the slow movements that Haydn is most innovative and most unsettling.
In No. 1, the cello and the first violin embark on a series of brusque dialogues. No. 4
is a subdued meditation based on the hushed opening chords. The slow movements
of No. 5 and No. 6 are much looser in structure, the cello and viola setting off on
solitary episodes of melodic and harmonic uncertainty. But there the similarity ends,
for while No. 5 is enigmatic and predominantly dark in tone, the overlapping textures
of its sister are full of light-filled intensity.
E. The Opus 76 quartets were published in 1799 when Haydn was well over 60
years old. Almost immediately he was commissioned to write another set by Prince
Lobkowltz, a wealthy patron, who was later to become an important figure in
Beethoven’s life. Two quartets only were completed and published as Opus 77 Nos.
1 & 2 in 1802. But these are not the works of an old man whose powers are fading,
or who simply consolidates ground already covered. Once again Haydn Innovates.
The opening movement of Opus 77 No. 2 is as structurally complex and emotionally
unsettling as anything he ever wrote, alternating between a laconic opening theme
and a tense and threatening counter theme which comes to dominate the whole
movement. Both quartets have fast scherzo-like “minuets”. The slow movement of
No. 1 is in traditional variation form but stretches the form to the limit in order to
accommodate widely contrasting textures and moods. The finale of No. 2 is swept
along by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of energy and inventiveness.
F. In fact, Haydn began the third quarter in this set but never finished it, and the two
completed movements were published in 1806 as Opus 103, his last published work.
He was over 70 and clearly lacked the strength to continue composition. The two
existing movements are a slow movement followed by a minute. The slow movement
has a quiet warmth, but It is the minuet that is remarkable. It is in true dance time,
unlike the fast quasi-scherzos of the earlier quartets. But what a dance in a sombre
D minor Haydn unfolds an angular, ruthless little dance of death. The central trio
section holds out a moment of consolation, and then the dance returns, sweeping on
relentlessly to the final sudden uprush of sound. And then, after more than 40 years
of composition the master falls silent.

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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 30-40, which are based on

Reading Passage 3 below.

Haydn’s late quartets

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