Book Description

Though often remembered primarily for his published recollections about his famous teacher Beethoven, Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838) was an accomplished composer in his own right. Among his many works are twenty-seven string quartets composed between the years of 1795 and 1834. His Three String Quartets, Op. 150, first published by Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn in 1828, evince his considerable imagination and skill. While these quartets borrow elements from the then-popular quatuor brillant style, Ries’s careful attention to motivic organization and polyphonic writing elevates these works to a higher level of artistic sophistication. While technically brilliant writing for the first violin remains at the forefront in Quartet no. 3, Quartets nos. 1 and 2 reveal more complex formal processes and better integration of their virtuosic first violin parts. In this volume, Quartets nos. 1 and 3 have been carefully edited based on the composer’s autographs, while Quartet no. 2, the autograph of which is now lost, is based on the original Simrock print.