Irony and Incomprehensibility: Beethoven's “Serioso” String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, and the Path to the Late Style

Abstract

Beethoven acknowledged the radical nature of his “Quartetto serioso” (1810) when he noted that it had been written for “a small circle of connoisseurs” and was “never to be performed in public.” The coda to the quartet's finale, with its sudden reversal of tone, has proven especially problematic, eliciting responses that include incomprehension (Marx) and outright dismissal (d'Indy). More recent accounts have pointed to irony as a strategy of negation, but Beethoven's contemporaries were inclined to embrace it as a constructive, liberating device. The Schlegel brothers, among others, championed it as the primary instrument of an epistemological framework that promoted the accommodation of multiple perspectives. The antifoundationalist nature of irony encourages a mode of understanding that precludes the possibility of any one “correct” perspective. Beethoven's use of “serioso” here and elsewhere, moreover, evokes a sense of the word that conveys pathos bordering on bathos. The “Quartetto serioso” is Beethoven's most extreme essay in irony, a device that would permeate his later works in more subtle but no less far-reaching ways. Opus 95 also reflects the growing prestige of artistic incomprehensibility, part of a broader shift from an aesthetics based on the principles of rhetoric, in which the artist bears the burden of intelligibility, to an aesthetics based on the principles of hermeneutics, in which the audience assumes responsibility for comprehending a given text. Beethoven's “late” works, often regarded as products of self-critique or turning inward, can thus be heard as part of a wider effort to engage audiences as active participants in a community dedicated to a dialectic of critique.