From a wide range of options, both quartets use the same rather atypical four-movement plan featuring a second movement scherzo and a third movement theme and variations. Yet despite these wonderful telltale correspondences, each quartet could only have come from its respective composer.
Beethoven: string Quartets & chamber Music in MIDI files
With Mozart there is the suave, graceful lyricism, the classical balance and a perfection of construction. With Beethoven, there is the exuberant drive, the extended codas and a kind of imaginative brashness that nearly threatens to burst the seams of the inherited model. The first movement Allegro is bright, bold and luxuriant. Strong dynamic contrasts, dense worried filigree and stabbing accents project a touch of anxious mania that might have riled the more conservative listener of the time. The Menuetto is light and lilting, a sure homage to Mozart compared with Beethoven's more muscular scherzi.
The part writing is delicate and agile while the dramatic use of silence, aborted phrases and off beat accents is signature Beethoven.
Beethoven String Quartets
The trio in particular evokes a kind of rustic folk dance that could only have been Mozart if he were wearing wooden clogs. Beethoven was undoubtedly the greatest master of the theme and variations of all time eventually leaving Haydn and Mozart far behind by comparison. What is remarkable is how he can eventually make so much out of so little.
The third movement begins modestly almost blandly but ends with an explosion of fireworks with some rich contrasts along the way.
And here the connection with Mozart is not as much the A major quartet as Mozart's sublime Divertimento for string trio, K. The remarkable transformation through variation is remarkably similar and, clearly, Mozart did it first.
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But Beethoven adds a brilliant coda for a much more interesting conclusion than simply one final variation. Many commentators suggest that the forth movement finale is perhaps the most Mozartian of the quartet due to the musical materials, Beethoven's deft handling of counterpoint and the relatively calm and gracious ending. But it is all in how the movement is played: For that we must wait a quarter of a century until the A minor quartet, Op.
Yet the minuet in Op. But after five variations of which the fourth is an exquisite, soft reharmonisation of the theme , Beethoven, like Mozart, embarks on an elaborate coda, beginning with a mysterious swerve from D to B flat: Even Mozart rarely wore his polyphonic learning more lightly than Beethoven does in this scintillating movement.
String Quartet in C major, Op. Introduzione Andante con moto — Allegro vivace 2. Andante con moto quasi Allegretto 3. Around the turn of the nineteenth century Vienna was swarming with musically cultured Russian, Polish and Hungarian aristocrats. Those who could afford it even supported their own string quartets.
They are profoundly thought through and composed with enormous skill, but will not be intelligible to everyone, with the exception of the third, which by virtue of its individuality, melodic invention and harmonic power is certain to win over every educated music lover. When the Italian violinist Felix Radicati admitted he found them incomprehensible, Beethoven allegedly retorted: But while the Op.
On the whole No. It certainly proved more instantly palatable than its companions, doubtless because of the forthright extroversion of the Allegro vivace and the urbanity of the minuet. Yet in some ways the C major quartet is the strangest work of the three. Even at the start of the Allegro vivace the key of C major is initially shadowed and tentative before emerging unequivocally, with a glorious sense of release, at the first sustained forte.
From here on the music is predominantly exuberant, relishing the depth and sonorous brilliance of C major. Yet the movement also has its whimsical, quizzical streak. Paradoxically, though, the Andante con moto quasi Allegretto sounds more exotically Slavonic than anything in Op. With its rhythmic obsessiveness and atmosphere of remote sadness, this is the most inscrutable movement in Op. Beethoven brings us back to the light of common day with an almost exaggeratedly decorous minuet, a half-nostalgic, half-ironic glance back to an earlier age shades here of the galant theme in the previous movement.
String Quartet No. 5 in A major Opus 18 No. 5
In the pianissimo coda C major slips to a shadowy C minor. The promise of a full-blown fugue is, though, short-lived. And it is surely not too fanciful to hear this whole torrential movement as a triumphant assertion of the will in the face of his affliction. String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.
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Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo — 2. Allegro molto vivace — 3. Allegro moderato — 4.
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Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile — 5. Adagio quasi un poco andante — 7. While we might like to imagine Beethoven composing his late quartets of in hermetic isolation from the world, the truth is that they were created in response to a growing public demand for string quartets. Several publishers vied to acquire the rights to the three works Opp , and that Beethoven had written at the behest of Prince Nicholas Galitzin.
And while he was still wrestling with the Grosse Fuge finale of Op. This turned out to be the C sharp minor, begun in late and finished the following summer. But though there are accounts of earlier private performances, including, poignantly, one to Schubert on his deathbed, it was not heard in public until Ever unpredictable in his dealings with publishers, Beethoven eventually sold the rights not to Schlesinger who later received the F major Quartet, Op.
Schott failed to see the joke, and had to be reassured that the work was in fact brand new. Yet Beethoven being Beethoven, he welds diversity into a profound unity. He fashions tight motivic links between sections, drawing much of the material from the prominent pairs of semitones in the fugue theme B sharp-C sharp, A-G sharp , and alluding to the fugue theme in the finale. Beyond this, the sections do not so much end as dissolve into each other, creating the impression of a vast single span that traverses various related keys before finally reasserting C sharp minor.
But the music ranges through a wider spectrum of tonalities than we ever find in a Bach fugue, straying as far as E flat minor and B major before settling in A major for an ethereal canonic episode for the two violins.