String Quartets as “Refined Conversation”

Featured in the August 2016 issue of The Strad is a series of articles about the history of the string quartet, titled ‘Quartet Playing Throughout History.’

Here is a brief excerpt from one of the articles, followed by a link to the full article:

“Today this comparison between quartet and conversation is strongly associated with Goethe, who in an 1829 letter famously described Beethoven’s quartets as resembling ‘four intelligent people conversing among themselves’. But the idea in fact stems from several decades earlier, and by the time of Goethe’s letter had become something of a cliché.”

link to the article in The Strad