Opus 18 was the first set of 6 quartets that Beethoven composed, around 1800. This 47-minute lecture starts with an overview of Beethoven’s influence of other composers and how he was inspired to (finally) try his hands at quartets, and thus let his work be directly compared to that of his masters Mozart and Haydn.

The quartet #1 was the first published, but actually the second composed by Beethoven. In the 10 minutes starting at 26:00 in the video, Michael Parloff gives a great analysis of the musical and rhetorical tools employed by Beethoven in each of the four movements of this quartet #1: the “motive” of the first movement, the Italian opera in the second movement, the precursor to his symphonic writing in the 3rd movement, and how he displays his counterpoint skills in the 4th movement.