Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Tuesday, November 1, 2011


A long time ago, when I was young and unemployed, I visited my friend in Oxford. He later became a history don and at that time was living with three other highly intelligent youths. They were in their last year at the university. My intellect was not up to their standard, I had indeed been sent down for not being able to keep up, but they welcomed me into their little house and we laughed a lot. During the day they went off to tutorials and lectures and I examined their record collection. I found some Beethoven string quartets that I had never heard before and was enchanted by just one track, which I played over and over again. Since then I have looked for that track by buying collections of quartets, but never found it until today when I simply listened to every recording of string quartets on You Tube. I was so familiar with it then, years ago, for just a couple of days, that I can tell that it is played differently, but oh, what a pleasure to find it at last!
It is the second movement of op. 59 no. 3.