An unusual string-quartet event took place in Budapest this past January. For years, the Manhattan String Quartet has been holding workshops for amateurs on specific repertoires, choosing locations where the appreciation of the music may be helped by the genius loci and the advice of local experts. This year, the workshop was brought to Budapest, with Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 6 as the subject. This is not Bartók's most dissonant work, yet it is certainly modern music and by no means easy to perform. The participants had to be divided into two groups, because as many as 23 amateur quartets, mostly from the East Coast of the United States, had registered for the programme. Each foursome was able to perform this composition, albeit it is challenging from both a musical and a technical point of view. Their playing was real Hausmusik, though even if some of the quartets may have included professional musicians, most do not play for a living.
Why do I still speak of the twilight of quartet playing, after witnessing such an event? Sadly, the twilight of quartet playing is imminent, in spite of some heart-warming exceptions. And the decline is most painfully evident in the way Haydn is being played. I truly worry that on the 200th anniversary of his death, Haydn will get the short end of the stick, in spite of many spectacular events. Of course, there is no shortage of sensations. It is likely that no composer has ever been the subject of a spectacle on the scale of the 2009 World Creation Day for Haydn. On the actual anniversary of his death, May 31, the oratorio The Creation was performed in the musical centres of many countries, staggered in time according to different time zones. My worry is about something long term and probably irreversible, namely that the middle-class audience that considers Haydn's music relevant, a part as it were of its own life, is dwindling everywhere. As a result, professional musicians are also showing less respect for, and interest in, Haydn than before, and this is especially true for string quartets. This state of affairs may have far-reaching side effects, and may have harmful consequences in the training of musicians in general.
I would like to attempt to disentangle the complex problems with the admitted bias of a musicologist who considers Haydn's quartets a basic frame of reference for European art music, one who has been studying them since the beginning of his career.

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László Somfai
is Professor Emeritus at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest; former director (1972–2005) of the Bartók Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; between 1997–2002 President of the International Musicological Society. He is editor-in-chief of the forthcoming Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition and is currently at work at the Bartók thematic catalogue. His books include Joseph Haydn's Keyboard Sonatas (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (University of California Press, 1996).