The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130 [Course Book ed.] 9781400864201

Table of contents :
Contents
CHAPTER 1. Introduction
CHAPTER 2. Motifs, Counterpoint, and Form. THE QUARTET IN E♭ MAJOR, OP. 127
CHAPTER 3. Unity and Disunity. THE FiRST MOVEMENT OF THE QUARTET IN A MINOR, OP. 132
CHAPTER 4. Rhythm, Time, and Space. THE LAST FOUR MOVEMENTS OF OP. 132
CHAPTER 5. Cadences and Closure. THE MIDDLE MOVEMENTS OF OP. 130
CHAPTER 6. Doubles and Parallels. THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF OP. 130 AND THE GROSSE FUGE, OP. 133
CHAPTER 7. Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven

The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven OPP. 127, 132, 130

•

DANIEL

K. L. CHUA

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS 1995

·

Copyright © 1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex AU Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chua, Daniel K. L., 1966The "Galitzin" quartets of Beethoven: opp. 127, 132, 130 I Daniel K. L. Chua p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.

) and index.

ISBN 0-691-04403-1 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827. Quartets, string. 2. String Quartets—Analysis, appreciation. I. Title. MT 145. B425C56 1995 785'.7194'092—dc20 This book has been composed in Adobe Sabon and Petrucci Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America by Princeton Academic Press 1 3 5 7 9

10

8 6 4 2

•

I S D G

•

Men of Athens! I see in every way that you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Acts 17:22-23

•

CONTENTS

·

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

3

CHAPTER TWO Motifs, Counterpoint, and Form: The Quartet in El Major, Op. 127 CHAPTER THREE Unity and Disunity: The First Movement

of the Quartet

CHAPTER FOUR Rhythm, Time, and Space: The Last Four Movements CHAPTER FIVE Cadences and Closure: The Middle Movements

11

in A Minor, Op. 132

of Op. 132

of Op. 130

54

107

163

CHAPTER SIX Doubles and Parallels: The First Movement of Op. 130 and the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

201

CHAPTER SEVEN Conclusion

245

NOTES

249

BIBLIOGRAPHY

273

INDEX

283

The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven

•

CHAPTER ONE

·

Introduction

was unhappy about the Ek He had commissioned three quartets from Beethoven, and when the first one arrived at St Petersburg in 1823 what seemed like little mistakes kept cropping up in the parts during the rehearsals. Was it DP or EP? The Prince thought it should be DP, his viola player thought otherwise; the only way to resolve the dilemma was to write to the composer himself. This was not the only notational problem that they faced; in fact quite a few such letters were written. Unfortunately, only one reply survives—or, rather, a draft of one— but it provides a rare insight into Beethoven's compositional thinking. The Prince was right—DP not EP "on account of the melody, which merits always to be preferred to anything else." PRINCE GALITZIN

In a way, this study of the late quartets is an elaborate attempt to relive the experience of the Prince as he wrestled with the peculiarities of the scores. At first he found them difficult, even disappointing, since he and the musical circle in St Petersburg had expected something along the lines of Beethoven's earliest quartets. They "were anything but that," wrote the Prince. In fact these quartets were so different that they left the original audience quite bewildered and the critics divided, despite a concerted attempt to come to grips with them. If analysis is to relive this experience, it should begin by recovering the initial surprise (or even confusion) occasioned by these well-worn works. What follows, then, is a detailed study of a tiny slice of time between 1823 and 1825 in which the oddities of Beethoven's language come under close scrutiny. The three "Galitzin" Quartets, picked out from Beethoven's last five, are analysed chronologically—Op. 127 in EP, Op. 132 in A minor, and Op. 130 in Bk I have chosen to confine this study to the first three quartets because there is a difference of direction between the "Galitzin" Quartets and the remaining two. The first three works explore a process of increasing disintegration, from the apparent 'Classicism' of the Quartet in EP major to the broken utterance of the BP major Quartet and the Grosse Fuge. In these pieces, Beethoven's language undergoes a self-searching progress towards an abstraction that forces the emotional and technical content of the music to break down in violence. What follows in Opp. 131 and

4

CHAPTER ONE

135 is a different subject, a change of style sometimes (mis)taken as the reintegration of Beethoven's language. But it is not that the last two quartets reconstruct what Beethoven had dismantled; an innocent return is impossible after such a radical disintegration. Instead there is an air of indifference, as if the progress of the "Galitzin" Quartets had simply reached a point of stasis, and all that is left is the history of that progress to play with. Nowhere is this change more apparent than in the controversial endings that Beethoven offers for the Bt major Quartet. In fact, the difference between the Grosse Fuge, which originally closed the "Galitzin" version, and its replacement, written after Op. 135, is so sharp that the two endings undo each other in their attempt to finalize the reading of Op. 130. That Enlightenment motor of logic and progress drives the Grosse Fuge to the point of near annihilation, whereas the new finale, in the face of that destruction, hides beneath a sheen of history or a style of Classicism as if nothing had happened. What the two finales represent is the opposition of progress and history—a fundamental conflict that afflicts all the late quartets. This internal struggle creates the different emphases that divide the late quartets in two, with Op. 130 so delicately balanced at the centre that the choice of a finale can tilt the balance either way. The disintegrative progress of the "Galitzin" Quartets signals an end to a process which began with the inception of the genre. For Beethoven, as for Haydn, the quartet was a vehicle for intellectual exploration, and sometimes this was of a radical nature. Prince Galitzin may have wanted works akin to Beethoven's earliest quartets, but even they were already full of strange disruptions that constantly questioned Classical forms. This quality of cerebral experimentation persisted from the first quartets to the very last. Some of the earliest critics found this difficult to stomach. They thought that they were being assaulted, tricked, needled, or played with, and that somehow, as they contemplated the late works, Beethoven was actually demolishing his Classical heritage before their ears. But they had forgotten, perhaps, that the wit of the Classical language had always been a cutting one, and that often in the hands of Beethoven the keenness of his wit could go beyond a joke and become a critique. In fact, the rational nature of the string quartet was the ideal medium for the kind of self-conscious critique that the Enlightenment cultivated. Freed from its social function, the quartet, in its autonomy, was able to turn against its society, as if it were contemplating the audience instead. After all, Haydn in his quartets played with his listeners' perceptions, using an ironic humour that made them conscious of these

INTRODUCTION

S

manipulations. His ability to betray his presence in his own music and subvert the aesthetic illusion of the work by revealing its artifice was something that Beethoven acquired when he studied with Haydn in Vienna, perhaps in order to outwit his teacher. What Beethoven inherited he took to dangerous extremes, for implicit in this language, with its capacity for criticism, is a tendency towards self-destruction: the music could easily undermine itself and alienate its audience. Thus Beethoven's quartets became increasingly paradoxical, representing both an extension and a negation of the Classical language. The question for the analyst is whether there is a logic behind the weird and sometimes shocking events that such an aesthetic produces, particularly in the late quartets, where these peculiarities are the most pronounced. Unfortunately, analysts have exhibited a strange reticence; perhaps this is due to a sense of awe in the face of these difficult works, clothed by history in such an aura of spirituality that to analyse them would be almost sacrilegious. But if Beethoven could explain to the Prince that it is Dl> and not Et because of a certain melodic process, then there could also be equally rational answers for some of the more peculiar elements that have made the quartets so controversial. This requires a 'close reading' of the works; the occasional annotations given by various commentators, although full of sporadic insights, are not designed to tackle a whole quartet. This investigation hopes to demonstrate that there are processes at work which cause an entire piece to unfold with a logic that creates the peculiarities of the score. What appears to be happening in the late quartets is a rather arcane method of manufacturing forms; Beethoven seems to play with a process of expanding a gesture, shape, or motivic complex into increasingly large structures that encapsulate one another, like a set of Russian dolls, until they fill out a form and even an entire quartet. The logic of this process results in some peculiar twists and turns that create a kind of structured disruption. However, this is not a simple process. The idea of a structured disruption is an analytical paradox; the very logic that analysis tries to uncover is also the cause of the illogicalities in the works. In a desire to rationalize these quartets, the analyst is caught in a kind of irrationality that questions the nature of analysis itself. The music forces analysis away from the hallowed concept of unity towards paradox, ambiguity, and disconnection. The quartets confront the analyst in the same way as they confronted their first critics. Evidently, the investigation begins to echo Theodor Adorno's diagnosis of Beethoven's late style. For Adorno, the late works deliberately shat-

6

CHAPTER ONE

ter the unity and coherence of the middle-period style and become critiques of the very language that they use, pointing to some kind of failure that is ultimately traced to society. Through these quartets, Adorno puts humanity on trial. All the promises of the Enlightenment, he claims, are relentlessly broken in a dialectic of history in which reason oversteps its boundaries and inverts into a coercive and ultimately irrational (dis)organisation of society. An authentic work of art, then, must register this logic of disintegration within its own material structure. Like some impenetrable monad, art functions as a mute indictment of the present and reconfigures the promise as a faint, almost impossible hope for a future reconciliation. Thus it is not difficult to see how the late works of Beethoven begin the aesthetic negation described in Adorno's Geschichtsphilosophie. In a sense, my study is a translation of Adorno's philosophy of music into actual analysis, since it attempts to bridge the gap—felt so keenly by Adorno in his own work—between the sheer inadequacy of traditional theory and the works themselves. But how can theory measure up to these quartets which are not merely difficult but seem to evade and disable the orthodox systems of analysis? How do you read a work that reads you? Traditionally, there have been two ways of stabilizing these quartets: diachronically, by drawing a contextual framework around the work in order to explain it, and synchronically, by subjecting the work to the rigours of some self-enclosed theory. But in each approach the attempt to control the quartets already hints at a certain insecurity. This does not mean that we should abandon these apparently suspect methods; it simply means that we should recognize their limits. Perhaps it is only by demonstrating the inability of such practices to control the quartets that the critical and subversive nature of the music can be unleashed. A kind of role reversal is necessary, where theory half-relinquishes its power and allows the work to control the discourse and unsettle analysis. Take, first, the contextual approach. Critics, when confronted by the late works, have often sought to account for their inexplicable aspects by looking into the biographical or historical traumas that characterized the period. This is often expressed as a deflection away from the 'heroism' of the middle years, associated with the Napoleonic fervour that characterized the period, towards something which has been perceived either as bordering on lunacy or as groping towards some spiritual transcendence. The quartets have been read against the pain of Beethoven's life, his nephew's revolt, his deafness and 'madness,' his wheeling and dealing with publishers and relatives; or else they have been perceived in

INTRODUCTION

7

terms of the political upheavals and mutations of intellectual history— Romanticism, German idealism, the Hegelian dialectic," the "paralytic regime" of Metternich with its dampening of Napoleonic ideals into a Biedermeier domesticity. All these historically diverse interpretations are legitimate and fasci­ nating in the way they try to fix meaning in these pieces. But the roles can also be reversed; these quartets are able to turn the process of inter­ pretation upside down. Instead of being determined by history, the quar­ tets themselves begin to manipulate history in ways that may re-inter­ pret, idealize, or undermine it. Far more than any other work by Beethoven, these pieces are encrusted with a historical awareness. They are written in a style of historical extremes; the contemporaneity of the Grosse Fuge jars against seemingly innocent reincarnations of eigh­ teenth-century styles, with Beethoven not only digging up his preNapoleonic sketches, but imitating pre-Classical dances, re-creating the Rococo, the Baroque, and even the Renaissance. His contrapuntal obses­ sion with species patterns and fugal structures in the late pieces is a return to the ancient didactics of strict counterpoint, which Beethoven studied in his early years under the tutelage of Haydn and Albrechtsberger. Indeed, the notorious B-A-C-H motif that threads its way through the late quartets is a kind of historical task; Beethoven remoulds the theme with a clearer tonal definition based on fifths, and tries to complete the Art of Fugue, as it were, by investigating the his­ torical origins of counterpoint, from the atavistic polyphony that opens the A minor Quartet to the 'futuristic' dissonance of the Grosse Fuge (Ex. 1.1). Moreover, by the 1820s the dynamic structures of Haydn and

i

Ex. 1.1. B-A-C-H configurations in the late quartets

B

A

C

H

I*,J J if

r ifrfrJUr r ι-'· η

Op. 132 I O fl L" «/ H LYsiZ

Op. 131 &1

^

Kr 1

-

LpL

Op. 133 (Grosse Fuge)

1r

Γ-ΎΓ· # « η

VM^

1 1

«I 'If

1I

rβ

1

8

CHAPTER ONE

Mozart were an anachronism which Beethoven cultivated, at times, with a studied nostalgia in the most Classical of genres—the string quartet. This is music about music. These are pieces that posit themselves against their own history and are critically honed against the style they recall. And, as Adorno would emphasize, this is not so much nostalgia as critique. Thus analysis must be aware of the historical signs, styles, cliches, and conventions that Beethoven is playing with if it is to grasp the strategic significance of 'context' in these quartets. Analysis should unveil the critical processes that are at work, to show that what appears to be an innocent imitation is in fact nothing of the sort. Consequently the analytical process becomes as diverse as the historical references and can no longer define the quartets from a single perspective; rather, as the music shatters into a collage of historical styles and techniques, analysis is dragged into an eclecticism that has to deal with Lydian modes and Webernesque palindromes. At times the investigation is taken to dialectical extremes, since whatever is distilled as a definition of the late style is invariably negated by its opposite; the esoteric and the sociable, the mellifluous and the rebarbative, the rational and the deranged, the abstract and the concrete, the naive and the intellectual all repel each other, imbuing the late works not so much with a late style as with a collection of styles. Secondly, the purely analytical approach can undergo the same role reversal as the contextual one. Theory is meant to elicit from these works the logic of their internal construction and to uncover their autonomous mechanisms, but these quartets can disable the very theory that tries to grasp them. This is particularly poignant since much theory has been moulded around Beethoven's music, particularly from his 'middle period,' so that it tends to be the paradigm of the analytical systems themselves. After all, what other music finds itself so susceptible to the smooth unfolding of the Schenkerian Ursatz, the motivic transformation of Schoenberg's "developing variation," the formalism of Hanslick, the thematic process of Reti, or the long-range tonal dynamics of a Rosen analysis? It seems almost impossible to extricate these works from the theories that enfold them, particularly as they assume a certain neutrality in manipulating what they merely claim to discover. But despite their diversity, all these strategies have in common the power to totalize, unify, and reduce a work to a pure functionality, ironing out the inconsistencies and discrepancies, and imputing a kind of unity or completion to explain (away) the difficulties of the late quartets. However, these works are recalcitrant and do not always conform to the theories that manipulate them into immutable structures. They are

INTRODUCTION

9

riddled with contradictions and are constructed with such a heterogeneity of histories and emotions that they resist the perpetration of organicist and structuralist principles. By setting their own agenda of disruption and disorder, they derail theory in a way that exposes its limitations. No wonder these works were thought insane. The accusations of madness levelled at Beethoven indicate the critical disturbance that the late quartets engendered. In one sense, it is better to allow the quartets to insinuate their critical 'madness' than to neutralize them with the predetermined sanity of theory. If the critical force of these quartets is to be preserved, then analysis must become a struggle between a theory that encloses the work and a work that disables theory; analysis thus explores the distance between itself and the work. Obviously, from this angle there can be no systematic method of analysing these works, since they constantly undermine analysis; but such an approach has at least three consequences. First, in the analysis of the works the process will be dialectical to the point of contradiction rather than synthesis; the deployment of Schenkerian and Schoenbergian techniques will constantly confront their opposites—unity will simultaneously be superimposed upon disunity, cogency upon contingency, and closure upon deflection. Thus the process is both constructive and destructive, in order to prevent the manipulation of the music into a onedimensional state or the belittling of theory into an irrelevance. After all, it is not difficult to hear the late quartets as a dialectical contradiction of art and anti-art. Both critical and complicit, and riddled with antinomies, these quartets demand an analysis that will re-enact their resistance. Secondly, the analysis will be deconstructive. The dialectical approach will cause an analytical strain, as theoretical systems are pushed to extremes and forced out of shape by the diktats of the quartets. Under the tension, the analytical inadequacies will give way to ambiguities and impasses; harmonic logic will fail to connect, Schenker graphs will 'warp' under the strain of demonstrating motivic structures, tables will be confused with undecidable partitions, and motifs will be stretched out of recognition. As analysis actively constructs the quartets, the quartets are just as actively deconstructing theory, laying bare the assumptions and 'ideologies' deployed against them and forcing them into a state of aporia—a path that is impassable. Such moments of 'undecidability' and 'unreadability' are meant not to denounce theory as impotent but to displace theory outside its limits, forcing it to develop 20

new strategies. So, thirdly, in its constant search to overcome aporia, analysis will be driven to an extreme eclecticism. The impossibility of a uniform theory

10

CHAPTER ONE

gives way to a collection of conflicting theories that gather about the object, in response to the diversity of the music. In particular, the middle movements of Opp. 132 and 130 demand an analytical pluralism since they present a chaotic assemblage of historical styles. But it is not only historical relics that Beethoven tampers with: he also manipulates parameters that are often pushed to the periphery of analysis. Seemingly insignificant rhythmic irregularities, tiny gaps in the music, and other surface gestures become the focus of an entire structure, and analysis has to accommodate what it often discards. In this way the strategies for analysis change constantly. Of course, it would be impossible to apply every nuance of this theoretical apparatus in a systematic manner: this would merely rehearse the dogmatism it is meant to shun, by forcing a method upon the object. Instead, the analysis of the three "Galitzin" Quartets will build up its theoretical complexities layer by layer, elaborating the hypothesis that these quartets are critiques that play with elements of disunity and destruction. The investigation of Op. 127 explores the basics—the defining of motifs, counterpoint, and form. It starts out almost in a structuralist fashion, probing the scores for deeper patterns; but in these explorations the analysis will uncover alternative systems of construction that begin to undermine the established theories, causing them to buckle. Then with the analysis of Opp. 132 and 130 the cracks discovered in these systems are exploited and sometimes deliberately exaggerated to set the tension in relief; the strategy becomes dialectical, deconstructive, and increasingly eclectic in response to a music that becomes more extreme and disparate, reaching its climax in the disintegrative processes of the Grosse Fuge. A study of this kind inevitably invokes the presence of Adorno and the post-structuralists he foreshadows. But this book cannot possibly explore, let alone endorse, every complicated twist of his mind. What it shares with Adorno is the idea of the quartets as critiques and the critique of analysis. From this basis, the procedures of the "Galitzin" pieces are examined in order to elicit some kind of meaning. After all, locked within the mute abstraction of these works is a desire to become voice, to speak and disrupt. Beethoven throws out, as it were, a message in a bottle, which requires to be not only found but decoded. The investigation begins in 1823, with Op. 127 and Beethoven's redefinition of the basics of composition—motifs, counterpoint, and form.

CHAPTER TWO

·

Motifs, Counterpoint, and Form THE QUARTETIN

E\> MAJOR, OP. 127

Ex. 2.1. Op. 135, fourth movement—motto Grave

—

gj

—V

Muss Allegro

S Es

muss

sein!

Es

muss

BEETHOVEN'S LITTLE MOTTO "ES muss sein!," inscribed above the finale of his last quartet, Op. 135, is more a cryptic epigraph than a motivic manifesto. Nevertheless, analysts—including Schoenberg, Reti, Epstein, and Cooke—have embraced it as their mandate, echoing "It must be! It must be!" to their notions of motivic analysis. The work is a motivic delight, the structure riddled with inversions, retrogrades, and retrograde inversions, not merely in the finale but in the first movement as well. And this is not all, for the motif mushrooms profusely in all the late quartets—so much so that Deryck Cooke proposed the idea that the late quartets "constitute a self-contained unity, a single continuous act of creation" based on the "Es muss sein!" motif [A) and a semitonal motif (B) which Paul Bekker, Marion Scott, and Gustav Nottebohm had already unveiled as the thematic thread of the middle three quartets, Opp. 132, 130, and 131 (Ex. 2.2).4 It should be pointed out, however, that the "Es muss sein!" motif has also been spotted in various guises in the last three piano sonatas, as well as in the Credo and the Dona nobis pacem of the Missa solemnis, and it would be extraordinary to pursue this logic to the point of proclaiming the entire late period as a single creative act of unity.

12

CHAPTER TWO

Ex. 2.2. The motivic source of the late quartets

motif A

1

'''V - r r,-4-4i- r ,J motif B

ρ

inversion

Motif-spotting can be as deceptive as it is enlightening. At times, motivic analysis is just like doing a jigsaw puzzle, in which different bits are identified and slotted together into an apparent unity. Motifs are reduced to a quantitative sameness, which neutralizes the qualitative dif­ ference that characterizes the dramatic conflict of the "Classical style." To speak of coherence at all in a style in which rhythmic, textual, and tonal variety proliferates requires at least two other factors in which the motif functions. First, the motivic process must transcend a myopic, barto-bar continuity and rise to a higher order of unity which ranges from the balance of periodic structures to the overall tonal motion. Far from making the idea of motivic unity redundant, the motivic element often serves to articulate these higher units, delineating the proportions and the tonal direction. Most obviously, this is seen in the articulation of tonal structures by motivic or thematic statements—a fact mirrored in our 'textbook' terminology for the description of sonata form with its first subjects, second subjects, codetta themes, and the like. On a more abstract level, motifs are sometimes a microscopic reflection of a larger harmonic motion; this idea lies at the heart of Schenker's thinking con­ cerning diminutions, Epstein's application of the Schoenbergian Grundgestalt, and the "subthematic" lines that Carl Dahlhaus observes in the later works of Beethoven. Thus a volatile element in a motif, such as a chromatic or dissonant note, may have larger repercussions through­ out the form. A thematic analysis, therefore, is not simply a matter of identifying motifs and connecting them together, but must be bound up with the dynamic of the form if one is to demonstrate some aspect of coherence. As Rosen writes, To point out the recurrence of one short motif, and even to remark on its role in the development of the work, while ignoring its dynamic

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

13

qualities... is to forget that music takes place in time... There must be a coherent interaction between the individual motif and the direction of the piece — the intensity and proportions of its gradual unfolding. Secondly, with the late quartets, motifs must be considered not only in their harmonic and tonal context but also within a contrapuntal framework; for in these late works there is an obsession with counterpoint in the structuring of the form, reflected in a radical shift in Beethoven's sketching process from thinking on a single stave to working on fourstave score sketches. Beethoven's brother, Johann, put it like this when he first heard the Et major Quartet: "In everything, there was a mood that exists in no other quartet. The interweaving [of voices] is so rich that one is fully occupied just observing a single voice: therefore each wishes that he could hear the quartet four times." Motifs and counterpoint interact to manufacture form on a contrapuntal plane. But how exactly does this contrapuntal perspective affect the method and manner of Beethoven's compositional process? Robert Winter writes: Whatever the total motivation behind Beethoven's sudden and dramatic increase in reliance upon sketching in score for the composition of the late quartets, the predominant factor seems to have been an equally dramatic transformation of style... from 1824 on there was a profound change in both the manner and methods by which Beethoven composed string quartets... reflected in the wonderful statement that Karl HoIz reported Beethoven to have made concerning the Bl> major Quartet, Op. 130: "You will notice a new type of part writing [Stimmfiihrung] and thank God there is less lack of invention than ever before"... it is a knotty issue to determine exactly what Beethoven meant by this remark. This may not be so difficult to divine in the Grosse Fuge... But given that the application of score-sketching in the late quartets is near universal, gracing virtually every compositional style, we are obliged to take more seriously the extent of the style shift. More than one hundred and fifty years after their composition, perhaps the greatest significance of the late quartets remains largely unexplored. The simplest way into this unexplored world of counterpoint may be to examine the Scherzando of Op. 127, for of all the movements in the first of the late quartets this is the most overtly contrapuntal. Indeed, its counterpoint is so obvious that Mason dismisses this "super-scherzo" as a dry, academic, and jerky piece, full of calculated tricks that merely trivialize the quartet. "In vain," writes Mason, "does [Beethoven's] contrapuntal virtuosity transpose the motive to unexpected places, turn it

14

CHAPTER TWO

upside down, combine its two directions simultaneously, tickle it with pianissimo, proclaim it fortissimo by all four players in shifted rhythms—in short, exploit all possible permutations of it." What Mason objects to is simply a motif built out of a chain of thirds (y) which doubles back on itself in counterpoint (Ex. 2.3). In turn, this complex of Ex. 2.3. Op. 127, third movement—a motivic reduction of bars 1-10 bar

3

2

4

5

6

9

10

viola

m

^

RT

m

SS

&

•

cello

^

JO m=

*·

beamed notes = motif

thirds is controlled by a chromatic motif (z), which articulates the main cadential points (bars 8, 22, 26, 30, 35, 39) in order to focus the harmonic forces. Thus the two motifs {y and z) work hand in hand in their contrapuntal interaction, one spiralling waywardly around the cycle of thirds and the other stabilizing the tonal structure. With a frugality of material, Beethoven crams as much motivic significance into the contrapuntal process, either with rather arcane and exact inversion devices or by a complex invertible counterpoint where different parts swap around from voice to voice (bars 40-48 and 90-109). Bars 20-23 provide a clear summary of their motivic function (Ex. 2.4). Ex. 2.4. Op. 127, third movement—the motivic and contrapuntal outline of bars 20-24

riffiirJfclJrJfrlJ

20

S ^

f=T

F^f i=fe

i

j

IS

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

But why all this densely woven counterpoint, which Mason finds so hard to appreciate? What is the reason for all this contrapuntal empha­ sis, particularly as the tightness of the motivic construction is loosened by tonal and harmonic gestures that run quite contrary to the surface logic, exhibiting an irrationality that rebuts Mason's accusation of aca­ demic dryness? One example is in the development section (bars 37-89). Kerman views this passage as "pressing dangerously and deliberately toward the breaking point," a tendency no doubt facilitated by the crazy modulation, which moves from C minor to its tritone antipole, Gl> major (bar 60), before suddenly shifting into a chord of D major to hint at G minor—and all within a space of 30 bars. What is the rationale behind these tonal gestures? It is, in fact, the motivic counterpoint: the very logic of the surface is used to create the irrational forces within. By reducing the development to its harmonic functions and structural pitch­ es, what appears are the two motifs. The semitonal motif ζ is expanded as the basis of the modulations; just as it had articulated the local cadences, so now it demarcates the central cadential motion that links the dominant (Bl> major) at the end of the exposition to the tonic (E\> major) at the recapitulation. Riding above these strange harmonic motions is the chain of thirds, prolonged in the highest register, so that motif y, locked together with the chromatic motif z, fashions the direc­ tion of the entire development section (Ex. 2.5). Ex. 2.5. Op. 127, third movement—a reduction of the development section bar

37

52

m

60

81

J

m

s

ι \QTl J |J

L 11

Γ

ur r r

^mm

32

CHAPTER TWO

Ex. 2.17. (continued) Cooke: motif c

ffei= J

'

1

'

