Beethoven: String Quartet No. 11, in F minor, Op. 95, Serioso
Ames Town & Gown performers: Colorado String Quartet
March 12, 2003
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
A measure of mystery attends the composition of the quartet in F minor that Beethoven published as his opus 95. Two matters are certain—first, that the quartet was among the works that Beethoven presented to his Vienna publisher, Sigmund Anton Steiner, in 1816 in payment of a debt; and second, that the Schuppanzigh Quartet gave the work its first hearing in May 1814. On other issues, however, the historical record is murky or silent. When, for instance, was the work composed? Given that the autograph score bears the date “October 1810,” the answer seems straightforward. Some musicologists, however, have argued that this date is either mistaken or misleading. Turning to evidence from Beethoven’s sketchbooks and from the manuscript paper he used, they maintain that even if the quartet was begun in 1810, it was later extensively revised, probably in 1814. If this assessment is correct, it explains the otherwise puzzlingly long delay in the work’s publication. Nonetheless, the argument has not persuaded all scholars, many of whom continue to accept Beethoven’s dating as trustworthy.
Apart from when the quartet was written, why was it written at all? It was not prepared in response to a commission. Evidently, Beethoven had some private reason to undertake its composition. In 1809, he had likewise produced a quartet without having the external stimulus of a commission. Once that work was completed, though, Beethoven promptly published it as his opus 74. In contrast, the F minor quartet appears to have been written without any thought of publication or, possibly, even of performance. When Beethoven did finally decide to issue the work in 1816, he submitted it to his London publisher, Sir George Smart, with a cautionary note attached: “The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.”
Some commentators, taking 1810 to be the year of the quartet’s composition, have attributed the work to the turbulence within Beethoven’s life. To be sure, the music is filled with vehemence, even anger. (Biographer Alexander Thayer judged the quartet’s first movement to be “the most splenetic piece of music Beethoven ever wrote.”) To be sure as well, 1809 and 1810 were years filled with difficulties for the composer. For one thing, his steadily worsening deafness led him into periodic despondency. In May 1810, he wrote his friend, Franz Wegeler, that his life was “poisoned forever” by the “fiend” that had “settled in my ears.” He declared, further, that he would probably already have ended his life had he not once read “that a man should not voluntarily quit this life so long as he can still perform a good deed.” In addition, Beethoven had met with a blunt refusal when he made a proposal of marriage to Therese Malfatti (the actual dedicatee of the piece that has come to us, through a misreading of Beethoven’s script, as “For Elise”). After seeing Beethoven in 1810, Bettina von Brentano felt sure that the composer had been devastated by the rebuff. Later biographers, however, have questioned whether the blow was quite so shattering as Bettina claimed. In any case, reading Beethoven’s life into his works has always been a most tenuous undertaking.
Beethoven’s remark to George Smart hints at a different explanation of the work’s origin: it may have been written primarily as an exploration of what could be attempted within the form. A further suggestion of that possibility lies in a remaining mystery—what the composer meant in labeling the work a “Quartett Serioso.” In an immediate sense, the description is altogether unnecessary, as no one would ever construe the quartet as lighthearted or frivolous. Implausible, too, is any implication that Beethoven regarded his previous quartets as somehow failing to be “serious.” But what, then, does his use of “serioso” signify? Melvin Berger takes the subtitle to be “an obvious reference to the prevailingly somber mood of the piece.” William Kinderman remarks that the subtitle “may be understood to allude not merely to the work’s dark, emotional tone but also to its challenging stylistic demands.” Maynard Solomon understands the designation to be Beethoven’s indication that the work belongs with “the so-called ‘learned’ style.” Solomon, moreover, bluntly terms the quartet “an experimental work.” That description seems justly applied to a work that Beethoven thought suitable only for “connoisseurs” and that later scholars have established as marking a striking advance towards the still more daring and unparalleled final quartets of Beethoven’s last years.
Commentators are unanimous in citing the first movement, marked Allegro con brio (“Fast, with verve”), as an extraordinary instance of compressing potent musical ideas into the smallest possible span. It is the briefest quartet movement that Beethoven ever wrote—and also one of the most intense. It opens peremptorily and explosively with the four instruments playing in unison. Periodically, the fierceness relents, but the gentler mood is always only temporary, while each reappearance of the opening motif carries an added ferocity. Near the end, the music begins to race madly towards some fearsome climax, but astonishingly, the movement instead closes in a few succinct, quiet phrases.
In a departure from the conventional practice of following the first movement with a slow one, Beethoven labels his second movement as an Allegretto ma non troppo (“Somewhat fast, but not overmuch so”). While the music offers a calming contrast to the preceding turmoil, its tonal ambiguities impart an underlying sense of uneasiness. The cello opens the movement with a descending scale. This simple beginning soon leads to an extended section in which the violin sings a long, lyrical theme over a rolling accompaniment. The viola then introduces a second theme that the other instruments take up in a fugal manner. The cello again plays the descending scale, but this time what follows is a section that grows increasingly impassioned until the cello once more intervenes to bring back the songful themes from the first part.
The third movement, marked Allegro assai vivace ma serioso (“Very lively, but serious”), follows without a pause. The movement roughly conforms to an ABABA pattern, with the two gentler “B” portions acting as interludes between the forceful, even snarling “A” sections. The last movement begins slowly {Larghetto), but the tempo soon picks up as the movement enters the main section, marked Allegretto agitato (“Somewhat fast and agitated”). This faster section develops a theme that, in the words of Henry W. Simon, “might suggest a sad Punchinello tentatively waltzing.” Suddenly and startlingly, however, the music shifts into a higher gear and into the major mode to bring the quartet to a stirringly upbeat close that has struck some listeners as wholly inappropriate. Vincent d’Indy regarded the ending to be “without interest or utility of any kind” and added that “no interpretation could palliate this error of a genius.” Arthur Cohn judges it to be “an abortive attempt to hide the veracity of what has preceded.” But others have defended Beethoven’s act. While admitting that the ending is “absurdly . . . unrelated to this ‘quartett serioso,’” Basil Lam sees the disconnection as Beethoven’s deliberate resort to “the Shakespearian touch that provides the final confirmation of the truth of the rest.” Randall Thompson held the ending to be consonant with the “contrast of light and dark [that is] the essence of Beethoven’s style.” In Thompson’s view, “No bottle of champagne was ever uncorked at a better time.”