The reception of Haydn's early string quartets is chequered. Professional performers tend to avoid the quartets before Op. 20 (1772). In scholarship, essential features of ‘Classical’ string quartets are typically thought to be in place at the earliest with Op. 20, but more usually with Op. 33. This essay contributes to a critique of these assumptions, and offers an alternative view of the earlier works. The slow movements in particular, with their solo ‘arias’ for first violin, have been considered especially problematic. From a historical perspective, however, these movements can be understood to exemplify a fundamentally new mode of expression that was extolled by mid-eighteenth-century theorists: that of the tableau. This concept was discussed, for example, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, and was brought to the stages of Vienna and Eszterháza in the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre and the operas of Gluck and Haydn, among others. As sonic tableaux, or instrumental ‘arias’, movements from Haydn's early string quartets epitomize a dramatic mode that was of fundamental importance to music of the Classical era.
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