Joined
·
9,927 Posts
No. This-he established the form's structural and musical hallmarks.
was something that pretty much everyone was doing in the 1760s-70s. What evidence is there they all learned it from Haydn?That "form" would, for the most part, consist of four movements:
1. An Opening movement in sonata form,
2. A slower, more lyrical movement (or perhaps a set of theme and variations)
3. A minuet or scherzo, most likely in 3/4 time (or a variation such as 9/8 or 6/8 time).
4. A fast rondo with contrasting sections.
And writing a string quartet didn't really require a very different technique from writing a symphony, serenade, divertimento, notturno, or other string ensemble works (in terms of part-writing and form). Please reconsider my post, #412.
Mara Parker, who claims to have examined over 650 string quartet works from 1750-1797 (
(2018)
"As so much scholarship is devoted to Mozart and Haydn at the expense of other composers, I wanted to avoid this pitfall as much as possible."
"Hickman criticizes the developmental approach, stating that the idea that Haydn invented the string quartet and single-handedly advanced the genre is based on only a vague notion of the true history of the eighteenth-century genre. In a number of articles, Hickman argues for the recognition of various types of quartet, each of which can be related to and distinguished from each other, and whose popularity and prominence rises and falls."
"The string quartet of the second half of the eighteenth century is often presented as a medium which underwent a logical progression from first-violin dominated homophony to the conversation among four equal participants. To a certain extent, this holds true if one restricts oneself to the works of Haydn and Mozart, and some of their contemporaries. My own research initially led to me believe this be to a provable and convincing argument. Once I began examining the actual works, however, I realized my assumptions were continuously being challenged, and that things were not nearly as nice and tidy as I had expected. Increasingly, I found numerous exceptions to my model and it was not long before I realized that my hypothesis was simply wrong."
I still don't know why they do that. (Maybe to make some composers seem more "significant" than others?)
Cliff Eisen wrote that, - in the dedication letter of certain works Mozart dedicated to a certain contemporary of his, Mozart wrote "They are, indeed, the fruit of a long and laborious study".
Actually, the dedication letter was originally written by Mozart in Italian, and Mozart's original writing for that part reads "Essi sono, è vero il frutto di una lunga, e laboriosa fatica". ("fatica" means "endeavor" or "effort"). So Eisen cleverly twisted Mozart's word, "endeavor", to "study", to make it seem like Mozart actually seriously studied the contemporary's works (as a crucial step before writing his own), even though there's no actual evidence of that. (Eisen, in his writing, actually uses the twisted sentence to support his claim Mozart did.)
There are other similar writings by guys like Landon (titled "What X Taught Mozart"), Greenberg. They fabricate at every opportunity - "Mozart always said he learned how to write [works of a certain genre] from X", and similarly nonsensical fantasies such as "Mozart never had grasp on 'independence of 4-part voices' in instrumental music before he studied X's works."