Carducci String Quartet

Beethoven’s String Quartets VII Carducci String Quartet String Quartet in G major Op 18 No 2 String Quartet in E flat major Op 127 Monday 24 May 4pm Assembly Rooms This concert is generously supported by an anonymous donor. Beethoven and the String Quartet The writing of string quartets was a daunting challenge The ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, Op 59, stand in the same for any young composer in Vienna in the 1790s, even relation to the Op 18 quartets as the ‘Eroica’ does to the one as brilliantly gifted as Beethoven. Over the previous first two symphonies. In their sometimes truculent way, two decades Haydn, especially, and Mozart had raised Op 18 by and large had adhered to the 18th-century the quartet to the most exalted of classical genres: a notion, encapsulated by Goethe, of the string quartet as supreme vehicle for ‘learned’ taste and subtle, civilised ‘a conversation between four intelligent people’. With the musical discourse. In the words of the late 18th-century Op 59 quartets, unprecedented in their rhetorical force aesthetician Daniel Schubart, a string quartet expressed and symphonic cast, the private has become public. ‘the whole musical universe concentrated into one work’. Projection rather than intimate discourse is now the order of the day. Not surprisingly, Beethoven waited until he had established his credentials as a composer for the piano, These quintessential works of Beethoven’s so-called his own instrument, before venturing on to his string middle period were followed by two isolated quartets: quartets in the autumn of 1798. In preparation, he had the genial ‘Harp’, Op 74, in 1809, and the violently steeped himself in the quartets of his great compressed ‘Quartetto serioso’, Op 95, in 1810. Then predecessors, copying out many of them, including three came a gap of nearly 14 years. The revised version of of Haydn’s epoch-making Op 20 set and Mozart’s Fidelio, which had its premiere in 1814, had marked the A major Quartet K464. More than with any of his zenith of Beethoven’s popular acclaim and the previous works, he made extensive, painstaking culmination of his ‘middle period’. With a few exceptions sketches, both in the large workbooks that he kept in his — the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, the Missa solemnis and lodgings and in the pocket-books he carried round on the Ninth Symphony — his music now abandoned the his walks in Vienna and the surrounding countryside. monumental, heroic vision for a more private, introspective questing. It is tempting to imagine Although some found them strong meat, Beethoven’s Beethoven composing his late quartets of 1824–6 in Op 18 quartets were generally well received when hermetic isolation from the world, but they were in they appeared in 1801. The reviewer for the Leipzig fact written for immediate performance and Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote of the first publication. Indeed, as Beethoven himself noted with three that they were ‘excellent works…giving a satisfaction, there was a newly flourishing market for complete demonstration of Beethoven’s art’, adding string quartets in the mid-1820s, stimulated not least by that ‘they must be played often and very well, as they the popularity of his own Op 18 and, increasingly, of his are very difficult to play and by no means popular in middle-period quartets. manner’. Having now proved himself in the most elevated genre of chamber music, Beethoven became For all their structural and harmonic innovations, these absorbed in other large-scale projects, including the five late quartets — Op. 127, 130, 131 (in seven Third Piano Concerto, the Second Symphony and the movements!), 132 and 135 — still depend on the three Piano Sonatas Op 31. Then, in the autumn of sonata principle that Beethoven had used with such 1802, came the climacteric of the Heiligenstadt far-seeing mastery all his creative life. It is this, together Testament, a document of despair and depression with his magnificent sanity and control, even in written by Beethoven in the village of Heiligenstadt, in extremis, that confirms Beethoven as an essentially which he resolved to triumph over his encroaching Classical artist in an age of burgeoning subjective deafness through his art. Romanticism. Yet in these sublime late quartets Beethoven imbues the Classical sonata ideal with a Determined to pursue a ‘new path’ in music, he embarked new concentration, clarity and inspired eccentricity, on the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, to be followed by the while expanding it as never before to embrace fugue ‘Waldstein’ and ‘Appassionata’ Sonatas and the opera (otherworldly in Op 131, violently rebarbative in the Fidelio, the first version of which was completed in Grosse Fuge that concludes Op 130), variations, serene, 1805. That same year Beethoven began work on a set of rarefied lyricism, quasi-folksong and — in a movement three quartets commissioned by one of his most