Classical Convert

A Chamber Full of Beethoven

This morning, as I sat nursing a cup of coffee and procrastinating starting work,  a sudden Beethoven-related thought appeared: are there arrangements of his symphonies for string quartet? The answer is: sort of.

Theses ones aren’t for quartet, but quintet. I discovered these via this thread, which contains a wealth of information about chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s works.

It turns out that in the days before CDs and MP3s and 8-tracks, chamber arrangements were the shit. Apparently, music publishers in the 1800s were limited to selling only a certain number of copies of a hot new symphony. However, they could get around this by publishing versions arranged for smaller groups of instruments instead. This had the added bonus that the public were probably more interested in the chamber arrangements, because they could play them when their friends were over (unless you happened to be friends with a full symphony orchestra).  This resulted in lots of subpar, unauthorized arrangements of famous pieces (and a few good ones, too).

From liner notes reference in the thread above:

… The present recording of two well-known works by Beethoven affords an example of … [a] practice that was once very common: that of transcribing large-scale orchestral works for chamber resources. This was a popular practice during the Classical era, when successful new symphonies or concertos were offered for sale by publishers in all manner of additional arrangements suitable for performance within a domestic setting, not only in the form of piano reductions, but also in transcriptions ranging from duets to septets and even nonets. Most of these arrangements were the work not of the composers themselves but of arrangers who specialized in this task. But in the case of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 2 in D major op. 36 we have an “authentic” arangement that Beethoven himself prepared soon after the first performance of the symphony in 1803. Whereas the majority of these transcriptions were intended on the whole to insure a wider and quicker distribution of the music, the chamber version of the Fourth Piano Concerto in G major op. 58 that was recently rediscovered and reconstructed by Hans-Werner Kuthen seems to have been intended primarily for the private use of Prince Lobowitz, one of Beethoven’s music-loving patrons in whose town mansion the concerto had first been heard in its original orchestral version in March 1807. Beethoven was involved in this transcription too. Although he entrusted a tried-and-tested acquaintance, the court violinist Franz Alexander Possinger, with the task of reducing the orchestral lines to five-part strings (two violins, two violas and cello), he himself reworked the piano part and in the outer movements alone changed more than eighty passages in order to bring it into line with the new sororities, while at the same time considerably increasing the virtuoso demands on the soloist….

Which is describing this CD of chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s piano concerto No. 4 and 2nd Symphony.

Phew. That’s a lot of information.

I;m not sure how much I like the versions in the youtube videos above. The phrasing feels a bit too over-Romanticcy. I do really like the Liszt piano transcriptions, though.

What do you think?