It’s not often you can hear a piece by Beethoven that almost no one else has ever heard.
But thanks to the University of Colorado’s Takacs String Quartet, you have just that opportunity on Sunday, March 8 and Monday, March 9. The piece in question is the Elegischer Gesang (Elegiac song) for string quartet and four voices, which Beethoven composed in 1814 for his friend Baron Johann Baptist von Pasqualati, whose wife had died three years earlier.
Because it is an elegy, the Beethoven score works well with the final piece on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, an intense and somber piece that takes its mood and the theme of its slow movement from Schubert’s song of the same name. Also on the program is Haydn’s String Quartet in C major, op. 76 no. 3, known as “The Emperor” Quartet.
Joining the members of Takacs for Beethoven’s elegy will be CU faculty members Jennifer Bird- Arvidsson, soprano, and Matthew Chellis, tenor; and graduate voice students Rebecca Robinson, alto, and Luke Williams, bass.
The Elegischer Gesang is rarely more than a footnote in even the most thorough books on Beethoven. In fact, it is so obscure that it cannot even be found in the index of the major books on Beethoven’s quartets.
“We’re always looking for pieces that give us a chance to showcase some of our wonderful faculty,” Takacs’ first violinist Ed Dusinberre says. “The chance to work with several singers at once seemed great. There’s a nice mixture [of the quartet and the singers], so I think it’s a very effective piece.”
Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet is one of the great works for string quartet. It was composed in the 1790s after Haydn’s celebrated visits to London and while he was working on his oratorio The Creation. It has all the hallmarks of Haydn’s mastery, with a fluid texture and constant dialogue among the instruments.
“This is quite a big, dramatic piece,” Dusinberre says. “Our approach to Haydn is very vivid, and we don’t shy away from making a big sound if the occasion requires. And we think how you characterize the dialogue is the most critical thing about playing Haydn quartets — to give those conversations the right character. Sometimes it’s polite and civilized, and other times it’s more showy and dramatic. This piece has a brilliant combination of those things in it.”
But history has also left a shadow on the quartet. The slow movement is a set of variations on Haydn’s hymn for the Austrian emperor, Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God save Emperor Francis). This tune gives the quartet its title, but also conjures unhappy associations from having been used as the German national anthem by the Nazis.
“Because of its history, for me, it’s impossible to play it with the celebratory character that it might have had in Haydn’s day,” Dusinberre says. “I think it’s an absolutely beautiful piece, and I think it’s very important to play it, to reclaim that beautiful music from the horrendous later associations. But at the same time, it must have a melancholy tinge to it — how could it not?”
Like Haydn’s “Emperor,” Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet takes its name from a set of variations on a song. Based on the theme representing Death in the song, the movement gives a heavy mood to the whole quartet. It was written in 1824, as Schubert himself became aware of his fatal illness.
“The whole piece is a very convincing whole and a very emotional statement,” Dusinberre says. “In the first movement you hear fear and dread, and a sort of imminent catastrophe. So I think the drama evolves in an integrated way from the first to the second movement.”
The other movements are both contrasting and integrated into the mood. The third movement has great energy and rhythmic drive, while the finale is a tarantella — a dance associated with tarantula bites — that is sometimes called a “dance of death.”
Recently, Takacs has given special, limited performances of the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet that give insight into how they approach the piece. They have paired the music with readings from novelist Philip Roth’s Everyman, a meditation on the approach of death. In two performances of this special project, the readers have been Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep.
The Boulder performance will not include readings, but even without Streep it is easy to think of the quartet, and Takacs’ performance of it, as an invitation to ponder deeper questions about existence and eternity. And in that endeavor, who better than Schubert, himself close to eternity when he wrote the quartet, to guide our thoughts?
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