Playing repeats and double endings.

I recently acquired yet another recording of the "Russian" Middle Period String Quartets of Beethoven Opp 59 nos. 1-3 Quartets nos. 7-9. The middle one in E-minor, is a favorite and the performance by the Takacs Quartet includes a repeat with double ending that I've never heard before. I checked the score and the repeat is indeed there. Most people wouldn't know about repeats with double endings unless they had the score,

So what are these repeats and double endings and why are they there? The idea is that the performers come to the repeat and play again the whole section. With the double ending they play the first ending, repeat the section and then play the second ending continuing on into the next section. With the advent of 80 min. CDs it is possible for recording companies to allow for repeats.

When you think about why composers wrote repeats and where in the form they put them, the option to play the long version in modern performances becomes clear. Before recorded sound the listener got only the live performance to get the idea of a movement. In a Sonata Form, like the first movement of Op 59 #2, the audience gets to hear the exposition with its tonic key area and main theme and modulation to second key area and theme and then close. To reinforce the impression the exposition was often marked with a repeat and double ending. The double ending is required because the development section of a Sonata Form often begins with a modulation to a distant key, far from the tonic of the piece, becomes complex harmonically and contrapuntally and must find its way back harmonically to a cadence that returns to the tonic key and a recapitulation of of the exposition, but this must have the wrench of a different key for the second key theme, a false transition and rhyme of the second key area, and it must allow for extension of the close into a coda.

What Beethoven does is to repeat the development and recapitulation up to where the coda begins. This repeat is rarely played, but it is there in the score. It has a double ending and so the first of these are never heard unless the whole section is repeated. What it must do is to modulate from E-major back to E-Flat Minor that begins the development, in three measures. The arrival at E-major ( The key of the rhyme of the second key ) moves briefly through E Minor in the second ending at that repeat to eventually modulate back to E-minor, the key of the coda. We always hear this ending because we always get to the coda of the piece.

The sonata forms of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven often have both the exposition and the development and recap. repeated, and they don't always have double endings, but their works were often recorded in the days of LPs without the repeats because of time limitations and unless you were looking at the score, you would never know, except for ocasionally hearing one of the repeats and that was usually of the exposition. Only rarely was the entire repeat cycle and double endings played. Now, we can hear more examples.