9 Manner, tone, and tendency in Beethoven’s chamber music for strings

JOHN DAVERIO

I

In his chamber music for strings, Beethoven made incredibly rich contributions to an entire family of genres: trio, quartet, and quintet. This music comprises the sort of metagenre that Walter Benjamin had in mind when, writing about Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu , he maintained that all great works of art either “found a genre or dissolve one.” ¹ One could make that claim for Beethoven’s string chamber music in general and of his quartets in particular, even if it is not easy to pinpoint the precise means through which the composer either founded or dissolved a genre.

On at least one point there can be no doubt: Beethoven viewed his chamber music for strings as a privileged repertory. Consider his attitude toward the common practice of arranging chamber works for other media. One special case aside, Beethoven did not recast his string chamber music for other instruments, though there are several examples of the reverse procedure in arrangements either made by Beethoven himself or completed under his supervision, for instance, the reincarnation of the Wind Octet op. 103 as a string quintet (op. 4), or the arrangement of the Piano Trio op. 1 no. 3 for string quintet (op. 104). Furthermore, his recasting of the E major Piano Sonata op. 14 no. 1 for string quartet – a task that Beethoven felt only he could have accomplished satisfactorily – amounts to awholesale transformation of the original. ² Hardly a measure of the piano sonata is left untouched in matters of register, texture, dynamics, accompanimental figuration, or rhythm, and a rationale for every modification can be found in the composer’s desire to “translate” the source work into the language of the new medium. ³

Yet Beethoven was never tempted to make such translations of his chamber works for strings. (H is arrangement of the Grosse Fuge op. 133 for piano four-hands [op. 134] hardly counts, for it is merely a note-for-note rendering undertaken to facilitate study of the quartet movement, and devoid, apart from the opening flourish, of any pianistic touches.) When other composers attempted something of the kind, the results were often found wanting by contemporary critics, such as the reviewer of an arrangement of op. 18 no. 4 for piano four-hands who commented that Beethoven’s quartets, “even if skillfully arranged, will lose more than those of other masters.” ⁴ One is left with the impression that Beethoven’s string quartets, owing to their ultra-refinement of style, suffered more than other instrumental genres when arranged for different media. ⁵

To be sure, the quartet shares this ultra-refinement with the string trio and string quintet. According to the entry for Quartett in Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie , which not surprisingly cites Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as the preeminent contributors to the genre, the string duo, trio, quintet, and sextet all draw on the technical and aesthetic categories associated with the quartet. ⁶ The discussion of string chamber music in Carl Czerny’s School of Practical Composition is based largely on early- and middle-period Beethoven (who receives twice as many examples as either Haydn or Mozart), and here too the trio and quintet are said to partake of the same ideals as the quartet. ⁷ We will not do justice to Beethoven’s string trios by viewing them as preparatory exercises for bigger and better things; on the contrary, he approached these works just as seriously as he would the later quartets. This is not only true of the C minor Trio op. 9 no. 3, which foreshadows the storm and stress of op. 18 no. 4, but also of the unabashedly sunny G major Trio op. 9 no. 1. The concertante textures in the latter work hark back to the idiom perfected by Mozart in his E major Divertimento K. 563 (the model for the early String Trio op. 3), but the prefacing of the first movement with a slow introduction and the appearance of elaborate sonata forms in all movements except the Scherzo betray Beethoven’s desire to lend the genre a new weight and substance. Likewise, the Quintet op. 29 exhibits the formal expansiveness often associated with the middle-period quartets, while the D major Fugue op. 137 and the unfinished Prelude and Fugue in D minor (Hess 40), both for string quintet, look forward to the fascination with contrapuntal textures that informs the late quartets. ⁸

None of this, however, provides evidence of the founding or dissolution of a genre. Indeed one could easily argue that Beethoven's chamber music for strings remains well within traditional bounds. The level of technical proficiency needed to play his first violin parts seldom exceeds that already required to negotiate the Trio in the Menuet of Mozart’s K. 589 (which includes passages with marked similarities to the first-movement coda of Beethoven’s op. 74) or the finale of Haydn’s op. 76 no. 2, to cite a few obvious examples. Precedents for Beethoven’s attempt to achieve continuity on the large scale by linking movements with transitional passages – an often-cited feature of his middle- and late-period style – can be found in Haydn’s op. 20 no. 2 and op. 54 no. 2. The expansive forms of Beethoven’s middle-period quartets are no larger than those in the opening movements of Haydn’s op. 77 quartets or of Mozart’s Quintet K. 515. ⁹ Still, listeners, players, and critics alike are left with the impression that Beethoven accomplished something fundamentally new, especially in his string quartets, that he pressed the genre to a point of no return. Where, then, does the novelty reside?

