Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809)
Flute Quartet no. 2, in G major, op. 5 (1767 or ’68)
Most of Haydn’s professional years were spent in the court of the Esterházy’s, a wealthy family of Hungarian nobility who employed him full-time as court music director between 1761 and 1790, and then on a part-time basis for the remainder of his life. During his first nearly three decades with the Esterházys, Haydn spent much of his time either at the Esterházy villa in Eisenstadt, near Vienna, or, later, at Esterháza, the family’s palace in Hungary. To say that his position was labor-intensive is to put it mildly: in addition to composition, Haydn was responsible for running the court orchestra, performing chamber music, and, later, mounting operatic productions. However, the Esterházy princes – Paul Anton, Nikolaus, and then Nikolaus’s son Anton – were musical connoisseurs who provided Haydn with virtually everything he needed to be productive.
And productive he was. Musicologist James Webster writes that “[Haydn] excelled in every musical genre…He is familiarly known as the ‘father of the symphony’ and could with greater justice be thus regarded for the string quartet; no other composer approaches his combination of productivity, quality and historical importance in these genres.”
The six flute quartets that comprise Haydn’s opus 5 were first published in Amsterdam in 1767 and ’68. In recent years they have attracted scholarly attention because there are no known copies of the quartets among Haydn’s musical manuscripts – they only exist on plates printed by Haydn’s publisher, Hummel. Unsurprisingly, several of them have conclusively been proven to be “inauthentic”: that is, compositions passed off under Haydn’s name in order to increase sales. While nos. 3 through 6 have been dismissed as fakes, the first two quartets are authentic arrangements of Haydn’s music.
Like the other quartets in the set, no. 2 in G major follows a four-movement pattern in which two fast outer movements bracket a minuet and a slow movement. Each movement is written in binary form, a compositional form that was very popular in the 18th century in which a movement is divided into two halves, both of which are repeated.
The first movement, a short Presto, is characterized by two motives: the first, a droll, bouncy descending scalar figure; the second, a legato ascending gesture, both of which can be heard in this excerpt.
The second movement is a classic Haydn minuet, filled with contrasts of dynamics and expressive character.
In contrast to the three other movements, the slow third movement demonstrates Haydn’s keen sense of the melodic line. It casts a long-breathed melody played by the flute and echoed by the viola over a rhythmically active accompaniment played by the violin and cello.
As was a convention of the day, the finale is cast in a triple meter and the quartet concludes with a joyful, bouncing dance that rounds out the work in high spirits.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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