BEETHOVEN’S LATE QUARTETS 2

‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’

[This line of from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty leapt out at me as I was writing about Beethoven’s Late Quartets, and chimes with a lot of what I feel is so wonderful about them…. ]

Mulling on the broad outlines of Beethoven’s Late Quartets leads in many fascinating directions, so while I aim to make this post as tight as possible… There Is Just So Much To Think About. Apologies, up front, for the length. This post will focus solely on one question: how extraordinary are the long form structures of the Late Quartets? Apologies also to those who may feel that much of this post states the patently obvious (as I am not presuming that anyone who reads this is familiar with any of the quartets) but to me this is all stuff worth dwelling on. First…

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF LONG FORMS 

By long form, I mean a piece with multiple movements.

The earliest long forms in Western music were built on texts, on ‘scaffolding’ tunes like plainchant or on dances…. or on a combination of these. Let’s divide them into two broad types – rigid and flexible. Settings of the mass (probably the earliest long form) are rigid by virtue of setting ritual text that dictates structure: most have a Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei in that order. But a suite (one of the next earliest long forms) has no text, and is simply a sequence of dances strung together to the satisfaction of the composer. It is as flexible as that. Also, composers commonly find ways to unify the musical material in a mass setting. They might use a tune to underpin the musical invention of all the movements; so if you ever see ‘L’homme armé’ in the name of a mass, you know that all of its movements draw on that tune. In contrast, the dances of a suite very rarely share any musical DNA.

Beethoven wrote masses but no suites; by his time type key long forms were opera (in vocal music) and two key structures which dominated instrumental music’s long forms for at least 200 years. The lesser was a 3-movement form which you hear in most concertos: Fast, Slow, Fast. Much more pervasive was the 4-movement form: Haydn’s 51^st quartet is typical:

The overwhelming majority of string quartets, sonatas, duos, trios… all sizes of instrumental works right up to symphonies from around 1760 to the present day use this 4-movement form. The one regular variant is that the middle 2 movements can be the other way round. One other thing to note is that the movements used to tend to be approximately similar lengths, but as time went on this could vary considerably. To listeners, this consistency has given the double gift of a familiar road map to navigate any new piece of this shape; and also a point of reference from which to compare and critique. It has nigh on inculcated in me, at least, a subconscious expectation of what a 4-movement piece of music will do for me:

1. Upbeat Engagement: a first movement full of ideas, explored at some length to draw me in while I am at my freshest and most attentive. A proper weighty and engaging main course. (Allegro)
2. Leisurely Reflection: Now I am hooked, seriousness of different, more lyrical or spiritual sort. Music to be moved by. (Adagio)
3. Wake-up call: the sorbet of the quartet – light relief: pithy, jokey, rumbustious (Minuet)
4. Culmination and sign-off: an exhilarating dash to the finish but not without a bit of meat to chew on (Finale)

If you want to test this, pick any Haydn quartet after Op. 3 and give it a listen. In fact, here’s a gem to enjoy – Haydn’s 51^st quartet played in proper old Viennese style by the Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet in 1954.

THE LATE QUARTETS 

If this 4-movement form was so ubiquitous, where did Beethoven’s Op. 131 come from?

5 remarkable things you can see at a glance:

1. There are 7 movements not 4
2. They are not in any order that resembles the 4-movement template.
3. They vary in length from 52 seconds to almost 13.5 minutes (timings taken from a recording by the Alban Berg Quartet as benchmarks)
4. Their proportions vary so widely that the longest movement lasts almost 18 times as long as the shortest.
5. There is a lot of slower music: 2-and-a-bit Adagios plus 1 Andante. This accounts for more than half of the piece.

Bearing these in mind, consider the shapes of all the Late Quartets and the durations of the movements (in square brackets, and all from the ABQ recording)

The only Late Quartet to fit the Haydn-esque 4-movement pattern is the last, Op.  135. Otherwise, they share the same 5 remarkable characteristics as Op. 131 and are truly ‘counter, original… strange.’ Op. 127 may have 4 movements, but its slow movement lasts almost as long as the remaining 3 movements put together; meanwhile, Op. 130 has 6 movements and Op. 132 has 5. Every single piece differs more from its fellows than 50 of Haydn’s quartets do from each other.

