Beethoven

In 1857, thirty years after Beethoven’s death, the violinist Karl Holz gave Wilhelm von Lenz some written reminiscences about the last quartets, which Lenz published three years later.¹ Holz had credentials. He had joined the Schuppanzigh Quartet as its second violinist in 1824, just when Beethoven was working on Opus 127. In 1825 he became a trusted member of the inner circle, replacing the officious Schindler as personal assistant, factotum, and unpaid manager of Beethoven’s business affairs.² Holz was a musician of independent judgment who did not hesitate to tell Beethoven what he thought on any subject.³ His testimony to Lenz on the quartets is as follows:

During the time when he was composing the three quartets commissioned by Prince Galitzin, Opus 127, Opus 130, Opus 132, such a wealth of new quartet ideas streamed forth from Beethoven’s inexhaustible imagination that he felt almost involuntarily compelled to write the -minor and F-major quartets [Opus 131 and 135]. “My dear friend, I have just had another new idea,” he used to say, in a joking manner and with shining eyes, when we would go out for a walk; and he wrote down some notes in a little pocket sketchbook. “But that belongs to the quartet after the next one [i.e., the minor quartet], since the next one [Opus 130, with six movements] already has too many movements.” . . . When he had finished the major quartet [Opus 130] I said that I thought it the best of the three. To which he replied, “Each in its own way! Art demands of us that we don’t stand still” (he used to speak this way, in an imperial style). “You will find here a new kind of voice-leading, and, as to imagination [Phantasie], it will, God willing, be less lacking than ever before!” Later he said that he thought the minor Quartet his greatest. On the score he sent to Schott he wrote, ironically, “Pilfered together from various odds and ends” [“Zusammengestohlen aus Verschiedenem, diesem und Jenem”].⁴

The passage is rich in implications behind the humorous veil. Whether Beethoven actually said that he had “another new idea . . . in a joking manner and with shining eyes” might be an invention or a wishful memory, but it gives a feeling of what his immersion in his composing life meant for him as an aging, misanthropic artist for whom joy in any other aspect of life was a fleeting dream at best. Beethoven’s hope that in these quartets “imagination [will be] less lacking than ever before,” has been called an “understatement to leave us all speechless.”⁵ Striking too is that Holz approaches the three Galitzin quartets and even the next two (Opus 131 and Opus 135) not only as individual works but as an aggregate. His vignette of Beethoven jotting down an idea for one of them, well in advance of settling down to work on it in earnest, fits well with what we find in the sketchbooks. Of course he had had such habits all his life, but the last quartets impress us more than any other closely related group of Beethoven compositions as being mature individual artworks that nevertheless are bound to each other like family members who look somewhat alike and have some common features, traits, and gestures. Some of these are shared thematic and motivic ideas, some are contrapuntal, some are rhythmic; the sum of their presence is that these works belong to a special and rarefied plane of musical thought. Beethoven’s further comment, that these quartets present a “new kind of voice-leading,” is at the heart of what is rich and strange in their textures. Holz’s memoir reinforces the feeling, felt by listeners from Bee-thoven’s time to ours, that the last quartets form a summa of his creativity, that they give access to higher regions of thought and feeling that lie beyond even his farthest-reaching earlier achievements. The response of twenty-first-century lay listeners and of musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers, speaks volumes about the qualities of experience that the last quartets reveal to the perceiving world.⁶

Years earlier, while preparing the Opus 59 Quartets for publication, Beethoven had claimed that he was thinking about “devoting myself almost entirely to this type of composition.”⁷ Yet after Opus 95, composed in 1810, his only token before the last quartets was a little B-minor quartet movement that he wrote for an English visitor in 1817.⁸ After accepting Galitzin’s commission for three quartets in November 1822, he started drafting a quartet in E-flat, then turned back to the completion of the Missa solemnis, the “Diabelli” Variations, and the Ninth Symphony. Only after the premiere of the Ninth in May 1824 was he ready to bury himself in work on the quartet that became Opus 127, completing it in time for its first performance in March 1825.

From then on, and especially beginning in 1825, the story of Beethoven’s compositional life centers on these quartets, each of which became a full-time creative project, not really interrupted by a few little works written or jotted down along the way, such as joking canons, two little piano pieces (WoO 85 and 86), some random ideas for unfinished works that barely got beyond the planning stage, alternative movements, and plans for movements. No other major projects, and few external distractions (not even his nephew’s attempted suicide!) interfered with his riveted concentration on these quartets. Never had there been a period in his life during which he chained himself so exclusively to work on a single genre as he now did for two and a half years.

In order of composition, the first three quartets, as promised to Galitzin, were Opus 127 in E-flat major, Opus 132 in A minor, and Opus 130 in B-flat major, with its long fugal finale that he later removed and published separately as the Grand Fugue, Opus 133. Composing the A-minor quartet took him from February to July of 1825 but was interrupted when he fell prey in April to a serious abdominal illness that lasted a month. The illness, evidently more threatening than most of his chronic debilitating ailments, is reflected in the celebrated “Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent, in the Lydian Mode,” the slow movement of Opus 132. He was now in the hands of a stern and demanding physician, Dr. Anton Braunhofer, who bullied Beethoven into submission to the regime he prescribed for recovery, apparently with good results. In May Beethoven sent Braunhofer a letter of “respect and gratitude” in the form of a comic dialogue between doctor and patient, along with a canon on the text “Doctor, close the door against Death, notes [Noten] will help him who is in need [Not].⁹ In this case the connection between life situation and compositional idea is unusually direct. The canon text, which Beethoven wrote himself, gives every hint that during this illness, his sense of mission, his urgent desire to complete these quartets, and—not stated but implied—his obsessive love for his nephew Karl and yearning for Karl’s reciprocation of that love, were now (with much difficulty and with Braunhofer’s help) holding the door closed against death.

With the A-minor Quartet finished by July 1825 he turned directly to Opus 130 and its fugue, planning it at a very early stage as the “Last quartet [that is, last of the three for Galitzin] with a serious and heavy-going introduction,” a jotting that he then followed with a sketch for a “Finale” in B-flat major that forms the kernel for the beginning of the Grand Fugue (*W 53).¹⁰ This shows that Beethoven was building the frame of the structure by first envisaging its beginning and its ending, along with the character of its “introduction” (which indeed turned out to be “serious and heavy-going”) and that of the finale, which he then conceived as a fugue but with a subject that had a close intervallic kinship to that of the introduction’s opening.¹¹

Again the project lasted half a year, not the few weeks that Beethoven imagined in the late summer of 1825, and it was first performed with the fugue as the finale in March of 1826. We can see that if Beethoven had written the three “Galitzin” quartets and stopped there, leaving Opus 130 with its enormous fugal finale, the resultant trilogy would have distantly resembled his Opus 59 trilogy in its larger pattern: the first is a sturdy and lengthy work in a major key (Opus 127); the second (Opus 132) is in a little-used minor key and has an idiosyncratic layout and diversity of movement types; and the third is in major and culminates in a fugal finale (though one that differs vastly from that of Opus 59 No. 3). Despite their radical differences, there is some affinity of aesthetic balance in these trilogies, and we should remember that in Beethoven’s later lifetime the Opus 59 quartets were still regarded as difficult to understand, above all No. 2. As with Opus 18, if the three members of Opus 59 had been published separately, we would see them quite differently and more independently. And the opposite would hold if the three “Galitzin” Quartets had been, imaginably, grouped under one opus number.¹²

In the early months of 1826, Beethoven’s last full year of life, he embarked on the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Opus 131, again completing it in six months or so. It turned out to be so difficult to play that a performance planned for September of that year was abandoned. We can gauge the circumstances when we realize that early in 1826, while he was working on Opus 131, Beethoven had to cope with the difficult decision to uncouple the Grand Fugue and publish it separately; and in July and August he had to deal with Karl’s attempted suicide. The crisis occurred just as Beethoven was reaching an artistic summit, the completion of the C-sharp Minor Quartet. It sharpens our awareness of Beethoven’s ability to deflect psychological pain from his artistic life, to cover the pain through creative work and to “close the door against Death,” that in these same months, midsummer of 1826, he started on Opus 135, the epitome of subtlety, brevity, and humor. Opus 135 took less time than the others, only the four months from July to October, the last part of which he spent in refuge, along with Karl, at his brother Johann’s estate in the country village of Gneixendorf near the Danube.¹³ After this there remained the composition of the substitute finale for Opus 130 to replace the Grand Fugue—a labor of love that was finished by November. He tried to launch a string quintet in C major but made little progress. In December his health failed again, and though he rallied for a while it became progressively worse in the early winter of 1827. Seeing a few visitors, writing a few letters, complaining about current trends in music and politics, bravely offering the Philharmonic Society a “new symphony, a new overture, or some other work,” none of which existed, he tried to keep the flame alive. But it was all too late, and he died on March 26, 1827. Of the last quartets there had been performances of the first three (127, 132, 130) while he was still alive but not of Opus 131 or 135.

Opus 127

The traditional four-movement layout of Opus 127 is the only feature of the work that might be construed (that is, misconstrued) as conservative. In the long course of planning and writing the quartet Beethoven thought at one time that it might have as many as six movements, including a slow introduction to the finale and a middle movement to be called “La Gaieté.” Strangely enough this heading was applied to a sketch for a jocular movement in 2/4 whose theme he transformed into the profoundly moving 12/8 main theme of the Adagio movement of the quartet.¹⁴ The final movement plan of the work, with its tightly condensed slow introduction to the first movement, has a fair number of antecedents. Perhaps most relevant are two important chamber works in the same key: the Trio Opus 70 No. 2 and the “Harp” Quartet, Opus 74. The first movement Allegro, with its smooth, flowing melodic motion in 3/4, recalls the first movement of the Violin Sonata Opus 96 and the Piano Sonata Opus 90, but in his earlier works, triple-meter Allegro first movements had been a minority compared to those in duple.¹⁵

The very brief opening Maestoso sets up the first movement with a clenched-fist opening gesture in which the basic tonic chord of E-flat major appears three times with the upper line rising through each statement on the scale steps 1, 3, and 5, spaced out between restless syncopated figures in the intervening measures and leading to a firm subdominant (A-flat major) chord. There may have been Masonic overtones in this elaborated use of the rising tonic triad to open the work; similar conspicuous uses of the rising triad, all progeny of the symbolic rising triadic chords that open the overture to The Magic Flute, had appeared in earlier Beethoven works in this key.¹⁶ Slow introductions in middle and later Beethoven works are often extended sections with well-developed frameworks of their own, but here, as in at least one earlier example—the Piano Sonata in F-sharp Major, Opus 78—the introduction is short and firm but subtle in content and consequence. The Allegro rises smoothly out of the subdominant harmony that ends the introduction and feels more like a continuation than a wholly new theme. In fact, somewhat as in the Eroica, this exposition has no single, fully shaped main theme; rather, a succession of well-crafted thematic ideas lead from the tonic area to a transition that moves out, not to the traditional dominant (B-flat major), but to G minor and then to G major.

