Event Detail

SCHUBERT AND BEETHOVEN
Monday, October 6, 7:30pm
SCHUBERT: Quartettsatz in C minor, D. 703
BEETHOVEN: String Trio in D Major, Op. 9 No. 2
BEETHOVEN: String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127

A note from Camera Lucida Artistic Director Charles Curtis about this program:

"You will find here a new kind of voice-leading, and, as to imagination [Phantasie], it will, God willing, be less lacking than ever before!" (- Ludwig van Beethoven, ca. 1825, on the late string quartets, in conversation with violinist Karl Holz)

Camera Lucida is proud to present the final installment of our five-year project surveying the last string quartets of Beethoven. "So that the last shall be first, and the first last" - our survey began in 2010 with Opus 135, and ends now with Opus 127. This quartet, invoking the august, ritualistic tonality of E-flat major, beckons the listener into the final and deepest chamber of Beethoven's creative life, a period in which he worked almost exclusively in the medium of the string quartet. The result is a set of six quartets that have baffled and overwhelmed listeners up to the present day - from our standpoint, Beethoven's remark above seems an "understatement to leave us all speechless" (Joseph Kerman). The "new kind of voice-leading" heralds a new kind of listening, and potentially even a new kind of feeling and thinking - fragmented and compressed, elliptical, ambiguous, yet deeply, even violently expressive - perhaps more akin to the flows of meaning in Joyce than to Haydn or Schubert. Adorno refers to "quasi-allegorical, formulaic moments..." – for him, Beethoven does not seek to "cleanse music of the formulaic, but to make the formulaic transparent, to let it speak on its own"; and he claims for these aphoristic formulae "the uncanny utterance of a magical spell." One seeks in vain for an analog, in any art form, to the strange beauty of the late quartets.

Our program opens with another sort of fragment: the orphaned Quartettsatz in c-minor of Franz Schubert, composed in 1820 as Beethoven embarked on the initial works of the late period; seven years later, Schubert would carry a torch at Beethoven's funeral. And we perform as well the String Trio in D major, Opus 9 Nr. 2, a perfect example of Beethoven's gallant early style, predating all of the extraordinary string quartets which would map his later creative journey.

Camera Lucida, a collaboration between UC San Diego and the San Diego Symphony, presents chamber music masterpieces of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries in the acoustically perfect Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at UCSD. Principal musicians from the San Diego Symphony and distinguished performance faculty from UCSD join with guests from the international chamber music world in performances that blend the precision and cohesiveness of a permanent ensemble with widely ranging instrumentation.

Sponsored by the Sam B. Ersan Fund at the San Diego Foundation