The great series of string quartets begins with the six of opus 18,
published in 1801, and concludes, officially speaking, with the
masterpiece in F major, opus 135, completed only in 1826, but not
printed till something like half a year after his death. The half-dozen
works constituting the earlier opus had been ripening in the form of
sketches and experiments of one sort or another for several years. They
were finally issued in two numbers, each consisting of three scores. It
is not possible to determine precisely the order in which they were
written, but that fact is unimportant because the lot do not exhibit any
definite line of development. It seems that one version of the first
quartet, in F, was completed in 1799. Beethoven gave it to his friend,
the young ecclesiastical student Carl Amenda, but asked him to show it
to nobody because “I have altered it considerably, having just learned
to compose quartets aright.” Bekker finds that the revision “tends to a
freer, more soloistic treatment of the accompanying parts, a clearer
individualization of the cello part and a greater tonal delicacy in the
ensemble effects.... The main idea of the composition, however, remained
unchanged. This is no disadvantage, for the fresh naiveté of the content
and the unassuming clarity of structure are great charms, and more would
have been lost than gained by overmeticulous revision. As the work
stands it is gratifying to the performer and offers pleasant, not over
difficult problems to the listener.”
The finest part of the work is undoubtedly the second movement, an
“Adagio affetuoso ed appassionato.” It is the richest in texture and
certainly the most poetic and emotional of the four. When the composer
played it to Amenda he is said to have inquired what the music suggested
to him. “It suggests a lover’s parting,” replied Amenda; whereupon
Beethoven replied, “Well, the tomb scene from _Romeo and Juliet_ was in
my mind.” And Bekker insists that this Adagio is “a most moving song of
sorrow such as only Beethoven could accomplish when he turned to the
grave D minor key.”
The second quartet, in G major, has been christened in some German
countries the “Compliment Quartet.” It is graceful and rather courtly
but it reaches none of the depths of the more moving pages of the
preceding work, The Finale, however, is an instance of that “unbuttoned
humor” that Beethoven was to exhibit on later occasions and of which he
gave us supreme instances in the last movement of the Seventh Symphony,
the Eighth Symphony, and moments in the last quartets, the “Diabelli
Variations,” and several of the final piano sonatas. Opus 18, No. 3, in
D, is likewise marked by a quality of gaiety, though hardly of the
“unbuttoned” kind.
The fourth work of the opus 18 set, in C minor, is more or less a work
distinct from its companions. “A mood of deep seriousness is common to
it and the C major Quintet, opus 29,” believes Bekker, “but the Quartet
is full of passionate excitement,” and he alludes to its “mournful
earnestness ... and restless dissatisfaction, the very opposite of the
cheerful sense of concord with the world and mankind expressed in the
other five.” The Quartet in A major has been termed Mozartean by some,
operatic by others. Certainly it is fluent and lilting music, of which
the Minuet is in some respects the most winning portion even if the
final Allegro excels it in expressiveness.
The B-flat Quartet, sixth of the series, is particularly significant for
the sombre adagio beginning of its otherwise jubilant allegretto Finale.
Beethoven has headed this introduction (which is recalled dramatically
during the movement) “La Malinconia: Questo pezzo si deve trattare colla
più gran delicatezza” (“Melancholy: this piece must be played with the
greatest delicacy”). This eerie and wholly romantic movement is a true
glimpse of the Beethoven into whose newer world we shall presently
penetrate.
With the three monumental quartets of opus 59 we have entered this new
sphere. They belong to the year 1806, which means that they are of the
epoch of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, the third “Leonore” Overture,
and the Violin Concerto and the G major Concerto for piano. Beethoven
dedicated them to the Russian Count Rasoumovsky, whose name is thus
imperishably linked with these masterpieces; and it was perhaps as a
compliment to this nobleman that he introduced into the first and second
of these works authentic Russian themes. Indeed, the Scherzo of the E
minor Quartet utilizes that great melody around which, more than half a
century later, Moussorgsky was to build the coronation scene in his
opera _Boris Godounov_.
The “Rasoumovsky” trilogy exhibits Beethoven’s inventive and technical
faculties at the ideal symmetry they had achieved at the flood tide of
his so-called “Second” period. The F major, C major, and E minor
Quartets are in some ways the most ideally “balanced” ones he ever
wrote; and, with all their splendor of form and substance, they are
still replete with the most astonishing originalities and departures.
Indeed, the amazing “Allegretto, scherzando” movement of the F major
Quartet so astounded the players who first undertook to perform it that
they imagined Beethoven’s rhythmic motto theme was intended as a joke at
their expense and almost refused to go through with it. The Adagio, on
the other hand, develops, with the utmost richness of sonority and color
possible to four stringed instruments, two gorgeously songlike themes
till it seems as if they had become expanded to orchestral dimensions.
The E minor Quartet, less a display piece than its companion works, is
in a totally different and quite as unprecedented manner, while its slow
movement (“Molto Adagio”) sounds a deep, spiritual note which seems to
have been inspired in the composer by a nocturnal contemplation of a
starry sky in the country around Baden, near Vienna. As for the C major
Quartet, the third of the “Rasoumovsky” set, it closes in a jubilant,
sweeping fugue, which is like a paean of triumph.
There are two E-flat quartets in Beethoven’s output: the first, opus 74,
is known as the “Harp” Quartet by reason of the numerous passages of
plucked strings in the first movement; the second is the tremendous opus
127. The former is the dreamier, less challenging of the two; it is rich
not only in a sort of romanticism that looks forward to the age of
Schumann, but also in unexpected effects bearing the unmistakable stamp
of the Beethoven of the “Emperor” Concerto period, though in its way it
is rather less venturesome than the “Rasoumovsky” trilogy. But the
quartet that was written down in 1810—the F minor, opus 95—is in another
category. It is the product of a new period of emotional ferment and a
disquiet pervades the score with the irascible pertinacity of a gadfly.
There is, indeed, a new quality of storm and stress in this _Quartetto
Serioso_, as the composer himself designated it. Here he is in no mood
for trifling. “At the moment when Beethoven had fought out his battle,
when he could look back on all stages of the contest and taste the
fruits of victory, he became most intensely aware of what it had cost
him,” writes Paul Bekker, adding that “the autographed title shows that
the composer sought no happy solution of his problem”—in spite of which
the F minor Quartet does, surprisingly enough, end on a note of
laughter.
Beethoven did not busy himself with the composition of string quartets
for another fourteen years. This stretch of time is longer than any
other interval in the various series of his compositions. It must be
recalled, however, that in this space he wrote the last three
symphonies, the last half-dozen piano sonatas, the _Missa Solemnis_, the
definitive revision of _Fidelio_ together with its new E major overture,
the _Ferne Geliebte_ song cycle, the “Consecration of the House”
Overture, and a quantity of other works only less significant.
Spiritually, of course, he had traversed cycles of experience and had
become, in an intellectual and artistic sense, another being.
It is almost inevitable, therefore, that the next great masterpiece of
chamber music, should lift the curtain on a new creative realm. The
E-flat Quartet, opus 127, has been properly likened to a majestic portal
opening on the grand landscape of the last four quartets—the B-flat,
opus 130; C-sharp minor, opus 131; A minor, opus 132; and the relatively
short F major, opus 135, which may be described as a short of epilogue
to the series.
There is nothing quite like these “last quartets” in Beethoven’s
myriad-faceted output. In its way the series may be said to transcend
even the Ninth Symphony, the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, and the “Diabelli”
Variations. The novelty, the explosive qualities, the far-darting
influence of these works (which span the nineteenth century and might
even be said to help leaven the musical art of our own time) cannot be
fully evaluated, let alone described, in this book.
