Ferdinand Hiller string quartet No 1

[Double-A]

My typeset of this work (i.e. the score) is now here.  When everything is finalized it will be posted on IMSLP.

In the mean time those who are interested can look at it and listen to the synthetic realization at the link above.  I'd recommend to read along; the system tends to suppress faster passages and over stresses accompanying voices.  Just expand the score to cover the whole screen, button top right.  Of course this is not more than a first impression.

I find it interesting how different the work is from the almost exactly contemporary Mendelssohn op. 12 and 13--in spite of the identical opus numbers (Hiller and Mendelssohn were friends at the time).  On an older thread we find the opinion:  "Hiller must be re-evaluated."  This quartet IMO confirms the feeling. 

Quartet 2 will follow in due time.

[JimL]

Excellent work!  I'm sure Santo will be glad to snap it up!

[matesic]

It certainly seems to owe little or nothing to Mendelssohn, who by the same age (and a few years earlier) had already produced some of his greatest and most original chamber works. To my ears the first two movements of Hiller's quartet occupy a purely Mozartean sound world, without contributing much that's distinctive, let alone surprising! The andante poco agitato seems to be the most interesting of the four, although I can't help feeling its tread should have more of a 9-in-a-bar feel, so as to avoid giving the impression of a waltz. But I can see that might make the central section with its rather plain melodic progression against pizzicato arpeggios seem rather static. The finale I'm afraid I thought simply dire! By the way, shouldn't that be a Bb in bar 280 of violin I?

I hate to be negative but I've been in a similar situation as yourself when trying to argue the case for Macfarren's and Ellerton's quartets. I was eventually forced to accept that some works really are neglected for good reason!

[Double-A]

Starting with M. 280:  To my ear the natural does not sound incorrect, just surprising--and indeed more interesting than b flat.  The source has a reminder natural sign (technically unnecessary, there is no b flat before in the first violin part) on that note.  It is at least plausible that Hiller wanted it natural and put that sign there. 

Personally I like the minuet best.  It seems a new and interesting way to deal with the good old da capo form:  The minuet (very stately and menuet-ish and old-fashioned for the 1830s) proper reminds in texture bit of Mozart's "Hofmeister quartet" in its rather thick texture with the quavers in the middle voices.  The trio is essentially just rhythm and its parts are not repeated.  The da capo section then is varied by incorporating rhythms from the trio into the accompaniment, making it less dense and more varied than the first time around.  Moreover the harmony wavers forth and back between major and minor in a way I can't remember hearing before.  The key signature says b minor, but the piece starts boldly in B Major.  The second chord is the e-minor triad, the subdominant, but of b minor, not major.  And so it keeps going, also melodically with the sequence e.g. ... g natural - a sharp - b - c sharp - d sharp:  First the augmented second, tell tale sign of the minor scale, then shortly after that the d sharp, the tone that creates the Major third for B Major.  I see this Major - minor mixing in other movements too, e.g. d sharp (suggesting e minor) appears often in the last movement (in G Major).  BTW this last movement starts with the dominant seventh chord, not only not on the tonic, but on a dissonance with a non standard resolution (the seventh upwards).

As to the slow movement:  I think if anything it ought to be even somewhat faster, Hiller calls it poco agitato and I think the sixteenths in the accompanying voices as well as the construction of the melody in short fragments (in the A part) suggest agitato and even anxiety.  You can't make a computer deal with rhythm sensibly, but if playing you would aim at avoiding Waltz elements by playing those sixteenths very flat, not stressing the ones at all, rather getting an even line out of 6 or 12 of them as the case may be and let the first fiddler do the agitato stuff.  I also think that a good violist and violinist can make that melody in the B section sing.  And if the pizzicati temporarily give a Waltz character to it there is nothing wrong with that (when the violin repeats the melody, the other voices bow murmuring quavers in legato and with no discernible dancy-ness).  BTW the repeat of the A section comes varied in a similar way again (with an entirely new line added in the first fiddle).

On the whole I think the quartet has qualities:  Competent and sometimes original writing for the ensemble (the very beginning of the first movement for example with its two parts in horn fifths which are doubled in the lower octave is not something I have heard before), nice part writing, interesting harmony.  If this is enough for it to be successful (and in what context, concerts, recordings or home quartet sessions?) I don't know.  But it seems to me it is quite easy to find works inferior to this when clicking around in IMSLP.

