CHAPTER 15

STRING QUARTETS

The “Razumovsky” Quartets

Around 1810, an Italian couple, the violinist Felix Radicati and the soprano Teresa Bertinotti, were touring in England. In Manchester they visited the English musician Thomas Appleby, and on his piano they found the newly published parts of Beethoven’s Quartets Opus 59. Said Radicati, according to an anecdote: “Have you got these here! Ha! Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad—for these [pieces] are not music. He submitted them to me in manuscript and, at his request, I fingered them for him. I said to him that he surely did not consider these works to be music? To which he replied, “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!”¹

The later age came quickly. Only twenty years afterward, musicians and listeners were beginning to understand that these three quartets formed a continental divide in the history of the quartet comparable to the Eroica and the “Waldstein.” Each quartet in its own way embodies a transformation of the genre, an expansion of the realm of the possible in what contemporaries saw as the most demanding branch of chamber music. As early as 1831 Ignaz von Seyfried could write that in the period around 1806 “Beethoven sought to bring about profound achievements in quartet style, that noble genre, which had been reformed by Haydn, or, better said, conjured up by him out of nothing; which Mozart’s universal genius had given much greater and deeper content and had filled with luxuriant imagination; and in which finally our Beethoven took those culminating steps that could only be attempted by one who was predestined to do so, and in which he could hardly be followed by anyone else.”²

Seyfried’s thumbnail sketch was biased by hero worship but it holds a kernel of truth. If there was a revolutionary step in Beethoven’s middle-period chamber music it was in Opus 59. Although the Opus 18 Quartets had been ripe products of his first maturity, they stood in the shadow of Mozart’s later quartets, especially the six of 1785 dedicated to Haydn. And if Beethoven in Opus 18 had also been directly competing with Haydn’s last quartets (all but one of which had also been written in the 1790s), even the progressive features of Opus 18 predicted future greatness more than they could fully embody it. Certainly the strongest features of Opus 18 moved beyond previously established aesthetic norms: witness the motivic elaborations of the first movement and the rhetoric of the Adagio in No. 1; the smooth professionalism of No. 3; the C-minor outbursts of No. 4; or the compositional economy of No. 6, not to mention the manic rhythmic life of its Scherzo or the harmonic labyrinths of La Malinconia. Nevertheless, the gulf between Opus 18 and Opus 59 is as great as that separating the First Symphony from the Fifth and Sixth, or the “Pathétique” Sonata from the “Appassionata.” In each category Beethoven now entered another world.

The commission for the new quartets came to Beethoven not from one of his earlier patrons such as Lobkowitz or Lichnowsky, but from the Russian ambassador to the court of Vienna, Count Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky. Even among wealthy chamber-music fanatics Razumovsky stood out. A Haydn enthusiast, he played second violin in quartet ensembles, sponsored quartet concerts, and in 1808 took over from Lichnowsky the patronage of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, then the best in Vienna. According to a later biographer, Razumovsky “lived in Vienna like a prince, encouraging art and science, surrounded by a luxurious library and other collections, and envied by all; what advantages accrued from all this to Russian affairs is another question.”³ By marrying a daughter of Countess Thun in 1788 Razumovsky had moved into the top echelon of Viennese patronage, and he probably knew Beethoven more than casually before 1805. It was as well that he offered Beethoven this commission when he did, because his Viennese palace burned down in 1814 and its contents were destroyed. Not much is known about his later years, but it appears that in the 1820s he traveled to Italy, France, and England, and in 1826, Beethoven’s last year, he turned up again in Vienna—now “without money,” as Beethoven’s nephew Karl drily remarked in a Conversation Book.⁴

Count Andreas Kyrillovitch Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to the Austrian court, who commissioned Beethoven’s three Quartets Opus 59. (Historisches Museum, Vienna)

