I have finally completed my digital performance of the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, which I have been working on little by little for some time.
It took considerably longer than I had expected, partly because I was also experimenting with Vienna MIR 3D, a convolution reverb system that I introduced for the first time in this project. It is quite different from the reverb I had been using before, and I find that it gives the sound a much greater sense of three-dimensional space.
The third movement of this quartet is truly extraordinary music. I have often wondered whether there might be two different backgrounds behind the beauty that gives so many listeners such a quiet and profound sense of emotion.
Beethoven himself gave the movement the title “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a Convalescent, in the Lydian Mode”). Having finally recovered from a serious illness, he must surely have put into this music both his joy at recovering and his deep sense of gratitude to God.
And yet, when I listen to this music, I feel there may be something more. There is a quality shared by many of Beethoven’s late works—a gaze directed not toward the outside world, but ever more deeply inward.
In his younger years, Beethoven seems to have possessed a powerful will directed toward society and the world around him. By his later years, however, Europe was under the Metternich system, a tightly controlled society far removed from the hopes for freedom and social change that he had once embraced. Along with his personal circumstances—his loss of hearing, isolation, and illness—perhaps these changes in the world around him were also one of the factors that gradually turned his gaze inward.
Listening to the quiet chorale of this movement, I sometimes feel that the music goes beyond simple gratitude for recovery from illness. It seems almost as though Beethoven were quietly contemplating his own existence. In creating this digital performance, I hoped to capture at least something of that extraordinary inward quality.
Song Title:
Title:.
String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132 – Third Movement
Sound source:
Sound Library:
Solo, Chamber, and Ensemble Strings
Audio file format: mp3
For streaming on a PC, please see this page.
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For streaming on a PC, please see
this page.