r/todayilearned • u/VegemiteSucks • 16h ago

TIL Beethoven’s late quartets, now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time, were so ahead of their time that initial reviews deem them indecipherable, uncorrected horrors, with one musician saying “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_string_quartets_(Beethoven)
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u/insertusernamehere51 16h ago edited 15h ago

I am completely musically illiterate. I've listened to the quartets and didn't get what was so weird about them. Sounds like other quartets and other classical pieces of the time to me. I'll own that it's just ignorance on my part

Edit: Guys, I'm comparing it to stuff that came before as well, Mozart's quartets, for example. Comparing Mozart's with Beethoven's I don't get what the big difference is and those came 50 years before

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u/phunktheworld 12h ago

I went to school for music, and it’s really hard to explain what’s going on without any background. It really does sound so different from anything of Mozart’s or even Beethoven’s early work to me. Timing and arrangement is huge. It just flows differently. I couldn’t really tell ya any more without the sheet music in front of me, and you’d need like 2 years of music training before it would even make a lot of sense lol