There is little or no use of the dominant as a key area in the entire work, a mark of late Beethoven harmonic planning in which the time-honored use of the dominant as basic opposition to the tonic is supplanted by other contrasting tonal centers. Sometimes the main contrasting harmony is the subdominant, as in the Missa solemnis; sometimes the flat sixth degree, as in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony and that of the Sonata Opus 111. Here the central contrast is formed on the third degree, G, as root of both major and minor harmonies. The formal dynamics of the movement take advantage of the opening contrast of Maestoso and Allegro. The Maestoso returns in G major to signal the beginning of the development section; it returns another time, now in C major and in truncated form, near the end of the development section, thus dramatizing the harmonic move to C major that Beethoven will use to set up the eventual return to the tonic E-flat major.

A typical paradox of the late style, met with here for the first time, is that the three statements of the Maestoso appear in three different keys and serve three entirely different structural functions: to open the piece; to open the development, and to mark a turning point as the development moves to C major. Most important is that the Maestoso never returns in the tonic. Thus it does not round off the form, as it so readily would have in earlier works using this strategy—and it does not appear in the recapitulation. Whereas the opening of the recapitulation in many an earlier and middle-period work had always been a moment of vital articulation, whether attacked forcefully or smoothly, here it is virtually concealed within the ongoing discourse at the end of the development; the listener has to know it is there in order to hear it.¹⁷ In other words, traditional formal junctures and dividing points are now either signaled by an introductory passage that is never exactly the same twice or are concealed in the name of continuity. That is why there is no repeat of the exposition and no use of the Maestoso at the recapitulation or the coda. Another element of long-range structural planning does emerge, however, and this one harks back in various ways to earlier works, especially Opus 59 No. 1. It is the gradual enlargement of registral space as the movement progresses, from the opening two-octave span of its beginning, to the three octaves of the G-major Maestoso, to the four octaves of the C-major Maestoso, and finally, to the maximum span, four octaves and a sixth—from low C of the cello to the high of the first violin—at the apex of the coda. From this moment of maximum spatial expansion, the final beautiful and intimate phrases take their point of departure and finish the movement with grace and sensibility on a tonic chord that spans four octaves.

From the very opening of the Allegro we see what Beethoven meant when he spoke to Holz about “a new kind of voice-leading.” It is true that the upper line, Violin 1, is the leading voice in the sense of carrying the most distinctive melodic content. But the lower voices are no mere accompaniment. Each is a smoothly written, stable melodic or quasi-melodic voice. No matter to what degree they are simpler than the top voice and seemingly subordinated to it, they are individualized and linearized to a degree surpassing what we find characteristically in the earlier quartets, except in earlier fugal and fugato writing. The texture is saturated with motivic content, overt or latent, and is inherently linear in all voices, while at the same time it makes perfect harmonic sense. Not only this counterpoint of voices but also another factor strikes the ear and helps account for the density of the content. Although there are four instruments in the quartet there are often many more than four voices. Sudden leaps in register within individual string parts, abrupt shifts that can occur in the current leading voice or in any other voice, above all the viola and cello, give rise to the realization that a single part can often imply more than one contrapuntal line. For example, in one cadence on the tonic E-flat major, both Violin 1 and cello suddenly leap down from a high to an an octave and half lower, instead of resolving conventionally to the a fifth below. Moreover, to reach this higher the cello has to leap up an octave to reach it, when it could perfectly well have remained on the lower (*W 54). Why? Because in both string parts Beethoven wants to prepare the middle register in which the next thematic material will occur; the cello picks up the middle-range for the next phrase, and Violin 1 answers it two bars later in the same range. Meanwhile the high in Violin 1 is being “saved” or held in reserve until it reemerges a bit later.¹⁸ The texture is filled with mysterious suggestions, hints, and allusions to voices that come and go in the four-instrument texture, which is perpetually resonant with content, infused with even more motivic and thematic material than it overtly presents.

The slow movement, transformed from “La Gaieté” to a profoundly beautiful variation movement, exemplifies the cantabile aspect of quartet writing but shares the development of thought that marks all of Beethoven’s mature variations. As it fills out its ample space it has room for striking shifts of affect, from the jocular to the tragic. The opening “curtain” in pianissimo, which slowly steals into the mind of the listener by building a dominant seventh chord from the bottom up, is acutely calculated to prepare the arrival of the main theme, a long and winding melody whose first and second strains are each presented first in Violin 1, then in the cello, with a short codetta to softly round off the whole.¹⁹ Now begins a set of variations, five in all plus a surprising interlude between Nos. 4 and 5, and with a breathtaking coda to finish the movement.

It is no accident that the variations are not numbered in the score. By omitting the numbering, as he had already done in other variation movements, such as the finale of Opus 74, Beethoven signals his departure from the traditional formal codes that belonged to the variation as a classical genre, with its familiar succession of tonally closed sections.²⁰ The same is true in late independent sets of variations, above all the “Diabelli” Variations, but there he has no choice but to number each variation since they make up the whole work. The same avoidance of labels for each variation is found in the slow movement of Opus 132 (the “Heiliger Dankgesang”), the Andante of Opus 131, and the Lento assai of Opus 135.²¹

Gone too in this mature phase is Beethoven’s earlier adherence to the older method of variation writing in which the first few variations of a set in turn created new versions of the theme by having each variation proceed in shorter note values than the one before, then altering the material in new ways such as a change to minor (for a major-mode theme) and a change of tempo. Now in the first variation, while retaining the 12/8 meter of the theme, Beethoven plunges directly into elaborate figurations in all four instruments, weaving fantastic patterns from the simpler melodic lines of the theme. In the second variation he shifts the tempo from Adagio to Andante con moto and brings a new meter, 4/4, for a marchlike section with even more complex writing in the two violin parts, which form an animated dialogue. The third variation restores the Adagio tempo, maintains the duple meter, but moves the entire harmonic content into the key of E major—extremely distant from the basic tonic of A-flat major. In this new environment he develops a rich body of melody from the earlier material, with Violin 1 soaring into new expressive regions and with a harmonic climax on a C-natural harmony in Beethoven’s ripest style. The fourth variation slips back easily into the home tonic, A-flat major, and unfolds a dialogue between cello and first violin in the original meter, followed by a strange interlude, perhaps an extended coda, at the end of this section that leads once more from A-flat major to E major. This move in turn leads back to the final variation, in which first Violin 1 and then the three other instruments sing in arabesques of sixteenth-note diminutions of the phrases of the original theme. The coda revives echoes of the rising arpeggios of variation 4, then works its way gently through reminiscences of earlier sixteenth-note patterns to the final measure, where the last cadence closes the vast circle of the movement with a reference back to the opening phrase of the theme. And fully indicative of Beethoven’s departure from convention is that the last cadence, rather than having the traditional dominant to tonic (5–1) motion in the bass, moves from scale degree 2 to 1, keeping its melodic role alive to the very end, as do all the voices.

In its third and fourth movements Opus 127 sails into uncharted waters, making full use of the Scherzo-Trio and sonata-form templates but with a new relation between content and form. The opening measures announce a new paradigm in Scherzo writing, as Beethoven finds ways of supplying inner contrasts to this movement type that is seemingly limited by its adherence to a single basic metrical format throughout its length.

The opening phrases give us a clear sample of how he achieves such variety (*W 55). First comes a short “curtain” made up of four plucked chords in a regular 3/4 rhythm, simple tonic and dominant in a two-octave span. A paradox follows: neither the opening harmonic sequence, nor the short chords on the beat, nor the pizzicato sonority provides the main stuff of the movement: in fact they are never heard again within it. The cello theme that follows, with its sequential rising repetitions of a rhythmically jagged, four-note upbeat-downbeat figure (3 + 1) moving on to a smooth legato phrase with conspicuous trills on the third beat of each measure, is answered by the viola with an inverted form of the figure that also descends in its main melodic line, replying to the cello’s ascent. They join as a contrapuntal pair. In complementary style, the tossing back and forth of short phrases (always with trill) spreads to the upper voices and higher registers; just as the first big cadence is to be reached, the cello makes a rhythmic shift and brings the jagged rhythm on the first instead of the third beat. This introduces a new form of the rhythm that then has a life of its own, and we realize with astonishment how freely new rhythmic cells and placements of already known rhythmic cells can be worked into the texture. This scherzo in fact resembles some other late Beethoven scherzos (certainly that of the Ninth Symphony) in having enough differentiated material to form an approximation of a sonata form. Not that this formal shape is new here, but a sonata-form scherzo with such ample material and density of textures had not been seen since the large, one-movement Scherzo of Opus 59 No. 1. In Opp. 74 and 95, and in the Seventh Symphony, Beethoven worked out the scherzi along different lines.

The larger pattern of the whole third movement is:

Scherzo	Trio(Presto)	Scherzo repeated	Coda
E-flat major (sonata form)	E-flat minor	E-flat major	E-flat minor–major
143 measures	125 mm.	146 mm.	21 mm.

This makes up a large, three-part Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo form with coda, but the coda alludes to both Trio and Scherzo at the end, somewhat as in the Seventh Symphony, and thus hints at Beethoven’s middle-period five-part Scherzo form. No change of scene in any Beethoven movement is more vivid than that between this intricate, active, contrapuntal Scherzo and the mysterious Trio that flies in like a distant storm, passing from its opening pianissimo to its fortissimo climax and then receding; it breaks off abruptly to give way to the return of the Scherzo, briefly reappears, and then breaks off again in the coda.

The finale, massive like its fellow movements, is in a highly elaborated sonata form with remarkable features, most of all a pseudo-recapitulation in the subdominant immediately followed by the real recapitulation. The opening gesture, an octave leap from G to G, is a hallmark of the late quartet style, in its anticipation of the leap that opens the Grand Fugue (on the same pitch, G), and even that of the D-major second movement of Opus 131) (*W 56). But even more striking is Beethoven’s way of opening this E-flat major finale with an off-tonic phrase that then wends its way down to E-flat through sinuous motions that suggest a related key area, C minor; in fact C minor is a goal of the development section. The opening gesture also anticipates the movement of the first theme to its dominant note, , by way of its own leading tone, the raised fourth .

