Re-hearing Op. 131

One sees a decisive shift in Beethoven reception in the late nineteenth century. The late quartets, in particular, were starting to be considered as a special group of “very late” masterpieces, cut off from contextual and social moorings and expressive only of Beethoven’s innermost thoughts and feelings. In the case of Op. 131, the meanings of the work became yet more restricted in later reception: this penultimate work is often considered to be Beethoven’s melancholy swansong. A rhetoric of “lack” emerges in the discourse about the C-sharp minor quartet from Wagner onwards, including seminal twentieth-century analytical accounts. At the same time, scholars seem to grapple with the wealth—perhaps overabundance—of material in the quartet by repeatedly showing how it is unified, in twentieth-century analytical terms. Only recently has this view started to change, so that scholars re-hear the work in ways that celebrate its plenitude.

“A new kind of part writing”

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Beethoven’s two statements that the work shows “a new kind of part writing” and “not less fantasy” than his previous works. The chapters explore, respectively, what each of these statements might have meant in terms of Beethoven’s compositional perspective, and in terms of performance and reception in his day. His comment on a “new kind of part-writing” is especially noteworthy, given that Op. 131 was his penultimate quartet. In light of the considerable experimentation in the middle-period quartets, one might have thought that by the 1820s Beethoven would have exhausted most possibilities for innovating in string quartet part-writing. To further explore what Beethoven meant, I go back to sketches and notes relating to the middle-period quartets, in particular his new idea of composing and hearing all four parts at once, which he noted down in a sketchbook around the time he was composing Op. 74. How does this new idea about the compositional process relate to the late quartets and Op. 131 in particular? I consider evidence from the sketches for Op. 131 as well as the early reception of the finished product. Adolph Bernhard Marx, for example, draws attention to the late quartets’ “Bachian counterpoint.” I focus in particular on the variations of the fourth movement. My analyses draw attention to the unique nature of all four voices, and the sense in which each part is crafted with careful attention to the art and science of listening.

Popular and Early Reception

Chapter 2 takes in two popular contemporary reception documents—a film and a TV drama—which reinforce themes found in the reception of the work from Wagner onwards: lack, loss, and tragedy. The typical conflation of biography and work in the reception of late Beethoven is nicely exemplified by the 2012 film A Late Quartet. Sequences from the film help one to understand this work as a portrayal of struggle brought on by lack—of health, of power, of ability to express passion and love, and of time. The later reception, especially the popular later reception, contrasts sharply with the early reception of Op. 131, which underscores fantasy, fecundity, and plenitude.

Introduction

IN THE LIVES OF great artists, the late or last works are often considered to be the greatest, the flowering or crowning of all that came before. This phenomenon, the valuing of “late” creations, artistic creations in particular, is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in connection with Beethoven. The late works, especially the late quartets, late piano sonatas, and the last symphony (the Ninth), are much discussed, much performed, and highly prized. In the case of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 (1826), this canonization is everywhere apparent. The work is not only firmly a part of the scholarly canon, the performing canon, and the pedagogical canon, but also makes its presence felt in popular culture, notably in film (for example, ...

“Like an overly large fantasy”

Audiences at Iganz Schuppanzigh’s 1820s quartet concerts in Vienna would have expected a string quartet to be a weighty, four-movement work with an emphasis on a sonata form, thematische Arbeit (motivic working) between parts, and an overall tonal plan based on one or two primary key areas. Beethoven no doubt had such connoisseur listeners in mind with this work, but was pushing far beyond that traditional idea of the string quartet. Op. 131 is full of all sorts of different kinds of writing. The chapter explores the quartet in terms of fantasia, a word found frequently in connection with Op. 131, starting with a discussion of the free fantasia as a work exhibiting apparently chaotic musings over a highly logical ground plan. As Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach pointed out in his influential discussion of the subject, there is method in the seeming madness of the free fantasia, especially as regards harmonic links. The chapter considers the entire work as a fantasia, exploring the clever linkage of seemingly disparate ideas within and between movements. The fantasia form might seem the opposite of the formalized string quartet genre as it was starting to be understood by Beethoven’s time, but in one important respect it was not. The free fantasia was a work for the connoisseur: as Carl Friedrich Michaelis noted in his article on music and humor of 1807, the free fantasia, in particular, reveals to the connoisseur listener the soul (or inventive repository) of the composer.

Epilogue

OP. 131 HAS BEEN read as a tragic, deafness-induced chaos or as an innovative triumph taking the potential of music closer to the sublime and perhaps the divine. Was it an over-ambitious jumbled patchwork? Or was it a deliberate composition of various Stücke to achieve a whole wherein exultation pays tribute to the depth that melancholia adds to the human condition? Might the ...

Op. 131 and the Rise of Attentive Listening

This chapter begins with a discussion of Mark Andre’s ensemble work riss 2 (2014) as an alternative window on the modern-day reception of Op. 131—the two works can similarly disrupt our ontological understanding of musical works in terms of structure, sound transformations, and especially sense of time. I then step back to consider the larger context in which Op. 131 was originally heard, setting it within an emerging ideology of “serious listening” in Vienna in the early nineteenth century. I consider the early nineteenth century as an era in which the seeds for silent listening were sown, by key agents of change, who tried to adjust audience behavior at string quartet concerts—influential figures such as Schuppanzigh, Beethoven, and reviewers for the Wiener Theater-Zeitung and Viennese Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the 1810s and ’20s. Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet can be understood as a work that took part in this move to instill silent and serious listening. However, the climate in Vienna was not was not such that Beethoven (and Schuppanzigh) could enjoy much success with this particular listening project. The “romantic listener” does not represent a nineteenth-century norm, and was certainly not the norm in Beethoven’s Vienna. But the compelling ideology of listening and associated habits that started to develop there—especially reverent silence—continue to influence powerfully our concert hall behaviors today.