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Toby Keith~American Soldier
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The quartets of Beethoven easily divide into early, middle and late periods. This quartet is the first of his middle period quartets, where Lou works the quartet concept free of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart. He blazes new ground, and even the musicians who played these quartets had problems understanding what he was doing. But we don’t. The middle quartets pour new musical ideas into bottles designed by Haydn decades earlier.
The three Opus 59 quartets are known as the Razumovsky Quartets because Count Razumovsky, a Russian diplomat stationed in Habsburg Vienna, commissioned them. In each quartet, Lou hid a Russian folk tune.
The first movement opens up as though you are walking into a room, and a conversation is already going on. The cello, an Episcopal vestryman with an expensive watch and Masonic ring, is going on about the world situation. The first violin, his wife, chimes in. There is a brief conversation, and at the cadence, three of the four people say, “By God, Bryce, you’re right!” You can invent all kinds of scenarios for these pieces.
Musically speaking, the first movement is marked “allegro” and is in sonata format. The second subject appears in C Major at 1:40.
The development begins at 2:45, and it’s as if Bryce has uttered a dirty word. Everything turns dissonant and freezes. The first subject is taken apart along with a fragment of the second subject. This is a very large development.
At 6:28, the recap begins, featuring both subjects in the tonic key of F Major, but Lou re-composes his recap with a long bridge between subjects.
At 8:54, there is a grand summation for the coda.
What is fascinating is that all four movements of the First Razumovsky Quartet are in sonata format, even the minuet, which is in second position. It’s marked “allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando”.
The last two movements of this quartet are conjoined. The slow movement is marked “adagio molto e mesto”, which means, keep it slow and bring out the tissues. It’s rare to find a slow movement in sonata format, but here is an example. A Beethoven slow movement tends to be a conversation with God, and the conversations he wrote in his quartets are his most profound.
The finale, marked simply “allegro”, is based on a Russian theme, and like the other three movements, it’s in sonata format.
h!!Luv.....#50 and #100!!
GOD BLESS AMERICA!!