PROGAM NOTES

VIENNA TENG is a Stanford Alumni and Pop Singer/Songwriter who is back for Reunion Homecoming 2025 in a first time collaboration with Viano String Quartet!

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
— Program notes copyright © 2024 Keith Horner.

Born in Bonn, Germany, baptised December 17, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827

String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 74 (Harp) (1809)

"Life is nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery of every sort," Beethoven said in the summer of 1809. Austria was at war with France for the fourth time in 18 years. When Napoleon's troops began to bombard the city core, after advancing from the suburbs where they had consolidated their strength, Beethoven ran through the besieged streets to a friend's house. There he covered his ears with pillows in a vain attempt to preserve what was left of his hearing. This was truly a miserable time. Weeks earlier, three Viennese princes and patrons had banded together to offer Beethoven an annuity for life to prevent him fleeing Vienna. He was initially elated and set about proposing marriage to his 19-year-old pupil Therese Malfatti. He plunged into despair when she turned him down. “Oh, life is so beautiful,” he wrote to a friend, “but for me it is forever poisoned."

Beethoven was unable to concentrate and writer's block set in. He began to fill his sketchbooks with fragments, undeveloped melodies, theoretical examples, and exercises. Then, remarkably, in the fall of 1809, he produced three masterpieces, all in the key of E-flat. They included the Emperor Concerto, the piano sonata Les adieux, and this string quartet. It is Beethoven's tenth quartet and is as genial and outgoing as the F minor Quartet, Op. 95, which followed one year later, is dark and inward-looking. Both works, along with the three Razumovsky quartets belong to Beethoven's middle period. But where the Razumovskys speak of heroic argument and rhetoric, and Op. 95 foreshadows the deep utterances of the towering late string quartets, the relatively untroubled E-flat quartet often casts a glance backwards into territory familiar to Mozart and Haydn.

Beethoven filled some 30 notebook pages with the working-out of the quartet. It opens in a contemplative mood, with a question, posed by the entire quartet. Twenty-four bars later, the introduction gives way to the Allegro and to a confident, spirited answer to the opening question.

Beethoven weaves pizzicato (plucked string) effects into the fabric of the music. Towards the end of the first main section (the ‘exposition’), one particularly expressive moment, where rippling, plucked chords rise gently from the lowest instrument to the highest, suggests the sound of a harp – hence the work’s nickname. Brilliant first violin passagework towards the end of the opening movement gives way to a gentle, direct, though profound slow movement. An energetic scherzo follows. Its rhythm is like that of the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, which Beethoven completed the previous spring. The impact of its opening is repeated three times, each time at a different dynamic. By the end, the music seems to be going along the same route as the Fifth Symphony towards a blazing C major finale. But then, along comes an uncomplicated finale: a set of six variations and coda.