Opus 74 Number 3 - "The Horseman"

It's me, the Haydn bug.  And I've come to take another bite.

When listeners bother to give something a name, it means something.  It
means that there is an overwhelming impression that dominates the music,
that sticks, often despite the composer's best efforts to cleave what has
cleaved.

The galloping figure that dominates the first movement of this quartet
can scarcely be called a tune in the typical sense, and it is not the
melody.  Instead, it is a squiggle.  A squiggle that cascades easily
down the fretboard of the most inaccomplished player.  And as it makes
the rounds through the players it leans into each succession of the chord
changes.  And it becomes obvious what it is, a passing phrase, as will
later, imfamously, dominate Richard Strauss' Salome and Electra.  But
rather than being harshly dissonant, the squiggle is mainly consonant,
with one note consistently out of place, the accented one of course.

But it is the hook at the end which gives this horseman his grove, the
slight lift, which is mirrored in the harmonies.  Here we have it, in its
rawest simplest form - tonality, only without layers of figuration, but
instead a squiggle loaded with contrapunctal devices, which instead of
twining together to form the harmony, deforms it.

And this of kilter skittering makes the quartet - with scarcely more
for ingredients than flower and water - become magic.  Every culture
has its equivalent of the crepe - a creation which cooked against a flat
hot griddle takes on a leavening from the steam itself.  It is the very
thinness that makes it work.  Here Haydn's quartet writing is a crepe -
since there is nothing else, no over arching tune or melodic material, the
steam that rises from the squiggle is all that it takes for thereing to be
a wrapping in which the the cream of his chord progression can be held.

Listen again, that's all there is, some chords, a suqiggle that
gallops about, and, oh such delight.

But Haydn isn't finished there, our squiggle shows up at the turning
point of the slow movement, and is echoed in the minuet, as the gesture
that separates the sections.  And finally becomes the counter to the half
hoping first melody.  Then, and only then, does it become clear that the
A section of the minuet has a melody which is an inversion of our long
serving squiggle.

The middle section suddenly changes character, with a "Hungarian" style
melody set against a thicker accompanying texture - but at the centre of
the melody? Our friend the galloping squiggle which finally files out the
whole texture of the music.  The movement then concludes with the suqiggle
oing up and down as part of the whole melody, which comes and goes.

Beethoven and Wagner have been accused of writing from cells or unifying a
whole work with motives.  Perhaps we should charge Haydn with the crime as
well.  But then, that would make him far more of a Romantic than many
people would be comfortable with.

But we shouldn't forget the finale, which, of course, incorporates our
friend the squiggle, and alternates between a bright major, and an almost
crying minor inflected harmony.  It is here, without the hard edge of the
first movement layout that Haydn turns to his favorite game, reaching the
end, and then turning to a coda, both unexpected, and complletely welcome.

And how does the careful listener know that this isn't the end?
Because our friend the squiggle did not announce the last  cadence.

Stirling Newberry
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