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. Opera, too. But nor was chamber music neglected. As well as Beethoven’s 17 string quartets one could buy the Septet and the piano trios; as well as Mozart’s celebrated 10, his string quintets and the quintets for clarinet and piano with four winds, the piano quartets and trios; every major chamber work of Schubert too; and, later, Brahms.
The whole endeavour was at bottom a means of closer acquaintance, of involvement in the actual notes, by making them for yourself: the thrill of feeling favourite passages under your own ten — 20! — fingers, compounded at its best by disciplined chamber-music-style collaboration in a play of mutual responsiveness not unworthy of the originals.
In this burgeoning culture of duet arrangements Haydn, as always throughout the 19th century, comes a poor fourth after Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Favourite symphonies were done, and some progress was made on the quartets — of the 80-odd works 15 were managed. The arguably pre-mature sets were not touched; but neither were the six quartets of op. 20, known in their time as the ‘Great’ and the ‘Sun’; nor the six of op. 33, claimed by Charles Rosen to be the meeting-place of wit and soul from which the Classical style rose to noonday splendour. The 15 the Victorians achieved are long out of print; they might be located with patient searching, and the entire series was rather roughly reproduced by French pirates in the 1980s.
So, in setting out upon my own transcriptions, I didn’t want to replicate what had already been done (however difficult to obtain). With 30 variously marvellous works to be getting on with, I also feel justified in omitting the earliest (at least for now): and the Seven Last Words are not (I believe) suited to the medium (and anyway were beautifully re-composed by Haydn himself, in the orchestral version and the version as oratorio).
From the start I desired to make my transcriptions available to their potential users by electronic means. Since I am terminally technologically disadvantaged, a way forward was not obvious; nor was the endeavour forwarded by the generosity and olde-worlde skills of a copyist, himself an ardent duettist (and Luddite), who made impeccable handwritten scores from my rapidly executed scrawls. I’d virtually given up in despair the hope of wide dissemination when, just in time for the bicentennial, everything changed. To cut a long story short the project — from being quaint, Utopian, foredoomed to blush and wither unseen — is now up and running. Contact www.fourhandsplus.com for oven-fresh details!
We’re beginning at both ends: the sunrise of the op. 20 set, and the glorious curtain of the two quartets op. 77, written some 30 years on, in 1802 — all the master completed from a further group of three (maybe six). After this he abandoned the medium except for the two inspired movements of op. 103 from the next year, which will also be available soon, contained within a Prologue and Epilogue of hommage that I’ve added especially for the bicentennial. Over the next few years, the gap will gradually close. I can’t promise when the bridge will be complete — only that, in an unassuming, handmaidenly way, it will lovingly link to those of the 21st century the musical cultures and practices of the 18th, 19th and 20th.
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