Beethoven: Quartet No. 8, in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2, “Razumovsky”
Ames Town & Gown performers: Cavani Sting Quartet
Ames City Hall November 2, 2007
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
Soon after moving to Vienna in 1792 to take up the post of Russian ambassador to the imperial court, Count Andreas Kirillovich Razumovsky got to know another newcomer to the city, an up-and-coming musician named Beethoven. An ardent music-lover and able violinist, the Count became both friend and patron of the composer, from whom he commissioned three quartets in 1805 for performance by the resident ensemble employed at his palace. Ever since, the completed works—among the most beloved of all chamber compositions—have been identified as the “Razumovsky” quartets.
Up till receiving the commission, Beethoven had not written any quartets since issuing his inaugural set of six as his Opus 18 in 1801. Clearly, though, he was primed to renew his exploration of the form. He completed the first of the quartets during May and June of 1806, thereupon writing his publisher that “I am thinking of devoting myself almost entirely to this type of composition.” While he did not come to act upon that thought until the final years of his life, he quickly turned his attention to the other two quartets of the set, finishing them between September and November. The works received their first hearing at private performances in the early part of 1807.
Such rapid composition was unusual for Beethoven, who by this stage of his life habitually carried a notebook in which he jotted possible themes that he would then laboriously rework and revise until he hit upon “the triumph of the musical idea,” as put it when he described his creative process to Bettina von Arnim. The speed appears all the more remarkable in view of his other activities at the time. He received the commission while he was revising his first—and only—opera, Leonore (the title Beethoven preferred over Fidelio ), in an effort to salvage that work after it had flopped dismally at its first performances in November 1805. During the period of the quartets’ composition, moreover, Beethoven was also working on his Fourth piano concerto and Fourth symphony, while adding as well to his catalog of piano music. The composer’s notebooks, however, reveal that for more than a year prior to undertaking Razumovsky’s commission he had been sketching material that he would incorporate into the quartets.
When the quartets first became known among Vienna’s musical public, their reception was at best respectful and anything but enthusiastic. A reviewer for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung judged the quartets to be “long and difficult . . . excellently wrought but not easily intelligible.” Carl Czerny reported that Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the leader of the ensemble that premiered the quartets, laughed when he first looked through the music, believing that Beethoven was playing a practical joke by substituting a bogus score for the real one. Attitudes quickly changed as the quartets became more familiar, but the public’s initial mystification is understandable. The Razumovsky quartets push the form and medium beyond anything that had been done previously even by Mozart. They contain movements of unusual length, some of them—like the second movement of the E minor quartet on tonight’s program—reaching near a quarter-hour’s span. (Among Beethoven’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors, only Schubert would attempt quartets of similar scope.) They call upon the players to produce an uncommon volume of sound, a trait that has prompted numerous commentators to describe the works as being, in effect, symphonies for four instruments. But perhaps their most striking feature of all is their expressive range, achieved in part through unconventional key-relationships among the movements and through an emphasis upon devices that had hitherto been used sparingly, such as passages that entail slashing bowstrokes or the use of pizzicato (plucking, rather than bowing, the strings).
Like the Eroica Symphony written the previous year, the E minor quartet opens with two quickly successive chords. This peremptory call to attention is followed by an unexpected silence, after which a theme appears in two fragmented statements before the music begins an unimpeded flow. That flow, however, is only momentary. Marked Allegro(“Fast”), the movement proves to be filled with interruptions, dramatic outbursts, and severe contrasts that lend it a tense and anxious character.
Peacefulness reigns in the Molto adagio (“very slow”) movement that follows. As is so often true of Beethoven’s adagios, the music seems to have entered an otherworldly realm. According to Carl Czerny, Beethoven testified that the movement came to him while he was “contemplating the starry sky and thinking of the music of the spheres.” Nothing in the music contradicts such an origin. The third movement—marked Allegretto (“Somewhat fast”)—has a skittish quality owing to what Melvin Berger terms a “quirky and highly eccentric rhythmic pattern.” Twice during the movement, Beethoven interpolates a fugal treatment of a Russian folksong that Mussorgsky would later likewise adopt in the coronation scene of his opera, Boris Godunov. Because Beethoven also included an explicit Russian allusion in the preceding quartet, scholars speculate that Count Razumovsky may have requested such a feature, but it is possible that the idea was entirely the composer’s. The quartet’s closing movement is an ebullient romp. Cast as a rondo, a piece in which the music keeps circling back to a specific theme, the movement is marked Presto (“very fast”).
Performances of String Quartet no.8, in E minor, Op. 59, No.2 ““Razumovsky” (all freely available on YouTube)