Beethoven's two string quintets are among his least-played major works. This is perhaps understandable in the case of the String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 4, which is based on a serenade from the composer's early Bonn years. That's interesting enough in itself, for it places you inside the expansion of Beethoven's creative capabilities when he came under Haydn's tutelage in Vienna (although this work sounds more like Mozart than Haydn). The String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, was composed in 1800 and 1801, and its absence ...
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Beethoven's two string quintets are among his least-played major works. This is perhaps understandable in the case of the String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 4, which is based on a serenade from the composer's early Bonn years. That's interesting enough in itself, for it places you inside the expansion of Beethoven's creative capabilities when he came under Haydn's tutelage in Vienna (although this work sounds more like Mozart than Haydn). The String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, was composed in 1800 and 1801, and its absence from the mainstream repertoire is harder to explain. The appropriately named annotator Irmlind Capelle goes a bit far by saying that here "it is sound itself, not concise themes and their elaboration, which now predominates." What's happening is that the quintet is one of those works from the years before the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55 ("Eroica"), when Beethoven began to experiment drastically with traditional Classical forms. The larger integration of experiment and...
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