As the leading local violinist, Ignaz Schuppanzigh figured in Beethoven’s career for many years, from the 1790s to 1816 and then again in the 1820s. A jocular fat man whom Beethoven nicknamed “Mylord Falstaff,” Schuppanzigh founded his quartet and held it together, with some changing players, until 1816, when the new diplomatic openings created by the Congress of Vienna led him away to Russia to pursue his career. When he returned to Vienna in 1823 Beethoven saluted him with a Presto five-voice canon on the name “Falstafferel, lass dich sehen” (“Falstaffo, come to see me”).⁵ Schuppanzigh remained a prominent and influential fixture in the city, not only as quartet leader but as a regular concertmaster in orchestral and other ensemble performances, until his death in 1830. He played in premieres of new Beethoven works ranging from the Septet of 1800 to the Ninth Symphony in 1824, and he premiered several of the late quartets until the complexities of Beethoven’s late style proved too much for him.

Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the principal violinist in several string quartets that bore his name, who was a long-time associate of Beethoven’s and performed many of his chamber works. (Österreichische Galerie, Vienna)

Beethoven’s work on Opus 59 was held up by the complications surrounding Leonore, so that he could really concentrate on the new commission only from the late spring through the fall of 1806. The autograph manuscript of the first quartet, in F major, bears an inscription, “begun on May 26, 1806,” a very unusual thing for Beethoven to write on an autograph. If we can believe his letters to Breitkopf & Härtel he had finished No. 1 by July and all three by November. The period 1806 through early 1807 was a time of tremendous productivity along various lines of concentration: besides these quartets and the revision of Leonore he completed the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and Coriolanus, probably in that order.⁶ For Opus 59 the surviving body of sketches is slim, much thinner than for any other Beethoven quartets, but we do have the three complete final autograph manuscripts. They show that the three were almost certainly composed in the consecutive order in which they were first published in 1808, when they came out adorned with a handsome title page that listed Razumovsky’s titles and honors as boldly as if it were bedecked with the ribbons and medals that he wore on his ambassadorial dress uniform.

The choices of key, aesthetic character, length, and movement plans of the quartets suggest that they form a trilogy comparable in some degree to Mozart’s three last symphonies, which were written in six weeks. The analogy may be more than speculative. Both sets present three innovative works—one in major, one in minor, the last a brilliant work in C major ending with a contrapuntal finale. As Mozart’s symphonic testament, Nos. 39 in E-flat, 40 in G minor, and 41 (the “Jupiter”) in C major follow divergent pathways. No. 39 is a profound realization of that part of Mozart’s artistry that is closest to Haydn, especially in its vigorous finale. No. 40 is the classic expression of the poignancy that Mozart could summon for his most heart-breaking moments, along with the G Minor String Quintet and Pamina’s aria of suffering, “Ach, ich fühl’s” (“Oh, I feel it”), in The Magic Flute. And the “Jupiter” Symphony sums up the ideal of the sublime in the late-eighteenth-century symphonic world in combining formal clarity and the highest craftsmanship in the first movement, profound expressivity in the slow movement, and, to end the work, a matchless synthesis of sonata form and fugue, based on Mozart’s elaboration of a classic contrapuntal subject that goes back to Fux.⁷

The same fraternal binding is felt in the Opus 59 Quartets. The first, in F major, is the longest and most massive, set up on the scale of the Eroica with four very long movements, all in sonata form. No. 2, in E minor, is highly compressed, angular, intrinsically difficult for listeners to grasp at first hearing, as Beethoven’s audiences found out. No. 3 is the C major crown of the opus, the one that contemporaries found the easiest to grasp. That Beethoven saw ways of suggesting connections from work to work is apparent in his overt use of Russian themes in the first two quartets and possibly in the third, but even more in his use of key associations. Thus the finale of the E Minor Quartet, No. 2, prepares the C major of the work that follows by opening not in its own tonic, E minor, but in C major and not really providing an emphatic arrival on E minor for a long time to come.