like the Presto of Op 131 — knockabout farce. musically cultivated patrons, Count Andreas Razumovsky. String Quartet in G major String Quartet in E flat major Op 18 No 2 Op 127 Allegro Maestoso — Allegro Adagio cantabile – Allegro – Tempo I Adagio ma non troppo e molto cantabile Scherzo: Allegro Scherzando vivace — Presto Allegro molto, quasi presto Finale The second of Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets in their After the lone Quartet Op 95 of 1810, 12 years passed published order is an altogether more urbane affair than before Beethoven’s thoughts turned again to the string the first. Despite subversive moments, the fiery quartet. In the summer of 1822 he offered the Leipzig revolutionary here re-creates the spirit of the 18th- publisher Peters a quartet, already partly sketched, century comedy of manners; and of all the Op 18 together with the Missa solemnis. Peters accepted the quartets, this is the one that most often suggests Haydn. Mass but turned down the quartet. A new stimulus The courtly opening, with its graciously balanced two-bar came in November that year, with a lucrative phrases, has spawned the German nickname commission from the Russian amateur cellist Prince ‘Komplimentier-Quartett’ (‘quartet of bows and Nikolas Galitzin for up to three quartets. But work on curtsies’). But amid the relaxed, civilised discourse there the Ninth Symphony prevented Beethoven returning to are plenty of surprises. As in the first movement of Op 18 his sketches until the summer of 1824. In December he No 1, the recapitulation enters, unexpectedly, in an wrote that he had virtually completed the first of the emphatic forte with the theme (on the cello) Galitzin quartets, in E flat. But, true to form, he resoundingly counterpointed by the repeated crotchets continued to make last-minute revisions, causing the of the transition theme. Then, in a series of canons premiere, by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, to be between the two violins, the opening phrase slips postponed to 6 March. through a series of distant modulations. After these magical new excursions, the coda is terse and With limited time for preparation and rehearsal, the epigrammatic, ending nonchalantly with the original performance was not a success. The quartet’s version of the main theme. numerous changes of metre, for instance, caused enormous problems of ensemble. With some understatement, Schuppanzigh stated that ‘its The Adagio begins as a formal, rather old-fashioned originality makes it difficult, and one cannot grasp it violin-solo-plus-accompaniment, which becomes at first sight’. Beethoven, by now profoundly deaf, more florid as it proceeds. Then, out of the blue, did not attend the concert, but when he heard Beethoven takes a tiny cadential figure, speeds it up reports from his friends he resolved that a repeat to Allegro and makes it the basis of a quivering moto performance be arranged as soon as possible with perpetuo dance that has more than a whiff of Joseph Böhm, who had often led the ensemble in Mendelssohn. When the Adagio returns it is even Schuppanzigh’s absence. At the suggestion of the more extravagantly ornamented, with a suggestion of second violinist, Karl Holz, the quartet was played parody. The (not so fast) Scherzo is the most puckish not once but twice in each concert, to enable the and humorous in Op 18, with Beethoven drawing the audience of connoisseurs to digest its complexities. maximum comic capital from its airy opening theme. Holz’s novel idea paid off. The two ‘double’ concerts Launched by a compact, Haydnesque theme, the were a triumph. ‘The misty veil disappeared, and the finale makes gleeful play with displaced accents, magnificent work of art shone in all its glory’, wrote typically Beethovenian ‘rough’ counterpoint and one admiring Viennese critic. outrageous shifts of key, above all the deception at the end of the development, where the music lingers on In his classic study of the string quartets, the the brink of G major before insouciantly continuing in American musicologist Joseph Kerman called A flat. Op 127 ‘Beethoven’s crowning monument to lyricism’. Though it has its disquieting, subversive aspects, spaciousness and serenity rule. As in Op 130, the opening movement integrates its grandly sonorous in the first movement, the recapitulation steals in Maestoso introduction into the main body of the ethereally. Then, towards the end, the motion movement, creating in effect a ‘first subject’ in two subsides and the music melts via another trill into the different tempos. The Maestoso dissolves via a trill coda, in 6/8 time. Subverting tradition, Beethoven into the tenderly beseeching Allegro theme and twice uses the new metre not for a display of brilliance but recurs later in the movement, at the end of the to create a radiant lyrical apotheosis that dissolves exposition and during the development. Either side of and transfigures the main theme.

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