Vegh Quartet
Alban Berg Quartet
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Beethoven's series of late string quartets were his main creative preoccupation during the final three years of his life. To many listeners, these five works (six, if we count the original large-scale finale - the so-called Grosse Fuge - which Beethoven eventually removed from the Quartet Op.130, and published as an independent piece) form the most profoundly personal and spiritual music he ever wrote. Yet the quartets had a surprisingly mundane origin. In November 1822 Beethoven received a letter from Prince Nikolas Galitzin, an important artistic patron in St Petersburg and a passionate admirer of his music, asking for "one, two or three new quartets", for which he offered to pay whatever fee the composer thought appropriate. Beethoven accepted, and promised to have the first quartet ready by the following March, at the latest. But he had reckoned without the amount of work he still had to do on his Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, and in the event he didn't turn his attention to Galitzin's quartets until the second half of 1824. Perhaps he was prompted to do so by the fact that it was Galitzin who organised the first complete performance of the Missa solemnis , which took place in St Petersburg on 18th April of that year.
Among Beethoven's late string quartets the first work in the series, Op.127, and the last, Op.135, are alone in being cast in a traditional four-movement mould. Beethoven had, however, contemplated a more extended plan for Op.127. His sketches show that a piece called 'La Gaîté' was to have been inserted between its first two movements, and that the finale was to have been preceded by a slow introduction. Remarkably enough, it was the light-hearted theme of the 'Gaîté' movement, initially conceived in the form of a high-lying cello part, that Beethoven transformed into the sublime variation theme of the work's slow movement.
©Misha Donat
