The hard won decisions: the Große Fuge and the quartet in F, Op.135

Must it be?   It must be!
(click on the links to hear the music)

Beethoven’s last major work is the string quartet Op.135. It is an enigmatic piece whose finale has the above words written across the top of the score. No-one knows quite what they refer to – guesses range from ‘profound existential doubt followed by joyful  acceptance’ to ‘do I have to pay my laundry bill?’ – but, as Philip Radcliffe points out in his book Beethoven’s String Quartets, whatever their ‘real’ meaning,

…although the simple Es muss sein theme appears more frequently and has the last word in the final bars, it is the feverish questioning of Muss es sein that remains most vividly in our minds.

As for the Great Fugue…

…the Great Fugue is more than a piece; it’s a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention. (“Your cradle was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,” Oskar Kokoschka once said to Schoenberg.) Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist tendencies.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker

Music: (you must install Spotify* to hear the music link below) 

Große Fuge, Op.133 

String Quartet in F, Op. 135

* If you have problems accessing the Spotify link, paste Op.135 Quartetto and/or Op.133 Quartetto into the Spotify search box.

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