Haydn’s reputation as the “father” of the string quartet reflects not only his extraordinary productivity—he wrote no fewer than 68 quartets, as well as a number of quartet arrangements—but also his pivotal place in music history. In 1732, the year Haydn was born, the Baroque masters Bach and Vivaldi were still in their prime. By the time he died, 77 years later, Beethoven was diligently ushering in the Romantic Era. Haydn’s lifetime thus neatly encapsulated the Classical Era, and his music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose, tempered with a playfulness and often earthy humor that have delighted audiences ever since.

Although Haydn’s influence was felt throughout Europe, he spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic seclusion of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s country estate in Eisenstadt. His earliest quartets, dating from the mid- to late 1750s, are closely related to the string sonatas, sinfonias, and lightweight divertimenti that were perennially popular with midcentury European audiences. In such works the cello was largely confined to continuo-style harmonic accompaniment, on the Baroque model. In Haydn’s hands, however, both the bass line and the two inner voices became increasingly active and independent. In the second of his six Op. 33 Quartets, written in 1781 and dedicated to Grand Duke Paul of Russia, the cello still plays a supporting role for the most part. Even so, Haydn turns convention on its head in the slow movement by allowing the two lower instruments to introduce the sweetly majestic theme.

The first violin starts the ball rolling at the outset of the quartet with an amiable melody in E-flat major whose signature motif—a brisk upbeat figure comprised of two rising sixteenth-notes—underpins the entire Allegro moderato. With characteristic economy, Haydn ingeniously varies and extends this simple thematic idea, transferring it from one voice and register to another in a lighthearted game of hide and seek. The jovial Scherzo is equally sophisticated in its unassuming way: Haydn plays with the eight-bar phrase structure by repeatedly inserting “extra” bars that thwart the listener’s expectation of predictable regularity. The Largo sostenuto, in B-flat, picks up the triple meter of the Scherzo, but this time in a radiantly lyrical vein, with sudden dynamic contrasts and sharply accentuated syncopations providing a hint of drama. Listen for the half-step oscillations in the accompanying voices, another subtle thematic link to the Scherzo. The high-spirited Finale is the first violin’s show from start to finish, right up to the whimsical false endings that give the quartet its nickname, “The Joke.”

© Harry Haskell, 2022

George Walker was trailblazing musician and composer whose works influenced American classical music during the latter half of the 20th century. Born in 1920 in Washington, D.C., the precociously talented Walker gave his first public performance at age of 14 at Howard University and won a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory in the same year. He went on to Curtis Institute, where he studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Samuel Barber, before moving to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and then earning a doctorate from Eastman School of Music in 1956.

Walker made his professional debut in 1945 at New York’s storied Town Hall, where he was the first African American performer on that stage. The next year he went on to be the first African American soloist to appear with The Philadelphia Orchestra in a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3. He toured extensively both in the U.S. and abroad. In the 1960s, Walker’s focus shifted to a long and distinguished teaching career. He was the first African American tenured professor at Smith College and held appointments at other schools, including The Peabody Institute. Among his honors were Fulbright, Whitney, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and MacDowell fellowships, honorary doctorates from six institutions, and a Pulitzer Prize in Music—the first African American composer to receive this honor.

He composed throughout his career and was commissioned by such major organizations as the New York Philharmonic. While his musical influences as a composer came from mainstream trends of 20th-century classical music such as serialism, the works of Debussy and Stravinsky, and African American spirituals, blues, and jazz, Walker has his own distinct musical voice. He commented, “I had to find my own way, a way of doing something that was different, something that I would be satisfied with.” His music is marked by intellectual rigor rather than an overt display of emotion. His musical concerns are for formal construction and an emphasis on counterpoint and chromaticism.

Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 dates from 1946 and was one of his first major works. The opening Allegro is an extended essay in sonata form. The principal theme immediately establishes the composer’s compellingly individual voice—muscular, neo-Romantic, mildly dissonant but essentially tonal, somber, serious, and, above all, astoundingly confident for a 24-year-old. The ensuing Molto adagio is an intensely lyrical lament for Walker’s grandmother, who died while he was writing the Quartet. (In his subsequent arrangement for string orchestra, titled Lyric for Strings, the slow movement would become Walker’s signature work, analogous to Samuel Barber’s popular Adagio for Strings of 1936, which similarly originated as a string quartet.) The finale is another propulsive and intricately motivic Allegro, this time marked “con fuoco” (with fire). An urgent, crisply rhythmicized theme alternates, rondo fashion, with passages of a more lyrical and relaxed character.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

The year 1875 marked a watershed in Dvořák’s life. Hitherto, his reputation had hardly reached beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the Czech opera house. But Dvořák’s career finally took off when the Austrian government awarded him a prestigious stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security, the prize brought him to the attention of Johannes Brahms, who warmly recommended the little-known Czech composer to his own publisher in Berlin. Soon Dvořák was inundated with so many requests for publications and commissions that he had trouble keeping up with them.

So it was that the G-major String Quintet, composed in early 1875 and first performed in Prague a year later, didn’t see the light of print until 1888. Dvořák, as was his wont, comprehensively revised the score for its belated publication. Among other things, he scrapped the original slow movement, which he had recycled from one of his early string quartets. The final version of the Quintet thus took its place among the great chamber works of Dvořák’s maturity, midway between the Piano Quintet in A major of 1887 and the Piano Quartet in E-flat major of 1889. It had its premiere in Boston on Nov. 25, 1889.

As a violist, Dvořák might have been expected to employ the standard quintet ensemble of two violins, two violas, and cello. (In fact, the first work that he deemed worthy of an opus number was a two-viola Quintet in A minor, written when he was in his early twenties.) In the event, he chose the unconventional combination of string quartet plus double bass, a scoring that recalls the bottom-heavy textures of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and the C-major Quintet for two cellos. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Dvořák felt a special affinity for Schubert’s chamber music. “Schubert,” he once wrote, “does not try to give his chamber music an orchestral character, yet he attains a marvelous variety of beautiful tonal effects. Here, as elsewhere, his flow of melody is spontaneous, incessant and irrepressible.”

A swaying seven-note motif, presented by the upper strings in the opening bars of the Quintet, generates much of the first movement’s fiery energy and rhythmic incisiveness. Listen for its two conjoined figures, one sharp and angular, the other soft and rounded: Dvořák weaves them ingeniously into the colorful musical fabric, combining drama and lyricism in true Schubertian fashion. The explosive Scherzo, with its driving, folklike theme and restless syncopations, is characterized by fluid shifts between major and minor tonalities (another Schubertian trait) and duple and triple rhythms. In the Poco andante, a tender C-major melody, rising stepwise and then falling back on itself, casts a sweetly melancholy mood. A magical modulation to E major takes us on a lengthy detour, with the first violin’s ecstatic melody soaring above interlocking rhythmic figures in the lower voices. The spitfire Finale, darkly urgent in tone, harks back to the thematic material of the first two movements.

© Harry Haskell, 2022