To begin with, we might say that in his quartets Beethoven decisively altered a basic feature of the mode in which such compositions were offered for consumption: the very notion of an opus or “work.” Up through op. 59, he adhered to the eighteenth-century custom of publishing either three or six more or less independent quartets as a single opus, while thereafter only single works were allotted an opus number. (Already in 1797 Beethoven issued a single piano sonata under an opus number: the Sonata in E op. 7.) A vestige of the older practice appears to survive in the later chamber music: after all, precisely three quartets resulted from Prince Nikolas Galitzin’s commission of November 1822 (opp.127, 132, and 130). At the same time, Beethoven’s conscious effort to forge palpable relationships among discrete works departs significantly from tradition. As many writers have observed, opp. 130, 131, 132, and the Grosse Fuge all make prominent use of a four-note configuration consisting, in its most common form, of a rising half-step, a leap upward of a diminished seventh or minor sixth, and a descending half-step. ¹⁰ In fact, certain aspects of the genesis of all the late quartets suggest that these works comprise a unified corpus. The sketches for op. 127 show that, like opp. 132, 130, and 131, this quartet was originally intended to have more than the traditional four movements (the “extra” movements would have been a character piece entitled La gaieté and a brief Adagio before the finale). In all likelihood, the Alla danza tedesca from op. 130 was first envisioned as the fourth movement of op. 132, where it would have appeared in A major instead of G major. What began as part of the last section of the op. 131 finale ultimately provided the basis for the theme of the third movement (Lento assai) of op. 135. ¹¹ Thus, significant elements of the finished works and of the process leading to their completion indicate that Beethoven has replaced the traditional opus – a series of complementary but independent works – with a system of interrelated compositions, each of which was weighty enough to receive its own opus number.

We can gain further insights into Beethoven’s transformation of genre by examining what Ludwig Finscher calls the theory of the string quartet. ¹² According to Finscher, this theory drew on two principal ideas: first, on the notion that the four-voice texture was the ideal medium for the presentation of lofty musical ideas, and second, on the analogy between few-voiced chamber music and a conversation among intelligent speakers. Both ideas had a long history, but they were first applied to the string quartet in the 1770s. Thereafter, in critical and theoretical accounts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, each idea gave rise to a number of corollaries. The privileged status of the four-voice texture, for instance, became closely bound up with notions of the quartet both as a vehicle for the contrapuntal or learned style and as an object of study. At the same time, comparisons between the quartet and the art of conversation often imposed a hierarchy on the interlocutors and treated the genre as a vehicle for the comic style and as an object of elevated diversion. In other words, implicit in the theory of the quartet is a series of dialectical pairings: between equality and hierarchical disposition, between strict and free styles, and between reflection and diversion. It could be argued that Beethoven exploited the tensions between these pairings more thoroughly than any composer before or after him.

In the slow movement of op. 18 no. 2, for instance, two statements of an ornamented aria (Adagio) frame a central Allegro. While the opening statement is dominated by the first violin, thus evoking the quatuor brillant popular in France during the early nineteenth century, the cello comes into its own in the second statement, so that an elaborate concer tante texture reminiscent of Mozart’s late quartets and quintets results. But the two soloists are not treated in quite the same way. Reluctant to grant the cello equal rights, the violin reminds the rest of the group of its traditional role as primus inter pares in the ninth bar of the second Adagio, where the thirty-second notes of the corresponding bar in the first Adagio are replaced by an extravagant roulade in sixty-fourths.

Although the conflation of sonata-form rhetoric and fugal techniques often provided Haydn and Mozart with a venue for high comedy, Beethoven intensified the dialectic between learned and comic styles in the finale of op. 59 no. 3. The breathless, almost frantic quality of the movement is a direct consequence of its opening theme, a chatty fugue subject whose incredible length issues from a series of varied repetitions and sequences. This high-spirited spoof on the learned style reaches a highpoint in the development section, where a comic derivative of the subject – hurled from the top to the bottom of the texture – knows no better than to march up an octave and back down again.

A reflective attitude on the part of listeners and players is a condition for the appreciation of all of Beethoven’s quartets, but the tension between reflection and diversion is particularly marked in his late contributions to the genre. Writing in 1827 and echoing the claim of many nineteenth-century critics that the late quartets do not divulge their secrets easily, the reviewer of op. 127 for the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung maintained that the work required repeated hearings in order to be understood. Only after careful study of the score will “the unfamiliar harmonies [of the quartet] seem like the white streaks of the Milky Way.” ¹³ Indeed, it was probably not by chance that the scores and parts of the late quartets were published more or less simultaneously (in contrast, the scores of op. 18, op. 59, op. 74, and op. 95 were not issued until between nineteen and twenty-eight years after the appearance of the parts). An organization such as the Beethoven Quartet Society, founded in London during the 1840s, even took as one of its express aims the study of the late quartets from score. ¹⁴ The dialectic between initial befuddlement and subsequent illumination born of study – a theme closely associated with the reception of much twentieth-century music – is intimately related to the first reactions to Beethoven’s late quartets. And even if Beethoven’s chamber music for strings was not the first repertory to embody the tensions we have considered, it certainly brought them to the surface.

