Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15, in A minor, Op. 132
Ames Town & Gown Performer: Pacifica Quartet (web site)
Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall, January 21, 2006
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and the appointment to Lincoln Center’s The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two), and in 2006 was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. A link to their website is provided below.
Composition notes:
The string quartet was to Beethoven what the self-portrait was to Rembrandt—a vehicle by which each man initially tested his skills and then stretched his craft, and through which each later came to express his most searching thoughts on time and mortality. Unlike Rembrandt, however, Beethoven clustered his essays in the form, so that his quartets fall into three distinct groups that typify what are by convention termed the Early, Middle, and Late periods of his artistic career. The first six were written during 1798-1800, the next five between 1805-1810, and the final five (plus the Grosse Fuge, which was composed as the finale for the Thirteenth quartet but was ultimately published separately) between 1823-1826, the next-to-last years of the composer’s life.
The years separating the Eleventh quartet (1810) from the last ones took in the most tormented period of Beethoven’s life. In 1814, at the time of the Congress of Vienna, the composer had attained international acclaim. Events then turned against him. Death took two of his staunchest patrons—Prince Lichnowsky in 1814 and Prince Lobkowitz in 1816—while a third, Count Razumovsky, had been financially ruined when his palace burned down in December 1814. Following the death of his brother Caspar in 1815, Beethoven became embroiled in an ill-considered and protracted legal battle with his sister-in-law for custody of her son, Karl. (Unfortunately for both the composer and his nephew, Beethoven ultimately won his suit.) Far worse, though, his loss of hearing continued to deteriorate. By 1816, friends could communicate with him only by writing their remarks in notebooks. Frustrated by his isolated state, Beethoven became prey to paranoid suspicions. To add to his miseries, he became afflicted with a chronic gastrointestinal illness that caused him recurrent pain.
Small wonder, then, that he produced few works between 1816-1821. Among the musical cognoscenti in Vienna, the word was that Beethoven was written out. Within his private world, however, the composer was conceiving compositions on a grand scale. In 1818, he began work on the Missa Solemnis, which he completed in 1823. During this time, he told friends that he had in mind to write “two great symphonies” and an oratorio. Upon completing the Mass, he set to work on one of those symphonies, the Ninth. He mentioned other plans as well—another opera possibly and perhaps music to accompany Goethe’s Faust. Furthermore, when a publisher asked him for some piano quartets and trios, Beethoven countered with an offer to provide a string quartet instead. Nothing came of this feeler, but news of the composer’s interest in writing a quartet reached the Russian prince, Nikolai Galitzin, who had come to know Beethoven’s music while serving as a diplomat in Vienna. Writing from St. Petersburg in 1822, Galitzin asked if Beethoven would compose for him “one, two, or three quartets,” adding that the composer could set his own price. Beethoven accepted the offer, assuring Galitzin that “since I see that you are cultivating the violoncello, I will take care to give you satisfaction in this regard.”
Though Beethoven eventually sent the full three quartets that Galitzin had hoped for, he was slow in fulfilling the commission, not getting around to delivering the first of the quartets—the Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127—until 1825. By the year’s end, however, he produced the other two—the A minor quartet on tonight’s program and the B-flat quartet, Op. 130. The following year, he composed the C-sharp minor and F major quartets, while also writing a new finale for the Op. 130. Because the final quartets were published independently, they came to be issued with opus numbers that violated the actual order of their composition. Hence, the A minor quartet is known to us as Beethoven’s fifteenth, though it was in fact the thirteenth.
From the start, these last of Beethoven’s compositions both astonished and mystified players and listeners alike. Besides their unprecedented demands upon the musicians, they employed a harmonic language unlike anything known before. In his memoirs, Prince Galitzin recalled that the three quartets sent to him had been
a source of deep disappointment in musical circles in St. Petersburg. They had been expecting music in the form and manner of Beethoven’s first quartets; they were anything but that. … The poetic idea was hidden beneath phrases of seeming angularity, and only revealed, even to the discerning, after long imaginative researches into the mind of the composer, through the medium of perfect technical performance (quoted in Joseph de Marliave, Beethoven’s Quartets [1928], p. 225).
In some ways, the reception accorded the quartets—initial perplexity followed by growing admiration—parallels that accorded Einstein’s papers on relativity. Both thinkers offered revelations—Einstein about the physical world, Beethoven about a spiritual realm—that confounded expectations and forced people to think in unaccustomed ways. Both instances represent prodigious intellectual achievements whose full import and implications are still unfolding.
Begun in late 1824 and finished in July 1825, the A minor quartet was originally planned to have four movements. During the spring, however, Beethoven suffered a severe illness. Upon recovering, he expanded the quartet to five movements and pointedly labeled the central one as “Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity by a Convalescent, in the Lydian Mode”—the Lydian Mode being an ancient, so-called “ecclesiastical” scale corresponding to F major but with B-natural replacing the B-flat.
Like its companions, the A minor quartet has been thoroughly anatomized by various scholars—among them, Joseph de Marliave, Daniel Gregory Mason, Philip Radcliffe, Basil Lam, and Michael Steinberg. But Maynard Solomon remarks that “we do not need a close analysis to tell us that the subject matter of this quartet is pain and its transcendence” (Beethoven [1998], p. 420). The first movement opens with a brooding passage marked Assai sostenuto (“Very sustained”). A cadenza-like utterance by the violin announces a shift to the movement’s main body, marked Allegro(“Fast”). The cello, playing very high, states the first theme, which is then developed. Partway through, a gentler theme, played against triplet figures, emerges as a momentary respite to the preceding distress. The music then oscillates between anguish and consolation, ending in a defiant exclamation.
The second movement—Allegro ma non tanto (“Fast, but not overdone”)—has a more cheerful character, with a middle section that suggests a country dance complete with a bagpipe drone. The “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” that follows employs two themes. The first, a reverential chorale marked Molto adagio (“Very slow”), is stated at the outset. It is given an extended variation treatment before the appearance of the buoyant second theme, which is marked Andante(“Walking pace”) and to which Beethoven added the descriptive label, “Feelings of new strength.” The first and second themes then sequentially return in modified forms. The opening chorale appears once more in a spacious conclusion that soars to ecstatic heights and then closes in a hushed and awe-filled section of transcendent beauty.
The final two movements are played without pause. The first—Alla marcia, assai vivace (“Like a march, very quick”)—is boisterous and brief, terminating in an operatic passage that puts the violin in place of a singer. The last movement, marked Allegro appassionato (“Fast and impassioned”), opens with a melodic theme that Beethoven had first sketched for use as the finale of his Ninth symphony. Cast in the fashion of a rondo (i.e., having a theme that keeps reappearing), the movement conveys an agitated uneasiness that is ultimately released in a concluding section, the tempo now speeded to Presto (“Very fast”), of joyous affirmation.
Performances of String Quartet No. 15, in A minor, Op. 132 (all freely available on YouTube):