In the days when Juliette Gréco could walk in and out of a song by Barbara, making her decide to sing something else.

 

 

Welcome to the 120th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition

String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor op. 131

Every superlative in the critical lexicon has been lavished on the opus 131. It is known as ‘the Everest of string quartets’. Also as Parnassus, pinnacle, inexhaustible and ineffable – ‘the most superhuman piece of music that Beethoven ever wrote.’ Beethoven himself places this work beyond the bounds of normality by writing seven movements, an unprecedented extravagance, and testing our emotional tolerance in every direction. By blowing apart the format established by Joseph Haydn, he leaves the listener not knowing what’s meant to come next.

The unanswerable question is, did Beethoven know? Did he have this structure in mind, or did he go from episode to episode not knowing where it might lead? When the publisher Schott asked for an explanation of the unwieldy manuscript, Beethoven replied that it was ‘zusammen gestohlen aus Verschiedenem, diesem und Jenem’ (put together from stolen odds and ends’). Believe that, if you like. Believe also, or not, a statement by the violinist Karl Holz that Beethoven thought this the greatest of his 16 string quartets – only to contradict himself immediately by saying ‘art demands of us that we must not stand still,’ a hint that he has greater things in preparation on his desk.

He is playing games, teasing his interlocutors. ‘Thank God there is less lack of imagination than ever before,’ he told the violinist Karl Holz.  Schubert, demanding to hear the work five days before his own death in November 1828, said: ‘After this, what is left for us to write?’

Although it was not much performed in the next few decades, this quartet attracted powerful commentaries, of which the most resonant came from Richard Wagner who, writing in 1870 for the centenary of Beethoven’s birth, aimed to establish Beethoven as a man who changed the world, his own personal precedessor. Wagner drew attention to the rough and raging finale, a passage which may have influenced his seaborne operas, The Flying Dutchman and Tristan and Isolde: ‘Tis the dance of the whole world itself: wild joy, the wail of pain, love’s transport, utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, riot, suffering, the lightning flickers, thunders growl: and above it the stupendous fiddler who bears and bounds it all, who leads it haughtily from whirlwind into whirlwind, to the brink of the abyss – he smiles at himself, for to him this sorcery was the merest play – and night beckons him. His day is done.’  Maybe he’s hearing Götterdämmerung.

Virginia Woolf used elements of this quartet in her novel The Waves. T S Eliot had both opus 131 and opus 132 in mind while writing his Four Quartets: ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future, /And time future contained in time past. /If all time is eternally present /All time is unredeemable.” Beethoven is reaching into the future, he intimates, to make sense of the present. Or vice versa.

Episode nine of the HBO series Why We Fight (2001) used the 6th movement to accompany footage of a devastated German town in the aftermath of Hitler’s death. Yaron Zilberman’s movie A Late Quartet (2012) featured a string quartet grappling with their own failing health and crumbling relationships through Beethoven’s opus 131. ‘What are we supposed to do,’ demands one of the players, ‘stop – or struggle?’

Latterly, American youth orchestras have fused the opening of opening of opus 131 with Kanye West’s hip—hop track ‘On Sight.

What these diverse and challenging resonances demonstrate is the extraordinary immediacy that this quartet has exerted from its inception,  while remaining as unfathomable in its essence as the Sphinx of Giza.

The first movement, which is slow, was described by Wagner as ‘the most melancholy sentiment in (the whole of) music’; others find it uplifting. Two dance movements follow, both verging on the macabre. The fourth movement, lasting 15 minutes and the pivot of the entire work, is a set of seven intricate and absorbing variations. The fifth movement is a two-minute runwaway horse, followed by another two minutes of profound self-contemplation before the finale rocks completely off the rails. For reasons that will soon become apparent, I will discuss the sixth movement in a separate post.

So where, across the history of recording and more than 50 different versions, do we find clarity and illumination? Both the 1932 sessions by the Hungarian Lener Quartet and the 1936 response from the exiled Busch Quartet demand serious attention, the Lener more questing, the Busch more certain. I am further intrigued by the 1944 Musikverein recording by Wolfgang Schneiderhahn and three fellow-Nazi members of the Vienna Philharmonic unfolding a sanitised performance in which beauty is the supreme value in a crumbling world. The beauty is, indeed, intoxicating. It is also the forerunner of a kind of post-War music making by certain Austrians in which beauty itself is an atonement for past crimes. Two of the Schneiderhahn players feature in the 1952 Barylli Quartet recording, an unnerving connection.

