Beethoven: String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131 (1826)
Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo –
Allegro molto vivace –
Allegro moderato – adagio –
Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile – Andante moderato e lusinghiero – Adagio – Allegretto – Adagio ma non troppo e semplice – Allegretto –
Presto – Adagio quasi un poco andante –
Allegro
It would not have seemed inappropriate had Beethoven drawn his career to an apocalyptic close in 1823 with the Missa Solemnis and the “Choral” Symphony. Yet such a questing mind could hardly have sought rest at such a time of achievement. He evidently did not see the ninth symphony as his last, since another was planned (and started) – as also were other large scale works, including an oratorio. But among sketches for the Ninth was some material which later assumed significance: notably the main subject of a rejected instrumental finale, which eventually found its way to the corresponding point in the A minor quartet (Op.132). But there also appeared ideas specifically intended for a string quartet, such that soon after the first performance of the symphony (on 7 May 1824) a quartet in E flat (Op.127) was eventually begun – no doubt encouraged by an unfulfilled commission: it was in November 1822 when Prince Nikolas Galitzin (a wealthy Russian nobleman and patron of music, as well as the cellist of the St Petersburg Quartet) invited Beethoven to write him “one, two, or three new quartets, for which I should be delighted to pay you whatever you think adequate”! Three years later the E flat, A minor, and B flat quartets (Opp.127, 132, and 130 respectively) were all ready – but Beethoven only ever received the 50 ducats agreed for the first of them! This was probably completed in February 1825, nearly fifteen years after its predecessor (the F minor, Op.95), and marks the beginning of his total withdrawal into the private and intimate world of the String Quartet: from now until the end of his life he was to write for no other medium (with the exception of a few vocal canons and two or three short piano pieces). So it was that with Op.127 he turned his back on every “public” musical form: it is as if the creating of this work drew him into an inner region of utterly personal communion with quartet texture, but a place from which, two years later, he emerged with Op.135 as a Being somehow relieved and exorcised – rather akin to Samson, “Calm of mind, all passion spent”.
Having fulfilled Prince Galitzin’s commission he was still far from done: despite the increasing agonies suffered through guardianship of his nephew Karl – which reached a climax with the youth’s attempted suicide in July 1826 – he somehow managed to complete yet another quartet around the same time. Who knows how much the tone of this work was coloured by his own desperate private struggles – notably so its opening movement: Op.131 undoubtedly invites the listener and performer to speculate and muse over its inner “meaning”, to a greater extent than usual – and it is for each of us to ponder on our own individual response to so deeply felt a personal testament. Over the years it has certainly drawn from a wide range of writers a stream of prose of unusually poetic imagination; in the light of which any further scribblings here would be both superfluous and disrespectful.
- Suffice it to point out that the aforementioned opening movement – one final fully worked out fugue – bears further witness to Beethoven’s studies of Bach and Palestrina, yet whose sparseness of texture at times foreshadows late Shostakovich;
- that its seven movements continue his step by step expansion of the form, from the traditional four in Op.127 through the five of Op.132 and the six of Op.130;
- that the four-note motto of Opp.130 and 132 has not only developed into Op.131’s main fugue subject, but that its original outline has been simultaneously hidden in the key centres of movements 1 to 4;
- that near the end of No.5 we hear one of the first ever examples of that modernistic device sul ponticello;
- that Franz Schubert specifically requested to have this quartet played to him, days before his death just two years later;
- that Beethoven himself considered it his finest;
- that at its centre is another extended set of variations. It could be argued that its predecessor in Op.127 constitutes the greatest single movement in the entire group of late quartets, and such is the dominance of that Adagio that its length might seem disproportionate within the quartet as a whole. But so many compositions from Beethoven’s final period have at their centre of gravity (if not always at their actual physical centre) such an extended set of variations, notably all the last quartets except Op.130, the piano sonatas Opp.106/109/111, and the Ninth symphony itself; not forgetting those outrageous 33 on Diabelli’s silly waltz..…. Variation form had by now virtually superseded sonata as Beethoven’s principal vehicle for intellectual and emotional expression, bringing with it an almost rhapsodic freedom of tonality and thematic development, uninhibited by the rigours and tensions inherent in classical sonata structure. But in terms of sheer expressive variety the Andante of the C sharp minor must mark the consummation of his exploits in the form – a veritable suite within a suite. Consider Op.131’s impact on these eminent writers:
“the most melancholy sentiment ever expressed in music” (Wagner, on the first movement)
“I know of few things in music which seem so to transcend temporal existence” (Marion Scott, on the finale’s second subject)
“absolutely new in conception and in the resulting form” (Vincent d’Indy)
“It has always seemed to musicians that these quartets were the expression of a man who was spiritually no longer as other men……The C sharp minor is the most original and the most consistently sublime [of them]. This music floods the mind with its beauty….. Beethoven solves with complete success the problem of equating variety with unity. In this music Beethoven seems to have escaped from the world of men and to have achieved utter spirituality” (Roger Fiske).
© Alan George