The coda is a telling example of Beethoven’s sensitivity to the effects of harmonic shift and tone color. Anticipating Impressionism by three generations, it blends the strings in a gossamer web of new sonorities, some of which were heard by Schubert and used to wonderful effect in his last piano trio, in the same key, and in his own late quartets, written in the next few years. The coda is no mere completion of the final tonic harmony: it has its own tempo and meter, starts in C major with a new version of the first theme, and explores, in order, a series of keys descending by major thirds before moving chromatically into the home tonic. It is exactly the scheme that Beethoven used for the Bagatelles Opus 126, as we saw earlier. It was this coda that the deaf Beethoven, “crouched in a corner,” heard being rehearsed by Joseph Böhm and the other members of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, and, by following their bowings, attended so carefully to the tempo that he changed it then and there from “Meno Vivace” to “Allegro con moto.”²²

Opus 132

As noted earlier, A minor as a principal key is surprisingly rare in Beethoven’s works and in those of his predecessors. Despite its ready playability on stringed and wind instruments, neither Haydn nor Mozart wrote more than a very few works in this key, a pattern that seems to fit in with a general inhibition in the later eighteenth century against minor keys containing sharps as principal keys. Preferred instead are the flat-side minor keys: D minor, G minor, and C minor (with F minor as an extreme possibility).²³ Although Beethoven wrote interior movements in A minor, he avoided it as a primary key except in two cases, one of which is slightly ambiguous. Altogether in A minor is the quirky and peculiar Violin Sonata Opus 23 of 1800; largely in A minor but interestingly mixed with major is the “Kreutzer” Sonata of 1801–3.²⁴ The movement plan of Opus 132 has some surprising parallels with the “Kreutzer”:

Opus 132, Movement Plan

1. Assai sostenuto [Introduction], 2/2, and Allegro, 4/4, in A minor

2. Allegro ma non tanto [Scherzo], 3/4, in A major

3. Molto adagio: “Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity by a Convalescent, in the Lydian Mode,”²⁵ 4/4, in Lydian F major

4. Alla marcia, assai vivace, 4/4, A major, plus Più allegro and Presto [recitative]

5. Allegro appassionato, 3/4, in A minor (with A major close)

This cycle of five movements yields a simple tonal arch-form: A minor–A major–F major–A major–A minor. In the proportions of the quartet’s movements, however, we can construe the scheme as having four principal elements:

1. a slow introduction and Allegro first movement

2. a substantial Scherzo (three-part form)

3. a slow movement, as double variation movement

4a. A short Alla marcia plus recitative, all of which can be heard as an introduction to the finale

4b. the 3/4 finale itself

The tonal layout, with its long slow movement in the Lydian mode (for Beethoven a special archaizing form of F major using a B-natural instead of a B-flat) extends the tonal plan of the “Kreutzer” (first movement in A major/minor; slow movement in F major; finale in A major). It shows a kinship with the Piano Sonata Opus 101, in A major, which also has an F-major middle movement; there the sequence is A major–F major–A minor–A major. For inner tonal contrast Beethoven often used the major key on the flat sixth degree in minor-mode works; thus a number of C-minor works have A-flat-major slow movements, (e.g. Opus 10 No. 1, Opus 13 (“Pathétique”), Violin Sonata Opus 30 No. 2, and the Fifth Symphony, among others). Equally, D-minor works can have B-flat-major slow movements (Opus 31 No. 2 and the Ninth Symphony). This choice allowed Beethoven to reinterpret the tonic pitch of the home key as the major third of the slow-movement key, with expressive consequences, often consolatory, as the slow movements begin. In major-mode works he also used the major key on the flat sixth as a tonal foil in, for example, the Violin Sonata in G major, Opus 30 No. 3 (slow movement in E-flat major); the Triple Concerto in C major (slow movement in A-flat major) and, far closer to the late quartets, the Hammerklavier Sonata in B-flat major, with its slow movement in F-sharp minor—the only example in Beethoven in which a major-mode work uses its flat sixth in minor rather than major. In late quartets other than Opus 132, the wider harmonic range prompts other uses of this relationship. In Opus 131, the most experimental of his works in tonal plan, the C-sharp-minor home tonic has as its primary slow movement an Andante in A major (the flat sixth); and in Opus 135 in F major the slow movement is in D-flat major.

Some precedents for this tonal layout in minor-mode works came down from Mozart (though not for A minor). For example, his great D-minor Piano Concerto, K. 466 has its pensive slow movement in B-flat major; and in several of Mozart’s late works in G minor (above all the String Quintet and the Symphony No. 40), a slow movement in E-flat major is an anchoring major-mode element of stability. But in the major mode Mozart does not normally choose an internal contrast so dramatic as that of a slow movement in the flat-sixth key, preferring one in the subdominant or the dominant.²⁶ Haydn is characteristically more adventurous in choosing keys that for Mozart (and even for Beethoven) would be extreme.²⁷

The opening measures of Opus 132 project us into a dark terrain in which multiple pathways open up the musical space, all using the same initial four-note figure but in several different forms and scalar positions, both successively and in combination with each other. The slow introduction begins with a four-note figure (call it “x”) that will permeate the first movement and in various ways become its fundamental idea (*W 57). For this view of the first movement no complex analysis is needed, since the statements and elaborations of the opening figure are manifest throughout the slow introduction and the Allegro. Less obvious, though listeners have always felt it and can hardly fail to sense it, is that it also exerts a profound influence on the later movements. We should also stop for a moment to consider that this four-note figure—a latent shape more than a motif—appears in various forms, all of them closely related, in all the late quartets after Opus 127, stated and elaborated in different ways in each of them but always playing a substantial role.

In the slow introduction that begins Opus 132 the figure “x” is on the tonic in the cello; it is answered by an immediate restatement of “x” on the dominant in Violin 1 (thus at once implying a potential fugal exposition, which, however, does not materialize) while simultaneously the viola brings the inversion of “x” on the dominant. This same inversion is then repeated by the cello, but in the tonic. Above, two-note cells, as halves of the original four-note unit, are divided between Violins 1 and 2. To close this densely packed opening phrase, the registrally extreme Violin 1 and cello present the two halves (“x1” and “x2”) in E minor simultaneously twice, while the inner voices remember different earlier versions. All this plays out in the space of some twenty seconds, within a harmonic context that oscillates between the tonic A minor and its dominant, E minor.

The Allegro grows out of this mystery by posing a new one that combines two basic ideas: one is the arabesque of descending and then rising sixteenth-note figures in Violin 1, the other is a distinctive figure in the cello, a short quasi-theme that will be elaborated throughout the movement. Everything is fluid and elusive, shapes and quasi-motives appear only to melt back into the texture, and no clear-cut tonic arrival is offered for a long time to come—in fact not until the very end of the movement, where at last a series of cadential figures resolve forcefully to the tonic. Creating expectation of the tonic and then postponing its arrival is a plan we have encountered in Beethoven’s earlier works, certainly in the second period; but here it is magnified as the tonal scheme interacts with the other asymmetries that suspend expectations and give the work its complex larger shape. The formal plan of the first movement itself poses a problem as it appears to have two recapitulations: the first in E minor, the second, or “real” one marked by the return to A minor, which runs its course and is then followed by the emphatic Coda that finally gives firm shape to the whole.²⁸

At one point in the composition process Beethoven wrote out in nearly full form a draft of a 3/8 movement in A major, “Alla allemande,” which he later deleted from Opus 132 and which then found a home in Opus 130 in G major, as the “Alla danza tedesca.”²⁹ The Scherzo of Opus 132 shows us why. Here he created one of his most convincing new scherzo types, a quasi-waltz that elaborates its opening figure, combines it with a second figure, and expands both in complementary ways to form the sections of an expanded compound binary form in A major. The full-bodied Scherzo is followed by a dreamlike musette, with a long drone on A and easy melodic motions in tenths in the high violin registers. It hints at similar quasi-pastoral evocations from the late Baroque, above all the musettes in Bach’s suites, which normally function as counterparts to gavottes that imitate their own French models in Bach’s masterly way. Examples include the “Gavotte ou la musette” in Bach’s English Suite No. 3, and that in the Sixth Violoncello Suite in D major. So Beethoven’s “pastoral” sections in late works not only point to a quiet utopian aesthetic state (as in the comparable Trio of the Ninth Symphony Scherzo) but also to historically memorable antecedents of an earlier period, namely that of Bach, the “immortal God of harmony,” as Beethoven called him.

From here the quartet moves into a different world—that of the poetics of prayer and thanksgiving for recovery “by a convalescent.” That he chooses the Lydian mode betokens not only a desire to frame this poignant movement with a modal cantus firmus that has an archaic character, but to use the time-honored Lydian mode in one of its historical associations, as the mode associated with healing and recovery.³⁰ To portray this experience, like no other in his works or those of any predecessor, Beethoven finds new means. One is the creation of a chorale melody in five phrases that can serve as the basic prayer and can later be elaborated in variations. Although some surmised that the melody must have come from his studies of early music, possibly Palestrina, the sketches show that Beethoven invented it. It is his own, fully realized chorale, “archaic” in sound because it is built, like the whole movement, on an F major foundation that has no . In short, it uses the Lydian mode in the strict form that was, ironically, almost unknown in the sixteenth century except as a theoretical construct but that Beethoven chose because he wanted the movement to oscillate between a feeling of F as tonic and a feeling of C not as dominant but as an alternate tonic. The result is a new kind of harmonic polarity quite different from his various ways of making tonal contrasts in late works, such as substituting a contrasting key built on the third, sixth, flat sixth, or even the fourth scale step for the traditional role of the dominant. The stages of prayer are intensified by two means: one is the increasing animation and tension as the chorale elaborations are successively presented, the other emerges through the contrasting passages in D major, marked “Feeling new strength,” in 3/8, that he alternates with the chorale segments.

After this great stillness the work resumes its motion, as the Alla marcia restores the tonic, now as A major, and the little march, with its off-beat accents (which we have learned to expect in this quartet from the very beginning) restores the atmosphere to vivid life. But after two brief, repeated sections it is quickly supplanted by a wholly new genre piece, a quasi-operatic recitative in which the first violin is clearly the solo voice. Its purpose, like that of all recitatives, is to prepare an aria, or in this case a finale. Sure enough the final cadence of the recitative, amazingly reminiscent of the opening of the first movement, brings in the final movement.

The rondo form of the finale disguises its own subtleties, but one of great importance is the harmonic oscillation that governs the main theme itself. We can get outside the work to remember that the theme had surfaced years earlier as a possible main theme for an instrumental finale to the Ninth Symphony, where its ending worked differently from the way it does here. Now the ending of the theme opens out from its A-minor to a C-major harmony, then slides back to A minor with ease. This harmonic motion also has a quasi-modal feel to it, though less an archaism than in the “Heiliger Dankgesang,” but the basic sense of the movement is an exploration of the tonal space of a special version of A minor. At first this version of A minor engages in destabilizing relationships to C major but at last gives way to a firm and clear A major for the extremely long coda, which settles the harmonic questions of the finale and of the whole quartet. To strengthen the coda Beethoven made a basic compositional change in his autograph manuscript, extending it from its original close (at measure 351) for an additional fifty-four measures. In this late phase of his thinking, sectional proportions were more important than ever in compositional planning, and the need for a full thematic completion of the movement grew on him at a late stage of composition, as it often had before.

