L. Michael Griffel
Hunter College, CUNY
When Haydn composed his Op. 33 string quartets in 1781, he stated that these six works exhibited "an entirely new, very special manner"--a style that we today recognize as Viennese Classicism. Like Haydn, Beethoven moved the art of music into a new phase, one that we now call early Romanticism, when he composed a set of three string quartets in 1805-06, the Op. 59 "Rasumovsky" Quartets. This paper examines some of the features of the opening movement of the first of these quartets that help define the novel musical style introduced by Beethoven. These features include a dramatically heightened use of elision, the subtle manipulation of conventional phrasing, an effort to camouflage structural signposts in the sonata-allegro form, the inflation of the length and intensity of the development section, strange and unsettling sonorities, and strings of ambiguously multifunctional chromatic chords.