It must suffice here to point out that the E-flat Quartet places the
listener at once in a world of unimagined wonders. The very opening
measures of the first movement with their powerful chords sound like a
heraldic annunciation. The second movement, (“Adagio ma non troppo e
molto cantabile”) is a series of variations of deepest earnestness. It
is as if the composer endeavored to bring to his hearers revelations
newly unfolded to his searching vision. The “Scherzando vivace” that
follows is wildly and even uncannily humorous—and, incidentally, the
longest of Beethoven’s scherzos. The Finale is a sort of triumphal march
in which “some adventurer from the heavens seems to visit the earth ...
with tidings of gladness, to return to his home in the heavens once
more.”
[Illustration: Portrait of Beethoven in later life.]
[Illustration: Etching of Beethoven’s study.]
The B-flat Quartet is, if anything, more unusual and amazing, and it is
in reality bound by a kind of mystical thematic kinship with the A minor
and the C-sharp minor Quartets which come next. This kinship can be
traced through the Great Fugue and is carried through the following
quartets with a variety of profound philosophical modifications. The
seven relatively brief movements of the B-flat masterpiece culminate in
the hyper-emotional Cavatina (of which Beethoven said that remembrance
of the feelings that inspired him to compose it always stirred him to
tears); and to this sentimental outburst the harsh if stupendous fugue
provided a truly beneficent purgation. The later-written closing
Allegro, if lively and effervescent, is much less truly “in the
picture.”
While it is risky, if not really impossible, to speak of the “greatest”
of the last quartets, more than one musician would vote for the
fourteenth—the tremendous one in C-sharp minor. The composition has
seven movements, extraordinarily diversified. Beethoven tried out one of
his little pleasantries on Schott, the publisher, and declared at first
the quartet was “pieced together out of sundry stolen odds and ends.” A
little later he reassured the frightened, unimaginative man of business
that it was really “brand new.” And subsequently he said impulsively
that he considered the C-sharp minor “my best.” The introductory “Adagio
non troppo” was called by Wagner “the most sorrowful thing ever said in
music.” All the same, the mighty creation, after passing through
unbelievable emotional transformations, closes in a triumphal frenzy
which Wagner likened to “the dance of the whole world.”
The A minor Quartet, opus 132, doubtless begun somewhat earlier than the
two preceding, is scarcely less amazing. Its heart is the “Molto Adagio”
movement which Beethoven called “Song of Thanksgiving in the Lydian mode
offered to the Deity by a convalescent.” It is filled with a mystical
quality, a religious mood explained by the circumstance that the
composer wrote the movement (one of his longest) when recovering from an
illness. But the still more amazing fact about this quartet is that some
pages of it were conceived for other works. It is a strange phenomenon
that Beethoven on several occasions designed a quantity of pages not
wholly sure where they would best fit, though in the end his artistic
intuitions invariably led him to discover the right place. Just as he
once intended the last movement of the “Kreutzer” Sonata for one of the
sonatas of the opus 30 set, so he at one time intended the “Alla Marcia”
that begins the finale of the A minor Quartet for the Ninth Symphony.
And the last quartets furnish other instances of the same kind of thing.
The sixteenth quartet, last of the series, is rather different from the
philosophical quartets that immediately preceded it. It is, on the
whole, of lighter weight, though its brief “Lento assai” movement
touches hands with the ineffable Cavatina of the B-flat Quartet. It is
the shortest, though one of the most moving, of Beethoven’s slow
movements. The last movement opens with a three-note motto under which
the composer wrote the words “Must it be?” and followed it with another
three-note theme (Allegro) inscribed with the words “It must be!”
Explanations have been numerous and often far-fetched. There is reason
to believe that this formula and the musical embodiments of this
interrogation and answer must be construed in the light of the master’s
philosophy, with its cheerful acceptance of the inevitable. It looks
almost like a purposeful reversion to the mood of “La malinconia”
episode in the B-flat Quartet of opus 18.
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
BY THE
PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK