The proverbial good that comes from waiting: roughly thirty years elapsed between the time Beethoven first envisioned setting Schiller's An die Freude and the first performance of the Ninth Symphony; the release of the late Beethoven string quartets by the Vienna-based Quatuor Mosaïques in autumn 2017 also came on the thirty-year anniversary of the group's inception. Not only does this recording represent a milestone in the quartet's own journey, their ‘maturation’ with Beethoven and with one another, as Andrea Bischof (second violin) describes it (liner notes, 22), but the set is of great historical moment for Beethoven, for music of the long eighteenth century and for the historically informed performance (HIP) or early-music movement. Before this release, an HIP collection of the Beethoven quartets remained piecemeal and incomplete: Op. 18 (Mosaïques and Turner); Op. 59 (Kuijken); Op. 74 (Eroica and Turner); Op. 95 (Eroica and Chiaroscuro); Op. 130 with Große Fuge finale (Edding); Op. 132 (Terpsychordes); Op. 135 (Eroica Quartet). Op. 127 and Op. 131 had remained unrecorded. This Mosaïques release is the first and only recording of the last five (with the original Große Fuge finale for Op. 130) in an HIP setup: instruments dating from 1700–1800, fitted with gut strings tuned at A = 432, and played with early nineteenth-century bows (recorded in their concert home, the Mozart-Saal, from 2014 to 2016).

The instrumentation is but a first step to meet Beethoven head-on – it elevates the difficulty of performance in a way that, for a repertoire as demanding as the last five, is without comparison – hence the drought. As Jan Swafford writes of the Große Fuge, ‘part of the effect of the music here is the suffering of the players’ (Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014), 894). Beethoven's uncompromising attitude toward instruments and singers for the sake of his compositional vision is perhaps best encapsulated by his pithy response, in the third person, to the lead violinist of his own Schuppanzigh quartet: ‘Does he believe that I think of a wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?’ (Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words, ed. and trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (New York: Dover, 1964), 25). Without the comfort of the more forgiving response of modern bows, instruments and steel strings, the Mosaïques handle the ‘fiddling’ challenge masterfully. In all performance-practice conventions expected of any HIP group, they flirt with perfection. In their intonation, cantabile legato, sharp articulation and a lively, energetic spiccato, sparing and expressive use of vibrato, dynamic contrasts, clarity of phrasing, and balance among the four instruments, known in Beethoven's day as Viereinigkeit, or the unity of four (the four strings sound like they are being played by a single performing agent, as if distributed in the two hands of a keyboardist), the Mosaïques display why they are considered by some to be the best string quartet living today.

But that is not what makes this recording extraordinary, indeed transcendent. Unlike some HIP strains that resist the composer's vision or the concept of Werktreue, the Mosaïques want you to hear Beethoven: ‘the ultimate aim of any performance is to reveal the inner spiritual richness of the music’ (25), and for the late quartets, it's Beethoven's ‘go[ing] even further in his exploration of the layers of consciousness, to transcend the deepest human emotions’ (23). In this, the group again meet Beethoven's difficulty head-on, but on another level. For Beethoven, ‘difficulty’ also carried philosophical and aesthetic import. In a letter to his publisher Sigmund Anton Steiner, he wrote of the late piano sonata Op. 101: ‘this term has a very precise meaning, for what is difficult is also beautiful, good, great and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since what is difficult makes one sweat’ (Emily Anderson, ed. and trans., The Letters of Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1961), volume 2, 661, No. 749). The Mosaïques’ work on the late quartets was a nearly thirty-year ‘sweat’ that also included ‘a lot of Haydn and Mozart’, Beethoven's ‘Op. 18 and middle quartets’, ‘the art, the literature, the social fabric of Beethoven's time’, and ‘study of three crucial works: Fidelio, the Ninth Symphony, and the Missa Solemnis’ (22). Not only do these three represent Beethoven's ‘most important and fundamental ideas’ (22), but together all this music constitutes a veritable repository of the styles and genres of Beethoven's day. The group met, crucially, playing in the Concentus Musicus Wien of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who wrote Musik als Klangrede (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1985). And in the Mosaïques’ recording of the last five quartets, one hears an unprecedented clarity and immediacy of what Bruce Haynes, in The End of Early Music, similarly called ‘musical rhetoric’ (Klangrede approximates to ‘speech in sound’): ‘a new style of playing based on figures and gestures’, which ‘acts as a kind of hermeneutics or narrative, providing handles for understanding music's meaning, in ways parallel to discursive thought, stories, and descriptions of emotional states. And it provides performers with a rationale for making emotional contact with their listeners’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 166). From a more musicological and music-theoretical perspective, Haynes's ‘musical rhetoric’ is equivalent to musical topics – styles and genres as the semantic and discursive means with which musicians communicated ideas throughout the long eighteenth century (as comprehensively covered in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)).

In (re-)rhetoricizing Beethoven, the Mosaïques have done for the late quartets what HIP groups have been doing for Bach's music for some decades now. Their fidelity to Beethoven's vision is in large part a fidelity to the intertexts: the language and ‘musical rhetoric’ with which Beethoven was communicating. In the late quartets especially, Beethoven's music is characterized by a multiplicity of such styles and genres, where pastoral and folk idioms dance with and against the meanings of stile antico, tempesta and ombra. The difficulty and meaning of the music lie in the complexity and breadth of its discursive range, its shifting topical landscapes, what the Mosaïques refer to as the music's ‘stylistic freedom’: ‘In addition to the omnipresent cantabile writing, dance is often evoked, and so is nature. . . . Other passages allude to folk or pastoral music’ (23). The Mosaïques’ recording is a performative reconstruction of this stylistic density. Whereas modern (as opposed to period) stylistic approaches to this music tend to overperform, or overinterpret, either to make the performance itself the subject matter, or otherwise to impose a performative logic that is not there, essentially making the music a pretext for performance or performative display, with the Mosaïques performance-practice excellence is not the end product but the by-product; their fiddling is the means, not the end – to let the ‘spirit speak’.

The Muss es sein? passages of Op. 135, for example, become raw terror and fear in the Mosaïques’ hands. Here Beethoven adapts the ombra style, which represented death, the supernatural and the funereal, and conveyed a sense of awe in opera and sacred music. The adaptation to the medium of the string quartet takes a once-representational style from the church and theatrical stage and renders it personal in the chamber. The Mosaïques give it a particular intimacy and closeness: it's as if the sounds are coming from your own mind. This is the difference between what (cognitive) psychologists call perceived and felt emotion. It's not out there, someone else's fear and anxiety, not even Beethoven's anxiety alone, but a tapping into the universal anxiety: human fear writ large. Then, suddenly, back out into the rustic world with pastoral dance. Here and in all the other dance, folk and pastoral music, whether in the Tedesca of Op. 130/iv, the inner movements (ii, iv, v) of Op. 131, the droning folk music in Op. 132/ii or the Adagio of Op. 127, the Mosaïques beautifully capture the countryside that Beethoven held so dear, where rustic fiddling and drones become a metaphor for (a) man groping for the simplicity and joy of idyllic life, as a path toward the divine. The Heiliger Dankgesang, with its profound contrast between chorale-based prayer and the human vitality represented by dance, and their later union, where prayer is made dance-like, is unspeakably beautiful – one of many transcendent and transporting moments. The Meno mosso e moderato of the Große Fuge, where the chromatic fugue subject and conflicting contredanse struggle for autonomy, neither successfully, each held in abeyance, in a kind of spiritual battle, is handled perfectly – two stylistic streams trying to coexist. The same struggle is projected on a macro level in Op. 131, where the stile antico fugue and tempesta march-dance of the outer movements in C sharp minor are contrasted with the three inner pastoral and folk major-mode movements (ii, iv, v), with the third movement functioning as a recitative and the sixth conveying the atmosphere of a preludio from a sonata da chiesa: the calm before the storm.

The one curious move in this set is the inclusion of a review by Andras Schiff in the liner notes – as if the group needed a seal of approval from an authority who represents the dominant mainstream. But the review is, none the less, highly revealing. Along with the expected praise, Schiff goes out of his way to qualify the Mosaïques as a ‘complement’ to, not a ‘substitute for’, their modern predecessors. This rather marked statement betrays a discomfort, perhaps even a fear – it reads as an attempt to protect the mainstream from the Mosaïques’ revolutionary achievement. So long as HIP dealt in Corelli's or even Bach's world, there was no major threat. But the late Beethoven quartets are a game-changer. This Mosaïques release has not only brought the early-music movement too close to home, it has rebuilt home itself. It marks the full arrival of a new world – the old world. Erich Höbarth (first violin) speaks of Beethoven's ‘feeling of liberation: “I've done it!”’ to be able to compose the quartets after endless suffering and challenges. Bischof parallels the quartet's own journey with a similar phrase: ‘We've “got there”’, these works are ‘impossible to surpass’ (23). The Mosaïques have indeed ‘got there’, and HIP through them. They have broken the chain of ritualized performance of the Beethovenian canon and returned to its source language. So much prophetic historiography has informed performance of the late quartets, viewing them as anticipations of modernism, the Second Viennese School and so forth – one step in a so-called unbroken tradition of performance and composition. Meanwhile, Beethoven was uniquely confined to his musical past: his deafness cloistered his mind and ear to the styles of the eighteenth century. With the old-instrument set-up, the historical manner of performance and the dedication to the ‘musical rhetoric’ of the day, the Mosaïques recording is like hearing Beethoven's late quartets within this metaphorical cloister. One can hear how Beethoven's deafness not only ‘forced [him] to become a philosopher’ (Heiligenstadt Testament), but also in some measure a reactionary composer – though the late quartets are philosophical treatises written in the early nineteenth century, they are written in the musical styles of the eighteenth. What Beethoven himself deemed the ‘most lavish praise’ applies here: the Mosaïques’ recording is indeed ‘difficult’, the good things that come to those who sweat.