Reflections on the 17 Beethoven String Quartets: Some Interpretive Considerations (Part 4 of 5)

Some Interpretive Considerations

By Paul Katz

It’s been a personal joy for me to revisit the album notes I wrote 45 years ago for  the Cleveland Quartet’s recorded Beethoven Quartet Cycle on RCA Victor. The 17 quartets of Beethoven were the core of our 26-year career as we immersed ourselves in research, score study, years of exhilarating rehearsals, two recorded cycles, 30 complete cycles in the major capitals of the world, and literally thousands of Beethoven quartet performances. Musicians generally agree that there is no other music as rewarding or profound  in all of western music. These masterpieces have challenged me as a musician and enriched my life -what a privileged existence!

Formed in 1969, the CQ knew only 2 Beethoven quartets for the 1970 Beethoven bi-centennial year, but we joked that we would be ready for 2020! Though the Cleveland Quartet is no longer active, I could not let this special year go by without participating in some way, and so I returned to my notes written between 1975-1980, and reduced and edited them for this series of CelloBello blogs. The original project was voluminous – 3 boxed sets of LP vinyl, with written liner notes discussing each individual quartet. I have taken about 20% of that original project and present it here in a five-part series.

No composer has expressed Man’s deepest emotional states as profoundly as Beethoven. There is a heartfelt depth to the musical experience, an enlightened level of consciousness, a sincerity and nobleness of concept that enriches and inspires. “Those who understand (my music) must be freed by it from all the miseries that others drag about with themselves,” Beethoven is reported to have said. Whether or not he actually uttered these words is ultimately unimportant, for generations have found in his music the noblest and purest expression of universally shared human values such as Love, Joy, Peace and Strength of Character. There is despair and anger, even rage, but never hate, not a cynical or bitter note. Pain and suffering (which he knew better than most are beautifully expressed to us as a necessary part of the synthesis of life.

Some Interpretive Considerations

The interpretive process can be the most creative, fascinating, rewarding part of a musician’s life, but it is an extremely complex process that evolves over time, and that each artist needs to continually contemplate. How do we best honor our responsibility to the composer? Are the composer’s markings, historical and theoretical facts illuminating or in conflict with our instincts?

It is interesting to consider the various interpretive aims and motivations that affect artists and their musical decisions, and musicians do not always agree. Some use a work simply as a vehicle for expressing their own personalities; others believe they should submerge their own individuality and strictly reproduce the composer’s printed notations; others attempt to recreate a performance the composer himself would have wanted to hear. There is some truth to each of these approaches – careful attention to the composer’s indications, a theoretical and historical perspective, and the imagination of the performer all contribute to a successful performance. It is the integration, the synthesis of all these elements that leads to valid, communicative interpretation.

The great pianist, Alfred Brendel, in “Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts,” says it eloquently:

Music cannot “speak for itself: the notion that an interpreter can switch off his personal feelings and instead receive those of the composer “from above” belongs to the realm of fable. What the composer actually meant… can only be unraveled with the help of one’s own engaged emotions, one’s own senses, one’s own intellect, one’s own refined ears. It is our moral duty to make music as visionary, moving, mysterious… as we are able to: but this raises the question, ‘What will move, shatter, edify or amuse our contemporaries?’ To… strike the noblest, the most elemental resonance in modem man—it is this task that raises the Urtext interpreter above the status of museum curator.

In other words, the concern is not what would have exactly pleased Beethoven in the early 1800s, but rather, how to execute his printed intentions in a way that communicates the emotional essence of the work today. Our high-speed 21^st century world of jets, mass media, large halls, and two hundred years of music written since Beethoven, must inevitably result in performance differences. Times, tastes and performance practices change but the human emotions expressed remain eternal, and it is the performer’s duty to communicate these to the listener of his time.

Of course a 21st-century interpretation should also be informed by the stylistic considerations and performing aesthetic of the composer’s time. We know that Beethoven made tempo changes between first and second themes; grace notes in the early 19^th century were generally still played on the beat; trills in his early period usually started from the upper note, and so on.

As we musicians begin to learn a work, instinctive feelings of mood and character stimulate countless early decisions of tempo, articulation, phrase-shaping, timing, etc. These all will evolve, change and refine over time. We are each a little different and we each find our own working process. Speaking for myself, I look at a composer’s notations as clues to character and emotion: “Is that accent mark scary or painful (what does that accent mark mean)? Should I use bow speed or vibrato? Should I attack the string with a bite, or should it be a more cushioned stress?” In other words, what was the composer trying to say.

Fidelity to the text is important, yet in the case of the Op. 18 quartets, many of the wishes of this unique genius are not known. There are no surviving manuscripts, and we know that Beethoven was unhappy with their publication:

Herr Mollo has once again published my quartets full of mistakes and errata on a large and a small scale. They team in it as fish do in water, i.e., ad infinitum … my skin has been greatly cut and ripped over these fine editions of my quartets.
(Letter to Hoffmeister. April 1802)

Succeeding early editions , unfortunately, show no major revisions, and so we must conclude that not even the recent scholarly editions of the Op. 18s can know many of the composer’s wishes. We do have the middle and late quartets in Beethoven’s own hand, but because of the messy and sometimes indecipherable condition of these manuscripts, there are still questions of articulations, dynamics, and in some cases, even the proper pitch of a note is unclear. A careless attitude on Beethoven’s part should not be inferred from this lack of neatness, for he expressed often and in no uncertain terms the wish that his markings be copied and executed exactly. What at first might appear to be sloppiness can be understood as the process of composing, working out problems on paper, adding a new idea or discarding another, often in a rather emotional state: “[I am] excited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.”

Comparisons of all existing source material by modern day scholars (sketchbooks, the manuscripts of the middle and late quartets, early printed editions and even Beethoven correspondence regarding these works) have been enormously valuable to the performer, yet much work still needs to be done. My NEC faculty colleague Nicholas Kitchen of the Borromeo Quartet has made some fascinating new observations on how Beethoven notated dynamic markings. Subjective decisions and educated guesses will always be needed, for sources will remain unclear or in conflict, and not all of Beethoven’s wishes can be known.

An interpretation, then, is the process of blending instinct and intellect – they may interact compatibly or in conflict, but the serious musician works to resolve these differences so that all considerations eventually become a compelling whole.  It’s a journey each player, each string quartet takes in its own way, ensuring that these masterpieces remain alive and relevant through future generations.