“[I] imagine Beethoven as kind of a mad scientist in his laboratory 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.” —Eugene Drucker

The Emersons on Beethoven

David Finckel and Eugene Drucker explore the impact of Beethoven’s Opp. 127 and 132. (3:54)
Eugene Drucker discusses Beethoven’s ideas in Op. 130 and the Große Fuge. (3:31)
David Finckel & Eugene Drucker discuss Beethoven’s ideas in Opp. 131 and 135. (4:02)
Eugene Drucker discusses Beethoven’s techniques. (3:00)

In his late string quartets, Beethoven bursts the bounds of his Classical models, creating works that clearly prefigure (or perhaps even begin) the Romantic era. Revolutionary in their structure and scope, these works in particular would be the model for generations of later composers, as well as a yardstick by which to measure later masterpieces.

Background

When, in June 1822, Beethoven again turned his mind to string quartets, he had done nothing in that genre for 12 years. Twice that year, he offered the Leipzig publisher Peters a quartet, but, after being turned down, he seems to have laid his sketches aside until November, when another Russian in Vienna came along with a request for one, two, or three works. Prince Nikolaus Galitzin was a good cellist married to an accomplished pianist, and he was skilled enough to have made quartet transcriptions of several of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Having been excited by Der Freischütz, premiered in June 1821, he first thought to offer a commission to Weber, but Karl Zeuner, the violist in his private quartet, persuaded him to turn to Beethoven instead. The three Galitzin quartets are Opp. 127, 130, and 132; before, however, Beethoven began concentrated work on this project in the summer of 1824, he finished the Ninth Symphony, the “Diabelli” Variations, and the Missa solemnis, all of which had been in some state or other of progress for some time.

—Michael Steinberg

19th-Century Accounts

Karl Holz, the young second violinist in Schuppanzigh’s quartet and a good friend to Beethoven in his last years, recalled that the Cavatina in Op. 130 “cost the composer tears in the writing and brought out the confession that nothing he had written had so moved him; in fact, that merely to revive it afterward in his thoughts and feelings brought forth renewed tributes of tears.” —Michael Steinberg

Richard Wagner’s poetic description of Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131:

The longer introductory Adagio, probably the most melancholy musical statement that has ever been made, I want to compare with the awakening in the morning of this day “which, during its long course, shall not fulfill one wish, not even one!” Yet, at the same time, it is a prayer of repentance, a consulting with God in the belief in the eternally good …