It is Distillate of Beethoven: 21 minutes of sharply compressed music that shows him in all his violent, tragic, angry, plaintive, contemplative guises. For four months it has haunted the halls of the Curtis Institute of Music, the elite conservatory here.
In an unusual educational experiment Curtis has established Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11 in F minor (Op. 95) as the touchstone of the academic year for its 160 students. Imagine a year of medical school revolving around the liver, or a car repair course centered on the Chrysler LeBaron.
A highlight of the Opus 95 Project, as it is called, was a performance of Mahler's orchestral transcription of the quartet by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra earlier this month at Carnegie Hall in New York. Alan Gilbert, a Curtis alumnus who is to become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2009, will conduct. The program also includes Nielsen's Symphony No. 3 and Barber's School for Scandal Overture.
Back in the wood-paneled rooms of Curtis, a cozy hothouse of talent with oil paintings, creaky stairs and free tuition, Opus 95 is everywhere you look.
Each violinist, violist and cellist has worked on the piece in a quartet with coaches; literature courses cover the Beethoven letters that mention it; the music history survey course required of first-year students will devote classes to it this week; the advanced music theory course picked apart its structure.
Bruce Adolphe, the composer and lecturer, gave a talk analyzing the work as a musical example of Tourette's syndrome. Top string players performed Opus 95 for the public in December.
The attention devoted to the piece contrasts with what Beethoven himself wrote in a letter: that it was "written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." In this case make it a large circle of connoisseurs.
"It's turned out to be an incredible educational experience for the kids," said Roberto Diaz, the president of Curtis. "There's a common thread running through everything that they're thinking about. They're learning about how the world that this piece was created in affected the creation of the piece."
The germ of the idea came from Diaz, a former principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra who is in his second year at Curtis.
One of his favorite recordings, he said, is a Leonard Bernstein performance of two late Beethoven quartets with the Vienna Philharmonic. The program notes mentioned that Bernstein had the string players prepare by playing the chamber music version, Diaz said.
"One day I was listening to this recording, and I thought this would be so incredible for the kids at school to be able to do something like this," he said.
He approached Gilbert, who was scheduled to conduct the Curtis orchestra this year, with the idea. Gilbert suggested the Mahler transcription of Opus 95, a work he had met as a violinist with a string orchestra in younger days. Diaz took him up on it.
Written in 1810, the work is considered a culmination of Beethoven's second period and looks forward to the late quartets "in its dominant qualities of conciseness, directness and instant confrontation of contrast," the musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote in The Beethoven Quartets.
It is called the Quartetto Serioso, a rare instance in which Beethoven himself bestowed a subtitle. "The F minor Quartet is not a pretty piece, but it is terribly strong - and perhaps rather terrible," Kerman wrote. "Everything unessential falls victim, leaving a residue of extreme concentration, in dangerously high tension. But strength, not strain, is the commanding impression."
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