String Quartet No. 8

My String Quartet No. 8 is made up of three movements, and a fast tempo prevails almost throughout the entire work. The extreme brevity of the opening movement oscillates between rugged unisono passages and cascades of chords. The central movement is a set of variations based on the theme from the first eight bars of my beloved Alla danza tedesca, the enigmatic dance movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 130. I have not written any explicit variations for many years. I feel as though the Beethoven theme has itself gone through a large number of transformations and is already teeming with exceptional rhythmic, melodic and harmonic features. I naturally take great pleasure in immersing myself in my variations with this permanent calling into question of assertions.

Although it has been a long-planned dream of mine to create something from this Beethoven theme, it is actually the final 3rd movement which has become the central and most extended section of the work: a Rondo-Presto which repeatedly becomes caught up, almost ad absurdum, in its own breathless playfulness. Jörg Widmann