It is the year of the Emperor Concerto. Beethoven was at the summit of his fame and success. Publishers in three countries were demanding new works. Aside from his deafness and some worries about his brothers and their families, he should have been basking in his achievements and enjoying some of the rewards.
Instead, he lived in squalor. Here’s a visitor’s report from this time: ‘Picture to yourself the extreme of dirt and disorder: pools of water decorating the floor and a rather ancient grand piano on which dust competed for room with sheets of written or printed notes. Under it – I do not exaggerate – an unemptied chamber-pot… Most of the chairs had straw seats and were decorated with clothes and with dishes full of the remains of the previous day’s supper.’
Amid noisome chaos that would drive any sensitive person outside for fresh air and a fire hose, Beethoven created works of taut discipline, not a superfluous note, each part fitting the others like a machine-tooled jigsaw. From time to time he rushed to his brother’s cellar to hide from the unbearable noise of French guns.
The tenth of his string quartets takes its title The Harp for its plucked sections in the opening movement. Its opening is as laidback and relaxed as Beethoven ever gets. He even marks it sotto voce, so quiet it is announced as if under its breath. The second movement, equally slow, was a favourite of Mendelssohn’s for its lilting, smiling melody, as if the composer had not a care in the world. The contrast with his physical situation and the surrounding uncertainty is so extreme as to suggest a possible bipolar condition. The third movement opens with a flagrant allusion to the opening of the fifth sysmphony. The finale has a retrospective feel to it, as if the composer is looking back at his rackety life thus far and preparing himself for the next great leap.
The Melos Quartet, a mainstream German ensemble from the 1960s on, present a textbook performance that leaves the listener plenty of room to fantasise about the composer’s ultimate intentions. If I had never heard the work before, I should probably start here, and maybe return to it as a point of reference, although not for ultimate revelation. You will want more salt and pepper in subsequent hearings.
Remarkably, the first recordings of this concerto were made in the mid-1930s by two Hungarian quartets – the Lener Quartet, which lasted only until 1939, and the Budapest Quartet which continued in different formations until 1967 having settled after much turbulence in the United States. Both of these performances are highly individualistic, the characters of their players emerging with striking difference. The calibre of the Budapest – Joseph Roisman, Sasha and Mischa Schneider, István Ipolyi – is a cut above and the vigour of their playing takes the breath away. A much later best-selling recording for Columbia lacks the original fire. A third Hungarian quartet – Sandor Vegh‘s in 1952 – is perhaps just a little too Magyar, sloping the accents some way off the straight and narrow, albeit in the most agreeable fashion. Wrong as it may be, I do love this reading.
Half a century later, in 2002, the Hungarians rise again with a rivetting Decca recording by the Takacs Quartet – Edward Dusinberre, Károly Schranz, Geraldine Walther, András Fejér – that has just about everything: poise, fantasy, wit and perfectionism. Not quite in the same class (though still of interest) is the Bartok Quartet (2014), playing a little too safe. I have no way of explaining why the Hungarians understand this quartet more roundly and profoundly than anyone else, but the recorded evidence is incontrovertible.
There is also a line of development in American interpretations of this enigmatic work. The Juilliard Quartet led by Robert Mann (1965) has a locker-room athleticism and a certain roughness to the sound. The Fine Arts Quartet (1966) present greater style and sophistication – also greater relaxation: listen closely and you’ll hear how American life has speeded up since then.
The Guarneri Quartet (1970) are masterful, measured, magisterial: one imagines pupils sitting at their feet, knowing that they will never attain this exceptional sheen. And I can never hear the Emerson Quartet (1997) without learning something new – in this instance, the play of light and wit in the theme and variations in the finale. As with the Hungarians, we are witness to an evolving tradition.
There is more contrast to enjoy – the warmth of the Amadeus (1988), for instance, against the clinical coolness of the Alban Berg Quartet (1979), or the studied hush of the Belcea Quartet (2012) compared to the headlong passion of the Cuartetto Casals (2019). And for the most exquisite and timeless eleganceno-one should ignore the Quartetto Italiano at their peak. If pressed, I would choose the Budapest and Takacs as being the most indispensable.
That a single string quartet can accommodate so many different style is itself a testament of its genius. And bear in mind that the Harp is not, by any measure, the most important of Beethoven’s string quartets. When we arrive at the late works the approaches are so varied that there is no telling right from wrong. All we can do is marvel at the diversity.
Violist Vince Lionti was a member of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1987.
His death has been reported online by devastated colleagues.
He would have been 61 this week.
Metropolitan Opera Musicians say:
We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of one of our own. MET Orchestra Musician Vincent Lionti passed away due to complications related to Covid-19. ‘Vinnie’ joined the viola section of the MET Orchestra in 1987 and enjoyed a diverse career as a conductor, educator, and program director as well. We offer our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.
The Italian baritone Silvano Carroli died today in Lucca, the region’s second operatic fatality in a week. We understand that he was not taken by Covid-19.
Venetian by birth, he made his debut in 1963 in a Zeffirelli Boheme and went on to work with Pavarotti, Domingo and most great artists of his time. He last appeared at Covent Garden in 2008.
Ian Balmain, principal trumpet of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and later of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, has died at the age of 57.
He leaves a young family and many friends across the music world.
The singer has listed a downtown condominium for sale at $520,000, LA Times reports.
