As with the three Opus 30 Violin Sonatas (Day 151f) and the three Opus 31 Piano Sonatas (Day 155f), Beethoven ordered the three Razamovsky quartets into a major-minor-major cycle that may suggest an overall dramatic arc. The third in the series is thus the crowd-pleasing finale.
The third of the Razumovsky Quartets is a backward look that has the same key, overall structure, and a similar slow opening as a work that Beethoven had long admired: Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465, nicknamed the “Dissonance.”
#Beethoven250 Day 197
String Quartet No. 9 “Razumovsky” in C Major (Opus 59, No. 3), 1806
The Quatuor Ebène with another of their great Beethoven performances, at the Angelika Kauffmann Hall in Schwarzenberg, Austria.
Like Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 9 begins with an unsettling slow introduction, but what follows gradually clears up the mystery. Despite the complex use of fragmented motifs, the overall spirit is obviously one of elation.
The third of the Razumovsky Quartets does not seem to quote an explicit Russian tune, but the 2nd movement Andante is perhaps a substitute. The wavy 6/8 barcarolle meter and the frequent cello pizzicato might have induced a pleasant sense of homesickness in a certain Russian.
The third movement of the String Quartet No. 9 is something that had become a rarity in Beethoven: an authentic minuet and trio, so old-fashioned that at this point it might be considered a parody. Or maybe affection. No, it’s a parody. Scratch that, it’s love.
The extremely fast Allegro finale of the String Quartet No. 9 follows right on the heels of the Minuet, and now we’re in the grips of a thrilling moto perpetuo, a finale of “barnstorming fury … great loudness and tub-thumping emphasis” as Joseph Kerman wrote.
An Italian violinist named Felix Radicati said of the Razumovsky Quartets,
Beethoven, as the world says, and as I believe, is music-mad; — for these are not music. He submitted them to me in manuscript and, at his request, I fingered them for him. I said to him, that he surely did not consider these works to be music? — to which he replied “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!” (Thayer-Forbes, p. 409)