Franz Weiss (1778–1830) remains one of the least studied composer-performers of early nineteenth-century Vienna. Today, he is remembered primarily as the violist in various prominent string quartets, including ensembles that worked alongside Ludwig van Beethoven and premiered many of his compositions. In the 1790s, while still a teenager, Weiss joined the celebrated Knabenquartett sponsored by Prince Karl Lichnowsky (a group whose other members included the violinists Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Louis Sina and the cellist Nikolaus Kraft), and in 1807 he joined the quartet employed by Count Andrey Razumovsky (a group also led by Schuppanzigh). That quartet disbanded in 1816, after which Weiss played in quartets led by violinists Franz Pecháček and Joseph Böhm before forming another quartet with Schuppanzigh in 1823. Throughout this nearly four-decade career as a chamber musician, Weiss wrote music as well, including two string quartets dedicated to Razumovsky and published as Op. 8 in 1814 by the Viennese firm S. A. Steiner. These were marketed as creative responses to Beethoven’s own ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets of 1808; Weiss’s dedication page even reproduces the design of Beethoven’s, as if to advertise the parity of the two opuses. Although Weiss’s compositions met with some success during his lifetime, receiving praise in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, his works have received minimal attention from modern-day scholars and performers, who generally view Weiss merely as a supporting character in Beethoven’s reception history.

Even so, recent efforts have begun to address this neglect. In 2023 A-R Editions printed a critical edition of Weiss’s two ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets, Op. 8, edited by Mark Ferraguto, who has also published a companion essay in String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe, edited by Nancy November (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2022, 130–169). Building on Ferraguto’s research, a world-premiere recording of Weiss’s Op. 8 has been released by the Toronto-based, period-instrument Eybler Quartet – indeed, this may be the first recording not only of these quartets but of any of Weiss’s compositions. Although the recording is a self-contained product that stands apart from the edition, it is clear that both are the fruits of a long collaboration between Ferraguto and the group: Ferraguto wrote the informative and engaging liner notes for the recording, the quartet’s members are thanked in the edition for having annotated drafts of the parts, and the whole endeavour, an exemplary model for the interplay of musicology and performance, was awarded the 2024 Noah Greenberg Award by the American Musicological Society.

There are many reasons this release will interest readers of Eighteenth-Century Music. Although numerous recordings over the past three decades have featured piano sonatas, symphonies, sacred works and even operas by non-canonical composers from the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the string-quartet discography from this era continues to be dominated by Beethoven and Schubert. One obvious point of interest, then, is that the present recording fleshes out our understanding of the Viennese quartet repertoire during a historical moment that is at once pivotal to modern-day interest in the genre and yet in which familiar masterpieces represent only the tiniest sliver of the music that contemporaries were consuming. This could be said of any recording of early nineteenth-century quartets as well; but more specific to Weiss’s ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets are experimental features that make the set a vivid essay in contemporary performing techniques. Weiss uses a remarkably wide range of dynamic indications, from ppp all the way to fff, and a wide variety of accent markings including not only the standard fz, sf, >, fp and ten., but also more evocative markings such as ten.>, ffp, fzp and pfz. He also calls frequently for pizzicato, multiple stops and – for the first time in the history of the string quartet, as Ferraguto notes in the booklet – harmonics (flageolet tones). In light of Weiss’s creative attitude toward string technique and timbre, a recording such as the Eybler Quartet’s is not only a document of lesser-known repertoire, but also an illuminating demonstration of the sounds and expressive devices available to virtuoso chamber players in the early nineteenth century.

Even beyond such marked sonic effects, the technical demands these quartets pose are considerable, and the Eybler Quartet deserve credit for tackling music that may lie beyond the reach of less intrepid period performers. Weiss’s violin writing ascends to the upper limits of the instrument’s range, with the first violin regularly reaching c⁴ and once even pressing further to d⁴ and e♭⁴, a register generally reserved for virtuoso showpieces in music of this era. The same applies to the cello part, which is sometimes voiced above the other instruments. But such passages present no discernible challenge to first violinist Julia Wedman and cellist Margaret Gay, who navigate their parts with great technical command and expressive sensibility. There are also many extended contrapuntal passages requiring detailed coordination among all four players, and many ethereal modulations to far-flung tonalities in which the group manages some beautiful shifts of colour. The playing throughout is full and generous, energetic and affecting, and the musical vision is well conceived. The interpretation is especially effective when the quartet brings out the intimacy of the music, exploring quieter dynamics and unhurried tempos. In the first movement of Quartet No. 1, for instance, they take Weiss’s ‘Allegro ma non troppo’ as an invitation to luxuriate, and as a result do justice to the lyricism of the writing, highlighting passing dissonances that might otherwise speed by, and emphasizing the introspective topical states the music inhabits. Finally, the group is to be commended for making liberal use of portamento slides, which, though a staple of nineteenth-century string playing described in numerous sources, are rarely heard in modern-day performances outside of a few notable cases.

Despite these many strengths, there are also some weaknesses in the performance – if not necessarily in the playing itself, then in the interpretative outlook and approach to parsing the music and notation. The quartet’s tendency towards intimacy and introspection, though highly successful at times, is occasionally less convincing. The Minuet of Quartet No. 1 is marked ‘Allegro’, and yet the Trio section (given no new tempo indication) is here played significantly more slowly than the Minuet. In this case, the tempo may not fully serve the music, whose assertive leaps, grace notes, staccato articulations and sf accents all call to mind a jolly Ländler rather than the plaintive song heard in the recording. The same applies to the finale of Quartet No. 1, marked ‘Allegro’ but played with an intimate, often quiet and crystalline tone ill-suited to the boisterousness of Weiss’s writing.

