Joseph Haydn’s opus 33 quartets are most often referred to as the ‘Russian Quartets’, because they were dedicated to Grand Duke Paul, a future tsar of Russia. Of the six works in the cycle, the String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 33 No. 2 (‘The Joke’), has gained particular popularity, owing its intriguing nickname to a witty device that Haydn introduced in the rondo finale. In the final bars of this passage, styled as a lively tarantella, the melody ‘dies away’ several times, playing with the expectations of the audience, who prematurely prepare to reward the performers with thunderous applause. The final ‘breath’ is not brought about by a fermata and a slowing of the tempo, nor by deceptive quasi-endings, which turn out to be general pauses four times, after which the melody returns from its temporary absence.
The stage career of Grażyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 4 began in Belgium. The work won First Prize in a composition competition in Liège, where it was also first performed, on 21 September 1951. It became the most popular of the Bacewicz’s seven string quartets, and owes its success partly to its combining of neoclassical form and folklore: critics discerned motifs from Polish folk dances in all three movements, and Bacewicz herself agreed with those observations. The work’s narrative gives the audience no respite: there are many colouristic effects, contrasts and sudden ‘twists and turns’, and the rondo finale discreetly balances between an optimistic oberek full of boundless energy and a melancholic kujawiak. The oberek also conceals the rumblings of a somewhat ominous tarantella between the lines.
The rhythms of the tarantella, clearly marked by the symbolism of the dance of death, become the driving force behind the finale of Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (‘Death and the Maiden’). Written in 1824, the piece owes its name to the variation in the second movement, in which the composer used a melody from his own song, written seven years earlier to the words of Matthias Claudius, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’.
Grzegorz Zieziula