Epstein: motif d

Γ

Ti

PP

=

1

Ih(I

r ιΓ r > i-TJJg-J

Γ

ί^Ξ^

some metaphysical expression of "unbounded humanistic confidence and joy" in the work; and David Epstein sees motif d as the basic shape which determines the melodic and harmonic course of the first move­ ment. However, no one has yet stacked these motifs together into a con­ trapuntal complex—except, of course, Beethoven, who seems to meld these abstract motifs into contrapuntal matrixes that embrace both the tiniest details and the overall structure. In this opening movement of Op. 127, it seems that Beethoven is try­ ing to squeeze in as many of these motifs in as many contrapuntal com­ binations as possible. Even areas of chordal sonority and vertical orien­ tation are packed full of imitative and motivic cells. In the coda, for example, motifs a and b are stripped of their ornamentation and are piled one on top of another in a note-against-note polyphony, as if Beethoven were finally revealing the significance of this fundamental shape in governing the direction of the work (bars 240-280). But it is in the development section that these contrapuntal complexes proliferate, as the different motivic patterns, sometimes reversed and inverted, are

33

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OR 127)

locked together in varying rhythmic guises, cramming as much motivic significance as possible into every voice. Bars 99-106 come closest to unveiling, on a microscopic scale, the basic contrapuntal shapes which fashion the entire movement (Ex. 2.18). With a little analytical ingenuity Ex. 2.18. Op. 127, first movement—the motivic-contrapuntal structure of bars 99-106 d(\) 99

I

I

L· Y

I/

^Jt

^ ¥• U

J

one could add Epstein's motif d, not for the sake of flexing some analyt­ ical muscles but to accentuate the fact that these motifs, in their contra­ puntal and harmonic complexes, generate the motion of the movement at the most basic background level. Epstein has already shown how motif d directs the long-range melodic line towards the climactic C major Maestoso (Ex. 2.19). But more significantly, perhaps, the motif not only Ex. 2.19. Op. 127, first movement—Epstein's long-range motif motif d

i

Ή

U 75

A\

§=tf

^ %

~r

^ Allegro

4

135

*

m Maestoso

Maestoso

punctuates the form through these Maestoso gestures but is reflected in 'diminution' in the developmental texture just before the climax, in

34

CHAPTER

TWO

which the dynamism of this motif is felt pushing the music ineluctably towards the apogee of the form (Ex. 2.20). But this chromatic figure is Ex. 2.20. Op. 127, first movement—motif d controlling the texture of bars 121-135

129

36

CHAPTER

TWO

merely a part of a larger melodic structure that goes beyond the climax to the close of the movement—an Urlinie that conforms to motifs a and b. Moreover, underpinning this melodic structure is motif c. This motif first rears its head aptly in the bass, in quasi-canon with the upper voice, at the opening of the work (bars 3-6); and it seems that these intervals are expanded to form the underlying harmonic and tonal direction of the whole structure, so that all three motifs are locked in counterpoint as they unfold the movement (Ex. 2.21a). But again, as in the coda of the slow movement, a Schenker graph is not really necessary, for Beethoven has provided a reduction at the very start, a 'graph' embedded in the score itself as a miniature encapsulation of the whole (Ex. 2.21b). The contrapuntal structure of the theme is encased by exactly the same contrapuntal structure in the form. Ex. 2.21. Op. 127, first movement—parallels between theme and form (a) a reduction of the first movement

37

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

Perhaps all this sounds a little abstract, with these subthematic pitch patterns nested like Russian dolls. Maybe these parallels are merely a tautology of the Schenkerian system itself, as it coaxes its contrapuntal structures from the phrase to the form. But even these graphs are begin­ ning to buckle under the conflict of Schenkerian and motivic processes, as if the object of analysis were beginning to disable the very theory that tries to grasp it. Indeed, the analysis so far is merely a way into a struc­ ture that is far more disturbing and complex; for these patterns are not simply an abstract construct of pitches—rather, this contrapuntal expan­ sion pushes its arcane logic to the immediacy of the surface as a gesture. It is not only the motifs at the start that are extended, but also the con­ cept of contrast and transition embodied within the Maestoso and Allegro. The initial gesture becomes the gesture of the entire form. From the very beginning, the intensity of contrast brings this fissured shape to the forefront of consciousness, not simply because of the juxtaposition, but in the way they are forced to interlock as one entity and not as two ideas. They never recur as separate themes. Indeed, with the contrast between groups diminished, it is the contrast of the Maestoso and Allegro that demarcates the tonal structure, by penetrating the texture at the most unexpected places in a kind of gestural counterpoint against sonata form. These contrasts, by emphasizing El», G, and C major, repli­ cate the emphatic chordal punctuations at the start, for these tonalities are a tonicization of the pitches of the Maestoso's initial arpeggio (x), and their disruptive articulations are an expansion of this chordal gesture (Ex. 2.22). Thus the form presses to its climax tonally in the same way Ex. 2.22. Op. 127, first movement—arpeggio χ Allegro

Maestoso

m 1

arpeggio χ

S

W

* d d

Maestoso

Maestoso 75

fe

M aa

Maestoso

m

135.,.

tonicization of the notes of arpeggio χ

m

VI

38

CHAPTER TWO

as the opening phrase ascends to its apogee melodically. But the most critical point in these structures is what happens after the climax, because it is here that the distinctive fissure of elements is forced to fuse. In the initial theme, this mediation of contrast between the Maestoso and Allegro takes place within one bar by a gradual metamorphosis of every parameter—the diminuendo links the forte to piano, the tying of pitches merges the harmony, the melodic elaboration fuses chordal and lyrical sonorities, and the cessation of harmonic rhythm blurs the contrast of tempo (see Ex. 2.16). Exactly the same gesture occurs at the point of contact between the development and the recapitulation. In fact, the transition is so smooth that "One is hardly aware what has happened," says Philip Radcliffe; the recapitulation creeps in without dominant articulation or dramatic demarcation but is hidden, displaced up an octave and camouflaged by variation, so that it is perfectly integrated into the development (bar 167). This almost imperceptible return is a shock, for the basic tonal blocks of the structure had always punctured the movement by the contrast of the Maestoso-Allegro theme, and yet at the fulcrum of sonata form the articulative Maestoso is missing, seemingly divorced from its Allegro. But it has not actually disappeared at all; it has only been displaced, hauled back some 30 bars as the C major climax. Notice how that one transitional bar—the original bar 6—has apparently been omitted from the C major Maestoso, cutting the theme short; but actually that bar is being elongated, with the prolongation of its original Al> harmony stretching some 30 bars to the recapitulation. And riding melodically above this harmony, the C " of the Maestoso (bar 135) eventually links up with the C " of the recapitulation (bar 167)—which explains why the reprise is transferred up an octave. And in between, that melodic trill that wove its way from bar 6 into the Allegro is duplicated gesturally as the development of a motivic oscillation. Thus, the Maestoso and the Allegro have not been severed into two themes, but are fused together as an expansion of the initial gesture of contrast and transition. To summarize the gesture from the start, the first half of this sonata form takes the Maestoso (bars 1-6) and elongates it, using the Maestoso itself to mark out a structure which climbs emphatically to its climax and then dissipates gradually into a lyrical contrast. What remains in the second half of the form is therefore an expansion of the Allegro, in which the falling line of its melodic shape becomes the Urlinie of the entire structure. And, significantly, the Maestoso never reappears after the recapitulation to fissure the melodic flow, re-creating in the form the 'lop-

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

39

sidedness' of contrast inherent in the theme. Thus, as in the other move­ ments, the initial idea opens out microscopically into a world of its own reflection; the contrapuntal gesture entwines itself within itself to create an alien logic beneath the surface (Ex. 2.23).

Ex. 2.23. Op. 127, first movement— the structural parallels between foreground and background bar

1 3

5

6

1314 20 21

Maestoso arpeggio χ

IV

I toso bar

1 41 75

135

159

ns

w

Allegro recapitulation 167 170

198 207 231

40

CHAPTER TWO

III Evidently, motifs and counterpoint interact to create a most peculiar form, by expanding the intricacies of an initial complex into a whole structure. But as in the Scherzando, the consequence of such a logic is a certain illogicality that defamiliarizes the functions of sonata form. By turning inwards, the motivic structure creates a kind of 'madness' that disturbs the rational discourse of sonata procedures. Despite its mellifluous melodies and lyrical flow, this movement proved quite incomprehensible and even offensive to some nineteenth-century ears. "The work was understood by very few, and made a bewildering impression," said a critic at its premiere. For others, Beethoven had simply gone mad; many shared Henri Blanchard's view that these late quartets belonged to Beethoven's last period, when deafness had overtaken him, and his broken faith in humanity had driven him to take refuge in a half-defined religious mysticism. He had reached a stage of premature senility, brought on by illness and discouragement rather than by his actual age... To say that Beethoven became at the end of his life a sublime madman, like Tasso, is to commit a sacrilege in the eyes of his most ardent admirers, but I am not ashamed to uphold the statement. This 'madness' is not merely a matter of surface gestures, with all those sporadic contrasts and punctures; it is also reflected in how the underlying motivic structure stretches sonata form 'out of shape.' Of course, Beethoven was not limited by definitions in his transformation of sonata form; but the existence of a motivic totality that cuts across the totality of sonata structure meant that the dynamic balance of the form had to be radically rearranged if it was not to break down in the conflict. The patterns of sonata form were not a game of conventions but were functions that moulded a dynamic totality of balance and closure, and it is no accident that the design of Beethoven's sonata forms in major modes, involving a mediant conflict, followed a particular plan—from his first venture in this form in the Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 1, to his last in the finale of the quartet Op. 135. Almost invariably, the surrogate dominant would be in the major mode, balanced in the recapitulation by shifting down a fifth to the submediant at the onset of the second group, just as the dominant would normally move down a fifth to the tonic. This dynamic requirement is sometimes only momentary, perhaps just 4 bars as in the "Waldstein" Sonata, and sometimes quite monumental, covering some 40 bars as in the Piano Trio Op. 70, No. 2. In order to

41

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

reinforce the tonic, the instability of these distant tonalities are offset by strong references to the dominant, particularly in preparation for the recapitulation (Ex. 2.24).

Ex. 2.24. Op. 127, first movement—'abnormalities' of the form "normal" structure: EXPOSITION

DEVELOPMENT

El» major

G major

ι

m

RECAPITULATION

modulations

Et major

C major

Et major

Vi

v-i

ι

outer tonalities displaced into the centre .

Op. 127, first movement: EXPOSITION

DEVELOPMENT

RECAPITULATION

El> major

G minor

G major

C major

E!> major

At major

I

ΙΠ

ΙΠ

VI

I

IV

El> major I

climax twofold development group II in minor no V prepartation strong IV tendency

In Op. 127 all the elements are there; they are just in the 'wrong' order. The recondite logic beneath the surface causes a redistribution of func­ tions in order to conjure a new dynamic within the decorum of sonata form. For a start, the mediant is not in the major but, uniquely, in the minor, and it is balanced in the recapitulation not by the submediant but by the tonic, now recast in the major mode and not the minor. These modal and tonal peculiarities are generated from within, as the music stretches out the initial melodic structure. Moreover, the normal tonali-

42

CHAPTER TWO

ties of G major and C major are ousted from the outer segments and hauled into the middle as a very odd bipartite development section in order to duplicate the thematic climax. As a result, the mediant in both its major and minor guises consumes half the exposition and develop­ ment, and C major usurps the dominant, squeezing it out from the strate­ gic point in the structure so that it does not articulate the recapitulation. In fact, the dominant is marginalized altogether; it is simply not empha­ sized as a structural part of the form. What is striking about the motivic graph of the movement is that every note of the Urlinie has been toni­ cized except for Bl> and its own dominant. And this exclusion is not simply theoretical; it is quite literally felt as a dislocation, as if something critical had been cut out of the score. Look again at the apogee of the form—the moment of C major usurpation (bar 135). Although the music presses ineluctably towards that point, propelled by the chromatic motif d clambering step by step (Bl>, ΒΊ, C), at the moment of climax there is no logical progression to the tonality of C major. Instead, there is a fissure (see Ex. 2.20). Two C major sonorities are juxtaposed against each other, but they are not iden­ tical, for the C major triad before the contrast has a dominant function (bar 133), whereas the C of the Maestoso is a tonic (bar 135). The devel­ opment has not been pushing the music towards C major at all—the submediant Maestoso is quite a shock. What is expected at the point of cli­ max is the same logical progression that had articulated the G major Maestoso—dominant to tonic, V to I, C to F major. But this does not happen. By evoking F major only to remove it, Beethoven literally articulates the suppression of the agent of dominant tonicization at the most pow­ erful moment of dramatic contrast. There is a 'real absence' in which manoeuvres towards the dominant are made to appear missing. Far from minimizing contrast, as Kerman suggests, structural suppression actual­ ly maximizes it. What validates this interpretation is that it happens again. The play of evocation and suppression is conjured this time by the disappearance of certain bars. At the climax, the thematic events of bars 1-14 are being recounted, but what would have been bars 6-11 have vanished; these would-be bars are all references to F major (Ex. 2.25). Because in the key of C both the climax of the Maestoso and the start of the Allegro would dramatize F major, Beethoven literally cuts out these bars, leaving only the head of the Maestoso and the tail of the Allegro theme; the remarkable avoidance of an F major chord in this pas­ sage forestalls any possible tonicization of Bk Dominant preparation

Ex. 2.25. Op.127, first movement—the 'missing' bars of the C major Maestoso

44

CHAPTER TWO

becomes problematic, and the recapitulation is simply not articulated but merges into the developmental textures. This may be unusual, but it is not inexplicable, since it is an exact replication of the opening gesture (see Ex. 2.23), with the same fleetingly elusive dominant tucked away on the last beat of a bar at the harmonic turning point of the theme (bar 7). To suppress the most fundamental harmonic articulation is radical. Maybe this was why Joseph de Marliave described the movement as "progressing] towards a goal that constantly recedes as it approaches," or why Kerman says that these developmental passages "go nowhere." Certainly, the ectopic tonal functions of the piece are made all the more extraordinary by this dominant suppression. And as far as Schenkerian theory is concerned, something peculiar has definitely happened to sonata form. "Only the prolongation of a division [interruption]," writes Schenker, "gives rise to sonata form"; sonata design, in other words, is dependent on the dominant as a structural partition, creating a divided form. According to Schenker's plan, in a major key the structural division § occurs just before the development, and in a minor key the modulation to the mediant acts as a third divider, but the structural goal is still §, which occurs as preparation before the recapitulation. This structural division is precisely what Beethoven does his utmost to avoid. The structural § event simply does not happen where it should to divide the form; it occurs only right at the end, just before the coda, in effect creating an undivided form—which is a rare, if not a contradictory, sonata structure (see Ex. 2.21a). Schenkerian theory is faced with an exception.

IV The consequence of such a strange sonata form goes beyond the movement itself, since it exaggerates its tonal oddities in order to point them out; the suppression of dominant functions is possible only in tandem with such an elevation of the submediant that the music skims over the second group to summit the form on C major, 'stretching' the tonality away from the tonic; correspondingly, with each recurrence of the Maestoso the range is extended, from two octaves to three to four, and this is matched by the deepening of resonance, as more of the open strings vibrate in sympathy. To climax the structure so emphatically in C major is one thing; but how do you resolve it, particularly when the recapitulation is 'hidden,' when the Maestosos never appear again to resolve the form, and when

MOTIFS, COVNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

45

Beethoven does all he can to suppress its balancing tonality, F major (IV)? In fact, with the rather 'lopsided' distribution of Maestosos and the absence of the dominant, perhaps the structure does not resolve at all, but creates new tonal and gestural problems that expand and spill over the double bar into the rest of the quartet. The magnification of the initial gesture has opened the movement out beyond itself. C major certainly has repercussions at critical and climactic moments in the remainder of the work—resonances that are estranged as if they were submediant recollections of an unresolved event in the past. This overshadowing event is, of course, the goal of the first movement. Governed by the linear expansion of motif d, the arrival of the C major Maestoso is characterized by its massive, sonorous sound, as it rises through four octaves from a raw, rasping open C-string. This timbral quality resonates into the next movement. In the central E major variation, the theme is stripped to its essential pitches to reveal its affinity with the very opening gesture of the quartet (Ex. 2.26). And Ex. 2.26. Op. 127, first and second movements—thematic parallels first movement: Maestoso

Allegro

second movement Adagio

as if to pursue this microscopic recollection, the variation reaches its apogee on the same C major sonority, stretched even wider to four and a half octaves, and intensified by the most daringly luminous dissonance. Quite literally, Beethoven takes the chromatic motif d and verticalizes it, as if to compress that chromatic motion, which had been instrumental in creating the tonal issues, into one dissonant chord (Ex. 2.27). It is an extraordinary chord, created to contain three adjacent semitones. Then in the finale Beethoven does it again, taking the same agglomeration of motif d, at a similarly climactic point in the exposition, based on the

46

CHAPTER

TWO

Ex. 2.27. Op. 127, second movement—the C major sonority in variation 3

These three chords, scattered at different points of the work, analyse this sonority from different perspectives; each pitch of motif d is taken in turn as the operative element within the harmonic context. In the first instance, it is obviously C that is fundamental; in the second, the chord functions as an appoggiatura to the dominant of E major, so that the outer notes of the motif—Bl> and C—are directed inwards to resolve on B1); in its third appearance, the roles are reversed, B^ is the decorative appoggiatura to C, and Bl>, hammered out in octaves, is the significant

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

47

pitch that changes the function of the chord to a dominant seventh that resolves on F major, which ultimately results in the tonicization of Bk Thus this sequence of chords isolates in turn C, ΒΊ, and Bk, as if to reverse the motion of motif d in a palindromic resolution of the quartet. As such, this symmetry is merely an abstraction picked out from con­ stellated sonorities; but what is of cardinal significance is that these sounds are symbols of a resolution, in which a C major sonority, left hanging in an unresolved state, is eventually engulfed by a shift in har­ monic perspective which merges it back into a tonal 'consonance,' so that by its third appearance what had suppressed the dominant is made to articulate it. But if these scattered sonorities are symbols of a resolution, what pre­ cisely is the process they symbolize? If they are merely peaks at distant points in the quartet, what surrounds them to connect them into a coher­ ent landscape? To begin from basics, the quartet is symmetrically arranged, like most Classical forms, with the outer and inner movements mirroring each other. The last movement is clearly connected to the first; for instance, it extracts the intervallic content of the initial Allegro and animates it into its own theme (Ex. 2.29). It also duplicates the same Ex. 2.29. Op. 127—the thematic connection between the outer movements bar 8 illecro JL b I—F 1 1 ^ " ¾ " fty.f \t

0

•

·

•

I

bar i

rinaie (fo b b J

,_— 0

J

=3= -A I

form, not so much sonata form as that peculiar ectopic structure at the start; there is an initial thematic contrast that marks out the structure (bars 1-12); as in the Maestoso, the opening gesture (bars 1-4) punctuates the development (bar 97) and the false recapitulation (bar 135, cello), and divides the central domain into two tonal blocks; then this gesture, failing to appear again, leaves the real recapitulation almost inarticulate and hidden up an octave (bar 187), just as Beethoven had done before; again as in the Maestoso, the melodic climax of the introductory gesture (Ak) is tonicized at the summit of the form (bar 145), in

48

CHAPTER TWO

the guise of a false reprise that really connects up with the recapitulation as an expansion of the initial contrast. It is, as it were, the structure of the first movement all over again; what the finale does, however, is to take the structural oddities of the initial movement and neutralize them. The mediant is normalized by the dom­ inant (bar 55); the dominant articulates the recapitulation (bar 183); the false recapitulation in the subdominant flattens rather than aggravates the tonal structure; the contrast within the initial theme does not inter­ rupt the flow of the form. Even that volatile motif d which kept nudging the music towards C is brought down a tone to focus instead on the dominant, BI» (Ex. 2.30). Ex. 2.30. Op. 127, fourth movement—motif d motif d c

ι

1

1

1

Everything works towards resolution. Thus the C major sonorities are neutralized and orientated towards closure. Certainly by the coda of the finale (bar 256) the last residue of C major does not create tonal tension, but loosens the structure as a colouristic texture that is no longer volatile. The symbol of harmonic aggression has turned into its opposite. If the outer movements create resolution, then the central movements provoke conflict with one of those juxtapositions of the sublime and the ridiculous that become increasingly prevalent in the late quartets. There seems to be more contrast than connection, and yet they are inextricably bound, in the same way as are the Maestoso and the Allegro. The link is a rather circular one, for the variation structure of the second movement is circular in design. That luminous C major sonority, for example, is itself the centre of a huge spiral which turns increasingly dissonant as the structures encircle themselves, with Al» major curling up a sixth to climax in the central E major variation, and the E major variation also reaching up a sixth to its apogee on that dissonant C major chord. The theme, too, is caught in a circular process, repeated time and again, and goes round accumulating decorations which spiral within themselves in retrograde counterpoint (see Ex. 2.8), crablike patterns (bars 113-116), and close canonic processes (bars 100-104). But it is in the coda that this circular concept reaches its culmination, for the music has quite literally come

49

MOTiFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127;

round again: the seemingly insignificant curtain that had opened the movement (bars 1-2) expands to fill the entire coda, with the opening phrase of the theme actually closing the end of the movement, as if the music had spiralled back on itself to start the variations again (Ex. 2.31). Ex. 2.31. Op. 127, second movement—parallels between the "curtain" and the coda

m

J

' JJ JJ JJ ' 1

WV

curtain

ΦΜ

^

>-

I] -T

V

V harmonization of Dt

118

ffei 000

i

' 000

£

E major parenthesis

I

124

coda

H IV

fV

Bn^ I

And this is precisely what happens in the Scherzando. If the second movement ends with its beginning, then the Scherzando begins with the ending, changing the mood with a pizzicato parody of the variations' threefold cadence. And after the pizzicatos the music picks up where it had left off, behind the double bar of the previous movement—to con­ tinue the next variation, as it were, with the same invertible counterpoint (Ex. 2.32). It is the same, yet what a contrast! Not only is it "tougher, more intel­ lectual, and more disruptive" than anything else in the work, but its harmonic structure is radically different, for at last, after 408 bars, Bt major finally arrives, emphatically. It functions as a gigantic upbeat of some 15 bars (bars 2-17), which on its return from the 'trio' is blown up out of all proportion from fifteen bars to fifty (bars 237-280/10-17), as

so

CHAPTER TWO

Ex. 2.32. Op. 127— the thematic connection between the middle movements end of second movement

third movement: Scherzando vivace

second movement: theme

though the articulation of the dominant were meant to divide the quartet in two as it re-establishes Et major. In fact, the dominant which opens and closes the exposition (bars 2-26)—if one discards the pizzicato fanfare—is resolved back to the tonic only at the recapitulation (bar 90), turning the entire structure of the Scherzando into one vast V-I motion (Ex. 2.33). Ex. 2.33. Op. 127, third movement—the V-I background bar

1

3

15

36

37 41 52 54 66 75

82 85 86 89

90

All these peculiarities and parallels between movements are not simply sporadic connections caught up in a complex web of relationships: they actually express a linear process, a singular gesture. In fact, they articulate the ultimate expansion of the initial idea; growing from 10 bars to a movement, it eventually fills out an entire quartet. The Maestosos are the pillars of the first movement, expanding the initial arpeggio (x) to open

Sl

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

out the form on a dissonant C major tonality. The slow movement in Al>, as the gravitational centre of the quartet, is a magnification of that piv­ otal moment of transition (bar 6) in which C is prolonged and support­ ed by subdominant harmonies. This massive gesture of slowing down, like the critical point of contrast, hits the Scherzando in an extreme col­ lision that signifies a turning point in which the quartet turns back towards the tonic via the huge dominant upbeats of the Scherzando; it is exactly the same harmonic and gestural pattern as the very first change from the Maestoso into the Allegro. And as in the Allegro the expanded gesture, curving in upon itself, stabilizes the tonic in a finale that neu­ tralizes the dissonant elements. The motivic and gestural palindrome at the start (see Ex. 2.16) is reflected in the palindromic shape of the entire quartet—structurally, melodically, harmonically, and gesturally (Ex. 2.34). Ex. 2.34. Op. 127—the motivic expansion of the Maestoso-Allegro complex to structure the quartet first movement bars 1-22 bar 1 Maestoso

7 8 13 Allegro

14

19 20 21

22

Λ

5

melodic C climax arpeggio χ I

im

CONTRAST

Λ

Λ

Λ

Λ

Λ

5

4

3

2

1

Ε IV

&i I

bar 6 C major—ι I

Γ sonority

(ΠΙ VI)

tonicization of the notes of arpeggio χ

IV movement 2: an expansion of bar 6

huge dominant upbeat JL

movement 1

movement 2

movement 3

the entire quartet

movement 4

52

CHAPTER TWO

The ectopic tonal formations, the dominant suppression, and the mirror relationships all make their ultimate sense and find their ultimate resolutions in this panoramic gesture, actuated from the first 10 bars. Thus the very start forms the heart of Op. 127, an opening composed of a complex, ambivalent gesture, in which every element is interlocked to present an all-pervasive idea. Texture, gesture, contrast, counterpoint, shape, and structure all join to create a complex which permeates the form from the minuscule to the massive, growing from local motifs to large linear structures, and so creates a pattern of concentric expansion which fills out the form.

V This analysis of Op. 127 is an investigation and a definition of the way Beethoven handles the basic elements of musical construction in his late style. Motif, counterpoint, and form become strangely connected in this work; they are no longer independent elements that work together to form a totality, but are tied up as the totality in a circle of self-reflection. They connect like homonyms, seeming the same yet meaning different things; what may appear perfectly rational on the surface can appear utterly bizarre beneath. The fundamentals of composition are redefined by defining each other, so that in a sense they become the same and no longer require an interaction with external structures or a social code. When pushed to extremes, such inward-looking structures become esoteric. In the quartets that follow Op. 127, Beethoven uses this extraordinary logic of motifs and counterpoint to re-create forms, each one with its own unique configuration controlled by an 'inaudible' complex hidden deep beneath the surface. It is, in one sense, no more than an affirmation of Classical processes of coherence, pushing the systems of counterpoint and motifs to their limits. And yet it undoes the very process that it affirms, as if the motif, in its manic declaration of "It must be! It must be!," found itself dismantling a style at its very core. It is a curious form of autonomy, one which moves within a sphere that begins to detach itself from the very style it adheres to, by pursuing its logic to the very end. Sometimes, of course, this autonomy coincides with Classical procedures. Perhaps in Op. 127 the internal structure is not so distant from its Classical lineage—at least from our perspective. The opening, after all, is

MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM (OP. 127)

S3

balanced, lyrical, and symmetrical, and it rather conveniently conforms to Schenkerian patterns; the expansion, particularly of the stark contrast, may create some peculiarities that can be mistaken for madness, but they are nothing compared to the quartets to come. For what happens if that pivotal, all-embracing complex is not symmetrical and linear but broken, fissured, and agonized? With the A minor Quartet, the paradoxical logic of these structures pushes unity and disunity to such extremes that even analysis finds its own tools undermined. This analysis of Op. 127 merely erects a backdrop for Op. 132 to dismantle.