He has no reason to return.
It’s a Mozart broadcast from 1967.
There is some legal history to this track. Apparently it was taken by a CBC technician to a US label, which was then sued by CBC and had to return all physical copies of the recording.
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95, ‘il serioso’ (1810)
When I first met the Amadeus Quartet they were in advanced middle-age and in no mood for banter. At a photo session for the Sunday Times magazine, one of them burnt the sleeve his jacket on the bright lights and was muttering about damages. The other three could not get out of our studio fast enough. There was not much I could say or do to lighten the atmosphere. I registered them at the time in my young mind as ‘the serious quartet’, not relising that there happened to be a work of that name by Beethoven, or that all string quartets are pathologically serious when it comes themselves and their work. Show me a smiling string quartet and I’ll hazard a guess they are about to break up.
Over time, I got to know the Amadeus better, meet their wives and heard about the struggles they had endured to become the premier quartet of their time. Three of them – Peter Schidlof, Siggi Nissel and Norbert Brainin – met as Austrian Jewish internees in British wartime camps for enemy aliens. The fourth, Martin Lovett, got connected through their teacher in London, Max Rostal. They formed the quartet in 1947 and named it just in time for a January 1948 debut at the Wigmore Hall.
Forming a string quartet is tough and, initially at least, unrewarding. The travel is arduous, the hotels uncomfortable, and the fees have to be split by four. Most quartets break up in the first couple of years on the road. The Amadeus were just starting to make records on British Decca when Elsa Schiller, head of Deutsche Grammophon, heard them in Berlin and signed them to her label. Elsa was a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She was looking for a counterweight to some very well established German quartets with an unpleasant Nazi record. The Amadeus fitted the bill.
They became DG’s go-to quartet for core classics. Their 1952 recording of the Serioso has a raw contrariness that rubs against the grain of their sleek and unmemorable competitors. The stereo version of the Serioso in 1960 is, if anything, even more muscular and self-assertive while achieving a transcendent ethereality that helped define their style.
Back in England, they persuaded Benjamin Britten to write them a quartet but they showed scant interest in other new music. Playing classics was hard enough if they were to maintain supremacy in an incresingly competitive field with crack American and Russian groups crowding out the racks. The Amadeus had just signed on to record a second Beethoven cycle for DG when, in August 1987, the violist Peter Schidlof suffered a fatal heart attack on a Sunday afternoon in the north of England. ‘He was the one who was least often satisfied,’ said the critic Bernard Levin. The group could not continue without him.
Forty years is a long time for a string quartet to last, and the Amadeus defined their era. For those who got to know them, they were intensely human in all their transactions, dedicated to their craft and without a patina of the vanity that disgraces many classical stars. In the ‘serious’ string quartet, they were at once appropriately solemn and, if that can be imagined, just sufficiently distanced from the work to suggest an undercurrent of shared dissidence, ambition and exaltation. I can never listen to the 11th quartet without thinking of them and what they brought to the artform.
The 11th is the shortest of Beethoven’s string quartets, barely 20 minutes long. The composer wrote to an English musician, George Smart, that he intended it for serious people, ‘never to be performed in public’. It has a tight-lipped, stern expression and does little to ingratite itself with players or listeners. Gustav Mahler considered it one of Beethoven’s most progressive works and made a controversial version of it for string orchestra. Other musicians have found in it far-fetched theories of liberation theology and cosmic Buddhism. Taken seriously, it offers much food for thought. It is the last quartet Beethoven wrote before entering his transcendental final stretch.
I have to make a cup of tea and walk three times around my loft space before I can banish the Amadeus from memory and listen to other contenders. The Koeckert Quartet, for instance, established 1939 as the Sudeten-German Quartet with all four players landing post-War jobs for life at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. They have the luxury of being able to relax into the life of a string quartet and lack the existential edge of the Amadeus. In the Serioso they sound almost dismissive of the title, searching for a sweetness of tone and an idea of beauty of a very German, nature-based kind. There is an unarguable autheticity to their approach; the rest is a matter of taste.
The all-Russian Beethoven Quartet are positively brutal in their attack. There is an edge to the tone that would offend bourgeois ears and a thrust that calls to mind the momentum of their close associate Dmitri Shostakovich. Yet the closing Larghetto of this quartet is as serene and consolatory as any music one could call to mind.
The Alban Berg Quartet (1999), no less wonderful, import many shades of modernism to their art of interpretation. Technique and precision are faultless and one is left gasping at the effects they bring off. The US-based Emerson Quartet – Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, Lawrence Dutton, David Finckel – are in the same elite class, treating Beethoven with respect but not as a challenge to their abilities. The apparent ease of their playing can occlude the depth they achieve in presenting the work in its full colours. I am in awe of this performance.
Among recent recordings, the Prague-based Smetana Quartet (2018) exemplify a central-European tradition of strong statements backed up by powerful emotions. The Kuss Quartet (2019) sound emollient by comparison. Short as the quartet might be, it offers multiple avenues of exploration.
Are you still hankering after the Mahler adaptation? Don’t say you haven’t been warned. This is Yuri Bashmet souping it up with the Moscow Soloists. Christoph von Donhanyi with the Vienna Philharmonic is the de-luxe brand, immaculately groomed.
Latest offering from Rome Opera percussionist extraordinaire Rocco L. Bitondo:
