10 Beethoven and the Viennese legacy
The composition and publication of Beethoven’s first six quartets, Op. 18, are intertwined with those of Haydn’s Op. 76 and Op. 77. Haydn had completed the six quartets of Op. 76 in 1797 but they were not published until the July and December of 1799, dedicated to Prince Joseph Erdödy who had commissioned them. Meanwhile Haydn had embarked on a new set commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz, completing two works in 1799; progress on a third work was painfully slow and eventually the two completed quartets only were issued, as Op. 77 in September 1802. The dedicatee, Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, was one of Vienna’s leading patrons of music, devoting large amounts of money to the commissioning, purchasing and performing of all kinds of music, from songs to oratorios, and sonatas to symphonies. Over the next decade he was to become one of Beethoven’s most ardent supporters, a process that began in 1798 in a deliberately significant manner with the commissioning of six quartets. Beethoven began work on them in the summer of 1798, and handed over copies of the first three in autumn 1799 and the final three in autumn 1800. They were not published, however, until 1801. In the case of both Haydn and Beethoven these contemporaneous quartets – Op. 76, Op. 77 and Op. 18 – initially remained in the private possession of the two aristocrats who had commissioned them, Erdödy and Lobkowitz, until their publication when they were released to the public with formal dedications. While it is possible that Beethoven may have seen manuscript copies of Haydn’s Op. 76 and Op. 77 (particularly the latter because they were commissioned by Lobkowitz) before completing his set, it is likely that only with the publication of Op. 76 in the period July–December 1799 was Beethoven able to study any of Haydn’s latest quartets. Having already completed three of the quartets of Op. 18 (nos. 1, 2 and 3), Beethoven revised them in the summer of 1800, and it is tempting to speculate that the revision was in part prompted by the publication of Op. 76.
While there is no biographical evidence to support this appealinghypothesis, the musical evidence suggests that Beethoven’s first quartets were written independently of Haydn’s Op. 76 and Op. 77. Indeed, in many ways Haydn’s Op. 76, in particular, is more free-thinking than Beethoven’s Op. 18, with two quartets, Op. 76 nos. 5 and 6, beginning with a movement not in sonata form and two finales (Op. 76 nos. 1 and 3) setting off unexpectedly in the minor key before returning to the home major tonic; more generally there is a variety, sometimes an idiosyncratic variety of scoring and textural density, in Haydn’s quartets not apparent in Beethoven’s first essays in the medium. Unlike Mozart in his ‘Haydn’ quartets, Beethoven’s Op. 18 cannot, therefore, be viewed as a response to Haydn’s latest works. Instead the stance is a broader one. Beethoven’s understanding of the genre had taken several years to develop and reflected a general knowledge of the quartet repertoire from the 1780s and early 1790s rather than an exclusive knowledge of one striking set. In addition, as several commentators have pointed out, there is a particular debt to Beethoven’s string trios, five works composed between 1794 and 1798 (two single works, Op. 3 and Op. 8, and a set of three, Op. 9), in which the challenges of writing for a medium in which every note counts were first encountered head on.
The most obviously Haydnesque work in Op. 18 is the first quartet, in F major. The first movement is an intense sonata form that exhaustively explores the potential of a motivic cliché, a turn figure. The opening movement of Haydn’s quartet in D minor, Op. 76 no. 2, was a very recent example of this kind of concentrated writing for the medium (in this case featuring the interval of a fifth), but a more likely stimulus for Beethoven was another first movement by Haydn, Op. 50 no. 3 in E
, which is similarly governed by a turn figure. But a telling difference emerges in any comparison. Whereas monothematicism in Haydn’s case leads to a blurring of the internal paragraphs of sonata form, these divisions are clearly articulated in Beethoven’s movement; the moment of recapitulation, for instance, in the Haydn quartet is quite undemonstrative while in Beethoven it is heralded by a lengthy dominant preparation and a crescendo towards the fortissimo of the recapitulation.
The format of the slow movement, concertante melodic line over a repetitive accompaniment (in this case repeated quavers in the 9/8 metre), is as old as the genre itself, especially favoured by Haydn but also found in Mozart. Since Beethoven’s movement evokes a duet rather than an aria (first violin and cello in the first subject, second violin and first violin in dialogue in the second subject, and so on), comparison with the slow movements of Haydn’s Op. 20 no. 2 and Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ quartet (K. 458) are appropriate. More generally relevant are the large numbers of string quartets issued in Vienna in the 1780s and 1790s that were arrangements of vocal numbers from popular operas and oratorios. For instance, Johann Traeg, the leading music dealer in Vienna in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, advertised arrangements for quartet of movements from operas by Dittersdorf, Gluck, Grétry, Mozart, Paisiello, Salieri and others.1 Given the prevalence of this market, now completely forgotten, it is not surprising that a friend of Beethoven, Karl Amenda, should have remarked that the movement seemed to him to portray the parting of two lovers. Beethoven apparently vouchsafed that the particular impulse was the tomb scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a confidence supported by some annotations he made on sketches for the movement. Quartet arrangements of theatre music are especially invoked in the coda, where the cello and a highly charged ‘orchestral’ accompaniment apparently depict the suicide of Romeo beside his beloved Juliet. Originally Beethoven intended the F major quartet to be the third in the set of six, with the D major quartet (Op. 18 no. 3) appearing first. Given the very strong and contrasting character of the two opening movements of the F major in comparison with the less demonstrative quality of the D major work as a whole, it is not surprising that Beethoven should have changed the order.
Op. 18 no. 1 continues with a movement headed Scherzo, one of four such movements in the set; Op. 18 no. 5 has a Menuetto, while Op. 18 no. 3 has a 3/4 movement with only a tempo marking, Allegro. Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string trios from the 1790s have a number of one-in-a-bar scherzos which, in turn, might have prompted three similar movements in Haydn’s Op. 76 and Op. 77 (though the older composer retains the title of minuet). While the low centre of gravity that marks the scoring at the beginning of the scherzo in Op. 18 no. 1 and the abrupt changes of harmonic direction that feature later in the movement can be traced to the influence of Haydn rather than Mozart, they are, like the overcoming of similar influences in the first and second movements, wholly individualised.
When he embarked on the composition of Op. 18 Beethoven copied out (in whole or in part) two quartets by Mozart, K. 387 in G and K. 464 in A. The latter has long been regarded as exerting an influence on the Op. 18 no. 5, also in A:2 the Menuetto is placed second in the cycle, the third movement is a set of variations on a theme in D major – mature Haydn is much more likely to use alternating variations or hybrid constructions of rondo and variations – and the finale, too, is modelled on that of K. 464. Mozart rather than Haydn may be sensed, too, in the background to the standard one work in the minor key in the set, no. 4 in C minor. That key was already Beethoven’s favoured minor tonality, prompted by his admiration for C minor movements by Mozart such as the piano sonata (K. 457) and the piano concerto (K. 491). While Beethoven was to produce several piano sonatas of character in C minor (including the Sonate pathétique, composed shortly before Op. 18) and a piano concerto too, his one quartet in C minor disappoints. The opening of the first movement is artificially bolstered by energising turn figures, sforzando markings and triple stopped chords. There is no eloquent, deeply felt slow movement such as is found in the Sonate pathétique, and the finale is a very four-square sonata rondo. The only movement in C major is the second, a Scherzo in full sonata form in which the constituent paragraphs all begin with points of imitation; at the recapitulation the first subject is presented as a constituent line in three-part invertible counterpoint. While the effect is certainly whimsical and engaging, the craftsmanship shows the pedagogic training that Beethoven had undergone a few years earlier with Haydn and Albrechtsberger.
As well as beginning the standard set of six quartets with the most impressive work Beethoven followed the common eighteenth-century practice of concluding his set with the most lighthearted work. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the B quartet, Op. 18 no. 6, endured a mixed reception, regarded as inferior to the other five and almost certainly, it was often conjectured, drawing on much older material. In fact there is no evidence to suggest that the work was the equivalent in the quartet genre to the B piano concerto, reworked several times over ten or more years; it was almost certainly entirely composed alongside its companions in 1799–1800. Commentators now also are more willing to appreciate its distinctive qualities, for wit and irony are as much a part of Beethoven’s musical make-up as are the seriousness and pathos that appealed consistently to posterity.
The first movement of Op. 18 no. 6 has a lightness and transparency of texture that is absent in the other quartets in the set. The deliberately comic dialogue between first violin and cello over a simplistic accompaniment recalls the opening of Haydn’s Op. 77 no. 1, which suggests that Beethoven did catch sight of the work before it was published; however, as in most of the sonata forms in Op. 18, Beethoven prefers the Mozartian approach, with contrast of themes rather than a monothematic approach. No fewer than thirty-five bars of the development, approaching half the section, are given over to dominant preparation, ending with an open fifth.
Dialogue also features in the slow movement, though in a less rigidly formal manner. The main theme is announced by the first violin; on its repeat, played by the second violin, it acquires a commentary from the first violin. Later interjections are more pointed: staccato figuration in dotted rhythms, creating a complex rhythmic web that is entirely conceived in terms of the medium. The Scherzo offers yet another kind of dialogue, an ever-present conflict between music in 3/4 (the notated time signature) and 6/8. The Trio highlights the contrast by making all its metrical and phrase rhythms entirely regular.
There is no precedent in the quartets of Haydn and Mozart for the finale of Op. 18 no. 6. Headed ‘La Malinconia’, the opening Adagio is initially built on the standard pattern of a descending chromatic bass line beginning on the tonic, but when the cello reaches F
‘La Malinconia’ collapses into something much more distraught as the movement loses its harmonic direction. From E minor (a tritone away from the tonic) the music makes its way back to the dominant of B using a rising chromatic bass. What follows is an uncomplicated Allegretto quasi Allegro in B, a German dance of the kind featured in the drinking chorus in Autumn from Haydn’s The Seasons. Set as a rondo, the Allegretto is clearly meant to disperse the melancholy until, wholly unexpectedly, the darker mood twice interrupts the flow of the music in a kind of mental flashback, before the fast music prevails. A third would-be interruption turns out to be only a hesitant version of the main theme before a Prestissimo coda ends the movement. Interrupting one kind of music with another, often with programmatic overtones, was to fascinate Beethoven throughout his life (from the contemporary Sonate pathétique to the ‘Dona nobis pacem’ of the Missa Solemnis), and in the genre of the quartet he was to return to it in his very last quartet, Op. 135.
Although the Allegretto does not carry a descriptive heading the finale as a whole is clearly a dialogue between two opposites. Beethoven might have well have known a trio sonata in C minor (H. 579) by C. P. E. Bach that has the title ‘Conversation between a Sanguineus and a Melancholicus’. Although Bach’s dialogue is spread across the two movements of his trio sonata, his comment on the second, ‘Melancholicus gives up the battle and assumes the manner of the other’, is an apt description, too, of the final stages of Beethoven’s movement.
The completion of the Op. 18 quartets and of the First Symphony in 1800 has always been celebrated as the point when Beethoven demonstrated that he had absorbed the legacy of Haydn and Mozart and that he had his own views on how both genres might be developed. In the case of the symphony Beethoven went on, almost immediately, to the composition of the Second Symphony and by 1803 he had completed the Eroica Symphony, too. In the medium of the quartet, on the other hand, for which there was a much more eager market in Vienna, Beethoven did not return to the genre for six years, composing the three quartets of Op. 59 in 1806, probably between February and November.
This narrative is slightly misleading in that in the winter of 1801–2 Beethoven made an arrangement of his keyboard sonata in E, Op. 14 no. 1, for quartet, the only instance of an authentic arrangement for the medium by Beethoven, though many of his other works – sonatas, piano trios, symphonies, even Fidelio – were issued in arrangements for quartet prepared by other musicians. He transposed the work up a semitone, to F, presumably to make maximum use of the lowest, C string of the cello. But what is most striking in this transcription is the lightness of the quartet texture, especially in the first movement, in comparison with Op. 18.
One of the leading patrons of chamber music in Vienna was the Russian ambassador, Count Andreas Razumovsky, himself a competent violinist. Commissioning three works rather than six is part of a broader trend at the turn of the century; indeed Beethoven’s own Op. 18, as well as Haydn’s Op. 76, had been published in two instalments, labelled ‘books’. There is no denying the unprecedented ambition and scale of the three works, the product of Beethoven’s artistic imagination and of a musical society in Vienna that increasingly valued the connoisseurship associated with the medium. Although the scale of each of the three works has always invited comparison with the Eroica Symphony, this is, in many ways, an inadequate juxtaposition, for Beethoven draws on a range of musical resources not evident in the symphony; in particular none of the three quartets evokes the characteristic heroic quality evident in that work and others from the period such as the Coriolan overture, the Fifth Symphony and Leonore.
The expansiveness (as well as the key) of the opening movement of the F major quartet owes more to the Pastoral Symphony than to the Eroica, with its leisurely paragraphs that prefer lyricism to forceful drama and its many passages of slow harmonic movement. The first subject is remarkable, nineteen bars of melody built on an elongated version of the standard cadential progression Ic–V–I. From this simple harmonic base the quartet moves to embrace a much wider harmonic and tonal vocabulary than is used in the equivalent movement of the Pastoral Symphony. Midway through the development section the music reaches a very distant E minor and embarks on a pianissimo fugato that eventually pushes the music on to a prolonged G major chord that enables the following paragraphs to move by fifths to the tonic and the recapitulation.
The variety of sonority and texture that is suggested by the first subject and the fugato passage in the development section is a major advance on the more circumspect textures of Op. 18. In the following movement this new-found confidence and freedom is allied to an unprecedented manipulation of phrase rhythm and tonal direction, together with an allusion to a formal structure rather than an obvious statement of one.3 In temperament it is clearly a scherzo, but it does not have that title and does not use the familiar pattern of scherzo and trio, at least not obviously so. A simple antecedent phrase in the cello on the tonic B prompts a standard consequent from the second violin that modulates politely to the dominant; thereafter the two opening figures appear regularly but their relationship is wholly unpredictable in harmonic direction and phrase length. Equally perversely, the structural tonal goal of the music is not the dominant, F major, but F minor. Bars 155 onward may be viewed as a development section but the return to the tonic at b. 259 is fantastically confused in its messages, as fantastic in its way as the early entry of the horn at the recapitulation in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony: the first violin with its trill on f1 and subsequent ascent up to b2 suggests a dominant preparation but the second violin, viola and cello are simultaneously playing one of the main themes in the tonic. As in the celebrated moment in the symphony the subsequent ff marks the real beginning of the recapitulation.
The following slow movement in F minor is again in sonata form, the constituent paragraphs this time clearly marking its progress. It draws on the expressiveness of the slow movement of Op. 18 no. 1 and the finale of Op. 18 no. 6. In sketches for the movement Beethoven wrote ‘A weeping willow or acacia tree onto the grave of my brother’ which commentators have always been willing to interpret biographically while simultaneously noting that both of the composer’s brothers, Carl and Johann, were, in fact, very much alive. Perhaps the title was that of an engraving that had caught Beethoven’s attention rather than being a rather perverse remark on a family member. Whatever its particular stimulus or its indebtedness to previous slow movements in the composer’s quartets, the intense melancholy and lyricism of the movement are unparalleled. The careful ‘drifting in’ of members of the ensemble across three beats at the beginning rather than a formal tutti first chord was to become a favourite ploy of the composer, and the ready eloquence of the movement naturally embraces a new theme in the development, in D major. The subsequent move to the dominant of F minor for the recapitulation is a routine one in the Classical style, but the three-note pattern, D, C and F, that governs it, is one that features elsewhere in the quartet.
