Master of Petersburg/Haydn's "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Lawrence Bryan:
          Sounds good to me, but I'm intimidated by the 
          erudition shown by so many list members; a 
          bit like an amateur violinist invited to play 
          with the Julliard Quartet. So I'd prefer to 
          listen/read.

Well, you could pick up the kazoo. . .

. . . .on the program is the suppressed quartet from the Haydn
Op. 76, the so-called "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, which 
gets its name from the Largo, cantabile e mesto movement, 
in which the Inner Voices are called to play kazoos instead of 
their usual instruments, creating problems of dynamics for 
cello and first violin that are unique in the literature. "You 
actually need to shift in places from a spiccato to a 
detache," Bodine rapidly talking a Corporate Wife of
some sort across the room toward the free-lunch 
table piled with lobster hors d'oeuvres and capon 
sandwiches-"less bow, higher up you understand, soften it—
then there's also about a thousand ppp-to fff blasts, but only 
the one, the notorious One, going the other way. ... " Indeed, 
one reason for the work's suppression is this subversive use 
of sudden fff quieting to ppp. It's the touch of the wandering 
sound-shadow, the Brennschluss of the Sun. They don't 
want you listening to too much of that stuff-at least not the 
way Haydn presents it (a strange lapse in the revered 
composer's behavior): cello, violin, alto and treble kazoos 
all rollicking along in a tune sounds like a song from the movie 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, "You Should See Me Dance the Polka," 
when suddenly in the middle of an odd bar the kazoos just stop 
completely, and the Outer Voices fall to plucking a non-melody 
that tradition sez represents two 18th-century Village Idiots 
vibrating their lower lips. At each other. It goes on for 20, 40 bars, 
this feeb's pizzicato, middle-line Kruppsters creak in the 
bowlegged velvet chairs, bibuhbuhbibuhbuh this does not 
sound like Haydn, Mutti! . . .

Gravity's Rainbow, pgs P725/726