BEETHOVEN’S LATE QUARTETS 5
Read any biography and you will learn that Beethoven’s last years were marred by miserable family strife, anxiety and grief caused by his wayward but beloved nephew, depression and debilitating illness. His letters from this period offer plenty of evidence for this, yet, to me there has always been a tiny nagging doubt. Interleaved among those letters are others: many business letters and exchanges with friends whose tone is anything but ailing. Sharp, wheeler-dealing, humorous, warm, importuning, raging…they speak of a mercurial figure, full of vigour and activity whose eye for detail was never sharper than when his personal interest was concerned. Then, of course, he was extraordinarily productive for a sick man. Besides writing the astounding quartets we are focused on (together with other smaller things) he managed the promotion and performances of recent works like the Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, negotiated plans for publication of his Collected Works… I can’t help but wonder: was he really a bit of a self-dramatising hypochondriac? But I have to concede that the best evidence against that is in the music itself.
Beethoven wrote 3 quartets to fulfil the original commission that triggered the composition of the Late Quartets. If, like me, you have spent quite a bit of time recently with the Adagio of Op. 127 – the first quartet – you may experience an intriguing shock to the system when you turn to slow movements of the other two – Op 130 and Op 132. The Adagio of Op 127 is a world unto itself which you can enter and forget all else. In contrast, the Cavatina of Op 130 and the Adagio of Op 132 bring you face to face with Beethoven’s real life: his physical and mental state. They are certainly not the first instances of his personal life seeping into his music – nor was he the first composer to do this. But they dramatize his plight through music in a startlingly vivid way that had not been seen before: the personal story shapes this music’s very bones resulting in ideas and expression and forms as astonishing and unprecedented as they are moving and profound.
BEKLEMMT
Op 130 has the modestly entitled ‘Cavatina’ for its 5th movement. That word, cavatina, has had various meanings over the centuries but it seems unlikely that Beethoven intended anything other than ‘little song ‘. It is less than half the length of Op. 127’s Adagio and has the simple ABA shape of many short songs. And it is a proper song with a blissfully singable melody – I heartily recommend singing along as you are getting to know it. This is a lovely performance by one of the quartets who will be coming to ENF in June – the Elias Quartet.
If there is simplicity in the Cavatina, it is skin deep. Like slow movements in all his earlier quartets, this is a place in which Beethoven revels in an improvisatory freedom: it is very rare for him to repeat any section or phrase verbatim: there is always some change, if not to the melody then to the accompanying lines and harmonies. This must be an especial pleasure to the players who are so close to every note and nuance, but as a listener it is worth paying especial attention. Take the opening: Listen closely to the opening 8 bar melody; once done, Beethoven immediately starts repeating it but does not even get so far as the end of the first bar before evolving it in a new direction. The same happens to the melody in the B section, and when A returns towards the end it is different again: abbreviated to give way to the gradual ebbing at the close.
The most famous and extraordinary thing about this movement though comes in a passage that is inserted just before the second ‘A’ of the ABA shape. It is marked ‘Beklemmt’ and Beethoven’s use of it here is so notable that if you google it the results only include translations and dictionary definitions plus references to this passage.
Beklemmt: Oppressive, stifling, anguished.
Musically that translates into a disturbing moment in which the first violin is utterly isolated from its fellows. They play in triple time, it plays in simple time. They restrict themselves to lower registers leaving it exposed in its higher lines. They all play the same thing: cogent pulsing repeated chords while it has a fragmented broken line. In the midst of a movement full of mellifluous song, the unity of 4 players is broken and one player cast out.
[As a side note, it is fascinating to listen to lots of different performances of this from different periods – they range from unexpectedly poised to near deranged: it is an object lesson in the evolution of quartet playing]
What does it all mean? There are other famous examples in Beethoven’s work when the music falters in crisis or doubt from which it always recovers. The 5th Symphony has 3 – the oboe interruption the first movement, the late stage of the Andante, and in the famous transitions from darkness into light in the 3rd and 4th movements. But none has quite this shocking vulnerability. Is Beethoven this first violin, at odds with his fellows? Or is he describing a more general sense of isolation? His deafness, alone, could justify that – and it is worth noting that the Cavatina also opens and closes without the first violin.
Op. 132
The Adagio of Op. 132 is comparable in scale to that in Op. 127 – and like it, it dominates the piece as a whole. There the resemblance ends. Where Op 127’s journey feels very linear and full of tidal movements back and forth. Op 132 is more akin to the Andante in Beethoven’s 5th in its repeated circling around juxtapositions of dark and light. Very unusally for Beethoven, this Adagio has a title:
“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart”.
Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode
The holy song was written during May 1825. On 11 May, Beethoven wrote his doctor (Dr Anton Braunhofer) the latest of many letters detailing a queasy-making litany of symptoms and complaints, starting “We are rather poorly…” A little later in May (the letter is undated) he writes to the same doctor to thank him effusively: ‘…we now feel very well. Our heart and soul are inclined to overflow…’ This in a nutshell is the story behind the Heilige Dankgesan. Here it is played by the Alban Berg Quartet.
Its shape is breathtakingly simple: ABABA where A is a very slow and sombre chorale and B an ebullient flourish which must represent “Our heart and soul are inclined to overflow.“ Does that mean, though, that A represents “We are rather poorly”? I think not, because the music is imbued with ancient traditions of sacred music. Crudely, Palestrina is behind the imitative counterpoint: compare Beethoven’s opening string writing with Sicut Cervus by Palestrina
There is also J S Bach in the fantasy treatment of having the chorale tune very audible in long notes while musical invention flowers around it. Here is my very favourite chorale fantasy by Bach – Von Himmel Hoch: chorale in the sopranos.
Just as A brings Palestrina and Bach to mind, B also sounds archaic – like a Baroque passacaglia, a dance in which a short chord sequence is repeated and improvised around. Here’s a famous example by Purcell from The Faery Queen (+ some lovely dancing):
To me A does not so much represent the oppressiveness of illness as a prayerful gratitude for recovery. Meanwhile B is the very physical joy of ‘we now feel very well.’ Beethoven gives you alternation of these two kinds of music: ABABA. You have the hymn 3 times in increasingly elaborate realisations and the dance twice. As I said above – breathtakingly simple for such a profound work. And, as with the Cavatina, nothing is repeated, everything is in a constant state of development as it builds inevitably towards the impassioned close.
Whether Beethoven truly was as ill as everyone believes or not, this music tells me, is irrelevant. It is impossible to question the depth of feeling in these expressions of his suffering and gratitude at relief. It is so profound that it led Beethoven to eschew every expectation his audience might have had of a slow movement in 1825 and creates unprecedented (arguably unfollowable) music.