All three works established a new and much broader range of expression for the genre. Their technical difficulties and bizarre moments alarmed and astounded performers, not only Radicati but Beethoven’s old acquaintance from Bonn, Bernhard Romberg—by now a famous cellist—who trampled on the cello part of No. 1 after finding nothing to play in the solo opening phrase of the Scherzo but the single note . The critics were impressed but somewhat awed. One wrote of these works as being “deeply thought through and of excellent workmanship but not comprehensible to the public, with the possible exception of the third in C major.” And as late as 1821 the E Minor Quartet was being described as “important but . . . unpopular . . . bizarre.”⁸

The Russian melodies were further signs of the quartets’ special character, for Beethoven had not used recognizable folk tunes or national tunes in earlier instrumental works except as themes for variations, and even there they are rare. He had been aware of folk music all his life, as any serious musician would be, and his correspondence with the sometime publisher of folk and national songs, George Thomson of Edinburgh, had already begun some time before his work on these quartets. Still it was to be ten years later, in 1816, that he came back to folk music, fulfilling Thomson’s requests for settings of Scottish and Irish tunes along with Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Swiss-dialect, Spanish, and Italian melodies.⁹

For the “Razumovsky” Quartets he turned to a collection of Russian folk melodies edited by Ivan Prach and published in St. Petersburg in 1790.¹⁰ Beethoven owned a copy of this collection, and it was evidently the source for two melodies that he employed in these works. The first is the main theme of the finale of the F Major Quartet, Opus 59 No. 1, which in its Russian version, in a minor key and marked Molto andante, was a soldier’s lament on his return from the wars (we do not know if Beethoven knew any Russian or knew what the text meant) (*W 38). The second is the famous national melody “Glory be to God in Heaven,” later used by Musorgsky for the chorus in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov, that appears in the Trio of the Scherzo of No. 2. It is possible that the slow movement of the third quartet has a Russian origin; it has, at least, a Russian flavor, and Musorgsky thought it worthwhile to make a piano transcription of this movement.¹¹

The folk tunes are given real prominence. By reserving the D-minor/F-major theme for the last movement of No. 1 Beethoven gives the “Thème russe” (so marked in the score) a place of clear significance, and his decision to use it as the finale could have been the compositional starting point for the entire quartet. In that case his broad compositional procedure would have been analogous to that of the Eroica, in which the final movement on a borrowed theme (his own, in that case) was the conceptual point of departure for the work as a whole. Indeed, the Thème russe has strong intervallic relationships to the first themes of movements 1 and 3 and it seems unlikely that Beethoven should first have invented these themes and then been fortunate enough to pick up the Prach collection and find a theme that was motivically related to them. As for the E Minor Quartet, on the other hand, if he was going to use the patriotic Russian coronation hymn, it had to be in a triple-meter context, and so the layout of the work left him no option other than the Scherzo movement.

Quartet Opus 59 No. 1

Like the Eroica, Opus 59 No. 1 explores large dimensions of musical space on an unprecedented scale, combining this expansion with innovations in form that need this greater time-space in which to unfold. The opening theme is cast in the cello, in low register, with pulsating harmonic support in the second violin and viola above it. This way of beginning is more than an innovative reversal of registral expectations:¹² it signals that in the whole movement Beethoven will explore and dramatize the use of register, which he proceeds to do in both the opening theme and throughout the movement. The whole opening paragraph thus builds gradually from its octave-wide opening melody on a harmonically unstable form of the tonic, to its first four-octave climax, anticipating the far-flung organization of the whole movement around the preparation of registral climaxes, their postponement, and their eventual arrival. By omitting the usual repeat of the exposition, Beethoven sets up the first movement to prepare for the eventual main climax, that is, when the main theme will appear in the highest register for the first time—which does not happen until the coda (*W 39).

