Beethoven: String Quartet in E minor, Op.59 No.2 “Rasumovsky” (1806)
Allegro
Molto adagio: “Si tratta questo pezzo con molto di sentimento”
Allegretto
Finale:- Presto – più presto
Of course the Sinfonia Eroica is one of the major landmarks in the history of Western music – and Beethoven himself was surely aware of its significance when he wrote about its unusual length. Like so many iconic creations it has attracted its fair share of Romance and Fable: the very title, the association with Napoléon, the presence of a Funeral March, all have inevitably set minds and imaginations to work, conjuring up any number of programmes and meanings. If the Eroica has enabled succeeding “heroic” or “conflict” works to be born, then it cannot be solely because Beethoven’s example taught his followers how to think and create on this scale: a scale made possible by his own developing mastery of harmony and harmonic movement – involving a spreading apart of tonal poles and the consequent slowing down of harmonic pace. This apart, surely the symphony’s pictorial and spiritual vibrations are no less mirrored in the string of masterpieces it gave rise to? Perhaps it was indeed with the Eroica that Beethoven finally broke free from the conventions and artifices of the eighteenth century; and with the F major Rasumovsky that the revolution was first transferred to the quartet medium.
The three quartets of Op.59 followed the Eroica after a period of two years, and were commissioned by (and dedicated to) Count Andrey Rasumovsky, who had come to Vienna in 1792 as Russian Ambassador. As a tribute to his patron, Beethoven incorporated a Russian folk tune into each of the quartets, and these melodies are easily identified in both the F major and E minor quartets (drawn from Ivan Pratsch’s collection of Russian and Ukrainian folk songs, published in 1790). He may have become familiar with them when the allied Russian/Austrian armies passed through Vienna after their victorious campaign in Italy.
The E minor is on a similarly large scale to its predecessor, yet temperamentally the two are worlds apart: in the first movement, for example, there is no trace of the long-breathed expansiveness, the warmth and good humour which characterises so much of Beethoven’s music in F major. Instead, we are here confronted at the outset with a terseness, a brooding restlessness, which arises not only out of the minor key, but also originating in the absence of any long-flowing melody. Instead, as at the very opening of the work, we are presented with isolated fragments of material which soon expand into something recognisably melodic. Yet after an apparently false start the process begins again, only to erupt into a fierce conflagration of trills, broken chords, and repeated semiquavers.
Back at the beginning, the second of the two pianissimo statements should carefully be noted: here the music shifts up a semitone into F major, and this use of the flattened second degree of the scale (and the “Neopolitan” harmony which it gives rise to) colours much of this opening Allegro (as it also does in the outer movements of the near-contemporary “Appassionata” sonata). But not all is unrest: terseness can quickly give rise to lyricism, and this is no better illustrated than in the transition to the second subject, where the ominous oscillating semiquavers in the viola gradually transform their character completely, and become a gently rocking accompaniment over which the second subject proper expands like a ray of sunlight. There is a finely balanced symmetry about this movement which makes the observing of both designated repeats in performance especially important (not least because of the potential loss of several seconds of music in its first time bars!): once this is done the effect of the extended coda, which contains yet another passage of startling harmonic subtlety, becomes that much more powerful.
Both Czerny and the violinist Karl Holz have reported that the inspiration for the Adagio came from gazing at the starlit sky, “contemplating the harmony of the spheres”; and Beethoven’s entreaty at its head (“please play this piece with great feeling”) suggests that for him musical expression had already taken on an extra dimension, in that there was rather more to it than sound patterns and notes in a score. Despite its cosmic origins this is intensely human music, and must be one of the most serenely untroubled pieces he ever wrote (how significant might it be that the famous letter to the “Immortal Beloved” may have been written around this time….?).
The sketchbooks reveal that an elegant minuet in E major was originally projected for the third movement; but what eventually materialised was an Allegretto in the tonic minor, which looks back to the restless mood of the opening Allegro. Here melody has become so integrated with accompaniment that a note is sounded by different instruments on every quaver beat of the bar. In the trio section (marked Maggiore) we come across the second Russian folksong to be used in these quartets – this one (also used by Mussorgsky in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov) was originally a slow hymn of praise to God; but Beethoven’s irreverent treatment of it seems somewhat mocking, to say the least!
Each of the first three movements had been based in the tonic key (either minor or major); and although the finale is also in E minor (right to very end, indeed) it begins with a jolly thump in C major, but then quickly modulates (if briefly) to its rightful key. This happens with each return of the rondo theme, which occurs so frequently that one can only marvel at how Beethoven could get away with such hilarious recklessness! But that is just part and parcel of the tremendous exhilaration with which this Presto seems to be bursting at the seams; and which remains right through the final up-tempo romp to that concluding E minor chord.
With the violin concerto on the horizon it is perhaps not surprising that the first violin parts in all the Rasumovsky quartets should at times seem as if the composer were practising for what was to come! And what a succession of masterpieces that endearingly lyrical work proved to crown: at Op.61, it followed three piano sonatas (the Waldstein, the F major Op.54, and the Appassionata), the triple concerto, the Eroica and fourth symphonies – and these three rather extraordinary, not to say revolutionary, string quartets! Indeed, it would be hard to believe that any performances of these works should ever be mounted that did not attempt to project in some way their innovatory stance; and no sensitive listener can surely fail to be moved and astounded by the mind blowing originality of both the Eroica and these Rasumovsky quartets. But as they have become ever more familiar, along with over two hundred years’ worth of music which succeeded them, our perspectives become distorted, our perceptions blurred. This is the price we pay for our musical saturation, for hearing music of the past with ears tuned to the present – or, at least, to the late 19th century. The point is that in the Op.18 quartets Beethoven was still working with the tools of the eighteenth (and living through its final years, of course) – not only the musical vocabulary of the epoch but the musicians as well, together with their deeply rooted conventions of performance practice. It is this which we have most lost sense of, and which would throw into startling relief the boldness with which he was challenging those very conventions: their regularity of phrase structure, their non-aggressive articulation and attack, hierarchy of the bar line, controlled dynamic range, purity of sound, concept of tempo: we need to be fully aware of these and all other aspects of the status quo, in order fully to grasp the energy and sheer arrogance with which he was openly confronting them, and burying them for ever as new instrumental techniques (and instruments as well!) had to be evolved to meet his demands.
And so it is in the context of performance that we can most readily appreciate these ground breaking quartets and symphonies – just as the early piano sonatas should properly be approached in the light of their birth via the composer’s own questing fingers. So long as we are able to exhume those traditions, which Beethoven himself ultimately dismantled, there is much here to rediscover, much excitement to experience afresh. It is to be hoped that listeners to this music will never fail to be swept back to the heady fervour of central Europe at the dawn of a new century: post 1789, but still mid-Revolution!
© Alan George
