Challenges and Illuminations

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 postmortem 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.”

Indeed, the late quartets continued to resist assimilation into the mainstream well after Beethoven’s symphonies and piano sonatas had become its defining models. Daverio points out that “it was probably not by chance that the scores and parts of the late quartets were published more or less simultaneously”—thus allowing for in-depth study of each work as a whole—whereas there had been significant gaps between initial publication and the appearance of complete scores for Beethoven’s previous quartets. Thus the Londonbased Beethoven Quartet Society, which was founded in the 1840s, “took as one of its express aims the study of the late quartets from score.”

Digital Insights into Inexhaustible Music

“Illumination born of study” continues to motivate approaches to Beethoven’s quartets. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the latest digital technology is being pressed into service to yield fresh insights into their inexhaustible secrets. Take the composer, software engineer, and inventor Stephen Malinowski (who goes by the handle “smalin” on YouTube). He began applying his technique of animated graphical representations of scores to Beethoven’s string quartets in 2010—using color theory, for example, to identify the tonic, dominant, and so on with specific colors as a way to illustrate changes in the underlying harmonic structure. By October 2019, Malinowski had created animated scores for every one of the quartets. (His complete cycle, accompanying performances by the Alexander String Quartet, can be viewed at www.musanim. com/BeethovenStringQuartets.)

The 16 string quartets—including the Grosse Fuge (the “Grand Fugue,” which Beethoven initially intended to serve as the finale of Op. 130)—comprise between eight and nine hours of music. According to the digital musicologist Fabian Moss—lead author of a recently published study of the “statistical characteristics of tonal harmony” across the complete Beethoven quartets—the cycle contains nearly 30,000 chords. About 1,000 of these are different, while the most commonly occurring chords are, overwhelmingly and unsurprisingly, tonic and dominant chords. Such census-taking might bring an Anton Bruckner-like mania for counting to mind, but it provides the foundation for Moss and colleagues’ empirical analysis of what makes Beethoven sound like Beethoven.

That question was uppermost in the composer’s mind in his late 20s—or, more accurately rephrased, the question “What can make the string quartet sound like Beethoven?” During the waning two years of the 18th century and into the turn of the next, he worked intensively on Op. 18, which was issued in two separate volumes in 1801. The young transplant from Bonn to Vienna had been carefully preparing the way by focusing on other genres first (for example, the piano trio and piano sonata, which he chose as his Op. 1 and Op. 2, respectively; string trios; violin and cello sonatas; even a string quintet).

Beethoven reportedly had begun trying his hand at quartets already in 1795 in response to an aristocrat’s request, but these efforts were detoured into other compositions. The remarkable evidence of the sketchbooks so meticulously preserved by Beethoven documents the immense care that he devoted to this project. (Decades later, he produced more than 650 pages of sketches while composing Op. 131). With regard to the string quartet (as well as such genres as the symphony, opera, and large-scale choral music), observes Joseph Kerman, Beethoven “moved into formidable competition with Haydn and Mozart in the forms they had cultivated with full responsibility and artistic intensity.”

While Haydn’s influence on Beethoven’s conception of this prestigious genre was inevitable—they even shared the same patron for quartet commissions: Carl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky—Mozart’s achievements in his “Haydn” Quartets of 1785 profoundly shaped the young German’s thinking (above all, the harmonic boldness of the “Dissonance” Quartet as well as K. 464 in A major, a direct model for Beethoven’s contribution the same key, No. 5 in the Op. 18 set). At the same time, the “different” quality with which Beethoven’s brand was becoming associated can be gleaned from the first reviews. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, based in Leipzig, acknowledged Beethoven’s artistry but noted that these works “must be played frequently, since they are difficult to perform and are in no way popular.”

Perfecter of Tradition or Iconoclast?

