Haydn and his contemporaries were notoriously reluctant to compose multimovement instrumental works in minor keys. Their caution may be partially understood as a response to disturbing connotations that attached to minor harmony in late 18th-century operatic practice--connotations that rendered minor keys uncomfortable for the more even-tempered rhetoric customary in music for chamber and concert hall. But while composers indulged only rarely in the harmonic color and diversity inherent in the choice of minor as home key, temporary deflection to minor within the realm of a major tonic remained a cherished resource for a variety of compositional purposes.
In Haydn's practice, juxtaposition of major and parallel minor often serves to enhance sectional contrast or to designate a point of digression; and in Op. 76, this device enjoys special emphasis as a musical paradox: a simultaneous reaffirmation and denial of closure or stability. Strategies for the withholding an anticipated major tonic by substituting an unsettling parallel minor are most conspicuously evident in the final movements of quartets Nos. 1 and 3, where Haydn adopts an archetypal design for the last movement of a minor-key cycle: the contrast of minor and relative major, featured in the exposition, anticipates the ultimate ascendancy of tonic major over minor before the work concludes. But in an extraordinary reversal of custom, each of these finales grafts the minor-to-major agenda onto a cycle whose overall tonic is not minor but major.
In both works, plunging the finale into minor recalls and magnifies local disturbances that had involved mode change in the preceding movements. Providing a springboard for their ultimate resolution, it also enhances the sense of a large-scale coherence embracing all four movements. In addition to promoting cyclic unity, this plan invites an expanded spectrum of tonal contrasts as well. As seen especially in the last movement of Op. 76 No. 1, the tonal enrichment that results widens the expressive range and intensifies points of rhetorical emphasis without stepping outside the established perimeters of style and technique on which Haydn and his listeners relied.