The theme of the finale itself is a Russian folksong, included in obvious deference to Count Razumovsky. As the slow movement merges into the finale, a modal quality hinting at D minor is combined with lengthy trills on the dominant of F, an insecurity of tonality that recalls the scherzo. Thereafter the movement, the fourth in full sonata form, is more securely diatonic.
Op. 59 no. 2 in E minor is a shorter work, with more variety of formal patterns (two sonata forms, followed by a scherzo and trio, and a sonata rondo) and with cross references between movements that rely on harmonic gestures rather than motivic links. While E minor and E major are not especially common tonic keys in Mozart’s instrumental music, the more common occurrences in Haydn’s output share a predisposition to be mono-tonic works, a characteristic of Beethoven’s quartet, too. All the movements are in E: minor in the first movement, third movement and finale, major in the slow movement and in the trio section of the scherzo, a balance of opposites rather than a dramatic move from minor to major. One consequence of this emphasis on E minor and major is that the finale can broaden its harmonic horizons by always beginning the rondo theme off-key in C major. The semitonal relationship of C to B is heard locally within the rondo theme and in the second subject in B minor when it shifts, quite undemonstratively, to the Neapolitan. When this theme is repeated in the tonic in the recapitulation there is an exaggerated emphasis on the Neapolitan (bb. 232–44). The highest note in the entire quartet (c3) occurs as part of a fortissimo Neapolitan chord in the coda. Such relationships play a determining role in the finale but they had been glimpsed in earlier movements too, for instance the sideways shift at the beginning of the first movement and the forte and fortissimo outbursts of the scherzo.
The Russian folksong quoted in the trio section stands apart from this network of harmonic gestures, though Razumovsky the connoisseur would no doubt have taken delight in the union of folksong and learned fugue that constitutes that movement.
Fugue had featured incidentally in Op. 59 no. 1, in the development section of the first movement, and centrally in Op. 59 no. 2, in the folksong section in E major. In the C major quartet Op. 59 no. 3, fugue features in a climactic position, in combination with sonata form in the finale. As such, it is an obvious statement of pedagogical mastery to be placed alongside the finales of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony, his Quartet in G major (K. 387) and Haydn’s Symphony No. 95. Together with the use of a Menuetto, labelled ‘Grazioso’, for the third movement (rather than scherzo) it suggests a more conscious awareness of eighteenth-century inheritance than is evident in the two other quartets, though the way the coda of the minuet allows the fugue to emerge as the logical way forward, rather than beginning as a set piece, is a very Beethovenian thought-process.
While the previous quartets in the Razumovsky set had drawn attention to a Russian folk melody with a heading (‘Thème russe’), none is to be found in the C major quartet. As many commentators have noted, however, the rather bleak slow movement, a sonata form in A minor, especially the tendency for the first subject to use the harmonic minor scale (with augmented seconds) rather than the melodic minor scale, was probably intended as an evocation of Russian folk music, even if it does not actually quote a folk theme. More perplexing in its harmonic colouring is the slow ‘Introduzione’ that begins the quartet. Comparison is often made with the slow introduction that opens Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ quartet (K. 465) but whereas the harmonic asperity of Mozart’s opening is immediately clarified by the first subject of the ensuing allegro Beethoven steadfastly avoids such a resolution. From the first diminished seventh chord of the ‘Introduzione’ the music has an aimlessness that is exaggerated rather than resolved by the beginning of the Allegro. In particular, instead of resolving into F major at b. 30 (which might have provided Beethoven with an opportunity for a first subject tinged with the subdominant), it resolves on to the dominant seventh of G, followed by a harmonically unsupported line for first violin that leads to a forte imperfect cadence in D minor. It requires a ruthlessly diatonic theme in C major, with repeated quavers in the cello and octave scoring between first and second violins, to establish the tonic.
Beethoven’s next quartet, Op. 74 in E, is probably his most neglected work in the genre, despite its appealing nickname ‘Harp’, prompted – not very convincingly – by the unusual pizzicato figuration in the first movement. It was composed in the summer of 1809 alongside two other works in E, the Fifth Piano Concerto and the ‘Les Adieux’ sonata. It is not known what occasioned the composition but its dedicatee was once again Prince Lobkowitz; during the winter his palace in Vienna was the venue for private quartet parties every Thursday evening and the work may well have been composed for one of these concerts. A major reason for its comparative neglect is that it does not seem to embrace the progressive agenda evident in Op. 59 and, even more obviously, his next quartet, also a single work, Op. 95 in F minor. Also, had it belonged to a set of three or six it might have commanded more attention; as a single work it has tended to be forgotten.
If Op. 59 no. 3 in C looks over its shoulder to some notable works by Haydn and Mozart from the 1780s and 1790s, this retrospective air, even more apparent in Op. 74, seems to focus on Haydn and Beethoven’s own music from the 1790s. As often in Beethoven’s output, retrospection does not produce a dated, characterless work, but promotes a new coherence. At the end of May 1809, Haydn had died and it is possible that this quartet was begun as a private tribute to the pioneering master of the genre. The finale is a set of variations that, as James Webster and others have pointed out, clearly invokes the first movement of Haydn’s Op. 76 no. 6, in that both themes are in 2/4 with a series of short, repeated motifs over a strong bass line, rather than a broader theme.4 Rather than emulating Haydn by moving to a fugal conclusion, Beethoven is quite content, in a deferential way, to write six variations, all in the major, plus a coda. The previous movement, too, is reminiscent of Op. 76 no. 6. In both trio sections a contrapuntal texture is woven out of a rising and falling scale, mainly piano and presto in Haydn, fortissimo and ‘Più presto quasi prestissimo’ in Beethoven. In anticipation of the finale being grounded in E because of its variation form, the scherzo is placed not in the customary tonic but in C minor with the alternating trio (heard twice) in C major. Not only does the movement lead into the finale, but the structural modulation midway through the binary variation theme cleverly embraces the tonality of the scherzo by moving to the dominant of C minor rather than the routine destination of B.
The slow movement has none of the emotional power of the equivalent movements in Op. 59 nos. 1 and 2 but returns to the restrained eloquence and rich sonorities of a movement like the Adagio of the Sonate pathétique. The form is a straightforward ABACA but, as in many such movements by Haydn, the A section is varied on both returns; also section B is in the tonic minor rather than the dominant. More conventionally section C is in the subdominant, D.
While the choice of A, the subdominant, for the slow movement is a routine one, for which there are several precedents in Beethoven’s instrumental music from the 1790s in particular, this fall down to the comforting subdominant is prefigured in the Poco Adagio introduction to the first movement; the very first progression tilts the music towards A, later made more obvious by two forte chords. Both main subjects in the following sonata form are coloured momentarily by the subdominant, but the lengthy coda to the movement, where one might conventionally expect a subdominant bias, cleverly avoids one so as not to detract from the effect of the following slow movement, a harmonic plan of avoidance cleverly supported by the most rhythmically energetic music in the movement. Thus the first movement and the slow movement are bound together in a harmonic relationship, as are the scherzo and the finale. But the first movement highlights the second harmonic relationship too. At the beginning of the development the music begins on the dominant of C minor (a G major chord that follows on from the B that concludes the exposition), a gently startling opening for which there are ample precedents in the Classical style; here, however, it leads into a lengthy, agitated section in C major, an anticipation of the tonic note of the third movement.
Following the customary etiquette, for about a year, Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets had been played from the manuscript parts effectively owned by Count Razumovsky before the works were published, on general release as it were, by the Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie. This element of a discriminating connoisseur formulating taste amongst a privileged elite was becoming increasingly associated with the genre in Vienna, as composer, patron, four players and invited guests probed the potential of the genre. A brief report in the Leipzig journal the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in May 1807, eight months before the publication of Op. 59, hints at this process: ‘In Vienna Beethoven’s newest, difficult but substantial quartets are giving ever more pleasure; the amateurs hope to see them soon in print.’5 Pleasure in difficulty was to become a recurring characteristic of contemporary comment on Beethoven’s music. The composer’s next quartet, Op. 95 in F minor, is probably the most extreme example, not forgetting the late quartets, of that intellectual satisfaction that was increasingly associated with the composer’s output.
Op. 95 was composed in 1810–11 and the autograph manuscript carries a dedication to one of Beethoven’s most faithful patrons, Count Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. An official in the Hungarian Chancellery in Vienna who owned wine estates in Hungary, he was a competent cellist who regularly held quartet parties; he also composed fourteen quartets himself. When Haydn sanctioned a new edition, by Artaria, of his Op. 20 quartets in 1800 it was dedicated to Zmeskall and Beethoven’s teasing nickname for him, ‘Conte di Musica’, was a friendly acknowledgement of his understanding patronage. Five years, however, were to elapse before the quartet was published, by Steiner and Co. in Vienna in 1816, and when Sir George Smart enquired whether Beethoven had any recent quartets he could forward to London the composer replied, ‘The Quartett is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public. Should you wish for some Quartetts for public performance I would compose them to [sic] this purpose occasionally [i.e. specifically].’6
The original manuscript has the title ‘Quartett[o] serioso’. ‘Serioso’ rather than the correct Italian ‘serio’ was, at one level, a self-deprecating remark that would have appealed to Zmeskall but it hid, as connoisseur and composer fully knew and appreciated, a quartet of unprecedented seriousness. It is possible to view the title in the same light as others such as Sonate pathétique, Sinfonia Eroica and Sinfonia pastorella, indicating an exploration of ‘seriousness’ in the same way as the piano sonata had explored the world of the ‘pathétique’ and the two symphonies heroism and the pastoral respectively. However, unlike the others, the title does not appear on the printed edition, which suggests that the reference was a private one and not a public indication of expressive content.
