THIBAUD PAVLOVIC-HOBBA violin
WILMA SMITH violin
HELEN IRELAND viola
ZOE KNIGHTON cello
5STREAM filming and editing
THOMAS GRUBB sound engineering, editing and mastering
Filmed December 2021 in the Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre
This project was made possible through support from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, Cybec Foundation, Robert Salzer Foundation
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
String Quartet Op. 131 in C# minor (composed 1826)
This Op. 131 quartet, written in the curiously awkward key of C# minor was the second last quartet ever written by Beethoven, completed 10 months before his death. When Beethoven’s friend Holz asked, “which of your quartets is your favourite”, Beethoven replied “each in its own way, art demands of us that we don’t stand still” but after considering the question further, Beethoven admitted that the Op. 131 was indeed his favourite. Schubert asked for the score on his deathbed and it was played for him by Karl Holz and some of his friends, all the more remarkable because it had not yet been played in public. Karl Holz described Schubert as falling into such a state of excitement and enthusiasm. Afterwards Schubert wrote, “after this, what is there left for us to write?” He went even further to say that the Op. 127 and Op. 131 quartets “have a grandeur which no words can express. They seem to me to stand on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.”
Wagner can be added to the long list of composers in adoration of this work and wrote an essay on Beethoven in 1870: “If we wish to form a picture of a day in the life of our sacred genius Beethoven we can do no better than to derive it from one of his own marvellous compositions. To illustrate such a typical day in Beethoven’s inner life, I will choose the C# minor quartet.”
Bruce Adolph takes this idea of a day with Beethoven one step further, presenting this argument for the idea of each movement representing a different place. While the piece is in no way programmatic, these descriptions seem apt.
First movement - church
Second movement - town plaza
Third movement - a recitative on an opera stage
Fourth movement - university seminar, making fun of the intellectual pursuit
Fifth movement - playground, most charming and fun
Sixth movement - an aria on an opera stage
Seventh movement - the sonata form that encapsulates all of the ideas together
It seems too much of a coincidence that in the progression of the string quartets Beethoven wrote, the number of movements increases by one each time. As if he was constantly pushing the boundary of human achievement.
Op. 132 - five movements
Op. 130 - six movements
Op. 131 - seven movements
Beethoven said: “In this quartet you will find a new manner of voice treatment and thank god there is less lack of fantasy than ever before.” (In other words, he was happy with the level of fantasy… the double negative is hard to digest!) It was considered so avant-garde and not performed in public until 1835, nine years after it was composed. Schubert was certainly one lucky fellow to receive a private performance.
Beethoven’s Op. 130 builds to a finale of a giant fugue in his original ending (which later became a separate Op. 133) most aptly named the Grosse Fugue. He obviously had more to say within a fugue because the first movement of Op. 131, which was the next work composed after the Grosse Fugue, has another fugue which Wagner described as, “the saddest utterance ever made in notes.”
Following Bruce Adolph’s plan, we travel through the second movement in a town plaza, the third movement recitative, before arriving at the university seminar and a set of variations that lasts almost half the piece in length. You might be interested to know that Helen Ireland (FQ violist) actually chose a small section for us to play when she walked down the aisle at her wedding. We played it with her former teacher - a wonderful FQ memory! You’ll hear humour, invention and some of the most profound utterances ever written for string quartet. It leads us into the fifth movement playground where you can almost hear a schoolyard song. We are not going to implicate any quartet members by letting you know the various wordings we have come up with for that tune!
Beethoven exhibits his best sense of humour in this fifth movement: unexpected silences, hocketing pizzicato followed by a revolutionary extended sul ponticello section (where the players play with the bows right on the bridge producing an eerie, icy, ghostlike sound). After music so frivolous, we stumble through a cadence guaranteed to make an audience clap straight into the sixth movement aria. Suitably heartbreaking before launching into the stern, galloping finale in which Beethoven flexes his compositional muscle by deftly intertwining the previous movements towards a definitive C# ending.
We have often wondered how the structure of this piece is so satisfying, and seemingly so perfect. It could have something to do with the use of keys which follow the scale of C#minor:
C# - D (flattened 2nd) - B minor - A - E - G# - C#
The astute will notice that F# is missing. Beethoven spends much of the last movement oscillating between F# and C# before declaring C# victorious.
What is perhaps more fascinating, is that a piece that has been constructed with the utmost intellect, form and attention to structure should evoke such an emotional response.