Beethoven opus 132

[Haffner]

Today a friend of mine sent me an mp3 of the Takacs Quartet playing the Heiliger Dankgesang of LvB's opus 132. He hadn't known that I of course already possess that one. But I played it, and though it's only been a few Sundays since I last heard it, I was completely swept away by it.

It's the one piece that I still have a terrible time being objective about. My attempts to follow it with the sheet music have each time ended in me putting everything down and sitting, eyes closed, mouth open wide (to hear better), totally enthralled.

Opus 132, for me, is everything music is about...what it's meant to be. The expression of profound gratitude, humor, courage; the attempt to share those feelings with as many whom will open up to it. A most personal expression made perfectly accessible to those willing to open up...just a short 13 or 14 minutes. How many things could be as spiritual?

The third movement begins by only intimating at what will eventually become a surging, primordial bass line of massive emotional impact. The real "theme" doesn't really become apparent until well after the hymn's initial rounds of development. The structure of the movement makes me think of having the 30/30 hindsight of a person recovering from grievous illness (whether emotional, physical, or spiritual has no matter). A person whom, upon serious consideration of his or her past, sees, at first ephermally and finally with utmost Revelation, the binding motif that ties things together. Through all the stages...conception, birth, infancy, puberty, maturity, dormition...Assumption.

I realize this thread is probably pretty superfluous here, but I wonder if that's at least part of the reason this forum is here in the first place: to describe the rapture of experiencing a piece of Our Music so profound, so HUGE in meaning, so broad in content, as best we can.

[Harry]

I could not add anything to so eloquent a posting, Andy.
You said everything in quite a powerful way.
It has a beginning, a middle and a end.

[Haffner]

I could not add anything to so eloquent a posting, Andy.
You said everything in quite a powerful way.
It has a beginning, a middle and a end.

There aren't many pieces of music that...well, it reminds me of the word rapture. The etymology of that word has to do with birds of prey and how they lift something up and out. Listening to a piece like opus 132 takes me up and out, and when I come back, it's to a place of immense peace and good spirit. I truly believe that pieces like that could help change people, to make them come together and love each other a little more every day. I don't care how naive that sounds.

[Ephemerid]

Wonderful post, Haffner. 

I remember my first experience hearing it and just could NOT believe that any human being could compose such music.  The third movement creates this kind of deep ache inside that very few pieces of music do. 

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that.   

On that note, I think I'll put it on now...

[ChamberNut]

A fantastic string quartet.  The 3rd movement may certainly be the most beautiful music written ever.....at least by Beethoven anyways.

[val]

Haffner

There aren't many pieces of music that...well, it reminds me of the word rapture. The etymology of that word has to do with birds of prey and how they lift something up and out. Listening to a piece like opus 132 takes me up and out, and when I come back, it's to a place of immense peace and good spirit. I truly believe that pieces like that could help change people, to make them come together and love each other a little more every day. I don't care how naive that sounds.

I agree with you. With the Adagio of the Sonata opus 106, this is the music that has impressed me most deeply. Years and years listening to it and it is always a magical moment. I think the word transcendency is the one that better expresses what I feel.

[Anne]

Today a friend of mine sent me an mp3 of the Takacs Quartet playing the Heiliger Dankgesang of LvB's opus 132. He hadn't known that I of course already possess that one. But I played it, and though it's only been a few Sundays since I last heard it, I was completely swept away by it.

It's the one piece that I still have a terrible time being objective about. My attempts to follow it with the sheet music have each time ended in me putting everything down and sitting, eyes closed, mouth open wide (to hear better), totally enthralled.

Opus 132, for me, is everything music is about...what it's meant to be. The expression of profound gratitude, humor, courage; the attempt to share those feelings with as many whom will open up to it. A most personal expression made perfectly accessible to those willing to open up...just a short 13 or 14 minutes. How many things could be as spiritual?

