Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 130 / Grosse Fuge Op. 133

Description

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 130Grosse Fuge, Op.133 In 1792 Beethoven left his native city of Bonn to seek his fortune inthe imperial capital, Vienna Five years before he had been sent to Vienna byhis patron, the Archbishop of Cologne, for lessons with Mozart, but the illnessof his mother had forced his immediate return home Before long, after hismother's death, he had been obliged to take charge of the welfare of his youngerbrothers, a task that his father was not competent to discharge. As a boy Beethoven had had an erratic musical training through hisfather, a singer in the archiepiscopal musical establishment, later continued onsounder lines. In 1792 he was to take lessons from Haydn, from whom he laterclaimed to have learned nothing, followed by subsequent study of counterpoint withAlbrechtsberger and Italian word-setting with Salieri. Armed with introductionsto members of the nobility in Vienna, he soon established himself as a keyboard virtuoso, skilledboth as a performer and as an adept in the necessary art of improvisation. Inthe course of time he was to be widely recognised as a figure of remarkablegenius and originality. At the same time he became known as a social eccentric,no respecter of persons, his eccentricity all the greater because of increasingdeafness, a failing that became evident by the turn of the century. With thepatient encouragement of patrons, he directed his attentions largely tocomposition, developing the inherited classical tradition of Haydn and Mozartand extending its bounds in a way that presented both an example and achallenge to the composers who came after him. In his sixteen string quartets, the first set of six published in 1801and the last published in the year of his death, 1827, Beethoven was asinnovative as ever, developing and extending a form that seemed already to havereached a height of perfection. It was not until 1823, after a gap of thirteen years,that he returned to the form in a remarkable final series of works, starting withthe String Quartet in E flat major, Opus 127, completed in 1824. Thiswas the first of a group of three quartets commissioned by Prince NicolasGalitzin, who had to wait until March 1825 before he received the first work,after disguising any impatience he may have felt at a delay which he understoodas necessary for a genius. Beethoven wrote the second of the set, the StringQuartet in A minor, Opus 132, in the same year, and in the autumn and earlywinter, partially recovered from earlier illness, completed the String Quartetin B flat major, Opus 130. Both were sent to Prince Galitzin, in Russia, but the Prince'specuniary embarrassment prevented any payment, at least in Beethoven's lifetime.The latter work was given its first performance in Vienna on 21st March 1826 by the quartet led byIgnaz Schuppanzigh, jocularly known to Beethoven as Falstaff. There is a slow introduction to the Quartet in B flat major, itsbalanced