Robin Holloway

Building bridges

December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’.

December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’.

December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. No longer! His vast protean output has never been more widely available nor more highly esteemed. Father technically and spiritually to Mozart and Beethoven, revered by Brahms and (unexpectedly) by Wagner, beloved of Stravinsky, Britten and Ligeti, Haydn was something of a well-kept secret, but is now a universal possession, treasured as equal with the highest. Tovey himself, pressed on his deathbed by a kindly meaning nurse to declare his favourite composer, shyly preferred Haydn over even his deity Beethoven.

I, too, have contributed my mite towards expelling the Inaccessibility, in a steady endeavour down some 15 years, that, as the bicentennial draws to a close, reaches a conclusion as welcome as it is unexpected: the transcription of most of his string quartets for piano-duet. The medium can in its intimacy reach surprisingly close to the classic conversational collaboration of the four string-players; if you love this music, don’t play a stringed instrument, can’t command a professional group, can’t always get to a concert, are not always content with a recording or a broadcast, and can manage notes that howsoever far they range in intellectual subtlety and expressive intensity remain technically quite simple, the piano-duet genre is a marvellous second-best.

The culture of piano-duet arrangements begins in the early-to-mid 19th century; the great epoch of bourgeois music-making, with its easy availability of decent instruments for every front parlour or glittering salon. Transcriptions poured from the presses — four-hand versions of symphonies by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn were the equivalent of the wireless, the 78, the LP, the CD, in more recent times.

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