Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets (Op. 59) left audiences and musicians bewildered. “Surely you do not consider this music?” the Italian violinist Felix Radicati is said to have asked the composer.
They are “not for you, but for a later age,” Beethoven reportedly said.
The later age came quicker than maybe even Beethoven thought. The same journal that called them “not generally comprehensible” admitted three months later that the “most recent, difficult but fine quartets have become more and more popular.”
Twenty years later, the same journal described his Grosse Fuge (Op. 133) as “incomprehensible, like Chinese” and “a confusion of Babel.”