Beethoven’s Opus 4 is a String Quintet — 2 violins, 2 violas, and cello. It’s a revision of his earlier Wind Octet (Day 34), which was confusingly published much later as Opus 103. The revisions are so extensive that these are considered two distinct works.
#Beethoven250 Day 57
String Quintet in E♭ Major (Opus 4), 1795
There is apparently no complete live performance of the Opus 4 String Quintet on YouTube, so this ripped studio recording will have to do.
Opus 3 is a string trio. Opus 4 is a string quintet. Is Beethoven avoiding the string quartet? Does he find something intimidating about Haydn’s 68 string quartets? Or does he simply not want to encroach on a genre that Haydn invented and essentially owned? Time will tell!
Lewis Lockwood writes that Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 book On the Aesthetic Education of Man
informed Beethoven’s view of the potential power of art (and music) to enlighten individuals and society in a new way and to bring them to higher levels of understanding and behavior.
Here are some quotations from the Penguin edition of On the Aesthetic Education of Man:
The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion.
How does the artist shield himself from the corruptions of his age that surround him on all sides? By disdaining its judgement. He should look upwards to his dignity and the law, never downwards to fortune and need.
[M]an is driven into society by his needs, and reason implants social principles within him, [but] it is only beauty that can give him a social character. Taste alone introduces harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual.
The sensuous good can render only one person happy because it is founded upon appropriation, something that always implies exclusion … Beauty alone makes the whole world happy, and every being forgets its limits so long as it is under its spell.