To date Beethoven’s quartets had invariably shown their ambition by becoming progressively longer. In Op. 95 Beethoven does the reverse, compressing each of the four movements to form what is his shortest quartet. The resulting intensity of argument is especially evident in the first movement which takes fewer than five minutes in performance, compared with the ten minutes or so taken by the ‘Harp’ quartet. Nothing is made easy for the listener. There is no double bar in the sonata form and the music alternates aggressive gestures with wisps of melody to form what Joseph Kerman memorably termed ‘excruciating discontinuity’.7 Its driving force is the same motif of a turn that Beethoven had used in an earlier ‘serioso’ movement, the opening Allegro of Op. 18 no. 1, but whereas in the earlier quartet it had very consciously figured throughout here it has two clearly delineated functions: as the headmotif of the brutal first subject and the legato accompaniment pattern to other thematic material. The tonal goal of the exposition is not the conventional relative major of A, but D major. Beethoven supplies a cantabile second subject, but it is only two bars long and is concealed in the lower part of the texture (bb. 24–6). In the same way as the turn motif figures in the second subject area, the first unexpected harmonic shift of the movement, from F minor to G major (b. 6) recurs in the second subject area, as the music is twice dragged off-course from D to D major. This compelling network of aggression and allusion is clothed in a profusion of forceful performance markings, in particular exaggerated contrast of dynamics and accentuation and the demand that semiquavers be played ‘non ligato’.
The longest movement in the quartet is the following Allegretto ma non troppo, an up-dating of the kind of slow movement often found in Haydn (as in Op. 76 no. 2) where expressive reserve is complemented by counterpoint. The key is a very distant D major (a continuation of the semitonal dislocation of D found in the first movement) and the movement is introduced by the dedicatee, Zmeskall the cellist. In formal outline and temperament the following scherzo is more comfortable, but the last movement, with its short slow introduction leading into an Allegro agitato in sonata rondo form, again almost defies comprehension; in particular, the final move in the coda to an exhilarating F major – except that it is mostly in a piano dynamic – has puzzled commentators. The self-avowed difficulty of the quartet as a whole invites comparison with the late quartets, but the later works find a cohesion that is more satisfying than that evident in Op. 95. Rather than looking forward, perhaps it is more profitable to look back and view the work as a disintegration of middle-period Beethoven, not into empty gestures but into a fiercely channelled, deliberately provocative expression. It may not convince but it is utterly absorbing.
Op. 95 was published in Vienna in 1816. Nearly six years were to elapse before Beethoven began thinking seriously once more about composing quartets. In 1822, another Russian aristocrat, Prince Nikolas Borisowitsch Galitzin, wrote from St Petersburg requesting ‘one, two or three quartets’. Three quartets were eventually written for Galitzin, Op. 127 in E (completed in March 1825), Op. 130 in B (completed in January 1826) and Op. 132 in A minor (completed in November 1825). As Galitzin’s ‘one, two or three quartets’ implies, these three works are single ones rather than the traditional set of three and they were subsequently published as such by three different firms (respectively Schott, Artaria and Schlesinger). A few months after the initial enquiry from Galitzin, Beethoven’s favourite violinist, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, returned to Vienna after a seven-year absence in St Petersburg. He immediately set about organising several subscription concerts of chamber music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, including quartets from Op. 18, Op. 59 and Op. 74. These performances, expertly led by Schuppanzigh, no doubt encouraged Beethoven to fulfil the commission from Galitzin. He maintained this interest beyond the commission, completing two further quartets in 1826, Op. 131 in C minor and Op. 135 in F; these, too, were published as single works, by Schott and Schlesinger respectively.
Their identity as five single works is a clear one, further borne out by the fact that each has a different overall movement pattern and, though extant sketches for the works reveal that certain characteristics – a novel structural approach or a thematic pattern, for instance – were at one stage intended for a different quartet, nothing should be allowed to detract from the formidable integrity of each of the five. The critical approach that seeks to establish some kind of cyclic unity based on recurring motifs not only undermines this integrity but is fundamentally at odds with what Beethoven intended and his audience clearly expected.
While Schuppanzigh was a career violinist, the second violinist in his quartet, Karl Holz, was a minor official in local government and only a part-time musician. Appropriately it was to this representative of a musically receptive elite in contemporary Vienna that Beethoven made the following comment about the late quartets: ‘Art demands of us that we should not stand still.’ The use of the first person plural (‘us’ not ‘me’) is significant. This was not a lonely creative figure striding into the unknown but a composer very conscious of a particular quartet audience in Vienna that had emerged over the previous quarter of a century, one that treasured exclusivity and nurtured the composer’s individuality.
Op. 127 is the most traditional and, for that reason, approachable of the late quartets. It has the conventional four movements, a sonata-form allegro, a slow movement cast as a set of variations, a scherzo and trio, and a finale in sonata form. The work opens with a short introduction of six bars which, like those in Haydn’s Op. 71 and Op. 74 quartets, are used to launch the movement rather than to provide a formally complete section. It reappears twice in the movement as a clear aural landmark, before the development section and at the climactic point in that section. Elsewhere constituent paragraphs are less clearly articulated. The first subject, for instance, begins on the subdominant chord and though it has a series of four-bar phrases there is very little cadential emphasis. What might nominally be called a second subject (b. 41) is in G minor rather than B and has the same legato character, four-bar phrases and underpowered cadences as the first subject.
