Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-5. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement “a song of thanksgiving … offered to the divinity by a convalescent”, and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: “Feeling new strength.”
Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”
Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven’s work, Eliot’s poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale.
The first poem in the series, Burnt Norton, opens with an image of a couple walking in a rose garden and is full of regret for what might have been. At this point, Eliot’s concerns appear personal. However, in 1939, when he was working on the second poem, East Coker, war had broken out and by 1940 Eliot was working in London as an air-raid warden during the Blitz. The climactic verse of the final poem, Little Gidding, is set at night in a London street just after a raid. By the end of the four poems, Eliot had moved from the personal to addressing what he described in the poem as the “distress of nations”.
If suffering is the trigger for both pieces, then faith offers the shared antidote of “reconciliation and relief” that Eliot wrote to Spender about. Both men were practising Christians, and their belief underpinned much of their later work. Beethoven was a Catholic, and Eliot famously converted to Anglicanism aged 38, nine years before writing Four Quartets.
In 1933 Eliot said he wanted to get “beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music”. I am sure that it was Beethoven’s religious aims in the long and intense central movement of the quartet that Eliot had in mind when he wrote these words. Beethoven had been studying liturgical music – Palestrina in particular – while he was working on his Missa Solemnis, which he completed two years before starting work on the quartet. This study influenced the central movement of the quartet, which is based, unusually, on an ancient chorale melody and mode. Similarly, Eliot’s poem had a strong religious purpose and referenced Christianity in many forms – from direct quotations of the medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich, to the setting of the final poem in the village of Little Gidding, which was the site in the 17th century for a persecuted religious community.
Interestingly, however, both men were also drawn to the philosophy of eastern religions, with which they supplemented their own Christianity. Eliot quotes from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, in Four Quartets. Beethoven was influenced by the older Hindu scripture, the Rig-Veda. In his diary the composer jotted down a line from the Rig-Veda commentary about the idea of God being “free from all passion and desire”. Eliot expresses similar sentiments in his poem when he writes about:
The inner freedom from the practical desire
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.
—Katie Mitchell, “A Meeting of Minds,” Guardian
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132/Takacs Quartet
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