In his book The Beethoven Quartets, Joseph Kerman writes:
A mature Beethoven piece, I think I should be inclined to say, is a person; one meets and reacts to it with the same sort of particularity, intimacy, and concern as one does to another human being. The same cannot be said of Mozart’s music, nor of Brahm’s, nor certainly of Beethoven’s earlier music. This personal quality goes some way to explain the stubborn universal impressiveness of the middle-period works, that Humanität which the German critics write about so feelingly. Beethoven seems to have struggled to project in art the quality of human contact that he saw himself cut off from by deafness and the daemon of creation. That, for him personally, was perhaps the essence of the heroic vision. …
The three ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets constitute a trio of sharply characterized, consciously differentiated individuals, beside whom the earlier quartets look, regrettably, like pasteboard. …
They were the first great works by Beethoven to have been lost on their essential audience. That is an ominous tribute to their temerity, and to their unprecedented individuality as well. (pp. 117, 118–119, 119–120)
#Beethoven250 Day 196
String Quartet No. 8 “Razumovsky” in E Minor (Opus 59, No. 2), 1806
The Castalian Quartet performing in Wigmore Hall. They were doing a Brahms and Schumann series at Wigmore until the shutdown.
The first movement of the String Quartet No. 8 begins with two forte chords that remind us of the opening of the Eroica, but what follows does not: Mysterious silences defy expectations by fragmenting the music in abrupt disturbing ways and prevent it from gaining momentum.
The second movement of the String Quartet No. 8 has a hymn-like opening but it doesn’t last for long and only returns towards the end. “Play this piece with a lot of feeling,” Beethoven instructed. It’s gorgeously slow but not sad, conjuring a type of contemplative serenity.
Carl Czerny (who can generally be trusted in these things) said “The Adagio, E major, in the second Razumovsky Quartet, occurred to him when contemplating the starry sky and thinking of the music of the spheres.” — Thayer-Forbes, pp. 408–9.
Beethoven used the 3rd movement of the String Quartet No. 8 for introducing the mandated Russian melody. This is a jagged syncopated scherzo, and the Russian tune comes in the Trio section where it first seems that Beethoven is going to make a fugue out of it.
To some analysts, Beethoven does not treat the Russian melody as respectfully as some later composers — Rimsky-Korsakoff used the same tune in “The Tsar’s Bride” and Mussorgsky in the Coronation Scene in “Boris Godunov.”
“It sounds as though Count Razumovsky had been tactless enough to hand Beethoven the tune, and Beethoven is pile-driving it into the ground by way of revenge,” wrote Joseph Kerman in his book on Beethoven’s string quartets (p. 130).
The presto rondo finale of the String Quartet No. 8 is a rollicking country dance, perhaps with a touch of what Beethoven’s contemporaries would have thought of as a gypsy influence. The first violin is sent into the stratosphere, and the movement closes with a frantic tempo.