Beethoven: String Quartet No. 12, in E-flat, Op. 127
Ames Town & Gown performers: Leipzig String Quartet
Ames City Auditorium, February 23, 2007
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
In 1806, while he was working on the three string quartets commissioned by, and ever after bearing the name of, Count Razumovsky, Beethoven wrote his publisher that “[I] intend to devote myself almost exclusively to this kind of work.” For long, however, that intention went unmet. Over the following decade, Beethoven produced just two additional quartets—his Op 74 in 1809 and Op 95 in 1811. Instead, he directed his creative energies into an astonishing succession of compositions that remain his most-performed works—the Fourth through Eighth symphonies, the Fourth and Fifth piano concertos, the violin concerto, the Appassionata and Kreutzer sonatas, the music for Goethe’s Egmont, the Archduke trio, and more. Then, following the completion of the Eighth symphony in early 1817, his output waned drastically. By this time almost totally deaf, Beethoven was further afflicted with a painful gastrointestinal illness while also preoccupied with an ill-judged legal battle to wrest custody of his nephew from his widowed sister-in-law. In Vienna’s musical circles, the buzz about Beethoven soon became that the poor fellow was past it, all passion spent.
In fact, however, the aging and ailing lion still had in him one last, awesome roar. Over 1820-1821, he produced what would be his final three piano sonatas. During the same period, he began working on the Missa Solemnis, which he completed in 1823. Then he threw himself into composing the first of what, he told friends, were to be “two great symphonies” that stirred in his mind. Beethoven lived to complete only the one of them, but it—the Ninth—was a stunner.
Meanwhile, Beethoven had not forgotten his old dream of concentrating on quartets. In July 1822, he offered C. F. Peters a “violin quartet” that he was working on, but the publisher was unresponsive. In far-off St. Petersburg, however, Prince Nikolai Galitzin was more receptive. The prince had come to know and admire Beethoven’s music while serving as a diplomat in Vienna. Now, hearing of the composer’s interest in writing a quartet, Galitzin wrote to Beethoven in November 1822 to ask for “one, two, or three quartets” at whatever price Beethoven chose to set. The composer accepted the offer, but did not act on it until he completed the Ninth symphony in 1824. Once under way, however, Beethoven went beyond the commission. Between June 1824 and November 1826, he produced five quartets plus the Grosse Fuge,which had been intended as the finale for the B-flat quartet (Op. 130) but came to be published separately. Apart from a few trifling pieces, these six compositions became Beethoven’s valedictory statement. Unprecedented in their time in what they asked from both players and listeners, the quartets have become firmly fixed among the supreme achievements of Western music.
For the first performance of the E-flat quartet in Vienna in March 1825, Beethoven turned to an ensemble headed by his longtime friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Prior to the concert, the composer required the performers to sign a mock contract that declared
With this each one receives his due, and is bound to undertake on his word of honor, to behave in the best possible manner, to distinguish himself, and to vie each with the other.
Despite this precaution, the performance proved a disappointment to the players, to the audience, and above all to Beethoven, who later complained that Schuppanzigh had simply grown too flabby to negotiate new music as deftly as he once did. For subsequent concerts, Joseph Böhm replaced Schuppanzigh while Beethoven carefully rehearsed the players, having to guide the musicians by closely watching their fingering as he was no longer able to hear them. The meticulous preparation paid off. In June 1825, Beethoven happily wrote his nephew, Carl, that the quartet had been played six more times “in the best possible manner, and received with the greatest applause.”
Beethoven opens the quartet with a short section marked Maestoso (“Majestic”). Soon, the violin introduces a spinning theme that takes the music into the main Allegro. From here on, the movement abounds in sustained spells of liquid lyricism as one theme glides into another. In characteristic fashion, however, Beethoven also employs abrupt changes from soft to loud and furthermore twice interrupts the tempo by a return to the movement’s stately opening. Such shifts illustrate the sort of challenges that Beethoven presents to the players, who must ensure that the momentary contrasts are accomplished without disrupting the music’s general flow.
The second movement—an Adagio that carries the further instructions, “but not too slow and very much songful”—is cast as a set of five distinctly differing variations on a theme of extraordinary serenity. Energetic and playful, the succeeding Scherzando vivace (“Jocular and lively”) reveals Beethoven in one of what he termed his “unbuttoned” moods. The trio—the name given to the intermediary section of a movement in ABA form—does not appear till past the midway point. Typically, the trio of a scherzo serves to slow things down a while, but Beethoven makes his trio a bustling Presto (“Very fast”). In an inexplicable departure from his usual fastidiousness in such matters, Beethoven provided no tempo marking for the final movement. Assuredly, the movement is meant to be played fast, but just how fast must be based on the performers’ sense of how the music goes. That the movement is joyful is beyond question. Just the same, Beethoven once more displays his capacity to surprise when, near the movement’s end, shimmering trills take the music into what Robert Sherman describes as “a surrealistic world of light, motion and fantasy.”