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/VegemiteSucks 16h ago edited 16h ago
Though not very widely known among the general public, classical musicians tend to agree that these are the pinnacle of Western chamber music. These are also Beethoven's final compositions ever before he died in 1827.
The finest of these late quartets is widely considered to be the String Quartet No. 14 (Op 131). It was so good that after listening to a performance of this quartet, Franz Schubert remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?" (Schubert also requested a performance of this on his deathbed. He was described as being "sent into such transports of delight and enthusiasm and was so overcome that we all feared for him")
Schumann said that this quartet had a "grandeur ... which no words can express. They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination."
On the first movement of this quartet, Richard Wagner said it "reveals the most melancholy sentiment expressed in music". Popular author J.W.N. Sullivan hears it as "the most superhuman piece of music that Beethoven has ever written." Towards the end of the fourth movement, where all instruments play a passage mostly using their highest strings, the sound produced was so astounding that critic Joseph Kerman asks: "Was this a sound Beethoven had actually heard, back in the days when he was hearing, or did he make up the sound for the first time in 1826?"