The First Complete Beethoven Quartet Cycles, 1845-1851: Historical Notes on the London Quartett Society

Abstract

In 1964 Dr. Ivan Mahaim, the famous cardiologist and professor at the University of Lausanne, published the results of years of his private musicological research, an encyclopedic microhistory of the late Beethoven quartets entitled Beethoven: Naissance et Renaissance des Derniers Quatuors. This remarkable two-volume work, musicologically unconventional in the boundless enthusiasm and stylistic idiosyncrasy of its prose, contains a wealth of material never before assembled in one book. The point of departure for the study was the question of why Beethoven agreed to separate the Great Fugue from its original role as the finale of the Quartet op. 130, publish it separately, and replace it with a new substitute finale. In pursuing this issue, Mahaim analyzed the relationship of the Fugue to the other movements of op. 130 and compared the fugue subject to similar configurations in the Quartets opp. 131 and 132. Among numerous inserts included in a pocket at the end of volume 2 one finds a reproduction of Artaria's first printing in May 1827 of the Great Fugue, which Mahaim has annotated and analyzed extensively. Mahaim also describes in great detail the circumstances surrounding the creation of the last five quartets, opp. 127 to 135, including minutia about their commission, first performances, their reception by the contemporary press, and the fate of the quartets in performances up through the beginning of the twentieth century. A further poster-size insert provides a synoptic table of performance statistics of Beethoven's last quartets from 1825 until 1875, detailing the frequency of performances in eighty-nine European cities plus New York and Boston: this reveals, for example, that during this fifty-year period the five quartets were performed a total of 1,025 times while the Great Fugue was played on only fourteen occasions.