Well, we in the Arnica Quartet got through our first late Beethoven quartet together Sunday afternoon. With a piece of the size and complexity of the Op. 130, it would stand to reason that there would be places that we’d like to have done better, but on the whole, it was a reading that we were quite happy with given that it was our first performance of it in public.
It always amazes me how much of a journey these Beethoven quartets are – even the Op. 18. With Haydn or Mozart you get varying amounts of humor and profundity, but everything is “just so” (with the more than occasional joke from Haydn) and there is not so much the idea of transcendent human experience being manifested through the music. With Beethoven, you get the idea that there is a genius mind struggling mightily with itself and its mode of expression. No form can hold it – even if that is what must been done for the time being. If Mahler and Sibelius were correct in their assertion that a symphony must be a world unto itself, surely Beethoven must have felt that his quartets were much the same – but more concentrated, the distilled essence of an entire world in four movements and four players.
With the Op. 130, Beethoven breaks away from the standard four-movement “mini-symphony” form and explodes the form into six and even seven movements (Op. 131), more in the mode of a suite of movements than the expected “outer movements in sonata-allegro form, with the requisite minuet/trio and adagio inner movements”. Joseph Kerman writes in his monumental and seminal study of the Beethoven quartets that the late quartets become much more about dissociation – the fragmentation of the formal rhetoric which binds earlier compositions together. It’s as if he has finally tired of wedging novel new ideas into old, shop-worn formal constructs. This is readily apparent in the sprawling first movement of the Op. 130. It begins with a slow, spare, unison figure that’s nearly as much a cadence as a melody [1], which is interrupted several times by a scurrying motif of sixteenth notes and a fanfare motif [2]. What do these disparate figures have to do with each other? Beethoven seems not to need a relationship (at least at the beginning of the movement) and it is this sharp, wrenching contrast between the adagio and allegro aspects of the movement that really set this movement apart from anything that Beethoven has written for the string quartet up to this point. The development section [3], such as it is, is short and sublime. The sighing figure from the first phrase of the opening adagio becomes a softly rocking accompaniment to the three-note fanfare motif and a soaring melodic fragment – each passed between the first violin and cello. Like a vision of the immortal beloved, the mirage fades after a quick dip into the minor key and the increasingly violent tumult of sixteenth notes returns us back to the recapitulation.
This is such an amazing movement – I wonder what the poor quartet that gave the premiere must have thought as they worked their way through this one (I’ll find out and report here later)! It IS held together by a very coherent logic of motivic development and key relationships, but we don’t really sense that as listeners. Instead, we feel the clashes of the seemingly disparate elements that dominate the exposition and recapitulation and the idyllic warmth and calm of the development. This is also quite a departure from the “rule” of sonata-allegro form. The development is often the place where most of the action takes place, and Beethoven turns this on its head and makes it a refuge from the storms of the rest of the movement.