Quartettmusik in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

Looking back on the period around 1800, Eduard Hanslick confirmed that the string quartet was the favoured genre for private music-making in Vienna at this time: ‘practically every music-loving family gathered together their [string] quartet of amateurs, mostly on a given day of the week’ (Eduard Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna, 1869; Vienna, vol.i), p.202). Close friends joined the family group, and others might be invited because of their musical connections. Musical newcomers to the city with good connections could also expect to join such parties. Thus it was that the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, who lived in Vienna from 1783 to 1787 and became a close friend of Mozart, found himself at an evening quartet party in 1784 in the home of English composer Stephen Storace, at which a string quartet consisting of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Johann Baptist Wanhal supposedly performed. I say ‘supposedly’ because Kelly’s Reminiscences, in which he describes this quartet party, were written some four decades after the fact (1826), and doubt has been cast on the veracity of Kelly’s statements (R. Graves, ‘The comic operas of Stephen Storace’, The Musical Times, xcv/1340 (1954), pp.530–32). Nonetheless, this type of event—a quartet party with a small number of talented participants—was the norm rather than the exception in Mozart's Vienna.