[matesic]

I wouldn't take serious issue with anything you say, but when there are so many pieces out there competing for attention we have to ask, who is a particular piece likely to appeal to? In Hiller's day as compared with our own there must have been many more amateur chamber music groups whose choices were restricted to the "classical" repertoire. Most of them probably weren't interested in stretching the envelope, and would have been satisfied with minor variations on the standard recipe enlivened with odd dashes of spice. For me (and the amateurs I play with) this is no longer enough, and for professional players the criteria of whether a piece is worth playing are governed by whether it will attract a highly discerning public. So in comparison with another very close contemporary, Emilie Mayer, I'm afraid for me on present evidence Hiller just doesn't cut it.  I wasn't very impressed by his third string quartet Op.105 either...

[Double-A]

I am looking at op 105 (from 1865 if memory serves) right now (not that I want to publish the score,  it is already available for players, just for curiosity).  And it seems that in 30 years all that had changed was a much larger scale, other than that the piece is not very much different from no. 1 and the smaller scale makes that one more rather than less attractive, (though the intermezzo of no. 3 with its repeated failing attempts at building a movement is quite witty).
As to what amateurs play I am afraid that while it's true that much of the standard repertoire is wonderful it is also true that a bit more curiosity can't harm.  We played through a whole set of Donizetti once and none of them was as good as the Hiller.  Or, at the special wish of the cellist we played through the entire Dvorak and none of the early ones is worth playing either.  Yet I don't think that was a waste of time.  One learns from failure too.  We also kept trying the Brahms c-minor quartet and never got the second movement together (and the others much more al fresco than one would like).  Sometimes something not quite so good, but also not so hard is enjoyable in a different way.  But this is a different topic and has nothing to do with Hiller.  Where I grew up Mozart was for professionals only, amateurs had to stay with Stamitz or Christian Bach and maybe I haven't completely recovered from this attitude.
Anyway my point is not so much that this quartet is music worth reviving (I doubt I'll ever play it myself), but that Hiller has some individuality as a composer, something that maybe not everyone expected.  Sometimes even good art fails to survive.

[eschiss1]

Isn't there a unplayable doublestop in the viola part, somewhere in either the first or second Hiller quartet? I assume your edition redistributes the chord somehow, though that did not look a simple matter iirc.

[matesic]

Eric's memory is better than mine. I just went looking and found it on page 3 of the Op.13 viola part where he notates a simultaneous low C# and F#.

Of course, I love to explore the unsung repertoire as much as Double-A does. Unfortunately in the first half of the 19th century there seem to be very few neglected quartets that don't leave you feeling you'd rather be playing Haydn, any Haydn. Possible exceptions include Danzi, Romberg and Fesca.

[Alan Howe]

And Reicha!!

[matesic]

Reicha?  Purgatory!!!  Don't tastes differ?

[Double-A]

I hadn't heard of nor observed the unplayable double stop.  By tuning down the G half a tone one could actually play it  .   (One ought not to over-interpret errors like this--there is a parallel fifth in the Brandenburg concertos somewhere after all).  However there are double stops in Hiller's quartets that a violinist probably would rather not have written.  Playable but awkward.

A little surprised at the list of alternative names:  Neither Fesca, Romberg nor Danzi would in my recollection deserve a lot of attention--or if they do Hiller deserves a hearing too (Reicha and especially Onslow have more to show for themselves IMO).  Apart from the fact that they were all born 20 to 30 years before Hiller and belong to the Spohr / C.M. von Weber generation.  Hiller belongs to the Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, even Liszt generation.  (Which also means we don't have all that much sung chamber music from that generation, essentially just Schumann and Mendelssohn.)  The comparison with Emilie Mayer (or Fanny Hensel for that matter) is historically more accurate.  And there I agree and prefer both ladies over Hiller.

[matesic]

Of course in a thread about Hiller it's fatal to introduce the names of other composers, but I'm impressed by the excerpts of Johann Benjamin Gross's (1809-1848) third quartet on editionsilvertrust.com. His first two quartets (1833 and 1837, parts on imslp) might be worth sampling too. In an overview of string quartets of the 1830's Mendelssohn, Spohr and Onslow are clearly the dominant figures, venturing (perhaps a little tentatively) into the romantic era, but can anyone think of a work apart from Mendelssohn's Op.13 suggesting its composer was acquainted with Beethoven?

[Alan Howe]

Tried Reicha's string quartets on Toccata?

[matesic]

I've only heard excerpts of the Reicha quartets on Toccata, which seem to be of just the earliest sets, Op.48 and Op.49. Clearly I should give them a proper chance, but in the case of the Op.49 (one of the few on imslp) it's mainly the appearance of the lower parts that causes my spirits to sink. In Cobbett, Rudolf Felber writes that he eventually became more adept at part-writing. However, Cobbett himself points to the "divergence of opinion which obtains among critics". Good luck to the Kreutzers if they really are going to record all 20. Meanwhile I'm pleased to have played through the second quartet of Johann Benjamin Gross.

[Alan Howe]

Ah, well, you're missing out, then...