•

CHAPTER THREE

·

Unity and Disunity THE FiRST MOVEMENT OF THE QUARTET IN A

MINOR,

OP. 132

I had always been full of quirks, and his earliest critics were quick to accuse him of piling "one thought wildly upon another... in a bizarre manner"; but now, confronted by the late works, they were stunned and could hardly find a word to say. Out of pity for this institutional composer, some withheld their harshest invective until after his death. The ideas just did not connect; his "art [was] divorced from reason," determined by the fits and starts of "his own subjective thoughts." Such incoherent gestures were the very reverse of what E.T.A. Hoffmann had admired about the middle-period works, with their "inner unity" growing "from a single bud [to] a beautiful tree"; in his famous review of the Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann revered motivic logic as the concrete manifestation of the Sublime, drawing us "into the spirit world of the infinite." The ineffably exalted and the tangibly rational were coupled together. By the late quartets, however, the power of the Sublime was no longer a matter of inexorable logic but of utter madness. At least, this was the opinion of one critic, who declared the Beethoven of the late quartets "a sublime madman." The music seemed to "wander in a waste of formless development," quite unlike the motivic cohesion of the Fifth Symphony. BEETHOVEN'S MUSIC

Obviously, something new was happening in Beethoven's technique. It was not that Beethoven abandoned the logic of motivic development; rather, as the analysis will show, he complicated it by a process of variation and counterpoint, so that the logic did not quite connect, allowing chaos to break through the cracks in the structure. "With these techniques of thematic penetration, he seriously questioned the validity of his own style and all that he had inherited from "the spirit of Mozart through the hands of Haydn." The music turned in on itself and against its own public, and, as a cutting critique, it became as alienated as Beethoven's with-

UNITY AND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

SS

drawal from the apparent frivolity of Viennese society. This was difficult music, and the accusations of madness by his critics were a defence against this musical attack. Such accusations were not new to Beethoven's quartets. Some eighteen years earlier, the set of three "Razumovsky" Quartets had musicians falling about in hysterics; some called it "crazy music," whilst others wondered whether it could be called music at all. They too were difficult pieces that demanded an intellectual response; in them Beethoven dug deep into his musical language to turn up all kinds of oddities, at times pushing the music to its very limits. The late quartets obviously pursue these explorations, but perhaps this time Beethoven goes even beyond the limits to dismantle the very language itself. This is a matter not simply of intensifying the earlier oddities, but of forcing immiscible elements to coexist in a constant undoing of each other. The normal and abnormal are set at loggerheads, inviting a dialectical approach to these works. Indeed, this is merely one of a whole series of internal fissures that make the late quartets difficult to grasp. There is the conflict between an insane sublimity and an intellectual critique; there is the clash of Classical procedures against a radical Romanticism; there are contradictions of technique between sonata form and fugue, counterpoint and song, variation and motivic development. Esoteric structures are pitted against an anthropomorphic desire to sing, setting social discourse against soliloquy; but surely one of the most disconcerting of these conflicts is that tension between unity and disunity which challenges the perception of art itself. This chapter picks up the contradiction and is therefore split in two, pitting unity and disunity against each other.

II When the music does not quite connect, what does the analyst do? Take the first page of the A minor Quartet, Op. 132 (Ex. 3.1). Contrast confronts us as Beethoven juxtaposes blocks of blank and sharply differentiated materials; it is as if particles of diverse motivic, textural, and expressive elements were brought into collision. "The entire first group," writes Kerman, "has suffered a nervous crisis of indecision." But it is not only the first group but the analyst who is in a state of 'undecidability,' trying to hold the disjunct and disparate gestures in tension with a

Ex. 3.1. Op. 132, first movement—bars 1-27

UNITY AND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

57

desire to integrate them into structures. Given a choice, the automatic response is to dissect the score in search of underlying unities, for since Hoffmann's review the idea of organic coherence has been enshrined at the heart of Beethoven analysis and aesthetics. Both Schoenberg and Schenker are heirs to Hoffmann's metaphysics when they turn to

58

CHAPTER THREE

Beethoven as the exemplar of their organic theories. For the Second Viennese School unity, defined as the interrelatedness of the motivic sub­ stance, is "the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist," whereas for Schenker what matters is the tonal unfolding of unities of a higher order, of which the late quartets are a paradigm: "In these pieces, melody stands in the shadows. Beethoven truly remained to his last breath a composer of connected tones, a producer of tonal wholes which created luminous and floating coherence." Both tonal and motivic coherence can easily be culled from the score of the A minor Quartet. After all, structure in its barest essentials is stated from the start, as the contrapuntal artifice creates a lattice of inter­ locking motifs. What the cello announces in the opening bar is a pitch pattern which asserts itself as a source of motivic cohesion. It is, in fact, one of Deryck Cooke's 'meta-motifs' that apparently spill over to unite all the late quartets, particularly Op. 130 in Bl- major and Op. 131 in Cf minor. The connections are clear, but why the obsession? Perhaps Beethoven's interest with this pattern is a contrapuntal one, for it is sig­ nificant that the motif is most prominent in two fugues, the one that clos­ es Op. 130 and the one that opens Op. 131. But whereas in the Grosse Fuge the motif is pitted against innumerable countersubjects and in the opening of Op. 131 is interwoven with other patterns, the contrapuntal vision in the A minor Quartet is decidedly singular. The motif counter­ points itself. Unity of a nepotistic kind is posited at the start. There is something almost Webernesque about the way in which the atomistic idea is deployed symmetrically against itself, both simultane­ ously and in canon, in effect implying its own harmonic dialect of dimin­ ished inflections and appoggiaturas (Ex. 3.2). In this way, harmonic proEx. 3.2. Op. 132, first movement—the motivic counterpoint RI

isfe4UJdJ=Li=^U: M r r '''r'rir J

L

RI

ι ι ι V P I I P P = prime I = inversion R = retrograde RI = retrograde inversion V = variant

59

UNITYAND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

gressions can be governed motivically, even when the identity of the motif is obscured by variation (Ex. 3.3). This is possible because these Ex. 3.3. Op. 132, first movement—bars 111-115 111

harmonic implications are already latent in the pitches of the motif itself (Ex. 3.4a), and these pitches can be superimposed as diminished harmonies, chained together and juxtaposed (Ex. 3.4b). Ex. 3.4. Op. 132, first movement—the harmonic implications of the motto (a) motto

$

%

t

*

m

*

60

CHAPTER THREE

Ex. 3.4. (continued) (b)

ritard.

Schoenberg would perhaps identify with this self-harmonizing pattern, for—as in atonal composition—an isolated chord can be made 'structurally significant' by embodying a motif. Thus, from a Schoenbergian angle a passage of starkly juxtaposed contrasts, such as that which perplexes the end of the exposition (see Ex. 3.4b), can be partly resolved by reducing it to these 'structurally significant' harmonies, not only integrating the contrast but relating them to a motivic source. Indeed, closer scrutiny reveals that the motif and its fragments are ingrained horizontally in these textures. "An uncontrolled imagination," writes Tovey, can pursue this kind of motif-spotting "to results as fantastic as any Baconian cipher." Indeed, this quartet can easily promote a kind of mono-motivic mania in which the analyst is hypnotized by this pitch pattern in vertical, horizontal and contrapuntal formations. The motif is so omnipresent that it can be found in the most peculiar places, cropping up in a common-or-garden bass line (Ex. 3.5a: bars 33-38), or tucked away in an insignificant inner

UNITY AND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

61

voice (Ex. 3.5b: bars 44-48), or caught in the middle of a phrase in a different mode and on a different beat (Ex. 3.5c: bars 64-66); it is even etched in the entries of the canonic transition (Ex. 3.5d: bars 40-43). Ex. 3.5. Op. 132, first movement—the motto in different guises

62

CHAPTER

THREE

Ex. 3.5. (continued)

And there is more. It is clearly embedded in the melody of the first-subject group (Ex. 3.6a); and although the second subject seems in such Ex. 3.6. Op. 132, first movement—the motto behind the themes

63

UNITYAND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

incongruous contrast to the mood and mode of the movement, the motif is there too, not only minimally in the chromatic inflections, but struc­ turally in the melody and the bass (Ex. 3.6b). (b) 48

s

mm

inversion of larger structural motif

w fa

Ρψψ

m^

1

^THf

Lf r Lf if pr

^m Such structures reflect a deeper unity of a functional nature. Returning to the opening of the quartet, where contrast confronts structure, it is significant that the motif is there not only on the surface but as a scaf­ fold, hidden by processes of variation and counterpoint. The polyphon­ ic lattice of the opening is like a theme for variation, so that underlying the contrasts are unifying identities. Countless commentators have demonstrated how the theme of the Allegro fits neatly as a countersubject to the motif (Ex. 3.7). But the matter is far more complex than this. Ex. 3.7. Op. 132, first movement—theme and motto

$

^\h^~~n\

iniljif

64

CHAPTER THREE

The motif is not simply elongated like some substructural pattern beneath the variegated textures of the Allegro; the entire gesture of the opening (bars 1-8)—its contrapuntal texture of note-against-note coun­ terpoint, the mirror symmetries, the motivic density, the motion from tonic to dominant, the climax on C " — i s embodied in the Allegro (bars 9-22), but distorted through a process of contrapuntal variation. In this way the motif, or rather its complex of patterns and textures, becomes structural and functional, activating the harmonic direction. Indeed, it is not purely a matter of pitch but one of gesture—a certain motion of delay, of 'sighing,' of dissonance, of appoggiatura. The entire structure of the work is based on this gesture—the music, like the motif itself, presses obliquely yet ineluctably towards a goal: Gi to A, F to E. This is portrayed from the start, as the motivic cantus firmus controls the harmonic gesture of the first group, creating a chain of appoggiaturas (see Ex. 3.6a). And the second group exploits the same gesture, decorat­ ed by microscopic reflections of itself (see Ex. 3.6b). But in both the themes these appoggiaturas point to a deeper structural affinity, for the first group itself is a giant motion of this 'sighing' gesture created by the underlying dominant-tonic progression (Ex. 3.8a), and, similarly, the bipartite texture of the second group (bars 48-57) articulates a V-I motion enclosed by large structural appoggiaturas in the outer voices (Ex. 3.8b). Even the transition between the two groups (bars 30-47: see Ex. 3.8. Op. 132, first movement—structural appoggiaturas (a) motivic reduction of the first group bar

7

L

9

11 12

^U

M

(b) motivic reduction of the second group 49

53

16

ίν

W

is no mere flicker: it is prolonged as a huge appoggiatura which finally resolves on A in the second group (bar 57). And to underline the point, this falling Bt-A motif is the salient figuration in the melodic design of the second subject. When all this is transposed to the dominant in the Έ minor reca­ pitulation,' the appoggiaturas connect to create a giant structural motif (Ex. 3.15). Or, better still, when the form folds back on itself at the Ά minor recapitulation,' Beethoven removes the disruptive Bl> gesture (bar 210) and so discards the initial appoggiatura for a rising one, which sears through the texture of the coda (bars 254-264); the Gt-A motion that ushered in the piece is now expanded at the close, linking up with the

70

CHAPTER THREE

Ex. 3.15. Op. 132, first movement—structural motif bar

19

50 giant motil

^J

4=

129

141

r6—

\ ^ -

161

-

»—

~*^ν

=f=

• I!

exposition

dev.

n

^

r

. Γ

•

E minor recapitulation

5th transposition

central appoggiatura to form a massive inversion of the original motif. Viewed from this angle, the entire edifice of the work is a giant mirror structure in which the motif, stretched out as tonalities in the bass, is reflected upside down in the appoggiaturas of the melodic line (Ex. 3.16). This is only one instance of many similar connections. The score Ex. 3.16. Op. 132, first movement—structural motifs recapitulation I and II

exposition Ί

Γ

coda 1

Γ

^

is so saturated with motivic significance that it is impossible to isolate and explicate each one. Ex. 3.17 summarizes the functions of these motivic connections. This commingling of motifs creates a complex con­ trapuntal structure that is spun out from the initial bars to mould the entire form. And this too is only one of many similar motivic designs throughout the late works. There are examples (as demonstrated earlier) in both the first movement and the Scherzando of Op. 127, where the forms are structured by a contrapuntal-motivic expansion. Another example is the

bar

30 39

I exposition

110

IV

48 50

89 9192

development

76

102

113 121

V recapitulation I

104

Ex. 3.17. Op. 132, first movement—motivic reduction 141

VI

146 151

218

I recapitulation II

193

Coda

225 254

258

72

CHAPTER THREE

Vivace of the last quartet, Op. 135. A critic identified only as "M," writing in the Berliner Allgemeine Musikaliscbe Zeitung, quotes a little figure in this Vivace which he says is spun out forty-six times (Ex. 3.18). Ex. 3.18. Op. 135, second movement—"Grundidee"

This "totally nonsensical" gesture, he claims, can be understood, as can all of Beethoven's purple passages, by grasping the "Grundidee" which generates the music. Unfortunately " M " does not elucidate his point, but perhaps this is because it is quite obvious; tiny as this turn may be, it opens microscopically into a motivic universe of extraordinary abstraction. To start with, this Vivace is a quirky species exercise, composed of this turn figure stretched out in the violin line with diminutions in the bass (bars 1-8). In fact the same species pattern underlines the opening of Op. 127, and like it, the whole complex undergoes contrapuntal variation where the voices are turned inside out and upside down. But it is not until the so-called 'trio' that the motif is elongated tonally (Ex. 3.19). This vast development section (bars 66-208) is a gigantic expansion of the one motif, but inverted—a fact heavily embossed in the score as Beethoven changes the key signature from F to G to A major; then, having tonicized the first three pitches, the music turns back, oscillating in octaves in and out of G, before closing the descent on F at the recapitulation (Ex. 3.19). The forty-six little turn figures, pounded out in the lower strings, are the tiniest reflections of this "Grundidee." Ex. 3.19. Op. 135, second movement—the expansion of the "Grundidee" 67

97 *

J

f^# iu ^m

J

J

etc.

^

192

OJ=

&

m ^m etc.

£=£ & I

123 _

M0

73

UNITYAND DISUNITY (OP. 132)

193

ν

ρ

Ι?"" -

>* J.

?*L-n— Ί - ^ S ^

1

^

ι*·

I* J^_I* J^- J

two contradictory metrical interpretations. This duality is entertained simultaneously, not to wreak havoc but to animate the rhythmic rigidity through ambiguity; for it is the syncopation of alternatives that evokes the delicate poise of the piece—subtleties befitting the complex yet bal­ anced steps of this aristocratic dance. Thus these tensions are simply undercurrents, hardly able to muddle the dancers. At least not yet, for muddle they will. Beethoven's subtlety is to maintain the unaffected monotony of the surface whilst setting the steps askew through a metrical shift so surreptitious that it is hardly

114

CHAPTER FOUR

noticeable—unless, of course, one were dancing. At first, the tendency to set the barlines out of joint is reinforced by the details—little 'hairpins' that create a sense of syncopation (Ex. 4.5), then the splitting up of the Ex. 4.5. Op. 132, second movement—countertheme re-barred

countertheme into tiny motivic fragments (Ex. 4.7), one emphasizing triple time (a), the other duple time when chained together into sequences (b). But the most devious motivic fragment mined from the countertheme is, aptly, one that straddles the barline (Ex. 4.6). When this

Ex. 4.6. Op. 132, second movement—countertheme a

b

I

I C

figure (c) is reiterated time and again, the agogics of this pattern tend to undermine the downbeat, shifting the barline forward a beat, as it were, so that the second beat becomes the first. And it is by sheer repetition of this counter-rhythm that the music eventually overturns the metre, as this pattern fills up more and more space with each recurrence. The monotony is an essential function of this rhythmic game. Initially it is innocent enough, employed to heighten the first main cadence with only four repetitions of the figure (bars 19-22). However, at the centre of the form its sense of motivic compression and rhythmic syncopation gives way to a metrical shift, with some fifteen reiterations homing in on the recapitulation (bars 53-71). But the recapitulation is precarious, because the metre has been displaced. The critical point occurs in bar 57, when the rhythmic figure drags the introductory motif off the beat, so that the harmonic tendency of the initial motif and the rhythmic tendency of the figure coalesce to displace the downbeat—a displacement accentuated by

Ex. 4.7. Op. 132, second movement—countertheme

116

CHAPTER

FOUR

registral and dynamic contrasts (Ex. 4.8). Thus a missing crotchet muddles the metrical system. Although the music presses towards the recapitulation harmonically, metrically it cannot arrive on the 'tonic beat'— Ex. 4.8. Op. 132, second movement—metrical shift

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

117

that is, the original metre. Beethoven resolves this crisis by trying to compress the metrical pulse through hemiola patterns to iron out the rhythmic irregularity (bars 69-70). Thus, paradoxically, the disordering effect of hemiola patterns is used to re-order the metre; but in fact it serves only

118

CHAPTER FOUR

to highlight the missing crotchet, for it jolts the 'barline' back into place after such a long period of displacement that the return to normality suddenly feels abnormal (see Ex. 4.8). But at least the recapitulation puts the metre (along with the confused steps of the dancers) back on course, moving with absolute two-bar regularity, despite fragmentary echoes of that subversive figure accentuating the second beat (bars 76ff). To summarize the situation so far: from the exposition to the recapitulation, the metrical pulse has been gradually distorted by fragments of the countertheme to form irregular structures in the second section (bars 26-53), which climaxes with a passage of utter rhythmic aberration through a metrical shift (bars 53-70), before coming full circle, returning to the regularity of the recapitulation. This whole process starts again with the reprise, but this time there is no resolution—only impasse. Having been extended from 4 bars to 15, the rhythmic figure c repeats itself some seventeen times as it heads towards the coda (bars 91-109), once again 'shifting the barline' by its agogic implications, despite the surface regularity of the two-bar structures. In fact, this surface symmetry underlines the usurpation of the second beat, in which any calculations back to the first beat become impossible. At the fermata (bar 109), the apogee and aporia of the music, statistically speaking a bar is missing in the regularity of the periodic structure (Ex. 4.9). But psychologi-

Ex. 4.9. Op. 132, second movement—periodic structure bar 91

I

pause 1

99

11

2-bar + 2 units

11

+ 2

11

+ 2

I Il I

^

2

11

+ 2

11

+ 2

11

+ 2

11 +

I LJ

2 + 1

cally—and presumably for the aristocratic couple on the dance floor— there is a kind of quirky symmetry. What happens psychologically is that at some point between bars 91 and 109 the barline has imperceptibly stepped backward in the mind; a crotchet has gone missing, and the only reason why the music can be kept within the rigidity of the 3/4 time signature is that the missing crotchet reappears as the focus of aporia (Ex. 4.10). But although this note looks like a crotchet it is not really one at all, owing to the fermata. It is in fact an entire extra bar—the missing bar. Thus the symmetry, although flawed statistically, is intact psychologically, demonstrating that the metre has actually shifted. This time there is no compensation, recalculation, or rhythmic compression;

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

119

Ex. 4.10. Op. 132, second movement—bars 106-109

although notationally the music looks quite normal, every bar from here to the end of the minuet starts on the second beat—a fact reinforced by the 'hairpins' at bars 112-113. In absolute terms the 'barline' has been pushed forward, and the dancers are wrong-footed at the climax of the dance, presumably at the point where they are suppose to clasp hands (Ex. 4.11). Ex. 4.11. Op. 132, second movement—bars 106-111 re-barred

120

CHAPTER FOUR

Thus the second beat has usurped the first, and a crotchet has been irretrievably lost. This analytical interpretation of the minuet is verified by the final 10 bars, which act as a microcosm of the rhythmic events. The synopsis is a contrapuntal one, where the upper and lower voices are disjointed periodically, so that in the upper voice there is again a prob­ lematic missing bar (Ex. 4.12). Moreover, the disjunction is heightened Ex. 4.12. Op. 132, second movement—periodic structure in the coda bar 110 violins

1

ΊΓ

L

viola cello

JL

11

11 JL

in the last 3 bars, as the lower voices move recalcitrantly in duple time against the triple metre of the violins. But the effect of the hemiola is to shift the barline in the bass, so that the final crotchet is simultaneously a first beat in the lower voice and a second beat in the upper strings (Ex. 4.13). Yet even this rhythmic ambiguity is not the most significant sumEx. 4.13. Op. 132, second movement—the rhythmic structure of the coda

η

117

f] j

ri j

Fine

duple structure downbeat?

mary of events in the last bar. It is often a mistake to argue from silence, but with all these missing crotchets in the minuet it is significant that the final bar, which will end the entire movement after the 'trio,' simply does

121

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

not add up. There is a crotchet missing, as if the whole piece had start­ ed with an anacrusis. Of course, the missing crotchet could easily be explained by the fact that the minuet is linked to the musette, and the musette begins with an anacrusis. At least, that is what it looks like: in fact, it isn't. This musette was originally an Allemande written some thirty years earlier, and Beethoven had been re-examining it in the 1820s as part of a portfolio of bagatelles. In the original version this Allemande began, quite natu­ rally, on the first beat of the bar. What Beethoven does in the quartet is to shift everything back a beat (see Ex. 4.14). Just as he wrong-footed the aristocrats earlier, he is now about to muddle the feet of the peasants in a similarly unaffected manner. The crotchet really is missing. It is as if this extraordinary juxtaposition of independent pieces were tied togeth­ er by a rhythmic thread: the minuet opens with an anacrusis on the first beat, the musette with a first beat on an anacrusis; having shifted the barline backward from the downbeat in the minuet, Beethoven performs the same trick again. It is likely that the rhythmic quirk in the 'trio' may have been triggered by the metrical games of the minuet; for if in absolute time everything had been pushed back a beat at the end of the minuet, then why not do the same in the musette? Thus the dislocation of absolute time in the first dance, although it does not impinge visibly on the staves of the score, radically affects the notation of time in the second dance, so that the musette looks nothing like the original Allemande of c.1795 (Ex. 4.14). The earlier piece already plays with bucolic rhythms which punc-

Ex. 4.14. The Allemande and the Musette Allemande of c.1795

ffTfr

fe^

Φ Musette of 1825

fus

p dolce

φ

iffr

φ

h

t

J J J iJ

J 5 =Ep

tuate the cadences with accents on the second and third beats. By shift­ ing the barlines back a beat, and by setting the dance within a static har­ monic drone, Beethoven just complicates matters; he conjures a surface

122

CHAPTER FOUR

of rhythmic ambiguity, without the stability of harmonic rhythm to measure the time. Thus the opening is riddled with irregularities: the phrasing is not only asymmetrical but creates melodic structures that begin with the first beat on the off-beat and end with the downbeat firmly planted on the first beat of the bar; the 'psychological barline' does not stay put. It is precisely this tension that is underlined as the musette progresses away from the initial stasis to the regulating motions of a harmonic pulse. Starting in bar 141, the harmonic sequence begins on an anacrusis and goes against the barlines of the score, yet it cadences on the downbeat exactly as the opening melody does. Technically, what happens in the music is the intrusion of duple time (bars 145-146) within the triple structure to reset and upset the metrical pattern of the score, so that rhythm and metrical accents are (as Mason notes) caught in a dialectic of competition and cooperation. Time and again this shifting process occurs in increasingly larger sequences of music, but the duple tendency which triggers the downbeat cadence recurs in this expansion only sporadically (bars 146, 170, 191, 199). Thus the actual metre, as defined by the score, makes only a momentary appearance amid vast areas of metrical ambiguity. Statistically speaking, most of this musette—including the beginning and the end—has its downbeat on the upbeat at the end of each bar, flouting the 3/4 signature. This is the opposite process to that of the minuet; for in the minuet the music progresses away from the original metre, but in the musette it is always groping towards it, trying to establish what has been buried under the rhythmic surface from the start—hence the extraordinary events at the end of the piece (Ex. 4.15). Without rhyme or reason, the studied monotony of the minuet and the musette is suddenly ruptured by an expressive violence (bars 206-221); a passage in Cl minor is simply juxtaposed, like some irrational interpolation, within the A major sonority, breaking the texture, mode, and mood of the work. It is a shock because what is expected after the endless repetition of the same material is yet another round of sequences spiralling down the circle of fifths, always on the third beat as before. But it is precisely this third-beat usurpation that this interruption aims to erase. What is significant about this section is its metrical articulation within the design of the musette. Apart from the rhythmless drones that flank this dance, the musette moves relentlessly in four-bar units; but these are always internally dislocated, because every phrase starts with its rhythmic downbeat askew, and none of the structural downbeats at cadences ever articulate

Ex. 4.15. Op. 132, second movement—bars 205-221

124

CHAPTER FOUR

the start of a four-bar structure. It is only at the point of interruption that a structural downbeat and a rhythmic downbeat coincide with the hypermeasure of 16-bar units (Ex. 4.16). The complicity of the rhythmic hierEx. 4.16. Op. 132, second movement—metrical structure Ct minor intrusion

bar 110 I stasis

I I |

8

16

t

8

structural downbeat I

173 l

l+l I

16

I l I I

16

16

l+i II I I 12 14 | |

16

222 I

| |

stasis

|

cadences (structural downbeats)

archy with the gestural intrusion makes this passage a violent assertion about the time signature: for the first time in the musette, the music remains rigidly in the metre it is supposed to be in. It is a kind of metrical resolution, bringing a wayward rhythm into a state of normality. But the irony, of course, is that the moment of normality is completely abnormal; tonally, gesturally, and formally, it is not a resolution but an intrusion, breaking the monotony of the musette at a point of closure. And as a metrical resolution the passage is in crisis, for the metre has been abnormal for so long that it renders normality abnormal; the brute force required to bring the rhythm into line merely underlines the fact that the Allemande of c.1795 started on the wrong beat. Thus metrical normality collapses upon itself; as with the fermata in the minuet, apogee turns into aporia, and there is no way out except through a radical distortion of metre which turns the tendency to shift the barline back a beat into reality. The four-square rigidity of the Clt minor passage has its last phrase warped by the very duple tendency that has been the cause of metrical contention, but that is now inscribed in the score as a time signature (bar 218). In effect, it rehearses the motif of the first movement, as if the emotional coolness of this dance were too much to bear after the initial expression of pain. The metre, mood, and motif at the start of the quartet are invoked to shatter this movement. But note the "L'istesso tempo" marked above the new time signature; there is no change of time, simply a restructuring in which the duple dis-

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

125

tortion is just a rewritten hemiola pattern, masking an underlying triple metre. In absolute terms, it shifts the barline back a beat, so that the recapitulation of the opening drones really does start on the first beat, as it did in c.1795 (Ex. 4.17). Just as in the minuet the tendency to stress the Ex. 4.17. Op. 132, second movement—bars 218-223 4 bars as notated

L'istesso tempo

(R

V 5 bars

in absolute time 11

I I

barline displaced back a beat

second beat pushes the barline forward at the point of aporia, so in the musette the tendency to stress the third beat pulls the barline back. Of course, it does not look like this in the score; the removal of a crotchet is absorbed by the fermata (bar 109), just as the addition of one in the musette is obscured by the intrusion of duple time. But this is precisely the point. There is a conflict of metre, a constant ambiguity between absolute time and notated time; it is just that by the end of each dance the roles have been reversed: notated time no longer defines absolute time. So the musette closes as it opened—ambiguously—with the barline in the wrong place, with the first beat falling on the third. But this time there are no rhythmic acrobatics, no duple corrections; it ends on the third beat. In absolute terms, however, this is also the first beat. The result is an interesting crisis in the gap between the musette and the reprise of the minuet. In performance, the tendency is to treat the final note of the musette as a downbeat, despite the fact that it is an upbeat, and to count one or two bars' rest before resuming the minuet; but notationally this starts the minuet on an anacrusis. Alternatively, if one counts accurately after the last note, the minuet will begin psychologically on an off-beat as if it were an anacrusis, although notationally it would be correct. There is ambiguity either way. On rehearing, the minuet is not the same: it is metrically different, its ambiguity more intense and its metrical conflict more antagonistic. And if the minuet starts on an upbeat, as it were, in its second appearance, then its final bar adds up