Opus 130 and the Grand Fugue

Two ideas that Beethoven jotted on sketch leaves as he began to plan this quartet were an entry for a possible finale, written in 6/8 meter, marked “Fugha”; and as we saw earlier, an entry in words for the slow introduction to the first movement: “Last quartet, with a serious and heavy-going Introduction.”³¹ Along with other preliminary sketches these ideas show that from the beginning Beethoven was trying to reach a synoptic idea of how the quartet should begin and end. He wanted a weighty and portentous introduction to his first movement; although he also tried out a number of short ideas for possible finale themes, he foresaw that the work should end with a fugal finale.³²

The shape of the quartet in its original complete form is new. It is a cyclic work in B-flat major that has no extended transitions like those in Opus 132 and 131 but instead presents a deliberately unbalanced succession of six movements. The first and last, sonata form and fugue, are equally weighty though entirely different in form and length. Between them are four brief or moderate-length movements of different “characteristic” types. The whole is thus much more nearly a string of pearls of different colors and facets of light than any of the other late quartets; although comparisons with the eighteenth-century divertimento seem far fetched, we can understand why this superficial association springs to mind. The first movement, defined by its opening slow introduction contrasted with its Allegro main section, is tightly developed within its moderate framework; in performance time it comes to little more than half the length of the fugal finale.³³ It is followed by the shortest and tightest of all Beethoven’s quartet scherzi, a mere two-minute Presto of streaking light. Then comes an equally compact D-flat major movement of grace and subtlety, as gentle as the little Presto is gruff. The fourth movement is a waltz, the 3/8 Alla danza tedesca lifted from an early plan for Opus 132. The sequence of middle movements then closes with a slow movement “Cavatina” in E-flat major. Capping the whole and integrating the cycle is the role of the multisectional fugue in B-flat major, a leviathan of 741 measures that dwarfs the preceding movements in weight, duration, level of difficulty, and scope. It comprises a whole series of contrasting sections that differ in tempo and key; it is a “fugue” in the larger sense but like no other, since it is, as Beethoven’s subtitle later put it, “tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée”—“partly free, partly in strict counterpoint.” This is the finale that Beethoven later removed from the quartet and published separately as the Grosse Fuge, Opus 133. He thus gave it a life of its own and sparked a controversy that has lasted ever since as to which finale is “correct,” that is, the replacement finale that he wrote for the quartet—a genial deft, and humorous 2/4 Allegro—or the Grand Fugue.

Grasping the reasons behind the replacement may help resolve the question, though in a sense it can never be resolved in a simple either/or. The ambiguity of a work with two viable finales, each a plausible ending, is the central issue that needs to be understood by performers and listeners alike. A brief chronology will clarify the basic facts:

May–September 1825: Beethoven works on composing Opus 130, with the fugue as his only intended finale.

July 6, 1825 (approximately): Beethoven informs Prince Galitzin that the A Minor Quartet (Opus 132) is ready and that “the third quartet is nearly finished.”

August 24: Beethoven writes to both Karl and Holz to say that the third quartet will have six movements and tells Karl that it will be “quite finished in ten or at most twelve days.”³⁴

January 1826: Schuppanzigh and the other members of his quartet rehearse the B-flat Quartet in Beethoven’s apartment and find it very difficult to play, above all the fugue.³⁵ The work, originally offered to Schlesinger in Berlin, is now accepted for publication in Vienna by Matthias Artaria, who pays Beethoven eighty ducats for it. The actual publication of the first edition, both in parts and in score, with the fugue as finale, takes six more months to appear.

March 21, 1826: The first performance of Opus 130 takes place in Vienna, played by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, with the fugue as finale.³⁶ The Presto and Alla danza tedesca are repeated; the audience is totally bewildered by the fugue. A reviewer in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung writes that for him the fugue was “incomprehensible, like Chinese.” He sympathizes with what seemed to be the performers’ struggle to master its dissonances and registral extremes, and hints darkly that Beethoven’s deafness must have led him astray.³⁷ Sometime in March Beethoven sends the completed quartet to Prince Galitzin.

April 24: A piano four-hand arrangement of the fugue is completed by Anton Halm, who is paid for it by Matthias Artaria on May 12 (Artaria no doubt intended to publish it). But Beethoven is dissatisfied with Halm’s work and makes his own four-hand arrangement, giving it to Artaria for separate publication in August.

August: An engraving of Opus 130 with the fugue as finale is prepared for Matthias Artaria.³⁸ Word begins to circulate in Beethoven’s circle, led by Holz and Johann van Beethoven, that the other quartet movements but not the finale are being well received, and that the fugue is extremely difficult for players and incomprehensible to the public. Holz later tells Lenz that, at the publisher’s explicit request, he approached Beethoven with the idea of writing a new and more accessible finale, separating the fugue and publishing it separately with its own opus number, for which Artaria would pay a separate fee. Beethoven, according to Holz, “wanted time to think it over, but the next day he sent me a note in which he said that he was willing to comply . . . and that for the new finale I should negotiate a fee of fifteen ducats.”³⁹ Although Holz makes it seem as if Beethoven came to this decision in something of a hurry, the whole question of separating the fugue, if it came up first in August, was posed about five months after the first performance in March. In all probability Beethoven thought about it carefully during these five months and the project likely gained credibility for him once the notion of a separate four-hand version was agreed on. In addition, an entry in the Conversation Books in August 1826 indicates that Artaria actually had a plan in mind to bring out each single movement of the quartet in a separate edition.⁴⁰

September: Holz continues to encourage Beethoven to separate the fugue and write the new finale: “It would be more money for you and the publisher would have to pay the costs.”⁴¹ In late September, just as Beethoven is preparing to leave for Gneixendorf, Holz tells him, “You should work further on the finale. . . . [Y]ou’ll have it done in an hour.”⁴²

Late September–November: At Gneixendorf Beethoven writes the new finale. He delivers it to Matthias Artaria on November 22, 1826.

March 26, 1827: Beethoven dies.

May 10: Artaria publishes first editions of Opus 130 (with the substitute finale, in score and parts) and of the Grosse Fuge as Opus 133, plus a four-hand arrangement of the fugue as Opus 134.

The two sides of the “finale” controversy regarding Opus 130/133 have hardened over the years. Some argue that since Beethoven authorized the separation of the fugue from the rest of the work, published it separately, and wrote the “little” finale in its place, this final decision to separate it should prevail. Another view, championed by Arnold Schoenberg and his associates in the Kolisch Quartet, is that Beethoven’s conception of the work entailed the great fugue as its finale from the outset, that his agreement to separate it was not an artistic one but was more or less forced on him by his publisher and close associates—in short, that he let himself be persuaded to publish it with its own opus number and write the new finale, but not as a matter of deep artistic conviction. On this view the “right” version of the quartet has the Grand Fugue as finale.

There is justice on both sides, but except in performance we do not have to make an absolute choice. This is not the only case in which Beethoven changed movements after he thought a work was finished and used the excluded movement in another work or as a separate composition. An early example is the finale of the “Kreutzer” Sonata, originally planned as the finale for the A Major Violin Sonata, Opus 30 No. 1 and replaced there by the variations movement. Another is his excision of the Andante favori from the “Waldstein” Sonata in favor of the “Introduzione” to the finale. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at one time after the completion of the Ninth, Beethoven even considered substituting a purely instrumental finale for the vocal finale.⁴³

The two finales are so different that what results from performing one or the other is an entirely different proportional and aesthetic structure for the whole work. The Grand Fugue originated as the largest and most radical of Beethoven’s fugal finales. It is driven by the same impulse to use fugal textures to finish large cyclic works that brought about the finales of the Cello Sonata Opus 102 No. 2, the Hammerklavier Sonata Opus 106, and the A-flat Major Piano Sonata Opus 110. Its compositional scale is so large that we can compare it without exaggeration to the finale of the Ninth Symphony, with which it also has some direct affinities—one of them, and not the only one, is the B-flat-major “March” in 6/8 that inhabits a middle position in both.

That the work is dedicated to the archduke, coming in the wake of the great mass for his investiture, arouses further reflections, among them a link to other lengthy works in B-flat major that Beethoven dedicated to him, especially “his” Piano Trio and the Hammerklavier Sonata with its closing fugue. Like the finale of the Ninth, but without its humanitarian texts and political program, this work exemplifies Beethoven’s commitment to writing great polyphonic works that transcend their traditions.

In the case of the Grand Fugue, the tradition includes Bach, and it has been argued that this fugue, with its exhaustive use of arcane fugal devices poured out in a movement of passionate energy and enormous expressive contrasts, is Beethoven’s “Art of Fugue.”⁴⁴ Without assurance that Bach’s Art of Fugue could literally have been a model, or even that the features of the fugue must have resulted directly from Beethoven’s close study of fugal procedures in the work of Albrechtsberger—though the evidence that he knew his old teacher’s work is persuasive—nevertheless the figure of Bach looms over this movement, as it does over the other fugues and fugal finales of the late works. Beethoven’s spiritual kinship to Bach in these years, his reverence for Bach’s musical wisdom coupled with his own sense of purpose as both inheritor and innovator, is summed up perfectly in his urge to come to grips with what has been called the “nemesis” of fugue.⁴⁵ It has already been speculated that Beethoven’s use of the Italian term “Overtura” for the introduction to the Grand Fugue, a term he used nowhere else, links to the tradition of the French “Ouverture,” that long-familiar Baroque genre in which a slow section, often in “dotted” rhythm, passes into a swiftly moving contrapuntal Allegro.⁴⁶ Examples in Handel and Bach are legion, as they are in the works of many other Baroque composers, but Beethoven might well have known the examples in Bach’s Clavierübung, the D-Major Suite, and the sixteenth variation in the “Goldberg” Variations.⁴⁷

Whatever the terminology, the “Overtura” sets the stage for the entire vast structure that follows it, presenting its primary thematic material with the biggest of all his “off-tonic” openings, in four rhythmic versions that move harmonically down the circle of fifths, from G to C to F to the tonic destination, B-flat major (*W 58). Each of these versions is an instance of the basic intervallic material that will emerge in the two fugue subjects that constitute the main body of the first fugue. They provide preliminary visions of the later large sections of the work—almost as if, in opposition to the Ninth Symphony finale, they are “prefaces” to its sectional design, showing at once its vast diversity of material and its unity.

