Notes for: July 22, 2008
Opus 135 was Beethoven’s last quartet – in fact, his last major work in any form. It was completed in October, 1826, six months before his death, at the country home of his brother Johann near the village of Gneixendorf in the Danube valley. Beethoven had taken his unstable nephew, Karl, to Gneixendorf to convalesce from a head wound that he had given himself in a suicide attempt with a pistol. The visit turned out dismally – Beethoven’s relations with Johann were strained, he detested his sister-in-law, and Karl was in constant rebellion against the restraints imposed on him.
Out of this Kafkaesque setting came a quartet of surprising warmth and intimacy. Opus 135 shares with Beethoven’s other late quartets his final preoccupation with abstract musical ideas, but here the composer is relaxing rather than plumbing emotional depths. The quartet is far shorter than the others, and except for the slow movement, the tone is conversational, even lighthearted.
The first movement is in customary sonata form, but the tempo, allegretto, is more leisurely than the usual allegro. The themes come in bits and snatches – there are at least six of them – and in the development they are geared with one another like a Swiss watch. Of particular importance is the opening phrase in the viola and its flippant answer in the first violin.
The main theme of the scherzo is marked by a disagreement over the beat to be emphasized – the first violin stresses the second beat; the second violin, the third; the viola, the first; and the cello, the first and third. The trio, longer than the scherzo proper, stimulates considerable excitement when the first violin plays a wild dance over a five-note figure insistently repeated by the other instruments no less than 51 times.
Beethoven noted a sketch of the slow movement as a “sweet song of rest or peace.” It consists of a theme, only ten measures long, moving in its simplicity, and four variations. The first variation restates the theme in richer harmony. The second breaks the theme into grief-laden chords. The third repeats the theme in the minor. The fourth follows the harmonic outline of the theme but not the melody itself.
The fourth movement presents a riddle that has long teased Beethoven scholars. Beethoven super-scribed the movement “der schwer gefasste Entschluss” – roughly, “the hard-won decision.” He then set forth at the top of the page two musical mottos, one a question “Muss es sein?” (“Must this be?”) and the other the answer “Es muss sein!” (“This must be!”). The first motto, with the rising inflection of a question, becomes the dramatic introduction of the movement; the response motto becomes the main theme.
What was Beethoven’s meaning? One might reasonably conclude that the giant Beethoven, already ill, was facing up to his coming death. The note on the sketch of the slow movement cited above strengthens this hypothesis. But Lewis Lockwood, in his recent, highly praised biography of Beethoven, devotes four pages to the possibility of other explanations, including:
Certainly, the tone of the movement is consistent with a playful explanation. The “It must be” theme, as well as a tuneful second theme, related to that of the slow movement are treated in a carefree way. And, after a dramatic repetition of the question motto, Beethoven leaves the stage laughing.