Beethoven: Quartet No. 7, in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 Razumovsky
Ames Town & Gown performers: Pacifica String Quartet
September 28, 2001
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
Over the span of his life, Count Andreas Kirillovich Razumovsky (1752-1836) built up an impressive resumé. In his early manhood, the well-educated aristocrat trained for a career in Russia’s Imperial Navy, but after having attained the rank of captain, he decided to enter the diplomatic corps. Initially, the tsar sent him to Italy, where he served as Russian ambassador first in Venice and later in Naples. Subsequently, he was appointed to fill the same office in Copenhagen and then in Stockholm. Finally, in 1792 he was named the Russian ambassador in Vienna, where he would reside for the rest of his life. In 1815, Tsar Alexander I elevated him to the rank of Prince in recognition of Razumovsky’s service to his country.
For all these achievements, what has saved Razumovsky’s name from the obliterating effects of time is his association with an up-and-coming musician whom he met in Vienna—Ludwig van Beethoven. An ardent music-lover and capable violinist, Razumovsky became the friend and patron of the composer, from whom, late in 1805, he commissioned the set of three works that have ever since been subtitled the “Razumovsky” quartets.
Beethoven had not attempted any quartets since his inaugural set of six that he wrote in 1800 and published the following year as his Opus 18. Evidently, the commission appeared at a time when Beethoven was primed to pursue the form once more. He began the first of the quartets—the F major that we hear tonight—in May 1806 and completed it during the following month. In a letter sent in June to the publishing house of Breitkopf & Härtel, Beethoven remarked, “I am thinking of devoting myself almost entirely to this type of composition.” In the event, he did not act on that thought, though he would eventually return to the quartet as the consuming interest of his last years. Sometime between September and November, Beethoven finished the two other quartets of the set. 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 had taken to carrying always 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 catalogue 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 began to become 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—for instance, the slow movement of the F major quartet runs for nearly a quarter-hour. (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).
The first movement, an Allegro (“Fast”), begins with the cello stating the theme, which is then passed to the first violin. There follows a profusion of melodic fragments until the cello restates the initial theme, as though to repeat all that has gone on. Instead, however, the theme is now subjected to a rich development that comes to a close with the players uniting in a vigorous return to the full theme. The concluding section turns calm and peaceful only to end with three emphatic chords.
In a departure from the customary pattern for a “classical” quartet, Beethoven follows the opening movement with another fast movement rather than a slow one. He makes a further departure by his trademark practice of substituting a playful scherzo (“joke”) for the customary minuet.
There could scarcely be a starker contrast than that between the rambunctious scherzo and the elegiac third movement. Marked Adagio molto e mesto (“Very slow and mournful”), the movement is shaped from material that Beethoven had sketched in his notebooks. Alongside the theme that he turned into the central idea of the F major quartet’s third movement, Beethoven had at some time penned the phrase “A weeping willow or acacia upon my brother’s grave.” The notebooks are often filled with unrelated jottings, and no one can be sure that the words are in fact a comment on the music nearby. If they are, they must refer either to his parents’ firstborn child, also named Ludwig, who had died in infancy before the composer’s birth or (more likely) to a second brother, Franz Georg, who had died at age 2-1/2 when the composer was 12.
In another characteristic feature of Beethoven’s mature style, the third movement leads without pause into the final movement, another Allegro. The movements are bridged through a violin cadenza that ends on a held trill. Either out of deference to Razumovsky or at the Count’s explicit request, Beethoven builds the movement from a Russian folksong, though he radically alters its character. In its original form, the song is a lament over ill fortune; in Beethoven’s handling, it appears as a jaunty tune, save near the very end when the song’s melancholic quality is briefly revealed prior to the movement’s quick, brisk conclusion.