Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T23:10:22.801Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2009

John Irving
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Get access

Summary

Mozart's six string quartets dedicated to Joseph Haydn (K.387, K.421, K.428, K.458, K.464, K.465) are established keystones of the chamber music repertoire and frequently feature in concert programmes, broadcasts and recordings by the most prestigious professional ensembles. While brief accounts of these quartets have previously appeared in articles and books over the years, reflecting the changing agendas of several generations of musicologists and speaking to a diversity of readerships, no single book exists devoted to these seminal works.

The ‘Haydn’ set contains some of Mozart's most famous pieces (the ‘Hunt’ Quartet, K.458, and the ‘Dissonance’, K.465, for instance), works in which, according to Alfred Einstein, Mozart ‘completely found himself … music made of music’. These works embrace some of his most memorable melodic writing, and some of his most refined compositional thinking, often animated by counterpoint. It is true that counterpoint had been an important factor in some of his earlier quartets (K.155–60 and K.168–73), but it is arguably a weakness there, rather than a strength, since no attempt is made to integrate the strictly fugal writing into the prevailing ‘galant’ environment of elegant melodies supported by simple harmonies within a symmetrical, even predictable, periodic framework. The result is a rather uncomfortable disjunction of different expressive types, representative of a real stylistic crisis during the early 1770s.

That crisis required for its resolution a new way of integrating the melodic and harmonic elements of the emerging classical style so that neither was a mere passive support for the other.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • John Irving, University of Bristol
  • Book: Mozart: The 'Haydn' Quartets
  • Online publication: 10 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612114.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • John Irving, University of Bristol
  • Book: Mozart: The 'Haydn' Quartets
  • Online publication: 10 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612114.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • John Irving, University of Bristol
  • Book: Mozart: The 'Haydn' Quartets
  • Online publication: 10 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612114.001
Available formats
×