Performance History and Beethoven's String Quartets: Setting the Record Crooked

Abstract

A discographical study of Beethoven's string quartets gives rise to numerous counter examples to the normalizing trends that scholars of recording history have emphasized in the past. Innovation and variability of interpretation are central to the practice of performing these works in the recording age. Recordings of Beethoven's early, middle, and late quartets offer qualitative and quantitative evidence that spans an eighty-year history. Perhaps surprisingly, homogeneity and restraint are often found in historically informed Beethoven performance. In general, though, the various “voices” of mainstream string quartets have increasingly opened, rather than closed, these works' hermeneutic windows.