Challenges and Illuminations On Beethoven‘s String Quartets
Thomas May
Why are we so obsessed with Ludwig van Beethoven? Among the reasons that might be given, one is so obvious that it tends to be overlooked: he changed what we expect from music. Inextricably connected with that radical change are the bold demands any serious engagement with his music imposes on performers and listeners alike. Nowhere is this circle of exchange more consistently operative than in Beethoven’s body of string quartets. Stretching across his career from his first decade in Vienna to the last composition he completed before his death in 1827 (the second finale of Op. 130), the genre became an obsession for Beethoven himself. If Beethoven changed how we perform and listen to music, he also changed how music is discussed—for example, in the post- mortem operation that we call criticism. The Ninth Symphony, when it was initially being digested, provoked new ways of thinking and writing about the very topic of music. Coming to terms with the challenges posed by compositions as unprecedented as the late string quartets required a process of adaptation that strikes an uncannily familiar chord. It involved a “dialectic between initial befuddlement and subsequent illumination born of study,” the musicologist John Daverio has observed, that anticipates a pattern “closely associated with the reception of much 20th-century music.”
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