The Beethoven quartet companion

Abstract

The Quartet Companion Edited by Robert Winter and Robert Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 300 pp. $30 THE BEETHOVEN QUARTET COMPANION ADMIRABLY FULFILLS THE TWOFOLD PURPOSE LAID OUT IN THE BOOK'S INTRODUCTION. The first of these is enhancement of the listening experience; the second is enriching our understanding of the That term, cultural context is clearly meant the broadest possible context. It includes not only economic, societal, and historical factors, but also such technical/musicological information as the nature of earlier string instruments and the interplay among a quartet's four performers. Although the entire volume will enhance the listening experience, the book's second part focuses directly on the works themselves. Part II is entirely the contribution of that doyen of program annotators, Michael Steinberg. Readers fortunate enough to have read his notes the program booklets of the San Francisco Symphony, for example, know that he is a most learned, yet most readable (not to say, amusing) guide. In chapters, Steinberg brilliantly analyzes the early, middle, and late quartets. Steinberg also contributes a detailed glossary which by itself is all but worth the price of admission. The entry under Chord, for example, is page long and includes among other subjects inversions and figured bass. An illustration from the Fortepiano Sonata, Opus 27, No. 1, first movement, illustrates the former. Likewise the Circle of fifths is illustrated as well as explained. The same is true for the tunings of the quartet instruments. Sonata form is covered two pages of fascinating analysis. The glossary, sum, is a most useful guide, not only to the terminology utilized by Steinberg's fellow essayists, but also for the uninitiated to an appreciation of music. Perspectives is the title given to the first part of the book which contains five superb essays. The first of these, Joseph Kerman's Beethoven quartet audiences: actual, potential, ideal, is a riveting, enlightening history of the quartet medium during the period spanned by Beethoven's life. The principal audience for the String Quartets, Opus 18, according to Kerman, was the players themselves. They were in the best sense, amateurs, who played same passion which we until recently played bridge. The appearance of the Razumovsky Quartets, Opus 59, marked the emergence of the professionalization of the string Virtuosi string players led by such performers as Beethoven's friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh played not for themselves but for the new and growing audience for chamber music. And finally, the last quartets represent the composer fulfilling his own needs, meeting new musical challenges, expressing his interior vision. At the risk of oversimplification, Kerman writes, one can say that whereas Beethoven's first period the essential audience for his quartets had been the quartet players, and his second period the concert public, the late period the audience was primarily the composer. at the end of his life achieved the privatization of the string quartet. If, as Kerman puts it, we can see three phases the history of the quartet during Beethoven's lifetime the amateur, the public, and the private, the second essay, Performing the quartets their first century by Robert Winter, logically carries the argument on through the nineteenth century. It is a most absorbing story. Winter begins by detailing the contributions of Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who is credited with pioneering of the permanent string quartet and the presentation of regular series of chamber concerts, thereby changing landscape of quartet playing forever. An astounding fact is the youth of the period's leading players. Schuppanzigh was seventeen years old when he presided at Prince Lichnowsky's over colleagues ranging downward to fourteen years of age! …