After this second period, it was fourteen years before Beethoven returned to the string quartet, but this time to make it his genre of choice: in the last years of his life, he wrote almost nothing but quartets, linking them by a process of dovetailing, with the next one beginning while its predecessor was not finished. In chronological order, these late quartets are op.127 (no.12), op.132 (no.15), op.130 (no.13), the Grosse Fuge op.133 (initially intended as the finale to no.13), op.131 (no.14) and op.135 (no.16), written between 1824 and 1826. This period, which Romain Rolland called a ‘song of resurrection’, marks a prodigious moment in the composer’s creative life, with boundless imagination deployed on every page and forms constantly recreated as Beethoven displays a quite extraordinary capacity for invention. The ‘long sobs of the violins of autumn’ that ‘wound [his] soul’ (to quote Verlaine) are the paradoxical icon of a radiant spiritual springtime in which Beethoven rises to the level of the Olympian gods with whom he could already converse on familiar terms when he was younger. 41 QUATUOR YSAŸE
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