The Emersons on Beethoven

David Finckel and Eugene Drucker discuss the influence of the quartets (3:41)

Background

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Beethoven to succeeding generations of composers. The string quartet, which to previous generations had been merely one among many light chamber genres, was now something that every composer must undertake, and it was to Beethoven that those composers most often looked as a model.

Schubert’s passionate lyricism could be considered an outgrowth of one strain of Beethoven’s work. Brahms was so aware of Beethoven’s model that he avoided those genres closely associated with Beethoven—symphony, concerto, string quartet—until quite late in his compositional career. Even Bartók, whose angular, rhythmic quartets bear little resemblance to Schubert’s, draws on another key facet of Beethoven’s quartet music: its rigorous use of structure. No composer after Beethoven could write a string quartet without considering his work in relation to the past master’s.