Mike Leghorn flogs a dead horse:

>Why would Beethoven take a motif from Mozart to open these three quartets
>(and even use the same key)?

Several have contended that he didn't take this motive.  A motive, after
all, is defined as an idea that is developed in a piece.  The strongest
case that one makes would thus be that Beethoven merely quotes.  However,
these "quotes" are never rhetorically prominent and seem more an accident
of harmony.  After all, the sequence I-V-IV-I is hardly an unusual one in
tonal music.  Even assuming that he consciously did take the same motive,
you've yet to show that this is *Mozart's* motive -- that is, a motive
peculiar to Mozart -- and not a set of four notes common to the time.
Beethoven may not have gotten it from Mozart.  After all, I can show you
the same four notes in Palestrina (and Beethoven did know Renaissance
music, according to Warren Kirkendale).  If Beethoven consciously adapts
these four notes as such (and you've yet to show even this), the sequence
may be analogous to a Renaissance composer's use of a plainchant.  Right
now it's like arguing that anybody using the phrase "It's gonna rain" is
quoting Steve Reich.

>As I've suggested, he was foretelling -- and so was Mozart in the trio of
>the Jupiter.  Mozart's first introduction of the motif in the Jupiter is in
>the trio of the third movmement.  The finale of the Jupiter ended up being
>Mozart's full realization of that motif.  Beethoven took the same motif,
>right out of the trio,

And you know he got it from there because . . .?

>That brings me to another subject: my take on op. 132.  ...  When I
>listen to it, I imagine Beethoven almost delirious with illness, watching
>fleeting images of music pass in front of him -- music by other composers.
>The opening is kind of like the foggy void before the images appear.  The
>second movement is the most ghostly.  If this were a fleeting image of
>music, who would be the composer? Mozart perhaps? Well, I thought I heard
>some similarities between it and the third movement of the Jupiter -- the
>rhythm of the themes in both 'A' and 'B' (i.e.  trio) sections.

Yes, they're both essentially minuets.  I also hear rhythmic similarities
to works by Haydn, Seyfried, Pergolesi, and the Bachs.

>Then I asked myself: Mozart uses the 4-note motif (with a 4-note answer)
>in the middle of the trio -- does Beethoven do the same thing? Upon
>listening, I discovered that he does indeed use the 4-note motif in the
>middle of the trio section of the 2nd movement.  (These are my favorite
>kind of discoveries -- the kind that gradually unfold).

Having just listened to this with Mike's comment in mind, I can find no
use of this sequence at all either in the trio or in the entire movement.
Measure numbers?

>So, Beethoven starts the first three quartets in a foggy haze, and
>gradually injects himself into the music.  At first, the 4-note theme
>is distant (really it's eight notes).  But, by the time he gets to Grosse
>Fugue, he has arrived, and there is not mistake about who owns the 8-note
>theme.  I believe that in the Grosse Fugue, Beethoven meant it as a
>signature.

Except the sequence is not in the Grosse Fugue.  There *is* a four-note
motive, but it's not c-d-f-e; rather (if the quartet were in the key
of C instead of Bb) G#-A-G'-F#' in its opening form.  Furthermore, it
never becomes c-d-f-e in this piece.  So now, in effect, we've come from
"Mozart's 4-note theme," to any 4-note theme that rises by a whole or
half-step, skips x number of notes, and falls a whole or half-step.  It's
a real stretch to say that anyone after Mozart who constructs this kind of
motive gets the idea specifically from Mozart's Jupiter (since the motive
occurs in other Mozart works) or even specifically from Mozart.

Steve Schwartz