Conclusion and Awakening: Beethoven’s Last Quartets – No. 14, No. 16, and Rondo

About the production

This year the Lausitz Festival will present the Quatuor Danel performing Beethoven’s complete string quartets in the order of their composition. The final concert will feature Beethoven’s last complete composition, the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135, as well as the Rondo he composed to replace the Great Fuge as the last movement of the 13th string quartet. Beethoven submitted to his publisher’s request to find a more conventional ending for the work – after the premiere performance, critics complained that the fugue movement »sounded like Chinese«. Experts have debated ever since whether the new movement was primarily a marketing strategy or a sophisticated summation of the entire genre. Beethoven’s last quartet was completed in 1826, but it contains homages to the classical works of Hayden and Mozart. This concert will open with the String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, also completed in 1826. The work is written in an unusual key for Beethoven – the only other time he used it was in the »Moonlight Sonata«. The first movement of the quartet is an Adagio fugue that Richard Wagner described as »surely the saddest thing ever expressed in notes«. Wagner went on to compare his experience of the music to waking up on the morning of »a long day in which not a single wish will be fulfilled, not one! But at the same time it is a penitential prayer, a conversation with God grounded in the belief in eternal goodness.« In this field of tension between resignation and hope, past and present, disintegration and new beginning, Beethoven’s music will be performed in front of the historic Zittau Fastentuch (Lenten veil).