Beethoven String Quartet, Op. 59, No.2

Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Joshua Weilerstein

Arts, Performing Arts, Music

4.9 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2026

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I'm always tickled by composer trivia questions, like which standard canon works begin in a major key and end in a minor key? I'll give you one, but please comment others below: Mendelssohn's 4th Symphony. Well, how about this one: how many of Beethoven's 16 string quartets end in a minor key? The answer? Just one, Op. 59, No. 2, the subject of today's show. And that minor key is hugely important to this darkest of the three Op. 59 quartets, three towering achievements that changed the string quartet repertoire for good.

Beethoven, as I've said many times on the show, was a revolutionary within limits, always expanding, rethinking, and reshaping what was possible without breaking anything beyond repair. But make no mistake: the Op. 59 quartets were revolutionary works. No one had written anything like them before in terms of scope, emotional intensity, difficulty, and complexity. In fact, like a few of Beethoven's greatest works, they were received with confusion and, in some cases, anger by musicians, audiences, and critics. Famously, the cellist of the first string quartet to receive the parts of Op. 59, No. 1 saw the Morse code-like, one-note theme of the second movement, threw the music aside, and stomped on it!

These quartets were Beethoven going out on a limb, applying the intensity and drama of his Middle Heroic Period to a genre that had been at least partly the province of amateur musicians, but not anymore. Op. 59, No. 2, as I said, is the darkest of this group: four movements all centered around the key of E, and with the exception of the glorious second movement, all in minor, presenting a seriousness and directness of purpose that is powerfully compelling. This might be my favorite of the Op. 59 quartets, and so I'm very excited to dig into it with you today. We'll discuss the enigmatic and ecstatic aspects of this quartet, as well as Beethoven's own philosophical views on life, which come to light in the second movement, one of Beethoven's greatest creations.

Recording: Cleveland Quartet

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the Classical Music Podcast.
0:08.5	My name is Joshua Weilerstein. I'm a conductor, and I'm the music director of the
0:12.1	Orchestra National de Lille and the chief conductor of the Allborg Symphony. This podcast is
0:16.9	for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive in
0:21.6	to this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank my new Patreon
0:26.5	sponsors, D, Vaughn, Marty, Walter, Craig, Guy, Kevin, Deborah, Frederick, Dariah, and Ben,
0:36.3	and all of my other Patreon sponsors for making season 11 possible.
0:40.6	If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com slash sticky notes podcast.
0:45.6	And if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.
0:50.3	It is greatly appreciated.
0:53.4	I am currently preparing for about a month of concerts in Lille with two different programs.
1:00.0	One of the programs will be with Brahms' first symphony, Elsa Berens' second symphony, and the Barber violin concerto with the great violinist Renaud Capucon.
1:08.0	And the other program will be all French with the overture to
1:11.7	Offenbach, Orpheus in the underworld, the Saint-Sense cello concerto with the fantastic Nikola Alstette, and then the second half will have Lily Boulanger's d'atine de prenton, Revelle's Mother Goose Suite, and Revelle's Rhapsody Españon. It'll be a really great opportunity to dig into all this repertoire,
1:28.3	and we're playing it all over France, basically, in the north of France, and then in Ex-en-Provence
1:33.0	with Renault's festival, the Easter Festival in Ex-en-Provence as well. So I'm really looking
1:38.3	forward to that. For this week's episode, I've got one of my absolute favorite pieces on the planet and the
1:44.7	continuation of my exploration of Beethoven's string quartets. I really hope you enjoy this one
1:49.8	on Beethoven's Opus 59 number two. A quick note before we begin, I do recommend listening,
1:56.5	if you haven't already, to my show on Opus 59 number one before listening to this episode, as I go into
2:02.3	a lot of detail about the scope of the three Opus 59 quartets that I'll only really touch on
2:07.9	during this episode. That episode comes from February of 2024, and is available on all
	...

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