In analyzing Beethoven’s transformation of generic norms, we should also keep in mind that the composer came of age during a period when the concept of genre itself was undergoing intense critical scrutiny. In the influential Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1808–09) of August Wilhelm Schlegel, a normative outlook on genre gives way to an historical point of view in which the homogeneity of the classical genres was contrasted with the heterogeneity of their modern counterparts, without thereby implying a negative value judgment of the latter. On the contrary, the generic hybridity of Shakespearean drama, a result of the mixture of tragic and comic elements, was just as aesthetically viable for Schlegel as the supposed purity of classical drama. ¹⁵

August Wilhelm’s writings represent a distillation of the thinking of his brother Friedrich, who imparted further dimensions to the new view of genre in a notebook entry of 1797 regarding the novel, the ne plus ultra of romantic literary forms: “The various types of novel [Romanarten ] are determined by manner, tone, and tendency [Manier, Ton, Tendenz ]. But for the classical genres, style, content, and form [Styl, Stoff, Form ] are the determining factors.” ¹⁶ Implicit in these statements is a series of binary oppositions wherein the first member of the pair describes the classical artwork, and the second its modern analogue: style/manner, content/tone, and form/tendency. In pairing style and manner Schlegel probably drew on a celebrated essay by Goethe entitled “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil” (1789). But while Goethe makes a value judgment (he views “manner” as the artist’s ability to create “his own language to express in his own way what he has grasped with his own soul,” whereas “style” designates the highest level of art since here the artist detects “some order in the multiplicity of appearances”), Schlegel views style and manner as value-free characteristics of different phases in the history of art. ¹⁷ In his second pair, Schlegel sets the clearly delineated images of classical poetry (content) against the finely nuanced – and sometimes obscure – moods of modern art (tone). And finally, the ascription of “tendency” to Romantic prose addresses the replacement of the self-sufficient, rounded forms of Classicism with the intentionally fragmented structures of modernity. ¹⁸

These observations can provide us with a useful framework for an analysis of Beethoven’s rethinking of generic norms. In the first half of the nineteenth century his works were both praised and blamed for embodying precisely those traits that the Schlegel brothers defined as touchstones of modern art. In a diary entry of 16 June 1816, the young Franz Schubert traced the “bizzarrerie” of current musical trends to the influence of “one of our greatest living artists” – certainly he meant Beethoven – who “unites and confuses the tragic and the comic, the pleasant and the repulsive” without compunction. ¹⁹ Yet Hermann Hirschbach, an early apologist for Beethoven’s late music, expressed his admiration for the “novelistic” character of the late quartets. ²⁰ Moreover, Beethoven and his circle were well aware of the literary accomplishments of the Schlegel brothers. An enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare in A. W. Schlegel’s translation, Beethoven was introduced to the Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur by his friends and aristocratic patrons. ²¹ During his last years, Beethoven kept abreast of Friedrich Schlegel’s career as journalist, critic, and diplomat, and was even encouraged by Count Moritz Lichnowsky to set Schlegel’s translation of a story from the Mahabharatà of India. ²² In short, the ideas of the principal spokesmen for a romantic worldview were very much in the air in Beethoven’s household.

Given this context, I would like to suggest that in the string chamber music of his earlier period Beethoven strove to establish an individual manner , in his middle phase he effected a transformation of the tone of the string quartet and quintet, and in his late quartets he challenged the aesthetic unity at the heart of Classicism by resorting increasingly to ten dency . ²³ (To be sure, all of these categories coexist throughout Beethoven’s creative life, but in my view one element dominates in each of the various phases of his career.) Furthermore, some of the late works barely remain within the proprietary bounds of the quartet genre; in fact, they threaten to dissolve it.

II

Music historians often use the term “style” in two quite different senses. On the one hand, it may refer to a family of prescriptions and strategies shared by all composers of a period. When we speak of a “Classical style,” for instance, we implicitly allude to the existence of just such a lingua franca . On the other hand, “style” may designate an individual mode of expression, a repository of personalized gestures that account for an artist’s distinctive voice. In the latter case, we are in fact dealing with the artist’s “manner.” ²⁴ Beethoven implied that he had attained an individual manner as a composer of string chamber music when, in a letter of 1 July 1801, he asked his friend Karl Amenda not to circulate the earlier version of what would become op. 18 no. 1, adding: “For only now have I learnt how to write quartets.” ²⁵

Nonetheless, manner is unthinkable without style, that is, without the background provided by the works of those figures whose no less individual manners come together to create the dominant style of the day. In his chamber music for strings, Beethoven no doubt found this background in Haydn and Mozart. As has been frequently pointed out, both earlier composers left their imprint on Beethoven’s first genuine contributions to the genre. ²⁶ At the same time, his distinctive manner is just as pronounced in those works that at first appear to owe most to his predecessors.

