Beethoven: String Quartets Op. 18, Nos. 3 And 4

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) String Quartets (Complete) Val. 2 String Quartet in D Major, Op. 18, No.3 String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No.4In 1792 Beethoven left his native city of Bonn to seek hisfortune in the imperial capital, Vienna. Five years earlier his patron, the Archbishop ofCologne, a scion of the imperial family, had sent him to Vienna where he had hoped to havelessons with Mozart. His plans were frustrated by the illness and subsequent death of hismother, which made it necessary for him to return to Bonn and before long to take chargeof the welfare of his younger brothers. Beethoven's father, overshadowed by the eminenceof his own father, Kapellmeister to a former Archbishop, had proved inadequate both as amusician and in the family, of which his eldest son now took control.As a boy Beethoven had been trainedto continue family tradition as a musician and had followed his father and grandfather asa member of the archiepiscopal musical establishment. In 1792 he arrived in Vienna withintroductions to various members of the nobility and with the offer of lessons with Haydn,from whom he later claimed to have learned nothing. There were further lessons from theCourt Composer, Antonio Salieri, and, perhaps more important, from Johann GeorgAlbrechtsberger, an expert in counterpoint. He embarked at once on an initial career as akeyboard virtuoso, skilled both as an executant and in the necessary art of improvisation.He was to establish himself, in the course of time, as a figure of remarkable genius andoriginality and as a social eccentric, no respecter of persons, his eccentricity all thegreater because of his increasing deafness. This last disability made public performance,whether as a keyboard-player or in the direction of his own music, more and moredifficult, and must have served to encourage the development of one particular facet ofhis music, the use of counterpoint, stigmatized by hostile contemporary critics as"learned". He died in Vienna in 1827.In his sixteen string quartets, the first set of six published in1801 and the last completed in 1826 and published in the year of his death, Beethoven wasas innovative as ever, developing and extending a form that seemed already to have reacheda height of perfection in the later work of Haydn and Mozart. The earliest mention of astring quartet comes in the recorded request of Count Apponyi in 1795. This had noimmediate result, but it has seemed possible that Beethoven in these years might have beeninf1uenced by Emanuel Aloys Forster, a musician 22 years his senior, whose teaching ofcounterpoint he admired and recommended to others, while profiting, perhaps, from theexample of Forster's own quartets. At the same time Beethoven must have known the laterquartets of Mozart and the work of Haydn.The first group of string quartets byBeethoven, published in 1801 as Opus 18 witha dedication to Prince Lobowitz, consisted of six quartets written between 1798 and 1800.The third of these was a