The slow movement is in the very traditional subdominant, A major, and has its own introduction, two-and-half bars that build up a dominant seventh chord, note by note, to settle the music in the slow tempo and to prepare for the main theme. The compound time (12/8) in which there is little discernible emphasis on the pulse of the music, the instruction ‘molto cantabile’, the unconventional use of chords in second inversion (e.g. the first chord of the melody, b. 3) rather than emphatic root position or first inversion, and a liberal attitude to the harmonic role of the cello (which is as likely to change within a phrase as between phrases, e.g. bb. 38–9) are all recurring features in the late quartets.8 As in other similar movements in the late quartets, Beethoven does not label the constituent sections of the movement, theme, six variations and coda, but the sentence structure is clearly articulated and each variation has a highly distinctive rhythmic configuration. The third variation is placed in the key of the flattened sixth (F major = E major), but Beethoven is careful to avoid the kind of rhetoric that often follows when such a paragraph moves back to the tonic; in b. 77 the music simply slides down from an octave unison E to an octave unison E; it is left to the wide-ranging arpeggios of the cello at the beginning of the next variation to re-establish the tonic. The fifth variation is even more remote, D major, then D minor (= C minor), allowing the final variation to sit firmly in A. The coda includes another decisive move to the flattened sixth before the music is once more undemonstratively channelled back to the tonic.
The introduction to the scherzo has four pizzicato chords to set up one of those gently jesting movements by Beethoven that consist of short phrases that move in one direction followed by similar phrases in the opposite direction. The incessant dotted figuration recalls the scherzo of Op. 95 and anticipates that found in the Grosse Fuge, but more peculiar are the short interruptions in 2/4, as if the music was about to embark on a Rhenish dance before being hauled back to the main business of the movement. The trio section is in the tonic minor, E minor, but idiosyncratically makes its first structural cadence in D major.
A different kind of function is given to the introductory passage in the finale. Beginning off-key in C minor, it provides a distinctive harmonic colouring at the beginning of the exposition and, later, the development, but in the coda it is transformed into C major in order to initiate a new harmonic journey towards E in a new tempo (Allegro commodo), a new time signature (6/8) and a new texture (fast-moving triplet semiquavers).
One of the consequences of the largely undemonstrative nature of the opening and closing movements of Op. 127 is that attention is focused on the emotional core of the work, the Adagio. In Op. 132, the next quartet to be completed, the slow movement is even more central, the third movement in a sequence of five. Prompted by Beethoven’s own illness in the summer of 1825, the movement alternates two kinds of music, both given titles that reflect the composer’s temporary circumstances: ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart’ (‘Sacred Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a Convalescent, in the Lydian mode’) and, much shorter, ‘Neue Kraft fühlend’ (‘Renewed Strength’). The Lydian mode of the first section is a very deliberate choice, prompted by Beethoven’s reading of Zarlino’s treatise Istitutioni harmoniche (1558) where the mode is described as ‘a remedy for fatigue of the mind and likewise for that of the body’.9 While this might be construed as a vain display of erudition on Beethoven’s part, reflecting his general interest in older music and music theory, it did tap well into musically educated taste in Vienna, a reference which connoisseurs such as Archduke Rudolph (who owned a copy of Zarlino’s treatise) and Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (who organised regular private concerts of old music in his home) would have appreciated. Moreover, the points of imitation and block chord homophony that characterise the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ would have been generally familiar to Viennese audiences from church services, which still regularly featured the music of Palestrina alongside new music written in an up-dated a cappella style. If the opening music has sacred associations readily perceived by Beethoven’s public, then the music associated with ‘Neue Kraft fühlend’ has strong secular associations; it has many of the standard ingredients of a German dance – 3/8 pulse, heavy accents in the bass, simple diatonic harmony, even the trill in the first violin – but the slow tempo (Andante), contradictory emphases on third beats and the irregular phrase structure mask that association. From these two contrasting sections of music Beethoven builds a structure of alternate variations, ABABA, finishing in the Lydian mode with a tonic F major chord.
The arch structure of the slow movement is placed within an overall five-movement structure that reveals a strong sense of symmetry; one layer out are two dance movements in A major, a scherzo and trio (movement 2) and a march (movement 4); the outer layers consist of allegro movements in A, a sonata-form first movement and a sonata-rondo finale.10 Such a neat symmetry had last been used in the genre in Haydn’s earliest quartets and is unique in Beethoven’s output. The first movement is another exploration of how a short introduction can be related to the following Allegro. In addition it casts a shadow over the remainder of the work in that the motivic texture and the white-note notation of the opening bars are an anticipation of the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’, while the key of the second subject, F major, is a foretaste of its tonic. Linking penultimate movements into finales had long been a characteristic strategy in Beethoven’s instrumental music. Here, through careful thematic anticipation in an overtly theatrical texture, the transition from the fourth to the fifth movements makes the latter sound inevitable but it also prevents the preceding march from sounding dangerously brief. Exploring movement structures larger than the conventional four along with the new possibilities of balance and progression that result are compelling features of the next two quartets, Op. 130 and Op. 131, also.
