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Published: Sunday, 05 January 2025 at 16:05 PM
Beethoven late quartets: five profound, valedictory masterpieces
On 7 May 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven directed the premiere of his monumental Ninth Symphony, with its famous Finale setting Schiller’s Ode to Joy, in Vienna’s Kärntnertor Theatre.
Fortunately, a second conductor had been engaged, because the performance taking place in Beethoven’s mind had only a tenuous connection with what was happening on the stage. As the symphony came to an end, the deaf composer still had his head buried in the score, and he had to be turned round by one of the solo singers so that he could see the wildly enthusiastic applause, even if he couldn’t hear it.
Just a month earlier, Beethoven’s equally large-scale Missa solemnis received its first performance – not in Vienna, but in St Petersburg. The event was organised by Prince Nikolai Galitzin (or Golitsin), who had first approached Beethoven in November 1822, telling him:
‘Being both a passionate musical amateur and a great admirer of your talent, I am taking the liberty of writing to you to ask if you would consent to compose one, two or three new quartets, for which I would be pleased to pay you the fee which you will judge appropriate for your trouble.’ With the labours of the Mass and the symphony behind him, the idea of turning his attention to the more intimate sphere of chamber music must have come as a welcome change to Beethoven.
The Beethoven late quartets are a unique artistic testament
As things turned out, during the last years of his life Beethoven was to concentrate on composing string quartets to the virtual exclusion of all else. At no other stage in his career did he involve himself for such a long period with a single genre, and his five late quartets form an artistic testament of a unique kind – one in which each individual work has its own distinctive shape and character, while at the same time forming part of a single overarching project with common threads running through it.
Beethoven completed the first of his three quartets for Prince Galitzin just in time for its premiere on 6 March 1825, and he had already begun sketching ideas for the next quartet. In the autumn of that year, the conductor Sir George Smart travelled to Vienna to meet Beethoven and discuss with him the tempos for his symphonies, including the Ninth, of which he was due to conduct the English premiere.
On 9 September, Smart witnessed the first, semi-private, performance of Beethoven’s latest string quartet. The members of the quartet led by the renowned violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh had assembled at the Viennese tavern Zum wilden Mann, where the publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who had acquired the rights to the new work, had rented a room for the occasion.
A musical reference to Beethoven’s health
The meeting between Smart and Beethoven was engineered by the quartet’s second violinist, Karl Holz. Smart noted in his journal: ‘There was a numerous assembly of professors to hear Beethoven’s second new manuscript quartette, bought by Mr. Schlesinger. This quartette is three-quarters of an hour long. They played it twice… It is most chromatic and there is a slow movement entitled “Praise for the recovery of an invalid”.
‘Beethoven intended to allude to himself I suppose, for he was very ill during the early part of this year. He directed the performers and took off his coat, the room being warm and crowded. A staccato passage not being expressed to the satisfaction of his eye, for alas, he could not hear, he seized Holz’s violin and played the passage a quarter of a tone too flat.’
Sir George Smart was right in thinking that the quartet’s slow movement was autobiographical: Beethoven had been seriously ill with jaundice and abdominal disorders in April and May of 1825, and was forced to interrupt his work on the new quartet. His near-death experience led him to compose its slow movement as a ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an der Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart’.
This translates as ‘Holy Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Deity’, in the Lydian mode‘. In it, two contrasted themes rub shoulders throughout: a smooth, slowly moving chorale melody, and a more energetic, widely spaced idea expressing the notion of gaining new strength.
Nostalgia, wit, and deep emotion
The ‘Holy Song of Thanksgiving’ was inspired by the sacred music of the Renaissance, but it isn’t the only part of the quartet that looks back to the past: the second movement is a minuet, and it quotes an unpublished piano piece Beethoven had written more than 30 years earlier – as though in the twilight of his life he were nostalgically invoking the days of his youth, before his career was blighted by deafness.
The quartet was originally to have had six movements, but at a late stage Beethoven transferred one of them to the last of Prince Galitzin’s three quartets, Op. 130, which does have six movements. This is alone among Beethoven’s late string quartets in not including a slow movement in the form of a set of variations. Instead, there’s a delicately witty piece, and the quartet’s expressive heart is reserved for the relatively brief ‘Cavatina’ that comes immediately before the finale – a deeply felt piece that moved Beethoven to tears whenever he thought of it.
The first performance of the quartet Op. 130, on 21 March 1826, was at best a qualified success. Two of its movements were encored on the spot. The huge and immensely difficult fugal finale, however, proved a real problem for players and listeners alike.
‘As incomprehensible as Chinese’
It was, as a contemporary review had it, ‘as incomprehensible as Chinese’, and eventually Beethoven was approached to see if he would consider composing a less demanding finale, and allowing the fugue to be issued separately. Surprisingly, he readily agreed, and the quartet was duly issued with a new finale – the last piece of music he completed. The original last movement appeared on its own as a Grande Fugue.
No sooner had Beethoven completed his three quartets for Prince Galitzin than he launched on two uncommissioned string quartets; and just as Galitzin’s last quartet had ended with a fugue, so the next one began with a similar piece, as though one work had spilled over into the next – except that the opening movement of the new quartet was a much more intimate and orderly affair. And if Op. 130 had six movements, Op. 131 has seven, though two of them really function as short introductions to the one that follows.