I find the much-vaunted Juilliard Quartet – Robert Mann, Isidore Cohen (Violins), Raphael Hillyer (Viola), Claus Adam (Cello) – over-aggressive in the finale, though that may be exacerbated by execrable New York studio acoustics. The Guarneri Quartet – Arnold Steinhardt, John Dalley (Violins), Michael Tree (Viola), David Soyer (Cello) – are in all aspects preferable.

Finest of all the American performances is that of the LaSalle Quartet in 1977. Based in Cincinnati, far from the competitive pressures of New York, four Jewish refugees – Henry Meyer, Walter Levin (Violins), Peter Kamnitzer (Viola), Jack Kirstein (Cello) – backed into Beethoven in reverse, having first established their credentials as the world’s finest exponents of Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School. What they bring to this masterpiece, apart from superlative technique, is something of the T S Eliot sense of the fluidity of time, flitting back and forth between eras, informing the past with possibilities of the future. Each time I listen I learn something new, something I had missed before. I miss the high-minded ethos and utterly relaxed lifestyles that these four fine men brought to their art. I miss the world they inhabited.

 

Of 21st century recordings, the Ebène Quartet are both elegant and athletic, the Cuarteto Casals are wonderfully wistful and the Emersons are simply excellent. The Quartetto Italiano have unforgettable phrasing in the finale, but I like the Takacs Quartet best for spice and fire and a sense of the joys and sorrows that are common to us all.

And we still haven’t got round to discussing the sixth movement. That’s coming up here.

 

From the Associated Press:

Madrid (AP): At least 30 of 41 members of a gospel choir in northeastern Spain have contracted coronavirus following a rehearsal indoors with little air circulation…

The River Troupe Gospel, a volunteer gospel group, rehearsed on Sept. 11 ahead of an open-air performance two days later for a local festival in Sallent, a town in the province of Barcelona. It was their first public show since the beginning of the pandemic.

After one member of the chorus tested positive following the Sept. 13 performance, more than 40 other members and their close contacts went into isolation…

Read on here.

 

Ever since he was parachuted into the Metropolitan Opera as general manager in August 2006, Peter Gelb has sat on broken glass.

He was unqualified, never having run a performing arts company before, and cripplingly bad at communications both within the company and towards the outside world.

At his previous post in Sony Classical, he delivered soliloquies to staff with instructions that they were supposed to fulfil. He discouraged debate and was threatened by contradiction. What he is good at is managing a board of donors, a skill that has kept him going through 14 years of almost unceasing turbulence at the Met. In that time, barely a month went by without a rumour that Gelb was about to be fired, but he kept the board sweet and his job intact. Rivals who thought they could do better built up a quiet portfoloio from afar.

Then, yesterday, Gelb shut down the Met and, in a masterstroke, secured his position for the forseeable future.

How?

By killing the golden goose. The Met, laid out on an undertaker’s slab, is no prize for anyone. Gelb’s job as caretaker of an abandoned house is the least enviable in the performing arts world. The only tasks on his desk are cost-cutting. There is no creative challenge.

Gelb’s job is safe because no-one wants it any more, or will for quite a while.

On the day that Peter Gelb shut the Metropolitan Opera for the next year, the penny-pinched English National Opera were on Sky Arts television, performing La Boheme in a north London car park for £100 per vehicle, or £35 a bike.

The rain lashed down and Mimi could barely see beyond her lashes but the audience honked their horns with approval at every set-piece and we at home cheered at this triumph of art over multiple adversity – Covid, underfunding, poor governance and more. Natalya Romaniw’s Mimi showed the blazing fortitude and faith in opera that so many companies have lost in this pandemic.

Nor is ENO alone in its ingenuity. Zurich Opera has devised a way of presenting a Boris Godunov safely by beaming in the orchestra and chorus from another venue. La Scala, Barecelona, Vienna and Berlin have managed to reopen. Glyndebourne and Garsington used their gardens creatively. Wherever opera used to be performed, people are rethnking the dimensions of the artform – how it can survive the next 2-3 testing years, and how it reconfigures all available space for a future renaissance.

No such imagination has gone into, or come out, of the Met. Faced with a major obstacle, it took the easy option and shut down. With the whole of Central Park on its doorstep, it refused to step outdoors. The Met has failed the artists, failed the public, failed the art itself.

This might, however, be the start of a new era. Opera will find another way to flourish outside sclerotic establishments. It will take to the open spaces, to the parking lots, the brownfield sites, the new horizons. There will be a way. There must be.

A statement by the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra who have not receoved pay for six months:

After being furloughed without pay for six months, we are concerned for our members and their families as they navigate what will now be over a year without economic support from the Met. Furthermore, we are devastated that the Met has not found ways to engage the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra during this closure – especially when the Met Stars series shows that there is a possibility for collaboration.
Many orchestras across the country are performing in adapted ways, continuing to connect to their valued audience members and communities. Simply stating that labor costs must be cut is not a solution or plan for the future; especially in light of the fact that no labor costs have been paid by the Met over the last six months.
Great artistic institutions cannot cut their way to success. This leadership approach only further jeopardizes the Met’s credibility and artistic integrity with our audiences. With the Met at risk of artistic failure, we will insist on a contract that preserves the world-class status of the Met Orchestra so that when we are able to reopen, our audiences will be able to experience performances at the level that they expect and deserve.

She was treated for Covid-19 in a Moscow hospital for 8 days and is full of praise for the excellence of Russian medicine:

 

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Дорогие друзья! Спешу сообщить, что вчера меня выписали из больницы и я избавилась от заразы под названием COVID ✊✊✊ Хочу поблагодарить врачей и персонал 52 Московской клинической больницы за быстрое и эффективное лечение ( ковидная пневмония средней степени тяжести) Наши врачи лучшие и знают, как с этим вирусом разбираться👊👊👊! И , конечно поблагодарить моих подписчиков за поддержку, энергию и тёплые слова! Я чувствовала вас и по этому поправилась быстрее! И , конечно @marikabdrazakova , которая болела вместе со мной 🙏🏻 за поддержку и компанию!❤️В следующем посте я поделюсь информацией, которая может быть вам полезна и интересна! Спасибо 🙏🏻❤️❤️❤️ Dear Friends! Happy to inform you, what from yesterday I am out of hospital! I bit this shit call’s COVID 👊👊👊! I want to thank Russian doctors from Moscow hospital 52 for my fast (8days) recovery! They really know how to treat this virus 👊! And I want to thank all of you for support, energy and good vibes you send to me!! I feel it❤️🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻 THANK YOU! In next post I give you some information which will be interesting and useful for you 😍

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In a subsequent post she writes in Russian:
This will be the last post about Covid – I will not return to it anymore – it’s not worth it! I want to share information about MY course of the disease – maybe it will be useful to someone. Offers such as “you are lucky you survived” will be blocked immediately. I am saying what the doctors told me. At the moment, there are a lot of infected people in Moscow. 75% get sick easily, like a common cold and do not need hospitalization. The virus can affect each person in different ways and rather quickly – this is why it is dangerous! I have weak lungs, susceptible to bronchitis viruses (which were much stronger than this one), so I knew that I would get very sick and immediately, as soon as the temperature rose under 39, I went to the hospital. During! The disease was stopped quickly. Numerous droppers, antibiotics, injections for thrombosis (often with covid) and plasma with antibodies, inhalation with helium, beat the virus in 8 days. Now I am recovering as I have weakness and a slight cough. My sense of smell has almost recovered and yesterday I even tried to sing. 👍 and could! I had moderate pneumonia and did not use an oxygen mask. I don’t give any advice and of course I don’t regret anything! I am glad that life, work and theater are returning and no illness will ever dominate our life! Strengthen your immune system! Eat right and in no case go out in a sick condition – a person with a fever spreads the virus the fastest! And the last one! The tests may be wrong. For this – listen to yourself – loss of smell and temperature is exactly IT.