Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat, Op.130

The commission Beethoven received in 1822 from the posterity-conscious Prince Nikolaus Galitzin of St. Petersburg could hardly have been more generous: Beethoven was to compose a set of two or three quartets, to take as much time as he needed, and to name his own price. But work on the first two of these “late” quartets (Opp.127, 132) was perilous, for Beethoven suffered from ill health and had to literally rise from his sick bed to compose. This is not to say the composer’s poor health was responsible for the pall that hovers over much of the music in these quartets, but we can happily acknowledge that the next quartet, Op.130, written when Beethoven was, if not healthy, at least relatively free of illness, is a sunnier work than its immediate predecessors. Op.130 also contains some of the densest and most labyrinthine music Beethoven ever wrote.

Dense and labyrinthine. That would be the Grosse Fuge, yes? But weeks before Beethoven arrived at that inconceivably rich contrapuntal monument, he wrote the first movement of Op.130, which abruptly changes tempo and mood, leaps and hurries forward only to interrupt itself with one-bar outbursts, grants absolute independence to each instrument to engage in elaborate conversational exchanges and create simultaneous patterns, and generally carries on in a manner as complex as any quartet writing until Bartok, a century later, picked up the Viennese master’s gauntlet.

Op.130 is, or as reputation has it, a Gordian knot of a quartet. However, its complexity does not go unrelieved. The brief and breathless second movement Presto is transparent as a good-natured joke. The Andante was called by Schumann “an intermezzo” (a comic interlude played between the acts of a serious opera). And the fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca (in the style of a German dance), enjoys a relaxed, natural momentum, where witty chatter mimics some of what has gone before. Indeed, the progression of the quartet’s six movements has a “divertimento” quality, harkening back to musically simpler summer afternoons in the eighteenth century.


Then comes the Cavatina. If the Andante is an intermezzo, the Cavatina, with its operatic title, is a preghiera (an aria in which the character pleads for divine assistance). On the manuscript, over one of the passages in the Cavatina, Beethoven scribbled “anguished.” He told a violinist of the quartet which premiered Op.130 that the mere memory of the Cavatina brought tears to his eyes. The basis of the Cavatina is only a three-part song, but its external simplicity can hardly mask the movement’s intricately organized harmony and tortured, sob-broken melody. A Beethoven scholar says, “It opens sotto voce, plunging the listener so immediately into a highly-charged emotional atmosphere that he has the sensation of having suddenly opened a door and intruded on a scene not meant for his ears.” As Beethoven considered the Cavatina one of his greatest achievements, so history has agreed.

The finale Beethoven wrote to follow the Cavatina was so rhythmically violent and ruthlessly dense in thought and texture it reduced its first audiences to confusion. Beethoven’s friendly and publisher pleased with the composer to replace the finale of Op.130 with something else, something they could understand. Beethoven, who clearly loved the quartet as he wrote it, finally agreed to include an alternate finale (a Rondo that manages only to be an anticlimax to the Cavatina), on the condition that the original finale be published separately as Grosse Fuge, Op.133.

Ironically, the fundamental structure of the Grosse Fugue is a highly lucid, well-behaved, traditional sonata form, consisting of an overture, a single variation, and a fugue unfolding slowly, uncompromisingly, and exhaustively, until it has surpassed the classical fugue by an immense distance. “It is not difficult to write a fugue,” said Beethoven, “I wrote dozens of them when I was a student. But imagination also must have its due, and today another spirit, truly poetic, must enter into the ancient form.”