The third movement begins by only intimating at what will eventually become a surging, primordial bass line of massive emotional impact. The real "theme" doesn't really become apparent until well after the hymn's initial rounds of development. The structure of the movement makes me think of having the 30/30 hindsight of a person recovering from grievous illness (whether emotional, physical, or spiritual has no matter). A person whom, upon serious consideration of his or her past, sees, at first ephermally and finally with utmost Revelation, the binding motif that ties things together. Through all the stages...conception, birth, infancy, puberty, maturity, dormition...Assumption.

I realize this thread is probably pretty superfluous here, but I wonder if that's at least part of the reason this forum is here in the first place: to describe the rapture of experiencing a piece of Our Music so profound, so HUGE in meaning, so broad in content, as best we can.

Haffner, I LOVE your post.  What you say in it, is what I thought many years ago would be a majority of posts on a music BB - the sharing of the experience of hearing music and what it does to us internally.  I had hoped to find others who shared the experience of music and would express it for others.  I have since learned that this situation is not to be.  Maybe it it is too personal to share on a BB or if so, only rarely.

[longears]

Agreed and seconded.  I think I'll proceed to the music room and the same recording so that I, too, may drift in its depths and re-enter the world reborn with new eyes and mind and heart and soul.

(If music does that for me, then I consider it "great.")

[Haffner]

Haffner, I LOVE your post.  What you say in it, is what I thought many years ago would be a majority of posts on a music BB - the sharing of the experience of hearing music and what it does to us internally.  I had hoped to find others who shared the experience of music and would express it for others.  I have since learned that this situation is not to be.  Maybe it it is too personal to share on a BB or if so, only rarely.

I felt the same way when I started checking out forums. However, this one definitely has its moments!

I am so happy I was able to connect with you folks, you are all truly great friends!

[Dana]

I realize this thread is probably pretty superfluous here, but I wonder if that's at least part of the reason this forum is here in the first place: to describe the rapture of experiencing a piece of Our Music so profound, so HUGE in meaning, so broad in content, as best we can.

      Posts like this are why I returned here after a two or three year absence. I played Op.132 with three fine musicians last semester. Learning how to play music together with three other people with a work that is so demanding musically, technically, emotionally, and cerebrally is one of the finest experiences I've ever lived through. Nothing forges friendships like such an experience, and it's one of the reasons I hope to make my living in music.

[lisa needs braces]

I have yet to feel this way about the last quartets of Beethoven. I love the early and middle quartets, but only certain movements of the late quartets move me, like the last two movements of Opus 131. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

      Posts like this are why I returned here after a two or three year absence. I played Op.132 with three fine musicians last semester. Learning how to play music together with three other people with a work that is so demanding musically, technically, emotionally, and cerebrally is one of the finest experiences I've ever lived through. Nothing forges friendships like such an experience, and it's one of the reasons I hope to make my living in music.

Lucky you. Obviously you're a string player.

I consider this one of the strangest pieces of music ever written, and one of the most indispensable. For long stretches at a time, Beethoven seems to be drawing on levels of experience that are more despairing and painful than anywhere else in his music, and though the quartet eventually ends in a bright A major, it never quite feels as if it arrives at an unmitigated triumph.

The A minor first movement especially, with its sighing scale 6-5 motif, wide stretches, and extreme registers, conveys a sense of utter anguish, only intermittingly relieved by the consoliing second subject that first appears in F major. Odd features include the passages in bare octaves and formally speaking, a complete recapitulation in the dominant key (E minor, with the second subject returning in C) before turning to an abbreviated recapitulation in the tonic A minor.

The second movement is in A major, but its pace is slower than the usual scherzo, making it sound like an old-fashioned minuet; on top of which it has an almost disembodied quality, marked by brief 2-bar phrases and minimal dynamic contrast. The trio to this movement is a bit more open and airy, characterized by long tonic pedal points that give it an almost rustic feel. The octave passage from the first movement is echoed in another strange, octave passage in the trio.

The slow movement, Molto adagio, is of course the most famous one, the "holy thanks of a convalescent to the deity," one of the longest and certainly one of the slowest of all Beethoven's slow movements. It is also written in the Lydian mode, equivalent to playing scale F-F on the piano on the white keys (B natural rather than B flat), and this gives the piece a kind of unstable quality harmonically, making this one of the strangest movements in the composer's output, and most demanding on the listener's concentration. It is actually an A-B-A-B-A-Coda form which starts feeling like a hymn or chorale, but in which each of the three repetitions of A moves in shorter note values and thus feels as if it is moving faster. The contrasting sections ("feeling new strength") are in pure D major, and at a tempo of Andante feel considerably faster and harmonically more secure. Some listeners feel as if the F-Lydian and D major sections do not integrate well, that they stand too far apart for comfort, but nothing in this gigantic movement, not to mention this gigantic quartet, feels other than strange. The real climax of the quartet takes place in the long, intense coda, which appears to move to a secure C major before it subsides, returning to end in F-Lydian on an ethereal, spiritual final cadence.

But then what follows is neither ethereal or spiritual - a jarring contrast with the hymn-like third movement in the form of a trite little march that serves to awaken the listener from the extraordinary by providing something completely ordinary. This in turn gives way to a quasi-operatic recitative emphasizing the first violin, which introduces the true finale. This main theme of this movement is a kind of mournful waltz in A minor, Allegro appassionato. It is worth noting that Beethoven at one point contemplated using this same theme in the finale of the 9th symphony - which of course turned out to be instead his most populist, exuberant, public utterance. In the quartet, however, the mournful sense prevails even as the tempo speeds up and a coda in A major serves to brighten the mood. But not completely, and the quartet ends without a feeling that the despairing, mournful, and introspective delements of its makeup have been thoroughly overcome.

[Dana]

I have yet to feel this way about the last quartets of Beethoven. I love the early and middle quartets, but only certain movements of the late quartets move me, like the last two movements of Opus 131. 

      Look to the Razumovsky (Op.59) Quartets - Although emotionally not on par with the late quartets, they feature enough formal departure so as to serve as a bridge to the late quartets.

[chrisg]

Opus 132, for me, is everything music is about...what it's meant to be. The expression of profound gratitude, humor, courage; the attempt to share those feelings with as many whom will open up to it. A most personal expression made perfectly accessible to those willing to open up...just a short 13 or 14 minutes. How many things could be as spiritual?

Yes to all that.  I struggled a long time with the Late Quartets, which was unacceptable to a Beethoven nut like me.  I just couldn't get it, until one fine day it all clicked while listening to the Heiliger Dankgesang of Op.132.  Somewhere toward the end, I had what I can only describe as an out of body experience.  Just gone off to some other place.  As for being objective, forget it.  My only criteria for a performance of this work that it should bring tears to my eyes.  Lucky us!

Great post.

cg

[lisa needs braces]

      Look to the Razumovsky (Op.59) Quartets - Although emotionally not on par with the late quartets, they feature enough formal departure so as to serve as a bridge to the late quartets.

I actually adore the Razumovsky quartets! Perhaps it's time for a closer listen...

[ChamberNut]

Listening to the 3rd movement right now.....I can't even move.

[George]

Listening to the 3rd movement right now.....I can't even move.

We should all spin that this weekend for Gurn!  0:)

[George]

I realize this thread is probably pretty superfluous here, but I wonder if that's at least part of the reason this forum is here in the first place: to describe the rapture of experiencing a piece of Our Music so profound, so HUGE in meaning, so broad in content, as best we can.

Great idea for a thread!

Funny, I knew who started the thread before even seeing your name attached. 

[ChamberNut]

We should all spin that this weekend for Gurn!  0:)

Surely, if Gurn listens to this - he will spring off the gurney!  0:)

[Gabriel]

Just as we read Sophocles, whose works were written more than two thousand years ago, this quartet will probably move listeners and performers in two thousand more years. If there is a sense for describing classical music as "classical", it is its founding function: it is somehow in the base of our civilization and keeps feeding the souls of generations of people.