Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 59, No. 3, "Razumovsky #3"

I've signed up for another chamber music workshop; this time, the Wellesley Composer's Conference.  I'll be attending the second half of the second week, August 2nd through 4th.  For the afternoon sessions, I've been assigned to play viola in the Schumann Piano Quintet.  For the morning sessions, though, a cellist friend of mine put together a string quartet to play the Beethoven String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, the third of the set dedicated to Count Razumovsky.  (As an aside, I wonder how many of these late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century noblemen suspected that their lasting claim to fame would be as the dedicatee of some piece of music by a famous composer?)

We've had a couple of read-throughs of the quartet, but this week was our first attempt at taking it apart and working on small sections.  We worked mostly on the first movement, and while there were a couple of spots in the main section that needed work (there's one bar with syncopated sixteenth notes for the violins that's a real bear!) we spend most of that time on the introduction.

This introduction is Beethoven at his most audacious and amazing.  It's clearly modeled on the opening of the Mozart Dissonance Quartet that I played and blogged about a couple of weeks ago.  But Beethoven takes Mozart one further.  While the Mozart introduction ventures into far distant keys, it at least starts with repeated Cs in the cello to establish the tonic.  Beethoven starts this quartet with a diminished seventh chord, perhaps one of the most dissonant, and certainly the most ambiguous, chords in Western music.  Its ambiguity comes from the fact that it's completely symmetric, being made up of three minor thirds and an augmented second, which is enharmonically the same as a minor third.  You literally have no idea where it's going, and Beethoven doesn't do anything to clear up the confusion.  There are lots of diminished seventh chords in this short introduction, and lots of unusual resolutions, until you finally have the viola drop down from Ab to G, to clue you in that you're actually in C major, the bar before the introduction ends. 

By the way, does anyone know of a harmonic analysis of this introduction?  Internet research hasn't turned one up, and it would be incredibly helpful for me to figure out my way through this forest of bizarre chords.

As you might expect, this creates a big challenge in interpretation.  The introduction needs to be simultaneously mysterious and secure, a difficult pairing to pull off!  Plus, there's the problem of intonation.  How do you tune an isolated diminished seventh chord?  I'm thinking I need to write up a little introduction to the introduction, to establish the key and prepare that initial surprise. 

At the end of the evening we read through the last movement, but that, amazingly, seems to be in pretty good shape.  Well, we're taking it at a half-note equals 100 (100 beats per minute), which is significantly under the tempo of the recordings (including the one I've linked to).  But we can play it at that tempo, and I think it sounds good: you can hear all the motives from the fugue theme that opens the movement, and how Beethoven plays with all of them as the movement progresses.  The only trick is that it's all up to me.  The movement starts with a viola solo, and if I start too fast, we're in for a train wreck. :-)