String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe

Nancy November is currently an Associate Professor in musicology at the University of Auckland. Combining interdisciplinarity and cultural history, her research continues to center on chamber music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probing questions of historiography, canonization, and genre. Recent publications include Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74, and 95 (Cambridge University Press, 2013); a three-volume set of fifteen string quartets by Emmanuel Aloys Förster (A-R Editions, 2016); and Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven’s Vienna (Boydell Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship, and two Marsden Grants from the New Zealand Royal Society.

“String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe seeks to expand the available information about, and intellectual approaches to, chamber music around the turn of the nineteenth century, moving the discourse beyond a focus on Vienna and its most famous triumvirate, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. As an introduction to string quartets by a number of mostly overlooked composers contemporaneous with Beethoven, the book is a success… [T]he book suggests many avenues for future research and opens opportunities for scholars and students to explore music that has until now received less than its due attention, especially in English-language scholarship.”

— Marie Sumner Lott, Music & Letters

“Studies of string quartet compositions have long been skewed toward works by the triumvirate: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. This collection of essays fills in some of the gaps by broadening that scope to consider other leading composers of their time, including members of Beethoven’s circle (Ferdinand Ries, Louis Spohr, Anton Reicha, Andreas Romberg, Franz Weiss), and the Frenchmen Pierre Rode and Hyacinthe Jadin.”

— The Beethoven Newsletter (Winter 2023)

“The nine essays November… has collected provide a broad view of the string quartet in Viennese musical life around 1800. This topic has been insufficiently studied, and the book helps remedy that. … Expanding the lens through which to view the period, analyses are in depth and detailed and comprehensive bibliographies and useful footnotes are included. … Recommended.”

— M. N.-H. Cheng, Colgate University, CHOICE (April 2023: Vol. 60 No. 8)

“Nancy November has assembled a strong team of scholars for these detailed and copiously illustrated studies of the richly varied string quartet repertoire in ‘Beethoven’s Europe’. It is no surprise that her earlier monograph Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets has affected the discussion. ‘Theatrical quartets’ join more familiar sub-genres such as the quatuor brillant, practically a concerto for the first violin, and its antithesis, quartets that have been understood as a conversation among equals. A strength of these essays is their interrogating barriers between sub-genres by studying of composers outside the traditional ‘Viennese’ canon: the virtuosos Spohr and Rode, the unfortunately short-lived Jadin, Beethoven’s student Ries, and composers of a more contrapuntal bent, Romberg and Reicha, many of whom paid explicit tribute to the quartets of Haydn or Mozart. Much of their work is hardly known, but is well worth the attention of modern performers as well as scholars.”

—Julian Rushton, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Leeds