glimpses of a treasure

[Disclaimer: long, personal post from a Saturday morning at 5:30am when I should be catching up on precious sleep, but woke up anyways.]

I hope you can rediscover a long-lost of yours today--Happy Sunday!

I woke up this morning with this beautiful movement swirling through my head (just remembering little snippets of a few cadences) because I am a coaching it this semester. I feel like I accessed a different part of myself that has been dormant for years. I sat down and listened to it just to remind myself of how it goes with old-school score study catching myself going into harmonic analysis on the fly by accident just trying to understand it better (accessing conservatory habits full of cobwebs that have stuck). The Alban Berg videos still never disappoint. The harmonic language, the texture, the motivic development, the melodic arc... my heart!

I can't believe this is his entry into the world of quartets, op. 18 No. 1--not even no. 6-- written when Beethoven was in his late 20s. I hear hints of Razumovskys and even c# minor in this movement, and am moved to tears. And then I find out that he had written a complete quartet before this as his real op. 18, no.1 and then destroyed it, once he got to this version. I love this picture of him at his messy piano.

I am a tad jealous that this is the piece of chamber music that my group gets to experience as a real string quartet for the first time, not having much experience with string quartets before this.

But then I went down a rabbit hole of my favorite Beethoven quartet movements, and I feel like I am hearing them again for the first time, simultaneously so familiar, but so much that I notice for the first time, or had forgotten.

What a world that this lives in it. What will my grandchildren say when they hear it especially with the nature we are leaving them with?

"We can learn about it from exceptional people of our own culture, and from other cultures less destructive than ours. I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children…" (Wendell Berry)


Note by Misha Amory
"The opus 18 quartets, particularly opus 18 #1, have Haydn’s stamp deeply imprinted on them, in respect to their geniality, innovation and wit. However, there is another layer to these early chamber works of Beethoven, a kind of hard-edged brilliance or impetuosity, which one does not encounter in Haydn’s music. It is probably meaningless to describe a composition as sounding “young”, but listening to Beethoven’s early quartets, we can’t help being aware of his impatience and ambition at this time in his life, his eagerness to prove his worth.

From a player’s point of view, these demands of brilliance and impetuous character make themselves felt at once. In opus 18 #1’s first, third and fourth movements, all of which are essentially genial and sunny, we need to grapple with Beethoven’s quite rapid tempo markings, bravura passage work, rather complex contrapuntal writing and uncompromising unisons; at the same time, the work is a child of the classical period, and requires the same symmetry, grace and transparency as a quartet of Haydn or Mozart. The rather extraordinary second movement is another story. In this movement, according to one of Amenda’s letters, Beethoven sought to depict, in musical terms, the tomb scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Beethoven’s choice of key, d minor, hearkens back to Mozart’s stormy and tragic associations with that key. But Beethoven’s treatment of the string quartet goes beyond what Mozart’s own great d minor Quartet attempted. In that earlier work, especially in the first movement, grief is the enveloping entity, surrounding all musical events; but in Beethoven’s quartet we are asked to confront tragedy head-on, almost as an adversary. The opening is hushed, yet there is a feeling of heaviness in the steady rhythm of the accompaniment that oppresses the whispered theme. Although sweeter passages intervene, suggesting remembrance of happier times, there is never any doubt as to the movement’s ultimate message. Particularly in the middle and in the coda, where the quartet is whipped up to a frenzy, denoting a truly Beethovenian raging against fate, it is clear that we have left the classical era behind, in some expressive sense, and we get a foretaste of what this composer will become in his later years.

Thus almost uniquely among his quartets, opus 18 #1 is a window affording a glimpse of Beethoven at a turning point. We hear Beethoven the student, absorbing and imitating Haydn’s wit and capacity for surprise, as well as his prowess in quartet writing; Beethoven the classicist, handling standard structures with well-proportioned elegance and showcasing his melodic gifts, as he had done in several other works already; and Beethoven the self-determining artist, seeking to stamp his own voice ever more strongly on music that otherwise dwells within the formal constructs of his predecessors."



notes by the violist of the {Brentano Quartet}