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 5^th 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 3^rd and 4^th 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 5^th 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.    

BEETHOVEN’S LATE QUARTETS 4

‘Viewing the Firmament’: The Slow Movements

There is more slow, reflective music in Beethoven’s late quartets than in any other sequence of works from any other time in his life: in fact, he wrote very few other slow movements between 1787-1823 that are as long as those in Op. 127, Op. 131 and Op. 132, all written 1823-1826. Not only are they huge in themselves, they also take up a remarkable proportion of the total length of their pieces. Referring to the table below you can see that Op. 127’s Adagio is only marginally shorter than all its other movements put together. Op. 131’s Andante is longer than the 3 movements that precede it and only just shorter than the 3 that follow it. The slow movements are highlighted in the table below- all timings taken from Alban Berg Quartet recordings:  

It is hard to exaggerate what an enormous shift this is in Beethoven’s thinking about multi-movement forms. Just compare that grid with one showing his first quartets, the 6 Op.18 pieces he wrote 25-28 years earlier (all timings from the same Alban Berg Quartet set as those above). Here we are dealing with the heir to Mozart and Haydn. He departs from their practices in many ways, but not so much in the way he treats the form: With the exception of No. 4 (which has no slow movement) the first and second movements are about the same size and normally longer than the last two movements which are usually both shorter and lighter in tone.

I wondered if Beethoven’s thinking might have evolved between 1800 and 1826, so tried lining up the durations of the first and slow movements of all 16 quartets but found only that all his first movements except Op. 95 last between c.6 and c.10 minutes while the slow movements, last between 6 and 16.5 minutes: there was no evolution; more of a dramatic change in the 1820s.

Forgive me if I am labouring this: I find it utterly fascinating, all the more so because we have no words from Beethoven to help us understand the seismic shift in his thinking. It is not a glib question of him developing a liking for slower music as he got older – it is a complete shift in his concept of a multi-movement form. Before now, most of his 4 movement pieces (symphony, sonata, quartet etc) could be pictured as wedge shaped: the opening movement is the thick end, it was almost always the weightiest and most important. Then the remaining movements follow in descending order of gravity and length. The immense slow movements of the Late Quartets, shift what had been the thick end of the wedge to somewhere in the middle: I don’t even know what that shape would be called. There is an important qualitative difference too. Opening movements are almost always sonata forms i.e. built on the principle of argument and reconciliation: contrasting themes are introduced, developed then resolved. Tension rises as the argument develops, then is released as the musical logic brings us safely home. Slow movements are never sonata forms. (I almost stuck in an ‘almost’ before ‘never’ there since someone is sure to know of an exception). They can be many other things: simple binary forms (section A then section B), variations, rondos (where one theme returns several times with different material between the returns – ABACA etc) or song-inspired forms. If sonata form could be described as goal oriented music, slow movements often pursue episodic or discursive lines of thought to offer what is usually a place of repose and reflection. For me, they are also the place where you will find the most beautifully crafted, intimate and subtle ensemble writing. I can easily believe that Beethoven made his Late Quartets slow movements as a kind of special gift to his players. They truly deserve Charles Ives’ wonderful description of his own quartets as “…four men who converse, discuss, argue politics, fight, shake hands, shut up, and then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.”

By increasing the length and importance of the slow movements versus the first movements, is Beethoven indicating a shift, in his late middle age, away from the cut and thrust of sonata form and towards this more reflective music? Not quite, and it will take a few more posts to put down what I think I get out of them.

I aim to start with Op. 127 – not only is it the first of them, but working at getting to know this movement is a brilliant preparation (the best preparation I would say) for getting into all the other slow movements, each of which is utterly different and challenging in its own way.

VARIATIONS

Op.127’s Adagio is the first variations movement of the Late Quartets. 

Variations, at their crudest, can be bum-numbingly tedious music for show-offs. A tune is stated then each variation treats it in a contrasting manner. Usually, each successive variation has more notes in it than the one before. At some mid-point it may go all poignant, but it always recovers to romp to a close that is just begging for a standing ovation. None of the great variations fall into this deadly stereotype. The closest Beethoven came was in pieces like this, on Rule Britannia written in 1803 (so 20 years before the Late Quartets).

