Harp quartet string beethoven biography

Napoleon and his troops reached Vienna early in May, and on the night of May the city suffered heavy bombardment. Vienna was occupied the next day, and in the ensuing weeks its citizens suffered great hardships — rising prices, shortages of food and levies on their purse. Beethoven was despondent. His sources of income were shut off, his patrons had fled, and his favorite promenades in the public parks were now military camps.

The composer finally took refuge at the watering place of Baden, 15 miles from Vienna, where this quartet was written. The work did not come easily. Under these circumstances Beethoven lacked the incentive to break new ground or scale new heights, and this mainly easy-going quartet was the result. Fortunately for us, the mood did not last long.

One passage leads from the development into the recapitulation, and the other underpins part of the coda. Other than these features, the movement is a fairly straightforward Beethoven excursion in sonata form. The music takes on added expressiveness in the slow movement, a beautiful adagio , whose spacious melodies are subjected to exquisite ornamentation.

The movement is in abbreviated rondo form A-B-A-C-A , but the sections are more complementary than contrasting.

Beethoven late quartets

The overall impression remains one of restraint rather than tension. With the scherzo, the pendulum swings for the moment to the other extreme. Marked presto , the music is propelled by a strong, vigorous rhythmic drive and is full of hammering figures and breathless scale passages. The movement bears a strong resemblance to the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, with its obsessive use of a similar C-minor knocking motif and its long coda leading without pause to the finale.

However, instead of a triumphant peroration as in the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven gives us an unwinding theme with variations, a rare form for a Beethoven finale.