GRAND ROMANCE

The Op. 33 string quartets, of which there are six, are often dubbed the “Russian” quartets, because they are dedicated to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia. No. 1 is the only one in a minor key and exhibits the freedom of form that Haydn had already adopted in his Op. 20 set. The ten-year gap between the two sets were spent directing the music for 50 operas at the Esterhazy palace in Vienna, 5 of which were his own compositions; there was also a young Italian singer named Luigia Polzelli who may have served as a distraction! In any case, Haydn announced the Op. 33 quartets as “written in a new and special way, for I have not composed any for ten years”, and they are considered to be works of yet more masterful confidence.

The string septet is from Strauss’s last work for the stage, the opera Cappricio, composed in 1942. The opera takes the form of a series of elegant salon conversations that explore the question of what is more important, the words or the music to an opera. The septet begins the opera as both a prelude to the action and as the first topic of conversation, and is written in the late Romantic style of the 1880s and 1890s.

Enescu wrote his Octet for strings in C major, Op. 7, over a span of a year and a half, completing it in 1900. He wrote of the challenge of its huge form, “I wore myself out trying to work a piece of music divided into four segments of such length that each of them was likely at any moment to break. An engineer launching his first suspension bridge over a river, could not feel more anxiety than I felt when I set out to darken my paper.”

The Octet is considered one of the few works that is a worthy successor to Mendelssohn’s celebrated Octet Op. 20.

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