Haydn completed two of the pieces for Lobkowitz in 1799 (G major and F major, published by Artaria in Vienna in 1802 as Op. 77, No. 1 and No. 2, with a dedication to the Prince), but then broke off the series to take up the enormous labor on The Seasons , the successor to The Creation, which so sapped his strength that he was unable to finish any more of the quartets. The two quartets of Op. 77 were the last in the incomparable series of instrumental creations stretching over half a century with which Haydn had brought the quintessential genres of musical Classicism to their perfected states.

The String Quartet in G major, Op. 77, No. 1 not only culminates the experience Haydn had gained in some eighty previous works in the genre, but also presages in its internal movements the expressive vistas of encroaching Romanticism. The opening Allegro, buoyant and elegantly polished, focuses principally on a single theme, a teasing little ditty in dotted rhythmic figures initially proposed by the first violin. This subject also serves as the second theme, though a short phrase of lyrical character is introduced for contrast. Both the dotted rhythm motive and the lyrical phrase figure in the development section, into which Haydn inserted one of his favorite devices—a “false recapitulation,” which implies that the expressive and formal stability of the movement’s concluding section has been reached only to send the listener on further motivic and harmonic adventures. The true recapitulation is condensed by the excision of the earlier lyrical phrase.

The Adagio, one of Haydn’s most touching slow movements, achieves an intensity of introspective expression that looks forward to the music of Schubert and, in its suave but daring harmonic flights, to Schumann. Though it hints at traditional sonata structure, the movement’s form has been compared to a free passacaglia because of the frequent returns of its opening motive. The third movement is labeled “Menuetto,” but it is really a fully developed scherzo, a form that had gained considerable currency in fashionable Viennese musical circles following the publication of Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios in 1795. Haydn’s example is one of the most ferocious of all Classical scherzos, bristling with demonic energy, flying leaps and extreme registers. The finale is a sparkling sonata based on an irresistible melody that Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon called “Haydn’s farewell to the world of Eastern European folk music.”

Shaw composed Microfictions , Volume 1 in 2021 for the Miró Quartet, who premiered it on November 14, 2021 at Johns Hopkins University’s Shriver Hall in Baltimore. She wrote, “ Microfictions [Vol. 1] is a set of six short musical stories, in the tradition of imagist poetry and surrealist painting, inspired in part by the work of Joan Miró and the short science fiction of T.R. Darling. Each movement is brief but vivid, with a distinct sonic profile that is inspired by (or, inversely, served as inspiration for) original microfiction stories that are inscribed in the score. One’s interpretation of the stories and of the music can be varied—there is no one right way to connect the sounds and images or ideas. Rather, I hope that the words create an environment for curious listening, and an invitation to imagination. These short texts have been abbreviated in the movement titles listed in the program, but the full texts are:

“I. Under the hot sun, the road signs melted until they were the color of an unrhymed couplet, pointing to cadences left or north.

“II. The photographs smeared into focus one by one, like organ pipes being tuned. Some of the edges and corners were torn, but the tune was still visible.

“III. The summer storm laughed and lilted and shouted until it found a shady spot, beneath an oak’s dappled counterpoint.

“III½. Between the third and fourth movements, the second violinist stood up and said hello to the audience. Everyone was grateful to know which movement they were on.

“IV. The complete taxonomy of verse forms is buried in a cardboard box beneath a chord that fell from grace.

“V. Waking up on the early side that Tuesday, Miró noticed a bird repeating its solitary caption. The clouds nodded to the tempo of an undiscovered Mendelssohn song.

“VI. The mountains folded in among themselves, as the day grew on. Their songs could only be heard in heavy fragments, obliquely, from years and miles below.”

Fulfilling the commission for Galitzin, however, did not nearly exhaust the fount of Beethoven’s creativity in the realm of the string quartet. Karl Holz, the composer’s amanuensis and the second violinist in Schuppanzigh’s quartet, which gave the first public performances of Galitzin’s quartets, recorded, “During the composition of the three works for Prince Galitzin, Beethoven was assailed with such an overwhelming flow of ideas that he went against his will, as it were, to write the Quartets in C-sharp minor and F major.” Beethoven began sketching the C-sharp minor Quartet in December 1825, immediately after Op. 130 was completed, and worked on it during the following months at his flat in the Schwarzspanierhaus, near the site of the present Votiv-Kirche. By May 1826, the piece was sufficiently advanced for him to begin offering it to publishers, and he sent inquiries to the firms of Schott in Mainz, Schlessinger in Paris and Probst in Leipzig. The Quartet was finished in July, and accepted by Schott the following month, but the final details of the score’s publication were not fully settled until March 24, 1827, just two days before Beethoven’s death.

The C-sharp minor Quartet may well be Beethoven’s boldest piece of musical architecture—seven movements played without pause, six distinct main key areas, 31 tempo changes, and a veritable encyclopedia of Classical formal principles. So adventurous and unprecedented was this structural plan that Maynard Solomon allowed, “Beethoven may be regarded as the originator of the avant-garde in music.” Though it passes beyond the Fifth Symphony, Fidelio, and Egmont in its harmonic sophistication and structural audacity, this Quartet shares with those works the sense of struggle to victory, of subjecting the spirit to such states of emotional unrest as strengthen it for winning ultimate triumph.

The opening movement is a spacious, profoundly expressive fugue which, according to Richard Wagner, “reveals the most melancholy sentiment in music.” J.W.N. Sullivan waxed almost metaphysical in concluding that this is “the most superhuman piece of music Beethoven ever wrote. It is the completely unfaltering rendering into music of what we can only call the mystic vision.” The following Allegro offers emotional respite as well as structural contrast. A tiny movement (Allegro moderato—Adagio ), just eleven measures in the style of a ruminative recitative, serves as the bridge to the expressive heart (and formal center) of the Quartet, an expansive set of variations that seems almost rapt out of quotidian time. The fifth movement alternates two strains of buoyantly aerial music: a feather-stitched arpeggiated theme previewed by the cello and stated in full by the first violin, and a more lyrical motive first given in octaves by the violins above the playful accompaniment of the lower strings. The short, introspective Adagio in chordal texture is less an independent movement than an introduction and foil for the finale, whose vast and densely packed sonata form (woven with references to the fugue theme of the first movement) summarizes the overall progress of this stupendous Quartet in its move from darkness and struggle toward light and spiritual renewal.