HAYDN STRING QUARTETS
Played by THE BROSA STRING QUARTET
To take part in a String Quartet is to know one of the most wholly satisfying joys which music can offer. Those who know the delights of team-work in music speak feelingly of ' the sport of chamber music,' and the phrase is an apt one for the real pleasure which the art affords. And the string quartet is the best of all forms of chamber music, whether to play or to listen to. The four instruments are so nearly alike in tone quality and in flexibility that all can have parts of equal interest; each of the players can feel himself indispensable and of equal importance with his colleagues.
Before Haydn's day, the quartet, if written at all, was not much more than a solo for the first violin with accompaniment for the others. It was in his hands that it first took on anything like its present importance. He wrote no fewer than eighty-three, clearly finding the form a very natural means of expressing himself, for they are all full of that genial cheerfulness, that fresh and wholesome sense of life and health, which we associate with him.
They are almost all in the conventional design, the first movement usually being in what is called ' Sonata ' form, with two main tunes which are set forth, developed, and repeated at the end. There is always a slow movement of song-like character, sometimes with variations on the theme, and each Quartet includes also a Minuet with its alternative section known as the ' Trio.' The last movement, invariably bright and cheer. ful, like the first, is sometimes a Rondo-a movement in which the chief tune keeps on coining round after others have broken in upon it, but in some of the Quartets it is again in the same form as the first movement.
Listeners who hear even so small a part of Haydn's immortal eighty-three as can be played in this series for a week, will learn something of his inexhaustible fund of melody, and something of the great sanity and joy in life which it was his to express in music; they cannot fail to learn, too, something of the intimate and homely charm of the medium itself-two violins, a viola, and a violoncello. It is indeed as ideal a team for fireside music as mankind has devised.