Emerson String Quartet:
Farewell Performance,
Alice Tully Hall, New York,
October 21, 2023.
Danish String Quartet,
Richardson Auditorium, Princeton,
November 2, 2023.
LET ME start by making a case for the form itself.
The term is both musical and human, both a score for four musicians and a label for the four people who play it. I can't think of another musical form that is identified with its performers in this way. An orchestra plays symphonies or concertos; a duo plays duets or sonatas; a soloist can play any number of things. Even a trio, depending on its make-up, might play string trios, piano-and-string trios, clarinet-pianoand-string trios…but the group itself is still called just a trio, whatever kind of music it specializes in. Only a string quartet plays string quartets.
The music written tor this combination of two violins, a viola, and a cello was codified, and perhaps even originated, by Joseph Haydn. Since he basically invented the form—and in a massive way, writing sixty-eight string quartets in the course of his life—I doubt the four-member assemblage was a common performance structure in his time. Probably two eighteenthcentury violinists had to get together, ad hoc, with an eighteenth-century violist and an eighteenth-century cellist every time a new Haydn quartet was to be played. Most of this playing, in any case, occurred in royal courts and private houses rather than on a concert stage—that is, what we still call chamber music really took place in a chamber in those days. While this may seem exclusive in certain contexts, it can also be quite freeing in others. During Dmitri Shostakovich's time, for instance,
