Beethoven String Quartet in A Major, Op. 18 no. 5

Ludwig van Beethoven was born at Bonn, Germany; there are no existing records of his birthdate but we do know that he was baptized on 17 December 1770.  Beethoven died in Vienna, Austria on 26 March 1827.  The String Quartet in A major, Op. 18 No. 5 was completed somewhere between 1799-1800 and is part of the set of six quartets that signal Beethoven’s initial published contribution to a genre that was firmly established by Haydn and Mozart.  The Opus 18 quartets were dedicated to Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz of Austria and were premiered at Friday morning musicals held at the Viennese residence of the prince.  The quartets were first published by T. Mollo et Comp. in two sets of three quartets each in June and October 1801; Op. 18 No. 5 was published in the October set.  

“The Anxiety of Influence” is a term coined by literary critic Harold Bloom that aptly describes what Beethoven must have been feeling when he was charged by Prince Lobkowitz to write a set of quartets which would be his first serious essays in the genre.  When Beethoven started work on the Opus 18 set in 1798, the string quartet as a genre had been developed and solidified by Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Most of Haydn’s sixty-eight quartets were in circulation; to put things in perspective, Haydn’s set of the six Opus 76 quartets was hot off the presses in 1799 while Beethoven was feverishly working on completing his Opus 18.  Beethoven was coming into his own as a composer and was reaching a point where he was ready to take on the “important” genres of string quartet and symphony and establish himself as a serious composer; while Beethoven was composing his Opus 18 quartets he was concurrently working on his Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21.    

While Haydn’s influence is very evident in the Opus 18 quartets, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A major, Op. 18 No. 5, is clearly paying homage to Mozart’s String Quartet K. 464, which is also in A major.  The K. 464 quartet is itself part of a set of six quartets that Mozart wrote in homage to Haydn’s Op. 33 quartets.  Beethoven particularly admired K. 464; Carl Czerny, the famous Viennese pianist who was a student of Beethoven’s, recounted that “Beethoven once saw at my house the score of six quartets by Mozart dedicated to Haydn.  He opened the Fifth in A and said: ‘That’s what I call a work!  In it Mozart was telling the world: Look what I could create if the time were right!’”

Besides Czerny’s anecdote we have further proof Beethoven’s admiration of K. 464 in the fact that he copied out the third and fourth movements of that quartet in order to study Mozart’s work in greater detail.  This method of studying works of other composers through transcription of scores has much historical precedent; Bach copied out many of Vivaldi’s works in order to assimilate the new Italian compositional methods that were coming into fashion.  After writing his first three quartets Beethoven reached a momentary block as to where to go next; Joseph Kerman states that his transcription of the Mozart work may have been a way to get himself out of that impasse.

Beethoven’s first three Op. 18 quartets were innovative but held to the standard design as set by Haydn’s works.  In the last three quartets, Kerman says that “… Beethoven seems suddenly to have thrown the classical framework in doubt.  These pieces all entertain experiments with different types and arrangements of movements.  They show signs of perfunctory composition, of odd retrospective tendencies, even (it has been surmised, with a good show of reason) of the re-use of quite ancient material.  The Quartet in A, Op. 18, No. 5, actually models itself on a composition by Mozart, in certain respects quite closely.  Disruptive forces of all kinds are at work in these quartets…”.

Mozart also deviated from the standard movement order in his K. 464 which may be one of the features that attracted Beethoven to this work when he was looking for inspiration during the composition of the Op. 18 quartets.  Beethoven mirrors the movement order quite closely in Op. 18 No. 5.  Both quartets start with an sonata-allegro movement in triple meter (Mozart in 3/4, Beethoven in 6/8).  In Mozart’s first movement we sense of playful yet weighty formality that is inspired by the complexity of Haydn’s works.  In Beethoven’s first movement we actually find a buoyancy and lightness that is not very characteristic of his own works; we definitely sense that he is attempting to be “Mozartean” just as Mozart is attempting to be “Haydnesque” in the first movement of K 464.  Beethoven’s use of sforzandi in the opening measures add an element that is definitely characteristic of his own musical language as he attempts to obfuscate the meter of the piece through putting equal emphasis on weaker beats of the measure.  Mozartean lyricism abounds in the movement, however, and we definitely hear Beethoven paying homage to the operatic gestures of Mozart’s works.

The second movements of both quartets are minuets.  This is strange in that the dance movement is usually placed third in the standard sequence of movements.  Both movements feature contrapuntal writing and a thickening of texture in their respective trios.  Beethoven comes to Mozart’s K. 464 minuet again much later in his life and bases the minuet of the String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 on the Mozart movement.

The third movements are theme-and-variation movements in 2/4 time and in D major.  Here again we find a direct link back to Haydn; Mozart pays homage to the variation movement Haydn’s String Quartet in D minor, Op. 20 No. 4 and then in turn Beethoven pays homage to Mozart.  Besides mirroring the movement type, Beethoven also emulates the drumbeat-like ostinato found in Mozart’s work in the coda of his variation movement.

The final movement of Op. 18 No. 5 may be the most Mozartean of the four, especially as Beethoven quotes a theme from the last movement of K. 464 and uses it as the second them in the sonata-form finale.  Here we find another quirk in that last movements in classical works tend to avoid using full-fledged sonata form.  Mozart did not follow suit in K. 464 for his finale and Beethoven follows his lead.  The weight of a sonata-form movement is masked by the lightness of the musical language, and in this way we see that Beethoven has very successfully channeled the spirit of Mozart in this movement.    

In each of the Op. 18 quartets we see Beethoven dealing with the anxiety of influence in different ways.  In Op. 18 No. 5 Beethoven learns to take elements of a work he greatly admired and put his own twist on them.  Jeremy Yudkin summarizes this quite nicely in his article on the relationship between these two quartets:

The desire to learn, rivalry, and homage: these are the three principal ingredients of imitation [in Beethoven Op. 18. No. 5]…  In homage to Mozart, Beethoven models a quartet on a Mozart masterpiece.  In quiet rivalry with him, he fashions a completely different composition from matching materials and, in so doing, grounds his anxiety.

-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña