Presents
Ferdinand Ries
String Quartet No.11 in E flat Major, WoO.10
Today, Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838) is primarily remembered as a friend and student of Beethoven, as well as his first biographer. However, during his lifetime and for much of the 19 century, Ries was remembered as a fine composer and virtuoso pianist. He showed musical promise from an early age, studying both violin and piano with his father, and the cello with Bernhard Romberg. In 1801, he went to Vienna and studied piano and composition with Beethoven for five years. Like Beethoven, Ries composed string quartets throughout his entire life, some 26 in all. He wrote many more string quartets than any other type of work and one is forced to conclude that like Beethoven, he harbored a real ambition to make a significant contribution to the genre most composers of the time considered to be the most important.
Of the 26 string quartets Ries composed, only 11 were published during his lifetime. The rest remained unpublished. The String Quartet in E flat Major, WoO.10, which dates from 1805, was actually the 11th quartet he composed and the last before a set of quartets, dating from 1812, was published in 1816. These were his Op.70, a set of three, which became known as Quartet Nos.1-3, though they were actually Nos.12-14 with regard to the order in which they were composed. To add further to this numbering confusion, another publisher has dubbed WoO.10 as Quartet No.16 because based on its WoO number, but not its date of composition, it was supposedly the 5th unpublished string quartet without opus number. However, this is wrong because an additional six string quartets dating from 1798 with WoO numbers 71-74 were written before WoO.1 a set of three quartets and WoO.6 one more quartet. Hence, WoO.10 is the 11th string quartet composed based on its date of composition.
Ries has sometimes been criticized as writing too much like Beethoven, and Beethoven himself complained of this though half in jest. Hence, one might expect that WoO.10, which was composed while Ries was still studying with Beethoven, would show the influence of his teacher. Certainly, Ries would have been quite familiar with Beethoven's six groundbreaking Op.18 quartets published in 1800 and which had created quite a stir in Vienna and elsewhere. So, it comes as little surprise that one can hear faint echoes these works throughout much of WoO.10, beginning with the genial, opening Allegro molto moderto, especially in the running passages. The second movement, a nervous, edgy, Minuetto, allegretto, also sounds a bit like Beethoven but is not rhythmically as complex. A lovely, lyrical Adagio cantabile comes next. The finale, Rondeau allegro moderato, starts off in leisurely fashion with an appealing melody. However, tension is soon created with considerable excitement. Here, there is nothing of Beethoven to be found, just Ries.
Parts: $24.95
Parts & Score: $32.95
