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composition
Quartetto E-dur : Arrangement for guitar and piano / Franz Joseph Haydn, arranged by Kees Arntzen
Other authors:
Arntzen, Kees
(Orchestrator)
Haydn, Joseph
(Composer)
Description:
Since many years, the library of Augsburg in Germany has kept a particular manuscript. It dates from the XVIIIth century and is a quartet written by a certain 'Mr Hayden’, for violin, viola, violoncello and lute. In the twenties of the previous century, the German luteplayer Hans Dagobert Bruger took it for an original composition by Franz Joseph Haydn, with an obligatory part for lute. However, it was soon found out that a contemporary lute afficionado had adapted a pre-existing string quartet by Haydn (in E major, op. 2. nr. 2).
That final verdict caused some disappointment, yet the combination of strings with a plucked string instrument turned out to be a happy match, as the ‘guitar-quartets’ of Haydn’s Italian contemporary Luigi Boccherini had already proved. So my former tutor at the Vienna ‘Hochschule für Musik’ prof. Karl Scheit was justified when he arranged Brugers edition from 1924 into a modernized version with the guitar, now more prevailing over the
accompanying strings.
Since the revival of early music, copies of early instruments have become abundant and there is a variety of fortepiano copies available. Therefore it seemed a worthwhile project to arrange Karl Scheit’s edition once again, this time in the form of a playable version for guitar and fortepiano. A combination that sounds exceedingly well and offers new opportunities for Haydn's masterwork.
We re-transposed the piece to the original key of E major rather than keeping the D major of Bruger’s and Scheit’s adaptations but all in all this new edition rests on the many useful ideas that Karl Scheit proposed in his edition from 1959. He turned the obligatory lute-part that follows the bass-line almost continuously into a dominating and demanding guitarpart which takes over many musical lines from the 1st (and sometimes 2nd) violins, thereby supplying its own bass.
We wish to thank the Viennese editor Doblinger for licensing this new keyboard version of the piece.
With so many different sources available it becomes difficult to make a choice, but I hope this edition provides a useful and accessible version that strikes a balance between the original string quartet and the suggestions of Bruger and Scheit. In some places, especially in the menuets, we could not resist the temptation of a casual ornamentation or an added imitating voice.
Kees Arntzen
(translation with the help of Elizabeth Bruggenkamp)