The first page of the autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major, Opus 59 No. 1, showing some annotations and corrections. (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin)

This registral strategy resembles that of the Eroica first movement, except that there the long-range connections draw on the arrival of a downward descending scalar figure that refuses to descend to a dominant seventh until the coda. Here, much more overtly and audibly, it is not a transition theme but the main theme itself whose harmonically stable presentation is delayed until the coda. Although Beethoven planned the quartet movement carefully to omit the expected repeat of the exposition, he considered at a late stage enlarging the movement still further by inserting a repeat of the whole development and recapitulation. He even marked this repeat in the autograph manuscript and inserted a short transition to smooth the return to the development—but then canceled the entire repeat before releasing the work for publication. The repeat would have intensified the coda passage that forms the dynamic “resolution” of the movement by having the main theme appear in low register five times before the climactic high-register version, instead of three times. But this plan would also have rendered the movement much too long and unwieldy—the whole development repeat would have included two presentations of its fugato section. Restoring the proportions of the movement by removing the repeat still left the first movement as the longest quartet first movement written up to then.¹³

As it stands, this first movement is a monument of spaciousness and imaginative thematic design, in which every motif of the first theme generates elements suitable for elaboration over a vast and interesting harmonic layout. Thematic patterns easily emerge to create a web of interrelated elements in the exposition, marked not only by growing rhythmic intensity in moving from quarter notes to eighths to triplet figures but also by the arrival of an exotic phrase featuring antiphonal high against low unresolved dominant chords that break the flow and suggest a strange perspective, demanding confirmation at a later time.¹⁴ This they receive in the development, where they reappear in intensified form, preparing a long excursion into a foreign harmonic territory, and they appear again in the recapitulation.¹⁵ These antiphonal chords encapsulate in a short phrase the stark registral contrasts that in much larger terms govern the structure of the whole movement.¹⁶

Much the same integration of extremes is found in the Scherzo (not labeled “Scherzo” but it certainly is one), the most original in form that Beethoven ever wrote. This is not a conventional Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo or even a fivefold amplification of that scheme but a dramatic sonata-form scherzo of great length and dynamism, all in one movement.¹⁷ Like the first movement it begins with a four-measure phrase in the cello—Romberg’s bête noire—comprising repetitions of a motivic cell whose rhythmic profile is strong enough to generate material for the movement. From it and the contrasting Violin 2 phrase that follows it come the basic elements of the Scherzo, which develops a complex harmonic scheme with further contrasting themes. Long as the movement is, Beethoven also considered including a large repeat of what would be its development and recapitulation, but again, the plan is suppressed in the autograph at a late stage.¹⁸ What he left in final form stands as the most elaborated Scherzo he had written up to this time, combining astonishing energy and cunning intricacy of workmanship.

The slow movement brings tragedy: the word mesto (“mournful”) in its label Adagio molto e mesto tells us as much, and the movement eloquently fleshes out the implication of this rare term. Long and expressive, the movement plays on the two forms of the seventh note of the F-minor scale, E and E-flat. Set in sonata form, it is the longest and most complex slow movement Beethoven had written since the funeral march in the Eroica. In its feeling of tragedy, the strongly expressive thematic material, heard primarily in the first violin and the cello, is unmatched outside the world of Florestan’s dungeon, from which it may have borrowed its F-minor tonality and its implications of death. All the more important then is the sense of salvation offered by the coda, which brings the first theme in amplified form, worked out first in close imitation in the two violin parts, then in octaves, with arpeggiated rhythmic support from the lower strings. The coda takes the first theme to its full climax in high register, somewhat paralleling the climax of the first movement. When this drama is over, the first violin embarks on a soaring cadenza of seven measures, emotionally transporting the Adagio into a new phase of preparation for the drastic change brought on by the finale.

Under a persistent trill in Violin 1, the “Thème russe” in the cello launches the finale, still another movement of grand scope and energy, a finale with a sizable development section and a long coda that exploit ensemble textures. The movement, which easily matches the breadth of the other movements, closes with vigorous gestures that ground the vast bulk of the whole. No wonder that this composition formed the primary model for quartet composers for the rest of the nineteenth century; Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms understood that it opened a new world of quartet writing, and Cosima Wagner’s Bayreuth diaries report Wagner in his last years listening to it with close attention.

