When he was the Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II attempted to lure the Italian cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini away from his position in Spain. Three years later, in 1786, when Friedrich was crowned king, he placed Boccherini on the payroll. Boccherini was one of many notable composers to dedicate works to the new king. In 1787 Ignaz Pleyel wrote twelve ‘Prussian’ quartets (b331–333, b334–336, b337–339, b340–342) and Haydn dedicated his Op. 50 set to Friedrich. Later that year, Mozart was commissioned to write his Prussian quartets, Nos 21–23 (k575, k589, k590). Nearly a decade after that, Beethoven travelled to Berlin, where he dedicated his Op. 5 cello sonatas to Friedrich, and most likely played in their premiere performance with the brother of Friedrich's cello instructor, Jean-Louis Duport. Friedrich Wilhelm's ascension to the throne as King of Prussia thus ushered in an incredibly rich period in the history of music.
One of the king's beneficiaries was the Austrian composer and teacher Emanuel Aloys Förster. Known especially for chamber music, he dedicated a set of six quartets to Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1793. Published a year later, Förster's Op. 7 has until recently lacked a modern critical edition. But under the skilful eye of Nancy November, Op. 7 shines in its new edition, published in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era.
November argues that Förster's work should take a new place in the history of this period. Without a proper understanding of Förster's works, our grasp of the string quartet and the classical style as a whole is hampered. November details the implicit connections between Förster's and Haydn's quartets, and describes the close personal relationship between Förster and Beethoven. She notes the downside of this closeness, however, as Beethoven's status has led critics to write about Förster solely in terms of his better-known contemporary. Indeed, this is a problem to which November herself occasionally succumbs. In her introductory note, for example, she presents a gloss of Förster's life up to and including his contact with Beethoven; after this point, however, November's biographical sketch gives way to a survey of Förster's compositional output and neglects even to mention the date of Förster's death in 1823 (see ‘The Composer in Context’, ix–x). The New Grove entry on Förster similarly highlights Beethoven's importance: ‘Förster was an important link between the mature styles of Mozart and Haydn and the early works of Beethoven, and his experiments with form and tonality helped to underscore the equilibrium of the High Classic style’ (Rey M. Longyear, ‘Förster, Emanuel Aloys’, revised by Michael Lorenz, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 9, 104–105).
In the next two sections of her introductory essay, ‘The Music of the Edition’ (x–xiii) and ‘Notes on Performance’ (xiii–xv), November presents some of the notable features of Förster's music. While the ‘experiments with form and tonality’ noted above do play a role in her discussion, the most detailed analysis is devoted to more performative aspects of the music. For example, she notes that the prominence of the cello parts befits the status of their dedicatee's role as a cellist, and points out specific idiosyncratic choices for strings, including registral and timbral oddities. In this case, she traces a family line of influence back to Haydn's Opp. 64, 71 and 74, the latter of which was written in the same year as Förster's Op. 7.
November should be commended for emphasizing these unusual elements of Förster's music. However, she misses opportunities to discuss other, more characteristic aspects of Förster's style. Multiple times in her introductory essay, November mentions Förster's ‘interesting modulations’ without elaborating further. Surely the utterly experimental nature of Förster's tonal practice merits more discussion. The composer's expansive expositions unfold in leisurely fashion, and he often buries a tonal surprise within the new key area. See, for example, the first movement of the second quartet (F major), in which Förster seems to allude to the new key, C major, without ever clearly establishing it. After the transition touches on the relative minor (D minor), C major appears after the medial caesura (V: HC MC, in bar 29). Subsequently, the secondary theme appears in the middle voices, and then it eventually gives way to a three-bar-long prolongation of C major (is this the tonic key? the dominant of the subdominant?) before culminating in an F major chord (bar 45); soon thereafter, this chord is contextualized as the local subdominant, thereby launching a IV–V–I progression (in bars 45–48). Such an experimental tonal process, whether Förster's intention was humorous or otherwise, gives the lie to the perceived rigidity of the classical period.
One might also note Förster's playful approach to the new key in the expositions of his first and third quartets. For example, the exposition of the third quartet includes an almost shocking appearance of a ♭VI chord: about two thirds through the exposition proper, and squarely within the new key area, Förster uses a common-tone modulation to shift from the new key (A major) into ♭VI (F major). There is no subtlety to this gambit: Förster uses extremes in range and dynamics to highlight the modulation, and after three bars this mirage vanishes back into a dominant prolongation, as the new key and exposition come in for a smooth landing.
The first quartet offers a similar tonal device in its first movement. Instead of temporarily derailing the new key, now a ♭VI chord enhances its entrance: see the probable medial caesura in bar 25, the failure of a ‘proper’ secondary theme in the following bars, and then the ♭VI chord in bars 38–42. This entire sequence intensifies the meandering search for the new key – an approach that is not atypical of Förster's expositions. Förster's reliance on thirds-related harmonies as a prolongational device broadly anticipates the evolution of similar compositional techniques in Beethoven and Schubert, and surely deserves more than to be damned with the faint praise of ‘interesting’.
Despite the few omissions detailed here, Nancy November's edition is a model for other similar efforts. Her careful attention to editorial principles is laid out explicitly, but she is not afraid also to assign agency to the performer. The writing itself is lucid, and even colourful, as when she writes that ‘sixteenth-note runs in each instrument – played in turn and in tandem – surge upward through the quartet texture’ (xii). On the opposite side of the ledger, one might wish for a biographical note with more substance or the presence of footnotes instead of endnotes, but these are minor concerns. On the whole, November's edition provides helpful insight into music that influenced, and was influenced by, some of the best-known masters of music in this genre. With it, our knowledge of this genre, period and style is greatly improved.
