Haydneum Concerts in Eszterháza – Salomon String Quartet Haydn-Pleyel recital

‘A certain Baron Furnberg had an estate  in Weinzierl, several stages from Vienna; from time to time he invited  his parish priest, his estate manager, and Albrechtsberger (a brother of the well-known contrapuntist) in order to have a little music. Furnberg asked Haydn to compose something that could be played by these four friends of the art.’ – wrote Georg August Griesinger, claiming that this was how the shared career of one of the greatest composers in the second half of the 18^th century and the string quartet began.

Griesinger had a good personal relationship with Haydn in the final stage of the composer’s life; however, he almost certainly dated the birth of the first string quartet too early regardless. The pieces were undoubtedly written a few years later, in the middle of the 1750s (not when the composer was eighteen years old) but this could have very well still happened under the patronage of baron Furnberg. Haydn also did not create his 68 string quartet pieces continuously but in groups, organising them into significant series such as the Op. 20 ‘Sun’ quartets (products of the 1770s), or the Op. 33 cycle from 1781, which left a deep impression on Mozart, or the Op. 76 series of six string quartet pieces dedicated to Count Erdődy, including well-known works such as the ones bearing the nicknames ‘Fifths’, ‘Emperor’, and ‘Sunrise’. The Quartet D Minor (Op. 42) falls between these two series (1785), more or less at the same time when Haydn’s former student, Ignaz Pleyel, who decades later founded an excellent piano workshop in Paris, published his Op. 2 cycle in 1784.