Quartet Party
A short etude on how history is made
Vienna, 1784. Age of Enlightenment was at its peak. One year after the signing of Treaty of Paris which officially ended the American Independence War and five years before the French Revolution broke out, this hub in the center of Europe, a place where musicians regularly made their stops while touring the continent, saw a remarkable, almost iconic, event.
Four men joined their forces to create the history, a foreshadowing of the things to come. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, what connected them was their talent, hard work, drive, and love of music.
As an eyewitness recorded in his reminiscences (Kelly, 1826, p.237):
This [waiting for Signor Blasi] delayed us a little, and in the interim, Storace gave a quartett party to his friends. The players were tolerable; not one of them excelled on the instrument he played, but there was a little science among them, which I dare say will be acknowledged when I name them:
The first violin . . . . . Haydn.
,, Second Violin . . . . Baron Dittersdorf.
,, Violoncello . . . . . . Vanhall.
,, Tenor . . . . . . . . . . . Mozart.
These were the words of Michael Kelly, an Irish tenor, composer, and theatrical manager who would become the original Don Curzio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro two years later — a part to this day considered Kelly’s most famous premiere role.
No doubt, there must have been more than “a little science” among the four quartet players. After all, seeing a son of a wheelwright and village mayor; a child of a military tailor and a wunderkind who spent his earliest years in the midst of order, etiquette, and formalism; a man born into serfdom slowly making his way up; and another wunderkind who came from a family of one of the most influential music pedagogue in Europe was certainly an event on the level where “a greater treat, or a more remarkable one, cannot be imagined” (Kelly, 1826, p.238).
Not only was this spectacle a foreshadowing of the future, it was also an embodiment, an epitome, of the zeitgeist.
Although already Europe’s leading composer and despite a new contract that gave him more freedom (he was now able to write for others as well as sell his work to publishers), Haydn at the time was still employed at Eszterháza, also known as the “Hungarian Versailles”. His position of Kapellmeister made him responsible for musical production in one of the best musical environments in the world. It can be safely said that — like a scientist or a meticulous craftsman locked away at a remote rural location — musical experiments he conducted in his “private laboratory” set the overall tone of Classical period music. Well, he’s not called the father of symphony or inventor of string quartet for nothing.
Yet, when it comes to experimentation and pushing the boundaries, it was Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf who outshined even Haydn. Probably due to his early exposure to military and overall upbringing infused with importance and weight of structure and form, Baron Dittersdorf broke almost all established modal rules. Unexpected dynamics and tempos, unusual chord progressions, decomposition of standard expression devices, sometimes even absence of a clear melodic line — suffice to say, were it not for him, there would be no Romantic period as we know it. One may even say that he was the first (proto-)romantic composer. Definitely a revolutionary.
Where Baron Dittersdorf demolished the form, Bohemian composer Jan Křtitel Vaňhal, also known as Johann Baptist Vanhal, brought the power of raw human emotion into otherwise somewhat clinical, albeit luscious and dramatic, soundscape. Another ingredient without which the Romantic period wouldn’t took the shape it did. It’s certainly no surprise that Vaňhal was well respected by Beethoven as well as Haydn and Mozart. Although Vaňhal stopped writing symphonies around 1780, the influence of his work on Mozart can be clearly heard in Mozart’s later, mature works. Vaňhal was also the first independent “middle-class” musician who established himself as such. From rags to riches — by the time of his death in 1813 when he was living a quiet solitary life in the center of Vienna, he was not relying on patrons but supported himself with publishing of his works, live performances, and teaching.
As for Mozart, there is really no need to elaborate anything at length. It’s enough to say that he was and remains the most famous gateway into the world of Classical music. Why that’s so can be illustrated by the following excerpt from a letter from his father and teacher Leopold, who understood the talents of his son the best: “your whole reputation depends on your first work. Before you write it, listen and think about the taste of the nation; hear and observe their operas. I know you well; you can imitate anything . . . Discuss the text in advance with Baron Grimm and with Noverre and make sketches and let them hear them. Everybody does that. Voltaire reads his poems aloud to his friends, listens to their judgement and makes revisions,” (Schroeder, 2003). It’s also worth mentioning that Mozart was enamored with Haydn to the extent that he wrote six quartets, now called the “Haydn” quartets.
Looking back and comparing that vision with today, it’s obvious that our world desperately needs another quartet party at Storace. Or at least hard working folks with talent who are driven to push their craft to the limits simply out of love for what they do. Because, as it seems, most people nowadays lack in one or more of those departments. Then again, it might have been the affliction of humanity from time immemorial.
Anyway, if you want to create history ask yourself really hard if you have the talent needed for what you set out to accomplish. Ask yourself if you do everything possible to be as good at it as is humanly possible. But first and foremost, ask yourself if you actually love the path you walk.
A composition is worth a thousand words
References
Schroeder, D. (2003). Mozart and late eighteenth-century aesthetics. In S.P., Keefe (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Mozart (pp. 48–58). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Kelly, M. (1826). Reminiscences. London, UK: Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street
