Beethoven: String Quartet in E flat, Op.74 “Harp” (1809)
Poco Adagio– Allegro
Adagio ma non troppo
Presto – Più presto quasi prestissimo –
Allegretto con variazioni – Allegro
The first of two glorious quartets in E flat major – traditionally regarded as Beethoven’s “heroic” key; the first movement may indeed be heroic (for the first violin, anyway….!), but few such pretensions are to be found in the second of the pair, Op.127 (except that, having crossed the great dividing threshold into the private world of the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the process of creating these works at all, in the most abject and adverse of circumstances, might by its very nature be seen as heroic).
Of course the composer himself did not give this quartet its title: in the majority of cases such works of the Classical era acquired their nicknames sometime after the event, arising out of a superficial characteristic in the music, or bearing some relation to the place of composition or first performance – or perhaps even a circumstance connected with the same. In Beethoven’s Op.74 the reference is obviously to a “superficial characteristic” in the first movement – but to point out its exact location would be to insult the listener’s sense of perception…. The effect is not especially harp-like, all the pizzicati notwithstanding; but what delicate stroke of originality is underlined for us by that title! We listen out for it, we hear it, and we never forget it. The same effect is brilliantly transformed to herald the recapitulation, and again to round off the movement, and its function (in purely analytical terms) is simply to embellish and to intensify essentially slow moving harmony in a movement whose inter-thematic complexities otherwise make for intriguing and absorbing analysis on paper – and invigorating listening in performance. This movement is as characteristic of middle period Beethoven as one is likely to encounter in the string quartets, and those listeners who love his symphonies but find the quartets more problematic should quickly feel at home here.
Mention of the lead-up to the recapitulation prompts a brief diversion: Beethoven developed this moment in a sonata structure almost into a mini art form in itself, and if there is one other composer who can rival him in the sheer skill of building up expectation at this point, then it is Mendelssohn. The “harp” music may well suggest the delicate harmonic diversions soon to be realised by Schubert; but elsewhere it is the language of Mendelssohn that keeps coming to mind: notably in the introduction, and in the foreshadowing of what we have come to think of as the later composer’s “fairy” style music (for example, in the scherzo, which Beethoven – strangely – marks leggieramente). Yet Mendelssohn had barely arrived on this planet by then! Born in the same year as the composition of this very quartet, in fact; yet long before reaching manhood he had developed an extraordinary insight into these quartets – as reflected in his own early examples in E flat and A minor, and eventually his last completed work (the F minor quartet), all proudly and unashamedly proclaiming his reverence and homage. So these sounds we now hear as “Mendelssohnian” turn out of be those particular aspects of Beethoven which the younger composer drew on in the development of his own language.
There follows an Adagio in A flat major – since the “Pathétique” sonata a favourite key for lyrical love-song. So is the slow movement of this quartet truly a love-song? The famous but deeply touching letter to the “Immortal Beloved” was still three years into the future, but who knows whether her influence (whoever she may have been….) was not foreshadowed in this tender and expressive outpouring – all the more eloquent for not having words to clarify its emotions. Or maybe we have to thank Countess Therese von Brunswick, with whom he is known to have been in love at the time. The ensuing scherzo is both vigorous and shadowy (and Mendelssohnian!), and includes a particularly forthright trio which, after the reprise of the scherzo, receives a second hearing; so the scherzo must return once more, but this time played softly throughout, its boundless energy firmly suppressed (just like in Symphony 7), so that at the end the “shadowy” element is prolonged into a coda which finally comes to a half close, thereby serving as a link to the finale. Here is a fairly simple and straightforward – some would say conventional – set of variations on a theme which, apart from its cadential bars, contains one rhythm only. The variations themselves are alternately rhythmic and melodic, and make no attempt at the incredible resourcefulness and profundity of other more ambitious and extended such movements.
All in all, then, a work of considerable significance and originality, yet one that – even after its briefly rousing conclusion – leaves us with a sense of not being entirely fulfilled. The ever perceptive Marion Scott seems to have put her finger on its essential spirit: “A gallant work, a great work, but not one of his greatest because in its outward panoply of music there is a little more of the glory of this world than of the glory of the spirit”.
© Alan George
