String Quartet No. 14 in C‑Sharp Minor

By the time he came to compose his String Quartet, Op. 131, in 1825-6, Beethoven was almost completely deaf. His belief in democracy had taken a severe knock after the final defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the old powers in 1815, and he seems to have given up hope of ever finding a wife. He was now, in the words of Thomas Mann, the "lonely prince of a world of spirits". Yet out of this painful loneliness came what many consider his greatest works. The Op. 131 quartet is perhaps his supreme achievement in the form he made so much his own. In seven linked movements, some substantial, others fleeting and enigmatic, it takes us through a wide range of emotions, often at the very extremes of intensity. It begins with a slow, desperately sad fugue, which comes close to resignation, yet from this emerges a quirky, tentatively playful scherzo, a half-comic, half-ardent recitative, which leads in turn to a sequence of slow variations rising to a rarefied height of painful ecstasy. Good humour is restored in the scherzo—or is it? It’s no surprise when this fades into pure grief in a tiny “Adagio", after which an energetic “Allegro” strives to make sense of it all, ending with a strangely ambiguous gesture of defiance. On hearing an early performance of this quartet, Schubert is said to have remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?"