The Eybler Quartet also falters in translating the wide-ranging dynamic and articulation markings into convincing musical gestures. Given Weiss’s unusual notational precision, I am disappointed to report that a surprisingly narrow range of dynamics is actually audible in this recording. Many passages marked forte (for instance, throughout the last movement of Quartet No. 1) are played with a delicacy comparable to the mezzo forte or even piano playing heard in earlier movements. Elsewhere, particularly in Quartet No. 2, some pianissimo passages sound as full as other movements’ forte passages. To be sure, the lack of dynamic range may have more to do with audio engineering, mastering or speaker quality than with the performance itself; yet dynamics are not simply a matter of relative loudness but also of tone colour, and in a similar manner the differences between ppp, pp and p, and between mf, f, ff and fff, are not always well defined. Nor are dynamics the only notational device insufficiently digested in this interpretation. Accents are generally inaudible, particularly in fast movements and in inner voices (see, for instance, various passages between bars 94 and 124 in the third movement of Quartet No. 2); and the many hairpins used throughout these works, particularly in the first movement of Quartet No. 2, are likewise glossed over. Historical sources describe hairpins not in terms of dynamic alteration (they are distinct from the verbal directives ‘cresc’. and ‘dim’.) but as devices that may either indicate vibrato or shift a phrase’s tactus, rhetorical emphasis or even tempo, and it would have been interesting to hear Weiss’s music played with more attention to these details.

The performers also often take a distinctly modern approach to other expressive devices. Embellishments are entirely absent on this recording, even in repeated passages, save for a single grace-note added in one phrase; portato gestures, described in the sources as legato strokes in which the bow is ‘pulsed’ without allowing the sound to actually stop, are almost always played fully staccato here; final notes even of light, staccato phrases are generally played longer than I would have expected (see, for instance, bars 69–76 in the fourth movement of Quartet No. 1, where the crotchets should most likely be shortened to the length of quavers); and a large number of Weiss’s long slurs are audibly broken into multiple, shorter bow-strokes. This final point is especially unfortunate, since although long slurs present challenges for tone production, they also bring about adjustments to bow speed and pressure that force players into truly quiet dynamic levels. It is possible that a more scrupulous treatment of Weiss’s slurs would have contributed to a more varied approach to dynamics.

Even the Eybler Quartet’s commendable use of portamento, one of their most historically informed choices, occasionally works against their overall expressive purpose. My concerns here are, it must be said, based on intuition: historical sources make clear the centrality of portamento to string technique, but those sources cannot play for us, and in the end we must guess at how musicians of Weiss’s time would have wielded the device in practice. One complicating factor is that portamento is both a highly expressive gesture and a simple technical expedient – a way of shifting the left hand from one position to another that makes the motion along the fingerboard audible rather than masking it – and it is unclear how players should balance these technical and expressive priorities in performance. Should they use routine fingerings and simply allow the necessary shifts to yield audible slides? Or should they deliberately select fingerings that maximize the number of shifts, and thus slides? From my own casual survey of recordings of early nineteenth-century string music played on period instruments, historical performers seem divided on this point. In the pioneering recordings of the Eroica Quartet (who released benchmark discs of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann quartets on Harmonia Mundi between 1999 and 2005), portamento features routinely when the players shift, but it does not become a point of imitation – a player’s slides are generally not imitated straightforwardly in other voices, but rather each slides in ways that are convenient for that particular line. The same can be said of recordings by soloists such as Elizabeth Wallfisch, whose Beethoven violin-sonata cycle (Wyastone, 2014 and 2016), early nineteenth-century concertos (Hyperion, 1996) and études by Kreutzer and Rode (CPO, 2008 and 2010) feature constant slides as a by-product of nearly every shift, and yet who treats those slides as routine, an element of the technical background.

The performers on the recording reviewed here, by contrast, take a different approach: for them, portamento is not a side-effect of shifting, but rather an expressive focus in its own right. One indication of this outlook is the sheer frequency with which portamento is imitated across the parts, for instance in the Trio section from the third movement of Quartet No. 1, where a recurring ascending motif is always treated with a slide, in all the parts. For my taste, this passage, and similar ones in the slow movements of both quartets, draw far too much attention to the portamento; it ceases to feel like a basic facet of the style and instead becomes a self-consciously foregrounded mannerism – and it loses expressive potency as a result. I had the uncomfortable sense, listening to such passages, that the ensemble was undertaking an artificial demonstration of how often they could work portamento in, rather than simply allowing it to emerge ‘without comment’ in their technical choices. But again, I hasten to add that this assessment is a matter of intuition about how historical descriptions can be rendered in modern-day performances. Whatever one makes of their choice, the performers have done a great service by adopting an extreme position and allowing us to hear the results. Whether their particular approach is successful is, in the end, a separate question.

Such concerns should not eclipse the significance of this recording as a scholarly achievement, an act of musical recovery and a document of extraordinarily compelling and expressive historical string playing. The album is exemplary, and the specific interpretative matters I query here are ultimately minute. Our understanding of early nineteenth-century performing practices will continue to evolve, in part through the efforts and experimentation of players such as these. This recording, and the impressive scholarly work underpinning it, represents precisely the kind of collaborative partnership between musicologists and performers that I hope to see more of. We are lucky to have this project to sharpen our picture of the rich quartet culture that flourished in early nineteenth-century Vienna.