126

CHAPTER FOUR

perfectly instead of missing a crotchet, and everything is in order. Thus just as the minuet impinged metrically on the musette, so the musette in its turn redefines the minuet in its own light. The nobles and the peasants are caught in an extraordinary dance in which the surface symmetry hides a metrical force that pushes each group off balance. The social mockery continues in the march of the fourth movement, with a variation on the same theme—the upbeat is on the downbeat— and this time it is the infantry that is caught out. To "begin with an upbeat," wrote Gervasoni in 1800, "is at all events not advisable in a true march, since the unmusical soldiers are induced by it to raise their foot immediately with the first note and thus to disturb their measure." Beethoven was obviously planning something quite devastating here. He was not unfamiliar with military conventions; he had written several marches for specific regiments, all of them four-square. And here in the quartet the march is similarly rigid. As Martin Cooper describes it: "Everything about this twenty-four-bar episode is regular: the cadences and their modulations fall where we should expect them, the canonic entries and points of imitation are symmetrically planned." This may be true on the surface, but as in the minuet and musette, underneath the surface there is disorder. The authority of the time signature is dismantled internally by the melodic constituents, creating a totally asymmetrical infrastructure. There is a clash of systems as an inner irregularity rubs against an outward rigidity; melodic and metrical accents are forced into a dialectic in which both inner and outer structures simultaneously distort one another, causing the march to falter. Indeed, it is the faltering of the rhythm, the very inability to connect, that is the focus of the periodic design. The in-betweens of phrases—the gaps and anacruses—are employed to dislocate the articulation of the music. Although the music is harmonically coherent, rhythmically the gaps between the phrases are literally cracks in the structure, moments of hesitation that break the phrases into isolated fragments. These gaps are utterly unpredictable in length, and they seem contingent in the way they constantly change size and contradict expectations. The music seems to require a strange re-barring if the phrasing is to make sense (Ex. 4.18). Take, for example, the first lacuna in bar 2. Is it not too long? It stalls before the next 'line.' There is a hesitation, a stuttering of structure, because the expected upbeat is displaced to a downbeat, leaving a fissure that severs the phrases. This disconnection is rectified by the next fissure (bar 4), where the gap shrinks to re-align the anacrusis and thus bring some metrical normality to the march. For four symmetrically ordered bars the metre is

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

127

Ex. 4.18. Op. 132, fourth movement—the opening theme re-barred

stabilized, only to be dislodged by yet another gap: once again the flow of the form falters, as a displaced upbeat creates a fissure that feels quite out of place. Thus, at the critical point of reprise the structure is cracked and the two halves cannot quite connect. These blank spaces are paradoxical; if they did not 'pad out' the melodic irregularities, the metrical order would collapse; yet their awkward presence causes a periodic disunity, accentuating an internal disorder that makes marching an asymmetrical affair. Beneath the imperturbable face of the music, with all its harmonic simplicity, lurks a dissonance between parameters, as inconsistencies and irregularities bedevil the regimental motions—upbeats are delayed, and downbeats fall oddly on both feet. Nowhere is this more sharply felt than at the

128

CHAPTER

FOUR

transition back to the theme (bars 13-14), where the upbeat figure is expanded in a kind of stretto, trying to make almost every beat a downbeat, only to trip over itself in a constant faltering towards the recapitulation. Ironically, among all these pseudo-downbeats the real one on the first beat of the bar is missed out altogether, so that the recapitulation does not solve the metrical problems but simply reiterates them (Ex. 4.19). It is perhaps not so surprising that the metrical order should invert

Ex. 4.19. Op. 132, fourth movement—bars 13-16

into its opposite—the elasticity of a recitative. "In 22 bars," writes Kerman, "The recitative runs from Piu allegro to ritardando, in tempo, ritardando, immer gescbtvinder, Presto, and Poco adagio."15 The soldiers have fallen out of rank, and someone is protesting. Thus in both the second and fourth movements a state of inexplicable contrast is reached through metrical tensions that destabilize the form. Such alternative rhythm in dance—be it in the march, musette, or min-

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

129

uet—estranges the reality depicted and ultimately leads to a moment of "delightful horror" in which the social composure of the surface suddenly breaks into a grimace and the sign becomes opaque. Mimesis breaks down, and the signifier is suddenly alienated as far from the signified as the minuet is from the musette or the march from the recitative. Driven to breakdown, the music confronts aporia, and the fermatas, the lacunae, the irrational juxtapositions become a critique in which the signifier is not as transparent as it seems to be, but turns excessively against the signified, dislocating the possibility of wholeness. However, this semiotic fissure is not simply conceptual but creates a disunity expressed in the peculiar inability of the music to respond within and between movements. The violence of the Cl minor intrusion in the second movement, for example, can be resolved neither tonally nor emotionally; the rhythmic irregularities are not ironed out, and the sudden recitative turns the apparently autonomous march into an incomplete movement, split in two and spilling over into the finale. The gaps are as impassable, the contrasts as immiscible, as the diverse elements of society that are hauled into the quartet to repel each other. Whatever is being said (and music is too vague to say anything in particular) Beethoven is not simply indulging in some nostalgic naivety but is ironizing, as it were, through the Kantian Sublime, in which the imperturbable flow of the syntagmatic surface is suddenly ruptured to render the movements incomprehensible—what the early critics called madness. In the Kantian Sublime it is indeterminacy that signifies, the gap between alienated signs, and so unwholeness resolves itself negatively by comprehending the unattainable. As Thomas Weiskel writes, "the sublime began where the conventional systems, readings of landscapes or text, broke down, and it found in that very collapse the foundation for another order of meaning." It thus shocks the mundane into astonishment, creating in these dances a "new order of meaning"—one of ironic intransigence rather than sublime transcendence.

Ill It is not only rhythm, however, that is employed to ironize beneath the nonchalance of the musical surface. The very structures of time, as measured out by music, become a critique of the quartet by dislocating themselves into temporal fragments that cannot coalesce. In the three inner movements of this work, time is out of joint. And there is no attempt to

130

CHAPTER FOUR

set it right, just as there is no attempt to harmonize the elements in society that the work portrays; for in the quartet, the music not only measures time into stratified structures but signifies history itself, setting slices of it as juxtaposed elements to exaggerate the impasse between time spans, like Foucault's epistemes, Adorno's dialectics, and Schiller's historical sublime. For these three philosophers time, in terms of history, is not that 'bourgeois' sense of uninterrupted causality, as events progress purposefully century after century, but is a segmented and stratified structure which confronts, disrupts, and mocks human determinacy. And, significantly, both Adorno and Foucault locate the last major historical fissure in Beethoven's lifetime; indeed, for Adorno late Beethoven marks the end of history, and the nineteenth century simply "stiffen[s] into rigor mortis." For Schiller history, as interpreted through the Kantian Sublime, is so absurd that its very indeterminacy of disconnected and non-sensible events makes human determinacy ridiculous. Similarly, this quartet seems to be constructed out of historical fissures. In the minuet and musette, for example, Beethoven quite literally throws into one movement two pieces separated by some thirty years of history, with no attempt to plaster over the time gap; the minuet and musette are alienated from each other thematically, motivically, and technically. And to complicate things further, the whole movement itself is something of an anachronism, belonging to some pre-Revolutionary French court, so that the break between this and the contemporary complexities of the first movement is as much historical as emotional and structural, placing, so to speak, the two sides of Foucault's epistemological fissure against each other. Then in the Heiliger Dankgesang the historical gap widens, as stratified blocks of ancient and modern music are pressed together in an oscillation between modal counterpoint and tonal harmony. Internally broken, the Heiliger Dankgesang is also externally isolated from its historical surroundings, with the minuet on one side and the march on the other. And as if to turn full circle, the finale tries to recapture the contemporaneity of the opening, to bring some symmetry into this heterogeneous time sense. All this may seem merely tangential in the work, but the signifying of such broken historical elements has analytical implications, for music structures time differently at different moments in history; the result in this quartet is that the music is fashioned by a diversity of techniques that renders the work's own time sense heterogeneous, so that it breaks up into irreconcilable elements. Music moves in time, but time is not simply a receptacle for it. Rather, music manipulates time, makes it audible, purposeful or amor-

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

131

phous, sometimes contingent and sometimes static. It is as if Beethoven had discovered in the A minor Quartet this new technique of time manipulation, breaking out of the dynamic time mode of Classical procedures into a kaleidoscopic, differentiated time sense. As with the semiotic, social, and historical fissures, the time structures are juxtaposed to exaggerate the impasse between them. The technique which makes time heterogeneous is based on different methods of altering the harmonic forces. In the last movement, for example, tonality unfolds time as logically as the smooth linearity of a Schenker graph. Time measured out by the tonal dynamics of sonata form is made purposeful through function; it is "forward pressing," in Ernst Bloch's words, pushing relentlessly towards its goal. Rational, regulated, and determined, heightened by the dialectics of sonata structure, tonality has been interpreted by some as the articulation of 'bourgeois values,' embodying a belief "in progress, in expansion, in the ability to attain ultimate goals through rational striving, in the ingenuity of the individual strategist operating both within and in defiance of the norm." Tonality, like the 'bourgeois' perception of history, makes time determinate. What is radical about the minuet and trio is that this very function of tonality is turned on its head, breaking time into indeterminate fragments. In the second movement something new begins in which the tonal dynamics of the opening movement are rendered as indifferent as the self-conscious monotony of the minuet and the musette, exchanging complex tonal strategies for the irrational juxtaposition of autonomous blocks. Tonality does not become non-functional; rather, its linearity becomes segmented, and form becomes increasingly non-progressive and seemingly 'accidental.' Time is stratified. Or, to use Adorno's metaphor, the dynamics of tonal time transmute into the stasis of space as the material coagulates into isolated structures which can only be juxtaposed against each other. For the tonal structure in the minuet, although logical within each segment of the form, is dislocated between segments. The sudden shifts from E to C major (bars 22ff) and from A to C major (bars 98ff), without transition, modulation, or explanation, are like the juxtaposition of contrasts in the work—there is no response. Tonality becomes contingent and indeterminate, for nothing in the score seems to bear any relation to the tonal shift—neither implications beforehand nor resolutions after it. It is for this reason that Kerman intuitively senses a radical change in the "quality of key contrast... [in which] tonal tension seems no more stirring than in a fugue by Bach."

132

CHAPTER FOUR

The shattering of tonality into disjunct blocks becomes so pronounced in the musette that one wonders whether it is tonality or the symmetrical balance of juxtaposed segments that keeps the dance intact (Ex. 4.20). Beethoven simply pastes together a pattern of different time scales Ex. 4.20. Op. 132, second movement—block structure of the musette symmetry destroyed

theme A bar 120 TIME:

static

141 linear

158 static

166 linear

178 static

186 linear

^"222 206 static

Cltminor intrusion

that cannot interact. At the start, time stands still. There is tonal stasis— what Jonathan Kramer would call "non-linear time," that is, time structured by a non-processive segment of music in which the constancy of texture and rhythm moves in an indeterminate continuum of sound. There is simply a drone, a texture, a melodic fragment, unfashioned by tonal forces, so that it does not progress but 'floats,' disconnecting itself from everything around it (bars 119-141). The fact that there are 21 bars of this texture at the start and 17 at the end does not matter, in a sense, because it is indeterminate and could have 'gone on forever.' And neither can the music come to an end, for there is no real tonal function to articulate cadences; it simply stops when Beethoven cuts it off—quite contingently. Time here has not so much stood still as it has become spatial (as Adorno would say), turning the material into inorganic objects; and the shift in the musette from one slice of material to another demonstrates the impossibility that such a spatial object should cohere. In bar 141, one texture woven around an A major triad is set against another which starts on a Cl major chord in order to progress round a circle of fifths.

133

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

There is no attempt to cement the gap between the static and linear con­ trasts; rather, tonal, textural, and motivic differences are left unmediated. This is not surprising, because the technique in this movement is one of collage, in which different pieces by Beethoven are pasted together to form a quodlibet. Not only is there the collision of the minuet and musette, but within the musette itself there is a collage of three pieces— two Allemandes of 1793 and c.1795 and a snippet from the Piano Trio, Op. 1, no. 2, of 1794 (Ex. 4.21). At the centre of the musette there is a Ex. 4.21. Op. 1, No. 2, second movement (1794) 106

f&m ^

tm

m

m

^

P^

Twelve German Dances, No. 8, WoO 13 (c. 1795)

^ψψψ

M

i

φ

φ

ita φ

έώά £ ϋ ι U=I

f

I i

Allemande,Wo0 81 (1793)

jostling of different elements as the pieces cut into each other. The fis­ sures between them are enough to create a segmentation of time into cir­ cular and static structures. Stretched out in endless sequences around the

134

CHAPTER FOUR

circle of fifths, the Op. 1 quotation is predictable almost to the point of monotony; but this predictability is broken by two interpolations of sta­ tic arpeggios from one of the Allemandes. The significance, however, lies in the way these interpolations are pasted in: the first block of arpeggios is in E major (bars 157-165), but this is simply thrown against an A major section without modulation and so severs the music; the second interpolation is in A major (bars 177-185) and is placed within an A major domain, but it cuts in halfway through the melodic structure, sup­ pressing the consequent phrase and creating two bars of A major har­ mony that dislocate oddly in a context where there had been a relentless change of harmony at every one of the last 35 bars. The disjunctions may be slight, but there is enough evidence to demonstrate the gaps in this collage of pieces—fissures that keep the music teetering precariously between predictability and contingency. However, it is at the close of the musette that the inert tonal juxtapo­ sition becomes the focus of formal disintegration. Three segments, total­ ly alienated from one another, are forced into collision, but their juxta­ position merely underlines the impossibility of interaction and resolution (Ex. 4.22). In themselves, these fragments are autonomous, each tonally closed, cultivating their own distinct motivic and gestural habitat. Each coheres within itself—one a linear structure in the tonic, another a C It minor melody, and finally a non-linear texture decorating a triad—but they cannot adhere to one another. There is simply no reaction; it is a hyphenated structure, and the fact that the fragments follow each other is perfectly accidental (so to speak). Against the grain of Classical proce­ dures, the parts do not add up to the whole. Thus the movement is built, internally and externally, out of diverse blocks which hold each other up in a precarious symmetry, seriously destabilized by the Ci minor intrusion at an asymmetrical point in the structure (Ex. 4.20). Smoothly layered over these blocks, the monoto­ nous motivic surface acts as a faςade of integration, creating a dialectic between a conjunct surface and a disjunct structure. Beethoven ironizes by inverting the dialectics of the first movement; a surface of seamless motivic logic is set out of joint by tonal disturbances. Beneath the appearances of normality and naivety there is, quite literally, an under­ lying disorder which twists innocence into irony. But even the pretence of cohesion on the surface is disturbing in the way it measures time. In contrast to Beethoven's motivic procedures, the material of this movement is inorganic and cannot propel the time struc­ tures forward from within. What is disconcertingly odd is the deliberate

Ex. 4.22. Op. 132, second movement—juxtaposed blocks

Ex. 4.22. (continued)

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

137

monotony produced through an endless recycling of the same material, resulting in a kind of "non-developmental sameness" —a motivic stasis where development is more a matter of texture than motif. To borrow another of Adorno's terms, time is no longer processive but circular, trapped in an irrational futility of repetition. It is because the music is caught precariously between a sense of shattered tonality and one of endless circularity (non-linearity) that it conjures a sense of monotony; time passes linearly, but tediously, for everything that measures it is the same. It is hardly surprising that some critics accuse Beethoven of composing "weariness induced by mechanical monotony," offering skill as a lame substitute for zest. But neither should this monotony be aestheticized by simply pointing out the "range of variety that counteracts the thematic single-mindedness with brilliance to spare." Perhaps this weariness is a deliberate part of the critique. Beethoven does not just invoke the social habit of the eighteenth century but also structures into the score the affectation of boredom that became astonishingly prevalent at the time. Indeed, the monotony is an essential function of the critique and generates the rhythmic ambiguities so vital to this movement. Structuring boredom, of course, is not the same as being boring—the one merely signifies the other. The boredom of things "brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity" masks the fear of circular futility, and the eighteenth-century Sublime is (at least according to Wieskel) a concentration of this melancholy, a traumatic anxiety of terror which momentarily releases the unease by pushing it to breaking point. This is precisely the mechanism in the musette: the recycling of countrified cliches (bars 141-205) induces an unease of uniformity which is suddenly ruptured by a tonal and emotional contrast; the Cl minor intrusion, in concentrating anxiety in the terror of its expression, shatters boredom into the fear of the ungraspable and so diffuses the monotony. It turns the mundane into the unattainable, the familiar into the Sublime, by diverting attention from the actual substance to the disjunct relationship between elements—in other words, a concentration on the lacunae. This sublime moment of interruption deliberately destroys what would have been a perfectly symmetrical structure—architecturally, tonally, and thematicalIy—and so turns the possibility of unity into disunity. Thus boredom and sublimity inhere within each other as an unwholly alliance, producing a peculiar kind of resolution in a tonal structure where disjunction makes resolution difficult. To resolve through the Sublime is a kind of oxymoron, for the Sublime resolves through nonresolution; it hallows disunity and destroys what Adorno calls the

138

CHAPTER FOUR

"repressive equality" of the Enlightenment in which abstract systems of unity create uniformity and monotony. Once again Beethoven turns the second movement into a negative image of the first, this time by reversing the psychology of juxtaposition—in one disunity confounds, in the other it resolves. In the first movement, tonality presses forward powerfully and smashes suddenly into a juxtaposed block, bringing resolution into crisis; in the second movement, however, crisis is turned into resolution; the endless circularity of material dissipates linear energy and teases out a frustration to be resolved by a moment of stark juxtaposition. The anti-organic structure of the second movement, seemingly inconsequential when compared to the first, is in fact highly significant; indeed, it is the beginning of a process in which the ideas of the minuet and musette are taken to extremes in the rest of the quartet.

IV The Heiliger Dankgesang, for example, has neither the pretence of a coherent surface nor the uniformity of tonality; indeed, tonality itself is merely an option—at least, according to the text scribbled above the piece, this movement begins in the Lydian mode. Time unfolds backwards from the eighteenth-century Rococo to the archaic mysticism of an idealized past, in line with the veneration of medieval Christianity promulgated by the Schlegel brothers, the Nazarene painters, and the sacred landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Beethoven's resurrection of church modes and plainchant evokes a remote ritual in which time no longer ticks with the purposeful linearity of 1825 but is made static and amorphous. The linear dynamics of tonality are not even stratified, as in the minuet and musette; instead they are undermined by an attempt at modality, a system which cannot articulate those ineluctable, arching structures of Beethoven that fashion the minutest element into the form of the whole. In this prayer, Beethoven takes pains to wipe out his own technique along with tonality. Yet, paradoxically, tonality is so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it cannot be erased. The denial of Bl> in this Lydian exercise actually aggravates a lurking tonality. There is a kind of impossibility about the hymn: as soon as B^ is touched (bar 5) the connotations of C major are caught up in the Lydian mode. In this dualism which tugs the music in different directions, the Heiliger Dankgesang can but drift

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

41

among the interstices of tonality and modality, evoking a vague plagal relationship—that most religious of cadences. Functionally, F is no longer the gravitational centre and can define the Lydian mode only by assertion, becoming an arbitrary, juxtaposed 'tonic.' Take the final cadence into the Lydian mode in bar 202 (Ex. 4.23). Functionally, it Ex. 4.23. Op. 132, third movement—tonal-modal conflict

F major: V — I?

140

CHAPTER FOUR

works backwards, for the C major chord that precedes the F major triad is not a dominant but a tonic, and the F major chord is not a tonic but a subdominant. It is a kind of retrograde plagal cadence, in which the function of the chords as isolated structures and their function in rela­ tion to each other are as alienated as are the tonal-modal dialectics of this movement. As a result, the cadence does not bridge the harmonic connection but breaks it, and the Lydian coda (bars 202-211) is not functional but is a contingent assertion of the 'tonic' The coda ends (remarks Vincent d'Indy) "with a cadence on the dominant." Moreover, the sense of indeterminacy is intensified by the cantus firmus—the linear Lydian element that controls the harmonic motion of the form. At times, its Lydian structure strives against the harmonic motion to produce a sense of arbitrary progression. For instance, in bars 20-24 the music moves in C major harmonically, yet melodically it pushes towards the Lydian 'tonic,' creating a misfit between linear and vertical logic (Ex. 4.24). And unlike the motto-motif in the first movement, this

Ex. 4.24. Op. 132, third movement—linear-vertical conflict 20

cantus firmus (Lydian)

3

Γ

Γ

cresc.

4—iT rv

T V

tonal harmony: C major

I

IV

Γ

rv

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

141

plainchant is not a unifying scaffold which is structured from the same motivic elements, but threads through the form in an abstract, unpredictable manner. With little thematic, melodic, or 'tonal' cohesion, it simply meanders, pulling the harmony with it, to create five segments in the form—but there could have been any number of segments, since the process is infinitely extendible, involving a string of non-implicative phrases. Thus, ironically, as a linear structure the cantus firmus, broken into segments that do not even connect, cannot fashion time linearly. Moreover, for the opening Adagio Beethoven has denied himself all dissonances (save the occasional V ) so that even the technique of rhythmic movement in modal polyphony is disabled; time is unable to press forward, except with a modicum of motion as slow as the tempo itself: the music moves myopically from minim to minim. In order to articulate the larger rhythmic structure within what Kerman calls a "monumental flatness," time is measured out by the regular oscillation of polyphonic and homophonic textures, with a swing of the pendulum every six bars (see bars 1-30). Contrast this with the Andante—"Neue Kraft fiihlend." This new power is one of tonal dynamics, obliterating the C-F ambiguity by sharpening the would-be tonics in the new key signature to usher in the arrival of D major (bar 31). With the transitional A major chord (bar 30), the application of musica ficta creates a surge of energy as tonal function pushes the music away from the vagaries of modality to the "neue Kraft" of tonality. And this is not the shattered tonality of the minuet and musette, but an ineluctable, goal-directed linearity in which symmetrical, periodic structures imply each other. It is a Schenkerian delight; founded on tonic-dominant articulations, the music unfolds in smooth linear sequences, progressing towards cadences, yet with the tonic constantly deferred to render time forward-pressing and determinate (Ex. 4.25). In this way time, determinate and indeterminate, is held in tension; unable to fuse, it fissures, leaving modality and tonality to repel each other into their own autonomous structures. Contingency is set against continuity, frugality against floridity, duple against triple time, Adagio against Andante, prayer against power; and the entire form is in danger of folding in upon itself and collapsing under the pressure of opposites. With continuity fragmented, time transposes into space, and the work is perceived as "an assemblage of elements, each with its separate meaning, all arranged in a fixed pattern, to establish a total significance" after its

142

CHAPTER FOUR

Ex. 4.25. Op. 132, third movement—Schenker graph of bars 31-82 bar

31

40

Λ

Λ

3

2

67

71

46 57

62 3prg.

77

81

closure. As tonality can no longer unify or fashion the movement into a whole, the piece relies on the symmetrical juxtaposition of blocks to keep the recalcitrant elements in an antagonistic equilibrium. Thus sim­ ple architectonics replace a complex tonal dynamic to make contingency coherent and diversity stable (Ex. 4.26). But such a symmetrical arrange­ ment of blocks 'in space' is an utterly static form of coherence hitherto unknown in Beethovenian structures. And the seriousness of this struc­ tural stasis, with the demise of tonal unity, is underlined as Beethoven employs secondary parameters as a substitute for a lost linearity. For example, with each recurrence of the hymn the texture becomes increas-

143

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

Ex. 4.26. Op. 132, third movement—symmetrical structure of contrast

juxtaposed blocks:

A1 Lydian

mode:

bars 1-30 variation HOMOPHONY process:

B D major

I

I I

I : ;

A,

B

A

Lydian

D major;

Lydian

bars 84-104

bars 168-221

POLYPHONY

POLYPHONY

ingly elaborate, the dissonances more intense; the homophonic framework gradually loosens into polyphony until the contrast between the chordal and imitative segments is absorbed into a seamless texture. These parameters, then, of dissonance and texture are the linear markers of time within the static structure. Nonetheless, such surrogate linearity cannot compensate for the fracturing of time into different states. If time congeals into autonomous objects in space, then music has to be organized spatially, according to juxtapositions and proportions, rather than temporally, according to the linear energy of tonality. Time here becomes a matter of proportions, as is clear from the start of the movement, when it is regulated by blocks of alternating homophony and polyphony, to evoke a rhythmic pattern within an indeterminate time structure. Yet despite the regularity of this pattern, proportionally the hymn is very strange. Writing in a language without the Classical balance of phrases created out of tonal implication, Beethoven finds himself in an amorphous syntax in which symmetry is meaningless; proportion, if it is to create tension or motion, has to be asymmetrical—at least this is the psychology behind the ancient geometrical concept of the golden section (1:0.62 or 1.62:1). This point of maximal tension is apparently endemic both in the natural world and in structures forged by the human intellect, and has been found in such diverse elements as Greek pots, pineapple peels, subatomic particles, and the music of Bartok. And the Fibonacci series (an infinite series in which each number is the sum of the two immediately preceding numbers—a+b=c, b+c=d, d+e=f, etc.), in which the ratio of adjacent terms approaches asymptotically towards the golden section (Ex. 4.27), is a system of asymmetry often employed in .

music.

