The Beethoven Project: String Quartet No. 3 - Op 18, D Maj

 I'm still in Op 18, moving along to the third string quartet, which is actually the first one that Beethoven wrote.  He just liked mixing up the numbers, I guess.  Anyway, I'm actually fairly familiar with this one for some reason.  A few years ago I bought a recording of a complete set of Beethoven's string quartets, and this one stuck with me.  It sounds very Classical, and now that I know it was the first he wrote, knowing how he was trying to study Mozart and Haydn in learning how to write string quartets, I can definitely hear that it's early.  It doesn't have the same kind of emotion that his later works do, though that's not to say it's completely formulaic.  Just lacks some of the intensity of later Beethoven.

I think my favorite movement is actually the finale, which just sounds so joyous, and has so much going on that you need to listen very carefully, multiple times, to make sure you hear it all.  (On a personal note, it also makes my baby girl kick more than any of the other movements, which I quite like.)

Apparently this one - Number 3 (really the first, though) and Numbers 1 and 2 were part of a set that Beethoven composed and Prince Lobkowitz paid him 200 florins for the set in October 1799  He revised them before publication, writing an entirely new slow movement for Number 2.  In 2001 a professor at the University of Manchester reconstructed the slow movement using surviving detailed sketches, and performed it in a concert. 

I was curious as to how much 200 florins actually would buy you, and found this site about music in Vienna which gives a rough conversion: http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/v/vienna.aspx.  In 1783 a young Beethoven was paid 63 florins on a trip to Rotterdam, which they said had similar buying power to about US$2000 in 2007.  So 200 florins was a little more than 3 times that, plus it was almost 20 years later, so maybe it was worth about $7000 in today's money?  Not a lot for a masterpiece.

I like this review on earsense.org: http://www.earsense.org/blog/?p=233

Also the Elias String Quartet have lots of reviews and background notes in their Beethoven Project pages: http://thebeethovenproject.com/exploring-beethovens-quartets-barry-cooper-writes-about-op-183-op-95-and-op-130/