Michael Parloff: Lecture on Beethoven Quartets Op. 131 & Op. 135

Michael Parloff provides insight into the music and background of Beethoven’s String Quartets: Op. 131 (C# minor) and Op. 135 (F major).
Filmed live in the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio on March 15, 2016. Video produced by Trent Casey.
Chapters:
Quartet in C# minor, Op. 131: 8:44
Quartet in F major, Op. 135: 39:07
Finale “ Allegro” from Op. 130: 57:36
CMS is grateful to The Emerson String Quartet for the use of excerpts from their Deutsche Grammophon recording of the Beethoven String Quartets.
For additional information about the Beethoven String Quartets, the following resources are highly recommended:
Joseph Kerman: The Beethoven Quartets
William Kinderman: The String Quartets of Beethoven
Lewis Lockwood: Beethoven
Kurt Oppens: Kurt Oppens on Music
J. S. Shedlock, translator: Beethoven’s Letters
Maynard Solomon: Beethoven
Jan Swafford: Beethoven, Anguish and Triumph
Angus Watson: Beethoven’s Chamber Music in Context
Robert Winter (essays by Michael Steinberg): The Beethoven Quartet Companion

[@alfordreynolds6022]

This man, Prof. Michael Parloff, is a bleeping miracle! In today's America, where we are met on all sides by incompetence, here is a man who is so supremely competent, and who shares his great knowledge with us lucky ones with such genial, self-effacing grace, As I said, a bleeping miracle! !

[@canman5060]

Beethoven late quartets are lifetime study for me since teenage year.

[@joncheskin]

I think it is a great idea to consider these two quartets together, as the lecture points out they are two sides of the same coin, a composer wrapping up his career. Beethoven probably wanted to end with Op 131, simply because it is such an amazing piece and colossal achievement, but the piece is so desperate and angry at the end that he simply figured that he could not go out that way. So enter Op 135 which has the message that even in the face of earthly heartbreak and the inevitability of death, we can still be thankful for our lives and take satisfaction for a life well-lived.

[@canman5060]

I think my great great great great great grand teacher Maestro Beethoven was trying to find the meaning of 'infinity' in the distance future musical language in his late string quartets.

[@lauracalzolari9987]

Thank you for your insights and explanation of the greatest string quartets ever written.

[@telephilia]

Thanks, Michael, for this enlightening introduction to these supreme masterpieces.

[@adrianoseresi3525]

More of a conclusion, but true indeed.

[@janebrenner590]

Thank you ! What a great gift to hear him.

[@ilirllukaci5345]

I have the score of the Adagio quasi un poco andante framed on my wall. A reminder of happier days comparatively.

[@4eversearch]

Dear Prof Parloff, what do you think of Bernstein’s performance of this quarter with full orchestra? I think it is all splendour of Beethoven magnified to incredible degree

[@walteralter9061]

I have trouble assigning to music various pictures in the head as to what might be being described visually with an auditory medium, music. Music is temporal, sequential; pictures are instantaneous, an arrangement of simultaneous elements. In music you basically have intervals of range and of rhythm playing with expectation and certain inherent detections of sonority based upon natural harmonics, expectations in which the past dictates the future with infinite potential, yet those potentials we hear as the piece unfolds, were chosen over all the others. The why of those backwards referencing choices is the game we play in anticipating what is to come. We think in patterns and use them to predict. Music plays with prediction. The less predictable, the more unexpected yet fitting the flux of notes and their harmonies are, the more applause.

[@waggishsagacity7947]

Walter Alter: It gets even stranger when a KZbin video shows paintings by Guido Reni or Caravaggio [both 17th century painters] (real examples) to "illustrate" the music of Vivaldi [18th Century]. The option to turn off the monitor and just listen to the music is incredibly tempting --I know the feeling.

[@walteralter9061]

@@waggishsagacity7947 Nice to meet you, Wag. Basically I'm waging war against cliche. Analysts of poetry and music always seem to try to port their understandings into pictures - parables, metaphors for the masses. Optical uptake is obviously capable of extremely high resolution compared to auditory input, but has no greater command over our aesthetic sense, in so far as art is creation, and creation implies new; being that it is created in causal time. Beethoven and the musical masters should be judged firstly by the internal logic and development of the composition. The cultural/historical context is enriching from our point of view but can scarcely be said to have been primarily purposive in the struggle to evolve the piece, tho possibly a catalyst. Picasso's "Guernica" is hailed as a statement, yet, in truth, to another artist, it is his solution to relations of shape, contour, color, texture that form its beauty. These are the problems the artist struggled with, not it's value as propaganda or marketability. Art works are primarily islands of aesthetic lawfulness, solitaire gems reflecting their facets, and the more divorced from the dictatorship of history and contextualization they can be perceived, the more timelessly beautiful and culturally transcendent they become.

[@waggishsagacity7947]

@@walteralter9061 In my younger years I held negative opinions about methods to popularize Classical music. For example, I rejected playing isolated movements instead of whole compositions; thought that people should rise toward the music rather than have the music stoop to them etc. As I grew older, I became more accepting of these ideas. I still almost-refuse to accept applause after a single movement during concerts, but that's just a quirk of mine. Now, to the cliche-ing of music by "enhancing" music with "illustrations," I know of one exception (it gets to me every time I hear the piece): It's a promo video by DGG on KZbin where Helene Grimaud and a small ensemble play the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23. A superb visual and musical rendition of the MOOD of the movement, as I feel it. Check it out.

[@brandonterzic]

@@walteralter9061 Walter---you are a smart mofo!! You express something that I have found very difficult to articulate. Ultimately though, I believe our ears can regain their innocence, as it were, merging with TONE, In the absolute sense...Once the tone hypnosis occurs then music embeds itself on the periphery, over taking conceptual analysis. I also believe that the listener ultimately is the composer, in the sense that he or she projects the context to their own subjective needs and imagination. I always hear quartets as a wheel of light, with the low tones pivoting like the hub, and the higher pitches on the outside.

[@walteralter9061]

@@brandonterzic Early on music and dance, or music and story telling, were inseparable and were a vehicle for tribal lore and ritual. That was its purpose. I divide music into two realms - live concert and performance, which is analogous to tribal ceremony, and recorded listening in private, which lends itself more to analysis of the tune and its components as well as the possibility to forward and reverse to zoom in on a passage, or to play something else as a comparison, i.e., the experience is abstracted out of the public sphere and into the private, internalized sphere. Guess which modality works hardest to enable analysis and autonomous behavior? Music, art, aesthetics, are more than cultural glue, they can make you smarter, more perceptive.

[@micolsen9824]

Thank U 4 these LVB lectures.

[@NN-df7hl]

The "head motive" reaching its climax is actually in the Coda (or 2nd Recap) of the finale. I thought it connected with the previous "deeply lamenting" theme (which some call a "transition"). Fantastic lecture, brilliant man and speaker. Just wish he could point the exact location of the examples.

[@John-fn7dj]

Thanks @professor michael , you inspired me to understand more about this piece of art! Wish you all the best!

[@roybrewer7865]

Yes. thank you! Well done

[@Pretzels722]

Excellent content thank you

[@emilianocorradi4079]

Meraviglioso

[@idesof]

Thank you so much for this wonderful lecture. Could anyone please tell me which quartet is playing in the musical examples? Thank you in advance.

[@Ivan_1791]

I didn't know Beethoven knew Bach's "Art of Fuge". What a mystery Beethoven didn't consider Bach the best composer ever instead of Händel.

[@canman5060]

Beethoven himself is a avid reader and studier of Bach's fugue.

[@flexusmaximus4701]

Who am I to argue with Beethoven, to Handel, I bend the knee. I absolutely agree.

[@aronollerer5745]

Because I think, for Beethoven, the strict form was secondary, and in this sense, Bach was clearly a formalist, and Beethoven was always looking for the "behind concept", the spiritual, emotional basis of music, as a form, that's why he was so revolutionary.

[@aronollerer5745]

Beethoven and Bach were very very different type of musicians:) and so I can imagine that Beethoven rightly felt Handel closer to him

[@leonhardeuler6811]

I think he said that in his early years if im not mistaken

[@mendyviola]

24:24 I find this hilarious! Out of control children! 😂 44:55 I do play this piece. His late quartets are NOT easy to perform. They are absolute counting nightmares.

[@sfbirdclub]

Wonderful explication(s)....but I found myself not listening to the words and phrases, but watching how he managed that continual lip-smacking. I found I could not do it.

[@tbarrelier]

The La Salle Quartet played op.130 with the Grosse Fuge followed by the Rondo ending. It works amazingly well.

[@ofelia829]

Agreed

[@tbarrelier]

@@ofelia829 Could that have been intentional on Beethoven's part? He probably saw that future "purists" would want to play op. 130 with the Fuge restored to its original place and made sure the Rondo would be a compatible "last" movement with that in mind. I find the Rondo enhances the radical, shocking beauty of the Fuge, just as the Cavatina before it sets you up for the shock!

[@idesof]

That is actually how I always listen to Op. 130, regardless of how the particular ensemble plays it. That is, I'll "insert" the GF after the Cavatina and after that the replacement finale. As you say, I think it works "amazingly well."

[@tbarrelier]

@@idesof Apparently the GF was too radical for its first listeners and Beethoven was probably convinced by his publisher(s) to write the more digestible Rondo finale. Funny, I wonder if Beethoven knew that the GF would ultimately be restored to its rightful place and knowingly wrote the Rondo as its complement. Somehow, I think Op. 130 is better with the GF in its original position and the Rondo included at the end. It relieves/resolves the tension of the Fuge while also underlining its gravity. Amazing! P.S., I'm sure you know the Rondo was the last complete movement Beethoven wrote.

[@idesof]

@@tbarrelier I did know the Rondo was the last piece he ever wrote. Very much in the style of Op. 135 which it immediately succeeded, though in some of its more rhythmically obsessive moments it also reminds of the 8th Symphony. As the kids say, it slaps!

[@jaegonekim]

20:52

[@gregdietz5183]

I understand he's covering a lot in one hour, but the intro sadly misses the glory of perhaps the most sublime piece of music in western history - the first movement of #14. This is a deeply spiritual piece of longing for the divine that finally pays off at ~3:15 and rises to full ecstasy over the next 45 seconds or so. From the halfway point on our "penitent mystic" rests in the beatific vision only communicated to the senses by someone of Beethoven's genius.

[@the_eternal_student]

There is very little anyalysis on youtube, I would like to see and I believe it is much needed for you to give the same treatment to the small ensemble string works of Haydn and Beethoven, although you may have to divide into sizes like Trio, Quartet, Quintet, etc. However, please stay away from the sexual references or provide an edited version as it distracts from the healthiness of music.

[@4eversearch]

What a strange idea about healthiness of music. First of all there were absolutely no salacious details mentioned by the Prof MP, and secondly you cannot artificially “ sanitise” art. It is connected to messiness of life in general, and to imperfect characters of geniuses and their listeners Probably you have some strange fantasies yourself and see it everywhere , real or imagine