The biographer Maynard Solomon views this as representing the “classicist” perspective that would set a pattern of critiquing Beethoven “for perceived violations of normative precepts of order, unity, balance, and decorum.” Even Schubert, a contemporary who commanded a uniquely sympathetic understating of Beethoven and who was impressed in particular by the quartets, initially resisted what he evidently viewed as disturbingly anti-classical (and the antithesis of his beloved Mozart). He deplored, in a famous diary entry of 1816, the older artist’s “eccentricity, which joins and confuses the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings, and the holiest with harlequinades—without distinction, so as to goad people to madness instead of dissolving them in love, to incite them to laughter rather than lifting them up to God.” Beethoven himself would seem to have encouraged such takes with his reported response to naysayers, specifically referring to the string quartets: “They are not for you but for a later age” (Milton Babbitt avant la lettre).

Over time, the characterization of Beethoven’s art as quintessentially Romantic or even proto-Modernist has stood at one extreme; at the other is the image of his style as “a personal fusion of preexistent styles, traditions, and procedures rather than as a demonic or divinely inspired creation ex nihilo,” according to Solomon. Such a Classical-versus-Romantic dichotomy outlines shifting views of the composer, which have oscillated like a swinging pendulum up to the present—with the quartets in particular offering a rich proving ground for widely divergent perspectives.

Thus the Op. 18 quartets show Beethoven both consolidating the High Classicism of Haydn and Mozart and also, to varying extents in each of these six works, pushing the known boundaries of the genre as he anticipates essential aspects of what we recognize as the “Beethoven style”—whether in the obsessive motivic saturation of the movement that launches the set (the F-major Quartet, though it was actually composed second) or the extraordinary structure of the finale of the Quartet in B-flat major (inscribed La Malinconia) that concludes Op. 18.

Because Beethoven so significantly affected the course of Western music history, we find ourselves in something like a musicological Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle situation: our own perspective inevitably affects however “objectively” we try to perceive the progression of Beethoven’s language in the quartets. The issue is further entangled in the traditional classification of Beethoven’s life work into three distinctive periods. Such tripartite division possesses an archetypal power—after all, it echoes the dialectical process.

While skeptically assessing the well-known paradigm of early, middle, and late styles, Solomon finds that it is, in the end, defensible, aside from certain exceptions to the rule (such as the “Serioso” Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, from 1810–11).

Beethoven’s Quartets and the Three-Period Paradigm

The significant gaps in Beethoven’s quartet production underscore this three-period correlation. His Op. 18 quartets build on all he had absorbed from Haydn and Mozart, who in turn had secured the genre’s remarkable prestige: the string quartet as music for musicians, often compared to a conversational model—as Goethe later formulated it, music-making as “a conversation between four intelligent people.”

In 1806, five years after publishing Op. 18, Beethoven again took up the genre in the three quartets comprising Op. 59. The composer’s life experiences and artistic triumphs in the intervening half-decade had profoundly changed him. He had accomplished the miracles of the “Eroica” Symphony, the “Waldstein” Sonata, and the first version of Fidelio—and he had been forced to confront the trauma of his worsening and incurable deafness. Just as much as those works are for their respective genres, the C-major Quartet that launches Op. 59 is a Rubicon-crossing, game-changing composition: it forever altered what a string quartet could be.

But Beethoven was also responding to new developments in chamber music performance. Joseph Kerman notes the importance of the composer’s interactions with quartet players over the course of his career: above all, with the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who premiered some of his most important quartets. Kerman describes Schuppanzigh’s entrepreneurial approach to presenting chamber music in Vienna as a “harbinger of the professional world of the string quartet as we know it”—in contrast to the intimate circle of like-minded friends playing for each other evoked by the Op. 18 set. The catalyst for Beethoven to return to string quartet writing was a commission from the Russian ambassador to the imperial court in Vienna (and amateur violinist), Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky, Op. 59’s dedicatee. This time, Beethoven appears to have composed the set of three in the order in which they were published in 1808. Here, we encounter a fascinating example of Beethoven “toning down” his most experimental proclivities. His original version of the first movement of Op. 59 No. 1 resulted in an even longer duration for this work of immense architectural dimensions.

