The Arte Musica Foundation, in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and McGill University's Schulich School of Music, organized four days of concerts, lectures and film presentations in Montreal from 18 to 22 March 2009 to commemorate the bicentenary of the death of Haydn. Central to the festivities was a complete performance of Haydn's sixty-eight string quartets by a variety of ensembles. Each concert included a representative selection of quartets from different periods of Haydn's career, and on all days there were free pre-concert talks, films, lectures and other educational activities.

Ten concerts in Schulich School of Music's Pollack Hall formed the backbone of the festival, with sterling performances by the Alcan, Arthur-LeBlanc, Brentano, Claudel-Canimex, Festetics, St Lawrence, SuperNova and Ying String Quartets. ‘Marathon’ concerts featuring student ensembles from Canadian and American universities and conservatories took place at the Museum of Fine Arts, with audience members being admitted on the hour and half-hour.

Twelve additional cultural events were programmed by Isolde Lagacé (General and Artistic Director, Arte Musica Foundation), and featured discussions by prominent musicologists, historians, music theorists and performers. Highlights included a brilliant opening lecture by James Webster (Cornell University), who discussed various aspects of ‘work’ and ‘play’ in Haydn's works, concentrating on the quartets. Taking his cue from contemporary descriptions of Haydn's personality, which often underlined opposing physiognomies of ‘earnestness’ and ‘humour’, Webster looked at how various dialectically related binary oppositions could be seen to characterize Haydn's work, from contrapuntal rigour to galant elegance and from a professional to an amateur orientation.

William Caplin (McGill University) and Webster presided over a workshop on Op. 54 No. 1 with the Schulich School of Music's resident student quartet. Webster opened the proceedings with a discussion of the opening movement and the problems of analysing the exposition and the extraordinary recomposition of the recapitulation. Caplin gave a fascinating presentation on the saturating presence of chromatic pitch combinations throughout all four movements of the quartet, taking note of transformational processes and how these pitch groups emphasize important structural joints.

László Somfai (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest) presented a provocative lecture on ‘Crucial Performing Aspects of Haydn’, with the Festetics Quartet on hand to perform excerpts and demonstrate various aspects of performance practice. It was a wide-ranging and highly informative study directed towards present-day performances and performers of Haydn quartets, and Somfai ended with a plea for quartet performers to concentrate on entire opuses of quartets, not just single famous pieces, in order to understand better the precisely marked intentions of the composer.

One of the final highlights of this festival was a seminar directed by Tom Beghin (McGill University) with the participation of Webster and Somfai. Entitled ‘Modern-Day Performing of Haydn's Chamber Music’, this event took up some of the challenges issued by Somfai on the previous day as Beghin worked with a graduate student ensemble on a reading of Op. 33 No. 5. Using ideas on the faults and virtues of conversation in eighteenth-century salon culture as a point of departure, Beghin elicited lively debate about what makes for convincing performances, underscoring the different yet complementary perspectives of performer and listener alike.