Beethoven wrote his final string quartet while his nephew Karl lay recovering from a suicide attempt, and you can hear every hour of that in the music.
Op. 135 was finished in October 1826, just months before Beethoven's own death the following March. It is the shortest of his late quartets — barely half an hour — and because of that brevity some early listeners decided it was minor Beethoven, a cooling-down after the cosmic wrestling of Op. 131 and Op. 132. They were wrong. This is Beethoven at his most distilled: every note chosen with the ruthlessness of a man who no longer has anything to prove and knows it.
The Inscription
On the manuscript of the final movement, Beethoven wrote a riddle in German. Above the slow introduction he inscribed the question: "Muss es sein?" — Must it be? And above the resolving theme: "Es muss sein!" — It must be. The joke, as far as anyone can reconstruct it, started with a dispute over a music copyist's fee. But Beethoven let the joke become something else entirely. By the time he was writing Op. 135, the question carried the full weight of a man staring at the end of things and choosing, one last time, to go forward.
The first movement opens with a kind of wry normalcy — conversational, almost Haydnesque — before Beethoven slips the ground out from under you so subtly you barely notice until you're already falling. The second movement scherzo is violent in the way that only extremely quiet things can be violent. And then the third movement, marked Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo — slow, singing, tranquil — is among the most beautiful thirty-two bars Beethoven ever wrote. It asks nothing of you. It just opens a door.
The Recording That Matters
The Végh Quartet's 1952–53 recordings for Valois remain the standard against which I measure everything else. Sándor Végh and his players understood something that many later ensembles — even brilliant ones — have smoothed away: this music is not supposed to be comfortable. It is supposed to be true. There are moments in the Végh Op. 135 where the intonation bends in ways that sound less like error and more like grief, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
The Talich Quartet's 1978 Calliope recordings are warmer and maybe more immediately beautiful. The Busch Quartet's 1936 HMV recording, made when Adolf Busch was at the absolute peak of his powers, has a kind of urgency that makes you feel like you're present at something you shouldn't be witnessing.
For modern recordings, the Quatuor Ébène on Virgin Classics plays Op. 135 with a transparency that suits the late quartets well — you hear the architecture without losing the feeling. The Belcea Quartet on Alpha is also worth your time, and the recording itself is exceptionally clean.
Put it on late. After the dishes, after the news, after whatever the day handed you. Pour something, sit down, and let the Lento find you in the third movement. Beethoven didn't know he was writing his last quartet when he started it. By the time he finished, he probably did.
Es muss sein.