“I host ‘The Modern Chamber’ every Sunday, Milwaukee's last home for classical music. I picked Beethoven, The Late String Quartets because I do a classical show.
“In my opinion, The Late String Quartets are the greatest pieces of music ever composed by anybody, ever! What you have in them is the future of pretty much all music inside of it: you have minimalism, you have the avant-garde... everything that came after sort of comes as distilled from these string quartets.
“They're incredibly sad and incredibly beautiful. This is one of the last things he wrote before he died. He was deaf at the time, so he couldn't even hear them. There's a lot of pain and joy.
“Sometimes I think that everybody at some point in their life will find The Late Beethoven String Quartets, and that’s all the music the’'re ever gonna need for the rest of their life. But it has to find you at the right time and it’ll click.
“Pretty much every string quartet since then is always compared to these because they are sort of the apex. And I’m not the only one who thinks that this is the crowning achievement of composed music. As a cycle of music, it's the most profound and beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
Photo by Erol Reyal
Jason Wietlispach hosts 'The Modern Chamber' on WMSE, Sundays from 3 - 6 p.m.
