String Quintet C Major Op.29 - Cello

He is of a laconic nature and becomes doubly so because of this lack. Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming to a poet.

How can one really say very much about the ridiculous behaviour of virtuosi in this respect, when poets, who should be regarded as the leading teachers of the nation, can forget everything else when confronted with that glitter. While it is true that Beethoven was a difficult and abstracted man as Goethe says , and it is true that Beethoven had a distaste for glitterati and a romantic idea of art as he says of himself , it should be remembered that neither his reticence nor his idealism overruled his pragmatic needs as a professional composer.

The String Quintet in C Major, op. How far from a string quartet can it possibly be? The musicological story one most often finds in studying the quintet is about a tense legal and copyright struggle, during which Beethoven seems to have publicly sabotaged an edition by Artaria in Vienna so that the quintet could be published properly only by Breitkopf in Leipzig.

String quintet in C major, op. 29 ; String quartet in F major, op. 59, no. 1 : "Razumovsky"

He defended himself by saying that Haydn had also done this sort of thing. This did not impress the judge. There was a bit more of a frisson when Beethoven met Mozart in , during exactly the weeks in which Mozart would have been finishing his own C Major string quintet, K. The work opens with an Allegro, whose fluency and calm demeanor never seem threatened by anything in the development section.

There is more energy in the first subject, more repose in the second. If there seems a Mozart ean air about the music, it never appears to cross over, or even approach, the line to pure imitation. Beethoven is masterful throughout the movement, providing a compelling development section and reprise.

Notes and Editorial Reviews

The ensuing Adagio molto espressione features a lovely main theme and a charming middle-section, that again call the world of Mozart to mind. In this movement Beethoven's contrapuntal writing is brilliant and helps to impart an atmosphere of great warmth.

This and the first movement are the longest two in the work, each lasting nearly ten minutes. While the mood of the Scherzo, marked Allegro, does not radically break from the more easy-going demeanor of the preceding two movements, it is more robust, more neurotically insistent. Its main theme, all of one measure in length, is repeated throughout the movement, the music turning obsessive and overwhelming.

This Scherzo clearly looks toward the later ones, foreshadowing even that in the great Ninth Symphony.

If the third movement sounds advanced for its time, the finale surpasses it at least in its subtle and innovative use of counterpoint. The sometimes hesitant, sometimes start-and-stop character of this Presto clearly comes from a more mature Beethoven.

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The structure here is quite unusual, consisting of three themes and a short coda at the end of the exposition. There follows a development section, out of which emerges a fourth theme. The work closes with a brilliant coda. Without doubt this is music on a level of profundity rarely found in Beethoven's scores up to that time.

Beethoven, Ludwig van: Op. 29, String Quintet in C Major | Tim Summers, violin

This work was first published in Leipzig in and dedicated to Count Moritz von Fries. A typical performance of the Quintet lasts between thirty and thirty-three minutes.

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