Beethoven Quartet opus 74

A question that many people like to debate: does each musical key have its own character or personality, and if so, how or why? Granting that a given key does have a distinct character, can it be said that it acquired this stamp because of the great music that was written in that key, a set of associations that we listeners have accumulated? If a composer could ever be said to have “owned” a key, to have put an indelible stamp on it through a string of masterpieces, that composer would be Beethoven, and the key would be E-flat major. Not only did he return to this key again and again, using it for (among other works) four piano sonatas, two string quartets, two piano trios, a string trio, a piano concerto, a song cycle and a symphony, but almost all of these pieces are of significant creative importance, some of them groundbreaking. Many others before and after him wrote great music in this key, but none inhabited it as thoroughly as Beethoven. However, those hoping Beethoven will tell us what this key “means” are in for a disappointment; rather than reserving it for a particular character, he filled his E-flat mansion with many spaces, ranging from the exquisite brilliance of his early chamber works to the epic gigantism of the Eroica Symphony to the tender outpourings of his song cycle An Die Ferne Geliebte. In his late quartet opus 127, he combined together an enormous richness of characters, slipping easily between royal grandeur, inward reflection, silly capers and rustic dancing.

The “Harp” Quartet came to light alongside two other great works in E-flat, the Emperor Concerto and the Piano Trio opus 70 no. 2. The Concerto is essentially extroverted and brilliant, the Trio reflective and inward-facing. The “Harp” straddles these two worlds; the spectrum of its energy is enormous, ranging from the most ferocious thunderstorm to the most tenderly whispered confidences. The quartet opens on a note of great diffidence, unsure of what world it is stepping into. A halting question is asked once, twice, dropping downwards and rising up again; the music searches left and right, hesitating silences intervene. The beloved object seems to be E-flat major itself, not at first quite possessable; we find ourselves always veering off towards other keys, even as it is E-flat the music is sighing for. After a couple of frustrated, exclamatory chords, the approach becomes surer, steadier, if more fraught; we ascend painstakingly through a chromatic thicket, until we explode triumphantly into the E-flat Major Allegro: a true Beethovenian outcome, victory through the most difficult means possible. This Allegro is sunny, outdoors, optimistic, but it is striking that the main melody recalls the hesitant opening question by dropping and rising in the same way, and by referring to the same foreign key; if we have found a happier place, even so a shred of the old doubt clings on. But the energy of this new world is irrepressible. The plucked arpeggios that give the piece its nickname soon make their appearance; jokes, feints and brilliant outbursts abound; even the one ominous reference to minor, a lone G-flat, turns out to be just kidding. In the middle, developmental section, there is an enormous explosion outward to a sustained, Olympian C Major celebration, as if the joyous characters of the main section have swelled up to become, frighteningly, several times their normal size. When the hullabaloo eventually dies down we are left with a single sustained, expectant hum in the first violin, around which the plucked harp notes tiptoe, awaiting their moment, and finally vertiginously cascade to the moment of return.

Near the movement’s end, when it feels like its business should have concluded, somebody seems to say, “not so fast”: there are a few hushed, whispered exchanges; trouble is brewing; and all at once the music erupts in a fresh crisis, the first violin scrambling manically through arpeggios and bariolages, the perturbed harp twanging away desperately. But even through this a path to salvation is found, the second violin singing a miraculous, victorious song that spirals ever higher, E-flat major reclaimed. Beethoven seems to be saying, as he says so often: the crisis, the struggle, the final victory, are all essential parts of being alive.

The second movement, in a darker, sweeter key, has in its main sections the quality of a love aria. The first violin sings the melody, at first strikingly high above the levels of the accompaniment, embodying the role of the soprano in her splendid isolation. Heartfelt, pleading, openly confessional, this music will occur three times in the movement, with the violin moving to an ever-lower register with an ever more ornate, embellishing accompaniment that swirls around it. As a foil to these ethereally beautiful verses, a shadowy, grief-stricken music appears in between, in the parallel minor, suggesting the reverse side of the coin. Here the melody is broken, palpably struggling to rise before subsiding downwards. Obscurely, its melodic ease and rhythmic cadence have also been somehow hobbled, so that the music becomes expressive by struggling to express. It is interesting to reflect that this was the period when Beethoven, confronted by increasing deafness and the prospect of solitude, was most hoping to find a life partner, the time of his famous letter to the never-identified “Immortal Beloved”. No wonder then that he could produce, in this music, such an eloquent microcosm of loneliness.

Out of this reflective world erupts the third movement, a vigorous, at times Bacchanalian Scherzo. It recalls the same movement from the Fifth Symphony, despite big differences; a minor, commanding main section, with plenty of thunder and lightning, alternates with a brilliant C major section which derives its energy from counterpoint, voices imitating each other and leapfrogging back and forth. Here Beethoven employs a version of the form that he visited in other pieces such as the Seventh Symphony and the opus 131 quartet: he alternates between the two sections not once, but twice — A-B-A-B-A instead of A-B-A — and in his final return to the A-section, the music reappears much softer. The machines of war, or the demonic orgies, are receding into the distance, losing their muscle if not their menace, and dissolving, in this case, into…what?

The last movement of the quartet is arguably its biggest surprise. We have heard three movements of enormous expressive energy and scope, fully living up to the epic nature of the composer’s middle period, matching the ambition and intent of his three Rasumovsky Quartets. But where each of those earlier works concluded with an equally titanic Finale, here Beethoven bucks the trend: he retreats to a comfortable armchair in the library of his mind, offering a cheerful, almost Haydnesque theme for our perusal, and follows it up with a set of variations. In terms of drama, there is nothing left to prove, he seems to be saying; let us just enjoy exploring this very simple theme together. The variations are in turn boisterous, gentle, earthily energetic, bucolic; finally there is one that threatens to evaporate entirely, just some murmurs against a ground of spinning cello triplets. The regular form of the movement dissolves into a playful coda, and the music revs up into one final vigorous moment — reminding us that the energy of earlier times remains with us, even if sublimated! — before concluding with an offhanded shrug.

Note by Misha Amory