Between Two Worlds | Beethoven & Romanticism
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Lydian String Quartet
Scott Burnham, speaker
BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135
Beethoven’s last five string quartets hold a special place in Western music history. Though Beethoven is quite fittingly imagined to be the composer who bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, these works seem to operate from some different cultural geography altogether. Timeless, enigmatic, existential, deadly serious and bluntly humorous, full of extreme contrasts, the late quartets are quite unlike anything that came before or after. This group of works is often held up as the quintessential expression of artistic “lateness,” of that which happens to artistic expression toward the end of an artist’s life. Beethoven scholar Scott Burnham discusses the special qualities of Beethoven’s late style as demonstrated through a performance by the acclaimed Boston-based Lydian String Quartet of his final string quartet, Op. 135.