Quartet Opus 59 No. 2

After the spacious clarity of Opus 59 No. 1, No. 2 in E minor is elusive and mysterious. Its tonal plan is almost the obverse of No. 1 in that the slow movement is in the tonic major, all other movements in the tonic minor. E minor is a bleak and distant key in the tonal system of the period. It had gained some ground in the “Sturm und Drang” 1770s when Haydn used it for his Symphony No. 44, or “Mourning” Symphony. In Mozart it is equally rare as a primary key, appearing in the strangely beautiful Violin Sonata K. 304 written for Paris in 1778. And Beethoven also keeps it at a distance, using it as a main tonic only in this quartet and the Piano Sonata Opus 90 of 1814. Middle movements in E minor are the plaintive Allegretto of the E Major Piano Sonata Opus 14 No. 1 and the dramatic Andante of the Fourth Piano Concerto.

Opus 59 No. 2 opens with a forte two-chord gesture, followed by a silence. Then the first “theme” breaks out of the silence in a short phrase, which again stops for another silence. The opening phrase in E minor is then repeated, a half step higher, in F major (recalling the “Appassionata” opening), then another silence! A stream of new ideas follows, now elaborating earlier figures and bringing new ones in rapid flowing sixteenth notes, leading finally to a repetition of the basic two-note chordal gesture, but on unstable harmonies—and then another silence! This discontinuous, abrupt succession of motives and figurational developments—punctuated by eloquent silences—stands in contrast to the opening of the F Major Quartet with its smooth and well-shaped melodic linearity, and it is one of the ways in which Opus 59 No. 2 presages the late quartets. Like his last quartet, Opus 135, it begins at a high level of motivic intensity and then carries the intensity to still higher levels, with resolutions kept at bay for long stretches.

The E-major Adagio takes a balanced melody of the slow-paced, small-interval, symmetrical type that has prompted the term “hymnlike” from many a commentator, and expands it into a sonata-form movement (*W 40a). Subtleties play over the surface from early on, as when the contrasting second phrase of the melody closes into what is expected to be a return to the first phrase but instead dissolves into a new dotted scalar figure that sets up the arrival of a contrasting new theme.¹⁹ In other words, the seeming symmetry of the first large melodic paragraph breaks up, extends the form, and reaches forward into new material. The same thing happens in the recapitulation. The eventual resolution comes, as we might expect, in the lovely coda, where quiet triplet figures over a long-held E in the cello restore a sense of cadential close. Finally, the turning figure in the cello at the very end echoes the opening of the “hymn” melody (*W 40b).

The Scherzo renews the intervallic and rhythmic jaggedness of some parts of the first movement, also exploiting in a new way the severe E-minor/F-major contrast that opens the first movement. To the syncopated intensity of the Scherzo, the Russian theme of the Trio comes as a welcome return to a firm E major. Beethoven then demonstrates the capacity of the theme for contrapuntal treatment, as if he were improvising on it at the keyboard in his best fugato manner. (This contrapuntal invention on a simple theme foreshadows his way of handling the C-major Trio of the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, where the fugato animates a robust outbreak that contrasts with a ghost-ridden and deeply mysterious Scherzo in the tonic minor.)

The finale unleashes its Presto in C major, overtly denying the expected tonic, shifting between this C-major harmony and the dominant of E minor but not firmly landing on E minor as the central key of the movement for more than fifty measures! This opening was for Schoenberg a classic example of “fluctuating tonality.”²⁰ That so powerful an ambiguity can begin a finale, which traditionally is the place for the reaffirmation of the home tonic, is just one more sign of the experimental vision embodied in this work. The C-major/E-minor contrast persists right to the last page of the finale, where it gives way to the final peroration, the even faster closing portion of the coda (marked “Più presto”). Here E minor finally expels its tonal rival and drives forward energetically at a steady fortissimo to the final chords.²¹

