Kodaly 4tet - Haydn-String Quartets Op 3 Nos 3 - 6 [CD]

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) — Romanus Hoffstetter ? (1742-1815)String Quartets Op. 3, Nos. 3-6The question of the authenticty of Haydn’s so-called Op. 3 Quartets has engaged the attention of scholars since the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly every leading Haydn specialist from C.F.Pohl to H.C.Robbins Landon has published an opinion on the subject and it says something for the intractable nature of the problem that there is still no common agreement. Haydn himself is not a great deal of help in the matter. The works were omitted from the Entwurf-Katalog, the running catalogue of his works he kept from 1765 until after the London visits, but found their way into the Haydn-Verzeichnis prepared in 1805 under the composer’s direct supervision by his faithful factotum Joseph Elssler. Haydn also accepted the six works as genuine in the edition of his complete string quartets published by Ignaz Pleyel. Unfortunately, both strands of evidence are not beyond questioning. The inclusion of the quartets in the Haydn-Verzeichnis may have been based on their appearance three years earlier in the Pleyel edition. Pleyel claimed in his accompanying catalogue of the complete quartets that all the works had been avowed by the author but László Somfai thinks it very unlikely that Haydn ever saw the words ‘avoués par l’autheur’. The meagre bibliographical evidence has been painstakingly sifted and the works themselves subjected to every kind of analytical technique known to musicology. Haydn’s authorship still remains doubtful but so too does that of Pater Romanus Hoffstetter the most commonly favoured alternative. The jury is still out and likely to remain out unless a sensational discovery is made which settles the matter once and for all. 	The six quartets which comprise Op. 3 were published in Paris by Bailleux in 1777. If Haydn were the author it is extremely unlikely that the works were composed much later than 1764 although at least one scholar has suggested a composition date in the early 1770s, which seems highly unlikely. Unusually for Haydn, the works survive in the printed edition only, which casts additional doubt on their authenticity. Furthermore, Robbins Landon and Alan Tyson discovered traces of an inscription on the parts which clearly indicated that the plates originally bore an attribution to ‘Signor Hofstetter’. From this they drew the not unreasonable conclusion, given the dubious business ethics of many eighteenth-century publishers, that Bailleux replaced Hoffstetter’s name with Haydn’s in order to boost potential sales. Thus, the real composer of the Op. 3 quartets was undoubtedly ‘Signor Hofstetter’ — Pater Romanus Hoffstetter. Neat though this solution, is it is not entirely unassailable. Neither does it prove beyond reasonable doubt that the quartets really are by Hoffstetter. To do so it would be necessary to prove that they could not possibly be by a