Freakish Variations on a “Grand Cadence” Prototype in Haydn's String Quartets

摘要

Notwithstanding the virtues of ensemble balance, decorum, and registral restraint with which the eighteenth-century string quartet is associated, Haydn's works in this medium sometimes call on the first violin to ascend to a musical stratosphere (above a2, an otherwise normal ceiling), often in connection with whimsical variants of a standard formula that has been identified by Robert O. Gjerdingen as a galant-style “grand cadence.” In Haydn's apparent adaptations of the schema, its elements are sometimes subjected to comical exaggerations that have the effect of undermining rather than reinforcing the points of rhetorical climax and structural closure to which they are connected. The overdrawn climaxes and register-crossing leaps typically involved may be heard as object lessons in the dangers of hyperbole—of trying so hard as to become inappropriately absorbed in the exertion itself—and perhaps as part of the composer's effort to define boundaries of taste and propriety by the very act of overreaching at prominent junctures in a musical design. As they cast a withering light on performative extravagance, Haydn's cadence-formula excesses also serve to puncture any illusion of an unmediated aesthetic experience. Ironically, it is just as the first violin takes off into the highest regions that we find ourselves drawn down to earth. And here, through the music's ruptured faade, we may become freshly aware of the composer himself standing before us—not to prohibit us from enjoying the charm of an all-enveloping artistic illusion, but to promote an enlightened awareness of the artifice in which the illusion is grounded.