About this Piece

Famously “difficult” and esoteric, Beethoven’s last string quartets have been dissected and analyzed endlessly. Beethoven’s contemporaries—even fine and sympathetic musicians—professed extreme degrees of bafflement and horror before them, and it is largely because of them that “late style” is a thing in musicology.

With time, the horror has become awe and the quartets are loved for what they are (deeply probing explorations of musical craft and human expression) rather than feared for what they are not (easily understood exponents of period conventions).

The Quartet No. 13 was composed in 1825 and premiered in March of 1826. It had an exceptionally large finale, the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue), which proved technically daunting and conceptually puzzling at the time. In the fall of 1826, Beethoven replaced it with a shorter and lighter finale, which proved to be the last piece he would complete before his death a few months later.

Reduced to its barest bones, the quartet would seem well within contemporary expectations for the medium. It has a big, serious opening movement with a solemn introduction, vigorous dance and lyrical slow movements in the middle, and a dashing finale. Except that the conventional slow introduction pops back in unexpectedly at odd times throughout the main body of the opening movement to dislocating effect, making restoring formal order part of the narrative arc.

Then there are two dance and two slow movements in the middle, giving the whole quartet six movements instead of the usual four. All of the inner movements are extraordinary examples of their kind. The Presto is a fleet whisper of a ghost dance; the Andante is a marvel of interlocked, interactive construction; the Danza tedesca (German dance) is one of subtle wit; and the sublime Cavatina is widely acknowledged as one of the pinnacles of Beethoven’s art, and of human creativity globally; it was the last piece on the Golden Record of music and languages that were sent into space on the Voyager probes as representative of Earth in 1977.

—John Henken