BEETHOVEN’S LATE QUARTETS

In June 2025 at the 20^th ENF the 4 string quartets who have made the greatest impact at ENF over the past 20 years (alphabetically: Belcea, Castalian, Elias, Pavel Haas) will come together to perform all of Beethoven’s late quartets in chronological order: 5 masterpieces written around 200 years ago that have awed, inspired, terrified and intimidated generations of musicians and listeners since. Wonderful music – just listen to the opening minutes (or all!) of this, played by another great string quartet that came to Fife in 2007:

Between now and next June, I will be spending a lot of time getting to know these pieces as well as I can (mostly a personal thing), and writing about them: these are pieces I have heard countless times yet still find mysterious, often mind-boggling. I can’t be doing with a lot of the pretentious and frankly self-regarding tosh I have read about them: there is a whole priesthood of people (nearly all men, it has to be admitted) who love the idea of themselves as special because they listen to Beethoven’s Late Quartets, but their lofty language usually fails to measure up to the task of illuminating Beethoven. Many times I have just had to shut the book and put on the recording to remind me what is most important – which is every individual listener’s encounter with this amazing music. So this will not be lofty: I claim no special expertise, just my own curiosity and love of the music. I offer facts, context, ways in, thoughts, insights I want to share. Starting with…

EPISODE ONE: THE BASICS

Here is a brief overview. Best viewed in landscape format.

Beethoven’s Quartets: Beethoven wrote 16 quartets over the course of about 29 years: 6 in his ‘Early’ period, then 5 each in his ‘Middle’ and ‘Late’ periods.  His output is patchy as you can see in the table – the Early works were published in a group (as Haydn and Mozart had done, usually in sixes) and were written over 3 or 4 years around his 30^th birthday. Then he turned to other things before returning to the genre in his later 30s – his Middle Quartets. After the last of these, Opus 95, there was a 14 year-gap before a commission prompted Beethoven, now in his 50s, to write the Late Quartets.

“Late”? : Beethoven was just 57 when he died, so arguably middle-aged still. But he suffered extremely bad health and quite a bit of his treatment involved drinking wine and brandy. So, his Late period is not his most prolific… It is generally accepted to have started around 1815, so, as he died in March 1827 it lasted around 12 years in total. These are the main works from those years: 

If these were not Beethoven’s most prolific years, it must be remembered that individual works were generally longer and cost him greater effort: in them he was reinventing genres, techniques…even the fundamentals of musical language. There is huge diversity: the 9^th Symphony or Missa Solemnis may each last an hour but the shortest Bagatelle is little more than a scrap of a thought, maybe 20 seconds.

Why Quartets Then?

Rich Russians were surprisingly important to Beethoven’s quartets.  One – Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky – commissioned the 3 (Middle) quartets that carry his name; another, Nikolai Borisovich Galitzin, begged Beethoven for new quartets in 1822, offering to pay “whatever amount you would deem adequate”. Beethoven asked 50 ducats per quartet – very modest by today’s standards: a ducat is now valued at around £110, so approximately £5,500 per quartet: you would not find many composers of Beethoven’s stature happy with that fee today. 

Galitzin commissioned in 1822, but Beethoven did not set to work in earnest until 1824, and he eventually delivered 3 quartets to his patient patron – Op 127, Op 130 and Op 131. This triggered further work on Op 132 and Op 135. It is astounding how much music there is in them: 

That adds up to around 3.5 hours of music written over 2 years or so – and remember, he was pretty ill for most of the second year. Nowadays it is not unusual for a healthy and fit composer to consider that producing between 1 and 2 hours of music in a year is pretty good. And while many composers earlier than Beethoven produced vastly more than this, most of them were working within very clearly defined conventions and forms, all of which had their own short-hands which speeded up production: so Vivaldi may have written 500 concerti, and each has  its own character, but not one of them is as different from the other 499 than any of the Late Quartets is different from the other 4. Going further: all of them, except possibly the very last, belong to a different world from any quartet by any previous composer.

Where to start?

For the first few posts, I am going to stick to overview and navigation. We are dealing with 5 exceptionally unusual pieces, composed in a relatively short time, and for all their differences, they share a strong family resemblance – so understanding that before focusing on individual works is helpful.

You can sense just how unusual these pieces are from a quick survey of their shapes: only 2 have the kind of 4-movement patterns typical of all of Mozart’s and Haydn’s (and their many quartet-composing contemporaries’) quartets. No 2 are alike, and the bald statement of movements below conceals a wealth of idiosyncrasy and invention.  

Here’s the starting point for what I am going to look at and listen for next: what types of movements make up the late quartets?  Thanks for reading.