Many of Beethoven's late string quartets
are so uncommon in form,
breathtaking in innovation,
and searing in emotional depth
that they often make me think of space travel-
one quartet taking the listener
on a singular voyage to, say, Mars,
another to Jupiter, and so on.
Beethoven was completely deaf at this point
and besieged with illness that would
soon end his life. Sick and trapped
in a world of utter silence, he may
have felt that these quartets were
to be his last outpouring of inspiration,
and as such, why not make them
journeys into completely uncharted territory.
Not so with Beethoven’s late quartet opus 130
in B Flat Major- at least not at the onset.
The Quartet comprises six
rather than the more traditional four- movement mold,
but although the first four movements
possess their own distinct and independent character,
they have little of that otherworldly feel.
Arriving at the fourth movement,
Alla danza Tedesca- in the manner of a German dance-
if there is any sense of travel at all,
it is to the bucolic German countryside
rather than to distant planets.
As the movement good naturedly,
even playfully comes to an end,
Beethoven gives not the slightest indication
of what is to come- two of the most
remarkable movements in all of music.
Beethoven called the fifth movement, Cavatina,
an Italian word originally meaning
a short song of simple character.
The second violin opens with six notes
that gently rise and fall as a brief introduction,
and then the first violin sings his Cavatina,
a melody of utter simplicity accompanied
by the other three instruments.
Beethoven indicates sotto voce in Italian,
literally under voiced, as if the four voices
are communing with one another
in hushed privacy.
The opening section, tinged with an aching melancholy,
spins out slowly and solemnly,
and then comes to an end with softly pulsating notes
in the three lower voices, then joined
above by a single drawn out note in the first violin-
a bridge that draws the music
into an unexpected realm of debilitating darkness.
Beethoven described the following passage as beklemmt,
meaning oppressed, stifled, or anguished.
Of the thirty-one gasping, stuttering,
and pleading notes the first violin plays
in the next five bars, only three
line up with the grimly pulsating notes
that continue underneath.
The first violin becomes a desperate,
disoriented soul who has lost his way.
This is not travel toward distant planets.
It is is an interior journey to the darkest recesses
of the human condition. And just as quickly,
the darkness is gone and replaced
with the opening strains of the Cavatina
in condensed form, then a final
painful sigh from the first violin,
and four poignantly throbbing notes
from the other voices that bring
the movement to a close.
Karl Holz, second violinist in the Schuppanzigh Quartet
that gave the first performance of opus 130,
recalled that the Cavatina cost the composer tears
in the writing and brought out the confession
that nothing that he had written had so moved him,
in fact, that merely to revive it
afterwards in his thoughts and feelings
brought forth renewed tributes of tears.
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And then Beethoven must have thought:
enough tears, enough anguish and oppression.
As the Cavatina comes to an end,
listeners are rudely and abruptly
tossed into the Great Fugue’s world of wild extremes.
The Great Fugue has been described analytically as a double fugue,
but it is also a raw act of nature
that can be violent at times but always awe inspiring.
The movement opens with an Overtura,
thirty bars of disjointed bits and pieces of the fugue to come.
"Take a look at these", Beethoven seems to say,
"before I make something memorable out of them."
The fugue that follows is angry, jarringly
dissonant, and almost painfully drawn out
but the movement also has moments of peacefulness,
playfulness, mystery, exaltation, and humor.
As the end nears, Beethoven attempts
to start the fugue once again but fails.
Then he attempts another fugal motive and fails again.
Has the great Beethoven lost his way?
But no, he is only playing with us.
On the third try he successfully launches
the fugue once again and the coda
then gradually builds to an ending
of exuberance and great joy.
A reviewer at the time of the work’s
first performance called it incomprehensible, like Chinese.
Others thought it inaccessible, eccentric,
repellant, and an indecipherable, uncorrected horror.
Still, the composer Igor Stravinsky
said that “it is an absolutely contemporary piece of music
that will be contemporary forever….
I love it beyond everything”.
Beethoven’s publisher was so concerned
about the Great Fugue’s dim financial prospects
that he urged him to write a new Finale in its place.
Beethoven, uncharacteristically accommodating,
did so by composing a surprisingly light hearted Finale
as substitute and slyly included
a veiled reference to the original fugue.
But the Great Fugue itself remains
the movement that provokes and prods us,
that affects us greatly as it bewilders us,
and that has acquired a kind of immortality
by forever feeling contemporary.
As Stravinsky once said, it is not
just the Great Fugue, it is the VERY Great Fugue.
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Arnold SteinhardtPerformance Faculty
Dr. Mia ChungInstructor of Interpretive Analysis
