![]() ![]() The second movement is even more remarkable. ![]() The strings grow into the movement, making some rather beautiful harmonies together. To start with a slow movement of such depth of feeling is striking to the listener with its hushed, reverent string chords and expansive rhetoric from the piano. This is indeed remarkably profound music for a fourteen-year old to be writing. Swafford writes of how “the gestures and the low, close harmonies are Mozart’s, and so is the Mozart tone: languid, seemingly suspended between conflicting emotions, peculiarly shadowed for the major mode.” He then notes how Beethoven ‘pushes every envelope’ – with directions for volume that are fortissimo rather than forte, with harmonic writing that moves to the outlandish key of E flat minor, unheard of in his day, and piano writing notable for its difficulty. What had he experienced to arrive at such an outpouring? All that can be certain is that he had experienced his model, Mozart’s Violin Sonata in G major, K379 (which you can compare below) “This does not sound like learned rhetoric, like everything he had written before it sounds like music from the heart. “In the massive Adagio assai that begins the Piano Quartet in E flat major, listeners then and later could only be stunned at the subtlety and depth of feeling, call it a certain wistful pathos, coming from a composer of age fourteen”, he writes. The E flat major work is the most adventurous, and the one to which Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford devotes most time. Yet, as we outlined in the C major work heard yesterday, they are important works in the young composer’s development. It is curious to note that this group of three works from 1785 mark Beethoven’s only encounter with the form of the Piano Quartet – piano, violin, viola and cello – and that he would not write any more original works for the combination in his career. Piano Quartet in E flat major WoO 36/1 for piano, violin, viola and cello (1785, Beethoven aged 14)ĭedication Thought to be Elector Maximilian Friedrich ![]() Painting with a hillside view of Bonn around the year 1790. ![]()
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