Beethoven and Schubert at the Summit
Gallery Series
Sunday, February 22, 2026
3:00PM
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
410 Campus Center Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
Program
String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 Ludwig van Beethoven
Fry Street Quartet
Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 Franz Schubert
Frank Weinstock, piano
About the Music
Two enormous pillars in the canon of great works for piano and string quartet are featured side by side. Beethoven’s unique and dramatic seven-movement late string quartet is followed by Schubert’s last, and possibly greatest, work that he composed before his untimely death at the age of 31.
Program Notes
There are certain subjects in classical music about which it is nearly impossible to say anything new. Bach cantatas. Mahler symphonies. Mozart operas. An annotator struggles to find novel observations about such topics, thanks to the uncountable number of excellent words already written. Perhaps the most saturated of these scholarly canons is the Beethoven cycle of Late Quartets (capitalized here, and elsewhere, not for dramatic effect but out of immense respect). Structurally, the grouping comprises five quartets (Nos. 12-16) and the stand-alone Große Fuge, but it exists spiritually as perhaps the greatest valedictory gift ever given to us by an artist. Baffling, celestial, terrifying and prodigious. These are just a handful of the inadequate adjectives writers use to wrestle Beethoven’s grand compositional “goodbye” (the Late Quartets were some of his last major works) back into a human dimension. But perhaps the best way to understand the Late Quartets is to trust the sentiments of the master himself, who in 1822 tossed off a rather prophetic phrase in a letter to his publisher. “I sit pondering and pondering...”, Beethoven wrote of his days, providing posterity with the perfect description of his latter-career mind and the music that came from it. What if the Late Quartets were not a farewell? What if they were a confident, curious stare over the fence of the future? Op. 131 was composed in 1825-26, without a commission, following a trio of quartets he wrote for the Russian nobleman Prince Nikolai Galitzen. We should all thank the Prince for re-igniting the fire of quartet composition in Beethoven. Without his urging and support, the Late Quartets might not have happened at all. Op. 131 was reportedly Beethoven’s favorite among his sixteen quartets, and it had special personal significance. He dedicated it to Baron Joseph von Strutterheim who, a few years earlier, had welcomed Beethoven’s troubled nephew Karl into his army regiment. The music of String Quartet No. 14, like each of its Late siblings, refuses to stand on traditional ceremony. Over the 40-minute course of seven connected movements, we listeners are emotionally abducted by an opening section Richard Wagner called “the most melancholy sentiment in music”, and we are not released until the concluding “fury of the world’s dance” finale. There are no rules in the Late Quartets, only invitations to awe and humility. Schubert’s reaction upon hearing Op. 131 in the weeks before his death was so exuberant, his friends were worried he might further harm his fragile health. “After this,” he wondered, “what is left for us to write?”
It was not Beethoven’s intimidating final musical word that stopped Schubert’s pen. Disease did that. Schubert died at 31 but he left behind a century’s worth of material and, like Beethoven, he worked right up to the end. The list of works that date from his death year (1828) includes two symphonies, a mass, a collection of 14 songs, a string quintet and the three last piano sonatas. Schubert composed the sonatas (D. 958, D. 959 and D. 960) together from spring 1828 to September of that year and there can be little doubt he had the recently departed Beethoven on his mind during the process. He probably intended to present the three sonatas as a set but never got the chance to see it through. Luckily, Schubert’s brother presented them this way to a publisher in 1839, and they live on collectively. As with Beethoven and Mahler and others, writers love to ascribe a last-will-and-testament quality to Schubert’s 1828 pieces. There may well be a certain level of knowing submission in the music of the late piano sonatas, but there is too much flexible, iterative genius on display to deny that Schubert was looking ahead too. What is “last” for us might not have been for him. But theories about Schubert’s state of mind aside, the Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 did turn out to be the final addition to his catalogue of solo piano music. He completed it only weeks before he passed. In alignment with its set-mates, it is notable for the “heavenly length” once described by Robert Schumann. Schumann’s coinage refers to both monumental proportions (particularly of the first movement) and, more importantly, the richly expansive dramatic and formal scale of Schubert’s mature works. “Heavenly” is the operative word here, as Schumann’s phrase encourages us to see Schubert not only as a man about to go there, but one preternaturally capable of rendering its grandeur in sound. The tender nostalgia and unpretentious comfort of the slow movement alone are proof of Schubert’s access to things beyond our mortal understanding. It is a shame it took nearly a century for D. 960 and the other last sonatas to achieve their status as immortal masterpieces. Maybe they were too like the Beethoven Quartets. Too much. Too soon. Too perfect.
Jeff Counts © 2026
