The Complete String Quartets

Abstract

The string quartet is pre-eminently the dialectical form of instrumental music, the one most naturally suited to the activity of "logical disputation" or. to take another definition of dialectic, of "inquiry into truth". The reason for this fitness is in no way obscure. Given four parts to play with, a composer working in anything like the classical key system has enough lines to fashion a full argument, but none to spare for padding. Tne closely related characters of lis four instruments, moreover, while they cover in combination an ample compass of pitch, do not lend themselves to indulgence in purely colouristic effects. Thus, where the composer of symphonies commands the means for textural enrichment beyond the call of his harmonic discourse, and where the concerto medium offers the further resource of personal characterisation and drama in the individual-pitted-against-the-mass vein, the writer of string quartets must perforce concentrate on the bones of musical logic. All this made the quartet an apt medium for Beethoven, that supreme long-term planner and follower-through of highly organised musical argument. It was natural for him to explore it in all three of his main creative periods, and to use it as the vehicle for his last and probably greatest revela'.ions. But there is more to tha: aptness than the suitability of a dialectical - or philosophical or logical - medium alone. In addition to being, in his music if not always ir his personal life, a man of strongly philosophical and logical bent. Beethoven possessed a penchant for dramatic expression far above the ordinary. In Vienna, where he had settled late in 1792. the string quartet was inextricably bound up with the structural principles of what would later be codified as sonata form. The sonata style, with its emphasis on contrasted key areas and thematic groups that develop through conflict to resolution and unity, is a style of mighty dramatic potency. Combine that unity through-duality principle with the more radical unity of fugue and other contrapuntal styles, put the combination in Beethoven's hands, and you have the ground for a prodigiously fertile interaction of drama and philosophy in music. Such an enviable resource was not, of course, put in his hands whole and ready-made. He had to hammer it into shape through four decades and a half of compositional toil - toil, as his sketchbooks show, of almost Superhuman laboriousness and pertinacty. In the I fe-work that came of it. the sixteen string quartets form just one. but a central (or 'he central), element. To a degree, as might oe expected, the three groups into which the quartets temporally fall reflect the familiar classification of Beethoven's music into Productions of a first, a middle, and a third Period. The six quartets of Op.18. compcsed between 1798 and 1800. explore the implications of the sonata principle, divesifying its operation by annexing new tonal areas and incorporating much complex, even ostentatious, contrapuntal work. The middle period coincides 'oughly with the years of origin of the five middle quartets, composed between 1804 and 1810 and published as Op 59. Op.74 ana Op.95: this was a time when Beethoven look his sonata structures to a new point of individuality and intensification. Then. m:he third period, the last five quartets and the Great Fugue, spanning the years 1824-26. turn increasingly away from dualistic sonata towards monistic fugue, and plumb as they do so a further unprecedented depth of philosopiical connotation.