Beethoven - Quartet No 9 in C Major, Op 59 (Rasumovsky) Transcript
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Beethoven - Quartet No 9 in C major, Op 59 (Rasumovsky) Transcript Date: Tuesday, 6 May 2008 - 6:00PM BEETHOVEN QUARTET NO 9 IN C MAJOR OP 5 NO 3 Professor Roger Parker I'll start today with an apology and a confession. The apology (which can be brief) is that, in the initial publicity for this series, the quartet today was announced as Beethoven's Op. 95; but some time ago, and for eminently practical reasons, the Badke quartet and I decided to change to the same composer's Op. 59, no. 3. I sincerely hope this inconveniences no-one, and may even please a few of you. The confession (which must be longer) is that I've been having a recurring nightmare about delivering this lecture series. The nightmares of people who appear before the public can be many and various: musicians, for example, have a number of classic ones. In mine, though, it's something quite particular. I arrive at Gresham College in good time for my lecture, armed with a talk crammed full of what dignity and scholarship I can muster. But as I come in, I glance at the notice board and see to my horror that I've got the programme mixed up: the quartet about which I've written my talk is actually due to be played next month; I've prepared the wrong work. What's to be done? The Badke Quartet have no time (and frankly, no inclination) to dash home and grab next month's music; and why should they? I decide I have two choices, neither of them pleasant. The first is to admit the mistake, perhaps making some flimsy joke about our postmodern condition and the arbitrary nature of the speech act, and then force myself to drone through half an hour of purgatory: an elaborate introduction to what everyone knows is a non-existent object. The other choice, which I favour, is to brazen it out: to talk about my quartet, then let the Badke play their quartet, and pray to Heaven no-one notices. If I'm publicly exposed at the end (which I surely will be), then I can always use that last refuge of the desperate teacher and say: 'Well, I'm glad someone was paying attention'. I'm just about to enter this room, nervously shuffling my papers, when, mercifully, I wake up. Is there a dark secret lurking within this simple story? I have to confess to being a very sceptical Freudian on most occasions, but the interesting thing about this nightmare is indeed what might lie hidden beneath its bizarre narrative. [pause] Unfortunately, though, I see that time is pressing on, and so will leave any Freudian explanations (deeply revealing and perhaps even shaming) to your collective imaginations. *** Today, then, it's the turn of Beethoven: a chance to hear one of his greatest works: the third of the so-called 'Razumovsky' quartets, Op. 59. As I've said more than once in this series, the idea of the string quartet, its unprecedented prestige in the Western canon, is inescapably associated with Beethoven, who dedicated himself to the medium with peculiar intensity at three separate periods of his life, and who in the process created a body of work that all subsequent composers felt (some more willingly than others) they were obliged to emulate. The Beethoven quartets have long been regarded, by listeners and players alike, as the pinnacle of the repertoire: never to be essayed or talked about without a generous dose of that throaty awe we reserve for the weightiest monuments of our culture. I know you believe me, but test it out anyway. Type 'Beethoven string quartet sublime' into that little box on the first page of Google and you'll find countless reiterations of the same basic idea: Beethoven's quartets are transcendent; they hover over us, out there in the ether; they are forever relevant, beyond history. What's striking is how far back this reverential attitude goes. Of course, there are famous stories of the incomprehension some of Beethoven's early audiences felt; but, remarkably and quite unusually for the period, the lack of understanding was very often assumed to be the fault of the audience rather than the piece in question. A good example is an early review of the Op. 59 quartets, which admitted that they were 'long and difficult' but followed this by saying that 'admirers hope that they will soon be engraved'. The message is plain: these works are complicated for areason; they are not entertainment; we need to study them in order to understand them. This attitude, which was common to most of Beethoven's instrumental works, gradually spread through Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and was fuelled rather than dampened by the composer's death in 1827, an event that set in motion a huge wave of monument building and other types of memorialisation. In short, Beethoven's most famous works were powerfully implicated in enormous changes in the ways music was performed, listened to and written about. Let me list a few of these changes: the decisive emergence of silent, attentive listening; the parallel emergence of instrumental music as more serious than vocal music; an increasing sense that a certain strand of this instrumental music, now commonly called 'classical music', was spiritually uplifting and morally superior; a new hierarchy between the composer and the performer, one that saw the latter as merely a vehicle to express the thoughts of the former; an increased attention to, and reverence for, the score as a repository of the 'work'; and so on and on. Does all this sound familiar? It should do, because it marks the decisive emergence of 'our' classical musical world, with its concert going, its silent listening, and all the rest; a world that probably saw its peak in the state-sponsored 1950s and 1960s, and that is now, most would admit, in slow decline. Like most iconic cultural figures, Beethoven's life story was powerfully inscribed onto his artistic production, in his case through application of the classic trope of 'three periods' (youth, maturity, and old age). This was something applied to Beethoven very soon after his death, and has retained a robust currency to this day. As I mentioned a moment ago, it happens to suit his quartet production very well, as there are substantial contributions in all three periods. First, around 1798-1800, come his youthful quartets, the set of six which make up Op. 18. These bear very obvious debts to Mozart's quartets, two of which Beethoven copied out in his own hand (a common mode of musical learning that we have almost entirely lost these days). Less obvious, but equally telling, is the debt to Haydn, who was still alive and indeed still producing quartets, with whom Beethoven had studied briefly in the early 1790s (when he first arrived in Vienna), and about whom he evidently felt no small degree of competitive anxiety. But these Op. 18 quartets, though broadly speaking they still retain the intimacy and 'conversational' character of Mozart and Haydn (the sense of being written as much for the performers as for listeners) also display an intensity that both Mozart and Haydn would probably have found disturbing. The first movement of Op. 18, no. 1, for example, is ferociously single-minded in its thematic economy, hardly a bar going by without some statement of its opening, 'motto' theme: so ferocious, in fact, that Beethoven later revised the movement, taking out a lot of this 'thematic working', this thematische Arbeit, and thus, according to some, disconcertingly 'de-unifying' his musical language. Beethoven's middle period, sometimes called his 'heroic' period, began with a huge spiritual crisis around 1801: he realized, or finally admitted to himself and close friends, that he was going deaf, a disability that was disastrous professionally (much of his living was earned as a pianist), but that also - and in the end just as significantly - caused him to withdraw from social life. His emergence from this crisis was, in this sense paradoxically, by means of a compositional turn outwards: to a series of grand 'public' works that would cement his reputation as Europe's most celebrated composer of instrumental music: the Erocia symphony, the 'Waldstein' and 'Appassionata' piano sonatas all come from this period; and so too do the three quartets Op. 59 - which were written around 1805-6 and, as we shall see, partake freely of the spirit of these grandiose companions. Two further quartets, the Op. 74 and Op. 95 are also usually attached to this 'middle' period (they were composed in 1809 and 1810), although by that time Beethoven's 'heroic' phase was coming to a close. After 1812 there came an important hiatus in Beethoven's composing life; a period of several years in which he produced very little, surrounded as he was by new personal crises and also - though we know less about it - by a sense that more modern musical fashions might overtake him. But then the last decade of his life saw the emergence of a radically new musical language, that of the so-called 'late style', which is characterized by great contrasts and extreme individuality. Near the end of this period, and thus near the end of Beethoven's life, there again appear a series of string quartets, the five so-called 'late quartets', some of which he seems to have written without obvious stimulus from commissions and which have seemed, to almost everyone since, a deeply individual summing-up of his entire career.