Music and Letters

As well as being a musicologist, Mara Parker is a performer, a cellist whose curiosity about the string quartet in the second half of the eighteenth century has led her to explore over 650 works by contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart. Bibliographical control of the sources, especially the authenticity and chronology of the music, and broad issues of cyclic and movement structure are not her concerns. Instead her performing instincts have encouraged her to evaluate how prolific composers of quartets such as Beecke, Boccherini, Brunetti, Cambini, Dittersdorf, Gyrowetz, Krommer, Pleyel, and Vanhal treated the texture of the medium. Certainly, texture and sonority are only occasional concerns of modern commentators on music of this period, and one welcomes an approach that privileges such elements. However, the book does not fulfil this initial promise.

In an effort to control the impressive, not to say daunting, number of quartets that she has examined, Parker divides the music into four types, labelled 'the lecture', 'the polite conversation', 'the debate', and 'the conversation'. The preface stresses that 'these categories are in no way derived from contemporary eighteenth-century sources' (p. xi), oddly ignoring an opportunity to relate the approach to a fundamental aesthetic concern of the period—music as speech.

But there are more basic problems with Parker's categories, ones that mar the book as a whole. First, the differences between the last three of her categories are attenuated and difficult to maintain. Second, while she talks in the preface about 'works' being in each of these categories, the chapters devoted to each one of these types list, in the main, individual movements from works; further, as the author herself repeatedly admits, many of these movements, whether by Haydn or by a secondary composer such as Krommer (see pp. 178-9), move between these a priori categories. As a theory, 'four types of musical conversation' very soon lacks conviction.

Large tracts of the book consist of descriptions of quartet textures presented in adjacent music examples, often of generous length, with little or no attempt to relate them to other analytical concerns, whether local or large-scale. The broad-brush opening chapters on the historical background present information on the origins of the genre, the differing traditions of performance in Europe, and other aspects of the development of the genre in the eighteenth century but, again, none of this is systematically related to texture. Thus a book that avowedly focuses on texture summarizes but never scrutinizes terms such as quatuor dialogué, quatuor concertant, and quatuor brillant. [End Page 439]

The volume could have done with a stronger editorial hand. Music examples from the middle of movements do not have tempo headings, there is an inconsistent attitude to the indexing of material in footnotes, and there are too many casual errors: both 'Ursala' Lehmann (p. 1) and 'Ursual' Lehmann in the Bibliography (p. 303), Sylvette Milliot is referred to as 'he' (p. 2), missing text in the Koch quotation on page 21, 'Apfelmayr' for 'Asplmayr' (p. 43), 'archtype' for 'archetype' (p. 183), 'measured tremelos' (p. 195), and so on. Most comical, a mix-up in the footnotes on page 289 results in Vanhal's substantial output of quartets being equated with religious mania! [End Page 440]