Last week, according to the website Menorca, the death took place of the American cellist Miriam Rader at the age of eighty-six. She played in the Symphony Orchestra of the Balearic Islands from 1980 to 2004 and also taught the cello to a generation of students on the islands.  

I met her in Barcelona in 1976. She and some friends had just restored and decorated a house in the village of Vulpellach in the Ampurdan, near Girona in Catalonia. When I went to visit, I was amazed by the sheer amount of love and labour that had gone into the restoration. Every fitting, every colour, every piece of furniture had been carefully selected, even the ceramics and the curtains. My instant feeling was: why don’t I just move in here now? And then was intensified when I saw what books they had transported from the United States.   

But what really took my breath away was the music room, not the room where Miriam practiced, which was a kind of studio, but a room with sofas and high ceilings and a very good sound system and a wall of classical LPs, all neatly arranged. Miriam, seeing how awestruck I was by the range of the material, told me that I could spend all day there if I wanted and not bother exploring the landscape around.    

She nudged me towards the Beethoven string quartets, in the Deutsche Grammaphon label, played by the Amadeus Quartet. I remember coming down to the airy kitchen for lunch and saying: ‘There’s something strange about one of those records.’ When Miriam came back to the music room with me, she smiled. ‘Yes, it’s one of Beethoven late quartets. That’s all. They might sound strange if you don’t know them.’

I had started off, I suppose, by listening to one of the early opus 18 quartets. And, then, I must have chosen another record from the set at random and it must have been Beethoven’s opus 130 or opus 131 or opus 132, and the tone and the structure were new to me. These quartets sounded like music from the twentieth century, often dissonant and sharp, with many odds shifts, but then there would be sudden returns to sweetness or dance rhythm or easy melody. And then a stop, and the music again became challenging, unconsoling, uncompromising. 

Back in Barcelona, I found that the British Institute has a good classical record lending library. I borrowed the late quartets in the same recording as Miriam had. I probably wore out the first side of Opus 131, and the long slow movement of opus 132. And then I found a box set for sale in a little kiosk downtown in Barcelona, a recording by Quartetto Italiano that I now have on cd.

And recently I have been listening to the Beethoven Quartets in a new recording by the Dover Quartet. I have been coming back again and again to the Adagio at the opening of Opus 131, which reads more like a slow movement in the middle of a quartet than the opening movement.

I wonder if it might ever be possible to capture some of the gravity and plaintive tone in this opening movement, a tone becoming less calm more ominous, in the opening of a story or a novel.

It is important maybe not to use too many words to describe this music. Wagner called this opening ‘surely the saddest thing ever said in notes.’ He likened it to ‘the awakening on the dawn of a day that in its whole long course shall ne’er fulfill one wish, not one wish.’

But it is not programme music; it is not going to yield its meaning easily, if indeed it has any meaning at all, direct or implicit. It has sound, and also, being a quartet, it has structure. And Beethoven in these last quartets plays and experiments with structure, opus 131 having seven movements, with two Adagios and three Allegros. No mood is stable in this music, the most joyous following the most ominous and harsh.

It is easy to see this as Late Style, and look at Edward Said’s book on this matter, and indeed Adorno’s essay on late style in Beethoven. But recently in the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in New York I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Opus 135, the last full quartet he wrote, by the Orion Quartet. This should have been a quartet filled with dark textures, arching towards fulfillment and then holding back, resignation in battle with defiance. Instead, I found that some of this music was light in its tone, almost sweet, almost relaxed.

It was written just a few months before Beethoven’s death. Since his health was declining and he was staying with a nephew recovering from a suicide attempt, then it must have been tempting to write a quartet that is filled with dark expression. But Opus 135 has at its core a sort of light-heartedness, a lack of striving.

This changes, however, in a short sequence at the very opening of the last movement whose foreboding nature is emphasized by Beethoven with a note in words that says Der schwer gefasste Entschluss (meaning: The Difficult Resolution).

I always thought this note was about endings, late work, even death. But in a programme note for the Chamber Music Society, Jack Slevin asks: ‘Was this a morose reference to his own looming death or a quip aimed at his publisher, to whom he admitted that he was reluctant to write this quartet?'

