String Quartets in the Diamond: Quatuor Ébène – Beethoven's String Quartets (4:6)
Hear Beethoven’s 16 string quartets across six concerts in the Queen’s Hall as the French star quartet Quatuor Ébène returns to The Black Diamond. This evening’s programme features Nos. 7 and 3.
What do Beethoven's string quartets sound like 200 years after the composer's death?
In 2020, to mark Beethoven’s 250th birthday, Quatuor Ébène released all 16 of Beethoven's string quartets. The recordings were made all over the world, from Nairobi to Melbourne, and they received great praise for their contemporary interpretation.
Quatuor Ébène itself describes Beethoven's music as "music that expresses itself freely and that addresses the audience of the future rather than its own time."
Beethoven's 16 string quartets have taken pride of place in the chamber music repertoire, and they show his creative development as a composer. From the earliest Viennese Classical string quartets written in the wake of the genre's earlier masters, Haydn and Mozart, through the "middle period" when Beethoven broke with tradition and made the genre his own, and to his late string quartets written in the years leading up to his death, which have been called some of the most sublime music ever written.
String Quartet No. 7 and No. 13
This evening you can hear String Quartet No. 7, which is the first of the three so-called Razumovsky Quartets, commissioned by the Russian ambassador Count Andrey Razumovsky in 1805. The three string quartets represented a serious break with tradition, and with them Beethoven really made the string quartet genre truly his own. All three string quartets contain distinct Russian themes in keeping with Razumovsky’s wishes. The string quartets are from Beethoven's middle period, also called his “heroic” period, which is characterised by a more dramatic, expressive and Romantic style.
String Quartet No. 13 dates from 1825, his late period, and later received a new finale, Op. 133, in 1825-26. The quartets from this period are more ambitious, experimental and structurally and harmonically complex, and are recognised today as some of the most “sublime” music ever written, and far ahead of their time.
The two string quartets were written after Beethoven received a letter from a young Russian prince, Galitzin, in November 1822, asking him to write a series of new string quartets. Despite the extraordinary quality of the works, they were written during a period when Beethoven had gone through a long series of personal tragedies. He had both health and financial problems and in 1816 had become completely deaf, which isolated him.
Beethoven wrote String Quartet No. 13 in 1825, but subsequently Beethoven and his publisher agreed that the work's fugue (an important movement form in Baroque music in particular) did not fit in with the rest of the work. Therefore, it was separated as its own work, Opus 133, and Beethoven composed a more concise finale in November 1826. The finale was the last piece of music Beethoven wrote before his death four months later, in March 1827.
Composer Igor Stravinsky remarked of the Great Fugue that it was “the first piece of modern music that would remain eternally modern.” This evening, both the String Quartet No. 13 and the “Great Fugue” will be performed.
The performers
Quatuor Ébène:
Pierre Colombet, violin
Gabriel Le Magadure, violin
Marie Chilemme, viola
Yuya Okamoto, cello
Quatuor Ébène was formed in 1999 at the conservatoire in Boulogne-Billancourt in France. Since then, the quartet has performed at internationally renowned venues such as Wigmore Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York. Their performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets have also been heard at Philharmonie de Paris and Alte Oper in Frankfurt.
The quartet itself describes the string quartet as the musical form of democracy, in which each musician steps forward with their own voice while the whole emerges through shared interplay, attentiveness and mutual understanding.
