# Intricately Contrapuntal String Quartets From The 18th Century NOT by Mozart/Haydn



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

(Feel free to post examples of your choice, btw.)



I. Marcia: Andantino - Allegro molto
II. Menuetto: Allegretto
III. Rondo: Andante
IV. Finale: Lieto assai (theme and variations)

The way the steps and leaps are placed-












MH319/i.












MH319/iii.
It feels "cyclic", though it's not an explicit quotation of themes.

Another thing I've noticed about the work is the way marches are melded in the beginning of the first movement and the end of the final movement. The story has it that, as part of their graduation ceremony, students marched into or out of the University of Salzburg to the sound of the music, (or something like that). This is also why it is thought nowadays that a typical performance of a Mozart divertimento at the time would have started with a preceding march and ended with the same march it started with.


Btw, there have been various string quartets attributed to Haydn; I think the authentic ones are MH299, MH316, MH319, as argued by Dwight Blazin.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Polyphony, once thought to have been resurrected by Haydn only in his op.20 (1772), was in fact a fairly regular feature of chamber music during this period. Fugues for string quartet came into fashion in Vienna after the middle of the 18th century. In addition to Michael Haydn, composers such as Matthias Georg Monn, Johann Karl Ordonez, Johann Albrechtsberger, Florian Gassmann, and Joseph Kraus come to mind. To give but one example, in Gassmann’s String Quartet in C Major Op. 2 No. 2*,* an austere contrapuntal Andante with some odd moments of chromaticism form the beginning. The subsequent Allegro has a fugue-like structure – a conscious bow to the masters of the late baroque. The third movement is a Menuetto-Trio in a simple and folk song-like tone. The final movement (Allegro) takes up the fugue-like, sequence-saturated motion of the second movement again. The piece can be found on YouTube played by the Sojka Quartet.


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