Op. 130 in B major has six movements. In its original form the finale was a vast, intimidating fugue of 741 bars. Beethoven was persuaded by his publisher (Artaria) to provide a new finale, a rondo movement of 493 bars; the original fugue was then issued separately with the rather matter-of-fact title Grosse Fuge and its own opus number, 133. Whether the quartet is performed with the original Grosse Fuge or with the substitute finale it is possible to read the cycle as a compendiun of contrasting movement types, sonata form, scherzo and trio, slow movement as variations, a German dance, a slow movement in ternary form, and a fugue or rondo; instead of choosing four from these movement types Beethoven provides them all. But once the key structure is taken account of, a distinct sense of two halves to the work emerges. First the quartet moves forward in a conventional way from B, to B minor for the scherzo and to D major for a slow movement; at this point the work could have returned to a finale in B but, instead, makes a leap to the furthest possible point away from D – G major – for a movement of stunning simplicity, the ‘Alla danza tedesca’. This is then followed by the Cavatina in E and the finale in B; the opening of the Grosse Fuge and the rondo both emphasise G, a sustained octave unison in the former and part of a dominant seventh of C minor in the latter, to provide a second fall of a third between consecutive movements in the second part of the quartet. Beethoven’s willingness to provide a new finale, the much less demanding rondo, allowed the composer to follow the new directness of appeal apparent in the second half of the work. The original finale, the Grosse Fuge, gives a new sense of heightened contrast and climax, in part the natural legacy of fugal movements in the Classical period (in Beethoven’s own Op. 59 no. 3, the ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata, Mozart’s Quartet in G major (K. 387), Haydn’s Op. 50 no. 4 and several symphonies, and any number of masses), more particularly the product of a movement of often obscure erudition and calculated reference back to thematic and tonal concerns from earlier movements.11
It would be difficult to imagine Beethoven contemplating an alternative conclusion to his next quartet, Op. 131 in C minor, since the broad progression is from a contemplative fugue in C minor to an active sonata form in C minor which becomes C major in the last few bars. Though evident in the last few bars, minor to major is not the main tonal concern of the work; rather it is the more intriguing semitonal relationship of C and D, as in Op. 59 no. 2 and Op. 95. Typically the very first event in the work, the sforzando a1 in the second bar of the fugal subject, prefigures the Neapolitan D major chord that is often going to clothe it in the remainder of the movement; the subsequent six movements of the work are heavily influenced by this initial inflection. Other broad characteristics of the quartet are the familiar ones of making a slow movement in variation form the core of the work (movement 4) and providing a mix of movement types that promote continuity. Thus, the third movement is a recitative that moves the music from B minor to A major for the central Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile; unlike the variation movement in Op. 127 this one remains in the tonic, which in the broader scheme functions both as the dominant of D and the flattened sixth to C minor. The fifth movement is a regularly constructed scherzo and trio in a presto tempo; the home key is E, a stage further along the sharp route from D, but, crucially, the trio section (heard twice and then once, allusively) veers decisively, with a tell-tale change of key signature, to the pivotal A major. The sixth movement, marked Adagio quasi un poco andante, begins its twenty-eight bars in G minor, ending on the dominant of C minor in readiness for the finale. Although the thematic material at bb. 21–3 of the finale alludes very pointedly to the head motif of the fugal theme from the first movement, it stops short of the point when one might hear a D major chord; that tonal feature is featured instead in the recapitulation when it is fittingly heard as substitute tonic, instead of the real tonic, C major, for the presentation of the second subject. The coda includes one deflection to D major before it is finally incorporated within the orbit of C.
Having gradually expanded from four movements in Op. 127 to seven in Op. 131, Beethoven’s final quartet returns to the traditional four – sonata form, scherzo, slow movement and sonata-form finale. Lasting some fifteen minutes fewer in performance than Op. 127, it is sometimes seen as a retreat by Beethoven from the discoveries of previous works, the equivalent in the quartet genre to another F major work, the Eighth Symphony. But in the same way as the apparently conservative features of the symphony do not preclude newer characteristics, Op. 135 similarly creates its own individuality. Once more a variations movement in a slow tempo (Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo) forms the still centre of the work; as in the fifth variation in the slow movement of Op. 131, rather than adding decoration for the first variation, Beethoven reduces the texture to its harmonic skeleton, here with the additional bleakness consequent on turning the music from the major (D) to the minor (C) and requiring an even slower tempo (Più lento). The thematic material of the first movement is quite eccentric: the merest suggestion of a motif for the first subject and a second subject (b. 38 onwards) that could be taken from a quatuor concertant by any number of composers from the 1780s and 1790s. Even more eccentric is the finale, which makes use of a vocal canon by Beethoven, ‘Es muss sein’ (WoO 196), the composition of which was prompted by the unwillingness of an acquaintance, Ignaz Dembscher, to pay for a private performance of Op. 130: ‘It must be! Yes, yes, yes, yes! Out with your purse’ runs the insistent text. Beethoven turned the demand of the opening motif of the canon into a question by inverting it and placing it in the minor. The two motifs then feature in the finale, with a portentous title ‘Der schwer gefasste Entschluss’ (The Difficult Decision). One consequence of this extra-musical stimulus is that Beethoven for the first time in his quartets used a device featured by Haydn in Op. 76 nos. 1 and 3 of introducing the tonic minor as a point of contrast in the finale rather than earlier in the cycle. Beethoven’s slow introduction is in the minor and returns before the recapitulation. Meanwhile the exposition had presented the first subject in F major and by placing the second subject in A major had referred back to the trio section of the scherzo. But the more carefree, or rather apparently carefree, side of Beethoven’s musical nature, another clear inheritance from Haydn, emerges increasingly in the course of the movement. So certain is the composer of his craft that he allows the players to decide whether they want to repeat the development and recapitulation (‘Se repete la seconda parte al suo piacere’) and a flippant pizzicato (as in the finale of Haydn’s Op. 76 no. 1) initiates a cheerful coda.