Re-hearing Op. 131

Abstract

One sees a decisive shift in Beethoven reception in the late nineteenth century. The late quartets, in particular, were starting to be considered as a special group of “very late” masterpieces, cut off from contextual and social moorings and expressive only of Beethoven’s innermost thoughts and feelings. In the case of Op. 131, the meanings of the work became yet more restricted in later reception: this penultimate work is often considered to be Beethoven’s melancholy swansong. A rhetoric of “lack” emerges in the discourse about the C-sharp minor quartet from Wagner onwards, including seminal twentieth-century analytical accounts. At the same time, scholars seem to grapple with the wealth—perhaps overabundance—of material in the quartet by repeatedly showing how it is unified, in twentieth-century analytical terms. Only recently has this view started to change, so that scholars re-hear the work in ways that celebrate its plenitude.