Description
In our age of mostly passive listening, it can be rather difficult to contemplate life in an era in which if you wanted to hear music, you generally had to play it yourself or, far less likely, have the great good fortune of being able to hire others to play it for you, as in the case of Baroque nobility who commissioned works for small ensembles as their refined entertainment. Such were the circumstances that led to the rise of chamber music as a a genre. Always made to be played by small groups of musicians in small spaces (a home parlor, for example), the perfection of chamber music is built on a very intimate scale.
The patriarch of modern chamber music is undoubtedly "Papa" Haydn, who penned well over 100 pieces for string quartets, trios, and other instrumental combinations. The style of Haydn's iconic work was further developed and amplified by Mozart. (The younger composer was well aware of the musical debt he owed to his elder, and dedicated six of his own string quartets to Haydn.)
As lovely as Haydn and Mozart's chamber pieces are, the genre reached dramatic new emotional heights with Beethoven, who managed to scale down his ideas to a smaller canvas without losing any poignancy or depth. Romanticism's emphasis on the individual also proved a perfect match to chamber music's scale; composers such as Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms all wrote music for smaller groups that are central to the repertoire.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, Debussy, Ravel, and Dvorak composed string quartets that, taken individually, are perfect distillations of these composers' respective ethos; in the 20th century, composers including Bartok and Shostakovich wrote chamber music that even decades after their writing still sound excitingly innovative and new.
