A Recital by the Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre, violin
Harumi Rhodes, violin
Richard O’Neill, viola
András Fejér, cello

Joseph Haydn

String Quartet in G minor, op. 74, no. 3, “The Rider”

Haydn’s long-time service to the Hungarian princes of the Esterházy family naturally brought him into connection with other aristocratic families of that region. One of the consequences of this connection is that a dozen of his finest and most mature string quartets were composed on commission from the Apponyi family (the six quartets of Opus 71 and Opus 74) or the Erdödy family (the six quartets of Opus 76). Almost without exception, Haydn (like other musicians of his day) published chamber works in groups of six. Since Opus 71 and Opus 74 both contain only three quartets yet were composed in the same year (1793) and were published with a dedication to a single patron, we can certainly consider them together as a single set of quartets.

From very early in his career, Haydn had chosen to allow just one work in a group of six to be in a minor key. For the Opus 71/74 combination, that work is the very last one of the series, which has been nicknamed the “Rider” or the “Horseman” quartet, evidently from some early listener’s notion that the opening musical idea of the first movement suggests some kind of galloping motion; or perhaps it was the vigorous racing of the finale that suggested the name. In any case, it does not come from Haydn himself, and while it allows us a convenient shorthand for referring to this splendid quartet, it also has the unfortunate side-effect of emphasizing the outer movements and drawing attention away from one of Haydn’s greatest and most expressive slow movements.

All six of the Opus 71/74 quartets were composed between Haydn’s first and second visits to London in the early 1790s, a time when his musical language was at its most advanced level of development and also its most popular with musical audiences all over Europe.

The first movement begins with a vigorous opening gesture that ends suddenly after eight bars and never returns again—though a fragment of it (the last two beats of each measure) becomes an accompanimental figure to the triplet theme that soon follows, and the same fragment appears as a feature of the second theme, introduced by the first violin on the D string. The triplets that start near the beginning dominate the musical flow until Haydn begins a remarkable return to the home key and the recapitulation. The sudden disappearance of the triplets draws the listener to the re-emergence of the main theme (though without the “galloping” eight-bar opening). At the very end of the movement, Haydn moves from G minor to G major, which is closer to the key of the movement that is to follow.

This slow movement was extraordinarily popular in Haydn’s day. His publisher issued no fewer than five different arrangements for piano. The choice of E major—a very bright key, and not one that the audience would expect—gives it a special quality from the very first chord. Its shape is basically a very simple one (A-B-A’), but it is full of harmonic surprises that sound almost Romantic in their daring and range, especially after the return to the last A section.

Almost invariably a minuet movement is in the main key of a quartet in Haydn’s work. But in this case, Haydn opens his minuet in G major, the same key that he had used to connect to the slow movement. This links back to the home key of G minor, thus leaving the Largo as a brief visit to another planet. The Trio continues the return to the harmonic home by finally establishing G minor again.

The racing finale is filled with bounce and energy in its main thematic area and offers a perky tune for its second theme, then suggests elaborate contrapuntal play at the beginning of the development. But when the second theme returns in the recapitulation, Haydn takes us to a sunny G major as the “rider” gallops cheerfully home. — © Steven Ledbetter

Leoš Janáček

String Quartet No. 1 after L. N. Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata”

Human empathy is a hallmark of the music of Leoš Janáček, not only in his superb operas, where we learn the torment of Jenůfa or of the centuries-old Emilia Marty (in The Makropoulos Case), but even in the normally abstract world of the string quartet. Janáček wrote this first mature string quartet in just over a week, from October 30 to November 7, 1923, under the inspiration of Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata, which had in turn been inspired by Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A, Opus 47, dedicated to the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.

In Tolstoy’s tale, the married heroine is seduced largely through the expressive powers of Beethoven’s music—or at least her husband is convinced that this is what happened, though he has no evidence beyond his own jealous fantasies. In the end she is killed by her husband for her supposed infidelity, an event that Tolstoy seems to feel is justified.

Janáček was shocked at this attitude of violence toward women, and he wrote his string quartet as a kind of protest. The quartet has the traditional four movements. Though it would be a mistake to try to “follow” Tolstoy’s story too closely in Janáček’s music, the thematic ideas are surely inspired by the characters and events in the novel.

The opening Adagio presents a yearning, sighing melodic gesture against a tremolo that seems to indicate the heroine’s passionate desire, which is to lead to tragedy. A recurring motor rhythm in the background may well represent a train in motion (Tolstoy frames his story as a narration taking place on a train), an idea that had already occurred to Janáček when, in 1908, he attempted to translate the story into a piano trio—but that work is lost, so we cannot tell if it contributed actual material to the quartet.

