Polling Beethoven's Late String Quartets

Legendary, canonical, and somewhat overwhelming. People called them unlistenable, incomprehensible, said that now music had nowhere to go. Proust uses them as an example of how music can be so far ahead that it creates it's own future, iirc. I've spent quite some time listening to these over the last six months or so, and I could use some viewpoints to help me understand them all. So: Which one is your favorite?

I'm currently inclined to vote for no 14. The Presto and Allegro (sections 5 and 7) are so amazingly catchy. But I don't know yet.

I'm musically illiterate, so I don't really understand any of them, but my favourite movements are the Heiliger Dankgesang from op. 132 (some of the most beautiful music ever, imo), and the gorgeous second movement from op. 127.

love the donkeysong

i've listened to 2 so far and i'm digging all these beethovan jawns

to me these are one of the rare occasions where the "it can't be as great as they say it is" reputation isn't even adequate to how great they are. 13 is my first instinct but since we have 4 weeks to decide I'm going to bookmark the thread and get out the two versions of this I have (Takacs and Berg) and maybe check out another if somebody recommends one?? or more, and report back, any opportunity to delve into these is great imo

takacs is tops

i've listened to 2 so far and i'm digging all these beethovan jawns

Same here. Not sure I've heard any of these before? Is there a such thing as a Beethoven deep cut?

I like this quote about the great fugue embedded in the youtube video:

http://i.imgur.com/vUtyb.jpg

Same here. Not sure I've heard any of these before? Is there a such thing as a Beethoven deep cut?

All of Beethoven is deep cuts except for about... eight pieces or so!

Aero, maybe the Talich Quartet as a third option? They bring the warmth.

this thread has really opened my eyes to what Spotify means practically speaking & will result in me pulling the trigger on a premium subscription. I can listen to pretty much all the renditions of the late quartets. And all the St. Matthews Passions. Man oh man

Spotify is really great for trying out new renditions of classical works and checking out works you've never heard, definitely. There is a big frustration with Spotify and classical, though, which is that everything from Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, ECM-- everything under the Universal Music Group umbrella -- has grievous sound issues. If i may crosspost myself from the Spotify thread a couple of days ago:

The biggest hole with Spotify for me is that every single track from a UMG label has some weird defective codec thing where it sounds like it's being heard through a table fan (kind of a rapid-rate whooshing that's especially audible on elements such as cymbals, chorus, reverb decay, and strings at a moderate dynamic level. Motown, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM, Decca, it's just a giant swath of classic records fucked up.

It's not specific to Spotify either, I first noticed it on UMG tracks from eMusic and Amazon MP3. Seems like when Universal went through the humungous task, several years ago, of converting all their holdings to MP3 in order to enter the digital sales realm, someone had something set to 'fastest conversion/lowest quality' or something.

I would be really, REALLY curious to hear if this does not pertain when one has a premium membership.

Hmmm I subscribe do you have an example of a specific track?

haha look at you not fifty minutes and you're already all 'i subscribe…'.

listening to these i feel out of my depth, maybe not so much musically (though, yeah, musically), but emotionally.

it's good to let the donkeysong catch you by surprise

Here's 14 with some cool color-coded visuals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96G4ZnyHnLo&list=LLQ0yN_aOFfVZgHUeaUb2o_Q

Good tunes.

yo M@tt this is offtopic for this thread but an easy example of the 'UMG problem' is Steely Dan 'My Old School'. Have a listen and tell me if the backing vocals on the chorus sound super weird.

listening to these i feel out of my depth, maybe not so much musically (though, yeah, musically), but emotionally

this is well put - these are overwhelming to me, they're so much to take in and bear - I want to say "they don't let up," but they do, there's range, but it's all really -- not "heavy," but very real, so it's like having a conversation where somebody's lucidly being open about heavy stuff the whole time. It's funny though because every time I make the commitment to listen to them, there's always a point where I say "Why do I listen to anything else? This is the only thing you really need to listen to."

I know exactly what you mean. That feeling is so rare, and I guess it is an illusion of sorts, but... it reminds me of something someone wrote about Tilt to the effect that 'listening to this music, you get the feeling that everyone else has just been fucking around'.

otm

I guess my vote is for No. 12, which I think is the happiest of the five. I hear it as being like a respectably intoxicated summer evening. The contemplative second movement is like a pocket of tranquil conversation with the wisest person you know.

