Week of January 27, 2020
Dear Friend,
I hope you were able to join us for the spectacular start of our celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250
th
Anniversary, as over the past weekend the wonderful Gryphon Trio gave splendid performances of his complete piano trios in three concerts at every corner of Metro Detroit.
Next Saturday, February 1
st
, we move on to the string quartets at the Seligman Performing Arts Center, as the extraordinary Danish String Quartet brings us three of Beethoven’s masterpieces in this art form. There will be one from each of the three commonly understood “style periods” of Beethoven’s musical life and work, bearing the innovative titles of Early, Middle and Late.
In this update, I want to share some insights into the three quartets we will hear, and describe the stage of life of this great composer at the time he wrote each of them. It would be hard to imagine a more ideal selection of compositions to understand the evolution of Beethoven’s life and work than these three:
- Beethoven: String Quartet in G major, Op. 18, No. 2
- Beethoven: String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3
- Beethoven: String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135
Let’s dig in!
(If you want to save this to read later, but get your tickets now,
CLICK HERE
.)
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Franz Josef Haydn, widely understood as the Father of the String Quartet, wrote and published eleven different sets of string quartets in the 35 years between 1762 and 1797. Each set had precisely six quartets: Opus 1, 3, 9, 17, 20, 33, 50, 54/55, 64, 71/74, and 76. In fact, only five other quartets written during Haydn’s long life fall outside these published sets of six.
After playing string quartets occasionally with Haydn during the early 1780s, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also wrote a spectacular set of six string quartets, dedicated them to his friend, publishing them in 1785. Through their amazing creativity and imagination, these quartets had a profound impact upon all the quartets Haydn wrote afterward (Opus 50 and following), nearly half of all of Haydn's work in this musical form!
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Enter the young Ludwig van Beethoven, a brash, talented, ambitious pianist and composer, seeking fame and fortune in Vienna, a city with a musical life already well formed through the work of Mozart and Haydn, the latter of whom served for a time as Beethoven’s teacher.
How did Beethoven do it? In part, by systematically working his way through the published musical forms made popular by Haydn, Mozart and others, producing multi-work sets of piano trios (Opus 1), piano sonatas (Opus 2, Opus 10), cello sonatas (Opus 5), string trios (Opus 9), violin sonatas (Opus 12), and so on.
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It wasn’t until around 1799 that an already successful 29-year-old Beethoven turned his attention to perhaps the two most intimidating instrumental forms: his first symphony Opus 21, and his first set of string quartets Opus 18. How many quartets in the set? Six, of course!
Of the six, Opus 18 number 2 is perhaps the most grounded in the classical tradition handed to him by Wolfgang and Franz, thus it is quintessentially early Beethoven. Like the others in the opus, it’s in four movements, but unlike some of the others, it pays homage to tradition without challenging it at the same time. To learn more, there will be a marvelous set of program notes in the printed program book on Saturday. So for now let’s move on.
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At the time he wrote his Opus 59 string quartets (1805), Beethoven had reached the height of his creative powers. Contemporaneous works include the third symphony (“Eroica” Opus 55), the fourth piano concerto (Opus 58), the violin concerto (Opus 61), the “Appassionata” piano sonata (Opus 57). In these works, Beethoven is taking his inherited musical forms, and absolutely EXPLODING them, with longer and more complex movements, unexpected thematic elements, sharp dynamic contrasts, and a level of sheer instrumental difficulty that make these pieces to this day among the most challenging for musicians to play.
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But life for this now-35-year-old Beethoven was not easy. His encroaching deafness – disclosed to his brother and the world in the 1802 Heiligenstadt Testament – was growing worse, with devastating effect on already challenging interpersonal relationships. He was alternatively idealistic and irascible, sensitive and brutish. Not an easy guy to get along with, to say the least; and yet increasingly revered as a real master of uncommon musical genius.
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The Opus 59 string quartets, dedicated to the Russian Count Razumovsky who commissioned them, exploded the concept – and the purpose – of a string quartet player. As Will Fedkenheuer of the Miró Quartet told me, the quartets of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven’s Opus 18, could be read through, rehearsed and performed all in one day by the musicians of the time. The Opus 59 quartets, on the other hand, required two or three weeks of intense study and rehearsal before they could be mastered. This, says Will, gave birth to the modern concept of the professional string quartet!
Opus 59 number 3 is the last of the set, sometimes called the “Hero” quartet, reminiscent of the struggle over adversity that characterized Beethoven’s idealised universe (and the way he saw himself within it). But again, there will be great program notes available at the concert, so on we go...
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Fast forward 21 years to the year 1826, and to Beethoven’s last completed major work, his 16
th
string quartet, Opus 135. The 56-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven was in
terrible
shape. Sickly, weak, stone deaf, often bitter, increasingly dependent upon others, and yet – in his last five string quartets – reaching a level of transcendental compositional genius unprecedented in human history.
This final quartet, finished reluctantly for an impatiently waiting publisher, represented his farewell to the genre, and perhaps, to life itself. In a sense, it is a summation, sharing more in common formally with his Opus 18 quartets than the other last quartets, with their radical departures from convention.
My dad once shared with me a marvelous saying, “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans.” What plans Beethoven had! For a normal life with marriage and children; barring that, a nephew he might treat as a son. For a universal brotherhood of mankind, united in embracing the same ideals that shaped his work. And for hearing the sounds he now could only imagine, even as he crafted them into patterns of indescribable beauty and meaning. The program notes will describe this more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can, but there is a message for us all in this work's final movement.
As Beethoven himself described it in a letter to his publisher:
“Here, my dear friend, is my last quartet. It will be the last, and indeed it has given me much trouble. For I could not bring myself to compose the last movement. But as your letters were reminding me of it, in the end I decided to compose it. And that is the reason why I have written the motto: ‘The difficult resolution – Must it be? – It must be,
it must be
.’”
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To put it simply, this concert by the Danish String Quartet is perhaps the most complete portrait one might ever find of the total Beethoven – early, middle, and late – in a single evening.
CLICK HERE
for tickets if you don’t have already them, and come join us.
I hope we’ll see you at the concert!
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Steve Wogaman, President
Chamber Music Society of Detroit
Tickets: 313-335-3300 or
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