During the decade before the publication of op. 18, Haydn completed his quartets opp. 71, 74, 76, and 77. Among the traits of these works that must have impressed Beethoven most deeply is the motivic economy of their sonata-form movements. But none of these pieces is quite so densely saturated with a fundamental motive and its derivatives as the first movement of Beethoven’s op. 18 no. 1, in which the opening two-bar figure pervades every aspect of the design. ²⁷ And here lies an essential ingredient of the Beethovenian manner, for the motive serves not only as an agent of unity, but also as an emblem of obstinacy and disruption within the ensemble. Only during the initial stage of the second group (mm.57–71) is it absent, but immediately thereafter it reappears in dialogue between the cello and first violin. The fact that it is introduced in the upper reaches of the cello register – and is repeated twice more in the same range – lends it the character of an individual who can’t bear to be left out of a conversation for long. Rather than supporting a discourse among four intelligent interlocutors, the motive seems to disturb it.

Beethoven’s reliance on Mozart frequently extends to matters of large-scale design. At least two of the movements from op. 18 – the Scherzos of op. 18 nos. 4 and 5 – bear prominent traces of quartet movements by Mozart that Beethoven is known to have put into score: the finales of K. 387 and K. 464. ²⁸ Here too, however, the surface similarities to the models are overwhelmed by Beethoven’s individual manner. The finale of K. 387 and the Scherzo of op. 18 no. 4 conflate fugal techniques and sonata-form procedures, ²⁹ and both movements likewise delineate a trajectory from imitative to homophonic textures. But Beethoven’s movement embodies a contradiction between the nature of the thematic material and its subsequent development – a cocntradiction not persent in Mozart’s work. The main subject of the K. 387 finale is a deliberately archaic figure in long notes, ready-made for fugal treatment, while Beethoven’s opening theme, despite its elaboration in a fugal exposition, is an easy-going German dance. Beethoven makes the point gracefully but emphatically at the end of the movement, where the tune is fitted out with a lilting, waltz-like accompaniment.

Although Beethoven continued to invoke earlier models in his middle-period chamber works ³⁰ – and in the works of his later years as well – we sense strongly that he was interested in more than merely emulating his predecessors. Specifically, a fresh approach to the content of the musical text and a concomitant modification in its “tone” are both constitutive for the “new way,” which, according to Czerny, Beethoven adopted around 1800. ³¹ It is common knowledge that Beethoven’s middle-period chamber music is notable for its absorption of symphonic elements, but this feature alone cannot account for the new tone of this music. Writing in 1799, and acknowledging what was by then a widespread practice, August Kollmann related that chamber music for one-on-a-part ensembles can be “set in the style or character of a Symphony as well as a Sonata.” ³² The new tone of Beethoven’s quartets (and quintet) of the years 1801–09 seems rather to emanate from a confluence of several factors: an emphasis on musical topics derived from “public” genres such as the symphony and concerto, the placement of these topics in unusual contexts or their combination in unexpected ways, and the unfolding of lyrical ideas over larger spans than previously encountered in Beethoven’s music.

None of the favored musical topics of the middle-period chamber music lacks precedents in the earlier literature. To take a few examples from the “Razumovsky” Quartets op. 59: the hymnic Molto Adagio of op. 59 no. 2 has a counterpart in the slow movement of Haydn’s op. 76 no. 5; the use of popular tunes in op. 59 nos. 1 and 2 concords with the spirit if not the letter of any number of Haydn’s quartet movements; the first violin’s extravagant passage work leading into the finale of op. 59 no. 1 is firmly rooted in the virtuoso tradition of the quatuor brillant . What is striking in op. 59, however, is Beethoven’s constant allusion to genres associated with a sizable community of listeners or performers, that is, his reliance on gestures drawn from the world of the theatre, the public concert, and the church. In addition to the hymn, the folk-song, and the concerto, these works abound in references to the march, and, of course, to the symphony. Nor is this feature surprising, for the Razumovsky quartets were stimulated in part by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s establishment in 1804 of a quartet whose raison d’être was public performance. But the public for which this group performed was a decidedly select one: probably no more than a hundred people could comfortably fit into the space where the players held their concerts, a hall attached to the restaurant Zum römischen Kaiser. ³³

The paradoxical situation of the quartet in early nineteenth-century Vienna – suspended midway between public and private venues in its mode of performance – is aptly reflected in the Razumovsky quartets, whose new tone can be said to derive from the accommodation of gestures drawn from the public genres to the chamber idiom. Beethoven’s handling of march topics offers a case in point. Oft en Beethoven subjects these gestures to some form of rhythmic or metric differentiation, as in the middle segment of the first group in the first movement of op. 59 no. 1 (mm.19–28), where the accentuation of the march-like theme suggests a metric displacement by half a bar. In the finale of the same quartet, the second group includes another march tune, this one driven by persistent dotted rhythms. Initially presented by the lower voices (mm.206–09), the theme is combined with a figure in the violins in which the same dotted pattern is displaced by an eighth note, producing a propulsive rhythmic counterpoint. In both cases, an exoteric (or public) topic is transformed by an esoteric compositional technique. ³⁴

A comparable duality informs Beethoven’s approach to symphonic topics, many of which stem directly from his own works. The principal theme of op. 59 no. 2, for instance, clearly alludes to the celebrated opening of the Eroica , where Beethoven contrasts a pair of hammer-strokes with a cantabile response. But the two openings are actually worlds apart, the quartet theme a more highly differentiated – and more tortured – relative of its symphonic cousin: the affirmative tonic hammerstrokes and triadic melody of the major-mode Eroica give way in the minor-mode quartet to an interrogative gesture (moving I–V6), a cryptic, meandering answer, and a further heightening of tension through the transposition of the passage from tonic to Neapolitan.

