Beethoven’s genius as a composer for the string quartet is patent in every one of quartets he wrote, but the two works coupled here, so different in character and temperament, perfectly exemplify his huge expressive range. He once declared that F minor was a ‘barbarous’ key, and its associations in his work are oppressive. The String Quartet No.11 in F minor was composed in 1810, but the score was not published until 1816 (which accounts for its misleadingly high opus number). Beethoven himself gave it the subtitle Quartetto serioso, as if to stress its powerful, dramatic atmosphere, its terse, laconic themes, its tense minor-key mood, only relieved in the last unexpected opera buffa scurryings of the finale’s coda.
A furious opening theme, like a brandished fist, sets its angry stamp on the whole first movement. It is immediately answered by a wide-leaping phrase in dotted rhythm, with a side-slip into the distant ‘Neapolitan’ key of G flat. Themes and motifs succeed each other in an almost improvisatory manner. A gentler melody, in the remote key of D flat, rises on the viola and tries to extricate itself from the wrathful mood, but the furious motif continually asserts its authority – sometimes in more insinuating guise in the middle voices or in the cello, sometimes with overwhelming force as in the movement’s final bars.
The poignant Allegretto ma non troppo, which serves the quartet for a ‘slow movement’, has a more familiar formal shape. Nominally in D major, it begins with a descending cello figure that introduces a serene instrumental cantilena, followed in its turn by a restlessly chromatic fugato. The D major song returns, but there are intense reminders of the fugato before the movement ends with an air of expectancy on a diminished seventh chord. The ensuing scherzo returns us to F minor with a vengeance. This rugged, obstreperous music is built from obsessive dotted rhythms. The trio, which appears twice (with another side-slip into G flat and then to the slow-movement key of D), is smoother – like a chorale, decorated by the figuration of the first violin – but does not relieve the tension in any way.
The finale begins with a slow, disconsolate introduction, marked by wide intervals and at first seeming to promise release from the prevailing tensions. But it swiftly gives way to a nervy Allegretto agitato whose song-like theme is drawn into a whirlwind of rhythmic activity. Here again there are copious ‘Neapolitan’ inflections to G flat. After the movement has apparently run its course a few sombre, quiet bars lead into an utterly unexpected coda: a gay and witty Allegro in F major that seems a display of comic-operatic good humour.
Op. 95 is often regarded as closing Beethoven’s ‘middle period’ in composition, and it would be thirteen years before he returned to the string quartet genre. The ‘late quartets’ which he composed in 1823-6 are generally considered among his most important and personal works. Shortly after he began writing the String Quartet No.15 in A minor in 1825 he suffered a sudden serious illness: an intestinal inflammation. He completed the work while recuperating in the Viennese suburb of Baden, as is shown by his designation of the slow movement as a convalescent’s ‘song of thanksgiving’.
Beethoven’s sketchbooks of the time show an obsession with the four uppermost notes of the minor scale: these give rise to the work’s four-note opening figure, which in various forms constitutes the first movement’s mysterious introduction. In the fretful Allegro that it leads into the tension never really relaxes. The ensuing Allegro ma non tanto is a minuet with a double theme, perhaps in homage to the corresponding movement in Mozart’s A major Quartet, K464, a work Beethoven much admired.
The centrepiece of the quartet is the Adagio, which Beethoven himself entitled a ‘Sacred Song of thanksgiving from one who is recovered, to the Godhead; in the Lydian Mode’. It is a huge, very slow set of double variations, whose first element is an austere, archaic chorale, each line of which is separated by short contrapuntal passages. The second theme is a solemn dance which Beethoven marked ‘feeling new strength’ (neue Kraft fühlend) and whose wide leaps, florid decoration and rhythmic pulse all suggest the physical obverse to the hymn’s spiritual demeanour. There are two variations of the chorale, enclosing one variation of the dance, to create a very broad movement that closes in an empyrean nirvana.
By an act of almost perverse contrast the fourth movement is a march, not military or funereal but workaday, almost municipal in its rugged dotted rhythms and mellifluous second strain. It is, however, very short; and by a second incongruous contrast it flows into a very dramatic, very operatic recitative for the first violin against tremolando chords. The pace quickens to a swooping Presto that touches off the finale, a restless sonata-rondo whose main theme has the character of a celestial but somewhat melancholic waltz. Towards the end one of the subsidiary episodes refers back to the four-note figure with which the work opened, and the tonality finally brightens into A major, although to the end the music retains a tinge of melancholy.
