A Reader's Guide to Haydn's Early String Quartets.(Review)

By William Drabkin.(Reader's Guides to Musical Genres, 1.) Westport, Gonn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. [x, 186 p. ISBN 0-313-30173-5.$69.50.]

Despite their undeniable importance in the history of the genre, Joseph Haydn's early string quartets remain little known AND rarely performed. For this reason, the decision to open the new series Reader's Guides to Musical Genres with a study of these works is particularly appropriate. Yet the title's promise of a "reader's guide" is to some extent misleading, since over half of William Drabkin's book focuses specifically on the six quartets of Haydn's opus 20, which the author regards as "the culmination of an intensive period of quartet composition between 1769 and 1772" (p. vii).

Drabkin includes an analysis of music examples selected from the twenty-two string quartets preceding opus 20 in a broader discussion in chapter 2, "The Anatomy of the Quartet." Here, in his attempt to build a general theory of the quartet as an autonomous genre, he identifies some of its typical textural procedures, tracing the most significant influences of the symphony and the trio sonata on its evolution. Nevertheless, by emphasizing only the textural aspect of this influence important as it is, the author risks oversimplification, especially in view of the complex problems related to the origins of the new genre.

In spite of the author's claim that "all great works must be studied in context" (p. vii), the reader will not find here a historical framework for these pieces. The context to which Drabkin refers is essentially limited to analysis of Haydn's own output, with few examples from later com posers. Concentrating his efforts on an analytical approach, Drabkin deliberately takes for granted not only the biographical and historical circumstances surrounding Haydn's early production, but also the definition of the specific stylistic and structural traits of the quartet's ancestors. Nonetheless, his investigation of the textural devices provides many insights. Drabkin considers "antiphonal textures," the rhetorical use of "unison writing," the differentiation of "registral space," the increasing inclepen ...