Beethoven: The String Quartets
by David Vernon
Publ. 2023
440 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-1739659929
Candle Row Press

Reading this book produced in me an unusual set of sensations. Vernon is a highly personable writer and I enjoyed the experience of reading the book. Yet I found myself disagreeing with huge amounts of what he says about the Beethoven string quartets. It is rather like the pleasure of arguing about a topic with a highly erudite and companionable friend.

A difficulty every writer about music faces is that it is an art form notoriously resistant to verbal expression. Short of drowning the reader in musicological jargon, the writer has little choice but to resort to metaphor and analogy. Vernon’s zesty prose is studded with often extended analogies designed to help the novice listener get a feel for the character of the music. As an introduction to these supreme masterpieces, this book could hardly be faulted for its enthusiasm and accessibility.

One point of friendly dispute between me and the author is over his use (or overuse) of metaphors derived from the battlefield. As someone who sees the finale of the Fifth symphony as being about joy rather than victory I found this view of Beethoven, generally, and the quartets, specifically, as virtually musical extensions of Napoleonic campaigns, both tiresome and more than a little misleading. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the nickname of Beethoven’s final piano concerto a misnomer where Vernon doubles down on the militaristic qualities he hears in the work.

Another irritant, particularly in the chapters covering the Op. 18 quartets, was a near constant insistence that in their own way these early quartets are just as good as the late quartets. This eventually comes to smack of a lady protesting too much. Not least because the evidence for this seems to be ways in which Op. 18 prefigured, albeit in primitive form, elements of later pieces. In other words, Op. 18 is inferior to the later quartets. I ended up feeling that Vernon might have saved himself considerable hand wringing if he had just stated, as most of the rest of us think, that, good though the Op. 18 quartets are, they can not possibly stand comparison with the last ones. Given that virtually no other music could withstand such a comparison, this is hardly a damning indictment of Op. 18. I cite this at length as an example of me enjoying Vernon’s manner of laying out a point without actually agreeing with it.

Before moving on I need to express my disappointment that Vernon can’t resist the all too popular sport of using Beethoven as a stick to beat poor old Haydn in pursuit of a rather dubious pseudo Darwinian view of music as a process of progressive improvement. Whether Beethoven was better than Haydn seems a question I rather hoped we had grown out of!

Vernon is strong on the biographical elements he deploys to provide context for each of the main groupings of the quartets. He doesn’t just limit himself to composer’s biography and elegantly situates the works in their historical, political and sometimes even economic contexts. In fact, so good are these passages that I think the writer should be encouraged to take on a full length biography of the composer.

Whilst writing about the music itself, Vernon uses his obvious erudition wisely, neither dumbing down nor getting too technical. The reader doesn’t need a qualification in music theory to understand the points he makes. I doubt the expert will learn much they didn’t already know but they don’t seem to be who this book is aimed at. Likewise, the reader is left in no doubt as to the author’s enthusiasm for and love of this music – not something that can always be taken for granted these days with music books.

For example, Vernon absolutely nails the mood and character of the introduction to the Op. 74 ‘Harp’ quartet in luminous prose. This is the best sort of writing about music – the kind of thing that has one itching to listen to the music. He is, however, occasionally guilty of the breezy glibness of a Classic FM presenter as in when, with a nonchalant wave of the hand, he tells us that the Egmont overture is “comparable in scope to Othello or the Oresteia but with the compact intensity of Samuel Beckett.” Without backing up such statements this is just throwing names out for the sake of it.

This tendency, irritating though I found it, grows more serious with what amounts to a pet theory about the Op. 95 quartet which, for various reasons, Vernon sees as a jokey work. I would imagine that he is in a minority of one in thinking this but it is not presented as an unusual or even controversial view. I like a challenging or even iconoclastic opinion as much as the next person but I feel it is more than a little disingenuous not to advertise it as such, not least in a book aimed at a non expert audience. Perhaps I might have felt different if I had agreed with Vernon’s view of the quartet.

It isn’t that Vernon’s rollicking prose is devoid of insight – to comment on the first movement of Op. 95 “sonata form is sovereign, but compression is a despot in charge” is superb, capturing the essence of the quartet in a sentence – but the issues I have outlined grated on me as the book went on.

This sort of opinion feels like a rather old fashioned willingness to interpret Beethoven’s music in autobiographical terms. The F minor is deemed to be humorous mostly, it seems, on account of it being dedicated to Zmeskall with whom the composer enjoyed an occasionally ribald friendship. The logic, such as it is, goes that given this type of friendship, the quartet must reflect it and therefore must not be as serious as it purports to be.

There are quite a few of such sweeping judgements. Of the opening movement of Op. 127 we read: “…Beethoven has also invented a form of fluid unity… which the next generation of composers, including especially the writer of Tristan and the Ring, will develop to extraordinary levels of dramatic power.” There may well be an insightful point here about the connection between Op. 127 and Tristan but it isn’t made, merely alluded to. I’m left thinking that it seems too peculiar to view this particular movement by Beethoven as particularly influential in this regard.

Vernon has a habit of walking us chronologically through each movement which might potentially be of use to the reader wholly new to this music but I found its unvarying tread a little tiresome after a while. Worse it tends to obscure the many fine and interesting points he makes on the way.

Sometimes the well of metaphor runs dry as when the magical, mercurial trio of the scherzo of Op. 127 is likened to “a deranged badger”. His likening of the sublime, dimly lit mysteries of the Op. 132’s opening movement to gangsters plotting a raid is banal in the extreme which he then proceeds to extend to excruciating length. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that Vernon only really has ears for the slow movement of Op. 132 in much the same way, for all his protestations, that he really wants to be writing about the late quartets not the whole lot.

So I find myself back where I started but having now written a review which almost certainly reads as if I really disliked this book. Nothing could be further from the truth. With a few of my gripes put to one side, this is a lively, intelligent and, above all, fun introduction to some of the greatest music ever written and I very much hope it lures readers into listening to that music who might otherwise been deterred by its monumental reputation.

David McDade

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