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After the breezy divertimenti a Quattro (Haydn’s description) of Op 1 and Op 2, composed for summer quartet parties on the estate of his early patron, Baron Fürnberg, came a gap of around a decade. These were Haydn’s first years in the service of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, dominated by the intensive production of symphonies and, later, church music and music for the baryton, a curious kind of viola da gamba with additional sympathetic strings that became a passionate obsession of the Prince’s. But when Haydn returned to the quartet medium, he did so with a vengeance, producing in quick succession the three sets of Op 9 (c1769), Op 17 (1771) and Op 20 (1772) which mark the string quartet’s coming of age. Indeed, late in life Haydn said he wanted his series of quartets to begin only with Op 9. Although still dubbed Divertimenti a quattro, these works, written during the period when Haydn emerged as an indisputably great composer, have an amplitude, a seriousness of intent and an increasing mastery of rhetoric and thematic development that are a world away from the lightweight quartets of the 1750s.
We don’t know what prompted this sudden effusion of quartet-writing. Haydn was doubtless aware of the popularity of his Op 1 and Op 2 in France, Austria and southern Germany (less so in north Germany, where po-faced critics accused him of ‘debasing music with comic fooling’), and saw the potential for enhancing his rapidly growing reputation. Perhaps his experience of writing baryton trios by the bushel for Prince Nicolaus from 1765 onwards had made him eager to explore, in a less limited medium, the possibilities of interplay between solo strings, with the cello emancipated from its traditional continuo role. Significant, too, was the presence of the brilliant young violinist Luigi Tomasini, leader of the Esterházy orchestra and, we may guess, of the ad hoc court string quartet, with Haydn as second violinist. Tomasini was renowned for his pure, sweet tone and virtuosic panache. In the Op 9 quartets, especially, the often florid, almost concerto-like first violin parts were surely calculated to show off the fire, agility and ‘taste’ (an eighteenth-century buzzword) of his playing.
Whereas the serenade-like Op 1 and Op 2 quartets had contained five brief movements, including two minuets, the quartets of Op 9 proclaim their more serious, symphonic purpose in weighty four-movement structures. The first four of the set have an identical ground plan. Their monothematic opening movements are spacious and dignified, with a leisurely basic pulse (all are marked ‘moderato’) to allow space for elaborate figuration, especially for the first violin. Those in Nos 1 and 3 sound more like Boccherini than almost any other music by Haydn. The minuet and trio invariably come second, followed by a slow movement conceived as an aria for Tomasini, complete with improvised cadenza near the end. Finales are terse, spirited, often witty, and typically contain more democratic interplay—what we think of as ‘true’ quartet style—than any of the earlier movements.
Volume 2: Opus 17
Haydn stumbled on the form of the string quartet ‘by accident’ (his own words) when he composed a clutch of Divertimenti a quattro for summer music parties at the country estate of his early patron, Carl Joseph von Fürnberg. According to the composer’s early biographer, Albert Christoph Dies, these breezy little quartets from the mid- to late-1750s, published as Op 1 and Op 2, ‘won him the increasing favour of amateur musicians, so that he became recognized everywhere as a genius’. They circulated rapidly throughout Europe in manuscript and unauthorized printed copies (strict copyright laws lay far in the future), and, more than any of his other early works, sowed the seeds of Haydn’s international fame. Yet far from capitalizing on their success, the so-called ‘father of the string quartet’ composed no more works in the quartet medium for a decade.
Op 9 and Op 17 have far more in common with each other than either does with the more heterogeneous Op 20 quartets. In both sets four of the first movements are in spacious moderato tempo, with a leisurely basic pulse to allow room for elaborate figuration for all the instruments, especially the first violin. As in Op 9, one of the Op 17 first movements (No 3) is a slowish set of variations, while another (No 6) is a bounding 6/8 presto. Minuets invariably come second; and the slow movements (either adagio or largo) are in essence wordless arias, designed to show off the sweetness of Tomasini’s tone and his ‘taste’ in shading and embellishing his line. As in Op 9, the most immediately appealing movements tend to be the finales: spirited, puckish, and typically containing more democratic interplay—what we think of as ‘true’ quartet style—than any of the earlier movements.