Decoding the larger form of the Grand Fugue presents as many problems as does studying the finale of the Ninth Symphony, and for many similar reasons. It is not a fugue in Bach’s sense—the relentless working out of the combinatorial possibilities inherent in a single subject, or even at times two subjects. It is, rather, a poetic discourse of enormous size, a behemoth in which the fugal principle plays a leading role but is complemented by other textures. Also, a dialectic is worked out from start to finish that can be read into many formal templates without quite satisfying the basic requirements of any one of them. It is pretty well agreed that the work encompasses ten sections, as follows:

The enormous reprises of Sections 7 and 8 suggest that a version of sonata form underlies the work. Thus the work has also been construed in the following way:

Overtura = introduction

Sections 2 and 3 = exposition of theme groups A and B

Section 4 as a coda to the exposition

Sections 5 and 6 = development

Sections 7 and 8 = recapitulation

Sections 9 and 10 = coda

The Grand Fugue has also been described as being the equivalent of a multi-movement work:

Overtura + Allegro (Sections 1 and 2) = the first movement

Section 3 = a slow movement

Section 4 = an interlude

Sections 5 and 6 = the equivalent of a Scherzo

Sections 7–10 = more or less a composite finale

Vincent D’Indy construed the work along Hegelian lines as revealing a mighty dialectic in which there is an opposition of two antagonistic views of Nature, represented by the primary themes that form the opening double fugue: “one gently melancholy” (the “A” theme), the other “exuberant in its gaiety” (the “B” theme). As D’Indy sees it, “after the presentation of the two subjects, open war begins between careless merriment and serious thought,” the latter gradually winning over its thoughtless and frivolous opponent.⁴⁸

As superficial as this viewpoint may be, it has the advantage over formal taxonomies of stressing the dynamic, outsized, Armageddon-like character of much of the work, in which powerful forces contend in a struggle for supremacy. This struggle reaches a first peak in the later portions of the first double fugue and rises to still higher tensions at later points, such as a passage where lengthy trills on extreme high and low pitches pile heavily on one another, playing out in enormous gestures the little trill that had appeared at the end of the opening theme of the entire piece.⁴⁹ The immense dialectic seems to strive for completion when the Meno mosso theme (originally Section 3) is given a full reprise at Section 7, now not in the smooth flowing pianissimo dynamic of Section 3 but rather in forte with heavy accents on every quarter note and with new fragments of the opposing theme, Theme “B,” with its vast leaps in the cello, then the viola. At long last the whole settles down to a succession of closing phases, first exploring distant spiritual regions and then returning to a forceful, emphatic statements of the thematic material⁵⁰ before the last page rises to a final crescendo and brings the whole gigantic structure to rest.

How utterly different is the “second” finale, the “little” movement that Beethoven wrote as a substitute, ostensibly to satisfy his publishers, the performers, and the listening public, and perhaps to make a little extra money. Received opinion about this finale is that it is a light-hearted, easily digested, charming sonata-rondo movement in 2/4 with memorable tunes and an air of the Viennese tavern about it. Proponents of the Grand Fugue, above all from the Schoenbergian side, denounce it as an easygoing concession to necessity and see the publication and performance of the quartet with the fugue as an act of restoration. Thus a very serious and experienced Beethovenian writes,

Beethoven’s agreement to write a new finale was an act of resignation. . . . [D]espite all its geniality, which cannot be denied to the new finale, we must absolutely declare that this movement has no inner relationship to the rest of the work. To any sensitive musician, the beginning of the light rondo finale after the dying away of the unearthly Cavatina must always come as a dreadful shock.⁵¹

Schindler notoriously hated the Grand Fugue and joined the throng of admirers who breathed relief on hearing this new finale, persuading himself that its accessibility arose from its “similarity in style and clarity to many of the quartet movements of an earlier period.”⁵²

He could not have been more wrong. The undeniable air of charm and insouciance in the “little finale” is deceptive. It conceals a subtlety and intricacy of thematic interplay and sectional contrast that fits well with the earlier movements of the quartet, not as a big finale but as a clever, dancelike, beautifully proportioned closing movement that distributes the weight of the whole work back generously toward its predecessors. Beethoven not only devoted scrupulous care to its planning and execution, he saw to it that its material stands up to the previous movements and also reflects in subtle ways the basic thematic interval sequence that inhabits not only several of the last quartets but even the Grand Fugue itself.

The opening figure, a playful, two-note octave leap in the viola, has several functions (*W 59). It emphasizes the pitch G, thus stressing the same opening pitch that starts the Grand Fugue, but in a totally different way. The figure is a persistent accompaniment for the theme that enters in Violin 1 (though later the two-note octave leap turns out to have motivic functions as well). And the various returns of the two-note figure in the course of the movement enable Beethoven to fashion some Haydn-like jokes, as he uses it in different ways each time.⁵³ The main theme is intricate enough in its interior motives (no two of the first four measures have the same rhythm), and the speed and verve of the whole movement take their departure from the pianissimo character of the opening ten measures.

The exposition of the movement brings not two contrasting sections but three: the first in the tonic; the second in the dominant (so far all is normal), but the third in A-flat major, the flat seventh degree of the tonic, B-flat major.⁵⁴ This third segment of the exposition is the capstone of the movement, for not only does it bring new streaming legato thematic material into play, but it also makes room for groups of alternating four-note figures that have a familiar ring (*W 60).⁵⁵

The four-note figure, with its characteristic shape (two notes in stepwise relationship, then a large upward leap, then downward by step) is nothing less than a nonchromatic version of the same shape that underlies the opening of the Quartet Opus 132, the principal subject of the Grand Fugue—and (before this finale was written) in the great fugato first movement of Opus 131! With all this, the movement rolls smoothly to its appointed ending without any of the emotional stress that is rampant in the Grand Fugue.

The little finale once more evokes the issue of dualism in Beethoven’s art. Already in his second maturity we saw pairings of works in the same genre—often back to back and at times published consecutively—that exemplify aesthetic dualism: weight versus lightness; density versus lucidity; complexity versus simplicity. Examples include the “Waldstein” Sonata, Opus 53, and its companion, the F Major Sonata, Opus 54; the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, which are correlative antipodes in so many ways; the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies; and the Trios Opus 70 No. 1 (the “Ghost” Trio) and its curiously romantic mate, Opus 70 No. 2. In many other cases, contrasts we can call dualistic appear in the relations of movements to one another within a cyclic work—here the most palpable examples are the abbreviated two-movement piano sonatas, such as Opus 54 itself, Opus 78, and the almost late Opus 90, with its enigmatic E-minor first movement and its full-throated lyrical second movement. With the finale of Opus 130 and the Grand Fugue, Opus 133, the dualism is one of alternatives, since in performance we must have one not the other, and this concept is new in Beethoven’s output. But if we consider that the second finale brings a lightness of touch and intricacy of connections against the monumental weight, relentless intellectual earnestness, and heavy dissonance of the Grand Fugue, we can imagine that Beethoven was in effect giving the world two choices, not absolutely displacing one with another. And that legacy has not been lost on performers, many of whom now, in Beethoven quartet cycles, play the whole work twice, once with each finale. In effect, they are being true to the spirit with which Beethoven, in his last months, came to a complex vision of this great work.

Opus 131

Directly following his completion of Opus 130 Beethoven embarked on the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Opus 131. This means, and the sketches show, that he moved directly from work on the Grand Fugue to his first sketches for this new quartet, “as if,” as one writer puts it, “the profound catharsis of the former had released the serene lyricism of the latter.”⁵⁶ To which we can add that the immediate move from the expansive variety of the Grand Fugue to the single-minded concentration of the first movement of Opus 131 shows Beethoven adapting fugal principles to two entirely different aesthetic situations that he created in immediate succession. Since he had now fulfilled Galitzin’s commission for three quartets—and done it with a trilogy of depth and scope such as the world had not seen before—this new quartet was an independent venture, for which he was offered a fee of eighty ducats by Schott in Mainz, thirty more than he had been promised by Galitzin (if he could collect it from Galitzin) for each of the three previous quartets.⁵⁷ Schott had stepped forward as Beethoven’s major publisher in the preceding few years.⁵⁸ That he needed the money, as he always did, is a basic biographical truth, but it does not remotely suffice to “explain” his purposes in writing Opus 131.⁵⁹ Beethoven told Schott in May that the new quartet was finished, but he delayed sending it to them for several months, finally dispatching it in August. Despite the shock brought on by Karl’s attempted suicide on July 30, he was able to regain his footing by turning back to his work, not only in composing but in seeing to the usual round of publication arrangements. He never saw the quartet in print, since the first edition did not come out until June 1827, almost three months after his death. Nor did he hear it in a public setting, as it was never played in concert during the short remainder of his lifetime. It was, however, rehearsed privately by the quartet now being led by Joseph Böhm, and in November 1828 Holz apparently led a quartet that played it for Franz Schubert, whose last musical request is said to have been to hear Opus 131.⁶⁰

That he now chose the odd key of C-sharp minor was a vital condition for the new quartet, a mark of its special sound image. He had not used this key for any work other than the “Moonlight” Sonata, Opus 27 No. 2; nor had Haydn used it more than once (in the Piano Sonata Hob. XVI/36, apparently written in the mid-1770s), while Mozart avoided it entirely.⁶¹ Choosing C-sharp minor for a quartet meant that the semitone motion B–C would entail B (= ) as the open string in viola and cello, especially in the cello at the bottom of the quartet’s registral span. And Beethoven makes good use of this effect in the cello at the end of the first movement (with cello B against a high in Violin 1) as well as in the basic theme of the finale. Accordingly this extreme use of the open string as leading tone is reserved for the two C-sharp-minor movements that anchor the work.

As with Opus 132 and 130, another radically new formal plan dominates the work. Because Beethoven was persuaded to add numbers to the movements (just as he was to put rehearsal letters in the first great double fugue of the Grand Fugue), the number of separate movements in the work was fixed at seven. Ever since, seven has been graven in stone in the critical literature despite the fact that it hardly accounts for the true organization of the work. The movement plan of the finished work (published, as always, using Beethoven’s numbers) is this:

1. Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo; C-sharp minor; 2/2; closes into

2. Allegro molto vivace; D major; 6/8; closes into

3. Allegro moderato; B minor–A major; 4/4; actually a short transition to

4. Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile; A major; 2/4

5. Presto; E major; 2/2; marked “attacca” at end, to move without pause to

6. Adagio quasi un poco andante; G-sharp minor; 3/4; moves directly to

7. Allegro; C-sharp minor; 2/2.

If we recognize that movement 3 is simply an eleven-measure transition between D major and A major—a formal and psychological bridge but not really an independent movement—and also that movement No. 6 is a short, slow introduction to the finale (although it is in the dominant minor), then the quartet becomes a peculiar type of five-movement work, somewhat akin to Opus 132.⁶²

But another view can be advanced, construing the work in four large units:

Unit 1. Movements 1 and 2, where the first, fugal Adagio is construed as an immense slow introduction to an Allegro (although it is an introduction that outweighs the Allegro). The tonal sequence C-sharp–D for a pair of adjacent movements is unheard of in Beethoven and almost unique in the literature; only the adventurous Haydn had done it in his last piano sonata, where an E-major slow movement is flanked by E-flat-major movements. But in Opus 131 the C-sharp–D sequence is just the beginning of a tonal motion to far-flung regions. The short transition (“No. 3”) leads from Unit 1 to Unit 2.