It’s a lot of fun (and certainly not a bum-numbingly tedious ego-trip) but it is a long way behind the variations of the 5^th Symphony’s Andante con moto, written only a little later, 1803-1805. Like Rule Britannia, each variation is clearly segregated, but the ‘theme’ is more a sequence of ideas than a tune:

1: flowing melody in lower strings leads to several short phrases that are repeated like questions and answers by different combinations of lower strings, full orchestra and winds alone, leading to

2: rising march-like melody which you hear first in understated form on clarinet then, after a tentative moment, as a fanfare with brass to the fore.

3. After this, that tentative moment is extended into a mysterious transitional passage which leads you seamlessly into Variation I. 

The whole thing takes the first 2 minutes of this video – or hunt out the classic Kleiber recording which is also on YouTube:

If you listen to the first 2 minutes a few times then listen intently to the whole thing you see how little Beethoven is interested in using variations in the way he did with Rule Britannia. Instead, each variation subtly grows the material until the musical story reaches a moment of crisis: an hesitant, almost sinister moment of doubt… then recovers. It is a very linear movement and very clear. You might recognise that scenario’s similarity to sonata form and this middle ground between the two ideas is well worth remembering in considering the late quartets.

Now, Op. 127’s Adagio, written 20 years on from the 5^th Symphony. It is much longer than the Andante, and the story it tells not so linear or clear.  What it does have in common with the Andante is that the ‘theme’ is much more than a Britannia-style tune. It is almost a mini set of variations in itself because phrases are constantly exchanged between the first violin and cello and varied on each iteration. Variation works on a micro as well as a macro level here.

If you look around online you will have no difficulty in finding descriptions which tell you that there is a theme, 6 variations and a coda. This tells you little more about this piece than the Tube map of London’s Victoria Line conveys how the cityscape above ground changes between Walthamstow and Brixton.  In fact I have yet to find anything written about this movement that truly illuminates it. If anyone can point me at some great writing about it I would be truly grateful but, for now, I assume that far greater musical minds than mine have left well alone for a reason.  My best suggestion is to enjoy taking a lot of time to get familiar with it yourself. Ideally, listen to it once a day (or more) until you feel you have a grasp of it. This is no small ask: it is a huge expanse of music and requires considerable concentration to familiarise yourself with it. But it is worth it. 

Begin with ignoring the question of its variation structure and simply gain familiarity with the whole movement and its tidal movements. To my ear it is not as much of a ‘sonata’ movement as the 5th Symphony’s Andante: it is more episodic and discursive, but its narrative does pursue rises and ebbs in tension to bring you home at the end – but home is much changed.

I can suggest 2 good approaches for repeat listening. 

WHO IS TALKING TO WHOM? Paying attention to how the ensemble works is a great way into any music. Who is talking to whom? Who dominates and for how long? What are the other instruments doing meanwhile? What does that do for the balance and the way the music proceeds? Sometimes it is even worth taking the time to listen to a whole movement from the point of view of just one instrument – especially if you can find a well filmed performance on YouTube. In this piece, it does not take long to figure out the important relationship between first violin and cello. After the mysterious opening chords, they sing melodies back and forth to each other almost rapturously, and this regular repetition/variation gives the music a lot of its poise and spaciousness. Yet, as the movement progresses, viola and second violin become ever more prominent and interesting. Following that story is absorbing.

FOLLOW THE TIDES: taking the feeling of the opening (after the opening chords) as ‘home’, when do you feel the music is furthest from home and when does it feel more as though it is returning there? I may be edging into abstractions, but I also can’t help picturing music as space. Beethoven is constantly filling and emptying space in this movement, and not just by using more or fewer notes / instruments at any given time. Sometimes it is simply a question of momentum and stillness, but there is also everything from the emptiness of silence to the fullest harmony; everything from minimal activity to multiple lines of thought intersecting. The energies this releases are endlessly absorbing.

HAPPY LISTENING.

BEETHOVEN LATE QUARTETS 3

BEETHOVEN REWRITES HANSEL AND GRETEL.

Having looked at very big picture aspects of the Late Quartets so far, I am itching to get into some detail, so decided to spend last week with the first movement of Op. 127. It’s on a modest scale – just 6 minutes or so – but as intriguing and absorbing as many a longer piece. I need to start with some basic music theory as taught to me long, long ago. 

