Technique and Intuition Rule the Dynamic Adagio Movement of Beethoven's E-flat Quartet, Op. 127
With this movement, Beethoven has penned every violist's dream
It is the quartet cycle to end all quartet cycles, or so most any string-quartet musician will tell you. Spanning nearly all of Beethoven’s working life, with the later quartets written just a couple years before his death, this collection of works is renowned for its beauty and intensity, as well as its palpable, evolutionary sound tracing Beethoven’s musical journey from young composer to musical icon.
“I think that if you were to ask any quartet today, they would point to the Beethoven quartet cycle as the major body of work for the medium,” says Roger Tapping, founding violist of the Takács Quartet, a group that in recent years ambitiously both performed and recorded the Beethoven Quartet cycle in its entirety (the third and last recorded installment was released January 11 on the Decca label).
“There is something very complete about the way the cycle [follows] this already very mature young man to a rocking alter Weise,” Tapping continues. “And I think everyone would tell you that there is hardly any music written like the late Beethoven. The Bartók is probably the only comparable cycle, but there are just six pieces . . . And Haydn is fantastic, but it doesn’t have that same sense of a cycle. People think that Beethoven is absolutely one of the greatest composers for very good reasons.
“Certainly these quartets are a very good example of that.”
The Late Quartets
By 1818, Beethoven was completely deaf and communicated almost exclusively through “conversation books” (some 400 of these small booklets, in which visitors wrote remarks to him, were in existence at the time of his death). So his completion of these final chapters of the quartet cycle is an incredible accomplishment indeed. Beethoven delivered the ...
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