“– I will seize Fate by the throat,

it shall certainly not crush me entirely –

Oh, how beautiful it is to live life a thousandfold –”

— Ludwig van Beethoven, in a letter

to Franz Gerhard Wegeler, November 16, 1801

“– ich will dem schicksaal in den rachen greifen,

ganz niederbeugen soll es mich gewiß nicht –

o es ist so schön das Leben tausendmal leben –”

— Ludwig van Beethoven, in einem Brief

an Franz Gerhard Wegeler, 16. November 1801

Our View

Beethoven’s string quartets have been covered from every angle, so rather than offering a theoretical analysis (fascinating as it is!) we want to share a little about what makes us come back to this music for over 25 years now, how we approach it as interpreters and why we decided to record it. If you are interested in understanding the intricacies of the music in greater detail, we recommend starting with Joseph Kerman’s ‘The Beethoven Quartets’ and going from there.

Stravinsky is famously said to have called Beethoven’s ‘Große Fuge’ ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.’ In direct comparison, the op.18 set is clearly less adventurous in pretty much every aspect, but this is mostly true because we can’t un-hear 200+ years of music history when listening today. Zooming in and familiarizing ourselves with Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets of the time, we quickly understand that Beethoven’s set – while adhering to the same rules and principles – is distinctly ‘Beethovenian’. While this impression can be broken down into factors such as motive-driven development, emotional contrasts, his characteristic expanded harmonic language, structural experimentation etc., the big achievement was his ability to unify these elements into a compositional language that expresses extraordinary emotional depth.

At the time, Vienna was the music capital of the world, and with the first symphony hitting the market in 1800/1801 it is often pointed out that Beethoven started out relatively late in both of these important genres. Beethoven seemed to have known that finding one’s own voice as an artist is a vital process that must not be cut short and for him, this meant searching for his language on the piano, his musical enabler, which happened to take the majority of the 1790s.

Quartets were traditionally published in sets of six, and fittingly, op.18 became the last great quartet set of the classical period: we hear a young Beethoven proving himself on the battleground of his teachers and peers, Haydn and Mozart, while signaling a bold move toward new musical horizons.

Beethoven’s op.18 No.4 was the first quartet we tackled as 12-year-olds, and it’s no exaggeration to say it hooked us on this genre for life. As interpreters, we love diving deeply into the music’s details and we leave no theoretical and contextual stone unturned. At the same time, we make sure to maintain our intuitive approach to the music: every work we learn is first sight-read without preparation, unlocking our purest emotional reactions to the music. These feelings are then carefully preserved, allowing us to channel them when all the technical work of putting things where they belong is done. The next stage is when the magic truly happens, and we feel lucky to have been doing this since 1998: when the music meets the energy of the audience it starts to develop a life of its own, making each performance a once-in-a-lifetime event. This connection transforms both the music and ourselves, and it’s this immediacy and expressivity that we aimed to capture in our recording.

Our decision to record this cycle is meant as a testament to our belief in the enduring relevance of this incredible music. While we deeply admire the many renditions already available, we feel that this capture offers a new approach both in interpretation and in sound – thanks to Jesse Lewis, his remarkable ear and his possibly even more remarkable patience – and it’s our hope that listening to it will take you straight to the heart of this music’s expressivity and communicative depth.