Volume 3: Opus 20 ‘Sun’
Fine as Op 9 and Op 17 are, the quartets of Op 20 of 1772—an annus mirabilis which also produced three magnificent symphonies, Nos 45-47—explore the technical and expressive potential of the string quartet medium with a new spirit of adventure. As Donald Tovey famously put it in an article in Cobbett’s Cyclopaedia of Chamber Music (1929): ‘There is perhaps no single or sextuple opus in the history of instrumental music which has achieved so much or achieved it so quietly.’
By 1772 Haydn, already an acknolwedged master of the eccentric, the comic and the surprising, had become the supreme master of long-range sonata strategy. In Op 20, even more than in the finest of Op 9 and Op 17, the form of each movement is dictated by the material, with the recapitulations both resolving and re-interpreting, often radically, earlier events. Op 20 left a profound impression on Mozart, and on Beethoven, who copied out No 1 and parts of the other quartets before embarking on his Op 18 set. Brahms owned the autograph manuscripts until he bequeathed them to the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. When Op 20 was published by the firm of Hummel in 1779 (five years after the earliest edition issued by La Chevardière in Paris), the title page carried an emblem of a midday sun—hence the sobriquet ‘Sun’ Quartets. Neither edition was authorized by the composer. Although Op 20 contributed hugely to Haydn’s rapidly growing international fame, in an age before copyright laws it was the publishers who profited.
Whereas the first violin had ruled over long stretches of Opp 9 and 17, in Op 20 Haydn conceives the discourse as a free exchange of ideas, with each player accorded a vital, distinct identity. Much of the writing in Op 20 suggests ‘a conversation between four intelligent people’, as Goethe pithily characterized the string quartet—a reminder that the art of civilized conversation, where profound ideas could be expounded with a light, witty touch, was avidly cultivated in eighteenth-century salons. The finale of No 3, for instance, divides its theme in all sorts of ways: first between the two violins, who later proceed to swap roles, then between cello and first violin, and finally as a dialogue between the lower and upper pairs of instruments. These equal-opportunity tendencies culminate in the fugues that crown Nos 2, 5 and 6. During the 1760s composers such as Florian Gassmann, Carlo d’Ordoñez and Franz Xaver Richter had written fugues in their quartets, a sign that the string quartet was increasingly acknowledged as a ‘learned’ genre. But whereas their fugues are exercises in a venerable ecclesiastical style, Haydn’s, especially those in Nos 2 and 6, have a spontaneous freshness and urgency. The contrapuntal mastery he had honed in his early symphonies and his sacred music of the late 1760s is coloured here by the drama and wit of his sonata style.
No less striking is Op 20’s vast range of expression, from the sorrowful No 5 in F minor, through the gypsy pungency and zany antics of No 4’s minuet and finale, to the rapt, remote beauty of No 1’s ‘affettuoso e sostenuto’. Far more than in Opp 9 and 17, each work has a sharply individual profile. Indeed, no set of Haydn quartets is as varied or eccentrically inspired as Op 20 until Op 76 a quarter of a century later. It is as if the forty-year-old composer, at the summit of his powers, conceived the set as a showcase for his technical and expressive virtuosity. The six quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn in 1785 leave a similar impression.
Volume 4: Opus 33 ‘Russian’
After his intensive quartet activity of 1769-1772, culminating in the monumental achievement of Op 20, Haydn wrote no more string quartets for nearly a decade. This was a period when his energies were overwhelmingly absorbed by the composition and production of operas—mainly comedies—for the Esterházy court. When Haydn did produce another set of quartets in 1781, he advertised manuscript copies to potential subscribers, who for the price of six ducats per work would have privileged use of the quartets for several months before they became available to the wider public: cultural one-upmanship for the patrons, at a time when the string quartet was rivalling the symphony in prestige, and a lucrative extra source of revenue for the composer.
