Beethoven: String Quartet in A minor, Op.132 (1825)
Assai sostenuto – Allegro
Allegro ma non tanto
Molto Adagio (“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”)
Alla marcia, assai vivace – più allegro
Allegro appassionato – Presto

“He who wishes to touch the heart must seek his inspiration from on high. Without this there will be naught but sounds and notes, a soulless body…”

Beethoven to Max Strumff (1824)
“You will ask where my ideas come from. I cannot say for certain. They come uncalled, sometimes independently, sometimes in association with other things. It seems to me that I could wrest them from Nature herself with my own hands, as I go walking in the woods…”

Beethoven to Louis Schlösser
“….she cannot cook daintily nor in a way beneficial to health. She behaved at once very pertly when told about it…”

Beethoven to Carl Holz (2^nd violin of Schuppanzigh Quartet), 1825
“Now about your copy, my good friend, Obligatissimo – ma, the signs piano, crescendo, diminuendo are terribly neglected, – and often, very often in the wrong place. For heaven’s sake please impress on Rumpel to write everything as it stands. The crescendos are often intentionally placed after the notes, the slurs just as they now stand. The notes are right, only understand me rightly.”

Beethoven to Holz (about the parts of Op.132)
“My Dear Son, only nothing further – only come to my arms, you shall hear no harsh word. You need only expect from me the most loving help and care.”

Beethoven to his nephew Carl (1825)
The traumas and frustrations of Beethoven’s last years are sad truths reflected in his letters and in the many contemporary eyewitness accounts. The battered piano and conversation books (witness to his deafness), the financial worries, dissatisfaction with inept servants (and cooks!), continual illness, and the painful responsibility for his errant nephew and ward Carl all burdened the man intolerably. Yet a vibrancy, energy, and continual humour shine through Beethoven’s prose, and in his last compositions he orders masterfully what he was so pitifully unable to control in daily life.

The opening movement of Op.132 is a drama in which elements lyrical and rhythmic are forever being dislocated and interrupted by vigorous semiquaver passages, single bars of adagio reflections and even, at one point, silence followed by apparent bland irrelevance. It is a movement of plangent contrasts, where the dotted rhythm of the first subject becomes an obsessive agent of both generation and disintegration. Beethoven forces the moments of pure lyricism into a greater poignancy by making them short-lived. Every major crescendo in the exposition fractures the linear argument and is followed by a new attempt to provide stability. A poised march-like entry lasts but four bars and falls easy prey to the dotted motif; and the second subject is allowed only three fleeting bitter-sweet appearances. 

One must be wary of traditional structural nomenclature. There are clearly, one might say, two recapitulations (the first in the dominant key) or, alternatively, three expositions replete with development and a substantial coda. The determined answer to the traditional section repeats of classical sonata form? The effect is fantasia-like: calculated, yet utterly spontaneous, the poignant apogée of Sturm und Drang.

If the first movement seems concerned with arresting momentum, the second by contrast is an essay in perpetual motion. The first section contains only two elements, combined in a subtle and continuous web which, for all its contrapuntal brilliance, sounds droll rather than didactic. The melodic material must have been inspired by the minuet of Mozart’s A major quartet K.464, but the “great duple game” of including aural 2/4 bars was a particular favourite of Haydn’s. The central section spurns all counterpoint with a wayward dance theme from an earlier piano Allemande which, in this incarnation, takes the art of concealing the bar line to inspired heights: a stream of monody, introduced by a bucolic drone, which brooks scarcely a breath.

The slow movement heading could be translated as “Holy song of thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode”. The quartet had been completed in July 1825, after more than a month’s delay caused by illness. Beethoven had made a close study of liturgical music, and of Palestrina in particular, while he was working on the Missa Solemnis (1818-23) and had incorporated a section of music in the Dorian mode in his Incarnatus. There is no attempt by Beethoven to integrate modal tonality into his “ordinary” musical language: he incorporates it seemingly to produce an atmosphere of mystic solemnity and worldly transcendence, enhanced by both the very slow tempo and the scoring. It is a miraculous vision (Blake might have called it “threefold vision”): utterly sincere, utterly apposite, utterly contemporary. Twice this vision is confronted with the terrestrial vibrancy of a D major passage marked Neue Kraft fühlend (“vitality regained”) and characterised by widespread melodic gestures, sonorous textures, trills, brilliant decorations and ecstatic palpitations. In the final Lydian section the hymn, austere at the opening of the movement, has flowered and Beethoven exhorts the performers to play with the deepest emotion (mit innigster Empfindung). 

The march which follows is short, urbane and epigrammatic. It would sit prettily in any serenade or cassation and provides a perfect reawakening to more familiar mundane worlds. Its bridge to the last movement, by way of a dramatic recitative, is not without significance if one remembers that the finale was originally projected as an instrumental last movement to the Ninth symphony. Both the rhythm of the march and the demonstrative nature of the first violin recitative recall basic elements of the first movement. Having dissipated the inevitable meditative tension caused by the testing serenity of the Heiliger Dankgesang Beethoven whips up the emotions with that most clichéd of musical devices (the operatic recitative) followed by the most pregnant of silences. 

The finale itself has an impassioned waltz-like theme: Beethoven’s apotheosis of the “valse triste”. It must have been a great favourite of Schumann, Mendelssohn (witness his own A minor quartet, Op.13) and, in particular, Brahms. Although there is an ecstatic presto conclusion in A major Beethoven eschews either recourse to multiple tonic re-iterations, or to the kind of virtuosic fireworks which end Op.59 No.3 or Op.95. Textures are refined, a poignant and wilting octave melody for the outer parts, bustling quavers for the inner – a different coin of virtuosity. Heart and head, so perfectly balanced throughout the Quartet, triumph in unity.

Dr Christopher Rowland (1946–2007)
Leader of the Fitzwilliam String Quartet from 1974 to 1984 (including the Decca recording of this quartet)