Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
String Quartet in F minor, op. 95 (1810)
Of Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets, a plurality, four, are in the key of F, including the first and last. The F-minor, op. 95, Quartet was his eleventh and dates from 1810, at the tail end of one of the most remarkably productive decades any composer has experienced. It is, overall, a profoundly dark piece – the wholly unexpected, cheery final coda notwithstanding – and the only quartet for which Beethoven provided a subtitle: “Serioso.” It’s an apt moniker.
Though it can be unwise to read too much autobiography into a composer’s music (especially Beethoven’s), this quartet was written during a period of great personal tumult. Not yet forty when he completed the piece in 1810, Beethoven was at the end of his performing career, a demise hastened by his increasing deafness; he was regularly ill, otherwise; perpetually concerned about his financial situation; and, perhaps most crucially, standing at a creative crossroads.
Though the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were both completed by 1814, Beethoven’s output dropped dramatically in the second decade of the 19th century. When he returned to, more or less, prolific composing in the late-teens and 1820s, it was in his so-called “Late Style.” And it’s telling that, after completing the F-minor Quartet, his eleventh since the op. 18 set was published in 1801, Beethoven did not return to the genre for over a decade, until the E-flat major op. 127 quartet of 1824. In a letter he wrote to a friend in May 1810, Beethoven sounded downright suicidal: “If I had not read somewhere that no one should quit life voluntarily while he could still do something worthwhile,” he wrote, “I would have been dead long ago and certainly by my own hand. Oh, life is so beautiful, but for me it is poisoned forever.” It’s in this context that we can begin to understand this quartet as one of Beethoven’s most personal statements in this most personal of genres.
On the surface, it’s a fairly conventional quartet, formally, cast in four movements. The first is breathtakingly concise, opening with a powerful, six-note motive that encapsulates the terse mood of the entire piece. Beethoven eschewed the traditional repeat of the exposition, heading, instead, directly into the development with a jarring harmonic shift from D-flat major to F major. It’s a short development, as concise and direct as the exposition, but serves its purpose well: not a note is wasted. A short recapitulation follows, leading to a turbulent coda that eventually tires itself out and expires, softly, back in F minor.
The second movement begins in the somewhat brighter key of D major, though it’s filled with harmonic ambiguity. It falls into three parts, the first of which is introduced by a climbing melody played by the first violin. The second section is filled with imitative writing, anticipating the fugal section in the second movement of the Seventh Symphony. Here D major and D minor alternate with jarring power, the music seeming increasingly untethered, harmonically. It’s not, of course, and the final section of the movement recapitulates the opening material, now heard in a fresh context.
There’s no break between the second and third movements and only a single diminished seventh chord to form a transition from the D major tonality of the second movement to the F minor of the third. Like we find in the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, this is a scherzo with two trios, the second considerably shorter than the first. It’s, again, music that fluctuates wildly in mood, a kind of Sturm und Drang pushed to its breaking point.
The finale kicks off with a short introduction that leads directly into a rondo. This is, again, a very concise movement that alternates two ideas in between a recurring refrain: the first, a stormy interlude; the second, a sort of miniature development of one of the refrain’s key gestures. Unlike the previous movements, so marked by aggression, this finale is scarred by resignation: it’s music that, at more than one point, feels exhausted, petering out into a pianississimo cadence.
But that’s not the end. In a twist that nothing in the piece foreshadowed, Beethoven supplied a coda of exuberant cheer. It’s a gesture that perhaps calls to mind the finale of Verdi’s Falstaff and the observation that “all in the world’s a jest,” but concludes this most extraordinary quartet with at least a hint of ambiguity.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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