Beethoven had similarly “tamed” the opening movement of the F-major Quartet in Op. 18 by removing some of the recurrences of its six-note motif in his revision. Kerman notes that the first version “is decidedly more extreme in momentary musical inflection.” The notion of Beethoven steadily coming into his own with each phase of his quartets, starting with a more “conservative” approach, turns out to be simplistic and too tidy. Instead, it is more useful to think of “avant-garde” tendencies and a desire to be more accessible finding expression at different moments—whether within a given group of works or indeed across the otherwise neatly triadic span of Beethoven’s creative life.

Another period of change in the composer’s life circumstances, involving both personal loss and the stress of Napoleon’s second siege of Vienna in 1809, is associated with his ensuing string quartet efforts: Op. 74 and Op. 95 (1809 and 1810, respectively). Significantly, it is with these works that Beethoven began assigning a single opus number to each individual quartet. Considered side by side and also in relation to Op. 59, these two works posit an astonishing set of contrasts. The electrifying tautness of the F-minor Quartet (Op. 95), for example, inhabits a world very different from the confident expansiveness we had found in the C-major “Razumovsky” Quartet.

A dozen years elapsed after this before Beethoven again confronted the genre. In 1822, another Russian admirer, Prince Nikolai Galitzin (only 27 at the time), requested a set of three quartets on very generous terms. (An amateur cellist who promoted Beethoven’s music in Saint Petersburg, Galitzin had at first considered giving his commission to Carl Maria von Weber.) The composer completed his long-protracted Missa solemnis and Ninth Symphony first and then immersed himself in quartet writing.

Between 1824 and 1825, Beethoven was able to finish the three quartets, and he immediately embarked on two more, completing Op. 131 in the spring of 1826 and Op. 135, his last quartet, in the fall of that year. There followed the Allegro finale of Op. 130, his final completed composition. Once again, this represents a “concession” of sorts to something less radical. Beethoven initially intended to crown the B flat–major Quartet with the Grosse Fuge (Op. 133) — an “absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contempo- rary forever,” as Igor Stravinsky characterized it. Yet, however reluctantly, Beethoven later was persuaded to write a less weighty, less technically and musically complex finale. (Incidentally, he died before ever hearing this subsequent version of Op. 130.)

The diametrically opposed tendencies that are threaded through the earlier quartets resurface in even more extreme ways in the late ones. Beethoven’s quartets for the Prince expanded steadily in design, from the four movements of Op. 127 to the six of Op. 132. He carried that tendency still further with the seven-movement Op. 131 that followed, yet he next plunged directly into Op. 135, whose compact design veers in the opposite direction.

The special aura around the late quartets has enhanced their status as the holiest of holies within the complete body of Beethoven’s works. Paradoxically, these compositions, which more than any defy paraphrase, have inspired two of the most impressive attempts in English literature to convey their musical truths through words: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point, which even incorporates the experience of listening to Heiliger Dankgesang from Op. 132 into its narrative. Overall, the late quartets engage in a style of intense, fierce contrasts far more extreme than the ones against which Schubert had railed in his 1816 diary entry. Contradictory elements coexist in unprecedented ways, while visionary formal experimentation accommodates a dialogue with tradition (embracing Beethoven’s reexamination of his own past). Archaic procedures—above all, the composer’s obsession with counterpoint—are converted into innovations that have lost nothing of their capacity to astonish. In the late quartets, Beethoven gyrates without warning from the elated vision of a mystic to earthy, gruff humor—and somehow mingles it all together into unparalleled, unimagined unities.

The musical-historical, social, and political contexts of Beethoven’s life in Vienna had been inextricably linked with his changing approaches to the string quartet—as in the shift from the traditional model of lofty conversation to a more public, quasi-symphonic discourse in the “Razumovsky” Quartets, observes Joseph Kerman: “As Beethoven’s musical imagination turned inward, the quartet turned away from its earlier audiences.” That audience becomes “primarily the composer” in the late quartets, in which, as Kerman puts it “Beethoven … achieved the privatization of the string quartet” —and we, the audience, become “an awestruck eavesdropper.”