Listening to the complete cycle of a composer’s string quartets is not simply attending a series of concerts. It is something else: it is following how a composer progressively redefines their own tools—the sonata form that expands until it breaks apart, the fugato that, from a tribute to tradition, becomes the main structural engine of the musical discourse, the theme that does not develop but questions itself. Beethoven wrote his sixteen quartets over the course of nearly thirty years—from the early Op. 18, still built on Haydn’s legacy yet already driven by a barely containable energy, to the three Razumovsky quartets Op. 59, where the language fractures and reinvents itself, and then on to the final five masterpieces, written in complete deafness, where the quartet form is pushed beyond every imaginable limit: the Große Fuge, the seven-movement continuous structure of Op. 131, the almost visionary character of Op. 132. To follow them all is to traverse an entire musical life and to understand how a composer can change the world with four strings and no compromises.

MITO SettembreMusica inaugurates in 2026 a biennial cycle entrusted to the string quartet of the Teatro alla Scala, which presents the first part of this journey across three concerts. The project will conclude in 2027, the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death, with the remaining quartets: a tribute built over time, just as time is constructed by this music.