The second movement of his first Razumovsky Quartet is quite extraordinary. He asked the cello to play very quietly... Where's the tune? I mean, it’s really an invitation for somebody else to join in. So the second violin answers with a tune. And then the viola says, "Hey, I'm gonna ask that question again." And I answer once again with the similar idea as the second violin. It's as though we are having a conversation.

 

"So it's the response between the players that's so crucial. I change the way that I'm playing and everybody else would respond in the same way. You can't do that with an orchestra. And the other thing with a quartet, what you are trying to do, is not to project to an audience, you're trying to bring the audience into your own world. When the players had the music in front of them, they couldn't play it. It's so technically difficult. He said: Don't worry, he said, this is music for a later age."

 

The idea of speaking to posterity was another legacy of the French Revolution. "The revolutionary period was a period of oratory. In the convention in Paris, when people like Robespierre, Danton or Santos, these people stood up. They felt that they were speaking not just to the assembled audience there, they were speaking to the world at large, and indeed not only the world of the present, but they were speaking to posterity. And they crafted their speeches very carefully indeed. So as an orator, they would begin with some very striking phrase, some striking theme. They would develop that, and they would come back to that from time to time. And in a sense, Beethoven's music does that very often. He begins with something which is really striking gripping, a statement so to speak, then develops it, and then comes back to it, almost obsessively."