55

144

CHAPTER FOUR

Ex. 4.27. Golden section and Fibonacci series Golden section ι

G.S. 0.38 I y

0.62 χ

2- = 1 + * = 0.62

ι

X

X

I

1

G.S.

y 1.62

J

χ +y = χ =

Jl =

total length (1) arger subdivision (0.62) smaller subdivision (0.38]

Fibonacci series

2

1 : 2 13 21 34 55 89 etc. 1 + 2 = 0.5 2-5-3 = 0.667 3 - 5 + 0.6

5+8 = 0 8 + 13 = 0.615 13 t- 21 = 0.619

approximates to golden section (0.62) To structure music according to such a series is to counteract the very symmetry of Classical structure and the dynamics of its tonality. And it is precisely in the modal contrast to the D major section that such pro­ portions are at work, articulating structure and time. Internally, the Lydian hymn is measured by an alternation of contrasting two- and fourbar units—an irregular proportion in the ratio of 1:2. These irregular patterns gather into five segments, which divide asymmetrically at the point of climax in the ratio of 18 bars to 12, that is 3:2, with the initial 18-bar unit subdivided in bar 12 where the canonic entries invert, demarcating a ratio of 12 bars to 6, that is 2:1 (Ex. 4.28). Thus time is measured out according to the Fibonacci series in a method analogous to the motivic expansion in other movements, in which structures nestle within one another. Contrast, in the form of tonality, apparently shuts off the archaic world of geometry and ushers in the linear structures of the nineteenth century. But this very contrast arouses suspicion, for it is a peculiar but

145

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

Ex. 4.28. Op. 132, third movement Fibonacci proportions of the opening hymn I

2 ' 1 : 2

1 • 2

1 " l : 2

ι

I

1 • 2

I

1 hony

barl

1 •

2

,

t

climax

homophony polyp

I

-

inversion of entries 30

18

verifiable fact that the organization of bipolar opposites in human judge­ ment tends to approximate to this golden ratio in order to make contrast maximally striking. The Heiliger Dankgesang is certainly made up of bipolar opposites, bringing sickness and health into contrast. The oppo­ sition in this movement between tonal and modal domains is not some random fissure of time but is an expression of proportion. The periodic structures that mark the time, although different in kind in the contrast­ ing sections, find themselves articulating Fibonacci relationships; the five segments of modality are set against three segments of tonality made up of symmetrical 16- and 20-bar periods. (In fact, one modal segment is exactly the same length as one 16-bar tonal period in absolute terms— 48 quavers—if one assumes a constant quaver pulse.) So in terms of periodic articulation the Adagio and the Andante are in the Fibonacci proportion of 5:3 (Ex. 4.29). Ex. 4.29. Op. 132, third movement—Fibonacci proportions between the Adagio and the Andante Andante 3 periods

Adagio 5 units 6 bars

16 bars

= 48 h

20

16

146

CHAPTER FOUR

In this manner, the oscillation between modality and tonality articu­ lates proportions calculated to heighten opposition and tension. Perhaps such asymmetry, given the collapse of tonality, was created to provide a 'dynamic' of proportion, a 'spatial' rhythm of contrast that counterbal­ ances the symmetrical stasis of the architecture. But there is also some­ thing profound about this process. Between the immiscible elements of tonality and modality, the impossibility of unity and synthesis is resolved by a peculiar form of proportional asymmetry, providing a dialectical rationality that is truly one of ratio. There is something about "the total quality of form," writes Kerman (unable to define this something), "something about the set of the contrasting sections" that goes deeper than a mere description of details, "something almost preternaturally aloof and timeless." Perhaps this mystical "something" is as aloof and timeless as an ancient proportion. The final Adagio that closes the Heiliger Dankgesang is different from the other segments of this movement and so halts the see-sawing of con­ trasts and proportions. It is not a variation of the Lydian hymn but a contrapuntal reworking of its initial phrase against an imitative frag­ ment, which weaves a seamless texture. The synthesis of the imitative-chordal contrast that articulated the proportions of the hymn does not so much obscure the Fibonacci patterns as structure the music into larger and more irregular segments: extreme asymmetry closes the form. But the issue here is one not primarily of proportion but of punc­ tuation. How can this piece possibly end? Beethoven has cornered him­ self in a process that is interminable. Proportionally, the greater length of the final section tips the balance to ground the structure; but harmoni­ cally, it is debatable whether the movement finishes at all. How can the keylessness of a structure that vacillates between a Lydian pretence and a quasi-tonality find a 'tonic'? If the hymn lies somewhere in between modality and tonality, then the process is asymptotic and cannot come to a close but will go on for infinity. This is why the previous Adagios never ended but were deflected into the tonality of D major. The hymn is caught between a C major and a Lydian mode, between closure and infinity; it imposes an archaic technique, exhumed from Zarlino and Glarean, upon contemporary ears fashioned by tonality. Why else is that rubric imposed upon the score—in der lydischen Tonart} Surely, the Lydian mode has little to do with metaphysics or autobiography. The text is there to keep the music in the right mode, in the face of the very impossibility of doing so. "NB," wrote Beethoven in the original score, "this piece always has ΒΊ instead of Bl>"—as if to remind himself of the

147

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

impossibility of his task. Without Bl> there is no subdominant or dom­ inant seventh to confirm the mode on F, and, paradoxically, the moment the defining pitch of the Lydian mode—B natural—is touched, the music will slide irreparably into C major with no hope of escape. The words say what the music is powerless to explain; to listen to it in F major—as Schenker insists —is to miss the point, for the programme compels the listener out of tonality into an atavistic system which can only be a pre­ tence, and so forces the listener into a contradiction between opposed systems. The signifier and the signified dislocate. Perhaps the simplest way of demonstrating this dislocation is to sub­ ject this hymn to Schenkerian scrutiny (Ex. 4.30). Of course, Schenkerian Ex. 4.30. Op. 132, third movement—Schenker graph of bars 1-31 bar

1

6

12

18

24 C major

30

Λ

Λ

Λ

Λ

5

5

5

4

3

'

148

CHAPTER FOUR

theory cannot really function in this ambiguous harmonic environment, but what is significant about the graph is the sheer impossibility of the Urlinie descending to the Lydian 'tonic,' because F is always unstable, undermined harmonically so that it constantly slips beyond itself and its mode, becoming an appoggiatura to E, a mere passing note in C major— a very peculiar 'tonic' indeed. In fact, as the Lydian hymn unfolds, C major seems to be establishing its own 'counter- Urlinie,'' with an ineluctability that disarms the authority of the Lydian mode. It is only the extraordinary twist into D major that stops the Urlinie from com­ pleting itself and keeps C major from taking over the form. But what is only potential in the opening is made real at the close. The tension between modality and tonality is tightened in the final section as C major finally completes its Urlinie, closing the form and leaving the Lydian mode merely to make irrational assertions against it (see Ex. 4.23). The process of this last Adagio embodies a struggle akin to sonata form, except that the dialectic is not between keys but between systems, and the collision of contrast is not successive but simultaneous. In fact, the struggle here is purely contrapuntal. When Beethoven took the initial phrase of the chant as an imitative point, he did not set the entries at the fifth (F and C) simply out of deference to the past; rather, he took the tra­ ditional rotation of entries, which sonata form had separated into con­ flicting tonal domains, and imbued it with the same sense of struggle to accentuate the gulf between an F modality and a C tonality. This is accomplished through a process of contrapuntal destruction— a disabling of the very laws of counterpoint to expose the irreconcilabil­ ity of the two systems. Beethoven isolates the initial phrase of the hymn, which is a fragment sculptured to define its tonic, particularly with the emphatic cadential punctuation that closes it (Ex. 4.31). Indeed, Ex. 4.31. Op. 132, third movement—opening phrase 1

ν

M fiTS VUJ

r.

r.

«1

r.

A

cadential punctuation

Beethoven exploits this cadential flourish to force the opposing systems into conflict. Employing the 'head and tail' technique, the counterpoint begins with only the initial five notes of the phrase and becomes increas­ ingly antagonistic as the phrase extends to complete itself, climaxing

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

132

with the arrival of the cadential flourishes, set at loggerheads against each other (Ex. 4.32). It is precisely at the apogee of the form, with the

Ex. 4.32. Op. 132, third movement— contrapuntal development of the opening phrase

full statements of the phrase moving in canon at the fifth, that the struggle between F and C is pressed to the extreme, with the cadential articulations rubbing against each other (bars 188-193). It is actually a moment of aporia, because the imitative technique breaks down; the canon simply does not work: it is utterly wrong, producing an awkward

150

CHAPTER FOUR

and astringent harmony that flouts almost every law of counterpoint laid down from Fux to Albrechtsberger (Ex. 4.33). The canon is forced into Ex. 4.33. Op. 132, third movement—harmonic outline of bars 188-193

r

consecutive nsecutive octaves 188

J J i J

m

J JJ

J F should resolve to E

J ί

J J

ψ

ψ j

j

r r τ f FF

LA

FF

unprepared 4 resolves on dissonance

such dissonance and recalcitrance that the voices repel rather than com­ plement each other, emphasizing a linearity that amounts to a kind of 'bimodaP separation. With the mechanisms of two systems grinding away at each other, breakdown is inevitable, not only in the polyphonic tech­ nique but in the fracturing of the Lydian mode, as tonality eventually suppresses it with its unrelenting functionalism. The cadence in F, emphatically articulated in the upper voice (bars 190-191), tries to crown the form by completing the phrase for the first time. But the skewed counterpoint of the lower voices insists on contradicting this Lydian climax, asserting a cadence in C major and rendering F unstable in a precarious 6-4 progression (bar 191). Thus, as in the other Adagios, the Lydian 'tonic' becomes a mere appoggiatura at the point of climax, an auxiliary pitch that serves to articulate C major. At the golden section of the form (bar 194), after the antagonism between systems, only C major is left to finish the movement. The Urlinie falls, the tensions resolve, the music retards with a host of cadences as the 'tail' of the phrase punctuates the close. By bar 201, the movement has ended in C major—Marliave, in fact, regards the Adagio as being in C major. In Schenkerian terms, what follows this is 'coda,' which ought to be a "reinforcement of the close." But of course, according to the script the

151

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

piece is supposed to be "in der lydischen Tonart," and the coda does not "reinforce the close" but simply asserts an F major triad, which in the Schenkerian background is only half of a plagal cadence (Ex. 4.34).

Ex. 4.34. Op. 132, third movement—Schenker graph of bars 196-211 bar 196

I

197 199

V

I

202

V

1

207

211

IV

Does the piece end? The timelessness so keenly felt by Kerman, Radcliffe, and Bloch is quite literally reflected in the technique of indeterminacy, in a counterpoint that goes on for infinity and cannot close. Somehow the piece stops, 'floating' rather than grounded on an F major triad. It ends, according to the text, in the Lydian mode; yet according to the score, the final triad hangs precariously and needs to resolve. But to what? In the previous Adagios, F resolved down to E, and C was sharpened to conjure a sudden A major resolution that deflected the music towards D major; the music did not end, for it could not, so it veered away from the issue. What happens at the close of the whole movement is exactly the same. The F major sonority spills over the double bar into the march, to resolve itself in A major, as an expanded repetition of the harmonic twist that lifted the prayer out of modal ambiguity and into the power of tonality. "When the final chord topples over into the fourth movement, there is simultaneously a harmonic fusion and an emotional repulsion, as the march lifts the music back into the imperturbable world of the minuet and the musette. Thus the Heiliger Dankgesang does not quite end: it simply starts the cycle of deflection off again, with the same contrast, except that the neue Kraft is now a military one.

152

CHAPTER FOUR

V Without doubt, the Heiliger Dankgesang is one of the strangest and most outrageous of Beethoven's creations; the indeterminacy of its time structures, the asymmetry of its proportions, the inability to synthesize contrast, the impotence of tonality all make this work the absolute negation of all Classical procedures. Some early critics found this too much to handle, and they seriously wondered "whether the master was quite yet restored to health" in this song of convalescence. Beethoven's radical inversion of his own procedures is not simply an obliteration of his language for its own sake but is actually directed against the first movement, as a negative imprint of it in the narrative structure of the work. Although one need not invoke visions of Beethoven languishing in bed, screaming and moaning, in the first movement, then piously praying and feeling much better on the whole in the third, the programmatic elements cannot be denied; the verbal intrusion—Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart—is inserted to accentuate this radical reversal from the dissonant drama of the first movement to the prayer of peace. And this narrative strategy has concrete manifestations; crowning the centre of the quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang is the point furthest removed from the opening, tonally, modally, and emotionally. For example, the intense chromaticism of the first movement inverts into its very opposite—white-note diatonicism; A minor becomes the Lydian mode just as pain becomes thanksgiving. But it is in the details of the themes and background structures that this narrative design is most telling. To underline the absolute contrast between the initial and central movements, the motto-motif itself is transformed into its opposite, so that thematically the movements are related negatively precisely by being not the same as each other. Thus the allusion at the start of the Heiliger Dankgesang to the polyphony which began the quartet is, paradoxically, both obvious and obscure. The mysterious texture of close imitation that prefaced the work is transformed, as its crabbed chromaticism opens out into the 'whole-tone' quality of the Lydian mode; in this manner, the motif of the first movement becomes estranged in the hymn, metrically by dislocation and modally through a Lydian grid, so that the accents are displaced by a beat, and the contour is deformed as minor intervals are stretched to major ones, converting the motif into its negative image, hardly recognizable from the original (Ex. 4.35).67

153

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

Ex. 4.35. Op. 132— motivic relationship between the first and third movements first movement

third movement

$ But the negative affinity between these opposing movements also lies at a deeper structural level, for the cadential design of the Heiliger Dankgesang imitates the tonal strategy of the initial movement, taking the motif as the underlying pattern. Like the motivic reference, however, this structural identity is transformed through the Lydian mode into a reverse replica of the original, making the minor intervals major, the major sonorities minor, and the minor sonorities major, so that the connection is one of disconnection and the resemblance one of opposites (Ex. 4.36). Ex. 4.36. Op. 132— harmonic relationship between the first and third movements bar tonal design: first movement

1

111

159

193

major

A minor

^ A minor

bar harmonic nodes: third movement

48

1

-». F major

F E C major minor

6

~ D minor

8/12

14

18

24

«

~

C A G F major minor major

30 in}

major

A major

As a negation of the first movement, the Heiliger Dankgesang is the pivotal moment of contrast in the structure of the work, and the return

154

CHAPTER FOUR

from this point back through the march and into the finale clearly artic­ ulates a palindromic pattern in the ordering of the movements. This is not particularly surprising, as the employment of spatial symmetry in the musette and the Heiliger Dankgesang was essential to keep the hetero­ geneity of time in some kind of order. Thus, with the extremity of con­ tradictions and negations in this quartet stratifying time and alienating structures, the movements themselves have to be fashioned into a sym­ metry of contrast to keep the antagonistic elements that make up the work in equilibrium. And it is apt that the five-part segmented pattern of the Heiliger Dankgesang itself should crown the arch of the form as a microcosm of it (Ex. 4.37). But such a simplistic conceptualization of the Ex. 4.37. Op. 132—symmetrical structure of contrasting movements I

Π

•

in

XT

Heiliger Dankgesang

IV

•

m a r c h and recitative

minuet and musette

sonata form SIGN: TONALITY:

instrumental A minor

EXPRESSION: individual I

V

sonata-rondo dance A major

religious Lydian/ D major

dance A major

instrumental A minor

institutional

individual

institutional

individual

I

I

I

ι

I

I

structure is rendered untenable in the same way that the symmetry of the musette self-destructs in a moment of aporia. For the static, spatial framework is set against a linear momentum as the movements increas­ ingly spill over into one another, with the instability of the Heiliger Dankgesang collapsing into the march and the march breaking down into a recitative that fuses with the finale. Even as the music constructs its architectonic symmetry, there is simultaneously a breakdown of struc­ ture with the accumulation of movements; tonality becomes more con­ tingent, contrast more irreconcilable, and the autonomy of immiscible movements more precarious, until the music finally dismantles itself in the fourth movement, shattering any unifying visions of the quartet as a whole. For whereas in the second and third movements the stark con-

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

155

trasts were kept in a symmetrical structure to balance the diverse forces, in the fourth movement the antithetical elements are fused together without symmetry; the movement can hardly be regarded as a whole movement; it breaks into two pieces—one self-contained, the other transitional. The fissure of non-response that divided the movements is actually displaced, striking at the centre of the fourth movement, driving the march and the recitative into a moment of aporia. Unable to maintain its autonomy, internally and externally, this movement becomes a minute fragment among the massive structures of the other movements. But more poignantly, as it spills into the finale it is unable to parallel the threefold structure of the minuet and musette in the symmetrical design, and so the palindromic arch of the work is crippled at the critical point of return. The spatial symmetry and the temporal breakdown exist simultaneously so that neither can function exclusively. Once again, unity and disunity turn the quartet into a structure that does not quite work. The diverse movements of individual and institutional signs are faced with the impossibility of synthesis and wholeness. Such negative structures, in Adorno's view, make a work like the A minor Quartet into 'authentic art,' with society etched upon the score. "By exposing some irreconcilable dichotomy within itself, Beethoven's late music could call attention to the concurrent external disintegration of human integrity, to the enslaving, dehumanizing compartmentalization forced upon man by „68

society. To interpret this impossibility of wholeness as some hard-hitting protest against bourgeois society is to read the A minor Quartet as a kind of historical document. And although social content can be extracted from the score, Adorno stresses that the message is encoded internally within the musical material itself; this is music about music, in which the expressive and formal elements reflect and generate each other to mould the structure of the work. Indeed, the palindrome is cracked not simply because society was 'disintegrating' but because it deliberately mirrors the splintered expressions presented at the very start of the quartet. In other words, what breaks the palindrome is not the external world but the internal workings of the music; they activate a creative chaos in the same way that the motivic logic of the first movement overreaches itself to the point of irrationality. By forcing logic to confront its opposite, Beethoven creates a contradiction between spatial and temporal structures, for the broken palindrome is logical both in its symmetry and in its disintegration: wholeness and brokenness destroy each other. Symmetrically, the arch structure

156

CHAPTER FOUR

links the outer movements together so that they frame the heterogeneity of the work. But this logic of symmetry is destroyed by a temporal logic that attempts to demonstrate how the brokenness of time is merely a microcosmic reflection of a larger structure in which the outer movements are linked not vaguely, through symmetry, but concretely, through a linear narrative of signs and themes. For example, it is apt that the harmonic framework for the palindromic breakdown is a vast motivic expansion of the F-E relationship that motivated the thematic, harmonic, and structural elements of the first movement. What is apt about the motion is not so much its motivic significance as its destructive associations. From the very start, this motivic cell had been the harbinger of disintegration, straddling every contrast found on the opening page; it connects in the background and yet is split apart on the surface, conjuring unity and disunity at the same time (see Ex. 3.1: bars 8-9, 10-11, 18, 20-21, 23-24). When the motif expands to create the harmonic shape of the second group (F major) and the dominant recapitulation (E minor), what should disconnect them but the aporia of the development section—the very fissure that had destroyed the continuity of the form? So perhaps it is no real surprise that this F-E gesture should ripple outwards to fill the whole quartet in order to articulate the breakdown of the palindrome; the collapse of that Lydian tonic into the march and the merging of the fourth movement into the finale is actually a giant reflection of the harmonic fusion and expressive repulsion between the elements that characterized the start of the quartet (Ex. 4.38).

Ex. 4.38. Op. 132—F-E motivic background in the structure of the work

movement:

symmetry

And just in case this connection should be missed, the harmonic reflection is paralleled by a semiotic expansion in which the atomistic gestures of the opening are 'blown up' into whole movements. Perhaps 'whole'

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

157

is somewhat of an exaggeration, as these movements are giant fragments of the original ones—disruptive, open-ended, and forced into collision. The different signs in the exposition are thus the signs for the last three movements, placed in the same fragmented order—the polyphony, the march (bars 11-20), the recitative (bars 21-22), the aria (bars 48-56). 6 ' And as if to underline the point, these movements quite literally take up the themes that constituted the original signs; the polyphony of the Heiliger Dankgesang transforms the opening polyphony through a Lydian grid (see Ex. 4.35); the march of the fourth movement parodies the rhythmic and melodic contours of the marchlike theme of the initial movement (Ex. 4.39a); and the recitative that interrupted this theme with its operatic flourish is expanded to cut the fourth movement in half (Ex. 4.39b). And all the while, the motto-motif is transforming itself Ex. 4.39. Op. 132—thematic parallels between the movements (a) first movement 23

m

J"

J^*

fourth movement

1

i

*£==

3 ^

? r IP

7

P

f

(b) first movement

Allegro

pp cresc. fourth movement

f

dim.

Presto , /T\ 40

ISA&

smorzando

1S8

CHAPTER

FOUR

from its negation in the central movement back into its semitonal shape, arising almost inconspicuously from the cadential cliches in the Alia marcia and clad in that jouissance gesture of the first movement (Ex. 4.40). Ex. 4.40. Op. 132—motto motif in the fourth movement jouissance (motto) motif

With all these echoes of the start, the cyclical implications become clear. The music is returning to its origins, and this is made explicit in the recitative which traces out the spiralling gesture that had ushered in the very first theme (bars 10-12); obviously the same spiralling curtain has risen, implying that the theme of the last movement shall be a reincarnation of the first in the guise of an aria (Ex. 4.41). And, just to make it Ex. 4.41. Op. 132— thematic connections between the opening themes of the outer movements Op. 132, first movement

159

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

blatantly obvious, Beethoven not only injects the semitonal cells of the motto-motif into the accompaniment but prefaces the returns of the theme with a scuttling descent (bars 82-90/244-280), which fuses the motivic texture of the opening polyphony with that spiralling gesture so that the finale parallels the ideas of the first movement (Ex. 4.42). Ex. 4.42. Op. 132, fifth movement—bars 82-90 motto

*y ^f dim..

ΤΊ

r

ί ±A Γ Γ

piit ρ

1

Γ-ΓΊ

M

TΓ

F3PfT PP

1 U Jd

IS

r "r r ν"

ν

ΓΤτ-

Γ Γ Γ

ί^ ΓΤΤ

-J J . — > J = 4

ψ^ψ

Γ^Τ

ΤΎ=Ύ

recapitulation

^ P

m

Similarly, the codas reflect each other; the grating F-E oscillations of the first movement (bars 254ff) gradually resolve in the finale as it acceler­ ates into A major (bars 271-298), neutralizing the semitonal sigh with Fls (bars 339-344/388-393). Thus what happens in the last three movements of the work is noth­ ing less than an expansion of the first 30 bars of the quartet into 661 bars; the fusion of the movements and the fissures in their contrast trace exactly the same semiotic, harmonic, thematic, and gestural patterns pre­ sented at the beginning. As with Op. 127, the opening pages of the A

160

CHAPTER FOUR

minor Quartet are violently peculiar in order to draw attention to the Gedanke of the work, as Schoenberg might say; this all-pervasive idea is not simply a motif, as is often thought, but a complex of contrasting and ever-changing signs and themes which actuate the music to fill out the entire form. Thus the broken palindrome is structural in its brokenness, generated by the extraordinary events in the first exposition. The logic is there, but it is one founded on such a series of irrational gestures that the smooth, rational unfolding of Enlightenment thought is brought into crisis. The all-embracing coherence becomes one of incoherence; the details of disunity at the start also destroy the superstructure at the end. Ultimately, this has to be the conclusion concerning a quartet which, more than any of Beethoven's other late works, blatantly conjures up social and individual signs and forces them into contradiction and unwholeness. Quite deliberately, the quartet does not 'work' and does not quite connect: signifiers dislocate from the signifieds, appearances are merely disguises, rhythm becomes disruptive and time fragmented, structures are left incomplete, and apogees become aporiae. From the details of the work to the overall design, spatial symmetry and temporal linearity undo each other when they are not undoing themselves. For minds shaped by the Enlightenment, what is particularly disconcerting about the work is the way it negates Enlightenment thinking itself. Beethoven clearly manipulates the Enlightenment heritage handed down to him by Haydn and Mozart, even to the point of 'innocent' imitation. But he creates this world in order to cancel it in a devastating critique which pushes the old procedures to the forefront of consciousness. Far from obliterating the 'Classical style,' the destruction and distortion of the Classical language ensure its very presence, as exemplified in this and almost every other analysis of the late works, in which an ideal is posited only to be negated by the actual piece: the first movement is in sonata form except that it is not properly in sonata form; the minuet and musette employ Classical tonality except that they shatter it; the Heiliger Dankgesang is tonal except that it is also in the Lydian mode; the march is four-square except that it is internally asymmetrical. Having drawn us musically into an Enlightened mode of thinking, Beethoven smashes it at its very heart. Fundamentally, what is at issue is the destruction of two basic concepts of meaning in the Enlightenment, concepts embodied in the conflicting structures of the whole quartet—spatial symmetry and temporal causality. These unifying processes were ways of giving meaning without recourse to the metaphysics and theology of pre-Enlightened times, so that man could be freed from superstition (the great taboo of

RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE (OP. 132)

161

the Enlightenment); and, significantly, the rise of abstract instrumental music, particularly at the hands of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, is an expression of such meaningful structures that generate themselves through symmetry and causality. Of these two, causality is particularly important, seeing that after all music is a temporal process, and to do without it or to tamper with its mechanics is to cause serious difficulties for the unifying systems of the Enlightened mind. This is precisely what happens in Op. 132. "On an intellectual level," writes Kerman, "one feels a compulsion to argue for the integrity of the A minor quartet. The contrast within its movements and sections are on the face of it so wild that some effect of disparity might surely be anticipated. But in point of fact the whole work has scarcely ever failed to impress listeners or crit„75

ics as a convincing unity. But the unity that Kerman speaks of here is really a psychological one, which in any case he admits is "inchoate," for in this quartet there is no psychological linear progression, as embodied in such archetypal works as the Fifth Symphony in which struggle leads to victory. Rather, causality—the Enlightenment quantification of chronology, enshrined in nineteenth-century realism as a system of meaning, and still regarded as one in analysis today—is itself seriously damaged in the A minor Quartet, as historical epochs are juxtaposed and tonal forces are shattered. Nothing really follows anything logically; everything contrasts through non-response and non-reaction, and effects are apparently without cause. This cancellation of causality is tantamount to the cancellation of Charles Rosen's "Classical style"; simply delve into his book to discover how causality orders time and gives analytical meaning through the generation of tonal, motivic, and dramatic elements, from Haydn's quartets to the Hammerklavier. But this breakdown of causality is actually created by causality itself: by using the initial irrationality as the structural motivation of the work, Beethoven forces this concept into a contradiction. And it is the height of irony that the ultimate expression of causality, in that expansion of the opening gestures into an irrational sequence of movements, smashes this very concept by turning it upon itself. By destroying it, the quartet 'demythologizes' the Enlightenment myth of unity, wholeness, and abstract systems and so becomes a 'difficult' work to understand, goading critics to explain it as something senile, spiritual, or arcanely structural. At first it was madness; then with the deification of Beethoven in the nineteenth century the ungraspable nature of these quartets took on a spiritual aura, read off as some autobiographical or metaphysical styl-

162

CHAPTER FOUR

ization of reality. With the deification of structure in the twentieth century, dazzling abstractions, formal virtuosity, and contrapuntal intricacies were excavated from the scores. But neither structural nor metaphysical interpretations seem satisfactory, as they lead to half-truths or untruths. Metaphysics seems too speculative, and the remains of Enlightenment thinking in analysis, unable to grasp the heterogeneity or fashion the diversity into a unified system, cannot imbue the structure of the quartet with the type of meaning that depends on causality. The "compulsion to argue for the integrity of the A minor quartet," without resort to psychology or metaphysics, requires another mode of thinking in which fissures and contrasts are of the essence—hence the emphasis in this analysis on the Kantian Sublime and Adorno's negative dialectics. Time as historically signified, as fashioned by tonality and modality, by organic and inorganic structures, is a stratified experience in this quartet. It seems that the intention of the score, in substituting contrast for continuity and contingency for progression, is to prevent any simple appropriation of itself, negating the norms of causality and symmetry in order to underline them. By going against the grain, the quartet forces the Enlightened mind to struggle and think through the opacity and disconnections of the work; the dialectic of the Sublime—with a Beauty that beguiles and a Sublime that terrorizes—coaxes and crushes the analyst within a devastating critique, directed not only against society but against the critic himself, as the music confronts the very tools of thought.

•

C H A P T E R FIVE

·

Cadences and Closure THE MIDDLE MOVEMENTS

OF OP. 130

I EVEN BEFORE he added the final touches to Op. 132, Beethoven had been scribbling down some ideas for a quartet in Bt major. As early as March 1825, he reported to Charles Neate in London that the new quartet was almost ready. In fact, it had barely germinated. At the time when the A minor Quartet was finally completed in July, only the first two movements of Op. 130 had been fixed in the sketches, and what followed appears to be more of a groping towards a finale than a clear vision of the work. It was probably not until the end of August that the concept of this quartet had crystallized sufficiently for Beethoven to predict, somewhat optimistically, to both his nephew and Karl HoIz that the quartet would be finished in a matter of days. However, it was not ready for publication until November 1825.

It was not unusual for Beethoven to work simultaneously on quite different pieces; certainly the Bl> Quartet represents yet another scission of creative thought, exploring a space more abstract, more extreme and more enigmatic than Op. 132. But although there is undoubtedly a leap between the A minor and Bl> major quartets, it is a leap in the same direction, towards a splintering of Classical decorum that would ultimately result in the impossibility of closure, since historically the Grosse Fuge and the new finale of 1826 negate each other in their attempts to finalize the work. This quartet represents Beethoven at his most extreme—even against the standard of Op. 132. If the sequence of movements in the A minor Quartet disintegrates within a symmetry of contrasts, then the series of movements of the Bl> major Quartet is in danger of falling apart altogether; the Bl> Quartet not only intensifies the collision of elements but also shuns a central focus in which its broken and dispersed structure can be symmetrically anchored. Op. 130 comprises only the fissured and perplexed forms of the first movement

164

CHAPTER FIVE

and the Grosse Fuge, with a string of miniatures caught in between— movements so tiny and convivial in their recollection of the past that they jar against the rebarbative rhetoric that frames them. The discontinuities between the intellectual opacity of the initial movement and the comic escapades of the Presto, or between the interiority of the Cavatina and the aggressiveness of the fugue far exceed the juxtapositions that chequer the A minor Quartet. Indeed, so heterogeneous is Op. 130 that some commentators have abandoned the notion of a Classical structure that fashions the work into a logical totality in favour of the looser, more arbitrary sequence of a Baroque suite. Others, like Paul Bekker, speculate that this "pot-pourri" of movements is focussed on, and finds its resolution in, the heterogeneity of the Grosse Fuge; but when Beethoven himself ousts the fugue from the quartet, to replace it with the scherzo-like finale of 1826, this idea collapses in upon itself, leaving a diversity with no apparent direction. Perhaps all this is merely the outcome of a mathematical game Beethoven is playing, posing a new structural problem with each quartet by adding an extra movement. Starting with four in Op. 127, the movements progress to five and then to six, and culminate in the seven interconnected structures of the Ci minor Quartet. Each of the oddnumbered structures has a vast central movement to anchor the diversity, but in the even-numbered structures there is merely a gap. What Beethoven does in Op. 130 is to make this gap as wide as possible, placing a tritonal distance between Dt and G major that deliberately splits the heterogeneity in two. There is some sense of symmetry, but it is a symmetry that plays with the interstices of a fragmented sequence—a symmetry that is fissured rather than focussed (Ex. 5.1). Brokenness seems to be the structural articulation of the quartet; not only the sequence of movements but the movements themselves are dislocated—at times to the point of disintegration. The analytical strain in structuring the Heiliger Dankgesang or the first movement of the A minor Quartet seems almost slight in comparison to the opening movement of Op. 130 and the Grosse Fuge; their ambiguities and paradoxes are so frequent and perplexing that analysis flounders in the struggle to disentangle them. Theory continues to be displaced and dismantled as Beethoven advances through the late quartets. Faced with such difficulties, for the analyst to plunge into the complexities at the start would only confuse the issues; instead, this analysis of the Bl> Quartet will begin from the middle movements, for although the initial problems echo in the central movements they are somehow distilled

165

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

Ex. 5.1. Op. 130—the symmetrical structure of the quartet Presto

Andante

Alia danza tedesca

Cavatina

Dl.

G

Et

movement 1 sonata form

Bl.

tritonal gap harmonic link emotional fissure

new finale

harmonic link emotional fissure

within those tiny structures and are simpler to grasp there. Of course, these middle movements are not easy to tackle. They, too, baffle analysis, not with the explicit assault found in the forms that loom either side of them, but in a nonchalance that effaces the destructive process with an air of naivete. Such nostalgic reminiscences perform a critique much deeper than parody, hoodwinking the Viennese public into accepting a counterfeit of their own Biedermeier domesticity. In the middle movements, the surfaces never quite synchronize with their underlying functions; the forms are in constant confusion. As in the minuet, the musette, and the march of the A minor Quartet, an imperturbable surface hides processes that actually dismember and question the very style that Beethoven is recalling—the style of his own past, his own history and heritage, the very nostalgia that the Viennese rekindled under Metternich's police state. Thus these structures posit a type of Classicism that they simultaneously destroy in a kind of double image. Of course, it is possible to explore how these middle movements locate themselves within the Classical system of construction, but the purpose of this analysis—and perhaps of the music—is to tease out the opposite. This musical critique is based on a play of cadence and closure.

166

CHAPTER FIVE

II To cadence is to articulate closure. What is contested in the string of middle movements is the inevitability of closure that such cadences convey. After all, the energy of the Classical language is dependent upon a certain ineluctability generated by cadential forces from the phrase to the form. Thus for both Schenker and Ratner the paradigm of Classical structure is simply a contrapuntal motion towards closure—cadences, whether scattered on the surface or encompassing an entire form (Ex. 5.2).11 Ex. 5.2. Cadential structures

0

Λ

Λ

Λ

3

2

1

I

-^

-m)—^2

-¾

•1»

$

^-==

J

5

ι

V

I

Schenker's Ursatz

m

model

S one realization of model

Ratner's model for harmonic function in Classic Music

Even a simple reiteration of a cadential cliche characteristic of the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti can intensify the sense of inevitability (Ex. 5.3)—although in this particular example the moment Ex. 5.3. Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata in G major, Kk. 521, first movement—cadential figures cadential figures

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

167

of closure is deflected. But this merely reactivates the ineluctable logic of harmonic forces on a higher level of articulation; deflections merely make termination unavoidable. What the Classical language manipulates is precisely this sense of purposeful delay, where (for example) a phrase of a minuet by Mozart takes twelve bars to cadence where two bars would do (Ex. 5.4); he simply extracts a cadential motif (d), reiterates it, extends it, and interrupts it in order to create the appetency of closure right from the start of the phrase. Indeed, as Charles Rosen points out, cadences take up much of the proportions of a Classical form, with endless bars of cadential cliches, to ground the tonal dynamics and balance the structure. Thus the sense of purposeful delay, far from undermining the tonal logic, reinforces the self-enclosed mechanism of the tonal system and opens up a space in which the sense and sign of closure can be played with to conjure up false expectations, false recapitulations, and other such witticisms so salient in Haydn's style. Beethoven, too, plays with these cadential possibilities; in an early piano sonata, Op. 10 No. 2 (1796), he plucks out the common-or-garden cadence that closes the exposition of the first movement and develops it (bars 64ff) so that the cliches of closure are caught in the opposite process; and to cap it all, the moment of structural closure is an illusion—a false recapitulation (bar 117). It is this kind of cadential playfulness that Beethoven manipulates, some thirty years later, in the second and third movements of Op. 130; he recaptures the witticisms of the eighteenth century in order to outwit them, pressing this sense of purposeful delay almost to the point of collapse. But first the music must map out its Classicism, and the second movement opens by unfolding in its background a linear logic that drives towards structural cadences, with the sense of closure reinforced by a

Ex. 5.4. Mozart, String Quartet in A major, K. 464, second movement—motif d

169

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

periodic symmetry—a perfect structure for a Schenker graph (Ex. 5.5). However, it is in the foreground that Beethoven teases out the h u m o u r

Ex. 5.5. Op. 130, second movement—Schenker graph of bars 1-8 head motif χ ι 1

S^

cadential motif y ι 1

£

£

' 3 prg.

fete

τ

f

η •τ r

/Λ

Λ

Λ

Λ ,

(

3

2

1'

4 5 prg-

rΠ -r-m

* ^ 4 prg.

4 prg.

V J

V KJ

—

KJ

—

by exposing a little rhythmic contradiction. T h e rhythms in this piece have a habit of dislodging themselves from the metrical structure. Even the very first motif (x) tends to stress its opposite accent ( Τ-Π J * instead of

InI > ); a n d this rhythmic punctuation is reflected on all levels of the

rhythmic hierarchy, which consist of w h a t Leonard B. Meyer calls " e n d accented" structures (see Ex. 5.5).

Simply observe h o w cadence y

emphasizes the end of each phrase, creating a comic hiccup in the hypermeasure

(bars 4 and 8). This draws attention to the

major

contradiction in the w o r k — a mismatch between motifs χ and y (Ex. 5.6). Cadence y takes on the shape of the opening motif x, but it stifles

Ex. 5.6. Op. 130, second movement—head motif and cadential motif 1 opening gesture

closing gesture

,

Ϊ

,

ψ^

170

CHAPTER FIVE

the tendency of motif χ to accent the off-beat, shifting the motif out of place and grounding it emphatically on the downbeat ( L J ) . This rhythmic differentiation between the two motifs defines the work's most vital, though seemingly negligible, contradiction—the opening motif turns into a closing cadence. All this is not particularly salient, but with a Derridian vigour Beethoven seems intent on blowing this rhythmic quirk up out of all proportion, step by step and section by section. If the opening eight bars suggest a rhythmic contradiction between motifs χ and y, then what follows is the realization of that accentual shift. This is achieved by deploying little 'hairpins' that open out onto the second beat and by dispensing with the corrective accent of cadence y (Ex. 5.7a). Indeed, the final punctuation of the opening section (bar 16) takes the original cadence and extends it so that it hits the off-beat, as though it were interlocking motifs χ and y (Ex. 5.7b). This rhythmic tussle becomes the Ex. 5.7. Op. 130, second movement—accentual shift

4^i

CJ

^^

(b) 15

h\ J !,Π i'

ι

subject of the contrasting middle section, which is presumably a kind of 'trio' (bars 17-47). To make the point absolutely clear, Beethoven picks out the new cadential pattern in bar 16, shrinks it into an ornament, and places it on the off-beat accent, which is now blatantly punctuated by sforzandos (see Ex. 5.8b-c). It is as if the cadential function had been hoisted from the background, so that it is no longer a structural accent but a surface sforzando, shrunk from its harmonic function into a motivic shape that reflects within its minuscule patterns the cadential play of the entire piece (Ex. 5.8a-c). The process reflects not so much a causal logic as a curious turn of mind in which Beethoven simply latches

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

171

Ex. 5.8. Op. 130, second movement—accentual shift, background and foreground

onto cadential endings to prize open the contradiction they carry. By the 'trio,' the rhythmic dislocation is so exaggerated that it becomes a negative image of the opening, reversing the rhythmic conflict; the initial antagonism in the shift from the downbeat to the upbeat is now a contest

172

CHAPTER FIVE

between the off-beat sforzandos and the structural cadences that emphatically mark the downbeat in bars 24 and 47. In fact, this tug of rhythmic patterns finally causes the periodic structure to buckle. The regularity of the four-bar structure is suddenly twisted by a three-bar period (bars 29-31), and the symmetry of the design breaks down, leaving, as it were, all the downbeats of the hypermeasure as upbeats. Perhaps it is not so surprising that this "veritable 'ride into the abyss'" should crash at the centre of the form, leaving the harmonic and rhythmic accents to go haywire (bars 48-63). This is one of those moments of jouissance, an inexplicable gape in the structure that reveals the elements of construction in the piece; the clash of duple and compound rhythms, the major-minor contrast, the end-accented punctuations, and the motivic conflicts are all presented in the raw, as a moment of resistance against the inevitability of recapitulation (see Ex. 5.9). But this dramatic interruption is not an irrational splintering of the form. The phrases, in fact, are highly regular; what is odd about them is their displacement against the structure. Beethoven, having transposed the accentual shift from the bar to the hypermeasure (bars 31ff), repeats the process on the next level of the rhythmic hierarchy, in which dislocated four-bar structures rub against an eight-bar symmetry (Ex. 5.9). This is the culmination of a rhythmic process, as the rhythmic hierarchies slide out of phase from a beat to a bar and then to two bars, to create the ultimate rhythmic disruption, the ultimate end-accent, syncopating against the syntagmatic flow of the formal rhythm. And, as always, the rupture is articulated by the ubiquitous cadence, which Beethoven extracts from the final bar of the previous section as the subject of the next; but instead of shrinking it he elongates it (bars 50-54). In fact, this section takes up the cadences that have played havoc in the movement and forces them comically out of their function. These signs of closure fail to finish. The cadence of the 'trio' misses its accent (see Ex. 5.9), overstepping itself in a series of chromatic gesticulations that outline a dissonant dominant (bars 55-62). And the original cadence y, the source of all this disruption, reappears not really as a cadence but as a contradiction; Beethoven conflates the ambiguities of the opening into a single instance, for this gesture embodies both the melodic contour of the initial bar (x) and the rhythmic contour of the cadence (y). Thus, melodically the gesture of closure is forced to open out as the start of a phrase in which G\> must resolve along with its off-beat accent, and yet the gesture is also compelled to function as a cadence at the end of the

Ex. 5.9. Op. 130, second movement—periodic syncopation

174

CHAPTER FIVE

phrase (Ex. 5.10). The negligible contradiction at the very start becomes centrally critical. Indeed, this contradiction becomes the fulcrum of the Ex. 5.10. Op. 130, second movement—bars 54-57 four-bar period

I

opening motif χ

54

h ^ f ~ f ~ i f y γ JiJ JU Ii Φ J J J ? £ Ξ = / closing motif y

form: as the periodic syncopation resolves at the recapitulation, the cadential functions at the end simultaneously turn into the opening gesture at the start (Ex. 5.11). Suddenly, the harmonic and gestural confusions synchronize at a single point to make sense of the rupture and balance the form. In one stroke, all the rhythmic and gestural contradictions are brought into focus at a pivotal moment in which all the dislocations connect. Ex. 5.11. Op. 130, second movement—recapitulation and synchronization recapitulation

immrn)

closing gesture γ opens

eight-bar period

eight-bar period periodic syncopation resolved

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

175

To summarize: as the movement presses forward, the elements shift increasingly out of phase, the syncopations grow more obtuse, the gestural contradictions become more pronounced, until at the point of breakdown they suddenly all connect at the recapitulation. As in the dances in the A minor Quartet, the contradictions in this movement are presented not as a synthesis but as a crisis, carved out of the most insignificant of elements. The contrasting cadential punctuations are ultimately forced together in a collision of time and matter that stresses the immiscibility of elements as they slip out of phase (bars 48-63). It would have been possible to join Reti and Keller in spinning a web of motivic connections based on tones, semitones, and thirds, or to demonstrate with Meyer the linear logic of the melodic and harmonic construction. This movement, after all, is not an incarnation of contradiction but has as its sediment the Classical procedures that it toys with. But only to speak of a quantitative sameness, in which the initial motif χ and the cadence y bear the same pitch pattern or are caught within the same linear progression, is to miss the qualitative difference that Beethoven exploits. He not only manipulates motifs to create an ineluctable logic but also presses them into extreme elements of opposition to elicit 'chaos' out of unity. This technique of prizing open the slightest slippage of language also occurs in the other movements of the quartet. For example, in the Alia danza tedesca there is a strange conflict of duple and triple time between the melody and its accompaniment (bars 89-96: Ex. 5.12b). But playing this 'polyrhythmic' game is not an irrational whim to vary the recapitulation; it is an exaggeration of the start, where the motivic contours of the accompaniment lay themselves open for the cultivation of this peculiarity (Ex. 5.12a). Beethoven takes the remotest possibility of a rhythmic contradiction and raises it from its supine status until it becomes an obvious misalignment. Sometimes these disruptive processes do not erupt so blatantly through the surface. In the third movement of the quartet—the Andante con moto ma non troppo—the same strategic dislocations occur surreptitiously beneath a cool exterior in which the surface gesture and the underlying functions never quite coincide, so that the form is always ambiguous, without focusing on any particular fissure. Perhaps the smoothness of the surface is merely a semiotic device, since (as Leonard Ratner suggests) the music takes as its point of reference the workings of a mechanical clock. This mechanized plaything of the eighteenth century suggested an inevitability that enticed the Classical style to tinker

176

CHAPTER

FIVE

Ex. 5.12. Op. 130, fourth movement—cross-rhythms (a) opening theme

(b) variation of opening theme with "duple" accompaniment

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

177

with the predictable tick-tocking of the clockwork through the dynamics of its own temporal structures. One need only think of the sudden crashes in Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony, in which the contradiction between mechanical and musical time is made into a joke. The wit of this Andante also plays with the same temporal conflict. Beethoven exploits the relentless measurement of a mechanical time that can never close against the structure of a tonal time that inevitably works towards cadential closure, to create a contradiction in which the music can never quite end and the clock can never quite keep time. There is thus a constant conflict between two kinds of semiotic gesture—an external reference to the mechanical clock and an internal reference to the workings of tonal music. The humour of this movement lies in the exploitation of both types of signs as they interact. Perhaps it was in order to exploit this ambivalence that Beethoven fashions most of his motivic material out of cadential cliches that constantly extend or fragment but never manage to reach the closure that they presage. Classical inevitability is endlessly deferred by a clockwork determinism. The exposition, for instance, is simply a semiotic play on this sense of impossible closure. For a start, the opening theme spends most of its time manipulating cadential figures that are constantly reiterated to evoke a sense of ineluctable finality (see Ex. 5.13: bars 1-10). At least by bar 7 the rising theme starts to fall with a multiplication of cadences that confirms this obsession with closure. Then, as in the Presto, Beethoven isolates the final cadence in bar 9 (motif c)—which aptly doubles as a semiotic 'tick-tock'—and develops it as a double sign of mechanical and musical contradiction, gesturing towards a closure that can never close. To ensure that the point is not missed, the short transition into the A\> major section is made up entirely of this cadence c, overlapping in counterpoint and clocklike in its pizzicatos (see Ex. 5.13: bar 10). What follows appears to be the new theme in the dominant, but in fact it is a decoration of this cadential motif, which Beethoven isolates rhythmically and then fragments to prevent closure (see Ex. 5.13: bars 11-13). Indeed, he not only dislocates the mechanical rhythm with a sudden forte but also diverts the harmonic rhythm away from its conclusion in At (bar 13). This jolt in both the harmonic and the rhythmic systems, however, merely starts the whole mechanism off again, this time with a more obvious development of the cadential motif c, tossed contrapuntally between the parts (see Ex. 5.13: bar 13). But again there is a deflection: the promised closure on Al> is

Ex. 5.13. Op. 130, third movement, bars 1-13—the development of cadential motifs

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

179

syncopated out of joint and diverted towards the submediant (Ex. 5.14). The music just does not want to settle on the dominant. Instead it Ex. 5.14. Op. 130, third movement—cadential motifs 14

\

[T ι [ r / ί

ρ dolce

80

ι,

~*>

p^p

pup PP

sempre pp

m

ξρ^ρ

hih'*®ji

sempre pp

BtVi. P " ι

matters worse, it happens twice. Thus it is not without humour that Beethoven places a fermata just before the final chord. It is a question mark: will the piece end? Remarkably, the final cadence is the only structural articulation that ends up where it has promised to go. In a sense, it is the only cadence that functions as a cadence in this piece, despite the fact that most of this work is built out of cadences!

183

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

All this is merely a kind of playfulness on the surface, and these annotations are simply an attempt to dissect a joke. It is not even a particularly original joke, since these devices of purposeful delay and semiotic contradiction are almost stock witticisms of Classical humour; after all, Beethoven is re-creating a gesture of the eighteenth century. But the wit in this movement is a cutting wit, for this is not simply a piece of nostalgia but a critique which exaggerates these processes until they dismantle the precision of the surface. Despite its delicate Rococo exterior and its Classical decorum of thematic and tonal balance, the structure, in its entirety, is dislocated by harmonic ambiguities; the play of never-ending cadences on the surface is duplicated structurally beneath, so that it becomes difficult to elicit from the form a precise definition of itself. The reason for this is simple enough: the thematic and harmonic functions do not synchronize. Indeed, any attempt to schematize the harmonic structure will find itself constantly undermined by undecidable partitions (Ex. 5.18). Even the thematic signals are ambiguous. For a start, the form flirts with 'monothematicism,' since it is articulated by a fourfold recurrence of the initial theme, surrounded by material that never quite constitutes a second thematic group; what appears to be a tonal conflict is more a modulatory transition than a thematic contrast (bars 11-23), and by the time the possibility of a second subject arises it is, as Hans Keller points out, already the codetta (bar 26). Yet at the Ex. 5.18. Op. 130, third movement—a possible partition of the structure barl

11

20

26 (24)

exposition f;;

39 (37)

•

recapitulation

dev.

V.;

theme I

theme I

Bl-m? Dt VI? I

32

theme II? transition?

theme II? codetta?

At V?

At V

C/F? III?

Dt? I?

46

55

61 (59)

66 coda

I theme I

theme I theme II? transition?

Dt I

F/Bt III?

theme II? codetta? Dt? I

Gt IV

Dt I

same time this is not like one of Haydn's 'monothematic' structures, for the theme constantly undermines its own attempt to enunciate the tonal

184

CHAPTER FIVE

dynamic and ends up confusing its own function. At each of its appearances the theme is tonally ambiguous. Even at the very start it is in the 'wrong' key, with the tonic emerging out of Bt minor colouristically rather than cadentially; when the viola announces the theme in bar 3, it is not so much in the tonic as balancing precariously on it; the tonic is delayed, requiring the cadential figuration of the violin and a structural cadence to establish it (bars 4-5); but by the time it arrives, the theme has already started, dislocating itself from its tonal functions. Moreover, the ambiguous beginning is matched by an evasive ending: both melodically and harmonically the theme gravitates towards the dominant and actually articulates a closing cadence in Al>; but this conclusion slides back into the tonic by way of a rather awkward extension of its cadential cliche (Ex. 5.19). Thus the theme neither starts nor ends in the harmonic direction that it gestures towards. This is odd, because the core of the theme is simply a symmetrical four-bar structure which unfolds from tonic to dominant (bars 4-7); but Beethoven extends either side of it to disrupt its periodic and harmonic structure, so that the logic of the thematic shape is obscured. If the theme at the start is ambiguous, then its reappearance to articulate the conflicting tonal area is simply contradictory (bars 20-23). Again, the direction and the destination are mismatched, as the music presses ineluctably towards a mediant contrast that slips away elusively. The F-At harmonic relationship would have complemented the Bt-Dt ambiguity at the start, but despite the cadential gestures and the harmonic function F major does not arrive; Beethoven simply tonicizes its dominant to initiate the theme in C major (bar 20), and by the time the mediant of At emerges it is merely a passing harmony caught within a developmental texture (bar 22). The theme turns out to be a transitional structure, confusing both its thematic and its tonal functions, since it is neither a second theme nor a second tonal region. Thus the area of tonal conflict, despite its constant articulation of contrast and closure, is entirely transitional; it is impossible to pin down the precise point of structural dissonance. This constant dislocation of function creates an undecidability of form. The thematic confusion reaches its most perplexing moment at the critical point of recapitulation. It is simultaneously a false and a real recapitulation. The introductory gesture—originally marked "preludio" in the sketches—is transposed up a fifth, so that the false start becomes doubly false, and yet it bears all the gestures of a dominant preparation for a real recapitulation, as if the ambiguous opening were finally about

Ex. 5.19. Op. 130, third movement—the close of the opening theme

186

CHAPTER FIVE

to resolve (bars 37-39). But the key it heralds is Al> major and not the tonic; it is a false preparation for a real recapitulation (see Ex. 5.20). In fact, the function of the entire development section has been turned upside down; rather than acting as a "prolongation of the division" (§), as Schenker puts it, it begins with the tonic articulation that is denied at the recapitulation and heads towards the dominant, instead of moving from dominant to tonic. The pivotal section of the form moves in precisely the 'wrong' direction. In fact, there is even a 3-2-1 descent as F moves down to Dt (bars 32-37), but this is supported by harmonies in A\> major, turning 3-2-1 into a highly unstable 6-5—4 progression; the melodic and harmonic structures are at loggerheads as they try to delineate the form. When the theme reappears to articulate the tonic, there is a harmonic fissure as the destination and the direction collide in their misalignment. Thus, as at the beginning, the tonal definition of the theme is delayed until after it has started, and Beethoven makes this visually clear by placing the new key signature a bar 'too late' (Ex. 5.20). It becomes impossible to fix the start of the recapitulation since there is a disconnection and a displacement at the fulcrum of the form. Does it start in bar 30, 38, 39, or 40? And ironically, in the coda, when the "preludio" gesture finally resolves—reharmonizing its original pitches to articulate, for once, a real dominant preparation (bar 72)—it is just too late, for the theme that it gestures towards fails to appear, and the tonic that it indicates is simply deflected with the most dissonant of rebuttals (see Ex. 5.17). Thus in its fourfold utterance the theme is either ambiguous or transitional, and it never functions to clarify the form. Moreover, the codetta themes are just as ambivalent; in both instances they overstep their tonal direction and merge imperceptibly into the development and coda. At every point in the structural framework there is uncertainty, dislocation, and deflection. Consequently, the entire structure is fluid behind the mechanized precision of its clockwork reference. It is never clear where the initial theme begins, or where exactly the exposition and recapitulation end, or for that matter where they start, or where the development and the coda begin, or at what point the tonal conflict is set up or resolved. It is not that these things do not happen; it is just that the fundamental elements of Classical construction do not synchronize to articulate the critical moments in the form at every point: it is more a matter of constant trans/orwation in time than a static formation in 'space.' There is a deliberate creation of ambiguity and plurality in which to fix the form is to miss the point.

Ex. 5.20. Op 130, third movement—reprise of the opening

188

CHAPTER FIVE

Thus Beethoven awakens the Biedermeier urge for nostalgia but offers it only an ungraspable dream of the past; the security of all those eighteenth-century references is an illusion as deceptive as the structure of the piece. In this Andante, Beethoven is playing not merely with the Classical conventions he evokes but with the Classical system itself; he is tampering not just with an exterior mould but with the very construction of the Classical language—the syntax of tonality, the punctuation of cadences, the articulation of themes.

