How can we best describe the interaction witnessed in this example? Are the lower parts playing a prank on their leader by failing to lend harmonic and
tex-Vn1
Vn2
Va
Vc Allegro spiritoso
e x a m p l e 3 . 4 Op. 64/2/i, mm. 1–4
tural support to a problematical opening gesture? Or is the illusion of a per-former-driven pantomime erased by the controlling hand of the composer, whose string-pulling antics perplex everyone, performers and listeners alike?
Certainly there are many other situations in which impressions of free will and conversational exchange are suspended by a larger, all-encompassing im-pulse that draws the instruments together as one. In some passages, all parts blend in closely spaced, rhythmically uniform homophony, nullifying distinc-tions between principal line and accompaniment, and contradicting the more normal give and take among individual lines. The resulting effect of a musical parenthesis, suddenly planting us in a distant landscape, proves especially telling when a tonal inflection accompanies the change in texture, and sustained tones in all parts brake the surface-rhythmic momentum. (For a superb example, see the finale of Op. 64/3, mm. 47–52, 103–10, and 174–81; this case is discussed in chapter 14.)
A potentially more decisive unanimity arises from Haydn’s four-part unisons.6 When heard at the start of a movement, unison texture can have a galvanizing effect, commanding attention to a portentous announcement, as in the operati-cally inspired Capriccio of Op. 20/2 or the opening movement of Op. 74/2, with its fanfare-like call to order. Later in the course of a movement, the coalescing of parts into a single line may designate a moment of consensus before the argument turns in a new direction. In the finale of Op. 64/4, for example, we find a transition theme that gains energy through incessant motivic repetitions (mm. 26–33), then breaks into a run of continuous eighth notes in the first violin (second half of m. 33) before sweeping the ensemble together in unison for a two-octave arpeg-gio (mm. 37–38)—a culminating gesture that clears the air and makes way for a tuneful secondary theme (a comparable series of events spans mm. 115–25 in the recapitulation). The ability of unison texture to signal resolution is realized on numerous occasions, and it is featured memorably in the fugal finales of Op. 20/2
and 6, in which unison-charged perorations serve to overpower the centrifugal forces of polyphony.
Nowhere is the composer’s hand a more dominating presence than in pas-sages of rule-bound, equal-voice polyphony. In principle, learned counterpoint is a suitable discipline for the medium, given the premise of linear independence, not to mention the customary association with exacting technique and con-noisseurship; and, as noted earlier, strict style was indeed a favored element in early quartets by several of Haydn’s Viennese contemporaries. That Haydn him-self was reluctant to highlight this topic extensively in his own earliest quartets may be partially explained as a matter of circumstance, notably the lack of a con-nection to the imperial court, where conservative styles were preferred. But he also may have been wary of imposing schematic designs on his music that would stifle more spontaneous exchange among the quartet’s performers. In any event, his evidently cautious attitude persisted in subsequent quartets. Fugue and canon are most heavily concentrated in Opp. 20 and 76, yet even in these opus groups, learned style is by no means a dominant or pervasive quality.
Fleeting allusions to strict style occur throughout the repertory in the form of points of imitation in which a figure is taken up by each instrument in turn.
Because of the innate formality of the device, combined with the textural dis-continuity that it normally entails, a series of imitative entries serves well as a structural signpost: the start of a new phase of action and an opportunity to con-struct a four-voice texture afresh. The development section of Op. 2/1/i exem-plifies such a scheme (see ex. 3.5a). This portion of the form gets under way by recalling the movement’s opening chord and the first violin’s continuation. The lower parts then pursue one another in imitation before the eventual reversion to a stable, melody-plus-accompaniment texture. The reuse of this same device in a much later movement (Op. 71/1/iv, quoted in ex. 3.5b) attests to its en-durance. Here we find a similar pattern in reverse, as the development section begins with a subject in the cello before proceeding with imitative entries in suc-cessively higher parts.
Exerting tightest control on the relationship between parts are the sporadic instances of canon. On one occasion—the tumultuous “Witches’ Minuet” of Op. 76/2—an entire rounded binary dance is suffused with strict canonic imita-tion, and the effect is rendered both strident and severe by the revival of a cer-tain minuet texture first heard among the earliest quartets: violins in octaves, squared off against the lower parts, likewise moving in octaves.7Some passages of embedded canon are so brief and rudimentary as to go by almost unnoticed, except as extra complications within a context of rapid textural change. Others have a more arresting impact as they signal the change to a state of heightened technical stringency and rhetorical intensity. In the first-movement recapitula-tion of Op. 50/2, at a point where we might have expected a convenrecapitula-tional first
violin restatement of the primary theme (as in m. 21 of the exposition), the vio-lins drop out and the lower parts proceed alone, locked in contrapuntal embrace to render the opening of the primary theme as a canon at the fifth (mm. 196–
202). The violins are then made to respond, mirror-fashion, with their own pri-mary theme–based canon in inversion, and the counterpoint becomes even more formidable as the lower parts reenter in canon at measures 207–8. Polyphonic momentum now persists for several measures before dissolving and making way for the return to a more predictable course of events.
Haydn’s most ambitious examples of learned polyphony are the full-blown fugues that occur as final movements on three occasions in Op. 20 and once in Op. 50, and the later, embedded passages of fugal procedure found in several quartets from Opp. 54/55, 64, 71/74, and 76. Situated either in a middle portion of a movement or close to its end, each stands out as an event of highest impor-tance. The elevation to a realm of serious polyphonic craft, flagged by the manda-tory reduction of texture and concomitant announcement of a subject, temporar-ily transforms the discourse, as it channels the ensemble’s energies into patterns of nearly equal linear engagement.
3 3
3
3
37 3 41
3
e x a m p l e 3 . 5 (a) Op. 2/1/i, mm. 37–42
(b) Op. 71/1/iv, mm. 97–100
97 100