Unit 2. The Andante, a variations movement in 2/4; A major (one step up in the circle of fifths from movement 2).

Unit 3. The Scherzo; E major (another step upward in the circle of fifths).

Unit 4. The Adagio and Allegro form a second paired slow introduction and Allegro, entirely different from the pairing of movements 1 and 2; the keys are now G-sharp minor (relative minor of the E-major Scherzo) and the home tonic of C-sharp minor.

And there are grounds for hearing the whole as an enormously expanded four-movement structure, leaving out No. 3 as an independent entity and construing the slow sections as introductions. In that sense it seems like a distant parallel to Opus 127 or Opus 132 rather than to the authentic six-movement plan of Opus 130.

That all these ideas and more were in Beethoven’s mind as he worked is clear from the five different movement plans that have been unearthed from the sketches.⁶³ In the first one Beethoven considered making the work a true four-movement composition consisting of the C-sharp-minor fugue; a recitative leading to the Andante in A major; a scherzo in D major; and a tonic finale in duple meter. Other sketched plans included reducing the work to a three-movement cycle, with an opening fugue in C-sharp minor, then an Allegro in C-sharp major, and a last movement in C-sharp minor, a sequence that recalls the “Moonlight” Sonata of twenty-five years earlier.⁶⁴ But all the remaining plans bring back the 2/4 Andante, showing that he clearly wanted to keep the variations middle movement as a foil to the fugal first movement. Movement plan no. 3 sways the harmonic path toward F-sharp minor after the opening C-sharp minor fugue; this was to be followed by an F-sharp minor 6/8 Allegro; then the A-major slow movement; then a scherzo in F-sharp minor; and finally a fifth movement in C-sharp minor. At the end of this third sketched movement plan is the notation “end of the last movement,” showing a close in D-flat major! And this plan connects to a surprising finale score sketch in which it is clear that Beethoven was thinking of ending the work with a D-flat-major postlude whose theme is identical to the theme of the slow movement of Opus 135!⁶⁵ This transfer is even more remarkable than his shifting the Alla danza tedesca from Opus 132 to Opus 130 (changed from A major to G major). Of course the idea of ending the gigantic work as a whole in the major mode (final paragraph and final chords in C-sharp major) does survive in the final version. The remaining movement plans (fourth and fifth) include other elaborate fantasies about the middle movements, but all the plans keep the opening fugue intact.

The opening of the first movement is unearthly (*W 61). The slow unfolding of the four statements of the main subject, in strict fugal order and from top to bottom, gradually fills the registral space; we suddenly realize that the composer of this deeply expressive exposition had, three years earlier, written the opening measures of the Ninth Symphony in which a filling out of a large registral space also takes place gradually and systematically, though of course using entirely different means.

A central feature of the subject is its division into two parts: the four-note head motive “a,” with its motion 5–7–1–6 (bringing a focus on the semitones 5–6 and 7–1); and its tail, the “b” motive, a gradual turning motive around scale step 5 (G). The special expressive quality of the initial crescendo leading to an accent on the A in measure 2, followed by a steady piano on the tail of the theme, dramatizes the division between the two parts and prepares the way for the contrasting use of these two types of gestures—the dynamic crescendo-to-accent gesture and the placid, flowing gesture—throughout the entire movement.

Once the exposition is accomplished the movement proceeds by a series of closely packed segments, some of them strettos (close imitations) on the head motive, some using the tail motive, and finally an augmentation in the cello to end the movement. All of these are woven into a continuous fugal fabric while at the same time the larger harmonic and thematic plan ranges much more widely than most traditional fugues—and it presages the wider harmonic trajectory of the quartet’s movements. In the first movement the modulatory scheme leads from the initial C-sharp minor to B major and D-sharp minor, to E major and A major, to D major, and then returns to its home tonic, C-sharp minor, fixing firmly on the tonic key all the way to the end despite a few inflections.⁶⁶ This return somewhat resembles that of a sonata-form recapitulation, a feeling that is reinforced when the viola then brings back the first subject in complete form in the home tonic, C-sharp minor, for the first time since the beginning, and is answered by Violin 2 in close imitation in the subdominant (F-sharp minor) with the head motive, with exactly the same pitches we heard right near the beginning of the movement. Through the movement the main subject, especially the tail motive, has appeared in various forms, including diminution, stretto, and close imitation. One passage in particular has always struck deep into the minds of listeners for its sensuous beauty: the two violins alone answer one another with an altered vision of the tail motive (*W 62).⁶⁷

The larger pattern of dynamics in the movement at first oscillates between periods of crescendo-to-accent patterns and periods of placid flow. But in the last large segment, the harmony having settled down in the tonic, the crescendo phrases become more and more frequent, more and more insistent. As the movement reaches its climax, the rising and falling waves of intensity coincide with the extremes of dissonance created by the high in Violin 1 against the low B in the cello (*W 63). No moment of harmonic resolution anywhere in music is stronger than the arrival of the C-sharp-major chord in these closing measures, for this chord has not been heard before in the movement, and will not be heard again until the very end of the last movement.

It is by now a commonplace of the literature that the intervallic substance of the main fugue subject (two semitones a major third apart, with the four notes variously interchangeable in order) is nearly identical to a traditional fugue subject that stems from antecedents that go back to Bach. Other composers, including Haydn and Mozart, also used it. In all of these examples, as in Opus 131, the two semitones occur in the pitch relationships 7–1 and 6–5 in minor, which Kirkendale called a “pathotype.”⁶⁸ What has not been adequately considered, however, is the likelihood that Bach alone is the true background figure for this movement, in particular his Well-Tempered Clavier with its array of fugal masterpieces. We remember, of course, that Beethoven had known the collection (at least Book I and perhaps both books) since childhood.⁶⁹ The theme of Bach’s own C-sharp-minor Fugue, No. 4, in Book I, has an obvious affinity to Beethoven’s subject.

(a) Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Fugue No. 4 in Minor, beginning:

(b) Beethoven, String Quartet in minor, Opus 131, first movement, beginning:

But there is more. Another fugue of exceptional importance is the last in Book I, No. 24, in B minor. Bach organized the collection not only to show the viability of all major and minor keys (thus showing that the keyboard is “well-tempered” and fully usable) but also to demonstrate a wide range of subjects and what he could do with them in a correspondingly rich and varied set of fugues. The first fugue in the book opens with a rising figure in C major that recalls the “natural” hexachord of medieval and Renaissance music, in its normal position on C, rising from C to A, then moving onward. For the last fugue in the book Bach uses a “modern” subject that includes all twelve tones of the chromatic scale and is also shaped in such a way that, after its initial use of chord tones on the B-minor tonic triad, it forms four-note groups with increasingly chromatic content and widening interval spans. If we mark off the components as units “a,” “b,” and “c,” some affinities to Beethoven’s subject become clear.

Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Fugue No. 24 in B minor, beginning, with initial motives labeled “a,” “b,” “c”:

After the initial triad motion of “a,” figure “b” has the exact pitch content of Beethoven’s subject; and the figure “c” presents the related figure that he uses for the opening of Opus 132; from here it is only a step to the form he uses for the subject of the Grand Fugue. And a passage mentioned earlier from Beethoven’s first movement is also prefigured in an episode within Bach’s B-minor fugue:⁷⁰

Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Fugue No. 24 in B minor, excerpt, with motif labeled “m”:

It is certainly striking to discover that Beethoven copied this B-minor fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, on four staves, for string quartet. The copy may date from about 1817, a time when Bach fugues were very much on his mind, as we see from the fact that at about the same time, while composing the Hammerklavier Sonata, he copied the B-flat Minor Fugue from Book I of the same collection.⁷¹

In one way or another each of the remaining movements reflects the influence of the main subject of the fugue, in that the intervallic content of the main theme of each successive movement contains unmistakable elements of the semitones-and-leap configuration of the head motive of the fugue subject. The D-major Allegro movement, No. 2, contrasts sharply with the deep windings of the preceding fugue. Its opening moves in smoothly shaped symmetrical phrases in a clear-cut D major with sustained chords in the lower strings. Though the theme gains in urgency and complexity as it goes, its broad outlines are as clear as its melodic substance.

From the Allegro’s quiet ending emerges the curious short transition (“No. 3”) that first establishes B minor and then shifts course toward E major and then E as the dominant of A major. The little piece starts out in Allegro as if it were quoting the opening of Opus 59 No.2, then through short figures (as at the opening of the first movement, moving down in imitation from Violin 1 to cello) it cadences firmly on B minor. From here the tempo changes to Adagio, in which Violin 1 takes off on a long roulade (we have seen such cadenzas before in Beethoven’s quartet writing, as in Opus 59 No. 1 to prepare the finale)—the whole little passage paves the way for the lyricism to come.

Fugue No. 24 from J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, copied around 1817 by Beethoven, who used its primary subject as a source of ideas for his last string quartets. (Bibliothek der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna)

What follows is the centerpiece of the whole work—the A-major Andante variations movement. Its larger shape is that of a theme and six variations plus coda, but that is merely the skeleton. Its theme is a lyric tune in A major, divided between the two violin parts so as to give prominence to the pitches 1–7–4–3 (A–G–D–C), thus reflecting the semitones-plus-leap figure. The variations shed every kind of new light on the theme’s inherent possibilities, carrying out the process of variation as a kind of formal counterpart to what the fugal first movement does combinatorially for its first theme, of which this A-major tune is a relative. And the coda of the movement breaks free from the variation process and moves into a succession of short phrases built on the opening of the theme, first in C major then again in A major. It then moves suddenly into F major then accelerates into an outburst in Violin 1 that leads by a fantastic swooping cadenza to the emotional high point of the entire movement, an A-major chord in extreme registers with its high-placed 7–1 in Violin 1. It recalls the 7–1 that had been prominent in the fugue subject, then lapses downward to its quiet and serene close in high range for all four strings.⁷²

The Scherzo erupts as a low, barking triadic figure in the cello, then a silence; then the main theme picks up this figure and sweeps it forward. Duple-meter scherzi are more common in late Beethoven than earlier, where a rare specimen had been the 2/4 Scherzo of the clever Piano Sonata Opus 31 No. 3. Others are found in Opus 110, the Opus 130 Quartet, and the Trios of the Scherzi of the Ninth and of the Pastoral Symphony (the Pastoral occurred to Wagner when he wrote a program note for this quartet). The range of experiment with sonorities in this movement goes beyond even Beethoven’s most expansive previous quartet scherzi—witness the various uses of pizzicato and the final statement of the main theme sul ponticello, a first use of this rubric in quartet writing that tells the players to play close to the bridge, producing a strange nasal effect and a parody of the theme. But the movement recovers its gravity and normal bowing shortly before the end, and in a smashing crescendo the final cadence ends it all fortissimo. Then come three portentous G strokes to prepare another new key and movement.

