Day 236: String Quartets Op. 95 & 130, Grosse Fugue Op. 133

BeethovenCD41Something really weird happened today.

I was listening to CD 41, grooving on the string quartets, and my wife called from Niagara Falls (some 400 miles away) where she was visiting her brother in Canada. I had my hands-free buds in while I chatted with her.

Suddenly, she said, “That’s the song playing in the Firefly episode “Shindig.”

“You can hear that?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That was the music playing during the dance scene in ‘Shindig’,” she said.

I looked at the back of the CD sleeve and read off the title of Track 8, which was Movement IV (“Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai”) from String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat Op. 130. (It was composed in 1825; Beethoven was 55.)

“Well, it is a dance number,” I allowed.

“It’s the same song,” she said.

We chit-chatted a bit more and then we hung up.

I immediately Googled “Firefly Shindig Music” and discovered she was right.

If she and I hadn’t been speaking at that very moment, if she hadn’t heard the music I was playing in the background, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. (My memory is not that good.) So, a serendipitous conversation, at precisely the right moment, lead me to discover something I never would have known. How she heard it, and how she remembered incidental music in a TV episode we hadn’t watched in a year or two, I have no idea.

As for today’s CD, it begins with lively music (String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor Op. 95 “Quartetto Serioso”) that reminds me of something that might have played as the soundtrack to a silent movie in the 1920s. Don’t know why. It just has that feel to me.

Op. 95 was composed in 1810; Beethoven was 40.

The other composition on today’s CD is Grosse Fuge Op. 133. (composed 1825; Beethoven was 55.)

All compositions are performed by the Suske Quartett:

Karl Suske violin I
Klaus Peters violin II
Karl-Heinz Dommus viola
Matthias Pfaender cello

Of Grosse Fuge Op. 133, its entry on Wikipedia tells us this:

The Große Fuge (or Grosse Fuge, also known in English as Great Fugue or Grand Fugue), Op. 133, is a single-movement composition for string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven. A massive double fugue, it originally served as the final movement of his Quartet No. 13 in B♭ major (Op. 130) but Beethoven replaced the fugue with a new finale, and the Grosse Fuge was published separately in 1827 as Op. 133. It was composed in 1825, when Beethoven was almost completely deaf, and is considered to be part of his set of late quartets. It was first performed in 1826, as the finale of the B♭ quartet, by the Schuppanzigh Quartet.

Analysts repeatedly describe the Große Fuge as “inaccessible”, “eccentric”, “filled with paradoxes”, “Armaggedon”. “[It] stands out as the most problematic single work in Beethoven’s output and … doubtless in the entire literature of music,” writes Joseph Kerman of the fugue. It is also notoriously difficult to play.

That truly is a complicated piece of music. I’m listening to it as I type this and it sounds like a something from a nightmare. Very difficult to follow. I can only imagine what it was like to play.

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