Late String Quartets

Viola de Hoog: My colleagues in the Narratio Quartet and I have been immersed in all of Beethoven’s string quartets for over fifteen years now. We experience time and again how Beethoven explored and then overcame the limits of the Classical style and the instrumental challenges that were prevalent at the start of the nineteenth century along new pathways. Opus 95 is a great example of exactly this. Beethoven himself stated in a letter to Sir George Smart, at the time an important musician in England, ”The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.” Each of the five late quartets, from Opus 127 onwards, explores new forms, modulating to remotely distant keys, presenting hitherto unprecedented melodic arches and containing what were, at the time, unusually detailed dynamic instructions; different ways in which Beethoven was tearing himself away from the familiar style of the day. Beethoven composed these five quartets in a remarkably brief period, between 1824 and 1826.