The Schuppanzigh Quartet premiered Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12, Op. 127, in Vienna. The composer, totally deaf and increasingly isolated, had poured extraordinary innovation into the piece, but the initial performance was under-rehearsed and poorly received by an audience unprepared for its complexity. It was later repeated with better preparation and recognized as a landmark of the late quartets.
By 1826, Beethoven was profoundly deaf, cantankerous, and living in near-total isolation, communicating with visitors through conversation books rather than speech. Yet he was producing some of the most radically innovative music of his life in the late string quartets, works that baffled contemporaries and are now considered among the greatest compositions in the Western canon.
The premiere of Op. 127 by Ignaz Schuppanzigh's quartet was reportedly a disaster of preparation rather than concept: the musicians hadn't rehearsed sufficiently for music of such difficulty, and the first public performance fell flat. Beethoven, characteristically, blamed the performers rather than his own uncompromising demands on them, and he was probably right; a second performance weeks later with more rehearsal went far better and revealed the work's depth.
These late quartets, written on commission for Russian Prince Nikolai Galitzin, would not be fully appreciated for decades; even sympathetic musicians of the era considered them bewildering. Today they're viewed as prophetic, anticipating harmonic and structural ideas that wouldn't become mainstream until the 20th century. Beethoven died the following year, in 1827, having never heard any of these works performed, since his deafness was total.
Key people: Ludwig van Beethoven, Ignaz Schuppanzigh