Beethoven: String Quartets Opp. 135 And 131

Description

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)String Quartet in F major, Op.135 • String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131In 1792 Beethoven left his native city of Bonn to seek his fortune in the imperial capital, Vienna. Five years before he had been sent to Vienna by his patron, the Archbishop of Cologne, for lessons with Mozart, but the illness of his mother had forced his immediate return home. Before long, after his mother’s death, he had been obliged to take charge of the welfare of his two younger brothers, a task that his father was not competent to discharge.As a boy Beethoven had had an erratic musical training through his father, a singer in the archiepiscopal musical establishment, later continued on sounder lines. In 1792 he was to take lessons from Haydn, from whom he later claimed to have learned nothing, followed by subsequent study of counterpoint with Albrechtsberger and Italian word-setting with Salieri. Armed with introductions to members of the nobility in Vienna, he soon established himself as a keyboard virtuoso, skilled both as a performer and as an adept in the necessary art of improvisation. In the course of time he was to be widely recognised as a figure of remarkable genius and originality. At the same time he became known as a social eccentric, no respecter of persons, his eccentricity all the greater because of increasing deafness, a failing that became evident by the turn of the century. With the patient encouragement of patrons, he directed his attentions largely to composition, developing the inherited classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart and extending its bounds in a way that presented both an example and a challenge to the composers who came after him.In his sixteen string quartets, the first set of six published in 1801 and the last published in the year of his death, 1827, Beethoven was as innovative as ever, developing and extending a form that seemed already to have reached a height of perfection. After a gap of thirteen years he returned to the form in 1823 in a remarkable final series of works, starting with a set of three quartets commissioned by Prince Nicolas Galitzin and eventually completed in 1826. That year, the year of the Quartet in F major, Opus 135, was a difficult one for Beethoven. In 1815 his brother Caspar Anton Carl had died, leaving the composer as joint guardian with his widow of his son Karl. Beethoven had taken his responsibilities all too seriously, engaging in legal conflict with the boy’s mother, to whom he had taken strong exception. The family quarrel and consequent litigation had had a disturbing effect on Beethoven and his nephew. At the end of July, 1826, Karl had attempted to kill himself, a criminal act which inevitably involved the authorities in Vienna and which Karl attributed to his uncle’s constant harassment. It was decided that on his release from hospital he should enter the army with a cadetship and while preparations for this were under way Beethoven accepted