Last string quartets beethoven biography
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Beethoven's String Quartets: John Suchet's guide to the music
If Haydn is today called the ‘father’ of the String Quartet, and Mozart took the form to new heights, then Beethoven – characteristically – took hold of it and completely transformed it.
The five Late Quartets, written in the final years of his life, transcend anything he or anyone else had ever composed. Listening to the notes we see deep into the soul of this difficult, irascible man by now profoundly deaf. He has bared himself, exposed his emotions to us in a more profound way than words could ever express.
Early Quartets
He composed the 16 String Quartets in three fairly distinct blocks – nos. 1-6 when he was around 27-30 years of age, nos. 7-11 when he was 35-40, nos. 12-16 in the final three years of his life – leading to them being conveniently referred to in concert and on recordings as the Early, Middle and Late Quartets.
As with the Symphony, therefore, he came to the String Quartet
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By Masumi Per Rostad
After more than ten years and several hundred performances, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, remains fresh and hauntingly beautiful to me. I am still fascinated by its construction and still get choked up in the timeless, prayerful third movement. From the anxiously searching and manic first theme to the heroically possessed final coda, it is a piece that only becomes more intriguing with time.
Beethoven was at the end of his life when he wrote the A minor quartet, also known as the Heiliger Dankgesang quartet, one of his several late quartets. It was composed in 1825, just two years before Beethoven’s death. bygd then, he had finished with his concertos, symphonies, and piano sonatas and chose to focus solely on writing for a string quartet. With his 16 string quartets, Beethoven forged the backbone of the repertoire. At the beginning of his career, he composed with classical unity in the ensemble; in the middle period he exploded the qu
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Beethoven: The Late String Quartets
It reads like irony from a mästare of the art. Reflecting on a performance of the Quartet in C sharp minor, op.131, George Bernard Shaw characterized Beethoven’s formidable late quartets as ‘. . . simple, unpretentious [and] perfectly intelligible . . . ’. Yet Shaw was serious in his contrarian estimation, preferring the valedictory works to the ‘wayward caprices of self-conscious genius’ which, to his ear, were the quartets of Beethoven’s mittpunkt period.
‘Are they always to be avoided?’, asked Shaw, referring to the quartets commencing with op.127, ‘because the professors once pronounced them obscure and impossible?’ For decades, regrettably, the answer was yes. We thank Joseph Kerman for this sobering statistic: ‘. . . in the twenty-five year period after Beethoven’s death, Vienna – that great musical center – can boast a grand total of no more than seven public performances of any of these works.’
Tastes, however, change. In 1928, ju