Große Fuge
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The Große Fuge is a composition for string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven famous for its extreme technical demands on the players as well as for its unrelentingly introspective nature, even by the standards of his late period. It was written in 1825 and 1826, when the composer was completely deaf.
Beethoven originally composed the massive fugue as the final movement of his String Quartet No. 13 (Op. 130). However, the Fugue was so demanding of contemporary performers and unpopular with audiences that Beethoven's publisher urged him to write a new finale for the string quartet. Beethoven, notorious for his stubborn personality and indifference to public opinion or taste, acquiesced to his publisher's request on this occasion and published the Fugue as a separate opus number, opus 133. He then wrote a finale that replaced the Fugue, which is considerably lighter in character, more akin to the other movements of the opus 130 quartet. Today, performances of the quartet sometimes include both the Fugue and its replacement movement.
When the work was first performed the audience demanded encores of only two of the middle movements of the quartet. Beethoven, enraged, was reported to have growled, "And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!"
Most 19th century critics dismissed the work. Daniel Gregory Mason called it "repellent", and Louis Spohr called it, along with the rest of Beethoven's late works, an "indecipherable, uncorrected horror." However critical opinion of the work has risen steadily since the beginning of the 20th century. The work is now considered among Beethoven's greatest achievements. Igor Stravinsky said of it, "[it is] an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever."
Analysis
The quartet opens with a 24-bar Overtura, which introduces one of the two themes of the fugue, a tune closely related to the one which opens the string quartet opus 132. Beethoven then plunges into a violently dissonant double fugue, with a second subject of dramatically leaping tones, and the four instruments of the quartet bursting out in triplets, dotted figures, and cross-rhythms.
Following this opening fugal section is a series of sections, in contrasting keys, rhythms and tempi. Sections often break off suddenly, without real preparation, to create a structural texture that is jagged and surprising. Toward the end, there is a slowing, with long pauses, leading into a recapitulation of the overture, and on to a rushing finale that ends the movement.
Like some of Beethoven's other late finales, such as the Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony, the Fugue can be seen as a multi-movement form contained within a single large movement. Each of the smaller sections is built on a transformation of the original theme. In addition, the Große Fuge is an example of a compositional process Beethoven explored late in life: a combination of elements of variation form, sonata form, and fugue. The lyrical section in Gb has the weight of an independent slow movement; some commentators have even attempted to analyze the entire piece in terms of sonata form.
Rediscovery of Manuscript
On October 13, 2005 it was reported [link][link] that an authentic 1826 Beethoven manuscript titled "Grosse Fuge" (a piano four-hands version of the Op. 133 string quartet finale) had been found in July 2005 by a Pennsylvania librarian at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. This work, adapted for four hands, is known as Opus 134. It had been missing for 115 years. The manuscript was auctioned by Sotheby's Auction House on 1 December, 2005; It realised GBP £1.12 million pounds (US$1.95 million) to a then unknown buyer. The purchaser of the manuscript has since revealed himself as Bruce Kovner, a publicly shy multibillionaire who donated the manuscript - along with 139 other original and rare pieces of music - to the Juilliard School of Music in February 2006. The manuscripts known provenance is: The manuscript was listed in an 1890 catalogue and sold at an auction in Berlin to a Cincinnati, Ohio industrialist; His daughter gave it and other manuscripts including a Mozart Fantasia to a church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1952. It is not known how the Beethoven manuscript came to be in the possession of the library.Große Fuge in popular culture
Remarkably, this arduous work has had echoes in popular culture. P. D. Q. Bach produced a (spoofical) Grossest Fugue. And Kim Stanley Robinson's novel about global warming, Fifty Degrees Below (New York: Bantam Books, 2005) includes a scene in which one of the main characters manically vacuums his house while listening to the Große Fuge and the fugal movement from the Hammerklavier sonata at the same time, playing on different stereos in separate rooms, both cranked up to ear-splittingly high volumes. Alfred Schnittke integrated portions of the Große Fuge into his third string quartet.Resources
- The Beethoven Quartet Companion, edited by Robert Winter and Robert Martin (1994: University of California Press) is an excellent reference for information on Beethoven's quartets.
- Beethoven's Quartets by Joseph de Marliave (originally published in 1928; republished in 1961 by Dover Press).
- Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1966. ISBN 0393009092
| String Quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven |
|---|
| String Quartets Nos. 1 - 6, Opus 18 (Beethoven)>String quartets, Op. 18 | Op. 18 No. 1 | Op. 18 No. 2 | Op. 18 No. 3 | Op. 18 No. 4 | Op. 18 No. 5 | Op. 18 No. 6 |
| String Quartets Nos. 7 - 9, Opus 59 - Rasumovsky (Beethoven)>String quartets, Op. 59 ("Rasumovsky") | Op. 59 No. 1 | Op. 59 No. 2 | Op. 59 No. 3 |
| String Quartets Nos. 10 - 11, Opus 74 "Harp" and 95 "Serioso" (Beethoven)>Middle period quartets | Op. 74 ("Harp") | Op. 95 ("Serioso") |
| String Quartets Nos. 12 - 16 and Grosse Fuge, Opus 127, 130 - 135 (Beethoven)>Late quartets | Op. 127 | Op. 130 | Op. 131 | Op. 132 | Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 | Op. 135 |
| Arrangement by Beethoven of Op. 14 No. 1 |
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