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TALICH QUARTET
Did Beethoven realise that a piece of this kind, definitive, extraordinary by its very
essence, would displace the centre of gravity of the quartet as a whole, and that
the mounting tension born of this final monument would, in its generosity, ruin
all the economy of a work that was already highly dangerous and, in formal terms,
strikingly inhomogeneous?
Certainlynot;itwas,asweknow,hisentourageoffriendsandinstrumentalistswho
proposed, if not imposed the solution of substituting an alternative movement.
For Beethoven, fugue was above all a technique, a form clearly isolated from its
historical context, which allowed him to fight, successfully or so he believed,
against the inevitable deliquescence of its opposite, sonata form, which he sensed
was already becoming obsolete.
An appeal to the rigour of the day before yesterday in order to
break with the convention of yesterday – and the major ambition
of inventing a content that would be specific, free, radiant,
novel within a framework rigorous by its very nature.