In his middle-period quartets, Beethoven not only metamorphoses the topics of the public genres to accommodate them to a new context, he also combines them (and less genre-specific topics) in unexpected ways. The Allegro vivace of the first movement of op. 59 no. 3, for instance, is particularly rich in topical allusiveness. The opening first violin line represents an unusual cross between march and cadenza, though neither topic provides the actual content of the passage. On one hand, the topics neutralize one another; on the other hand, both appear in attenuated forms: the music is neither metrically square enough for a march nor brilliant enough for a cadenza. What remains, in other words, is an almost ineffable tone distilled from two of the most familiar topics of the period.

The special tone of op. 59 no. 1 also derives from a singular combination of topics. Here Beethoven makes telling use of the strategies for formal expansion and continuity he had developed earlier in the Eroica Symphony, and not only in the quartet’s first movement, where we might expect them, but also in its second. The Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando substitutes for the customary minuet or scherzo, but it hardly keeps to the modest dimensions of these traditional movement types; instead it unfolds as a broadly conceived sonata form replete with intensely developmental passages and a protracted coda (mm.394–476). At the same time, the movement proceeds well beyond the conventional boundaries of the form; its twists and turns include a curiously bifurcated exposition (mm.68–154 can be viewed as a reinterpretation of the exposition, mm. 1–67), a false recapitulation in G , the flat submediant (from m. 239), and an almost whimsical handling of tonal relations once the recapitulation actually gets under way (an entire segment appears a fifth higher than originally presented; cf. mm.68–99 and 304–35). These features result not only from the blending of two formal paradigms – sonata and scherzo – but, in a deeper sense, from the incursion of the scherzo’s playful essence, its characteristic tone, into a sonata-like design. The element of play is even apparent in matters of texture and ensemble: witness the manner in which the melodic substance of the movement assembles itself from motivic scraps – a teasing ostinato and a cryptic rejoinder – scattered among the voices at the opening. Hence the tone of the movement is a function of precisely those qualities that make it so difficult to classify. ³⁵

Concurrent with Beethoven’s proclivity for goal-directed, developmental forms in the middle-period chamber music is a complementary penchant for lyricism. The first movement of the C major Quintet op. 29 represents something of a breakthrough in this respect. Here the decisive aspect is not merely Beethoven’s employment of a number of lyrical themes, but rather his adoption of a pacing that tends toward leisurely, expansive unfolding. ³⁶ The opening idea seems to inscribe circles around itself: both the first violin and cello simultaneously trace a neighbor-note pattern around the pitch C, with the lower instrument providing an exact mirror image of the melody in the violin; an undulating accompaniment in the viola adds to the general air of calm; finally, the varied repetition of the entire eight-bar phrase offers textural amplification in lieu of dynamic change. The expansiveness of the second and closing groups (mm.41–93) hinges on Beethoven’s enrichment of the tonal palette through modal mixture (A major vs. A minor) and a “purple patch” in the submediant (F) – techniques that were certainly not lost on Schubert.

Lyricism takes a somewhat different turn in op. 74. One of the first reviewers of the quartet was puzzled by Beethoven’s decision to conclude the work with a set of variations, but as demonstrated by Elaine Sisman, the form of the finale is in many respects a logical consequence of what has transpired in the preceding movements. The varied treatment of the “harp” music in the first movement, the alternation of refrain and episodes in the second movement, and of Scherzo and Trio in the third, the rich embellishments of the hymnic main theme of the second movement – all of these traits foreshadow the design of the finale. ³⁷ Most important for our purposes is their contribution to the quartet’s lyric tone, which is not only a function of the thematic content, but even more a product of its treatment. The family of strategies employed in op. 74 (figural variation, alternation, embellishment) stand in opposition to the dynamic, goal-directed processes that regulate the musical flow over long stretches of the op. 59 quartets. Together they create a new and deeply expressive tone that will continue to inform Beethoven’s musical language in the late quartets.

The Quartetto serioso op. 95, completed on the heels of op. 74 in 1811, likewise embodies traits that resonate with the late quartets. Specifically, its design is characterized by the gnomic quality that the early Romantics associated with “modern” as opposed to “classical” genres. As we have seen, Friedrich Schlegel expressed this difference by means of a simple binary opposition between finished “forms” and incomplete or fragmentary “tendencies.” The latter category looms large in the reception history of Beethoven’s late quartets, and indeed was often adduced to account for the difficulties of this music. According to Friedrich Rochlitz, the C: minor Quartet op. 131 posed a formidable – though not insurmountable – impediment to ready comprehension through its recourse to “whimsical fragmentation [Zerstücken ] and hide-and-seek.” ³⁸ But what earlier reviewers often cast in a negative light can be turned to positive account if we concede that the fragment as a form in its own right may act as an ideal medium for conveying esoteric thought, and that the appearance of incompletion in “modern” art may serve as a powerful statement of the impossibility of attaining absolute aesthetic perfection. ³⁹ In Beethoven’s later string quartets, “tendency” assumes a number of guises, including radical compression of utterance and obliquely mediated contrasts at the local and global levels, and Beethoven further complements these features with an increasingly ironic attitude to musical form, a rhetorical strategy that questions a fundamental premise of the theory of the quartet.

