The Danish String Quartet plans to play all of Beethoven’s quartets in concert this month. But I beat them to it, streaming these 16 works, plus the Grosse Fuge, a monument in one movement — nearly nine hours of music in all — over some 10 days in January.I admit I couldn’t do it with quite the concentration of the Danes, who will play two or three quartets per sitting, in six concerts put on by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Friday through Feb. 18 at Alice Tully Hall.Modern living forced me to grab a movement or two at a time of my randomly chosen recording, made 40 years ago by the vibrant, deeply expressive Alban Berg Quartet. I listened while commuting on the 1 train, cooking dinner, putting laundry away, sitting on the couch. Sometimes the music poured into my head through earbuds, sometimes out of a wireless speaker, sometimes out of my stereo.[embedded content]I liked listening while walking. The regular gait helped keep my focus on the music, and being out and about made classical music feel part of the world at large — for a change.The Danish and the Alban Berg are among dozens of quartets to have performed or recorded the cycle, which has been likened to Shakespeare’s plays, Rembrandt’s portraits, the New Testament, the Bible itself.“It became at some point in history this mountain you had to climb in order to be a string quartet,” Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danish Quartet’s violist, said in a phone interview.An amateur wind player who used to cover classical music, I had gone through these works before. But, inspired by the coming concerts, I wanted to ascend that mountain again. Listening in chunks was definitely not ideal. But it fulfilled a basic human desire: to immerse oneself in a world that’s vast but circumscribed, and traverse it from point A to Z. It’s like following a baseball team intently for all 162 games; reading all of Graham Greene; looking at every Vermeer painting; watching all of Fellini.The best part: In a world — and streaming service — with infinite choices, I didn’t have to worry about what to listen to next. And hearing each movement was like adding a piece to a puzzle.I recommend completism. It’s a fine antidote to the fragmentation bomb of culture we live in and a chance to encompass an artist in totality. And when it comes to total immersion, there is nothing like Beethoven. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, Bach’s theme is religion and Mozart’s is characters, but “Beethoven was the first man who used music with absolute integrity as the expression of his own emotional life.”A traversal of the string quartets is like watching that emotional life unspool — across a musician’s despair at losing his hearing and arriving at total deafness, through the titanic and ultimately crushing struggle with his sister-in-law for custody of his nephew, and illnesses galore. You hear Beethoven in his late 20s, when he wrote the six Apollonian Opus 18 quartets; in the second half of his 30s, with the three meaty Razumovsky quartets of Op. 59 and the individual works of Op. 74 and Op. 95; and during the last two years of his life, when he wrote the searching, sometimes staggering late quartets (Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 and 135) and little else.“With Beethoven,” Mr. Norgaard said, “you have the full story.”My listening marathon gave me an acute awareness of the extraordinary range of sensations Beethoven depicts. Joy. Rage. Slyness. Gravitas. Grief. Snickering. Despair. Holiness. The quartets fit neatly into the standard, if flawed, conception of Beethoven’s early, middle and late periods. No other genre that he wrote in has the same arc through his biography and his artistic development. Not the piano sonatas, not the symphonies. (The Ninth Symphony came before the late quartets.)They start, in Op. 18, as exemplars of what quartets first stood for: “the art of musical conversation,” in the phrase of the musicologist Joseph Kerman, and compositions especially aimed at amateur musicians playing for one another. This art reached its height with Haydn and Mozart.Beethoven, apparently full of respect for their accomplishment, waited until his late 20s to take on the form, accepting a commission for the Op. 18 quartets. And he worked hard at them: The opening theme of the first required 16 pages of sketches.Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna and a violinist, commissioned the three middle period quartets of Op. 59. He asked for a Russian tune in each, and Beethoven obliged in the first two. The Razumovsky quartets mark a leap. They became works to project to an audience: a “determined musical shouting” that acquired the “heroic discourse of the symphony,” as Kerman puts it. Yet intimate moments abound.If it’s a clear night, and you should ever find yourself in the country, look at the stars. That’s how Beethoven said he was inspired to write the Molto adagio movement of Op. 59, No. 2. Simple ascending and descending scales have rarely been imbued with such sweet pathos. Unfortunately, urban light pollution forced me to just imagine a peaceful universe of little lights.The final quartets, Kerman wrote, were written for an audience of one: Beethoven himself, plus an “awe-struck eavesdropper: you.” Beethoven was completely deaf by this point, and wrote the last two quartets without any prospect of income from them.Listening all the way through drives home how the traditional early-middle-late narrative, which holds that the works steadily grow in experimentation, can become blurry. I noticed, walking past the stately facades of West End Avenue, the unmannerly slashing chords in the first movement of Op. 18, No. 4, and passages of simple charm amid the complexity (even madness) of the late quartets, like the little late-night, post-party dance melody in the final movement of Op. 135.I decided that two of my favorite movements are back to back in Op. 130: the lilting grace of the fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca — “like a German dance” — followed by the Cavatina, a prayerful movement that could bail out an atheist. “Never,” Beethoven said of it, “have I written a melody that affected me so much.”Next comes the Everest of the quartets, Op. 131: treasured by Wagner; called for by a dying Schubert, who supposedly said, “After this, what is left for us to write?”; subject of the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie “A Late Quartet.” I listened to much of it on the day a water main burst and knocked out my subway line. I barely noticed the 50-block walk to work.The Danes are tackling it and its siblings as a cycle for the second time. The first go came in 2018, on consecutive evenings. I asked Mr. Norgaard what he had learned from that experience.He said some of the quartets came to seem like acts in a larger opera, and that the later works felt far more intimate than their grand reputation warranted.Then he said something that stuck with me. “Flaws and imperfections” emerged in the late quartets, Mr. Norgaard said, in the way that a human being can be perfect yet full of mistakes.A couple of weeks spent with all these flawed, sublime, emotive, musical human beings revealed them in their fullness. More
