Integral of the
String Quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven 

Teatro Bruno Munari / at 08:00 PM

Quartetto d’archi del Teatro alla Scala

MITO 2026/2027

Listening to the complete string quartets of a composer is not simply attending a series of concerts. It's something else: it's following how a composer progressively redefines his instruments – the sonata form that expands until it breaks, the fugato that from homage to tradition becomes the main constructive engine of musical discourse, the theme that does not develop but questions itself. Beethoven wrote his sixteen quartets over the course of almost thirty years – from the first of Op. 18, still built on Haydn's lesson but already traversed by an energy that struggles to contain itself, up to the three Razumovsky quartets of Op. 59, where language breaks and reinvents itself, and then again up to the last five masterpieces, written in complete deafness, where the quartet form is pushed beyond every imaginable limit: the Große Fuge, the structure in seven uninterrupted movements of op. 131, the almost visionary character of the op. 132. Following them all means going through an entire musical life and understanding how a composer can change the world with four strings and no compromise.

MITO SettembreMusica inaugurates a two-year cycle in 2026 entrusted to the String Quartet of the Teatro alla Scala, which offers the first part of this journey in three events. The project will conclude in 2027, the bicentenary of Beethoven's death, with the remaining quartets: a tribute built over time, as time is built by this music.