Quartet Opus 59 No. 3

The Opus 59 cycle closes with the C Major Quartet, evidently designed as a partial easing of the strain created by Quartets 1 and 2. The layout of the whole, which at first seemed “disjointed” to some commentators, suggests that after the innovations of the first two works Beethoven was seeking a more reduced framework, partly reminiscent of Mozart.²² If he had specific models in mind, two are likely: Mozart’s C Major Quartet, K. 465 (the “Dissonant”), which, as we saw earlier, he had been thinking about for years; and the “Jupiter” Symphony, especially its contrapuntal finale. Signs of a relationship to K. 465 appear in Beethoven’s mysterious and harmonically ambiguous introduction followed by the decisive and clear-cut C-major Allegro first movement, as well as in some of the figuration patterns of the Allegro, which resemble figures in K. 465.²³ Further indications of a “classicizing” aspect to this work are found in the third movement, a C-major “Menuetto” marked “Grazioso,” which Beethoven had actually sketched some years earlier. The Andante, on the other hand, sings exotically in A minor and hardly supports retrospective interpretation. Nor would the last movement, his most energetic fugato-cum-sonata-form finale, a virtual perpetuum mobile, a technical tour de force that could not fail—and never has failed—to arouse excitement.

Beethoven’s plans for the work underwent some striking compositional changes. At one point the A-minor slow movement was intended to have a 2/4 theme—which, after being discarded from the quartet, resurfaced five years later as the slow-movement theme of the Seventh Symphony.²⁴ The Minuet was first sketched not in C major but in F major, with a projected D-flat-major Trio.²⁵ Beethoven also considered the possibility of a C-minor last movement for the quartet until he decided to unleash the manic energy embodied in the C-major finale.²⁶ And at least one of his early ideas for the first movement included a theme that traces back directly to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (*W 41).²⁷

But no matter how tradition-minded Beethoven was in fashioning the C Major Quartet, no matter how much any of its details resemble Mozart or Haydn, there are clear signs that it belongs to the same modern artistic sphere as its companions. One such indication appears in the slow introduction itself. Despite its general resemblance to the broad, intense chromatic lines of Mozart’s introduction to K. 465, it actually draws even more closely on some of the same harmonic resources we find in the F-minor introduction to Florestan’s dungeon scene, written in 1805–6 just before his main work on these quartets. The dynamics, mood, and of course orchestration and dramatic purpose differ, but Beethoven’s strategic use in the quartet introduction of the three different diminished-seventh chords in order²⁸ organizes the framework of the quartet’s opening section in much the same way that the identical harmonies organize the long Florestan introduction. At the same time the “wandering” lines of the quartet introduction are also reminiscent of the slow descending motions to mysterious goals that begin the second and third Leonore overtures. Most telling of all for the modernity of the first movement is the highly original way that Beethoven composed out the harmonic implications of the three adjacent diminished-seventh harmonies, first in the development section of the Allegro and then in the crucial transition measures that lead to the recapitulation.²⁹

The “Harp” Quartet and the “Quartetto Serioso”

Between the monumental Opus 59 and the much later quartets of the last years stand two single quartets: Opus 74 in E-flat major, later called the “Harp” Quartet, and Opus 95 in F minor, which Beethoven himself labeled “Quartetto serioso.” The E-flat Quartet dates from the summer of 1809, along with the “Emperor” Concerto and the Lebewohl Piano Sonata, both of which, it may be noted, are also in E-flat. By 1810 Beethoven had completed Opus 95, which did not appear in print until 1816 as part of the group published by Steiner, with a dedication to Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz “from his friend Ludwig van Beethoven.”³⁰ The private character of the dedication accords well with the character of the work—deeply expressive, tightly condensed, a probing experiment—which at one time Beethoven believed “is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.”³¹ Beethoven spent some time in private chamber music sessions in 1809 and 1810, often held at Zmeskall’s house with Schuppanzigh and Anton Kraft performing. A sketchbook from 1809 contains the annotation “quartets every week”; it also contains at least one idea for a C-major quartet that never materialized.