I love Goethe's characterization of the string quartet form as "four rational people conversing." That's a kind of ideal of art.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

has anyone ever heard the melos quartet's recording of these? is it good?

my computer picked a really great time to crap out, i was really looking forward to listening to these on spotify

felt a bit of a swizz voting - like giving a thumbs up to a mountain or something - but went for 14. third movement of 15 is all time for me too.

a+ snowcaps

15, but I feel it's a cheap vote as it's least indicative of his late period

I haven't yet come to enjoy Beethoven's late period, but big thanks to quartet 14 for inspiring all my future favourites (Bartok i.e.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

one can understand the six-voter turnout - it's only Beethoven's late quartets

cmon beethoven didn't take 22 years to release them

I actually got really into these thanks to this thread but didn't feel qualified to vote

man honestly that makes the poll a huge success. they're just so ridiculously good, I am legit stoked to hear somebody had a "fucking A, Beethoven's late quartets" experience

I didn't vote because I couldn't choose.

^

didn't vote because the great fugue wasnt a separate option, or at least the op130 with the great fugue, since i tend to think of op130 with the revised finale as a discrete entity

yeah the Gross Fuge is O_O & the fact that it was optional in this poll kinda threw me off

listened to two of these tonight - Opus 95, F minor, I guess not one of the "lates" but on the Takacs set, and Op. 127 in Eb major - after listening to a lot of Bruckner this morning. I was struck by how, with Bruckner, when he was new to me, I couldn't see him working - it was an immersive world I'd surrender to and get lost in. I still love Bruckner to pieces, and I still get to that state at points, but I feel like I hear the internal workings of what's going on pretty clearly now - the development, the motion. I sense the mind of the composer in the work. But with these quartets, that sensation of being swept away, of natural motion, the feeling that for me compares to prime Coltrane in that every move feels right, feels inevitable - that's every bit of these, you know? And no matter how hard I focus, I never lose that feeling of being caught up, of reaching that state you reach on the dance floor, where your experience of hearing the music and of yourself meld utterly. Which is a disorienting feeling after a lifetime listening to music - so rare now, and yet I can get there with something I've been hearing for years.

Can anybody tell me what, if anything, is considered precedent to these? I have Mozart's quartets, which are great of course, but these feel so modern and free.

i have listened to two different youtubes of the No. 13 in B-flat, and one must have been mislabeled because they were two completely different songs. assuming this one is correct because it's so beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p3L2Zm1-4Y

fitting that it's the last track on the Voyager Interstellar Record. if intelligent alien life ever discovered the record and knew how to play it, what a perfect final track. we may kill each other, and knowingly destroy the planet, and we may scream at ourselves in the mirror and self-mutilate, but we also had a guy who did THIS. the best representative of humanity.

earth's greatest hits

that's the fifth movement out of six. the other video you found probably started from the first movement.

didnt the voyager probe contain a recorded message by then UN hierarch and former SS agent kurt waldheim

I put on C Sharp Major Op. 131 this morning at 6 when aero jr & me came downstairs to the kitchen and he instantly got this "Whaaaaaa???" look on his face and stared up at the CD player (it's a boombox on the kitchen counter) like "what is that awesome sound"

good thread, ty all – these always seem kind of too-forbidding or intimidating to me, like they are the kind of thing that serious musicologist friends of mine will be extra-serious about, & I am just lost when it gets to that because I am totally musically illiterate & so don't speak the same language as them – a cheerful enthusiastic ilm thread with a few pointers is just what I needed to be pushed towards them with a less trepidatious attitude.

Glad if people could use the thread. I didn't even vote myself, I was going to figure out whether to vote for the 14. or 15. on the last day, but then I was too hungover to notice...

these always seem kind of too-forbidding or intimidating to me, like they are the kind of thing that serious musicologist friends of mine will be extra-serious about, & I am just lost when it gets to that because I am totally musically illiterate & so don't speak the same language as them

man that is the thing about them - which I wish people would stress when talking about them - you don't need to know anything about music for these to completely floor you, imo. there are a bunch of reasons why this is so but really I think anybody who likes music, literally any kind of music, could sit down with these, close their eyes, and be completely immersed immediately. They're very intense, more thrill-ride than relaxing reverie, but they're ready-to-wear to my ears - like Death and the Maiden, they just jump right out at you.

@ woof

I'm not a big fan of these quartets, either. I appreciate them for their formal beauty and historical significance. In his late period, Beethoven started using harmonic sequences and colours that sound repetitious to my ears. I assert that it's a taste thing, the way some people like V7 chords and others don't. My father always told me it has to do with age, that late Beethoven is something to look forward to enjoying, and I do. (He also told me that Shostakovich was for teenagers and he was right about that also.) But Grosse Fuge in particular is this impenetrable brick, the range of the instruments stays constant, the shifts in colour are tiny and uneffective, the material is unmemorable enough to hear it develop audibly. And it's funny that the Spohr "uncorrected" quote is so famous, bc Spohr is otm. It sounds powder-faced to use words like "uncorrected" with regards to 'great art' but it's a fugue, fugues are the most academic construction, fugues are cryptic crosswords and Beethoven is a novelist, imo.