In his three promotional letters of December 1781 that survive, including one to the celebrated Zurich theologian and philosopher Johann Caspar Lavater, Haydn famously proclaimed that the quartets were written ‘in a completely new and special way, for I haven’t composed any for ten years’. The Viennese publisher Artaria threatened to spoil things by announcing later in December that the quartets would be issued within four weeks. Fearing the indignation of his subscribers, Haydn got Artaria to delay publication until April 1782, when the quartets appeared as Op 33 in an order different from the traditional numbering, beginning with the G major (No 5) and ending with the B flat major (No 4). Meanwhile, Haydn had also sold the quartets to the firms of Schmitt, in Amsterdam, and Hummel, who had offices in Amsterdam and Berlin. By this time he had become a canny business operator; and here, as elsewhere, it is amusing to read him wriggling out of an embarrassing situation and putting a favourable gloss on his double-dealing. The familiar ordering, with the B minor quartet placed first, originates from the edition published by Sieber in Paris early in 1783. We know that at least one of the Op 33 quartets was performed on Christmas Day 1781 in the Viennese apartment of the visiting Russian Grand Duke Paul, later Tsar Paul I. Haydn subsequently dedicated the set to the Grand Duke, hence the nickname ‘Russian’.
Haydn’s ‘new and special way’ has often been dismissed as a sales gimmick. But there are new features in Op 33, as one would expect given the decade that had elapsed since his previous quartets. Compared with Op 20, the Op 33 quartets are altogether lighter and more ‘popular’ in tone (Haydn by now had his eye on the international market), less self-consciously ‘learned’ (no fugues!), with a livelier, more fluid sense of rhythm that Haydn had honed in his comic operas. Ideas seem to grow effortlessly and inevitably out of each other, in a spirit we might describe as ‘monothematic plurality’. Crucial, too, is the ease with which the instruments change roles in Op 33, moving almost imperceptibly between background and foreground, theme and accompaniment. Even more than in Op 20, the quartets illustrate Goethe’s famous description of the string quartet as ‘a conversation between four intelligent people’. The Op 33 quartets circulated rapidly throughout Europe, exactly as Haydn planned; and with their sophisticated conversational textures they were a prime influence on the six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn in 1785.
Volume 5: Opus 50 ‘Prussian’
None of Haydn’s instrumental works caused a greater stir than the so-called ‘Russian’ quartets, Op 33, which circulated throughout Europe after their publication in 1782. Eager to capitalize on their success, the Viennese publisher Artaria wrote to Haydn early in 1784 offering 300 florins for a new set of quartets. The composer accepted, but then became sidetracked by the ‘Paris’ symphonies and The Seven Last Words. The new quartets were eventually finished in July 1787, and published in December with a dedication (made at Artaria’s behest) to the cello-playing King Frederick William II of Prussia. By then, though, Haydn had sold ‘exclusive rights’ to William Forster of London—outrageous practice to us, but understandable in an age when composers had virtually no copyright protection. The autograph manuscripts of Op 50 were long lost until Nos 3–6 improbably turned up in Melbourne in 1982, having arrived there via a retired English colonel who had acquired the manuscripts in London in 1851. The autographs differ from the standard editions not only in details of phrasing, dynamics and articulation, but occasionally in the actual notes, as in the trio of No 5.
Some scholars have suggested that the ‘Prussian’ quartets are Haydn’s response to the six quartets which Mozart dedicated to him in 1785. True, two of them, Nos 2 and 6, are more spaciously conceived and more consistently chromatic than any of Op 33. There is Haydnesque wit and caprice aplenty in the finales, though the comedy is contained within subtly developed sonata-form structures such as Mozart favoured. Of the knockabout foolery found in the rondo finales of Op 33 Nos 2-4 there is barely a trace. Perhaps the intensity and sheer quirkiness of some of the Op 50 minuets and trios are Haydn’s answer to the subversive minuet in Mozart’s G major quartet K387. That said, there is little of Mozart’s vocally inspired lyricism and harmonic sensuousness in Op 50. This is, supremely, music about music: rigorously, obsessively argued, delighting in making much of little, not least in the quartets’ quizzical and/or unstable opening gestures.
Volume 6: Opus 54 & Opus 55
By the mid-1780s Haydn was leading something of a double life as Esterházy opera Kapellmeister and European celebrity. Publishers fell over each other to acquire his latest symphonies and quartets, while prestigious commissions and invitations poured in not only from Paris and London (one newspaper even proposed that he should be rescued from ‘the domineering spirit of a petty Lord, and the clamorous temper of a scolding wife’ and ‘transplanted’ to England) but also from as far afield as Madrid and Naples. Thanks above all to Haydn himself, there was a near-insatiable demand for string quartets in the lucrative amateur domestic market. Following the international success of the Op 33 quartets, published in 1782, the Viennese firm of Artaria lost no time commissioning another set of six quartets. Haydn accepted, but only embarked on the new quartets, Op 50, in 1787, after composing six symphonies for Paris (Nos 82-87) and The Seven Last Words for distant Cádiz. By now he was on something of a quartet roll, producing the six works published as Opp 54 and 55 in 1788 and another set of six, Op 64, in 1790—the last music he composed before his first London sojourn.
The twelve quartets of 1788 and 1790 are traditionally associated with Johann Tost, an intriguing, if slightly shady character who led the second violins in the Esterházy orchestra from 1783 to 1788. A born entrepreneur, he dreamt up various scams, including an illegal outfit to market stolen copies of works that had entered Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s domain! After inheriting money following the death of his wife Maria Anna (‘Nanette’) Jerlischeck, a former housekeeper to Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, Tost flourished for several years as a travelling businessman. He dabbled in wine, opened a cloth factory in Bohemia and—his shrewdest move of all—secured himself a contract to supply equipment to the Austrian army during the Napoleonic Wars. He was evidently wasted in music.
While the Op 64 quartets do bear a dedication to Tost in an early edition (though this was removed when the edition was reprinted), his only known connection with Opp 54 and 55 is that Haydn gave them to him, along with symphonies Nos 88 and 89, to sell to a Parisian publisher. They were duly issued, in two books of three, by the firm of Sieber in June 1789. With an eye on maximum circulation of his music, Haydn had already arranged for manuscript copies to be sent to London, where some of the new quartets were played at two concerts organized by the Professional Concert on 3 and 16 February. The brilliant, high-lying first violin parts in many of these quartets, especially Op 54 Nos 1 and 2 and Op 55 No 1, have spawned the assumption that they were fashioned explicitly for Tost. But there is no shred of evidence for this. We don’t even know how good a violinist he was. What seems virtually certain is that Haydn tailored these, his most flamboyantly ‘public’ quartets to date, specifically to the international market: to London and, especially, Paris, where the flashy, first-violin-dominated quatuor brillant—in effect a concerto for scaled-down forces—was coming into vogue. Yet, unlike his French contemporaries, Haydn was far too interested in the quartet as a medium for conversational interplay to allow brilliance to become an end in itself.
Volume 7: Opus 64
Thanks above all to Haydn himself, there was a near-insatiable demand for string quartets in North Europe during the 1780s and 1790s. Following the ‘Paris’ symphonies and the Seven Last Words of 1785/6, Haydn entered an intensive period of quartet composition, producing no fewer than eighteen works in four years. Hot on the heels of the so-called ‘Prussian’ quartets, Op 50, came the six quartets published as Opp 54 and 55. Two years later, in 1790, Haydn embarked on another set of quartets, probably completing them in the autumn, after the death of his long-standing patron Prince Nicolaus Esterházy in September. They were his last works before his triumphant first London visit.
Like Opp 54 and 55, the quartets published as Op 64 are associated with the slightly shady figure of Johann Tost, former leader of the second violins in the Esterházy orchestra. Haydn appears to have sold the quartets to Tost, who duly arranged for their publication in Paris and Vienna. In the first Viennese edition, issued by the composer-publisher Leopold Kozeluch in February 1791, the title page carries the announcement ‘Composés et dediés a Monsieur Jean Tost par Monsieur Joseph Haydn’. Haydn was in London at the time. Significantly, the dedication was removed when Haydn, now back in Vienna, supervised the second edition in 1793. Not for the only time, Tost seems to have been a touch disingenuous. There are certainly no grounds for the once-widespread assumption that the first violin parts of the Op 64 quartets were tailored specifically to Tost’s talents.
