Narratio Quartet

Viola de Hoog: My colleagues from the Narratio Quartet and I have been immersed in all of Beethoven's string quartets for more than fifteen years. We experience time and again how Beethoven explored the boundaries of the classical style and the instrumental challenges that prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and subsequently overcame them along new paths. Opus 95 is a wonderful example of that. Beethoven himself wrote in a letter to Sir George Smart, an important musician in England at the time: "The quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and must never be performed in public." Each of the five late quartets, from Opus 127 onwards, explores new forms, modulates to distant keys, presents melodic arcs unprecedented until then and contains what were at the time unusually detailed dynamic instructions; various ways in which Beethoven broke away from the familiar style of that era. Beethoven composed these five quartets in a remarkably short period, between 1824 and 1826.