The idea that Opus 74 is a light and genial diversion from the more serious Beethoven is a cliché that could not be more mistaken. This impression arises from the smooth and seemingly placid character of the first movement, along with the extended plucked-string passages that inspired its nickname and the quiet Allegretto variations finale. But it can hardly be sustained in the face of the passionate Adagio or the rough and dynamic Scherzo. These inner movements stand at extreme poles of Beethoven’s middle-period universe, while the first and last surround them with high imagination and subtlety. The work prompts memories of two earlier quartets in the same key: Mozart’s path-finding K. 428 of 1785 and Haydn’s Opus 76 No. 6 of 1797. Haydn’s E-flat masterpiece opens with a variation first movement that Beethoven could well have had in mind when he wrote the finale of Opus 74 (just as Haydn’s B-major Fantasia, as a slow movement, could have influenced Beethoven’s Fantasy Opus 77 a year earlier). In this quartet Beethoven’s contrapuntal treatment of the Trio of the Scherzo—again, as in Opus 59 No. 2—may also reflect his interest in theoretical studies at this time, as the 1809 sketchbook indeed suggests.

The tonal plan of Opus 74 is unusual in that the two middle movements are both in keys other than the tonic, E-flat major. The slow movement is a moving and expressive Adagio in A-flat major, and the Scherzo is in C minor, with a C-major Trio. Beethoven used this kind of tonal plan for a four-movement work in only one other piece from this time, the Piano Trio Opus 70 No. 2, in which the E-flat-major first and last movements frame a second movement in C major and an Allegretto in A-flat. In Opus 74, key relationships by thirds abound at the broadest structural levels, and we are not surprised to find that in the first movement there is much exploration of C major in the development section.

The first movement, in which the introduction prepares the Allegro in a richly imaginative way, is notable for its “harp” passages, strategically placed within the movement. Here Beethoven exploits the potential of pizzicato as a special string sonority. He had begun to use it extensively and in far-flung registers in the Opus 59 Quartets—above all in the cello in the slow movements of No. 1 and No. 3—and would later do so again in the “Archduke” Trio, but in Opus 74 it gains unprecedented importance. In Haydn, Mozart, and early Beethoven quartets, plucked strings were saved for incidental contrasts, either in final cadences of slow movements or in special movements in which plucked accompaniment figures were wanted; here it becomes an essential tone color. Appearing directly after the first thematic paragraph has run its course in the exposition, the pizzicato forms a special pocket of sonority with alternating plucked quarter notes against running bowed eighth notes. In the development the passage reappears to form the transition back to the recapitulation, now with alternating plucked quarters against sustained chords. In the recapitulation the original version returns in a slightly new guise.

The coda caps the climax when the alternating pizzicato quarter notes now fill four beats at a time while the first violin suddenly tears loose with the longest and most elaborate cadenza anywhere in Beethoven’s quartets. At first the lower strings, as if struggling to bring the first violinist back into the ensemble, turn to the first phrase of the first theme in Violin 2 and Viola while the cello continues to pluck away; then the cello joins in the insistent appeal, which grows in volume to a fortissimo cadence that finally closes the segment in the tonic and shows the way to the final tonic chords, by now all arco (bowed).

Of all Beethoven’s quartets up to then, Opus 95 is the most fiercely concentrated and closely argued. F minor, a key of tragic feeling, always evokes a strong emotional response, not only in Beethoven but in his two great predecessors and also his followers. Witness Schubert’s deeply moving Fantasy for piano four hands, D. 940, which shows some signs of potential influence from Opus 95 in its odd juxtaposition of keys. (Schubert has interior movements in F-sharp minor and D major within an F-minor context, which could well derive from Beethoven’s slow movement choice of D major in this quartet.) Later examples stream down through the nineteenth century. For Beethoven himself we trace significant uses of F minor as a main key only in his piano sonatas, first in No. 1, and again, much more developed, in the “Appassionata.” Otherwise Beethoven chooses it as tonic only for Florestan’s dungeon scene, for the slow movement of Opus 59 No. 1, for the “Storm” in the Pastoral Symphony, and for the Egmont Overture. It is somewhat surprising that after this quartet, he never completed another full work in this key and that the only F-minor inner movement of a later cyclic work is the Scherzo of the A-flat-major Piano Sonata No. 31. The tonal and expressive range of the late works—especially the late quartets—moves beyond the classical key associations that still hovered lightly over his middle-period works.