Joseph Kerman has lucidly described the extreme abbreviation that characterizes the F minor Quartet op. 95: “one senses Beethoven’s impatience (or fury) with conventional bridge and cadential passages of every kind – the more or less neutral padding material of the classic style.” ⁴⁰ The third movement (Allegro assai vivace ma serioso), for example, outwardly follows the plan of Beethoven’s big, middle-period scherzos – A B A B′ A′ – but, as Kerman notes, the closing A′ (Più Allegro) brings only the last twenty-four bars of the initial forty-bar Asection in a reduction bordering on the grotesque. ⁴¹ In fact, the initial A itself is already a fragment. Consisting of a single, repeated strain (not the customary two), it begins in the minor dominant, C minor – the harmonic instability of which is intensified by the fact that the notated downbeat is perceived as an upbeat – but rapidly moves toward the tonic and remains there for the rest of the section. What we have, then, are the final segments of an implied three-part form: a retransition and a restatement of an “absent” Asection.

A much larger piece, such as the opening movement of the second “Galitzin” quartet, op. 132, deals with its apparently fragmentary materials quite differently. The first group juxtaposes two ideas: (a) an Assai sostenuto featuring an imitative elaboration of the four-note cell that in varied forms appears in opp. 130, 131, and the Grosse Fuge ; and (b) an Allegro dominated by a languid march tune distributed between cello and first violin. Both ideas are open-ended, incomplete, and – at first blush – incompatible. Much of the remainder of the movement, however, is devoted to showing that these seemingly disparate gestures are or can be related. In the first group, Beethoven establishes such a relationship in a highly oblique way (see Example 9.1 ). The return of the march in mm. 23–26 is coupled with an inversion (or permutation) of the four-note cell (F–E–G –A), and in retrospect, the same combination is seen to have informed the first statement of the march, where segments of the inverted cell are rhythmically altered or hidden in the texture: its first two notes (F–E) come at the end of the first-violin cadenza in mm. 10–11, while the second pair of pitches (G –A) are tucked away in the second violin line in mm. 12–13.

Example 9.1 String Quartet op. 132, mvt. 1, mm. 1–27

This relationship is initially difficult to grasp not only on account of the fragmentary quality of the elements combined but also because of Beethoven’s uncanny treatment of the ensemble. Just as the march is split between first violin and cello (mm.11–14), and then among the three upper voices (mm.15–18), so too are segments of the four-note cell dispersed throughout the texture (first and second violins, mm. 10–13; viola and cello, mm. 13–16; first and second violins, mm. 23–26). Yet on reflection, we realize that here too Beethoven effects a rapprochement. The first violin appears to extend the march tune beginning at the last beat of m.16, but the pitches of the extension (F–D –F–E) are none other than a variant of the second half of the four-note cell, and thus a logical outgrowth of the preceding appearance of the first half in the cello (mm. 15–16). With this simple gesture, Beethoven reveals the complementarity of march and motivic cell, and also of the curiously dispersed lines that wend their way through the ensemble.

When Beethoven wrote on the engraver’s copy of the C: minor Quartet op. 131, upon sending it to his publisher Schott, that the work was “patched together from stolen bits of this and that,” he surely meant his comment to be taken facetiously. ⁴² The C: minor quartet is one of his most tightly integrated compositions; indeed, for many critics it represents the apogee of Beethoven’s achievement in the genre. But oddly enough, his statement comes very close to describing the remarkable compositional background for the second movement (Allegro ma non tanto) of op. 132. The middle section of the movement is built out of three dance-like episodes, all of them drawn from the many such pieces in a popular idiom that Beethoven composed between 1795 and 1800. The first episode, a musette, evolves from the four-bar vamp to an A major Deutscher Tanz for orchestra (WoO 8 no. 8); the second, shared by viola and first violin, derives from the second strain of a Ländler in the same key, and also for orchestra (WoO 13 no. 11); and the third, which flows directly from the second, recalls the melody of an A major Allemande for keyboard (WoO 81). ⁴³ Beethoven arranges these fragments of earlier dances in a fragmentary manner: one tune hardly plays itself out before another begins. The technique seems more redolent of Stravinsky than of the early nineteenth century. Moreover, the dances are metrically altered, their easy-going triple time shifted one beat “to the left.” The spirit of this procedure – aptly dubbed a “medley” principle by Kerman ⁴⁴ – also informs the fifth movement (Presto) of op. 131, a droll piece in duple time which Beethoven patterned after his middle-period scherzos: A B A B A+coda. Here the contrasting B section evokes a dance medley whose fragmentary quality is underscored by the lack of a transition between the first dance, in E major, and the last two, in A major.