Beethoven wrote other cryptic annotations on the pages of the sheet music, including: Muss es sein? (‘Must it be?’) and Es muss sein! (‘It must be!’). I have been living under the illusion since some time in 1976 that this referred to his encroaching and inevitable death. But Jack Slevin writes: ‘These too have a range of plausible explanations from the profound to the petty (the latter referring to a spat with a friend who owed him money and for whom Beethoven wrote a canon with Es muss sein! in the lyrics).’

One explanation for the general tone of this final quartet could be that artists cannot be expected to ponder on first things, last things and essential matters every day of the week. Even in the worst day of the nastiest winter in the draftiest house, it should be possible to begin to write a comedy because a comic image came to you from nowhere much. Or write a lyric poem or a love story. And, so, too, a sudden legacy, the return of a loved-one and a glorious summer’s day could put you thinking about the sheer awfulness of things, how there’s no hope much for any of us really. (Plenty of hope, none for us, as Kafka said.)

In New York in the spring of 1995, I attended a performance by the Tokyo Quartet of Beethoven’s quartet opus 74, known as one of the middle quartets. As the music played, a thought came to me, a banal thought enough, one that everyone must have had at some point or other in their lives.

It struck me that there would come a time when I would not be alive to hear this music. It would be played nonetheless. Others would come to hear it. In halls like this there would be an audience, but I would not just be outside or at home. I would not be at all. And I would never hear this music again. I would not even remember it. It would be nothing to me. Because I would be nothing. What had once been would be over. As the music played on, these thoughts came to me with a clarity, an intensity and a finality that I have never had before or since.

What should writers do at the dying of the light? What about one big final statement about life and death? Or a fragment, full of possibility, such as that which was found in the pocket of the poet Antonio Machado when he died: ‘Those blue days. This childhood sun.’ Or the prayers that come at the end of Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), the very last one reading:

Rays of Dazzling Light   

Light off metal shaken,
Lucid dew of heaven,
Bless each and every one
To whom the earth is given.  

In essence was always hidden
Behind a distant curtain.
We chased it all our lives
Bidden and unbidden.

Knowing the hunt would end,
That then what had been rent
Would be at last made whole:
Poor body and the soul.

W.B. Yeats, as he lay dying, saw no reason to pray, nor any reason to produce a final fragment. Instead, he wrote ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, his second last poem – the final poem was ‘The Black Tower’ - in which he seemed to repudiate much that had come before in his own work, not least a sense of the heroic. The poem is written in terza rima, the form associated with Dante, a new form for Yeats. Instead of Cuchulain as implacable, lone, male hero, Yeats has him vulnerable, close to death. All around him are Shrouds who are busy sewing. They are, they tell him ‘convicted cowards’ and they encourage the dying warrior to join them, as they transform:

'They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.’

This late poem, written in a set of clear statements, exalts gentleness, the unheroic, communality, ease and acceptance in the face of death. It is as though, as he faced death himself, Yeats wanted to write a poem in which all thought was fresh and new, ready to start again.

At the end of his life when Thomas Mann moved from California to Switzerland, he had one more novel to write. Since he was fascinated by magic and alchemy, as well as by illness and sexuality and death, and indeed by Germany and its history, it might have been tempting for him to produce one last dark book, brooding on what had happened to his country in his lifetime or a novel interrogating his own secret sexuality.

Instead, he went back to a light piece he had written forty years earlier called Felix Krull, a story about a chancer, a charmer, a shape-changer. And an expanded version of this would be Mann’s last novel. The book, known as ‘The Confessions of Felix Krull’ has a lightness, a throw-away air. Mann reverts to an old European picaresque tradition in which one piece of chicanery follows another, pockets are picked, the good are not rewarded and our clever, untrustworthy hero changes shape and survives. Mann made Krull’s sexuality an aspect of his trickery, just another thing.   

As he approached his eightieth birthday – he would die in 1955 at the age of eighty – Thomas Mann produced a comedy, as though offering a lesson to us all, or those of us willing to understand how serious the joke is.

Colm Tóibín (February 2023)