Joseph Haydn

String Quartets op. 54 1-3

The culture of piano-duet arrangements begins in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, the great epoch of domestic bourgeois music-making, with its easy availability of decent instruments for every front parlour or gilded salon. All the way from the Wittgenstein Palace in Vienna with its eight grand pianos, to the uprights in the suburban best-rooms of Europe and beyond; and above all, in the musical heartlands of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. Transcriptions poured from the presses: four-hand versions of symphonies by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn were, with the rarity of orchestral concerts outside major centres, the equivalent of the radio, the 78, the LP, the CD in more recent times. The whole endeavour was at bottom a means - to close acquaintance, to involvement in the actual notes by making them for yourself: the thrill of feeling favourite passages under your own ten fingers, compounded at its best by disciplined chamber-music collaboration in a play of mutual response not unworthy of the originals. In all this burgeoning culture of duet arrangements (in which the house of Peters took the principal part) Haydn as always throughout the 19th century comes a poor fourth after Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Favourite symphonies (numbered 1-20 though almost all of them are late) were done, and Peters got some way with the string quartets (again in no particular order, putting picturesqueness and popularity first). Of the 80-odd works they managed 15. Coverage began with all three of op. 54, to take in the second three of op. 64, all three of op. 74, and all six of op. 76. They are made available again, sitting alongside Professor Robin Holloway's newly published arrangements of opp. 20 and 33, the isolated miniature op. 42, all six of op. 50, the three of op. 55, the first three of op. 64, the three op. 71, and the two of op. 77. For the bi-centennial of Haydn's death Professor Holloway also fulfilled a long-held intention of "framing" the two movements of the incomplete op. 103 between a Prologue and Epilogue based on Haydn's late part song Der Greis.