The brief opening subject is outlined by the same scale steps, 1–3–1–5–1, as the Eroica opening subject but with the intervals filled in, using two forms of the minor scale in immediate succession (*W 42). Thus the melody moves down from 1 to 5 through lowered 7 and lowered 6, then moves back up from 5 to 1 through raised 6 and raised 7. This initial ambiguity sets up tonal suggestions that are immediately taken up in connection with scale step 2, that is, G; the opening subject reappears on , or lowered 2, thus treating this pitch as if it were a new local tonic, and then suddenly returns to its F-minor tonic by way of a Gn in the cello.

From here on the well-defined opening rhythmic cell of four sixteenth notes plus downbeat—with the pitches 1–2–3–2–1—takes hold as a basic figure for the movement, in which the tension once established never lets up. The phrases are frequently asymmetric and abrupt, and there is an absence of simple periodicity in the phrase relationships along with a focus on the close, insistent development of a small group of motives. This high degree of concentration allows little or no room for transition passages that could relax the discourse and define spaces between principal thematic units. The exposition is not repeated.³² Rather, Beethoven goes on at once to the short development section, which leads to a drastically shortened recapitulation. Everywhere compression rules: the whole development section occupies only 14 percent of the whole movement, and the fiercely emphatic recapitulation and coda hold the intensity to the end (*W 43).

In contrast the Allegretto slow movement, in D major, patiently explores its thematic material, which turns out to be based on the same descending interval of a fourth that is prominent in the first movement, but now with a completely different character: it opens “mezza voce” (“with half voice”) and slowly develops a web of quiet themes, gaining complexity as it accumulates more complex harmonies and relationships, including a fugal passage. The slow movement closes into a Scherzo that resumes the power and tension of the first movement, relieved only by a lyrical Trio in the odd keys of G-flat major (again the half step above the original F-minor tonic of the first movement) and D major (the key of the slow movement). All this is then capped by the Finale. A short introduction, Larghetto espressivo, prepares the 6/8 main body of the last movement, Allegretto agitato, whose basic sense is of deep gestural yearning and imploring, moving along pathways of feeling that no words can fully describe.

The coda of the Finale has baffled many a dedicated Beethovenian, as it ends the whole work with a light-fingered, nimble Allegro. Its special character is enhanced by what immediately precedes it, namely, a pianississimo close in F major that seemingly promises to conclude the movement on a quiet note of affirmation. But then the coda breaks out with its running figures in 2/2 meter, sempre piano, building gradually to two climactic arrivals on the tonic. The composer Vincent d’Indy criticized the coda harshly; others see it as perhaps a joke, even an “opera buffa finale,” or as a sample of paradox and Romantic irony.³³ But behind the facade lurk elements of art, as the half-step figure F–G–G–A that starts off the coda emerges as a basic idea that is repeated three times emphatically near the end. Here it suddenly reminds us of the opening chromatic figures that had started off the first movement, now on different scale steps but with the same emphasis on two forms of the same scale step, G, which is now G and G in immediate succession. Further, the F-sharp implies two forms of the tonic pitch, F; thus the implied sequence is an upward chromatic span of five notes: F–F–G–G–A. The chromatic figure forces our attention to the pitch content of the coda rather than simply letting us be carried away by its speed and finality. It ends this darkest of Beethoven quartets in a light still shadowed by the tragic features of the earlier movements. Such qualities, depths below depths, have given this work the valid reputation of being a visionary anticipation of Beethoven’s late style, certainly of the late quartets. Yet if we look at the work more for what it fulfills than what it anticipates, we see that in the foliage of its interrelated clusters of ideas, it represents a deepening and thickening of Beethoven’s second-period quartet style, moving from broad and open ways of expression, as in Opus 59 No. 1, into a world of pain and oppression.