World Premiere: 1826 (String Quartet version)
Most Recent HSO Performance: January 22, 2017
Instrumentation: Strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 16'

On November 9, 1822, Prince Nikolas Galitzin, a devotee of Beethoven’s music and an amateur cellist, wrote from St. Petersburg asking Beethoven for “one, two or three quartets, for which labor I will be glad to pay you whatever amount you think proper.” Beethoven was elated by the commission, and he replied immediately to accept it and set the fee of 50 ducats for each quartet, a high price, but one readily accepted by Galitzin. The music, however, took somewhat longer. The Ninth Symphony was completed in February 1823, but Beethoven, exhausted, was unable to begin Galitzin’s quartets until May. The first of the quartets for Galitzin (E-flat major, Op. 127) was not completed until February 1825; the second (A minor, Op. 132) was finished five months later; and the third (B-flat major, Op. 130) was written between July and November, during one of the few periods of relatively good health that Beethoven enjoyed in his last decade. Beethoven completed the Op. 131 and Op. 135 Quartets the following year to round out this stupendous ultimate series of his compositions.

The premiere of the Op. 130 Quartet, given on March 21, 1826 by the ensemble of violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a champion of Beethoven’s works in earlier years and the first musician in Austria to undertake public quartet concerts, went well, though the listeners seemed puzzled by the Quartet’s slow movements and, especially, by its finale, a gigantic construction in fugal style. Karl Holz, the second violinist of the ensemble and a close friend of Beethoven, tried to humor the composer by telling him that the audience demanded encores of the lighter second and fourth movements. Beethoven was incensed. “Yes, these delicacies! Why not the Fugue? ... Cattle!! Asses!!!” Despite the composer’s epithets, the first hearers of this Quartet were a highly sophisticated lot, perhaps the most knowledgeable and sympathetic audience in all of Europe at the time, and Beethoven must have ultimately found some merit in their misgivings because nine months later he replaced the Grosse Fuge with an alternate finale of more modest dimensions. It was the last music that he completed. The Fuge, in both its original version and in a piano duet transcription, was published separately as Op. 133 two months after his death.

The Grosse Fuge, grand in size and Promethean in thought, bursts from the strict model of the Baroque genre by inextricably combining counterpoint, variation and thematic development: it is a virtual compendium of Beethoven’s mature techniques at their highest level. (Beethoven placed upon the score the legend, “tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée” — “sometimes free, sometimes studied.”) English musicologist Philip Radcliffe noted that the Grosse Fuge “is best understood if regarded not as a highly eccentric fugue, but as a kind of symphonic poem consisting of several contrasted but thematically related sections and containing a certain amount of fugal writing.” The work’s principal thematic material is presented dramatically in a short, introductory “overture.” There follow a long fugue, four sections of motivic development in dense counterpoint (Meno mosso e moderato in 2/4 time; Allegro molto e con brio in 6/8; and altered returns of the 2/4 and 6/8 sections) and a modification of the opening fugue as conclusion.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda