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Haydn Quartet opus 17 no. 4

Ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning both confuse and delight our senses. Misdirection enchants and invites discovery, suggesting richness beyond the immediately apparent. The ability to exploit this to magical effect reveals an artist in full command of his or her powers.

One such artist is Diego Velásquez, who, in his seminal painting Las Meninas, from 1656, creates a canvas in which the viewer is made aware of the presence of the painter, the space around the scene depicted, and the coexistence of multiple focal points. Velásquez, himself, is shown in the act of painting a portrait of the king and queen, here seen only in a mirrored reflection, alongside the five year old Infanta with her ladies in waiting, as well as two dwarves, a dog, and other figures. We look at the painting, and some of the people in the painting seem to be looking at us, in turn, some beyond us, some at each other. Mastery in steering the gaze makes for a particularly complex and textured experience. In some sense, this is art about art, a vision created to explore the phenomenon of looking, itself. The painting reaches far beyond its two dimensional canvas, engaging the act of viewing with self-conscious artifice, rendering the scene vibrantly alive in the moment of its apprehension. It is a nearly impossible task to examine the painting without feeling included in the captured moment, the eye primed for manipulation, sent from place to place in the hope of gathering the scene into sense.

Just over a century later, in 1771, Joseph Haydn pens his Quartet in c minor, Op. 17 No. 4, and the opening movement of this work, too, is conjured through magical and self-aware misdirection. Tonal harmony is largely predicated on collections of three notes creating chords with varying qualities, the most common being major and minor. Just as two points define the possibility of a line (two dimensions), while a third is needed to suggest a plane (three dimensions), of which there are still infinite possibilities available while only two points are known, likewise in music two notes leave open multiple interpretations of harmony, each with a different sense of space and texture. Haydn masterfully capitalizes upon this ambiguity. He chooses a key here, c minor, that is often dark and melancholic. But the most obvious interpretation of the unaccompanied first two notes of this movement, as the ear gathers them toward a chord, would be as a launchpad for the key of E-flat Major, rather more optimistic and noble. Only at the arrival of the third note are we made to understand where we truly stand. (Haydn wrote a piano sonata in the same key in the same year, and uses the exact same technique in the opening of that work, though it is far more quickly resolved there.) This feint is used again and again in the movement, creating a sense of drift and discovery; we first see only the pointing finger, and only in the fullness of time come to see, each time anew, where it is directing our gaze. We are left guessing again and again, and revel in the cleverness and artful machinations of the composer. This is not unlike the breaking of the fourth wall in the theater, or the drawing of attention to the craft of narration in the midst of that very narration found in Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, an author to whom contemporaries often compared Haydn. There is formal misdirection here, as well: the composer twice leads us to believe, falsely, that we have come back to the opening idea before, at long last, once we have likely given up hope of finding our way back, allowing the recapitulation of the opening to take hold.

The Minuet movement is jovial, untroubled, and resonant, having cast aside the shadow of c minor. But that shadow reasserts itself, in spades, in the contrasting trio section, which, oddly for a dance movement, competes in intensity and pathos with the more substantial first movement. Perhaps here, again, we become uncertain of our own vantage point, whether to find more truth in the scene before us or the hidden regions around its periphery.

The slow movement is an effulgent aria sung by the first violin, in the radiant key of E-flat Major, the key we seem to have been promised at the opening of the work. The movement is earnest and highly sensitive. The playing style at that time would have been full of sentiment, featuring a wide variety of vocal inflections and colorations. Mozart owned a copy of Haydn’s Op. 17 quartets in which he made multiple notations indicating the nuances of interpretation that would have been expected and appropriate, a highly stylized and mercurial way of playing, immediate and emotionally protean. Haydn himself indicates a florid ornamentation of the initial song when it returns for a second time. Perhaps if we were in Velásquez’s painting we would be seeing the opera singer in the mirror.

The final movement of the work also refers outside of itself, often gesturing toward the symphonic in its energies and textures. Haydn wrote only a single symphony in c minor (#95, out of 104!), much later than this quartet, but, strangely, the figuration that introduces the last movement here is nearly identical to the first motif of the opening movement of that symphony. C minor is also the key in which Haydn depicts Chaos at the start of The Creation, preceding the eruption of C Major where the Lord says “Let there be Light!” And, again, it is the key in which Haydn writes the movement illustrating the earthquake that followed the Crucifixion in the Seven Last Words of Christ, the ending of which is uncannily akin to the ending of this quartet. The movement is a marvel of at times feverish excitement, featuring textures both sophisticated and contrapuntal, and, in other moments, purely theatrical and tempestuous.

Throughout Haydn is the master of guiding our perceptions, directing and redirecting our gaze, suggesting slippages away from the conclusions the rhetoric suggests, and beyond the instrumental forces involved. Velásquez would have recognized a kindred spirit here, and we are all the richer for being taken in along the way.

Note by Mark Steinberg