The discrepancy between the accessible content (or tone) of both movements and a formal pattern, the medley of fragments, which seems strangely out of place in a string quartet, offers a partial explanation for the sharp divergence of opinion among early critics of Beethoven’s late music. While the majority of writers, whether proponents or not, found it to be enigmatic at best and inscrutable at worst, Robert Schumann counted himself among those “for whom Beethoven’s late works [are] popular in the highest sense and clear as the sky.” ⁴⁵ Hermann Hirschbach, whose essay “Ueber Beethoven’s letzte Streichquartette” appeared in four installments of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik during the summer of 1839, shared Schumann’s sentiments. F or him, this supposedly arcane music was in fact teeming with jollity, good humor, and wit. ⁴⁶ But as he also understood, the distance between Beethoven’s playfulness and his pointed critique of the forms and materials of his time was a short one. And this brings us to an important complement to the “tendencies” or fragmentary utterances in which the late quartets abound. Specifically, the discrepancies among content, form, and context that we have noted in the scherzo-like movements of opp.132 and 131 speak to the presence of an ironic dimension in this music.

As the rhetorical device whereby the speaker says one thing but means another, irony represents an affront to the discursive mode of the string quartet: it can be extraordinarily difficult to carry on a conversation with an ironist. More significantly, irony allowed Beethoven to expose as illusory the aesthetic wholeness of the musical language that he inherited from his predecessors but applied toward his own ends. Hirschbach heard in the finale of op. 127 “the most original, maddest humor imaginable,” and supported his claim by calling attention to the “satirical” alternation of A and A in the main theme and the “mocking” quality of the theme’s final appearance, where it is transformed from duple meter to 6/8. The entire movement, he concluded, was conceived against an “ironic background,” yet “in order to make fun of the world and its inhabitants, one must have long reflected on them.” ⁴⁷ Beethoven not only “reflected” on the ironic potential of melodic and rhythmic details in this movement, but also on one of the most sensitive moments in the sonata form: the point of reprise. The immense “false” recapitulation of the opening theme – which appears first in the subdominant, A (mm.145–76), and then in the tonic (mm.187 ff.) – has none of the good-natured wit usually associated with this formal ploy; it goes on far too long for that. Rather , it creates a curious bulge that deliberately sets the proportions of the movement askew. An even more radical employment of the same strategy occurs in the “trio” section of the second movement (Vivace) of op. 135. Here a frantic dance tune inches up from F to G and finally to A, where it gives way to an ostinato figure repeated nearly fifty times in the lower voices, over which the first violin leaps erratically. ⁴⁸ Thus in both the finale of op. 127 and the second movement of op. 135, the continuity of the musical flow is intentionally cast in an ironic light. Organic wholeness gives way to “tendency.”

The fragmentary quality that we have observed at the local level in Beethoven’s late quartets operates at higher levels of structure as well. The overall design of op. 130 provides an excellent example. The slow movement of the Classical string quartet often brings together lyrical ideas and their embellished projections or variants, but in op. 130 these traits become the topics of separate movements: highly ornate melodic lines characterize the third movement (Andante con moto ma non troppo), while ultra-expressive lyricism is localized in the celebrated Cavatina. Similarly, the minuet or scherzo of the Classical quartet frequently unites the graceful gestures of the dance with witty rhythmic play. In op. 130, however, each characteristic is embodied in an independent movement, the witty side of the typical scherzo in a gnomic Presto, and the elegance of the typical minuet in the Alla danza tedesca . Therefore the sprawling six-movement design of op. 130 is the outcome of subjecting the affective unity of the Classical quartet to a process of fragmentation. Stil l, fragmentation or “tendency” alone will not account for all the difficulties posed by what remains to this day the most problematic of Beethoven’s late quartets. The chief difficulty, of course, involves Beethoven’s decision to replace the original finale, the Grosse Fuge , with a new finale at once lighter in tone and more modest in size. There is a strong likelihood that questions of genre – its limits and its possibilities – directly impinged on this decision.

Some writers consider the Grosse Fuge , which appeared with the rest of the quartet when it was first published, to be the “true” finale of op. 130. ⁴⁹ In their opinion the new finale represents Beethoven’s half-hearted capitulation to the wishes of his publisher Artaria, who exerted pressure on the composer through his friend Karl Holz. F or Stefan Kunze, however, the fairly common practice among modern-day performers of restoring the Grosse Fuge to the quartet amounts to an “arrogant disregard for Beethoven’s intentions,” while the new finale should be viewed as a result of the composer’s having taken to heart the public’s rejection of the fugal finale. ⁵⁰ The most controversial interpretation maintains that the late B major quartet is potentially two quartets, one ending with the Grosse Fuge , the other with the new finale, and each characterized by its own narrative trajectory. ⁵¹ But it seems plausible that if Beethoven had wished to retain the Grosse Fuge as an integral part of op. 130 (or had he wished to issue two separate quartets), nothing would have prevented him from doing so. In the summer and autumn of 1826, when the new finale was conceived, he was neither so physically nor psychologically debilitated that he couldn’t have insisted on his preference. Hence I am inclined to agree with Kerman, who sees in the replacement of the Grosse Fuge “an acknowledgment (however reluctant, bad-tempered, greedy, etc.) that [Beethoven] saw something wrong with the way it sat in the quartet.” ⁵² What, then, was wrong?

