Silencio y más

Once the summit of the Ninth is reached, Beethoven abandons the outside world. This talk addresses the radical turn towards his last String Quartets (from No. 12 to No. 16, including the Grosse Fuge). The laboratory no longer seeks to proclaim or build "monuments", but it never quite closes off either. In these final experiments of the Beethoven Laboratory, some saw "horrors" (Spohr); others, the purest and eternal "contemporaneity" (Stravinsky); some, the greatest "melancholy" (Wagner); and others, an "impossibility" ("What remains to be written?", said Schubert). A kind critic seems to have written: "We know there is something there, but we don't know what it is". Let's find out.