Beethoven: String Quartets Op. 59, No. 2, 'rasumovsky' And Op. 74, 'harp'

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)String Quartet in E minor, Op.59, No.2 (Razumovsky)String Quartet in E flat major, Op.74 (Lobkowitz) In 1792 Beethoven left his native city of Bonn to seekhis fortune in the imperial capital. Vienna. Five years earlier his patron, theArchbishop of Cologne had sent him to Vienna for lessons with Mozart. His planswere frustrated by the illness and subsequent death of his mother, which madeit necessary for him to return to Bonn and before long to take charge of thewelfare of his younger brothers, a task beyond the competence of his father. As a boy Beethoven had had an erratic but eventuallysound training as a musician. In 1792 he arrived in Vienna with introductionsto members of the nobility and with the offer of lessons with Haydn, from whomhe later claimed to have learned nothing. There were further lessons with theCourt Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri, and with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger,an expert in counterpoint. He embarked at once on an initial career as a keyboardvirtuoso, skilled both as a performer and in the necessary art ofimprovisation. He was to establish himself in time as a figure of remarkablegenius and originality and as a social eccentric, no respecter of persons, hiseccentricity all the greater because of his increasing deafness. Thisdisability made public performance more and more difficult but encouraged thedevelopment of one particular element, the use of counterpoint, stigmatized byhostile contemporary critics as 'learned'. He died in Vienna in 1827. In his sixteen string quartets, the first set of six publishedin 1801 and the last published in the year of his death, Beethoven was asinnovative as ever, developing and extending a form that seemed already to havereached a height of perfection in the later work of Haydn and Mozart. His firstgroup of string quartets, the six that make up Opus 18, were writtenbetween 1795 and 1800 and published in Vienna the following year, perhapsdiscouraging Haydn from further composition in this form. Apart from anarrangement of a piano sonata for string quartet, the next group of such works byBeethoven is the set of three written for the Russian ambassador in Vienna,Count Razumovsky. The latter's family owed its distinction to the favour shownto two brothers, singers in the Imperial Chapel in St Petersburg, by theEmpress Elisabeth Petrovna and by Catherine II respectively. Andreas KyrilovichRazumovsky, fourth son of the younger brother, was born in 1752 and trained asa naval officer, later serving his country as a diplomat. In Vienna he married,in 1788, Elisabeth, Countess Thun, the sister of the wife of Beethoven's patronand friend Prince Lichnowsky, and in 1792 was first appointed Russianambassador there, resuming his duties, after a brief interruption, in 1801. Hewas rich and extravagant in expenditure, building for himself a fine residence,destroyed in a fire in 1815, and distinguishing himself as a collector and as apatron of the arts. He pl