[Intro]ABABCAB

This is a mnemonic for arguably the most important form of the Classical and Romantic ages (1760-1914?): sonata form. The overwhelming majority of opening movements in long form genres (symphonies, sonatas, quartets…) written between 1760-ish and 1914-ish are sonata forms [see post 2 for more on this]. This mnemonic tells you that sonata form consists of – 

ABABCAB is a useful shorthand, but I also like the conceit of hearing sonata form as a classic fairytale: 

Soooo… labouring this a bit (though it is important) another way to look at it is that sonata form is all about disruption and resolution.

• Statement: the first AB is all about stating ideas and ensuring the listener knows them.
• Development/Disruption: the development/departure/adventure is the crucible in which we hear ideas transformed – thrilling magic in the right hands. 
• Resolution/Balance: the closing AB section balances the opening AB, and they frame the development/disruption. 

This shows itself in the way that keys work in sonata form. Op. 127 is in E-flat so if the first movement were a textbook sonata form it would work like this. Start in the tonic or home key [A], move to the furthest point [BC] then return home [AB], changing B to fit in the home key.

If you want to hear masterful, textbook sonata form [[Intro]ABABCAB], the first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony, No. 38 is terrific.  https://youtu.be/tLinpqckLGw?si=RNyI8EpkIRutx0QC

NAVIGATING

A listener navigating a sonata form must be able to navigate by a minimum of 3 landmarks:

• A the opening, 
• C the beginning of the departure
• A the homecoming.

If listeners cannot do this, the composer has failed. Everything stands or falls on the memorability and distinctiveness of the material and no one understood this better than Beethoven. He was staggeringly good at it. The opening of his 5^th Symphony! 

• A the opening: hear those opening 4 notes just once and they are in your brain
• C the beginning of the departure:  those 4 notes return with a twist to open up a new path
• A the homecoming: they return again, changed again, to signal homecoming, but more…

At no point is the listener in any doubt as to where in the piece they are and what Beethoven is doing with those 4 notes.

OP. 127: MAESTOSO – ALLEGRO

At first sight, the opening movement of Op 127 looks like another, brilliant example; but here is the rub. Beethoven makes it looks very much like sonata form but it is anything but. He uses two types of material: Maestoso [A] (majestic) and Allegro [B] (lively). 

Listen to the first minute or so of this wonderful performance by the Alban Berg Quartet a few times and you will hear the first Maestoso and then the beginning of the Allegro. I hope you agree there is no danger of any listener confusing the two types of material.

The first movement of Op. 127 consists of 3 pairs of Maestosos + Allegros. As a seasoned quartet listener around 1825, accustomed to hearing your first movements in sonata form, you could be forgiven for anticipating that the Maestosos function much like the opening 4 notes of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, i.e. they match up to the standard sonata form script as follows:

• A   opening                                                          Maestoso 1 + Allegro 1
  • C   beginning of the departure                Maestoso 2 + Allegro 2
• A   homecoming                                                 Maestoso 3 + Allegro 3

Going back to the video above, listen from the start until you hear the second Maestoso arrive – see how unmistakeable it is. But it is not strictly ‘C beginning of the departure.’ In fact, Beethoven does these things which make this not sonata form:

First: Remember C, the development section, the adventure/departure that should lie at the heart of the sonata form? Here, everything after the first Allegro, the first 2 minutes or so (therefore the majority of the piece) is ‘C’ because Beethoven simply does not stop developing his ideas: he never fully returns home to a second AB. It is as though Hansel and Gretel bake the witch then carry on having further adventures. You can see this especially clearly when you look at the keys Beethoven uses:

Second: Keys. As I mentioned above, if Beethoven were writing textbook sonata form his keys for this movement would maybe look like this –

He does nothing of the sort: 

At the start of Maestoso 2 he is in G major which is a distant relation to the tonic/home key. That would be fine since this could be taken for the start of the departure wherein anything goes. But, come Maestoso 3 – which should be the homecoming and in the home key – he has gone even further away, to C major. This unusual handling of keys is matched by very unusual proportions:

Third: Proportions. Remember, sonata form is partly about balance/resolution. Not so here, for two reasons. First, there is no symmetry, as we know already since there is no closing AB section. Second, if you take each pair of Maestoso + Allegro as a section and compare their lengths, you see immediately that the 3 sections are quirkily different lengths, and the last pair is 14 bars longer than the total of the earlier 2.

