Internationales Musikwissenschaftliches Symopsium 'Haydn & das Streichquartett' im Rahmen des 'Haydn Streichquartett Weekend': Eisenstadt, 1.-5. Mai 2002; Referate und Diskussionen (review)

These proceedings derive from one of a number of similarly themed Haydn conferences that have taken place in Eisenstadt (at Schloss Esterházy) in recent times. On this occasion the participants were surrounded by the music to which they devoted their attentions, all of the composer's string quartets being played in the five days by twenty-four different ensembles in twenty-four concerts. The papers themselves cover an impressive range of approaches, although dedicated coverage of Haydn's quartet output is almost entirely confined to its chronological outer limits. Georg Feder sets the tone by discussing some early personal encounters with the Haydn quartets. He recalls his first experience of the variations on 'Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser' in Op. 76 No. 3 when a student in Tübingen in 1949, a revelation after his earlier experience of the tune as he had often sung it up to 1945, in the 'crowing' interpretation of that time. This he compares with Haydn having called the tune his 'prayer' in later life; later Feder came to understand that the quartet variations represented 'the true unfolding of the essence of this melody' (p. 9). Yet this little morality tale might have been given a different twist from that of true intentions finally uncovered; it might also give cause for reflection on the nature of music as a 'promiscuous signifier'. Although he makes no explicit connection between the two sections, Feder's subsequent account of the first text-critical revision of a series of Haydn quartets (Opp. 9 and 17 in the 1963 Joseph Haydn Werke edition), after a long period of unquestioned trust in the traditional wisdom of previous musical texts, seems to be underpinned by the same narrative. Yet if Feder expresses little of the current relativism with respect to notions of an Urtext and of historical performance practice, he of all people is entitled not to do so. Deriving in great part from the composer's enormous contemporary popularity, the source-critical problems relating to Haydn's output have few equals.

A different consideration of origins is undertaken by Friedhelm Krummacher in his 'Haydn—Gründer des Streichquartetts? Anmerkungen zu den frühen Quartettsätzen'. This appeals for a more historically sympathetic and analytically nuanced way of dealing with Haydn's early quartets, which have after all stood rather uncomfortably at the beginning of the great line. For Krummacher this will be achieved by standing back from anachronistic criteria for judgement such as style or form or motivic work and instead concentrating on the smaller-scale relations between metrical impulse and cadential function. What emerges as most remarkable within these terms of reference is the intensity and flexibility of treatment that Haydn achieves, and this is accomplished 'without characteristic or expressive themes' (p. 23), with material of a more neutral cast. (Feder rightly queries this assessment in the post-paper discussion that is reproduced after Krummacher's contribution.) A quartet movement by Franz Asplmayr, one of the recent claimants for the honour of having written the first true quartets, is found to demonstrate nothing like this versatility of technique. It may seem rather incredible to our current musicological culture that Krummacher has to work so hard to demonstrate the flaws inherent in a fixation on themes, development, motivic manipulation, outer form, and the like.

Nevertheless, Krummacher still ends up asserting the prior claims of Haydn on the paternity of the string quartet, only it is now on the basis of compositional sophistication. So he simply wants to shift the grounds for judgement, not question the view of music history that demands its individual heroes and innovators, that has its competitive element and ignores the...