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. :-)

Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, and Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1

After a relatively quiet time (there was some music, but no time to blog about it) I've had an intense schedule of four sessions on four successive nights!  I think that was a bit much, even for me. :-)

Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting a new cellist.  As a violist, I feel I can never have too many cellists in my circle of acquaintance: the music you can play without a cellist is quite limited.  This cellist was a good player, a nice person, and, as a bonus, lives in my town.  A real find!

We started off with the Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, the last of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn.  The dedication is rather touching, I think: it seems to show a side of Mozart that we don't often think of:

To my dear friend Haydn,

A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,

W.A. Mozart

The quartet gets its name from the slow introduction to the first movement, with its harmonies so strange for the time that some of the early editions tried to "correct" them.   Haydn said, “If Mozart wrote it so he must have had a good reason for it.”

This reading went very well, I thought, even though the first violinist had practiced the wrong piece.  She did so well that I think I'm going to keep telling her the wrong pieces to practice. :-)

The other quartet we played that evening is the Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 in D major.  Readers of the blog will know that I particularly enjoy Mendelssohn.  I have an idea for a project (now that the Haydn quartet project is nearly over) to play all of the Mendelssohn string quartets in one day.  There are eight of them, plus twelve short fugues he wrote as a child: I think it's doable.  With lots of breaks.  And perhaps lots of coffee. :-)

The Mendelssohn D major quartet was great fun.  On top of just being beautiful music, I got to play a bunch of open B sharps, something which always tickles me. 

The new cellist remarked that the chord three from the end in the first movement was strange: she played a G sharp, which is not in the key of D major.  I've included an excerpt from the score (please forgive my inexpert cut-and-paste job).

Internet research reminded me that this is called a "secondary dominant", in this case V7/V.   Looking for explanations of this led me to discover a wonderful set of YouTube videos by David Newman, who teaches voice and ear training at James Madison University.   I can't decide which is my favorite: they're all absolutely amazing.  If you have any interest in music theory at all, you have to listen to them!