Our special bonus concert surveys two towering monuments of Western art. First, Duke’s own Ciompi Quartet performs Beethoven’s magisterial String Quartet Op. 132. After intermission, Chamber Arts Society Director George Gopen reads one of his academic specialties: T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” often considered to be the greatest poem in English since Shakespeare.

As his health faltered, Beethoven produced an emotionally complex fifteenth quartet anchored in a third movement of hymn-like gravity, which was a major inspiration for Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Both works divulge wonders on first encounter but only deepen over time, especially in the expert hands of Ciompi and Gopen. Together, they erase the line between the language of music and the music of language.

BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132
T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets