你好If there were a contest for the composer who has created the most Mount Everests of Western music, Beethoven would win hands down. But without a doubt the most sublime, personal music he ever wrote is in his late string quartets, written at the end of the composer’s life. It’s remarkable; the man was stone deaf, racked by illness at the end of his life and still he managed to turn out some of the most beautiful, most moving music we have. Almost two hundred years later, musicians still measure their talents by how well they manage to surmount its demands.

According to Nanette Streicher, who was friendly with Beethoven during his final years, the composer resembled "a beggar he was so dirty in his dress". The picture of the composer to which she contributed continues to dog us to this day. We see him as hopelessly unkempt in his appearance, a man who in 1825 was erroneously arrested for vagrancy and who regarded himself as "misunderstood" and as "hounded on all sides like a wild animal". It was in a state of isolation, cut off from the rest of the world, that Beethoven composed his demanding and inaccessible late string quartets.

But this picture isn’t totally accurate. In the first place, Beethoven was not simply an eccentric at the end of his life. He had astounded all who heard his Ninth Symphony. He was a major celebrity. People could simply address letters to “Beethoven” and they would be delivered to him. Which is how he received Prince Nikolas Galitzin’s request from St. Petersburg to whom these late masterpieces are dedicated.

In writing them, he no longer took any account of the spirit of his times or of his audience's receptivity (or the ability of the musicians of his time to perform them), the only thing that still counted for him was to advance the course of music Even today, Beethoven's late quartets create a stunning contemporary impression in terms of their structure and expression, yet ultimately what they express is their creator's private world of emotion. This intimate human quality is particularly clear in the magnificent slow movement of the Aminor String Quartet op. 132, headed "A Convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode".

There’s no doubt about who the convalescent referred to in this movement: it was none other than Beethoven himself. In the spring of 1825 he succumbed to an "inflammation of the intestines" that was treated by means of a diet that for the composer meant a large number of sacrifices and that included unseasoned soup, hot chocolate instead of coffee and eggs without any seasoning. Beethoven complained bitterly about this regimen but finally recovered his health again after a number of weeks.

The religious, otherworldly Lydian mode of the third movement stems from Beethoven’s study of liturgical music he had undertaken when he was writing his extraordinary Missa solemnis. It describes the patient's incredible relief at getting well, while at the same time its austerity expresses both distance from and an acceptance of God's will, two themes found in Beethoven's late music. Here we come upon the basic truth behind these late quartets: the outward neglect of the elderly composer is not just the sign of a lack of self-discipline but an indication of his profound belief in the transcendental and in pure musical substance. Beethoven was writing for us, for posterity.

What’s in our player now: Beethoven: The Late Quartets, Vol 2 - Quartetto Italiano - Philips 454 712-2

This is the kind of sumptuous, almost devotional, but never over-dramatized performance the late quartets deserve – by these masters of the quartet art, and for my money some of the finest playing ever recorded in analog. Of course, some of more recent, excellent digitally recorded competition, the Amadeus String Quartet (DG), or the Emerson Quartet (DG) is not to be sniffed at either.

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J.Mark Goldman

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