Practice does not necessarily make perfect. Blundering my way repeatedly through difficult passages was not improving the first violin part of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 59, no. 3. In danger of forming an antagonistic relationship with the final movement I could hear the composer’s derisive retort when Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the Viennese violinist most closely associated with Beethoven’s quartets, complained about the difficulties of these latest quartets: ‘Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?’1

This Allegro molto was one of several movements the members of the Takács Quartet had selected for my audition in January 1993. I wondered why a group that had already been playing concerts worldwide for eighteen years would consider hiring a twenty-three-year-old graduate student from the Juilliard School, with no prior professional string quartet experience. My teacher, Dorothy DeLay, had been asked by Fay Shwayder, a friend of the Takács Quartet, to recommend one of her students and explained that it was sometimes easier for a quartet to choose a malleable player fresh out of college than an established artist who might less easily adapt to the distinct musical personality of an ensemble, developed over many years.

My first audition with the Takács would take place in Boulder, Colorado, where the quartet had held a university residency since 1986. I guessed that the Takács had chosen this particular Beethoven movement for its technical difficulties. The viola begins with a fast solo theme, taken up in turn by the second violin and cello, the first violin last to join the frenzy. I had never come across a Beethoven movement so unashamedly flashy, a virtuosic showpiece where the challenge of playing the right notes seemed more pressing than any questions of musical interpretation. I could move my left hand fingers and bowing arm fast enough, just not at precisely the same time as each other. Hopefully familiarity would facilitate greater velocity and more nimble coordination. In the mean time Beethoven seemed to mock my slow practice tempo, laughing at my violinistic limitations and questioning my suitability to audition with the Takács.

The first string players to encounter these pieces were also challenged by them. Six years younger than Beethoven, Ignaz Schuppanzigh began his musical education as a violist, changing to the violin only in 1793, at the age of sixteen. Several years later Beethoven described Schuppanzigh as a miserable egoist and would have enjoyed the joke: Why does a violin appear smaller than a viola? They’re the same size but the violinist’s head is bigger.

Throughout a professional association that lasted more than thirty years, Beethoven sported a satirical attitude to Schuppanzigh, nicknaming him after Shakespeare’s Falstaff, not for the size of his head but for the rotundity of his stomach: ‘He might be grateful to me if my insults were to make him slimmer.’2 But his attitude was not always so jovial. Writing to a close friend, Karl Amenda, Beethoven described Schuppanzigh and the amateur cellist Nikolaus Zsemskall ‘merely as instruments on which to play when I feel inclined’. These musicians ‘can never be noble witnesses to the fullest extent of my inward and outward activities, nor can they ever truly share my life. I value them merely for what they do for me.’3

As I continued to work on my audition music, Beethoven’s objections about his musicians provided a useful jolt. Having spent many hours over the last three years labouring in a practice room while fretting about how to progress in the music profession, I recognised self-absorption as a not exactly elusive concept. But Beethoven’s letter to Amenda was a more interesting subject with which to occupy myself than the question of my suitability as a candidate for the Takács Quartet, providing an intriguing snapshot of Beethoven’s emotional state nearly a decade after he had moved to Vienna. While I couldn’t enter fully into the ‘inward and outward activities’ of his life, any extra information would give me another angle from which to approach my audition music.

Beethoven moved from Bonn to Vienna in November 1792, at the age of twenty-one, to study with Europe’s most celebrated composer, Joseph Haydn. His mother had died five years earlier and Beethoven ended his teenage years as the primary breadwinner for his alcoholic father and two younger brothers, relying mainly on his income as a court musician in the Electorate of Cologne, one of three hundred German-speaking states under the umbrella of the Habsburg or Holy Roman Empire, whose emperor resided in Vienna. Beethoven’s precarious family situation played itself out against the backdrop of increasing instability in Europe: in April 1792, France declared war on the Habsburg Empire, and the rise to power of Napoleon in 1799 and the Napoleonic Wars would dominate European life for the next fifteen years.

Establishing himself during his first decade in Vienna as a pianist renowned for his expressive improvisations, Beethoven continued to develop as a young composer about whom his patron in Bonn, Count Waldstein, had made a prophecy: ‘Through uninterrupted diligence you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.’4 (Mozart died in 1791.) A letter from Waldstein introduced Beethoven to a network of aristocratic patrons who helped to enable Beethoven’s rise to prominence. But by 1801 Beethoven felt that his early successes were threatened by the deterioration of his hearing, as he confided to Amenda:

Beethoven’s sense of isolation was perhaps increased by his determination to protect his professional reputation by concealing his condition from musicians such as Schuppanzigh. In the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ of 1802, a document addressed but not sent to his brothers and discovered only after his death, Beethoven continued to worry that his credibility as a composer would be ruined if his deafness became known. As a result he felt he must live as a recluse, although sometimes yielding to his desire for companionship.

During the four years following the crisis that prompted the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, Beethoven composed the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata for violin and piano, the ‘Waldstein’ and ‘Appassionata’ piano sonatas, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto. The Opus 59 string quartets, commissioned by Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, formed part of the extraordinary body of works that emerged from Beethoven’s despair. As he worked on the quartet the Takács had asked me to prepare, Beethoven had written on a sketch leaf a startling declaration that marked a significant change of attitude: ‘Let your deafness be no more a secret – even in art.’7 Rather than the virtuosic showpiece I had taken it for, perhaps the finale celebrated his defiance against his condition. As I continued the painstaking work of learning the notes in a practice room, I wondered how playing it with the members of the Takács would illuminate the character of this deceptively complex music.

I could see no one resembling the urbane violist of the Takács Quartet pictured on a CD cover: leaning back in an armchair, viola resting on his lap, Gábor Ormai’s photo exuded ease and confidence. In the baggage claim area at Denver’s Stapleton Airport a pale-faced man with rowdy ginger hair wearing a shapeless brown anorak passed me several times before I thought to wave my violin case in his direction. He glanced at me and then away as if in search of a viable alternative.

‘Are you Gábor?’

He tried to cover his surprise with a rapid grin. ‘You’re Ed! Sorry to miss you. We were expecting someone older.’ The quietly assertive expression looking out from the CD cover had not prepared me for restless, darting eyes that were hard to engage. ‘Welcome! It’s not far to Boulder. Are you tired after your flight?’

The Takács spent six months of the year travelling – I was not about to admit fatigue after a three-hour journey. We walked to Gábor’s car as he pointed out the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. He spoke softly, head pushed forward, diminishing his natural height. For someone accustomed to performing in front of large audiences, the violist was surprisingly unassuming.

On the way to Boulder, Gábor explained that we would first have dinner together, and play through the audition pieces only the following morning. In the position of the Takács members I would have wanted to read through the music right away: in the event that a candidate ruled himself out with bad finger coordination in a Beethoven movement, obligatory social interaction could be whittled down to a quick sandwich and token campus tour.

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