There is one well respected theory of why Beethoven’s thinking tended towards these extraordinary forms in the 1820s, and it is that he was inspired by the suite genre. This came to go by many names including serenade, partita, divertimento, cassation… but they were essentially the same. and Haydn’s earliest quartets, Op. 1-3, clearly grew out of it. Compare the movements of Haydn’s Quartet, Op. 1 No. 4 on the left, with his Divertimento Hob.II.22 on the right.

You remember that the suite was a very flexible genre: Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik has only 4 movements and looks almost exactly like a little symphony; but Gran’ Partita has 7 movements, long and short, and looks a lot like Beethoven’s Op. 131. So there is undeniably kinship between Beethoven’s quartets and the suite. But if it is possible that he, in his 50s, decided to turn his back on the previous 60 years of quartet evolution to return to this earlier genre (even though he didn’t write ‘suites’ as such), then his reasons relate to longer-standing preoccupations we ca spot throughout his life. Consider these factors:

First: Beethoven wrote many 4-movement works (most of his sonatas, trios, quartets and symphonies) but he was never a slave to it. Throughout his piano sonatas you will find 2 or 3 movement pieces and this tendency away from 4-movements increased in his later years. Only 1 of the last 5 piano sonatas has a conventional 4-movement shape. And where he did write 4 movements – as in his 9^th symphony – he disregards every previous idea of what a symphony was. In short, unusual long form is not unusual for him.

Second: Beethoven had been fascinated for decades with the musical and poetic possibilities of making a long form more than the sum of its parts i.e. shaping it into a greater musical and poetic trajectory. Quite how interesting that is is thrown into relief when you consider how differently Haydn’s, Mozart’s or Beethoven’s audiences behaved from audiences like us. We – until recently at least – have tended to respect the integrity of a long form piece by not clapping between the movements. We think of a symphony/sonata/trio etc as an integrated work. Their audiences? They would not only clap but demand immediate encores of any movement they especially enjoyed: if the slow movement was a hit, it could be played again, 2 or 3 times before everyone moved on to the next movement. Also, it was perfectly normal to split a piece up and distribute the movements across a concert evening. The first movement could act as a kind of overture, and the finale might close the first half, but you will have had a couple of arias, solos, chamber music or improvisations in-between. Soloists commonly inserted whole pieces to show off between the movements of a concerto. None of this suggests that performers, audiences (or composers?) saw, say, a symphony, as more than a sequence of discreet movements. Yet, as early as 1800, Beethoven asks them all to attend to an entire piece as a unified entity. In his piano sonata Op. 27 No. 1, he segues all of the movements into an un-interrupted sequence; not so much as a chink light in which to add an extra trill. A few years later, his 5^th and 6^th symphonies, and then his 5^th piano concerto all link their later movements to create expanses of music greater than just a single movement. He does this in every case to express a special poetic/musical idea. Later he went further and wrote single movements that sounded like several movements played without pause because they had multiple sections in a variety of speeds, moods and genres – just listen to the finale of 9^th Symphony.

SO…?

Having gone on far too long, this leads me to a star-struck conclusion of sorts. 

Beethoven’s inspiration for the long forms of the Late Quartets may have arisen from suites or from some other source, but what makes them unique and powerful (as well as ‘…counter, original, spare, strange’) is his intent with them . If every movement has its own mass, energy, emotional and spiritual weight, it – critically – only truly makes sense in the context of the whole piece. Each quartet becomes a magical balancing of weight and counterweight which allows for extreme contrast, mystery, surprise and, ultimately, resolution. This is as true of the finale of the 9^thSymphony as it is of the Late Quartets. I leave you with a wonderful performance of Op. 132 by the Quatuor Ebene, wherein he a sublime and vast (15-minute-long) spiritual hymn with a jolly march whose shocking, almost glib energy is just what he requires to pave the way to the deeply satisfying and fervent finale which follows. There is no suite in history, nor was there any string quartet before his that attempted this – and there have been very few ever that can stand comparison.

[The sequence described above starts at 19’48 on this video – or you can enjoy the whole thing…]

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