Ill It seems that the Andante triggers a series of harmonic repercussions in the rest of the work, from the Alia danza tedesca to the Grosse Fuge, in which the harmonic logic fails. In both the fourth movement and the Cavatina there is a structural suppression akin to that in the first movement of Op. 127. The dominant as a structural sign is missing; it is not 'seen to be done,' but is deliberately cut out so that the omission is felt as a harmonic slippage. It is not simply that there is no significant tonicization of the dominant in the Alia danza tedesca, or that in the Cavatina the 'second group' remains in the tonic, with no passage in the dominant at all in the movement; although such strategic omissions are somewhat odd in their consistency, they merely point to a more fundamental suppression: the dominant fails to articulate the critical turning point in both structures. In the Cavatina the return to the tonic is felt as a tonal rift (see Ex. 5.21). There is yet again, as in the Andante, a disconnection between the harmonic direction and the tonal destination. The gesture of dominant preparation at the tail of the central section is nothing more than a harmonic lie (bars 47—48), for the sign does not herald the return of the theme in the tonic. There is no actual dominant; rather, the direction of this central transition (bars 40-48) presses towards the subdominant, Al> minor. As in the third movement, what Beethoven does is to assert the tonic as a juxtaposition by tonicizing the dominant of A I», which he has meticulously defined by minor-sixth inflections. Thus the harmonic structure at the fulcrum of the form is forced into a double meaning, with El> simultaneously functioning as a dominant and a tonic, and Ft as a flattened sixth and a 'Neapolitan.' But in all these peculiar progressions the real dominant, Bl>, simply does not figure in the reckoning.

V of At minor

"dominant" preparation for "wrong" key

Neapolitan

Ex. 5.21. Op. 130, fifth movement—recapitulation

"missing" V

Et major

recapitulation

190

CHAPTER FIVE

In the Alia danza tedesca there is not even an attempt to gesture towards the moment of return. This dance, originally intended as a parallel movement to the minuet and musette of the A minor Quartet, is indelibly marked with the fissured constructions that form Op. 132. As in the musette, the central section of the Alia danza tedesca consists of a collage of self-contained dances, articulating G major, C major, and E minor (bars 25-79); these tonal segments are juxtaposed as slightly fissured but harmonically related blocks. With such paratactic logic, something as linear as a dominant preparation would be quite inconsistent, and, sure enough, just as the segments dislocate around intervals of a third, so the recapitulation is merely a shift from E minor to G major (Ex. 5.22). It is not just that the reprise is a juxtaposition, but

Ex. 5.22. Op. 130, fourth movement—recapitulation recapitulation

E minor

G major

that it happens without even the slightest hint of tonic return. It is even a thematic shock, with the initial theme treated as if it were another tune in the 'medley.' Nothing marks out the reprise; there is no dominant, no harmonic transition, no cadence—not even a semiotic cliche—to herald the pivotal moment in the form; it is merely asserted, merely contingent.

191

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

Perhaps it is this sense of contingency in the construction that Beethoven anatomizes in the coda. Having disconnected the joints of the form, why not cut up the simple melody at the start, bar by bar, and play these bars backwards so that none of the pieces connect? This sounds like a rather quirky Webernesque palindrome, but it happens in the coda—Klangfarbenmelodie and all (Ex. 5.23).The melodic function of Ex. 5.23. Op. 130, fourth movement—palindrome in the coda

m

129

Jb

O

g§

w at M

P

Mm M

P

each fragment is entirely reversed; it opens by ending and closes with the start, so that the inexorable logic of the melodic contour is literally dismembered and is as contingent as the assemblage of fragments in the centre of the form. Dispersed in timbre and register, the motifs stutter rather than flow, gesturing towards themselves, towards the particularity of each tiny fragment and the gaps in between, instead of constructing a melodic totality, in a kind of reversal of Classical procedures. But this dislocated syntax, in which the melody functions backwards, merely foreshadows an equally jumbled and fragmented harmonic process. Beethoven often summarizes the harmonic motion of a movement in the coda, but here in the Alia danza tedesca it happens backwards, like the dismembered melody. In its normal 'forward' position, the structural motion from the tonic to the subdominant in the middle section is articulated simply by the transposition of a melody

192

CHAPTER FIVE

from G to C major. It is a hyphenated construction, but at least the harmonic connection is fluent (bars 25-40/41-50). Done backwards in the coda, however, it becomes somewhat awkward; in fact, the movement from C to G is no progression at all but a fissure—an illogical juxtaposition of two tonalities. And the melodic stammer on the surface sounds as if Beethoven had got himself into the wrong key and, having made various false starts in C, suddenly shifts to the tonic (Ex. 5.24). Ex. 5.24. Op. 130, fourth movement—IV-I non-progression in the coda 138

shift to tonic

Of course this is a joke on Beethoven's part, but it encapsulates the structural fissures that perplex the apparent simplicity of this movement. Beethoven thus re-enacts the recapitulation in the coda with the same refusal to deploy a cadential logic to articulate the return of the theme (bar 143). Once again the dominant is evaded; G major is merely asserted, and the effect is a harmonic non sequitur. More than just contingent, it is a moment of aporia; the periodic construction collapses, the melody disintegrates, the harmonic process breaks down, and the form buckles. These fractures in the coda seem to underline the harmonic disruption that undoes the coherence of the movement. The Classical process of unfolding a cadential motion to create a totality collapses into a series of

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

193

discontinuities, gesturing towards segments that do not assemble themselves into a whole. It is meant to be witty, but this wit is part of a veneer of studied naivety, recalling a pre-Classical concoction of dances. As with the minuet and the musette of Op. 132, the naivete merely hides a dissection which disables the very style it revives. By placing the wit of cadential playfulness in the internal process of formal articulation, the wit turns into a critique. But this continual breaking and broaching of Classical procedures is not just a matter of negation, as if Beethoven were merely throwing in some irrational gesture to overturn Classical logic. As always in Beethoven, the 'chaos' is created. After all, what happens in the coda is not (as some have suggested) a game of chance called ars combinatoria, but a new system of (dis)ordering that creates a retrograde melodic structure. The Classical style is suddenly confronted by a kind of protoserialism—aptly, the very type of Schoenbergian logic that would ultimately destroy the coherence of the tonal system altogether. The coda begins with a melodic palindrome that pits two contradictory systems of logic against each other: Classical symmetry collides with a 'serial' symmetry (see Ex. 5.23). The disruptions in late Beethoven are thus a process or a network of connections within the structure, be it a systematic accentuation of a rhythmic ambiguity, as in the Presto, or the exploitation of an initial tonal ambivalence to blur the harmonic structure, as in the Andante. In the Alia danza tedesca the medley of disconnected dance tunes is reflected in the coda by a medley of disconnected motifs. But these disruptions are not set out from the start; rather, they perforate the centre of the form, showing how the undetermined can suddenly happen to derail the appetency of a structure. Once contingency strikes, however, the form must re-adjust to the repercussions of the 'new logic'; the formal fissure at the centre stimulates a different system of disconnection—a Webernesque retrograde—which itself provokes a retrograde harmonic progression that, in a process of circular reference, recalls the fissure at the recapitulation. The same can be said of the Cavatina, which has as its core an excursion into a different world whose emotional and structural contingencies eventually impinge upon the unfolding of the form. Beethoven writes "Beklemmt" (constricted, uneasy, anguished) above the fractured melody that rises within the central section (bars 40-48). This emotional and melodic contrast points to a structural dislocation in which the centre does not connect up with the rest of the song. The

194

CHAPTER FIVE

threefold pattern of the Cavatina consists of two self-enclosed outer sections, each so isolated within its contrapuntal and harmonic uniformity that they become autonomous, "homotonal" textures, without internal contrasts. In between, there is a modulatory structure, a transition that gestures towards the recapitulation. But this is a "transition to nowhere" (as Hans Keller would put it), since the outer sections are self-enclosed systems, leaving the central section as a peculiar contrast, a contingent insertion that does not connect at either end. Despite being a transitional 'arioso,' the sudden shift to the flattened submediant at its start (bar 41) and the harmonic volte face at the recapitulation (see Ex. 5.21) prevent the segment from merging into the form. Harmonically speaking, there is no transition. Of course, it is possible to rationalize the contrast. A little motivic sophistry can suggest that the melody is related, albeit very remotely, to the second theme of the opening section (Ex. 5.25). Perhaps with the Ex. 5.25. Op. 130, fifth movement—possible thematic connections

"Beklemmt" melody transposed

stretching of the ubiquitous thirds and sixths to a tenth at the melodic climax (bars 27/36) Beethoven simply brings the process to its culmination by tonicizing the interval as the tonal contrast (Ex. 5.26). But why a minor sixth (Et-Ct) that sinks to the subdominant minor (At)? And why the dislocation and dissociation? It seems that these connections, for all their insight, simply miss the point if they are used to neutralize and unify the Cavatina, for this central section is a strange instance of 'intertexuality,' a sudden and unexpected reference to another piece utterly alien to this movement. According to Karl HoIz, the mere thought of the Cavatina moved Beethoven to tears; maybe this is because

195

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

Ex. 5.26. Op. 130, fifth movement—thirds and sixths in the foreground and background

W

j. j ' r n

ι

ι

3rd

3rd

ι

3rd

ι 6th 3rd

3rd

17

ι

ι

1

^ ί J.J

IrV-M

ι

6th

3rd κ

P^i ι

3rd

melodic climax

26/35

10th

m

3ΞΞΞΞΙ1Ε 6th

3rd

basic harmonic blocks of the Cavatina's ABA structure

the "Beklemmt" section recalls a moment of psychological breakdown from the Al> major Piano Sonata, Op. 110, in which an "Arioso dolente" disintegrates with its return (third movement, bars 8ff and 116ff).28 Some commentators have already pointed out the obvious parallel between the arioso and the Cavatina in the broken vocal gestures. But Beethoven's reference is more exact than a mere gesture; not only does he extract the same key, the same rhythmic texture, and the same pulsating introduction to the arioso (Op.110, third movement, bar 8/Cavatina, bar 40), he picks out the poignant harmonic sequence that forms the recitative of the piano sonata and lays it down as the harmonic background at the centre of the Cavatina. These are the same pitches and

196

CHAPTER FIVE

melodic contours, the same colouristic disruption that drives the music towards At minor (Ex. 5.27). Beethoven is writing over a previous piece. What he does is to telescope the emotional progression of the arioso into 8 bars, condensing its most poignant harmonic and melodic elements. It is a truly constricted moment of anguish tucked within the tenderness of the Cavatina. Of course this "Beklemmt" section fails to connect; of course it gestures towards the wrong key—it belongs, as it were, not in this movement but in a piece that really is in At minor, as a passage that is a 'transition to somewhere' rather than being held in limbo. Perhaps the emotional pain for Beethoven derives from the fact that the broken texture does not "revive little by little," as it does in the fugue of the piano sonata; the reference is simply cut off in its brokenness, and the fugue that follows the Cavatina is not so much a revival as a violent breakdown. Lodged within this movement, then, is the remembrance of some inexplicable anguish in the past, etched in a previous piece and described in that score as "Ermattet" (exhausted). In an almost Proustian sense, the "Beklemmt" section is a recollection of lost time, in which the recovery of a previous artefact allows for an experience to be relived, no longer in the time span of the sonata but constricted in the brevity of a memory. This is music in the past tense, invoking an author to sing the story. Such moments in late Beethoven seem to evade the utilitarian mill of life, as if there were something intrinsically private and purely human about the music, something that had to be protected from the scrutiny of the external world (the violence of the fugue?). As Jiirgen Habermas points out, it was precisely through this kind of tender interiority, cultivated in the inviolable enclosure of the home, that bourgeois society affirmed its identity, holding up a world of private letters, domestic fiction, and psychological novels as a mirror of itself. "Letters," says Habermas, "were to be written in the heart's blood, they practically were to be wept"; the Cavatina not only reads like an intimate letter, it was supposedly wrung from the composer's heart and wept over with each recollection. For those in the nineteenth century who still believed in the intrinsic humanness of the family, Beethoven finally brought into the quartet the privacy and purity of domestic life—the very life that he himself longed for, and the space which chamber music was increasingly confined to. It is perhaps not so fanciful, then, of some commentators to regard this moment as a window into Beethoven's innermost emotions, almost too private to be disclosed. It is a fleeting autobiographical intrusion—a sudden need to speak in prose within a song.

Op. 132, Cavatina—the accompaniment beneath the "Beklemmt" melody

Adagio ma non troppo

Piano Sonata, Op. 110, third movement

Ex. 5.27. Opp. 110 and 132—intertextual references

198

CHAPTER FIVE

What is important analytically is that this seemingly contingent reference is not just an isolated moment, devoid of structural implications. This intrusion has repercussions, as the Classical structure absorbs this central dissonance of thematic contrast. In the truncated recapitulation, the second theme, which had some remote affinity to the central subject (see Ex. 5.25), is replaced by the "Beklemmt" melody itself (Ex. 5.28). After all, the second theme does not require a Ex. 5.28. Op. 130, fifth movement—thematic resolution 42 "Beklemmt" melody transposed

J^ Uj' ίΛ P h H L M

m 58

"New" theme in recapitulation

resolution, since it has always been in the tonic. Instead, the central segment of transition is treated as some kind of displaced 'second group,' in which its thematic material finally resolves, synthesized within the texture of motivic counterpoint from which it had been alien. So transformed is the theme in its resolution and integration that Kerman calls it a "new conclusion." Once again, an intrusion from without has reverberations within: the internal balance of Classical systems assimilates the dislocation, to hold the form in a precarious equilibrium. Indeed it also performs a strange kind of thematic resolution. As Carl Dahlhaus notes, this reappearance of the central theme has the effect of recalling the half-related themes in the Cavatina, bringing them retrospectively into an association, since it bears some aspect of their textural or intervallic quality. "Multiplicity," writes Dahlhaus, "does not issue from a primary unity—a theme, a source-shape—but is drawn together at a secondary stage to create unity."

IV Cadences and closure are not synonymous in the middle movements of this quartet; in fact, they often throw up a whole variety of contradictions. It is rather apt that a work that has such difficulty in

CADENCES AND CLOSURE (OP. 130)

199

closing (because of its 'double' finale) should spend so much of its time playing with the impossibility of closure. But the vacillation over the finales is not the only cause of the quartet's open-endedness; the middle movements themselves are partly to blame, since they do not carry the momentum of the first movement forward to mobilize the fugue. This string of middle movements, in their miniature nature, seems to diffuse the recalcitrant intellectuality that demonizes the first movement and the fugal finale. The central movements even mock the complexity that surrounds them, in their seemingly impotent withdrawal into comic pranks, ticking clocks, naive dances, and sentimental songs. But this is merely looking at the surface of things. The innocence is ambiguous. Far from evading the issues, these tiny movements reconfigurate within themselves the slippages and dissonances of the outer movements—not as an explicit confrontation, but as an implicit criticism that prizes open the cracks in the naive and nostalgic exteriors to disposess such idealized, unproblematic worlds. Beethoven chivvies even the most minute inconsistency to reveal the same hand that had crafted the violence which opens and closes this quartet; but he does so in minuscule and focussed ways, as if he were scrutinizing a single problem instead of the gamut of complexities in the outer movements. Thus the devices discussed here are a kind of taxonomy of the processes in the first movement and the Grosse Fuge, which enables a disentangling of their opaque virtuosity. Three elements in particular are of cardinal significance—elements that have in common an antagonism to closure. First, contrast can be pursued into immiscible fragments instead of creating synthesis, as a negation of Classical dynamics. Even the tiniest rhythmic contradiction latent in the Presto can be forced into a violent rupture. Exploited as a contrast between the Presto and its 'trio,' the contradictions are whittled down and made to collide so that they repel each other in the oscillation. Or in the Alia danza tedesca the slightest of fissures between the chain of dance tunes can open out into the completely dismembered utterance of the coda, where the collating of fissures merely gestures towards their irreconcilability. Secondly, the formal structure can be obscured by dislocating the systems of articulation. The surface gesture and the harmonic function fail to synchronize, with a consistency that goes beyond a joke particularly at the points of recapitulation, where the harmonic direction and the actual destination clash in their divergence instead of converging to stabilize the structure. The Andante con moto is a paradigm of such paradoxical structures: the formal framework is almost entirely illusory

200

CHAPTER FIVE

and is always plural, as the harmonic dislocation waylays the gestural signs of closure and as the thematic and tonal articulation fall out of step. These systems of formal construction dislocate so that everything is premature, delayed, or obviated; despite the presence of the mechanical clock, nothing actually happens on time. The music works against its own articulation and contradicts what it says. Finally, the undetermined can suddenly happen to jolt the appetency of Classical progress, be it in a cross-reference to an alien piece in another key, or in a logic of alterity as peculiar as a Webernesque palindrome. The significance, however, lies not in the intrusion itself but in the repercussions that perturb the Classical system as they try to absorb the shock. The foreign melody of the Cavatina re-emerges within the texture of the recapitulation to close the structure; the retrograde melody of the Alia danza tedesca mobilizes a back-to-front 'progression' that recalls the central disjunction. All three of these disruptive processes disturb the dynamics of the outer movements. The complexity of the first movement in particular is created by the interaction of these immiscible, dislocated, and undetermined elements as they combine antagonistically with Classical procedures. The confrontation is neither a negation nor simply an isolated disturbance, but a dialectical process in which the elements that seem to dismantle the music, in their struggle against Classical logic, actually reconstruct sonata form; there is a precarious equilibrium as the plethora of contradictions work themselves out, perpetually rearranging the functions, redistributing the themes, and rebalancing the structure. These middle movements, as the repercussion of the opening and a prelude to the fugue, interweave their apparent frivolity with the seriousness of the fissured structures that frame them.

•

C H A P T E R SIX

·

Doubles and Parallels THE FIRST MOVEMENT

OF OP. 130

AND THE GROSSE FUGE, OP. 133

I then they perform their dissection of society in two radically different ways. The first way is to elicit a kind of consent, by presenting all those delectable elements of dances and tunes in the middle movements only to undermine them by making the familiarity of these forms elusive or suddenly peculiar. In such movements, analysis has to cut through the polished exteriors, forcing open the tiniest cracks to reveal the disorder within; it is a type of 'micro-analysis' that focusses on missing crotchets, hairline fractures, odd gaps, and minute slippages in the harmonic, motivic, or rhythmic language. This is the first way. The second way is one of direct assault: the audience is simply thrown into confusion by a disarticulated syntax, by a language so violent and contradictory that to analyse the disunity is to be more obvious than 'post-structuralist.' Nowhere is this type of critique more extreme than in the first movement of Op. 130 and the Grosse Fuge that closes it. In these pieces, analysis has to deploy a very different strategy; it is no longer a microscopic inspection of tiny disturbances, but a struggle against the breakages of the score in that dialectical tension between unity and disunity. To explore these movements is to describe the dislocations and, at the same time, to divine a logic behind the splintered aesthetic. In other words, the ambiguities and paradoxes express a formal virtuosity as intellectual as it is disruptive. IF THE QUARTETS ARE CRITIQUES,

The very first page of the quartet emanates an aura of erudition, but its abstract contrapuntal patterns are disordered by a collage of seemingly irreconcilable elements—fragments that undo each other in their attempt to form a slow introduction (Ex. 6.1). Hans Keller tried to unravel the problem by posing the question: "When is a slow introduc-

Adagio, ma non troppo

Ex. 6.1. Op. 130, first movement—bars 1-25

204

CHAPTER SIX

tion not a slow introduction?" For him the answer was very simple; as in the previous quartets in El» major and A minor, what purport to be detachable introductory gestures are in fact integrated ideas that permeate the work: the preludial becomes essential. This is not the answer to the riddle, however; it merely neutralizes the disintegration in trying to unify it. In fact, the fractures that disarrange the very start are quite unlike those in the previous quartets. The conflict is not a cogent interaction of ideas, and the Adagio and Allegro are not staged as a simple binary opposition; rather, there is a complete muddle of contrasts in which it is almost impossible to disentangle the structural significance of these articulations. Where does the introductory gesture end? Where does the exposition proper start?—bar 1? bar 14? bar 20? bar 24? (see Ex. 6.1). And all this is just the beginning. The entire movement is made up of such paradoxes. Every formal articulation is simultaneously one of structural aberration, accomplished in a manner far more extreme than anything in the earlier quartets. What is the 'logic' behind this 'madness'? Perhaps the best word to describe it is 'duplicity.' For what confronts the analyst is no longer just contrast but a strange kind of 'double-mindedness' that forces him to dither. The paradoxes in the work are engendered by a fission in the construction, in which elements double up, duplicate themselves, insist on happening twice. Confusion arises from the blur of double images, and the clarity of events in the Classical language breaks down in the face of this 'duplicity.' Perhaps all this is not so surprising in the context of a piece which has almost enough movements to form two quartets, including two dance movements, two slow movements, and—ironically—two finales. And in a strange way the split personality of this work is born from an opening movement that grows by a process of 'binary fission.' Things simply hap3

pen twice. Consider again the confusion of the opening page (see Ex. 6.1). The difficulties in unifying the contrast arise from the fact that the introduction duplicates itself. Had there been a simple opposition between the Adagio and the Allegro, as in the previous quartets, then there would be no confusion; but having staged the opposition (bars 1-20), Beethoven does it again, creating a moment of aberration, because the gesture of introduction has contradicted itself by introducing itself. It is syntactically illogical for an introduction to introduce an introduction; so the introductions disconnect at the moment of 'doubling' (bar 20), where dominant preparation heralds yet another one. The work is in crisis

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

205

before it has really got under way. There are two introductions, the first (bars 1-20) seemingly detachable and the second integral. The opening splits in two, in the same way as the quartet is split tritonally at its centre. It is vital to grasp the significance of this double gesture, for it is precisely this duplication that Beethoven perpetrates throughout the work. This is why the repercussions of the opening contrast always happen twice—Adagio/Allegro, Adagio/Allegro—evoking the same confusion, so that this chequered pattern creates a sense of immiscibility and not the integration that Keller imagines (bars 94-103/218-222). Indeed, Beethoven whittles down the contrast into smaller and smaller particles—three bars of Adagio against one bar of Allegro in the development, then one of each in the coda—forcing them to oscillate to see if there could be some kind of miraculous fusion; but instead there is confusion, since their coupling merely splits the flow of the form. There is no synthesis of elements here, as there is in the A minor Quartet, where the elements of contrast at the start eventually merge into a single texture. The 'logic' of doubling posited at the beginning is not one that provokes a resolution of the contrast; rather, it forces the structure into all kinds of contradiction. The exposition, for example, is caught in the same 'duplicity' (Ex. 6.1). To begin with, its starting point is difficult to locate because the Allegro is made to happen twice, first in the tonic (bar 15) and then in the dominant (bar 20). The latter Allegro is more significant, since it is the one that the recapitulation recalls (bar 132). It seems that the first Allegro is merely a tonic backdrop for the main bulk of the exposition, where Beethoven simply tonicizes the dominant, transposing the opening bars from Bt to F major; perhaps the exposition begins in the dominant, as if (harmonically speaking) the first group had become the second. But of course, within its structural context it would be ridiculous to suggest that the exposition actually begins in F major. The first group is not in the dominant, as Tovey would say, but on it. It is simply a harmonic anacrusis of some 17 bars that resolves tonally and rhythmically with a structural downbeat to articulate the tonic in bar 37. This is simple enough to disentangle. However, the tonal ambiguity staged by the double opening has highly problematic repercussions in the recapitulation (see bars 132-145). To start with, bars 20-30 are transposed down a fifth in the recapitulation to Bt, as if the first group had really functioned as a second group. This is because the recapitulation does not happen twice; instead, it conflates the tonal vacillations at the

206

CHAPTER SIX

start into a single double entendre, with the notes of the first Allegro but the harmonic structure of the second. What appears to be the tonic, articulated by the gestures of recapitulation and made visual by a B I» major signature, is simultaneously not the tonic at all. As a replication of that vast dominant upbeat, the recapitulation is not so much in Bl» major as skimming precariously on it, and the critical moment of decision in sonata form becomes a moment of indecision. In fact, hidden behind this tonal trick is a rare instance of a Beethovenian sonata structure with a subdominant recapitulation—albeit a very deceptive one. Thus the return of Bt major is also the appearance of the dominant of El> major, driving towards its tonic in bar 145. The actual resolution back into Bl» is displaced by some 40 bars (bar 172). And yet, unlike the exposition, the harmonic context does not explain the paradox. Whereas it would have been absurd to interpret the exposition in F major, here in the recapitulation the music is genuinely in the tonic as well as on it; it is simultaneously a false recapitulation and a real one, a tonic and not a tonic at the same time, an unresolved resolution—a paradox. To put it another way, a flat is missing from the key signature—El» major not Bk Beethoven had a real choice. And perhaps it was to underline this ambiguity that he prefaces the return of the second group with an Al» signature despite the fact that the music is really in DI» major (bar 160). There is a flat missing, as if the eye were meant to tell the ear to review the recapitulation. If all this double meaning is not enough, the recapitulation itself has a double derivation; its ambivalence is the consequence not simply of the first group but also of the second. At the critical moment of tension in sonata form, the second group unveils the most bizarre of these harmonic contradictions—Gl» major. Beethoven does not actually arrive in Gl> major, because there was never a departure towards it in the first place; it is merely a contingent assertion. This may sound like a play of form with Beethoven thwarting expectations, since he establishes the dominant only to subvert it at the last moment (bars 50-56). "The surprise," as Brodbeck and Platoff say, "lies in the route [Beethoven took,] not his destination." This route may dramatize the peculiarities of the flattened submediant, but its harmonic significance is not simply in this play of convention. G\> major is significant in itself. As an isolated insertion it directly contradicts the structure, for at the moment of conflict in sonata form, where the harmonies invariably shift sharpwards, Beethoven plunges as flat as possible, plummeting some five places down the cycle of fifths. In fact, his destination is almost flat enough to be

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

207

sharp—one more notch down the cycle, and the whole system would invert. The binary opposition in sonata form between sharpward conflict and flatward resolution is suddenly shattered. If equilibrium is to be maintained, then sonata form must be radically rewritten at this point, with the tonalities reordered, the functions redefined, and the dynamics redistributed. But how can Beethoven resolve such a flatward dissonance? Certainly not by transposing the second group down a fifth in the recapitulation (as he does with the first group!), since that would invert the tonal system and cause the entire form to collapse. Instead, he sets up a double dissonance that holds the tonal system in tension. Having descended five places down the cycle of fifths, he simply veers the other way, climbing five places up the cycle to create the same harmonic dislocation in the development by setting Gt against D major. Tonality is an asymmetrical system; but because Beethoven has divided the form symmetrically— shifting five places either side of Bl>—to produce, in effect, a chain of major thirds, the structure is inherently anti-tonal. Thus when GI» rotates up to D major in the development section, the result is an enharmonic fracture (bar 97). The flattest and the sharpest of keys in this movement are juxtaposed. And this confrontation creates a dissonance at the extremes of the tonal system—a quantum leap across the cycle of fifths (Ex. 6.2). Consequently, the closure of the form is the resolution not sim-

Ex. 6.2. Circle of fifths

At Dt group II

Gt

D development

208

CHAPTER SIX

ply of one sharpward tonality but of two tonal dissonances, lying a major third either side of the tonic. The Classical equilibrium of oppos­ ing a sharpward dissonance by flattening it is suddenly thrown into con­ fusion, and once again the structure is split in two by a doubling of func­ tions. But once the movement is fissured with such harmonic extremes— hitherto unknown in sonata form—how can this cavity be closed? It is perhaps rather fortuitous that the melody that articulates the Gl> major fracture forms a pertinent analogy; Leonard B. Meyer would call this configuration a gap-filled melody, in which the initial intervallic dis­ junction of a sixth is resolved by filling in the fissure (Ex. 6.3). In exactEx. 6.3. Op. 130, first movement—gap-filled structure of the second theme 55

1

V

[

Ί^

1

U^J

'/VJ- ·'

Iy the same way, the harmonic design of the movement is a gap-filled structure, except that the tones are tonalities and the logic is the system of fifths. Like the melodic leap, the disjunction of a sixth (or third) between Gl> and D is filled in by a cycle of fifths tumbling nine places flatwards. Tonally, the differential between G\> and D generates a poten­ tial energy which is released kinetically in the development as the music swings round the cycle, filling in the gap and bypassing the recapitula­ tion to connect one second group to the other (Ex. 6.4). Thus, at the crit­ ical point of recapitulation the harmonic and formal systems slip out of phase. It is not merely that the tonic is caught up as a transition within a harmonic motion; it is deliberately undermined in the process: every pitch round this cycle is tonicized and prolonged except for the articula­ tion of the tonic by the dominant, F major. This is because what is at issue is not Bl> major but the tonal chasm that needs to be filled in. The tonic is dealt with later (bars 172-174). Consequently, the recapitulation is swallowed up in the circular motion and is orientated towards the subdominant, and so it rhymes with the harmonic instability that initiated the exposition. Thus the logic behind this paradoxical recapitulation has a double derivation—the 'dominant' of the first group and the flattened submediant of the second.

