(Fr. quatuor, quartette; Ger. Quartett; It. quartetto).
A composition or part of a composition for four voices or instruments, or a group that performs such a composition. Many chansons, madrigals and polyphonic lieder of the 16th century and glees of the 17th century are vocal quartets. Partsongs, sometimes (like Pearsall’s madrigals) imitating an earlier form, continue the tradition of writing for such combinations through the Classical and Romantic periods. Vocal quartets, like duets and trios, figured prominently in 19th-century domestic music, sometimes in an accompanied form, as in Brahms’s two sets of Liebeslieder waltzes with piano duet or his Zigeunerlieder and Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel with piano solo. Accompanied quartet cycles like Liza Lehmann’s once popular In a Persian Garden and Stanford’s The Princess were part of a sizable literature now almost totally neglected. Quartets for unaccompanied male voices were also common (e.g. by Schumann, Brahms and Niels Gade).
Vocal quartets accompanied by orchestra are frequent in opera and oratorio from the 18th century onwards. Handel’s ‘Why dost thou untimely grieve?’ in Semele is an early example of a form that was subsequently developed as a dramatic confrontation of characters. Independent lines of thought and action on the part of four characters were skilfully portrayed in the music both in ensembles forming an independent number like Mozart’s ‘Andrò, ramingo e solo’ in Idomeneo and ‘Non ti fidar, o misera’ in Don Giovanni and Beethoven’s ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’ in Fidelio, and in those that are an integral part of a scene such as the quartets in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Otello. Settings of the mass in the Classical period, particularly in Austria, frequently make use of a quartet of solo voices. In his Ninth Symphony Beethoven transferred the device to symphonic music. (For the history of the vocal quartet, see G. Rienäcker, ‘Quartett’, MGG2.)
The most important chamber music forms are the String quartet (two violins, viola, cello) and the Piano quartet (piano, violin, viola, cello); these repertories are discussed in separate entries. Closely related to the early string quartet are the many 18th-century works in which one of the violins of the string quartet was replaced by a wind instrument, notably the oboe and flute quartets of J.C. Bach, Vanhal and Mozart or the clarinet quartets of Carl Stamitz and J.N. Hummel. In many of these compositions the wind instrument is treated in a more soloistic manner than would be usual in a string quartet, more in fact in the manner of the quatuor brillant (with a virtuoso first violin part). Sometimes both violins were replaced, as in J.C. Bach’s quartets for two flutes, viola and cello.
Wind instruments tend to combine with the piano less well than with strings, but there is a handful of quartets for piano and wind, including works by Franz Berwald (with clarinet, horn and bassoon) and Florent Schmitt (with oboe, clarinet and bassoon). For keyboard with mixed ensemble there are various significant 20th-century works such as Hindemith’s quartet for piano, clarinet, violin and cello (1938), Messiaen’s Quatuor pour le fin du temps for the same combination, and Webern’s op.22 for tenor saxophone, clarinet, violin and piano.
The repertory of quartets for wind instruments alone is similarly varied in instrumentation. In their divertimentos and cassations Haydn and his contemporaries tended to combine pairs of instruments – two flutes and two horns or two clarinets with two horns, for instance. Rossini’s quartets for flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn are mostly arrangements. There are 20th-century works for four different wind instruments by Frank Bridge, Jean Françaix, Egon Wellesz, H.E. Apostel and Henk Badings.
For further information and bibliography see Chamber music; Piano quartet; Quatuor concertant; and String quartet; see also Barbershop.
MICHAEL TILMOUTH/R