Before the onset of the global pandemic, much of the news in the classical music sphere was concerned with the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was almost too much for some of us. “Why do we need more Beethoven?” we asked. In ordinary times, we have the luxury of questioning those canonical compositions and their creators – art grows and evolves through such questioning. But difficult times not only require challenging ourselves and the status quo, but also finding solace to get us through those hard times. There is something about the struggles that Beethoven so lucidly portrays in his music that we can relate to in times of both ease and difficulty.

Beethoven is arguably the most masterful of string quartet composers, and certainly among the most autobiographical. You can see his life’s evolution over the course of his three compositional periods, and most explicitly in his cycle of 16 string quartets.

The Arnica Quartet pays homage to Beethoven on this week’s edition of Fridays with 45^th Parallel with one of his early quartets, the joyful Op. 18 No. 2 in G major, which shows him looking back to the earlier masters of the quartet genre, Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, using their four movement form and order of movements.

The Arnicans finish with the Cavatina movement from his late masterpiece, the Op. 130 in B-flat major. Beethoven isn’t known as a composer of art songs, and he wrote only one opera (Fidelio), but his string quartet slow movements take on all the emotion of songs without words, and perhaps no other does so more affectingly than the Cavatina. The Cavatina was one of the pieces of music from Earth that was launched into interstellar space on the golden record placed on the Voyager I space probe in 1977, which is now the most distant human-made object known in the universe.

Charles Noble
Arnica Quartet