"The relationship between Ludwig van Beethoven's op. 132 string quartet and Luigi Nono's Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima spans 155 years while sharing several conceptual dimensions - among them, their respective composers' intense idealism in the pursuit of art as a transformational, unifying experience; their utopian visions of political and social justice; and the struggle to translate a profound personal expression into a consequential public reality. The stylistic characteristics distinct to and separating 19th and 20th century classical music procedures explain their works' radically divergent dramatic and formal qualities, yet the extent to which they each adapt, break with, and reinvent those procedures accounts for the music's ardor and integrity.

Fire delights in its form. Snow delights in its form. The three string quartets Beethoven composed largely in 1825 - in E flat op. 127, in A minor op. 132, and B flat op. 130, the latter including what has become known as the "Grosse Fuge" as its original finale, later replaced - were commissioned by a Russian nobleman and amateur cellist, Prince Nicolai Galitzin. Following their completion, Beethoven was inspired to write two more quartets - in C sharp minor op. 131, and F major op. 135 - in sum the last of his noteworthy works before his death in 1827. His decision to concentrate on a sequence of intimate, yet ambitiously creative works, after the completion and public premieres of his two most monumental and humanistically devout scores, the Missa Solemnis in 1823 and the Ninth Symphony in 1824, may have been based in part on ill health and near-total deafness directing his musical thoughts ever more inward, toward a private, personal reconciliation of crisis and comfort, articulated through the reconfigured forms of these last quartets.

At some point not simply to be determined the lines of movement were no longer congruent and they became divergent, flooded with memories. The five movements of the A minor quartet represent an ongoing revolution of internal contrasts and altered structure - harmonic distractions, modulations, dissonances - within the sonata form, where extremes of concision, fragmentation, interruption, and variation reflect a subversive point of view, equally embracing anxious outbursts and contemplative insight, brooding melancholy and shivering lyricism. The central movement, titled by Beethoven "Sacred Song of Gratitude to the Divinity by one Recovered," adopts the Lydian mode, dating back to the Middle Ages and possibly ancient Greece, echoing the past in an abstracted context. Ironically, Beethoven's plunge into psychological and constructive modernism was less directly influential in Europe than in the United States, where more than a century later composers like Roger Sessions, David Diamond, and particularly George Rochberg resurrected, via the music's formal breadth and gravitas, a postmodern memory of structural and stylistic alternatives.

Human life he had begun to recognize as an accumulation of persistent, small gestures and acts, intensively recurrent in their need.... Luigi Nono's only string quartet, premiered in 1980, was commissioned for the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany. The title, Fragments - Stillness, suggests its formal demeanor, possibly an anguished disruption of the fabric of life, marked by periods of soothing calm, or perhaps existential emptiness, or simply pausing to breathe. Yet the music, as it sounds, is connected to the past and the present as a continuity of change and contemplation. Noticeably, this is an ensemble music, a music of textures rather than melody, as the four close-knit strings combine voices much in the manner of an Elizabethan viol consort (music of a period which Nono studied with fellow composer Bruno Maderna) affecting a dislocation of time and space, an alteration of tradition that reflects its value while distorting its authority. The seeming discontinuity of "fragments" is an opportunity to reorganize and revitalize the components of society through an awareness of subtle details - the nuances of tone, pitch, dynamics, and harmony.

Harmony is just like what your ear says like. Open note to the possibility of something happening. "An Diotima" in the title refers to a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, an exact contemporary of Beethoven, fragments of which Nono wrote into the score - not to be spoken, but as verbal/emotional resonances, such as "shadow, silent realm," "when I sank in mourning," "out into air and light," and "more secret world." Part of this secret world - to be discovered, by performer and listener alike, through an awareness of the music's presence - are the references "embedded" in the sound environment, including Beethovenian intimations and score indications from op. 132, an "enigmatic scale" used by Giuseppi Verdi in his Four Sacred Pieces, and a viola quotation of the song "Malheur me bat" (Misfortune defeats me) by the 15th century composer Johannes Ockeghem, where the broken significance of time is reclaimed and reinvested in the necessity of our perception, understanding, and involvement."-Art Lange, Chicago, December 2024

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