Talk:String Quartets, Op. 50 (Haydn)

Questions
Should the Wikipedia internal review appear as TALK? It can't be edited, apparently, since it isn't shown as editable text at all. And even for Wikipedia, the idea that the characteristics of an article on a major musical composition can be adequately assessed by someone who doesn't actually know the composition seems very, perhaps unduly, trusting. I don't want to upset anybody, but some at least of the article seems to miss the boat. In Op 50 No 6 for example, the point is made that the main theme of I is an "ending'.  So it is, but Haydn used a similar device in the first movement of Op 33 No 5, surely, even more succinctly.  Worth mentioning? If the segue in Op 50.6 is to be mentioned, it should perhaps be explained that it is a feature missing from most of the editions easily available to the listener - for example IMSLP offers a German mid nineteenth century text which doesn't show it.  Neither did at least 70 or 80 years of Eulenberg. (In Op 54 no 2 there is actually a quite unambiguous attacca in the same position, inviting us to see the improvisatory slow movement and the minuet as a continuous whole) A lot of us will have to refer to a very technical article to get an idea of "bariolage" and even then our urban worlds may not have many choruses of frogs to explain the nickname aurally for us, but Haydn can't be blamed for that. Wasn't there a cello-playing king of Prussia for whom Haydn's friend Mozart wrote quartets too? The same man? In the Mozart "Prussian" quartets the texture is dominated by the need to accommodate the King's very obvious cello - in the Haydn set the first violin dominates - especially in the slow movement variations. Could it be that in the six or seven years between the two sets the King had reached virtuoso standard (Mozart had been to Berlin before beginning to write his set for the King) These are some of the issues musicians commonly discuss in relation to these works. It's odd Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge them.Delahays (talk) 23:59, 9 September 2017 (UTC)


 * It can be edited, but you need to go to the subpage /GA1. I know, it's not the most intuitive of systems.
 * I agree with you about much of this article. Mind you, given how many of the points you cite are referenced to Sutcliffe's book, I am not sure we can do very much given our dependence on reliable sources, even if the state of the art in musicology very often leaves a lot to be desired (and you should see the New Grove article on Schubert; it contains so many howlers in every edition I've checked that I almost wonder if it has become their tradition). The main theme of Op. 50 No. 6 is hardly alone in starting on the dominant and ending on the tonic; the same could be said of that of Op. 50 No. 1. Op. 33 No. 5 is rather different because the music stops moving after the first cadence, and therefore the beginning can literally come back as the ending, something like Mozart's quintet KV 593. I am not sure we need to reference the problems with most editions of Haydn whose copyright has expired; I have yet to find a quartet in Eulenberg's edition that does not contain some differences from the autographs or first editions.
 * Yes, it is the same king of Prussia. We need to remember that Mozart's letters are not the most trustworthy of sources, because he has a distinct tendency to make whatever he says more palatable to their recipient, in this case Puchberg, and the idea that six quartets were commissioned by the king of Prussia makes one wonder why Mozart stopped at three and, upon publication as his Opus XVIII, did not mention the dedication at all. I am inclined to agree with Alan Tyson that the task was one that Mozart set himself and that there was no real commission. For one thing, if we are to say from the evidence of the music that the King had reached virtuoso standard, one must evidently assume that his daughter likewise was a piano virtuoso rivalling Mozart himself, looking at the first movement of KV 576. At the most I might dare to say that he wanted to sell these works to the King, who found that they were too difficult to play, rather like why Mozart wrote only two piano quartets instead of six. This could also explain why the cello seems to retreat into the background from KV 589/iii onwards, with the exception of KV 590/i, but I think a better explanation for that is that he had figured out a way to integrate the brilliance of each individual instrument more tightly than just giving each of them long solos like in KV 575 and the first half of KV 589. This increase of brilliance was the only obvious way Mozart's style could develop further in chamber music after the Haydn Quartets, the Hoffmeister Quartet, and the Quintets KV 515 and 516, which are so concentrated in their style that any further expansion in scale or in emotional weight would burst the bounds of the classical aesthetic. This tighter approach appears in the second half of KV 589, most of KV 590, and reaches its full flowering in the Quintet KV 593. But good luck finding all of this stated in one source, where it would not be considered synthesis (you can find some of the observations in what I have written in Rosen's The Classical Style and Tyson's Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, but my remark joining the two is my own observation as far as I know). Double sharp (talk) 06:53, 20 October 2017 (UTC)