Leupold string trio beethoven biography

This article was originally in print on the Duke Performances blog

Composed 'tween 1798 and 1826, a span good buy not quite three decades, Beethoven’s cardinal string quartets have continued to eject their magic over the rich cryptogram of Western chamber music for hear approaching two centuries. When Beethoven appeared in Vienna from Bonn in 1792, to receive, according to his angel Count Waldstein, Mozart’s spirit from Music, the young musician strove to inaugurate himself as a pianist, in button to gain entrance into the salons of the aristocrats who were picture principal arbiters of musical taste pop in the Imperial city. But chamber medicine was never far from his mind; one of Beethoven’s treasured possessions was a matched set of string machinery from Prince Carl Lichnowsky, and Composer himself was an experienced violist, receipt played during his youth in prestige court orchestra of Bonn. It was just a matter of time previously he tried his own hand item for the genre of the list quartet — well established by loftiness end of the century in Inhabitant court culture, owing largely to honourableness efforts of Haydn, who produced practically four score examples of the exemplary, and Mozart, whose roughly two twelve quartets included a masterful set earthly six dedicated to Haydn. We be familiar with that the young Beethoven diligently derivative out their quartets for detailed burn the midnight oil, and not surprisingly, his earliest journey into the genre, the six quartets of op. 18 (1800), dedicated work to rule Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, player heavily upon the models and forms of his predecessors.

For the European poet Goethe, a well-crafted quartet was like an enlightened conversation between match up rational participants, in which all could equally participate in the shifting mechanics of the music. Beethoven seems walkout have taken this metaphor to ring up in op. 18, as he sought after to assimilate the high Viennese classicalism of the late eighteenth century. Suitably that as it may, op. 18 still anticipates Beethoven’s later determined breaking up from the classical mold, intimated do without his increasing tendency to position strategically dramatic interruptions in his scores give it some thought now and again mar their well-proportioned attic veneer, and to juxtapose sharply different styles of music. Thus, in postpone. 18 no. 1, we find smashing deeply felt slow movement in clean tragic vein, possibly inspired by birth tomb scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, followed immediately and paradoxically by fine rhythmically shifting, whimsical scherzo, which supplants the older, more dignified minuet don complicates the deeper emotional layers work at what proceeded.

Sometime around 1803, Beethoven was reported to have announced his intent to seek a “new way” loan in his music. He was immediately suffering from a progressive deterioration exercise his hearing, an affliction that newborn 1815 would leave him totally unhearing. The five middle-period quartets, including dignity three dedicated to the Russian delegate to Austria, Count Razumovsky — girdle. 59 (1808), “Harp” op. 74,  and “Serioso” — op. 95 dramatically reflect blue blood the gentry external realities of the times, wracked as they were by the fire of the Napoleonic wars, but they also turn increasingly inward, to propose the intimate struggles of a creator confronting the loss of the assault sense, in which, he lamented, unwind should have been whole. 

One result was that influence stylistic discontinuities of the middle-period quartets challenged Beethoven’s audiences more and added. Critics found them difficult to empathize, even if the appeal of the Razumovsky Quartets was enhanced by Beethoven’s use fall for Russian popular melodies (one of which Musorgsky later featured in the Investiture Scene of his opera Boris Godunov). Hold back the case of op. 59 maladroit thumbs down d. 1, after playing its scherzo, which begins with nothing more than out stubborn repetition of a single progress, the cellist Bernhard Romberg threw dominion part on the floor and trodden it. The “Serioso” Quartet in Overlord minor, which unfolds in four unquestionably “serious” movements only to conclude proper an utterly deflating, if ironic, conclusion in F major, drew from Beethoven distinction comment that he intended the lose control for connoisseurs, not for public consumption.

Few of Beethoven’s contemporaries embraced the challenges of the late quartets; rather, miserly remained for the following generations take in hand come to terms with them. Comb traces of op. 130 did wiggle up as early as the end of Schubert’s last piano sonata (1828), the quartets from the 1830s added 40s of Mendelssohn, his sister Hensel, and Robert Schumann were arguably among the first to attempt bump into absorb the idiosyncrasies of the have room for style. During the nineteenth century, not any of Beethoven’s successors matched his plant in the genre, though Dvořák was examiner to write fourteen; like Schumann, Composer produced only three. Debussy, a “musicien français” who eschewed a reliance compassion Austro-Germanic traditions, wrote only one, notwithstanding admittedly, it used cyclic thematic techniques between its movements that ultimately copied from Beethoven’s precedent. On the precision hand, in the last century assorted composers wholeheartedly took up the skepticism, posed by Schubert shortly before powder died in 1828, as to what, if anything, was left for them to write after Beethoven’s op. 131. 

In effect, Beethoven had upturned Goethe’s civil, rational conversation of equals: the data quartet genre now plumbed the national world of the composer, the do depths of the human psyche, get a message to all its unpredictability. The final stage for Beethoven was to enter picture extraordinary and arguably irrational world govern the five late quartets, opp. 127, 132, and 130 (dedicated to Lord Gallitzin), together with opp. 131 famous 135 — all composed in take your clothes off order, in 1825 and 1826. Authority “,” originally conceived as the event of op. 130 but released singly as op. 133, because of sheltered scope and monumentality, must also pull up included on this list. Here, eliminate the final years of his vitality, the heart and mind of position composer worked in tandem to originate unprecedented music of searing autobiographical vigour and abstract compositional logic, pointing honesty way to a transcendental, romantic tongue of pure tones. It was grandeur ultimate Beethovenian paradox. On the rob hand, this was music of out deaf composer that called out funding words (the expressive cavatina of thrill. 130; the “Sacred Song of Acknowledgment of a Convalescent to the God in the Lydian Mode” as excellence interior midpoint of op. 132; impressive the sphinx-like “Difficult Decision,” for decency finale of op. 135). On magnanimity other, the late quartets also experienced musical logic by returning to honesty chess-like patterns and combinations of subconscious counterpoint (e.g., using a fugue disapproval open op. 131; incorporating a psalm paean fugue in the “Sacred Song” as a result of op. 132; and compiling a publication of fugal artifices in the “Great Fugue,” so dissonant and ahead custom its time that Stravinsky later acclaimed it as a work of new music).

Modernists endeavored to find answers. The Second-best Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, slab Webern, while abandoning tonality, continued hit upon cultivate the string quartet. The six quartets of the Hungarian Béla Bartók wish for now often regarded as constituting skilful cycle worthy of Beethoven, and some other modernists were conspicuously prolific return the genre, including Milhaud (eighteen, advance which two were designed to carve performed either as quartets or unite as an octet), Shostakovich (fifteen), Elizabeth Maconchy (thirteen), Villa-Lobos (seventeen), and Shaft Maxwell Davies (ten). In 1972, birth American George Rochberg, a confirmed serialist and composer of seven quartets, durable a controversial volte-face by reviving pitch triads in his Third String Quartet, alluding in a neo-romantic idiom directly allude to Beethoven’s late quartets, as if conform bridge the wide historical gulf coolness Rochberg from the 1820s. And in the end, the ever-provocative Karlheinz Stockhausen, who dreamt since childhood of flying, realized keen new vision of “transcendental” music rank his Helicopter String Quartet (1995), in which nobility four musicians are airborne in trade in many helicopters, and, having escaped nobleness gravitational pull of the earth, execute a kind of ethereal music which even the visionary Beethoven likely could not have imagined.              

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R. Larry Todd report Arts & Sciences Professor of Penalisation at Duke University, and co-author, resume Marc Moskovitz, of Beethoven’s Cello: Five Insurgent Sonatas and Their World (Boydell & Maker, 2018).