Artaria, the publisher of the Opus 130 String Quartet (Day 355), was concerned about the Grosse Fuge finale, which in its difficulty threatened the sales of the music.
Here’s how Beethoven's secretary Karl Holz described the situation some 30 years later:
The publisher Artaria, to whom I had sold the rights for the edition of the Quartet in B-flat for a price of 80 ducats, had charged me with the terrible and difficult mission of convincing Beethoven to compose a new finale, which would be more accessible to the listeners as well as the instrumentalists, to substitute for the Fugue which was so difficult to understand. I maintained to Beethoven that this Fugue, which departed from the ordinary and surpassed even the last quartets in originality, should be published as a separate work and that it merited a designation as a separate opus. I communicated to him that Artaria was disposed to pay him a supplementary honorarium for the new finale. Beethoven told me he would reflect on it, but already on the next day I received a letter giving his agreement. (quoted in Solomon, Beethoven, pp. 422–3)
In October and November 1826, Beethoven composed a replacement finale for the B♭ major String Quartet to replace the Great Fugue. It’s never been quite clear if he agreed to this for artistic reasons or because he was promised some extra money for it.
Although Beethoven frequently made major changes to his compositions while they were still in progress — and he sometimes considered alternative finales after initial performances (including for the Ninth Symphony!) — he had never done anything quite like this. The most charitable interpretation is that he believed that the Opus 130 String Quartet might benefit from a finale more in accordance with the first five movements, and that the Great Fugue might survive better as an independent composition.
In a discussion of both the Opus 135 String Quartet (Day 361) and the new Opus 130 finale, Martin Cooper writes:
In both these works, Beethoven seems to have exorcised the angels and the demons, pity and terror, to have momentarily finished with supramundane contemplation and the Dionysian assertion of the significance of life’s struggles and contradictions. He is now content to cultivate his garden, to smile and to remember, to mock a little perhaps at this own dramatization of cosmic problems and to exercise his incomparable gift for sheer musical invention, the instinctive grasp and unfolding of a single melodic cell’s positionalities. (Beethoven: The Last Decade, p. 404)
Judging from YouTube videos of recent live performances, it has become much more common to perform Opus 130 with the original Great Fugue finale rather than the replacement. Musicians and audience are now willing to accept the challenge.
#Beethoven250 Day 363
String Quartet No. 13 in B♭ Major (Opus 130, v. 2), 1826
A rehearsal session by the Ceres Quartet gives us a rare (but persuasive) live performance with Beethoven’s alternate finale.
Most immediately obvious is that the new Opus 130 finale is not something that Beethoven dashed off to appease his publisher. It’s 10 minutes long, it flows elegantly from the end of the Cavatina, and it does not arise like a behemoth to overshadow the first five movements.
With his customary insight, Lewis Lockwood writes about the two versions of Opus 130:
The little finale once more evokes the issue of dualism in Beethoven’s art. Already in his second maturity we saw pairings of works in the same genre — often back to back and at times published consecutively — that exemplify artistic dualism: weight versus lightness; density versus lucidity; complexity versus simplicity. … With the finale of Opus 130 and the Grand Fugue, Opus 133, the dualism is one of alternatives, since in performance we must have one and not the other, and this concept is new in Beethoven’s output. But if we consider that the second finale brings a lightness of touch and intricacy of connections against the monumental weight, relentless intellectual earnestness, and heavy dissonance of the Grand Fugue, we can imagine that Beethoven was in effect giving the world two choices, not absolutely displacing one with another. And that legacy has not been lost on performers, many of whom now, in Beethoven quartet cycles, play the whole work twice, once with each finale. In effect, they are being true to the spirit with which Beethoven, in his last months, came to a complex vision of this great work. (Beethoven, pp. 467–8)
Beethoven’s new finale to the Opus 130 String Quartet was his last major composition.