When, at some time in August 1826, Beethoven finished proofreading the neatly written-out score of the new quartet which had been prepared by a copyist for the engravers, he returned it with a note he scribbled on the first page: ‘Put together out of various bits stolen from here and there’. This so alarmed the publishers that Beethoven had to reassure them it was a joke, prompted by their stipulation that the quartet had to be an original work.
Traumatic life events intrude
But there were more serious matters afoot. Just a fortnight before Beethoven dispatched his letter to the publishers, his 19-year-old nephew Karl attempted suicide. One of the bullets he fired grazed his head, and he was hospitalised for six weeks.
Beethoven, who regarded Karl as his adopted son – following the death of the boy’s father in 1815, he had become his legal guardian – was distraught. He had already begun composing what was to be his last string quartet, and when Karl was discharged towards the end of September, he and Beethoven set off for the country estate of the composer’s younger brother, Johann. There, work on the new quartet, which had been interrupted, continued.
Beethoven’s last string quartet is a work of almost Classical elegance, though its finale seems to delve into deeper waters. Beethoven headed it, ‘The decision taken with difficulty’, and he prefaced it with two musical mottos: one, in the minor, setting the words ‘Muss es sein?’ (‘Must it be?’); the other a more carefree upside-down version of the same motif in the major, accompanying the ‘It must be!’ answer. In order to illustrate the difficulty with which this seemingly metaphysical dilemma is finally resolved, the two motifs interact throughout, until, towards the end, they exchange roles.
‘Yes, yes! Out with your purse’
But the mottos had a surprisingly mundane origin. A wealthy music-lover named Ignaz Dembscher had wanted to hear the Quartet Op. 130, but had been equally anxious to avoid having to pay for the privilege. Instead, he decided to have the piece played at one of the regular quartet parties he held in his own home.
Beethoven, however, refused to let Dembscher have the music, and so he asked Karl Holz how this obstacle could be overcome. Holz told him to stump up the ticket-price of the original concert, and when Beethoven heard that Dembscher had complained ‘Must it be?’, he was so amused by the man’s stinginess that he dashed off a canon on the words, ‘It must be! Yes, yes, yes. Out with your purse.’
The music of the canon found its way into the quartet’s last movement. No one listening to such profound music would suspect that it was based on so down to earth a matter as money, but as an example of Beethoven’s sense of humour it’s certainly typical.
Beethoven late quartets: a style guide
Here are four key features of Beethoven’s five final, profound masterpieces in the string quartet form.
Slow introductions
Each of the first three late quartets begins with a slow introduction, which returns at crucial points during the main body of the first movement like punctuation marks, giving the piece greater weight and seriousness and underlining its unity.
Multi-movement forms
Among the late quartets, only the first and last are cast in a traditional four-movement form. The others have between five and seven movements, providing Beethoven with a larger canvas to work on, and lending the music an almost modular aspect.
Variations
During the last dozen years or so of his life, Beethoven became increasingly attracted to variation form. In all but one of his five late string quartets the centrepiece is a set of variations – not a display piece, but a serene interlude that forms the work’s expressive heart. Here perhaps the finest of all, from Number 12: a theme, six variations and a coda:
Fugues
Another preoccupation in Beethoven’s late period was the fugue. Like the ‘Hammerklavier’ Piano Sonata, the String Quartet Op. 130 was designed to culminate in an enormous fugal finale which made unprecedented demands of both performers and listeners. Beethoven’s next quartet, Op. 131, begins with a much smaller and more intimate fugue, this time based on a subject that could have stepped straight out of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
Beethoven: his life and times
1770
Life: Ludwig van Beethoven is born into a family of musicians on c.16 December in Bonn, Germany. With his musical ability apparent at a young age, he is touted earnestly as a prodigy by his father, Johann.
Times: More than 100 people are killed in a stampede at the celebration of the wedding of Louis-Auguste (future Louis XVI) and 14-year-old Marie Antoinette in Paris.
1792
Life: Beethoven is taken on as a student by Joseph Haydn. Though their relationship is not hugely harmonious, Beethoven later dedicates his Op. 2 Piano Trios to his teacher.
Times: Sir Joshua Reynolds, revered portrait painter of the British nobility and the co-founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, dies in London, aged 68.
1802
Life: On a restorative break, Beethoven writes but doesn’t send a letter to his brothers outlining his angst at growing deaf. In fact, the so-called ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ goes unread until after his death.
Times: On the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte, recently confirmed by a plebiscite as first consul of France, General Ney enters Switzerland with a force of 40,000 troops.
1808
Life: At the bitterly cold Theater an der Wien, Beethoven conducts or plays in the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth (or ‘Pastoral‘) Symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto and Choral Fantasy in a single concert.
Times: Prussian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte publishes his Addresses to the German Nation, a work later credited with laying the foundations of German nationalism.
1815
Life: Following the death of his brother Kaspar Karl, Beethoven becomes embroiled in a protracted battle with Kaspar Karl’s wife Johanna for custody of his nephew/her son, Karl.
Times: The Handel and Haydn Society is founded in Boston, US, by a group of musicians and merchants ‘to promote the love of good music and a better performance of it’.
1827
Life: After a long period of declining health, Ludwig van Beethoven dies on 26 March, aged 56. An estimated 10,000 people line his funeral procession as it makes its way through the streets of Vienna three days later. Attendees include the composers Schubert, Hummel and Moscheles, and Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny.
Times: In his The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically, German physicist
Georg Ohm sets out what will be known as Ohm’s Law, relating to electrical resistance.