Defining the String Quartet II: Beethoven

About this course

This course aims to enhance your understanding and appreciation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s music by exploring a genre at the very core of his development as a composer: the string quartet. Evenly distributed among the periods into which his life and work are customarily divided, his 16 quartets offer a broadly representative record of his changing musical language. The six quartets of the first period follow closely in the footsteps of Beethoven's teacher Haydn, the acknowledged “father" of the genre; the five quartets of the middle period significantly expand musical form as well as the range of dramatic expression; the remaining five quartets, written in the composer's idiosyncratic "late style," take the genre to unheard-of levels of innovation.