Volume 8: Opus 71 & Opus 74
During Haydn’s artistically triumphant first London season of 1791, three quartets from his recent Op 64 set were played at Johann Peter Salomon’s concert series in Hanover Square. This was the first time Haydn had heard any of his quartets performed before a large audience; and their success was surely a prime factor behind the six quartets, Opp 71 and 74, composed in the autumn of 1793 during the relatively tranquil Viennese interlude between his two London visits. Two of the new quartets (we don’t know which) were introduced at Salomon’s concerts the following year, though plans to perform the others in the 1795 season faltered after the concerts came under new management. Haydn dedicated the six works to his old friend Count Anton Apponyi, who paid him handsomely for the privilege of having exclusive use of the quartets until they were published, in two groups of three, in 1795 and 1796.
Whereas Haydn’s earlier quartets had been designed for private performance, Opp 71 and 74 were tailored, at least partly, for London’s Hanover Square Rooms, which seated up to 600 in comfort. And though they never overstep the bounds of true chamber music, the 1793 works are more obviously ‘public’ in manner than any of his previous quartets: boldly and spaciously conceived, with virtuoso writing for all the instruments, especially the first violin (played by Salomon himself), and flamboyant contrasts of texture, register and dynamics.
These extrovert tendencies were in part a response to the showy quatuors concertants by, inter alia, Adalbert Gyrowetz and Haydn’s former pupil Ignaz Pleyel that were so popular in London. Unlike Pleyel and Gyrowetz, though, Haydn was too much of a musical architect to allow virtuosity to run amok. Fast movements are tautly, often strenuously argued, reflecting the proximity of the London symphonies, while the slow movements of Op 71 No 2 and Op 74 No 3 are among Haydn’s most searching. Another tendency of these quartets, so characteristic of late Haydn, is their highly adventurous sense of tonality, manifested both in remote modulations within movements, and by the choice of a key a third away from the tonic for the trios of Op 74 Nos 1 and 2, and the largo assai of Op 74 No 3.
Volume 9: Opus 76
Haydn embarked on his final completed set of quartets in autumn 1796, a year after returning to Vienna from his second triumphant London visit. The following June, the Swedish diplomat Fredrik Silverstolpe wrote that he had ‘again been at Haydn’s house a few days ago … he played at the piano a few violin quartets which a certain Count Erdödi [sic] had ordered from him for 100 ducats, and which may be printed only after a few years have elapsed. They are masterly, and full of new ideas.’ Count Joseph Erdödy, who had commissioned the quartets, was the chancellor at the Hungarian court in Pressburg (modern-day Bratislava) who even in the cash-strapped years of the Napoleonic Wars funded his own private string quartet. In a spirit of cultural one-upmanship, patrons expected to have exclusive use of the works they commissioned for at least six months. Erdödy seems to have requested sole rights for two years. The quartets were eventually published, as Op 76, in Vienna and London in 1799-1800, with an inevitable dedication to Erdödy.
Haydn had brought the so-called ‘popular style’ to its apogee in the brilliant symphonies and quartets (Opp 71 and 74) he had composed for London. The Op 76 quartets continue their combination of easy tunefulness and intricate motivic development. But their arguments are more unpredictable, sometimes to the point of magisterial eccentricity, their contrasts, from profound inwardness to rowdy rusticity, more extreme. No set of eighteenth-century string quartets is so wide-ranging in expression, or so heedless of the structural norms of the time.
Volume 10: Opus 77, Opus 42 & Seven Last Words
Written, as the composer put it, ‘in a quite new and special way’, Haydn’s string quartets Op 33 created something of an international sensation when they appeared in 1782. Their sophisticated conversational textures and fusion of a light, tuneful surface with taut motivic development would set the template for many Haydn quartets of the 1780s and ’90s. With the composer now a hot commercial property, publishers were eager to capitalize on Op 33’s success. For the next few years, though, Haydn’s energies were chiefly absorbed by opera; and, apart from the little D minor quartet Op 42, he composed no more string quartets until the Op 50 set of 1787.
In a letter of April 1784 to the Viennese publisher Artaria, Haydn wrote that he was working on three ‘very short’ quartets, each in three movements only, for a Spanish patron. Either he abandoned the commission, or the quartets are lost. But it may be that the lone Op 42 quartet of 1785 (which is short and relatively easy technically, though in four movements rather than three) contains music from the lost or aborted Spanish project. It was published by the firm of Hoffmeister, which specialized in issuing quartets singly, rather than in groups of three or six (Mozart’s D major quartet K499 being another Hoffmeister one-off).
Early in 1799, some thirty string quartets later and fresh from the success of The Creation, Haydn agreed to write a set of six quartets for the music-loving aristocrat Prince Lobkowitz, who had recently commissioned Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets. By July 1799 Haydn had finished two of the quartets, and for the next three years or so still had hopes of completing the project. But his physical strength was gradually sapped by the composition of The seasons. The two quartets, published in 1802 as Op 77 and with a dedication to Lobkowitz, were to remain Haydn’s last completed works in the medium. They make a glorious culmination. With all the nonchalant mastery of technique acquired over five decades of quartet-writing, the Op 77 quartets encompass a vast range of experience, from rustic earthiness, through sociable wit and anarchic comedy, to Wordsworthian voyages across ‘strange seas of thought, alone’.
By the mid-1780s Haydn was the most celebrated composer of the age, and more famous internationally than any composer had been in his lifetime. European publishers fell over each other to issue his latest symphonies and quartets, while prestigious commissions and invitations poured in not only from Paris and London but also from as far afield as Madrid and Naples. Among Haydn’s most successful works, especially in Catholic countries, was his Stabat mater of 1767. Its popularity in Spain may have prompted the request from a priest in Cádiz for a series of orchestral reflections on the Seven Last Words of Christ, to be performed at the annual Passion celebration on Good Friday after the bishop had intoned each ‘Word’ and delivered a discourse on it.
Haydn finished The Seven Last Words in time for performance, at both the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva in Cádiz and the Schlosskirche in Vienna, on Good Friday 1787. To ensure the music’s wider circulation he quickly made an arrangement for string quartet, which has become far more popular than the orchestral original. He also authorized a keyboard arrangement by another hand. We can, though, take with several pinches of salt the story that the priest who commissioned The Seven Last Words paid the composer in the form of a cake filled with gold coins.
Haydn was especially proud of the work, writing to his English publisher William Forster that the music was ‘of a kind to arouse the deepest impression on the soul of even the most naïve person’. In both its orchestral and quartet versions The Seven Last Words soon gained favour in England, where Haydn’s friend Charles Burney deemed it ‘perhaps the most sublime composition without words to point out its meaning that has ever been composed’. In 1796, after his second triumphant London visit, the composer made an arrangement for chorus and orchestra that became known in Britain as ‘Haydn’s Passion’.
Haydn was only too aware of the danger of monotony in a sequence of sonata-form slow movements designed to foster contemplation and penitential awe. Yet he rose to the challenge through carefully planned contrasts of tonality (alternating major and minor keys throughout), pulse, metre and texture, while binding together the individual Words with recurrent rhythmic and melodic figures—most obviously the falling thirds, symbolizing supplication or resignation, that saturate the first, third, fifth and sixth Words. The Seven Last Words are the loftiest, most fervently Catholic music Haydn ever wrote, and a magnificent expression of his reverent yet fundamentally optimistic faith. No work of his could be further from the patronizing image of ‘Papa’ Haydn the amiable funster.
Richard Wigmore © 2026
We formed the LHQ specifically to immerse ourselves in this extraordinary music and for many years we did not play the music of any other composer. We were particularly keen to highlight the works that for one reason or another do not fit into the ‘programme opener’ slot traditionally reserved for Haydn. Some of his greatest string quartets were, we felt, neglected because those dark and mysterious, fascinatingly puzzling or simply longer works were deemed unsuitable for the beginning of a concert.
Exploring all these works with period instruments and with the beautiful editions printed during Haydn’s lifetime has been a hugely rewarding experience, often generating more questions than answers. The days we spent sequestered away recording these masterpieces often felt challenging beyond all imagination but there is nothing more enriching than spending time with this music and we wish all listeners the inestimable joy of this experience.
Catherine Manson © 2026
Founder Member, The London Haydn Quartet