Fourth: The End. Given that there is no final AB section, what happens to end the movement? If you have read Post 2 you will know that each of the Late Quartets needs to be listened to in its entirety to make sense of its individual movements. Here is a classic case when Beethoven eschews the conventional symmetry or an individual form to expand into the whole piece. As I say above, during the 3rd Maestro+Allegro Beethoven ventures further and further from home disappointing anyone hoping for a homecoming, and he does it at length. Then, as the end approaches, he allows everything to fade away – the momentum, the loudness, the amount of activity between the instruments. He ends on a light E-flat chord, pauses and then starts the next movement with a low E-flat in the cello: the innocent ear could be forgiven for thinking that this represents continuity – but in fact this new movement is in a different key (A flat), which you don’t discover for a moment or two. And that is a whole different adventure.

I am now hotly aware that it would take much longer to read this screed than to listen to the 6 minutes of music that inspires it….and this barely scratches the surface of what’s to be said about it: I hope it is useful. And I heartily recommend listening to it to the point of familiarity – then turn to the slow movement and be astonished in a whole different way….

If you would like to read more about sonata form, one classic is Charles Rosen’s Sonata Forms, but there is no shortage of books on symphonies and sonatas which can give you more thoughts.

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. Many claim them to be the greatest music ever written. That praise can be a forbidding obstacle when it comes to enjoying these works, so  between now and next June, I will be spending a lot of time getting to know them 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 The 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 turn back to the music to remind me what is most important – which is every individual’s encounter with it. 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.

This blog will be updated every few weeks with my latest thoughts – if you would like to be alerted to new posts, please sign up to the mailing list to receive emails and we will send you updates.

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…]

Return to Blog Post 1

BEETHOVEN’S LATE QUARTETS 1

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.

Go on to the second post.

HOW TO LISTEN

One aside before getting stuck in: the only way to listen to this music is actively, and active listening is something which is taught less and less, leaving listeners to develop their own approaches.  Thankfully, it is not difficult to acquire some good habits – I have 4 which work for me so I mention them here in case they are helpful.

Be prepared: Know what you are dealing with: what, when, why, where… You don’t want to be weighed down with info, but knowing nothing puts you at a disadvantage.

Repetition: listen to unfamiliar music over and over again until you find yourself humming along or anticipating favourite moments. Hey – you HAVE favourite moments. You also start to feel the bones beneath the surface, the ebb and flow of the piece. The only health warning is: listen to more than one recording to ensure that your view of the piece is not overly influenced by a single interpretation.

Compare: There is nothing like contrast to sharpen your ears. Anything works which offers a point of connection. With Op 127 you could find other quartets written in the early 1820s (Schubert?) or an utterly different quartet (Shostakovich?) or – the answer to health warning above – find very different performances: one from the 1950s, one by a young quartet, one by an acclaimed ensemble, a Viennese, French, American performance…. YouTube is a great source of rarities.

Change focus: now and then, set yourself a goal for a particular listen. Focus on the bassline, perhaps; or on how many kinds of texture are deployed; or how speed fluctuates – anything you find interesting.

Take the easy way…

We know that some long-time ENF attenders are finding the drive to the East Neuk an unwelcome obstacle to coming to enjoy the music and warm welcome of the festival  and we are keen to make it as easy possible. If you have ideas do fire them over to us at ian@eastneukfestival.com.

For this year we have arranged a coach trip which will take you from central Edinburgh to Crail for two concerts then back to Edinburgh.  Click on the bus to find our more:

If you want more, there are also still spaces available on ACE Study Tours trip which includes most of this year’s concerts find our more at…

WE’RE CELEBRATING 20 GREAT YEARS IN 2024 & 2025

ENF embarks on 2 years of celebrations in 2024: the 20th anniversary of its founding next June followed by its 20th festival in 2025. We’re celebrating with old friends and new faces in favourite venues and new found spaces in the East Neuk of Fife.

20 Years is quite the landmark for any festival: when we started we were warned that few even make it past their first year, so we’re proud to be still here, still fresh and true to what we set out to do.

The full 2024 programme will be launched on 25 January 2024, with booking opening right after that.

Download our preview brochure

Sample the spirit of the festival in this snapshot of ENF2023

Support ENF

Every year hundreds of people donate to ENF : without them we would not be able to do what we do. If you would like to join them, you will find some info HERE

WE are grateful to Creative Scotland for supporting our double anniversary with extended funding over the two years.