7. Candlelit Late Night
Also from 1825 comes Beethoven’s enigmatic late B flat Quartet that closes with the unpredictable and monumental Grosse Fuge. The six movement format harks back to the divertimenti of his youth and Beethoven seems to have gone out of his way to make this quartet more than usually accessible, until he gets to that final movement that left his contemporaries floundering with incomprehension, partly because no Quartet existed that could play this epic, mad fugue that begins in fury and ends in beauty.