The second movement opens with a rather foppish figure in the viola, seeming to suggest the supposed seducer, followed by more emotionally laden themes no doubt connected with the heroine. Passionate tension builds but suddenly breaks off, only to recur again. Each sudden breaking-off of the intense music suggests that the unwary husband has arrived, breaking the emotional build-up.

The third movement begins with a duet between violin and cello, playing in canon a figure that might well be derived from Beethoven’s violin sonata.

The final movement is a complicated assembly of materials again changing moods from hushed, breathless suspension to strong emotional outbursts. It reintroduces the opening sigh, but leads ultimately to catastrophe and a final reminiscence. — © Steven Ledbetter

Ludwig van Beethoven

String Quartet in C major, op. 59, no. 3

ollowing the completion of the Opus 18 quartets, Beethoven avoided the string quartet medium for a time. The gap was not especially long—only about four years—but it was momentous for Beethoven’s creative development. Those four years saw the creation of the Eroica Symphony, which marked the opening of the floodgates. Never again was Beethoven to be so prolific, turning out symphonies, concertos, quartets, and an opera, along with many other works, all projected on a scale much larger than before.

Until recently it was always the middle period that people referred to when they spoke of Beethoven’s style; the early works were too much influenced by his forebears, it was said, while the late ones were too bizarre and récherché. Even today, though we recognize the authentic Beethoven behind the masks of all three periods, we often feel that his middle period works are individual in a way not always true earlier.

Composition of the Opus 59 quartets occupied Beethoven in 1805–06, during which years he also composed the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Appassionata Sonata, and Fidelio (in its first incarnation as Leonore). These three quartets have often been compared with the Eroica Symphony and, rightly or not, their taut muscularity generally symbolizes our concept of what is Beethovenian. The first two quartets include Russian melodies, chosen by Beethoven to honor the dedicatee, Count Andreas Kyrillovich Razumovsky. The third quartet of the set lacks a specific Russian reference.

A composer writing a quartet in C major with a slow introduction featuring mystifying and dissonant suspended harmonies cannot fail to call up the ghost of Mozart, and this quartet does indeed recall the Dissonant Quartet of the earlier master at least in its opening measures, which make musical puns with Beethoven’s favorite chord of ambiguity, the diminished seventh. The Allegro vivace gets underway with a two-note rhythmic figure consisting of pickup and downbeat rising stepwise, a figure that becomes nearly ubiquitous in the movement to follow. The chords that support this figure punctuate interjections by the first violin taking off in solo flight. (The concerto-like flashiness of some of the soloistic writing calls to mind the fact that Beethoven was heavily involved in the composition of concertos immediately before and after the Opus 59 quartets: the third through fifth piano concertos, the concerto for violin, and the Triple Concerto all appeared within a year or two of this quartet.)

The second movement, in A minor, should be slow but not too slow; Beethoven modifies the marking Andante con moto with the additional specification “quasi Allegretto.” This movement is filled with soulful Russian-inspired qualities, perhaps to make up for Beethoven’s choice not to include a Russian folk song in this score. In any case, the hints of modal themes and scales in this extended movement may very well have been his idea of what Russian folk music sounded like.

By way of contrast, the movement that follows is a squarely phrased minuet, a decidedly old-fashioned genre employed here as a buffer between the somber minor-key weight of the slow movement and the vigorous energy of the finale.

The last movement is one of Beethoven’s most vigorously pushy, even hectoring quartet movements, built on a racing fugato designed to return at the recapitulation. The emphatic buildup to climaxes (sometimes rudely undercut, other times allowed to grow to completion) obviously recalls the triumphant C-major conclusion of another work of those years—the Fifth Symphony. As elsewhere in his quartet output, Beethoven here strains the rhetorical possibilities of the medium to the limit to close in a burst of glory with the return of the fugato, now enriched by the addition of new counterpoint. — © Steven Ledbetter

In recognition of its fiftieth anniversary, the world-renowned Takács Quartet was recently the subject of an in-depth profile by the New York Times and featured on the cover of Strad magazine. Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), Richard O’Neill (viola) and András Fejér (cello) are excited about upcoming performances throughout the U.S. and Europe. The Takács are associate artists at London’s Wigmore Hall. Other European appearances include the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Konzerthaus Berlin, Florence, Bologna, and Rome. The Takács has recorded for Hyperion since 2005. The Takács released two anniversary season albums in 2025 for Hyperion Records to glowing reviews. Flow by Ngwenyama, composed for the ensemble, was followed by an album of piano quintets by Dvořák and Price with Marc André Hamelin. Full details of all recordings can be found in the recordings section of the Quartet’s website. The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai, and András Fejér while all four were students. The group received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. The members of the Takács Quartet are Christoffersen Fellows and have been artists in residence at the University of Colorado Boulder since 1986. Members of the Takács Quartet are the grateful beneficiaries of an instrument loan by the Drake Foundation and are grateful to be Thomastik-Infeld Artists