Before addressing the question directly, it will be worth recalling that there is nothing in the quartet repertory quite like the Grosse Fuge . Its design can be roughly summarized as follows:

1. Overtura	various meters (proleptic introduction)
2. Fuga	C (double fugue in B )
3. Meno mosso e moderato	2/4 (fugato in G )
4. Allegro molto e con brio	6/8 (episode in B )
5. Allegro molto e con brio	6/8 (developmental fugue, beginning in A )
6. Meno mosso e moderato	2/4 (fugato in A )
7. Allegro molto e con brio	6/8 (reprise of episode; coda)

In terms of their meter, tempo, and tonal scheme, these sections can be grouped into an introduction (section 1) and three “movements,” as in a sonata or symphony, with section 2 functioning as an initial Allegro, section 3 as a slow movement, and sections 4–7 as a conflation of scherzo and finale. At the same time, the Grosse Fuge draws heavily on the tonal scheme and rhetorical disposition of the sonata form, with sections 2 and 3 acting as exposition, section 5 as development, and sections 6 and 7 as recapitulation. Obviously, the work also draws on a whole array of contrapuntal genres, including fugue, double fugue, fugato, and cantus-firmus variations. ⁵³ (In Beethoven’s hands, these genres take on an extreme character: while imitative textures normally represent the quintessence of the quartet’s conversational idiom, here they often create the impression of fierce arguments among the members of the ensemble, especially in sections 2 and 5.) Allusions to dramatic or operatic genres emerge in the opening Overtura , ⁵⁴ in the use of thematic reminiscences that help to unify the whole sprawling structure, and in the sublime can tabile of section 3. The notion of linking together a series of distinct sections or quasi-movements in turn recalls the keyboard fantasia tradition, and, for at least one writer, the symphonic poem. ⁵⁵

It would be misguided to pinpoint any one of these genres as the decisive one. What Beethoven created in the Grosse Fuge is rather a metagenre in which the canonical types – symphony, sonata, fugue, and so forth – are represented by some, but not all, of their constitutive features. If a “Classical” genre emanates from the confluence of style, content, and form, it could be said that what remains of the genres combined in the Grosse Fuge are some but not all of their qualities: the “manner” of the Classical sonata, the “tone” of a fugue, the “tendency” of a symphonic work. ⁵⁶

There is compelling logic in Beethoven’s initial plan to conclude the late B major quartet with the Grosse Fuge . Indeed, the earlier quartet repertory provides ample precedent for closing with a fugal movement: witness Haydn’s op. 20 nos. 2, 5, and 6, and op. 50 no. 4, Mozart’s K. 387, and Beethoven’s own op. 59 no. 3. Moreover, on at least two previous occasions Beethoven had deemed a long, complex design comparable to that of the Grosse Fuge to be peculiarly fitting for the conclusion of a multi-movement work. But when a design such as this appears in the finales of the Third and Ninth symphonies, the earlier movements prepare for it not only in terms of their length and breadth, but also by way of their motivic density and seriousness of tone. In the late B major quartet, however, only the opening movement remotely approaches the Grosse Fuge in breadth. As we have seen, the middle movements are inter mezzi in which the unified affects of the Classical slow movement and scherzo are split into disparate “tendencies.” In short, Beethoven must have realized that the Grosse Fuge threatened to upset the balance of power in the B major quartet, dwarfing what had gone before – even the profoundly moving Cavatina that precedes it – through its sheer size and intensity. ⁵⁷ His replacement of the Grosse Fuge with a new finale demonstrates a genuine concern for proportion – and also for generic propriety.

The new finale, though less challenging for listeners and players than the Grosse Fuge , represents more than a concession to popular taste. Beethoven’s last completed movement includes many echoes of its earlier counterpart: the opening Gs in the viola ironically recall the emphatic initial gesture of the Grosse Fuge ; its finely wrought obbligato textures answer to the gritty counterpoint of the original finale; the A major episode prefacing its development corresponds to the first stages of section 5 of the Grosse Fuge ; and finally, the closing phrases of this episode (mm.132–40) bring a motivic relative of the four-note cell that runs through the Grosse Fuge and many of the other late quartets. The sonata form of the new finale may be no match for the imposing design of the Grosse Fuge , but its episodic asides and extended coda lend the movement considerable dimensions. Even with its new finale, the late B major quartet nearly dissolves the genre that Beethoven played no small part in founding.