The first performance of the B♭ String Quartet (Day 355) on 21 March 1826 included as its finale a mammoth and forbidding movement that Beethoven called the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue). In his book on Beethoven, Barry Cooper writes:
While some in the audience at the first performance were tempted to reject the Grosse Fuge as the confused ramblings of a madman, the more discerning connoisseurs must have sensed that extended study of the movement would reveal it as another masterpiece. (p. 364)
The Quartet was scheduled to be published by Mathias Artaria. On 11 April he communicated to Beethoven via the conversation books,
There are already many requests for the Fugue arranged for piano four hands — would you allow me to publish it thus? (ibid)
In retrospect, this proposal to publish the Great Fugue separately proved to be the first step in the removal of the Fugue from the String Quartet. Beethoven had to be made aware that people valued the Fugue on its own basis.
Beethoven was agreeable to the piano four hands transcription, but he didn’t want to do it himself. The job was given to Anton Halm, who had recently played the piano part in Beethoven’s Opus 11 Piano Trio (Day 102). Halm finished the job in two weeks, but Beethoven was dissatisfied with it. To avoid hand crossings and collisions, Halm had split some of the voices among the hands, which would obscure the continuity on the printed page and possibly also in performance.
Beethoven decided to do his own arrangement for piano four hands and finished it in August. In a letter to Karl Holz, Beethoven says that “it has now become a separate work of my own.” (Beethoven Letters No. 1500) After Beethoven’s death, it was published as Opus 134.
#Beethoven250 Day 359
Grosse Fuge in B♭ Major for Piano Four-Hands (Opus 134), 1826
This performance at the Purcell School (@PurcellSchool) is one of a half dozen live performances of the four-hand Great Fugue on YouTube.
For listeners familiar with the Great Fugue as a string quartet, the big surprise in the four-hand piano arrangement comes right at the beginning: Beethoven turns the wide forte unison G in the string quartet into a piano tremolo, and scraps entirely the initial grace notes.