Beethoven: String Quartet No. 4, in C minor, Op. 18
Ames Town & Gown performers: Cecilia Quartet
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
Beethoven refused to publish his first set of quartets until he had, as he put it, “learnt to write quartets properly.” His sketchbooks reveal that his learning curve was vexingly drawn-out over at least a three-year span. No sketch material seems to have survived, however, for the C minor quartet that Beethoven placed fourth in his set of six quartets issued in 1801 as his Opus 18. This oddity has sustained a scholarly controversy over the work’s genesis. In his exhaustively researched Life of Beethoven, published in three volumes between 1866 and 1879, A. W. Thayer reported that the C minor quartet must have fallen last or next-to-last in Beethoven’s order of composition. (Though an American, Thayer wrote his biography in German. An English-language edition, translated by H. E. Krehbiel, did not appear until 1921.) Accepting Thayer’s chronology and dismissing the supposition of a vanished notebook, French scholar Joseph de Marliave argued that the absence of sketches for the C minor quartet compelled a conclusion that it was written “at a single stroke, and at express speed, and that it has no connexion whatever with the other works of the same period” (Beethoven’s Quartets [1928], p. 232).
Earlier, however, German scholar Hugo Riemann had drawn a different conclusion. In a commentary published in 1917, he proposed that the C minor had been fashioned from material that Beethoven had worked out long before he took up writing the other five quartets. Joseph Kerman endorsed Riemann’s thesis in his book, The Beethoven Quartets (1967). More recently, Sieghard Brandenburg has made a case that a sketchbook from 1799 has very likely been lost, that in any case the extant sketches actually do carry references to the C minor quartet, and that the quartet was almost certainly composed next-to-last in the series (cited in Barry Cooper, ed., Beethoven Compendium [1991], p. 234; and in Lewis Lockwood, Music and Life of Beethoven [2003], p. 162).
The literature concerning the Fourth quartet reveals an apparent requirement to recount an anecdote reported by one of Beethoven’s pupils, Ferdinand Ries. So here goes. In evidence of Beethoven’s obstinate insistence on following his own paths, Ries cited his once having complimented Beethoven on his effective use of perfect fifths in the C minor quartet despite the prohibitions against such practice. (Fifths are intervals separated by five steps in a scale. Also called parallel or consecutive fifths, perfect fifths are a paired succession of such intervals.) At first, Beethoven denied that the fifths were present, but when Ries showed that they were, Beethoven demanded to know who forbade them. Disconcerted, Ries stammered out a list of authorities, whereupon Beethoven responded, “Very well, I allow them.”
In Beethoven’s lexicon, the key of C minor commonly denotes drama and intensity. Think, for instance, of the Pathétique sonata or the Fifth symphony. The Fourth quartet meets expectations, but only in its first movement, which is marked Allegro ma non troppo (“Fast but not overdone”). To an accompaniment of nervously pulsing figures, the first violin begins the quartet with a struggling, stair-stepping ascent from its bottom register to a higher one. A series of emphatic chords marks the completion of the climb. After a transition passage, the second violin introduces a more lyrical and easygoing theme that is thereupon echoed by the first violin. The rising and the relaxed themes become the material from which the rest of the movement is constructed.
In place of the customary slow movement, Beethoven follows his opening movement with a puckish Scherzo (literally, “jest”), which he carefully (and also somewhat obscurely) designates Andante scherzoso quasi allegretto (“Moderately paced, playful, almost slightly fast”). Constructed chiefly from reiterated cells of three repeated notes, the music could well be labeled prankish, not just playful.
Though one would expect the missing slow movement to appear next, Beethoven instead follows the Scherzo with an even quicker movement simply marked Allegretto (“Slightly fast”). He calls the movement a minuet, but only a tipsy Russian bear could find the music congenial to courtly dancing. The composer’s love of striking contrasts is evident in the music’s suddenly shifting dynamics (i.e., the softs and louds). After an intermediary section of less quirky, but still animated character, the music returns to the opening minuet, this time played even faster than at first.
Aptly described by Joseph de Marliave as “full of spirited animation,” the last movement is essentially a rondo—a piece having a continually returning theme. Stated at the outset by the first violin, the recurring music is a scurrying theme having the flavor of what was regarded at the time as Turkish music. The vigorous opening is followed by an interlude in which the second violin spins a songful theme. A repetition of the opening is then followed by a second interlude during which the players sportively pass a motif among themselves. After another appearance of the “Turkish” theme, the songful theme briefly returns, and the music then shifts into a speeded-up restatement of the scurrying theme to take the quartet to an energetic and, at the very end, impish close.