Two years after they'd originally been scheduled to play, the Danish String Quartet finally arrived in town last week to perform the complete Beethoven string quartet cycle. The six performances took place over the course of a week with a single break half-way through.
Many had bought tickets to the entire series when it was originally announced, including several of our friends. That seemed like an awful lot of Beethoven to me, notwithstanding the fact that the quartets are widely considered to be the pinnacle of his achievement. I love the late quartets, so much so that I rarely listen to them—don't want to wear them out. When I do listen, I tend to do so in a steady stream from one to the next, and I couldn't identify a specific opus or movement to save my soul, other than the Grosse Fuge, Opus 135.
We checked online a few days before the first performance, found that it had not yet sold out, and secured two seats. We arrived early, parked on Summit Avenue a half-block from the church, and listened with half an ear to an pleasantly old-fashioned lecturer walk us through the movements: "The third movement is a scherzo, but Beethoven didn't call it a scherzo because it doesn't follow ALL the rules, but it has the flavor of a scherzo, and you're going to love it."
Considering that there were three quartets totaling seventeen movements on the program, such remarks were mostly useless, but they passed the time until the performers arrived on stage, and I suppose a few bits and pieces sunk in.
The Danish String Quartet doesn't look much like a classical string quartet. If they had been wearing suspenders and Makinaws they could have passed for a lumber-camp crew. But their playing was superb: thoughtful, nuanced, rich, bright. I had forgotten how much fun it was to follow the cello or the viola line, just because the sound of the individual instruments was so rich and the separation was so good in comparison with studio recordings regurgitated through a Bluetooth speaker. I felt that the performers were thinking and feeling the music, bar by bar, as a unit, and bringing me along with them, capturing a greater range and depth of emotions than I'd heard at a chamber music concert in years. Especially rich was the third movement of the Opus 59, No. 1, "Adagio molto e mesto." Coming on the heels of the relatively light quartet Opus 18, #3, it filled the church with palpable sorrow.
Following the intermission, the musicians returned to play Quartet No. 14, which is a wandering cavalcade of moods and movements, more richly endowed with beauty than structure, perhaps the musical equivalent of Hölderlin's poetry, though much more robust.
After the show Hilary said, "I think that's one of the best concerts I've ever been to. Let see if we can get some more tickets." I was doubtful. Yes, the concert was great. But does the sequel ever measure up to that initial blast of surprising, shocking, artistry and emotion? The weekend concerts at the Ordway were sold out, but we were free three days later, and there were tickets, so why not?
Once again, the early arrival, the great parking spot, the frivolous but endearing before-concert lecture, and then the show. The Opus 18, No. 4, was meticulously observed, but it left me cold. I was afraid of this. But the late quartet, Opus 127, was a knock-out. I was reminded of a remark that our lecturer made to the effect that this quartet was so conventional that it hardly qualified as a "late" quartet. This might be true on technical grounds, but in terms of sprightly and brooding emotion it lies well within the fold of Beethoven's last, richest, and most introspective creative period.
Back home, we queued up the Alban Berg quartet doing one of the late quartets; it was "nice" but thin in comparison with the real thing. We had once more chance, and we took it. The final performance consisted of an early quartet, a "middle" quartet, and Beethoven's last, brief quartet, Opus 135. Once again, riches galore.
I don't remember them one by one, but it was a pleasure and more than that to hear them. After the performance we were chatting in the lobby with two friends who had heard the complete cycle. One said, "I wish the events had been more spaced out so you could savor them." The other said, "I like the intensity of becoming immersed, and consumed, by the performances."
Perhaps we had had the best of both worlds. The performances were spaced out because we had missed half of them. And they were intense because in each case we signed on at the last minute. We savored every one.
But that was not the end of the affair. After the last performance, and the next night, too, I gathered together every CD I could find around the house—Alban Berg Quartet, Guarneri Quartet, Quartet Italiano—and we listened again, in the dark, on the "good" stereo in the den. We even read bits of the text from the concert program, as well as some of the CD liner notes. For example:
"The Andante in A flat, one of Beethoven’s most sublime and contemplative slow movements, takes the form of a theme with six variations. Apart from the introductory bars, the theme falls into the two traditional eight-bar phrases, but this is as far as any resemblance to variation structure goes: there are no repeats, the length of the variations is by no means constant, and the resemblance between them and the theme is often highly tenuous. The third movement is permeated by the angular accents of its theme, which is stated by the cello and immediately inverted by the viola; its second section is twice interrupted by mysterious, recitativelike octaves on the viola and cello."
Someday, perhaps, I will correlate remarks like these to phrases in the music itself, but not any time soon. The people who write such things know what they're talking about, but it hardly matters to the listener, who is faced with one essential problem: Beethoven's lack of "flow." By the time he entered his "late" period, he couldn't hear a thing, but he could string together snippets and phrases of German folk melodies above complex and unorthodox harmonic progressions, augmented by contrapuntal fabric of the utmost sophistication, and the result was sublime, but in a mode utterly distinct from, say, Mozart's heavenly and seemingly effortless sublimity. Mozart's sublimity arises in uncanny directions from largely Italianate conventions. Beethoven's sublimity arises from Germanic frustration, stammering, disgust at the forms he is called upon to fill with sound appropriate to his feelings.
The Danish String Quartet's utterly fresh renditions have revived my interest and reminded me that the early-middle-late schema is merely a mnemonic device. This afternoon I burned a couple of CDs of the "middle" quartets, which I hardly know at all. It might be just the thing for our gray November ramble north through Wisconsin to the South Shore.
Snow buntings, anyone?
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