What does the music of Beethoven have in common with the physics of string theory? Violinist Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet sees more of a connection than you might suspect. Discussing Beethoven’s Große Fuge in an interview for Carnegie Hall’s new Emerson String Quartet Sound Insights website, Drucker makes this comparison: “Perhaps Beethoven imagined an almost multi-dimensional acoustical space in which these ideas can unfold without getting in each other’s way. It’s almost like string theory—the idea that in addition to the dimensions open to our perceptions, there are other pockets of dimensions hidden within the fabric of reality. Perhaps that’s what Beethoven was imagining here.”

The Emersons will play the Große Fuge as part of their performance of the complete cycle of the Beethoven string quartets in Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage starting on May 31. The mind-bending qualities of the Große Fuge certainly justify the analogy. Ever since its premiere, this revolutionary piece has shocked audiences and challenged performers with its defiance of expectation, its brilliant structure, and its exacting technical demands. Beethoven was too nervous to attend the premiere of the piece, which was originally the conclusion of the Op. 130 String Quartet (and will be played as such by the Emersons). He waited at a nearby tavern for reports of its reception. When he heard that the massive concluding fugue was met with baffled incomprehension, Beethoven was furious. “Cattle!” he roared. “Asses!”

Though Beethoven may have been angry that the fugue was not understood, he had remained true to his artistic vision. Viewing music as more than a pleasant diversion, he very much valued its provocative potential. “My favorite way of thinking about this is to imagine Beethoven as a mad scientist in his laboratory,” says Drucker, “mixing things that really shouldn’t go together and then finding the explosive results. He's unleashing energy that had never been unleashed before in any classical music. In that sense too it seems like some kind of nuclear experiment.”

Yet as much as Beethoven’s late quartets anticipated and shaped the direction of Western classical music, they were also firmly rooted in earlier traditions, some of which the Emerson String Quartet will also explore in its Perspectives cycle. In addition to the eight concerts of the Beethoven quartets in context, the events include seven prelude concerts of chamber works illuminating the program to follow; a Discovery Day with performances, talks, demonstrations, and film; and a Professional Training Workshop for three emerging string quartets with a public master class and two concerts by the workshop participants in Weill Recital Hall. Taken as a whole, this sweeping array of activities not only brings the listener closer to the quartets themselves but also offers a look at the influences that shaped Beethoven’s quartets as well as the influence his quartets exerted on future generations of composers. Drucker has an apt analogy ready at hand: “I think of Beethoven in his late quartets as being like the Roman god Janus, usually depicted with two faces: one looking backward, the other looking forward.”