54. Candlelit Late Night
'Glimmers and nothing more..the rest is chaos' was Tchaikovsky's opinion of Beethoven's late quartets, a pronouncement that gives us some idea of just how far ahead of his time Beethoven was. However this quartet was well received at its first performances almost exactly 200 years ago in Beethoven's presence in the back room of a tavern in Vienna and publishers were soon competing for the rights. The key to understanding this extraordinary quartet is to know that Beethoven fell seriously ill while writing it and on his recovery he wrote the unsurpassed Adagio, which he originally entitled: Hymn of thanks from a sick man to God on his recovery - feeling of new strength and reawakened feeling. On a more mundane level he also wrote a four-part canon for his doctor on the little ditty, Doktor sperrt das Tor dem Tod {Doctor bars the door to Death].
