DAILY DOSES of BEETHOVEN (May 17, 2020)
Mozart was once widely denounced, after it was realized that the introduction to his String Quartet No. 19 in C major, K465, was not a typo. He meant it! The intro to this quartet, named the "Dissonant" Quartet (composed January 1785), prepares us for a seemingly self-evident theme in C major. (Joseph Haydn, to whom this quartet was dedicated, upon hearing it, immediately wrote the following to Mozart’s father, Leopold: “Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”)
Beethoven took Mozart’s work a step further. He wished to show that discrete things, such as keys, scales, and melodies, derived from the complex domain of physics. He also understood that keys and scales are not self-evident. You do not start with a theme in a key. You start with the entire well-tempered system, and derive the theme and key from there. His String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, the last of the three “Razmovsky” quartets (composed 1808), begins on the notes F# A C Eb—a diminished 7th, or double-Lydian interval. It defies keys. It exists only between them, and is deliberately ambiguous. Like Mozart, Beethoven arrives at a simple melody in C major, which might seem to be self-evident, if we had not distilled it from the universal 24 key system.