Schwartzo writes as part of a long exchange on String writing in Beethoven:

>Not really.  If you read carefully, you'd realize that I wasn't talking
>about the merits of the music as music at all - simply on Beethoven's
>mastery of string writing, which, if you talk to string players, is less
>than idiomatic.  Does it make a difference to the quality of the music?
>Not at all.  ...  The point is, again, that even a master has difficulty
>mastering all aspects of string quartet writing.  Players learn to overcome
>these difficulties, because the music's so good. ...

  "Of instrumentalists I can demand anything" LvB 1825

  "Does he, (the violinist he was talking to at that moment) think I
  care for the scratchings of his miserable fiddle when the muse speaks
  to me and I compose?" LvB on the Kreutzer Sonata.

Beethoven did write parts which were difficult, both by his own standards
and even by ours, even with 200 years of thinking on the subject of how
to play Beethoven. In fact Beethoven rewrote Beethoven - telling the odd
player to drop notes that were doubled in another part if they chose, and
concentrating on *knowing the grammar* of a musical style above
note-perfect reproduction.

This isn't however "bad writing for the strings", he was perfectly capable
of being idiomatic, but it is also clear that he wass driven to subordinate
what was easily playable for what was expressive.  Often the difficulties
of a part are what make the part expressive.  It is certainly true of some
parts of Beethoven.

I'd like to draw attention to a few of them briefly:

First movement of the E Minor (Op 52 No 2) quartet first violin part
measure 27.  Beethoven is busy establishing a particular cell outlined in
the opening of the exposition, from a high f down to a trill, then going up
again and down to another trill and then rising, and then down to a third
trill.  The perilous fall and off beat nature of the trill are what make
the opening work, the whole set of figures turns out to be a more complex
version of the opening figures, and that B has exanded them and forced them
to join by the mans of this trill is what gives the first section of the
work the rapid orgiastic rush into the material.  Yet I've heard it scooped
more often than not.

Third movement of the first F Major (59 No1).  In the closing bars of the
adagio the first violinist is expected to spin out an extended line,
meeting the nuances of it which essentially incorporate the whole of the
movment in a single line.  Here the violinist must sense the rubato this
long line demands, without breaking the flow of the notes.  Judging from
past performances - a reach even for some very fine players.

Among the violin sonatas, the Kreutzer is easy fodder for such examples -
so instead I'd like point to look at bars three and five of the Spring
Sonata Op 24 - the change of direction without loss of the feeling of
the same line often seems to be impossible for players of this piece.

While the whole symphony is filled with mines for the unexpected, starting
around measure 130 of the first movement of the chorale the violins have
some riffs that turn the harmony - catching the flavor of that turn makes
the moment.  Wager commented on some similar figures in the second violin
part later on in the same movement.  Here the whole tension between
rhyhmically active strings against a more solid mass of the harmony
demands just such turns.

All wonderfully expressive moments - And yet, if one was looking for
examples of string writing that lays by the book, none of these would
qualify.

Stirling S Newberry
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