The Opus 76 Quartet

Quartet in Bb Major, Op. 130

Today we think of the late quartets (five of them, plus the Grosse Fuge) as a group, but three belong to a set Beethoven was writing for Prince Galitzin of Russia. Op. 130 was the last of these. Sketches appear for the Bb quartet in March 1825, and Beethoven remarked buoyantly in summer that the piece would be finished imminently, which it certainly was not, requiring instead until the end of the year. 

The Bb major quartet is designed with a complex, rhetorical opening movement with imposing introduction, and an even more elaborate finale. There are four other movements in the center, all of a predominately light or lyrical character. Altogether, the construction is reminiscent of a Baroque suite, looking to the past in much the same way Beethoven adopted a church mode in Op. 132. He felt a strong personal connection to this quartet, which he called “dear” (lieb), especially the cavatina fifth movement. 

The first movement has an exploratory feeling like the previous two quartets, but the path diverges sharply in the Presto, a short scherzo with a contrasting section that seems like a diabolical study for the first violin. Eerie scales ending in gruff barks usher back the main theme. Next comes an andante of profoundly beneficent spirit with a trace of philosophical humor. A German dance, so declared in Italian by Beethoven, seems simple but contains devices otherwise not found until the 20th century, like an unaccompanied musical palindrome passed between the parts. The song-like cavatina moved Beethoven himself unlike any of his other music, according to violinist Karl Holz who played in the premiere. It includes a thematically transformed passage marked beklemmt (constricted/uneasy), written in rhythms that give exactly such a feeling.

The composer waited nearby after the March 1826 premiere given by his trusty Schuppanzigh-led ensemble, only to be told by Holz that the audience liked the middle movements better than the massive concluding fugue. For its misjudgment, Beethoven supposedly pronounced the audience to be farm animals of varying breeds! We can’t take this tone too seriously given the affection he had for the whole of the quartet. 

Beethoven had met the publisher Matthias Artaria after finishing the music in order to shop around the printing rights, as he often did zealously late in life. Beethoven awarded Artaria the distinction, resulting in three separate publication cities for the Galitzin quartets, further complicating Beethoven’s business affairs. Artaria assured him he would label Op. 130 the “third quartet,” cementing a fugue as the conclusion of the three commissioned by Prince Galitzin, just as a fugue had ended the “Razumovsky” group many years earlier. This fugue, however, was probably the most challenging music Beethoven ever wrote as far as listeners were concerned. In the fall of 1826, Artaria cleverly used the excuse of a rewrite for a piano duet version of the fugue as a way to also ask Beethoven for a new finale, more manageable for players and thus marketable for the edition. (This new finale is what you will hear tonight- KS).

Beethoven traveled with his nephew Karl, who was discharged just days earlier from a mental hospital for a suicide attempt that summer, to property of his brother Johann in Gneixendorf, where he wrote the requested new finale. It is a jaunty but still sophisticated conclusion to this gigantic quartet, and constitutes the last substantial music Beethoven finished. He had a bitter argument with Johann during the stay and left with Karl under primitive winter travel conditions, which brought on his final illness. A complete performance of the new version of Op. 130 only happened after Beethoven’s death. 

Prince Galitzin never fully paid the debt he owed Beethoven for the three quartets, postponing remittance just as the composer had initially postponed work on the music. He can hardly have been happy with the musical results, which were likely beyond his comprehension. The fee was finally paid by his posthumous estate to Beethoven’s… in 1852, over two decades later.

Quartet in c# minor, Op. 131

Mozart might be said to be the first composer for whom specific musical keys evoked associated moods or characteristics. Beethoven continued that, and c# minor was a rare but inimitable choice for him in the “Moonlight” piano sonata and this quartet. Both pieces start with slow movements of deep melancholy. But the similarities end there.

Beethoven had just written the Grosse Fuge as the finale to Op. 130. His flow of ideas was too large for any one work, often leading to the same musical motives and processes eliding into the next one. So Op. 131 starts with a fugue, albeit very different from the Grosse Fuge, which is almost savagely aggressive at times. This fugue is more Bach-like, smoothly flowing but for the accents of emotional emphasis. It again focuses on a pair of half steps, the focal point of all the previous late quartets. More practically speaking, publishers had kept asking Beethoven for additional quartets, so it made sense to continue despite the fulfillment of his commission from Prince Galitzin.

Op. 131 occupied the first half of 1826, the last full year of Beethoven’s life. It proceeds through seven movements without pause, a design without parallel in his music. They have no even mildly descriptive titles unlike the two previous quartets. However, this quartet has been the subject of perhaps the most programmatic speculation of any, with writers in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century indulging in purple narratives of psychic states and internal landscapes. It was only in the twentieth century that Beethoven was held up as the patron saint of “abstract” music as opposed to Liszt and Wagner, who also claimed him as their spiritual ancestor. Wagner especially loved Op. 131. Famously, Beethoven called it his own favorite, though he was comically disparaging elsewhere, ascribing to it “less lack of imagination than before.”

Like most of the late quartets, the centerpiece of the c# minor is an extended slow movement in the form of variations, though most listeners would not recognize them as such. The scherzo contains probably the most memorable melodies, plus the special effect of sul ponticello, a glassy and usually undesirable sound produced by bowing close to the bridge. The quartet’s conclusion in major is, like the endings of Op. 132 and 133, fairly surprising and sudden. Even in the quick movements, we can hear Theodor Helm’s 1885 recognition of the late quartets as “wholly divorced from the outside world.”

Although Op. 131 was intended to be printed during Beethoven’s lifetime, it was delayed until summer 1827. Private performances of it include a deathbed reading for Franz Schubert in 1828 at his request, but a public concert record does not appear until 1835 in Vienna. The dedication was switched from friend and merchant J.N. Wolfmayer to a military officer who obtained a regimental place for Beethoven’s nephew Karl after the latter’s suicide attempt, otherwise a stigmatizing factor in Catholic Austria.