It is the quartet cycle to end all quartet cycles, or so most any string-quartet musician will tell you. Spanning nearly all of Beethoven’s working life, with the later quartets written just a couple years before his death, this collection of works is renowned for its beauty and intensity, as well as its palpable, evolutionary sound tracing Beethoven’s musical journey from young composer to musical icon.

“I think that if you were to ask any quartet today, they would point to the Beethoven quartet cycle as the major body of work for the medium,” says Roger Tapping, founding violist of the Takács Quartet, a group that in recent years ambitiously both performed and recorded the Beethoven Quartet cycle in its entirety (the third and last recorded installment was released January 11 on the Decca label).

“There is something very complete about the way the cycle [follows] this already very mature young man to a rocking alter Weise,” Tapping continues. “And I think everyone would tell you that there is hardly any music written like the late Beethoven. The Bartók is probably the only comparable cycle, but there are just six pieces . . . And Haydn is fantastic, but it doesn’t have that same sense of a cycle. People think that Beethoven is absolutely one of the greatest composers for very good reasons.

“Certainly these quartets are a very good example of that.”


The Late Quartets
By 1818, Beethoven was completely deaf and communicated almost exclusively through “conversation books” (some 400 of these small booklets, in which visitors wrote remarks to him, were in existence at the time of his death). So his completion of these final chapters of the quartet cycle is an incredible accomplishment indeed. Beethoven delivered the E-flat quartet in December 1824, two years after the work was promised to Nikolai Golitsïn, the Russian aristocrat who commissioned the piece.

But Beethoven didn’t stop there.

“He continued writing,” says Tapping. “He had more work to do. He went on to write another one—over and above what was asked for.”

Op. 127, the first of the late quartets, showcases all that Beethoven: The quartet opens with a lyrical sonata form with two varied tempos, then transforms into a country-dance tune, and then in a brilliant finale, it ends in an explosive, spiritual conclusion—something previously seen in the F-minor quartet (Op. 95), and repeated again in the following quartet, A minor, Op. 132.

“But the part writing doesn’t lie very beautifully—you have to work for it,” Tapping says of the viola part. “Although Beethoven doesn’t write many wonderful melodies for the viola, you are providing harmony and rhythm, but then also an energy. Emotionally, [the part] is intense, and you want to play it extremely well.”