Like I said upthread, 15 is one of my favourite Beethoven things and I voted for it. 14 was one of Bartok's favourite things and so I listen to it every year.

I love aero's capital R Romantic tastes, too, between this and his Tchaikovsky recommendations there's been a lot of new dessertmusic round my house, thank you aero

I love the almost Middle Eastern melodies in op. 131, and the scherzo (if that's right) that seems on the verge of spinning out of control but somehow stays together, and that soaring trill about halfway through the last movement.

I love aero's capital R Romantic tastes, too, between this and his Tchaikovsky recommendations there's been a lot of new dessertmusic round my house, thank you aero

I'm so genuinely exposed by this, I try to be well-rounded and I listen to a lot of early music and super-modern shit too but I'm certain I hear it all through a lens of pure romanticism. I spent late high-school badmouthing any romantics I could find but guess what Dr. Freud yr right, yr right

Like I said upthread, 15 is one of my favourite Beethoven things and I voted for it. 14 was one of Bartok's favourite things and so I listen to it every year.

man we should have a Bartok quartets listening thread because those are fucking massively underpraised in my experience. idk maybe ppl who get out more do talk about them but they were a huge revelation to me late last year

I'm so genuinely exposed by this, I try to be well-rounded and I listen to a lot of early music and super-modern shit too but I'm certain I hear it all through a lens of pure romanticism. I spent late high-school badmouthing any romantics I could find but guess what Dr. Freud yr right, yr right

This is p much me though my sweet spot and spiritual home extends through that magnif train station between late Romanticism and early Modernism, say 1890-1930. 'The Long Nineteenth Century' as they say.

Beethoven through when Stravinsky got shook, that's my shit.

yeah I mean I would probably still argue for Mahler as G.O.A.T. and he's technically "modern" but it's the ache and pang and sweep that get me, they're what keep me going

There is a gap in my chest between Chopin and Schoenberg, where my heart should be

fucking massively underpraised

In both my estimation and my education, Bartok's string quartets are considered "the best quartets of all time" and still I agree they are yet underpraised

ha well like I say I basically only run across what I happen to be hearing about - I have no formal education, but friends talk Death & the Maiden or Beethoven or Messian, which basically shows you what kinda crowd I run w/

I wasn't belittling you! I was agreeing. You know that any mention I make of "well this is what I learned in school", it is a salted potato chip. Bartok, I think, particularly appeals to "the academy" because it's equally interesting in its formal innovations as it appeals to ethnomusicologists. Anyway, if the Emerson quartet sold t-shirts I would've worn one out

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9LDgV0lN__U/TNqyrAI7I3I/AAAAAAAAAz0/SC719CAv3ao/s1600/Bartok%2BEmerson.jpg

A 'listening through the Bartok SQs' thread would be pretty cool because those pieces are just so packed full of incidents.

Yeah, listen to a movement a day and talk about it? Sign me up pls

you don't need to know anything about music for these to completely floor you, imo

yep. i mean, i don't know all of these as intimately as i'd like which is why i didn't vote, and i might've voted for the gross fugue anyway had that been a thing (or i should've voted for no. 14 as i am all about 14), but i know very little about music, have had very little formal training, and i experience a powerful physical reaction to this stuff

A 'listening through the Bartok SQs' thread would be pretty cool because those pieces are just so packed full of incidents.

― try a little crowleymass (Jon Lewis), Tuesday, February 12, 2013 11:09 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think i'd have much to contribute but i would definitely listen along

The best part about a Bartok SQs is that there are so few low points, if any, plus 6:iv is the jam, best six minutes of your life and mine

*a Bartok SQs thread, implying that listening to it all in sequence ends beautifully; sorry, I'm a little harried

My father is admonishing me for my "Beethoven couldn't write fugues" comment, points out the first mvt of no. 14 in c#, fourth mvt of "Hammerklavier" sonata, but goes on to say with dryness that "the gross fugue is aptly titled"

i will say my fascination with the gross fuge is akin to me staring at a lengthy math equation & marveling at the way it travels aesthetically

dry like sauternes

It's 2pm and he's retired, he's allowed.

flamboyant goon tie I don't know if I know you personally or not but either way you are cracking me up here

Grosse Fuge is amazing. So much tense, twisted beauty.

(He also told me that Shostakovich was for teenagers and he was right about that also.)

haha, i love this detail

omg @ the final allegro of the 12th - Beethoven virtually invents Blue Cheer or Killdozer or whoever for 10 seconds (twice)

'cavatina' from the 13th really bringing me to my knees this morning -- such an intense gut-punch of longing. it feels like it could have been written recently and still would be every bit as moving and fresh

timely revive - i've been listening to the 13th (and The Große Fuge) a lot the last few days. Cavatina was the final song on the voyager record, too. can't really top that, imo.