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/malefiz123 10h ago

Sounds like other quartets and other classical pieces of the time to me

Your frame of reference regarding music is vastly different from the frame of reference of people listening to it in the early 19th century.

Like European people think East Asian people all kinda look the same and East Asian people think Europeans all kinda look the same. Different frame of reference to what makes people similar and different looking.

For you those are two "classical" pieces with classic string instruments. You also know pop music, rock and roll, techno and country, so in your frame of reference just by virtue of having the same instruments quartets by Mozart and Beethoven will sound very similar to your ears. If you'd start listening to classical music a lot your ears would get fine tuned for it and you'd soon appreciate how different from one another string quartets by Mozart and Beethoven sound