The new movement is the 3/4 Adagio in G-sharp minor. The Adagio provides the statement and three repetitions of a clear-cut thematic phrase. It is a dirge that ends on the tonic, the second time with a pungent flatted second degree (An) that intensifies the semitone inflection at the cadence each time it appears. The brief movement also includes a short figure, derived from the main theme and used in imitation.⁷³ Before it can all expand further, the work plunges into the finale.

The finale has to ground the work as a tonal, cyclical, formal, and psychological whole. It does all of that. First it restores C-sharp minor absolutely; second, its main theme has clear intervallic affinities with the opening of the fugue subject (*W 64). It has a compact head motive (this time twofold, statement and answer) and a scalar tail motive in a dotted rhythm that has no precedent in the work. After this a third important theme springs up, also clearly derived in intervals and rhythm from the head motive of the fugue subject (now the four-note sequence begins 1–7–6–5), and a full-scale eight-measure phrase emerges (*W 65).

The larger form of the finale oscillates between rondolike returns of the opening theme (though not in the home tonic until halfway through) and sonata-form features. This rondo- and sonata-form ambiguity is not new in Beethoven’s finales, as the last movements of the Second and Eighth Symphonies bear witness. But here it appears in a context in which only the most abstract formal outlines govern the action. I opt for the sonata-form interpretation, which makes better sense of the situation. It is, after all, no accident that the biggest and strongest return of the main theme is reserved for its reappearance in the tonic, C-sharp minor,⁷⁴ where it returns fortissimo in the cello under powerful contrasting figures in the higher strings, as if there were too much material to be accounted for to have a simple and direct repetition of the opening unison statement of the theme.

The fury of the final Allegro acts to release the pent-up energy that is so lyrically controlled in three earlier movements: the fugue, the D-major Allegro, and the Andante. In the Scherzo, hell breaks loose but in a subsidiary key, and with wit and humor. The G-sharp-minor introduction returns the work to the contemplative seriousness of the first movement, so it remains for the finale to find new reserves of energy with which to resume the note of courage with which the work ends. The turn to C-sharp major at the end, with its threefold chords with the tonic in the bass, takes possession of the whole work and brings it to its homecoming on a note of grandeur, no longer (and not possibly) the ending in triumph of earlier heroic works but with a deeper quality of affirmation that emerges from tragedy in its highest form.

Opus 135

In sketches, in Beethoven’s autograph fair copies of both the score and all four parts, and in the first edition of his last quartet—Opus 135, in F major—stands an enigmatic heading followed by a musical staff containing two musical phrases, both with text.

The opening of the autograph violin 1 part of Beethoven’s Quartet, Opus 135, Finale. The heading, inserted by the composer in all four string parts, reads (in translation), “The resolution reached with difficulty.” The words below the music read, “Must it be?” and “It must be!” (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection)

Transcription of the autograph heading for the finale of Opus 135:

This heading translates as “The resolution reached with difficulty”; “Must it be?” “It must be!” It relates directly to a canon (WoO 196) that Beethoven is supposed to have written several months before starting work on the quartet. The joking four-voice canon, on the text “Es muss sein! Ja, heraus mit dem Beutel!” (“It must be! Yes, take out your wallet!”) uses the same basic theme as the finale. According to Holz the story concerns an amateur named Ignaz Dembscher, who held chamber-music sessions at his house in Vienna. It seems that Dembscher had failed to attend the premiere of Opus 130 in March 1826 but wanted to have the work performed at his home, since, as Thayer reports, “it was easy for him to get manuscripts from Beethoven.”⁷⁵ But Beethoven refused to let him have it because he had not come to Schuppanzigh’s concert, so Holz told Dembscher to send Schuppanzigh fifty florins, the subscription price of the concert. Dembscher is supposed to have asked in joking fashion, “Muss es sein?” Whereupon, when Holz told all this to Beethoven, he supposedly sat down at once and wrote out the four-voice canon.⁷⁶

But sketch evidence suggests another dating. Received opinion is that Beethoven wrote the canon in April but did not embark on Opus 135 before the late summer and fall of 1826. During the spring of 1826 he was heavily engaged in writing Opus 131, which he finished (he said in a letter) on July 12. Sketches show that drafts for the canon (including fragments of its text, such as “heraus mit dem Beutel”) occur on leaves containing sketches for the conclusion of the Opus 131 finale, and the physical and handwriting evidence point to their being written in close proximity.⁷⁷ If this is true, then the canon might have been worked out later than April, for it also appears from the sketch material that the canon and the finale were both written near the end of Beethoven’s labors on the C-sharp Minor Quartet.⁷⁸ This general dating is confirmed by the Conversation Books, which contain an entry in July in which Beethoven mentions to Holz plans for a new quartet in F, to which Holz notes that “it will be the third in F major . . . there is still none [i.e., a quartet] in D minor.”⁷⁹ At times sketches for the canon and for the finale are so tightly intermingled that they cannot be, or at least have not yet been, fully separated from one another.

All this is by way of explanation for the startling inscription that Beethoven placed at the head of the music, “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss.” These words have been variously interpreted by scholars as a joke, as a terse German phrase out of daily life, or, in a serious vein, as a reference to Beethoven’s alleged difficulty in deciding to finish the work in the light of Karl’s suicide attempt and his own despair and debilitation.⁸⁰ The expression “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” has a formal and legalistic ring to it, and therefore it recalls Beethoven’s gruff and aggressive use of legal-sounding language when he wanted to be bitter and ironic, as in the draft of the attack on publishers regarding a complete edition of his works that he left among his posthumous papers. As a formal expression, the phrase “Unterzeichnete den Entschluss gefasst” (“the undersigned have reached the decision”) had been used by the archduke and the princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky in 1809 in the legal agreement by which they agreed to pay Beethoven his annuity of four thousand florins.⁸¹ Since Beethoven’s sketches for the finale include a pair of alternative phrases—“der gezwungene Entschluss” (“the forced decision”) and “der harte Entschluss” (“the hard-won decision”)—we can see him trying out other possibilities in his usual vein, much as he did when trying to find the right way of introducing the baritone soloist in the finale of the Ninth Symphony with his sententious “O Freunde.”⁸² At all events, the final version of the heading refers directly to the two texted musical phrases that follow, which are in bass clef, in Grave tempo and 3/2 meter. They consist of the three-note figure on the question “Muss es sein?” and its answer, in treble clef, Allegro, 2/2, “Es muss sein!” which is given twice. The two phrases directly anticipate the openings of the main sections of the finale.

Although Beethoven’s legendary humor is plentifully represented in his works, and although the whole inscription could be seen as a joke, there is more here than meets the eye. Other late quartet movements with special titles include the “Heiliger Dankgesang” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”) of Opus 132 and the “Cavatina” of Opus 130; but they differ in that they signify these movements as special instances of generally known song types, prayer and aria. Closer to the Opus 135 heading as personal statement is the inscription over the Dona nobis pacem of the Missa solemnis, namely “Prayer for inner and outer peace.” This is also deeply personal, and we know that here too Beethoven labored long over its wording before he found the right solution.⁸³ An earlier instance—notably, for a quartet finale—is La Malinconia as a title for the last movement of Opus 18 No. 6.

Accordingly, we should take the inscription seriously as a personal statement about the content of the movement and its meanings. One of these emerges from its “prefatory” function; the phrases show that the movement will be based dialectically on two musical elements—or two forms of the same element—that go with this question and answer. The question falls and rises. The answer, its near inversion both musically and verbally, rises and falls. The answer comes twice, to make the reply more emphatic but also because the second phrase brings the motif down a full step. The question (as the opening shows in its signature) is in F minor; the answer is in F major. So the polarity is one of minor followed by major; of doubt followed by assertion; of uncertainty followed by an emphatic twofold gesture of determination. There is no personified speaker; it is, as Kerman put it, the quartet that speaks.⁸⁴

What is the meaning of the inscription? We do not know, and are not meant to know in any specific sense, what is being asked and answered. We cannot miss the feeling that something basic is afoot, but we cannot define it in words or concepts. That may be the point. As in the Ninth Symphony cello-bass recitatives and at various points in other late works, Beethoven is driving instrumental music to the limits of speech, making instruments “almost speak”—as he had done in recitatives and other quasi-sung instrumental movements and works from early on—but with this runic inscription he raises the semantic potential of two vital musical figures to an even higher peak by using prefatory versions of these figures as settings of bits of text.

A number of decodings have been suggested. One is that this inscription refers to Beethoven’s own sense of the struggle for meaning in life, which for Beethoven is found in art. He had written the following to Prince Galitzin in his letter about the correction in Opus 127:

Believe me when I say that my supreme aim is that my art should be welcomed by the noblest and most cultured people. Unfortunately we are dragged down from the supernatural element in art only too rudely into the earthly and human sides of life. Yet is it not precisely they who are related to us?⁸⁵

The inscription may connect as well to those runic sayings in the Tagebuch of 1811–18, in which Beethoven had sought refuge from his isolation and psychic anguish in mottos and statements of stoic resignation. Thus: “Learn to keep silent, oh friend,” or “Live only in your art, for you are so limited in your senses; this is nevertheless the only existence for you.” And elsewhere, “Endurance—Resignation—Resignation. Thus we profit by the deepest misery and make ourselves worthy, so that God [can forgive us] our mistakes.”⁸⁶ The question and answer, “Must it be?” “It must be!” is like a Tagebuch entry in a finished work. We should also remember Holz’s comment to von Lenz that when he told Beethoven that his favorite among the three Galitzin quartets was Opus 130, Beethoven replied “Each in its own way! Art demands of us that we don’t stand still”; as Holz added, “he used to speak this way, in an Imperial style.” It is not far-fetched to imagine Beethoven asking and answering the question “Must it be?” to himself and perhaps to others, expecting no explanation and giving none.

The formal layout of the whole work has occasioned comment, much of it wedded to the view that Opus 135 is a throwback, a retreat to classical models and compositional techniques. The basis for this judgment lies essentially in externals, in Beethoven’s return in this work to a smaller compositional scale, his reestablishment of the traditional four-movement model, the apparent renewal of sonata-form procedures in the first and last movements. Kerman places it among works he calls “nostalgic—elusive spiritual ‘parodies’ of an earlier style, evocations of the artistic world of Haydn and Mozart,” and Ratner hears “much in this work that reminds the listener of an earlier style, the eighteenth-century galant.”⁸⁷ But these comments fail to look behind the mask of affability that the quartet wears on its surface, disclosing unmistakable features of his late quartet style and much that moves in new directions within that style.⁸⁸ We might also consider that, earlier, when Beethoven wanted to balance a big heroic or tragic work with a more modest and intimate one, he often turned comfortably to F major—consider Opus 54 after the “Waldstein,” the Sixth Symphony after the Fifth, the Eighth after the Seventh.

The opening phrase of the first movement discloses subtleties that could not possibly come from earlier times (*W 66). If we look at the curiously laconic opening figure in the viola, several features emerge. The most obvious is the off-tonic opening in F major, with two main subfigures. One is a little three-note figure that flips upward from G to (at once echoed in Violin 1); the other is the dotted figure F–G–E that immediately follows.

Furthermore, the first notes of the viola phrase, moving upward from G to and down to F, outline the “Es muss sein” figure from the canon and finale—literally identical to its second statement beginning on G. The perfect-fourth intervals are ubiquitous in the movement, as well as being prominent in the “Es muss sein” figure. The second figure, heard in both viola and cello, which mixes F major and minor, is a compressed form of the same basic theme type that dominates the late quartets—two semitones with inner leap—that we know from the openings of Opus 132, Opus 131, and the Grand Fugue.

The further development of the first movement is filled with quirks and odd moments that have stimulated questions about its use of discontinuous, short, pithy phrases whose order and positions are susceptible of curious interchanges, as if phrases heard earlier could in imagination be placed later, scrambling the sense of time. The view has been proposed that this movement makes use of several orders of time and does so “polyphonically” by embedding “nonlinear” as well as “linear” events within the work by separating its clock time from its “gestural time.” As an example, the strong cadence shortly after the movement opens has been cited, a moment that has the impact but not the function of a final cadence, a cadence that is found again right after the beginning of the recapitulation and at the end of the movement.⁸⁹ It is not merely that these cadences are identical but that in effect the movement “ends three times” and that “these moments do not so much seem to refer to or repeat one another as they seem to be exactly the same moment in gestural-time, experienced time.”⁹⁰ The first movement’s ability to sustain such interpretations while maintaining the logic and continuity of its phrase elements and themes only begins to suggest the range of its subtleties. That the movement shares procedures familiar in other late quartets appears from its use of contrapuntal artifice. Thus the development begins with a fugato built on the opening figure and a curious leap-and-step theme (which first appears right after the first of the three cadences), which now combine in fugue-like fashion before giving way to other contrasting processes that move the section through its harmonic paths.

The Scherzo is another sample of Beethoven’s mordant humor, now unleashed on a colossal scale through rhythmic displacement in the first phrase (*W 67). The syncopation and displacement distantly recall an early F-major Scherzo, that of the Violin Sonata Opus 24. There the violin is persistently off beat with the piano in a similar way in the Scherzo; also as here, the Trio relieves the rhythmic strain by bringing all parts together in regularity before the reprise of the Scherzo again tears them apart. The harmonic expansion of the Scherzo marks it as true late Beethoven: the larger harmonic layout of the movement, with its big sections in F major, G major, and A major, mirrors in the larger span the rising melodic motion from F to G to A that is prominent in the first phrase in Violin 1. And, beyond the irresistible momentum of the whole movement, its obsessive attention to certain odd elements (for example, the repeated on off beats that starts the second part of the Scherzo and the incessant repetition of the same figure for more than fifty measures at the end of the Trio!) rests a feeling that, even more than some of the other late scherzos, this one is laden with inner complexities that only now and then flash out as moments of surprise. The greatest such surprise is surely the ending. Repeating the tonic chord three time on off beats (in the rhythm of enigmatic E-flats that appear earlier), the ending simmers down through successive levels of dynamics from forte through a diminuendo to piano to più piano to pianissimo and then to a sudden forte downbeat that takes our breath away (*W 68). Thinking back, we recall that this way of ending a movement, with “terraced” dynamics becoming progressively softer, was his way of ending several late-quartet slow movements—the “Heiliger Dankgesang” of Opus 132, the Cavatina of Opus 130, and the Adagio first movement of Opus 131.⁹¹

To leaven the wit and brilliance with depth of feeling, Beethoven brings on the slow movement, Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo (“Quite slow, singing and tranquil”). This D-flat-major movement matches the other movements in packing density of thought into a short time span, now in the form of a beautiful melody plus variations that range over Beethoven’s time-honored variation procedures, each one adding a new layer of emotional meaning to the movement as it proceeds. The opening “curtain,” building a D-flat-major tonic chord by adding an instrument on each beat, reminds us of the opening of the Opus 127 variation slow movement, and we can also recall that this entire D-flat-major Lento, which is as centered and “settled” as any Beethovenian slow movement, was once under consideration as a tranquil ending for Opus 131. Further evocations of other late quartets are found in its “Più lento” variation, No. 2, which is notated in C-sharp minor and reminds us of the “oppressed” (beklemmt) section in the Cavatina of Opus 130. The canonic imitation between cello and Violin 1 in the third variation binds the movement by association to some of the deepest moments of the Opus 131 first movement, a connection that will return in the finale.

And at last “The resolution reached with difficulty” brings us to the finale (*W 69). The contrast of the question and answer, with their two versions of the same basic motive, form the essence of the movement, Beethoven’s last adventure in dialectic. The Grave insists on the question, always presenting it in bass register and repeating it four times insistently on rising scale steps of F minor; at first the upper strings reply softly with scalar figures in F minor and then B-flat minor, but soon reduce their material to a three-note forte figure that they repeat to the end. This figure seems to soften the dialogue of lower and upper strings in the last three measures of the Grave when the “question” disappears and only the figure remains; significantly this happens as the upper strings reach the note , for the figure –C will be among the important elements of the whole finale. And now the “answer” erupts in the F major of the Allegro main section of the finale, over a rising bass that manages to insert an into its F-major scale content.

The continuation of the “Es muss sein” phrase is one of those passages in Beethovenian discourse that turn out to have much greater importance then they seem to at first. This second figure of the Allegro has been noted as having the form of the descending fourth and rising third that relates it to both the slow movement main theme and to the contour of the “Es muss sein” itself; but what has not been noticed is that it also harks back to the tail of the main theme of the first movement of Opus 131, which is used throughout that movement. We see this figure in Opus 131 both in diminution and where it emerges in canon between the two violins, singing in upper register. How closely the Opus 135 finale follows this structural model, however different the emotional and aesthetic context. The figure, at various places in the movement, combines with itself as a canon, but with the canonic answers at a different pitch level; the culminating such moment is in the D major section in the recapitulation, which replicates the A major section but with the cello now as leading voice. As to the import of this figure, it reflects back to Opus 131—but we have seen that in turn it also has a long-range connection to the B-minor fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. I do not propose a “Bach quotation” in either work, although the spirit of Bachian polyphony, in Beethoven’s hands, is certainly palpable in the fugato movement of Opus 131. But when it appears here, it is as if the same Bachian antecedent can be reincarnated within a composition whose style and spirit seems utterly removed from Bach. That the same figure can live in both styles may be the point.

A further mark of the dramatic character and structure of this finale is this: the Grave returns in an intensified form of its earlier state, not a simple repeat (just as the recapitulation in the first movement intensifies and magnifies the opening). In the return of the Grave the upper strings roar repeated-note harmonies that are partly dissonant with the “question” below. A further mark of the growth we feel now is that the “answer” (“Es muss sein”) does not wait for the Allegro but now appears in the Grave for the first time, so that question and answer are in close juxtaposition, seemingly vying for supremacy. And from here the Allegro recapitulation takes off once more, but reharmonized by the lower strings over a dominant pedal that breathes a spirit telling us that all’s right with the world. The same confirmation comes at the end, where “Es muss sein” is the last word, first twice in pianissimo, then in a fortissimo gesture that triumphs over all earlier questions.

Final Thoughts

In the brief time that remained to him after finishing Opus 135 at Gneixendorf in October 1826, Beethoven took a month to compose the “little” finale for Opus 130 and then ceased writing quartets. His efforts in the last months focused on a C-major string quintet, for which he had accepted a commission from Diabelli a few years earlier, and some sketches toward a tenth symphony that never got off the ground.⁹² Schindler claimed that Beethoven worked on the quintet until twelve days before his death, but we have no basis for believing him. At all events, the surviving quintet fragments show several efforts at a slow introduction to the first movement, but nothing sufficiently articulated to warrant considering it a developed conception. What is important, though, is that by turning to other genres, Beethoven left Opus 135 as his final quartet. Conceivably he regarded it as such, and even if we can never be sure that he would not have returned to quartet writing had he lived some years longer, it remains that at the time of completing it (and then writing the Opus 130 finale) he was in effect designating Opus 135 as the last work in this cycle, that is, the Galitzin trilogy plus Opus 131 and 135.

If we regard the last two—the C-sharp minor and this F major—as a complementary pair, they embody the highest tragedy and subtlest comedy that he ever achieved. They stand as the last word in Beethovenian dualism. That Opus 131 is a tragic work hardly needs further explication; the critical literature from Wagner’s time to our own shows that it has long been understood as the most inward and searching of his late works while it is also, in content and form, the most innovative and most integrated of the late quartets. The whole work, but certainly its first and last movements, stand with Beethoven’s explorations of dark emotions—the Eroica Funeral March; the “Appassionata;” the Fifth Symphony; the F Minor Quartet, Opus 95; Florestan’s “Dungeon” scene; and the first movement of the Ninth Symphony—as his final word on the ways in which the human soul, confronted by an implacable world, comes to terms with fate and mortality through struggle but at last through endurance and resignation.

By common consent Opus 135 is its polar opposite—a work that steps forward into the light of day, raising serious questions but framing them in wholly different ways: by directness, humaneness, and what Kundera calls the “unbearable lightness of being.” With its enigmatic question and answer as to whether or not “it must be,” the work stands between joke and parable, between quotidian humor and allegory of necessity. In its four movements four categories of feeling prevail: in the first, wit, dislocations, and incongruities that surprise and please; in the Scherzo, manic comic energy bordering on the burlesque; in the slow movement, lyrical reflection; in the finale, the dialectic of darkness and light, of deep questioning followed by its transformation into joyous, brilliant resolution. For Beethoven, as for the greatest literary artists, above all his beloved Shakespeare, comedy is not a lesser form than tragedy but is its true counterpart, the celebration of the human in all things.