209

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

Ex. 6.4. Op. 130, first movement—gap-filled harmonic structure

GAP FILLED (kinetic energy)

G R O U P II maximum tonal contrast

-resolution of contrast

-* closure

By connecting the first and second groups, the recapitulation misaligns the articulation of the form, causing these double functions to impinge on the return of the second group. Its theme—not so surprisingly by now—happens twice, once in Dl> major as a resolution to the 'gap-filled' structure (bars 160-172), and once in Bl> major as the resolution in the tonic (bars 173ff). Thus the reappearance of the second group is a strange bipartite affair that represents an odd solution to the peculiar tensions of the form. On the one hand, it functions 'backwards' by resolving in the wrong direction, going up a fifth to Dl> instead of down a fifth to balance the G^ major intrusion; on the other hand, it functions ectopically as a delayed resolution of a first group that was unable to

210

CHAPTER SIX

articulate its tonic in the recapitulation. Set side by side, these resolutions split the theme in two with a tonal irrationality that is in fact perfectly logical. This split logic aptly sums up the entire structure; sense and nonsense are fused together within a form that is entirely made out of double meanings. The word 'duplicity' captures the play of this movement, because it implies the idea of duplication along with that of a kind of double-dealing that undoes the integrity of the work. By doubling elements, Beethoven creates a structure of 'undecidability' in which it is difficult for the rational mind to elicit a logic of simple binary oppositions so vital in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music; the tension of conflict and resolution, contrast and synthesis often associated with the functions of sonata form is eroded. It is not that these oppositions no longer exist: rather, the singularity of their logic is blurred by their being doubled so that, for example, the ascendancy of Allegro over Adagio, or resolution over tension, or flatward balance over sharpward dissonance is called into question. The 'duplicity' of the work confuses those elements in a series of paradoxes that signal a redistribution of the functions of sonata structure. A continual slippage between the formal gesture and the tonal function brings about a mismatching of systems that makes the form ambiguous. At every moment of structural punctuation there is a deflection, a deferral, or a functional inversion (see Ex. 6.5). In both the exposition and the recapitulation, the definition of the tonic is displaced towards the second group; in reaction, the sharpward conflict that generates the dynamic of sonata form is transferred from the second group to the development section, and the flatward balance at the close of the form is hauled into the exposition in the second group, so that it resolves sharpwards in the recapitulation. The structure is completely ectopic, the functions are radically reorganized, and the systems are out of phase. Thus the effect of disruption is created by an intellectual virtuosity that comes close to the edge of 'insanity.' Rosen would insist that the equilibrium of forces vital to sonata form is still present; but with such internal slippages in the machinery the equilibrium is not guaranteed from the start—it is always provisional, always in a state of flux and constantly deferred. Perhaps sonata form still marshals the systems of symmetry, causality, progress, and synthesis, but the narrative is one that teeters on the edge of breakdown—moving in the opposite direction, as it were, towards 'unwholeness,' symbolized by the 'double introduction' and all its paradoxical repercussions.

211

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

Ex. 6.5. Op. 130, first movement—displacement of formal and tonal structure Exposition formal surface

I group 11 \ tonic \displaced

Development

Ijroup II] \

sharp tonality \displaced

Bt

tonal function V

I

Recapitulation I group 11 | group II| N. tonic \displaced

Bk

D Gt flattest t onal point

I:\> subdo minant recapit ulation

Di.

flatward resolution inverts sharpwards

II With the form in confusion, perhaps the cohesion of the work relies upon the elaboration of the motifs. Analytically this is not difficult to prove; but in reality these motifs are as blurred in their logic as the form is duplicitous. Made to articulate the structure, they neither clarify nor unify the double vision; instead, they themselves are lost in all kinds of abstractions. There are momentary glimpses of an earlier dynamic, where motifs develop with an ineluctable flow of thought (see bars 132-145, for instance); but their intermittent appearances already point to a certain false coherence, since the technique cannot organize the movement into the "unfolding totality" that Adorno imagined in the middle-period works. For Adorno, in the late works there is no mediation between the motivic subject and its object, the form. In fact, the brute force of the form in its seemingly irrational assertions destroys the ability of the motivic subject to develop coherently. How can the individual motif generate the music when it is exposed to the juxtapositions and fissures that are imposed upon it? Instead, as was evident in the analyses of the previous quartets, the motif relinquishes its power to unite the form and colludes with the external forces by retreating into the background as a network of subthematic elements; what rises to the sur-

212

CHAPTER SIX

face is no longer the linear logic of motivic development, but a series of juxtaposed 'textures'—indistinct configurations woven from the same material. In the first movement of Op. 130, motivic texture and background abstraction work in tandem, creating a certain anonymity that makes it difficult for analysis to identify motifs; at times the motivic connections seem so obscure that analysis is forced to be speculative. Take, for example, the first four bars—the motto of the entire work. It is a conjunct structure of tones and semitones, except for one significant interval. The span of a sixth, drawn out by the crescendo and the sudden piano, hints at a framework of thirds (its inversion), which articulates the registral and linear boundaries of the theme. Thus the tones and semitones lie within a deeper structure, withdrawn from the surface (Ex. 6.6). Ex. 6.6. Op. 130, first movement—motivic structure of motto

chain of thirds

framework of thirds

It is not so much the theme as the abstract intervallic pattern beneath the surface that is vital. With these intervals Beethoven structures all the contrasts in the introduction. First he isolates the cadence (bars 4-7) to fashion a rising sequence that leads to an inversion of the semitonal motif x, played against a chain of thirds (y). It is as if the motto were doubling back on itself in counterpoint, employing exactly the same intervallic patterns to articulate an entirely different landscape (Ex. 6.7). Ex. 6.7. Op. 130, first movement—motivic structure of bars 7-9 7

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS

(OPP. 130 AND 133)

213

Then suddenly, with the Allegro, the surface changes abruptly; a new gesture disrupts the counterpoint, yet the theme is undergirded by the same intervallic structure. The chain of thirds is transformed into a spiralling figuration, which is moulded around the conjunct steps of the cadential motif; moreover, this relationship is reinforced by the sequential structure of the melody (Ex. 6.8). This connection is admittedly Ex. 6.8. Op. 130, first movement—motivic structure of bars 14-18

obscure; analysis seems to have overstepped the boundaries of perception in linking the cadential figure (bars 4-7) with the sequential structure of the Allegro; and yet, as Kerman points out, "this is the very relationship that Beethoven wishes to force,"" for in the coda, these opposed elements are juxtaposed in a chequered alternation held fragilely together by the motivic connection (Ex. 6.9). The retreat of the motif allows for Ex. 6.9. Op. 130, first movement—contrast and connection in the coda

214

CHAPTER SIX

Ex. 6.9. (continued) Adagio, ma non troppo

^m

5fe

Allegro

S

f

PP

ISJ R p ^ ± 5

S

^TTT

E

jt>

f f f

S

|»H*

/

/»P

PP

Pi

« f

P

a commingling of the most disparate elements, making the distance between the background logic and the surface 'chaos' almost unbridge­ able. Unperturbed by the 'madness' of the gestures, the motifs play out their intellectual games; meanwhile, what is left on the surface are textures. The chain of thirds, for example, has gradually (d)evolved from an expressive motif at the start to a texture of turns in the Allegro (see Ex. 6.10: bars 1-15). In Adorno's terms, it has changed from a theme to a cliche and grows as a geometry of scales, turns, and arpeggios (see Ex. 6.10: bars 25-54). It is as if the motif were developed to the point of effacement, losing itself in an indistinct texture that resembles a cadenza of stylized conventions. For Adorno, such external cliches signal a motivic inertia that allows the material to be violently juxtaposed by the force of the structure, since the motif has given up its distinct identity. But the identity of the motif has not in fact disappeared; it has simply withdrawn into the background. This process of abstracting themes and weaving them into a texture recurs consistently throughout the movement. In the development, for example, the cadential motif χ is extracted and turned into a textural

Ex. 6.10. Op. 130, first movement—motifs and textures in the first group

216

CHAPTER SIX

oscillation (bars 95-104). Or consider the second group: its theme is derived obliquely from the initial motto. "The second theme [bar 55]," writes Carl Dahlhaus, "emerges from motivic particles of the opening"; however, these particles are not strung out like a theme but are broken and bracketed together in counterpoint (Ex. 6.11). Moreover, the melody Ex. 6.11. Op. 130, first movement—derivation of the second theme motto motif 1

ι

motif y

second group 1

ιέ-, 1DZ

ι

y expanded ^.

^i

χ inverted

takes its pitches from the motto of the quartet—a symmetrical four-bar structure that falls into two phrases. What Beethoven does, however, is to cut across the logic of this structure to extract the pitches that strad­ dle the gap of articulation (Ex. 6.12). He makes the disconnection the Ex. 6.12. Op. 130, first movement—derivation of the second theme motto motif

55

second theme

Pi

mjTi

connection, obscuring the relationship. Then, having derived his second theme, Beethoven inverts it, but with an initial octave displacement to cover up the tracks (Ex. 6.13). As a result of these arcane connections

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

217

Ex. 6.13. Op. 130, first movement—second theme inverted theme 55

P 73

\J- J (*)

1

J iJ

r-r-rr-r

jug f ^ theme inverted

gpp^

P

·

countermelody (theme)

with the motto, the second group is also a construction of scalar patterns and chains of thirds, which gradually withdraw from the surface to turn a theme into a texture (Ex. 6.14)—in fact, the same texture of the first group, as if the abstract identity between them could be revealed only at the point of anonymity. Faceless and somewhat inert, these textures are controlled by the undercurrent of abstract motifs that causes them to toss and turn, with seemingly irrational changes of pace. Indeed, the construction of the work appears to be deliberately disjointed, as though each section of the sonata structure were a kind of texture, subject to the whims of an underlying shape. After all, the tonal rifts in the formal landscape articulate that ubiquitous sequence of thirds (or sixths)—Bl>, Gl>, D. Beethoven seems to latch on to the one anomaly among the conjunct intervals of the motto—that poignant annunciation of a minor sixth—in order to construct a 'tonicized motif (see Ex. 6.15). But the motivic unity is shattered by its very articulation, since to draw attention to its significance Beethoven dislocates the tonal sequence in a series of stark harmonic shifts—the very fissure that generates the 'gap-filled' dynamic of the form. Indeed, the gap-fill relationship between the harmonic structure of the form and the first and second themes is clarified in these analytical parallels as Beethoven forces the melodic sixth of the theme to

218

CHAPTER SIX

Ex. 6.14. Op. 130, first movement—motifs and textures in the second group

connect with the harmonic sixth of the form. But the relationship is allegorical rather than audible, since what makes sense on the thematic surface can appear to be totally absurd beneath. But these themes do not only impinge on the harmonic shifts in the form; they are also reflected as long melodic structures that are locked in counterpoint with the 'tonal motif.' Strung out over the first group, for example, is a giant replica of the second segment of the motto. The struc-

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

219

Ex. 6.15. Op. 130, first movement—structural fissures bar

1

i

chain of major thirds (minor sixths) tonicized

55

100

£

first group

Φ second group

development

harmonic shifts

tural pitch F (5) is thrust up by two cadences on the dominant and is left hanging in the air (see Ex. 6.1: bars 7 and 20). The impetus towards clo­ sure dramatized in these cadences is released as the energy of the Allegro carries F down a third to D (bar 37), swinging from dominant to tonic, only to rotate back to the dominant with emphatic cadential gestures (bar 45) that punctuate the end of this giant motto. This melodic shape, stretched across the first group, is marked out by disconnecting the pitches with textural changes, in order to force their significance into the foreground (Ex. 6.16). Ex. 6.16. Op. 130, first movement—background motivic structure of the first group 7

bar

26

36

37

44

45

Λ

i

5

^ ^_

^-,

second phrase of motto

*\·

l>*~"y-^

*:

textural changes -

Just as the first theme is encapsulated by a reflection of itself, so the theme of the second group opens out into a giant remoulding of its shape, with the harmonic shift to GI» widening the initial melodic gap of the theme for an Urlinie to fill in. But since the second theme is a refash­ ioning of the first theme (see Ex. 6.12), it also resembles the opening seg­ ment of the motto (Ex. 6.17).

220

CHAPTER SIX

Ex. 6.17. Op. 130, first movement—background motivic structure of the second group motto motif 1

"second theme" 55

¥m iy

frVj-hRj m bar

$

45

53

63

64

89

^g r^f

1

1

Ir^μ S

90

t 1

— textural shifts linear motivic structure of second group

Thus the exposition is almost an elongation of the initial 4 bars, but with its phrases in reverse order. What happens next in both develop­ ment and recapitulation is a duplication of this linear structure, but with the phrases shuffled back into the original sequence, to conjure a mirror symmetry on this highly abstract plane. The point of reversal is articu­ lated by the harmonic shift to D major, which initiates a progression around a cycle of fifths; above this, the pattern that encompassed the sec­ ond group is hung out over the development section and stretches into the recapitulation, since the reprise is caught up in the same harmonic cycle (Ex. 6.18). Ex. 6.18. Op. 130, first movement— background motivic structure of the development and the recapitulation bar

90

106

110

127

132 144

146

linear motivic structure

J.-.I A J

%

mm

• ""

tonicized motif VI 1,

ΠΙ development

recapitulation

221

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

But the recapitulation also re-articulates the linear structure of the first group, now transposed down a fifth, so that the melodic line slides down a third from Bl> to G. But instead of immediately rotating back to the tonic, Beethoven progresses up a chromatic strand semitone by semitone, moving first from G to an emphatic cadence on Ak The prolongation of this pitch in the second group may explain the mendacious key signature at this point (bar 160), since the music is unequivocally rooted in Dk Perhaps Beethoven is trying to emphasize the pitch by dislocating the signifier from the signified! for it is A I» that is structural and motivically sig­ nificant, and it is A I» which edges up to ΑΊ (bars 171-172) to signal a hia­ tus in this cycle of fifths and usher in the structural dominant of the movement. The F major sonority that has been dramatized and tonicized from the very start and deflected at critical moments in the form (bars 14, 20, 45, 131) is no longer deprived of its significance; rather, having driven the motivic line it finally articulates a structural cadence, as if to close the giant motivic shape with ΑΊ resolving to Bl>—dominant to tonic (bars 172-175). Thus the dynamic line that embraces the recapitulation is yet another remoulding of the initial motto; but this time there is not only a pro­ traction of the pattern but also a prolongation of the exact pitches in a kind of retrograde motion. The motif resolves the form in the same way that it closed the first 4 bars (Ex. 6.19). Ex. 6.19. Op. 130, first movement— background motivic structure of the recapitulation second phrase of motto

motto motif

φϋ

Φ

U Jj, retrograde

recapitulation

bar

132

146

154

172

209

linear melodic structure of the recapitulation

222

CHAPTER SIX

Together, all these linear structures connect to form a continuous and symmetrical unfolding of the motto (see Ex. 6.20). The entire movement seems to be generated by an alterior logic determined by the intervallic structures at the start. But once again this motivic rationale overreaches itself, creating an 'illogicality' that begins to disfigure the form whilst try­ ing to embrace it. These analytical observations, whilst justifying the form, cannot actually unify it. The web of intervallic relationships, neu­ tralized as foreground texture or background scaffold, can no longer cre­ ate the linear logic of Beethoven's middle-period works; instead there is abstraction rather than coherence. Or, to put it another way, the admin­ istration of motifs is no longer a visible manipulation of themes but has become a hidden 'bureaucracy,' like Metternich's police state, whose rig­ orous control devastates the form. The sinister connotations of this process add a new item to Adorno's catalogue of social ills, of which the late works, in their musical configurations, form the monumental ruins.

Ex. 6.20. Op. 130, first movement—summary of the long-range motivic structure bar

1

7

26 28 36 37 44 45

53 63 64 89 90

motif y

motif χ

Tv \\d^\>d

P I

)\M

chain of thirds

first group

106 127 132

motif χ

WlJ

U J U t|«.

I V ' motif y tonicized ΠΙ second group

146 154 172 209

motif y

I

u

development recapitulation

III

Not only does the 'duplicity' of the movement re-echo in the doublings and splittings of the work, but the motto also has repercussions in the rest of the quartet. It appears from the sketches that Beethoven, having completed the first two movements of the work, did not fix the number or sequence of movements until he had formulated the ideas for the fugal conclusion. He vacillated between all kinds of keys, themes, and finales, in a manner as haphazard as the melee of movements that constitutes this quartet. In constrast to Op. 131, where the smoothness of the open-

223

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

ing fugue generates movements that are seamlessly connected, in Op. 130 the initial fractures merely provoke a juxtaposition of movements with a tritonal gap that severs the work in two. But it would be a mis­ take to think that in Op. 131 Beethoven suddenly felt a new urge to inte­ grate his materials, particularly as both the El» major and A minor quar­ tets are embraced by a single unfolding of an idea. In all this juggling of elements that the sketches for Op. 130 testify to, it is significant that the middle movements were formed with the outer ones in mind; there seems to be a pattern which takes control of the structure, linking the first movement to the last. Reti certainly feels that the tonal scheme is a reit­ eration of what he calls the "corner notes" of the motto, which frame the sequence of thirds—Bl>, G, Ek But the peculiarities of this quartet announce something more exact than Reti's shadowy outline. Indeed, Beethoven spells it out explicitly in the Andante, opening it with a recol­ lection of the very start (Ex. 6.21). In fact, Reti has demonstrated, per­ haps with a little sophistry, how the motto of the work weaves its way through the violins; but what is structurally significant is not so much the motto as the motion from the Bl> of the previous movement through ΑΊ to At—a pitch which Beethoven quickly tonicizes and prolongs as the Kopfton of the Andante and even gestures towards, at the centre of the form, with the 'false preparation.' It seems that after delineating the

Ex. 6.21. Op. 130, second and third movements—recollections of the motto Bt 105

$

ite

(A 1 O

j=

ea= movement 2

M>i«[jjr> WL

Bl>

Al

At

/^J d—Γ

pp^^

«i^f ! J I

-ρ

movement 3

segments of the motto in the first movement Beethoven indicates that he is stretching one segment out over the entire quartet. After all, having isolated Bl>, ΑΊ, and Al>, Beethoven dislocates the quartet at its pivotal

224

CHAPTER SIX

point to tonicize the central pitch of the motto; the tritonal fissure, like the harmonic shifts in the opening movement, stresses the motivic sig­ nificance of G as the key of the Alia danza tedesca and the structural pitch of the Cavatina. Indeed, the Cavatina closes with its mediant (G), which links up meticulously with the opening pitch of the finale; and whichever finale one chooses, there is a dynamic motion from G back to Bl>, whether it be through the sequence of fifths in the Grosse Fuge or the off-tonic theme in the alternative movement (Ex. 6.22). Thus, for all its Ex. 6.22. Op. 130—motivic structure motivic structure of Op. 130

5*Ξ

^ l

f y y η

movement I

II

ΙΠ

tritonal fissure

rv

^") f" VI

heterogeneity the quartet is arranged around a symmetrical motif, using the pitches as a hidden scaffold that joins the first movement to the last. The abstract structure deliberately divides the quartet in half to throw this intervallic symmetry into relief. The harmonic links that group the movements on either side of the tritonal gap are not so much an attempt to unify the heterogeneity as a means of delineating the motto. Similarly, the juxtaposition of movements disconnects the pitches to emphasize their background connection, in that paradox so typical of the late quar­ tets. Thus the first movement, with its doublings, its fissures, its use of the motto and its abstractions, is the source of inspiration for the entire work. But this logic does not so much explain the 'madness' as aggravate it, providing a structure for the dissociative process. So it is not without reason that the first movement and the Grosse Fuge mirror each other at either end of this disconnected symmetry. They are parallel structures, as is true of many opening and closing movements in the Classical repertoire. But they are parallel with a difference: instead of creating closure with a sociable resolution of the structural issues, the finale pursues the disintegration of the initial movement with such anti­ social rhetoric that it was eventually ostracized from the quartet as Op. 133. This destructive parallel occurs on exactly the same two levels

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

225

explored in the analysis of the first movement—a formal level articulated by paradoxical punctuations, and a motivic level that tends towards abstraction. On both levels, the fugue is critically honed against the structure it posits: it dismantles the contrast of Classical forms and pursues the motivic unity of counterpoint to the edge of chaos.

IV There is something Sublime about the form of the Grosse Fuge; its sheer size induces in the analyst a kind of Burkian terror. Faced with such a structure, critics like Marliave, d'Indy, and Mason have simply tabulated the work, since it fits into no pre-existing mould; others describe it as some kind of hybrid—an amalgam of sonata, variation, and fugue, or a 'symphonic poem,' or a Baroque suite —or anything else that is amorphous. Indeed, even its disparateness has been applauded as a resolution of the diversity in the quartet. This is all rather ironic, since of all Beethovenian structures this one ought to enclose itself in an autonomy that could easily inhabit a separate opus number. Its lack of self-validation indicates that as a finale it is inextricable from the quartet. Perhaps without Op. 130 the fugue does not even make sense. For a start, it is a fugue by virtue only of its process and not of its form; it has neither the uniformity nor the cogency of a fugal structure. On the other hand, if one tabulates it as an isolated structure, its tonal and thematic elements do not add up as a balanced totality (Ex. 6.23). Moreover, the fugue evades all attempts to fit it into 'sonata form,' so that the term itself becomes another "abracadabra" definition for the fugue, as Kerman says. Therefore, it would be expedient to dispense with the concept of 'sonata form' altogether, if only the fugue did not gesture so blatantly towards its dynamics. Instead of slipping in and out of a fluid harmonic structure, in the way typical of fugal forms, the opening section limits its harmonic perspectives to define a vast texture of Bl> major. Its harmonic struggle is not within itself (since it constantly returns to the tonic) but is against the lyrical fugues in Gl> and A I» (bars 159/493), which similarly outline a single block of tonality. These contrasting fugues are staged as conflicting subject groups, juxtaposed to set up a tonal tension. In contrast, the fugue that troubles the centre of the work, although it is wrought in A\>, seems to spend most of its time exploring the entire tonal system, whittling down the motivic substance in the process. This fugue is clearly an exaggeration of a devel-

226

CHAPTER SIX

Ex. 6.23. Grosse Fuge—table of events Grosse Fuge: BARS

DESCRIPTION

KEY

1-30

Overtura

G, F and Bl> major

Bl> Fugue-in three sections: i) exposition ii) new countersubject iii) diminution

Bt-Et-D minor Bt Bt

30-158 30 111 139

SECTION I II

159-232

Gl> fugue Meno mosso e moderate)

Gt-V of Bt

III

233-272

Allegro tnolto con brio

Bt

IV

At fugue-in two sections: i) development of subject ii) return and development of ideas in section II

At (tonal flux) Et-At

273-492 273 414

V

493-532

At fugue Meno mosso e moderato return of section III

At-V of Bt

VI

533-656

Allegro molto con brio return of section IV

Bt

VII

657-741

Coda return of section I

Bt

VIII

opment section. Thus each fugue is given a distinctly different function which articulates processes analogous to the type of sonata-rondo dynamics that befits a finale (Ex. 6.24). Nevertheless, sonata form cannot simply be imposed upon this structure; the tonal forces are obviously haywire, and the essential element of recapitulation is lacking since the initial fugue is not repeated in the structure. The form seems to be very odd, alluding to 'sonata form' without actually being in it. So what is it? Must the movement be accepted as a law unto itself that confounds analysis in the same way as it confused its first audience? In a sense, yes—as Op. 133, it does have to be accepted as such. But as the finale of Op. 130 it cannot be so: it is inextricably bound to the work. For all its formal ambiguity, the fugue has to be understood as a parallel structure to the first movement, as a kind of fugal re-writing of the start.

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

227

Ex. 6.24. Grosse Fuge—possible sonata-form structure

Key Fugue Sonata

Bk

G\>

h\>

At (Et) At

At

Bt

I

II

III

III

IV

III

codetta/ group I in sonata-rondo?

development

group II

coda

group I group II

However, it is not so much an imitation of that movement as an exaggeration, in which the initial paradoxes are pushed to the point of collapse. The initial fractures (bars 1-30), for example, are clearly a hyperbole of the opening gestures of the quartet. In fact, Beethoven calls it "Overtura," as if the tension of integration that initiated the first movement had finally snapped, isolating the start of the fugue as a separate entity. It is an overture, in that it is an independent synopsis of the narrative to come, presented starkly as matter without form. Like the opening of the quartet, it has three disparate textures, woven together by the same substructural pitch patterns, which are thrown out like a table of contents. These gestures of disintegration are incorporated into the work, to fracture the entire form. Indeed, the assimilation of the material intensifies the fissures of the first movement; the textures simply clash against each other with a minimum of mediation (bars 159/233/273). Thus, when the first 'fugal group' gives way to the second (bar 159) they are simply forced to collide, causing one of the most awkward and dissonant progressions in the history of tonality; the linear energy is suddenly dammed by a few quick shifts into GI» major. In the first movement the dominant at least mediated between the tonic and its flattened submediant, with a transition to connect the contrasting textures. In the fugue there is no transition. There is a sort of modulation, but it literally sounds wrong; as the fugue is driving ineluctably towards the tonic an A\> major chord is suddenly thrown into the mechanism (bar 157), and the harmony shifts, sinking down to a chord of Gk There is not even a dominant for the new tonality—just dissonance.

228

CHAPTER SIX

In effect, the GP fugue functions as a huge appoggiatura on the flattened submediant, which eventually resolves back to the dominant that it usurped (bar 230). But GP is still a problematic intrusion. Indeed, the problem posed by its flatward nature is made explicit when Beethoven fails to balance it, as he does earlier, by veering sharpwards. Once again the tension of the first movement is broken: the flattest and sharpest keys are no longer held at extremes; instead, the fugue simply manoeuvres into flatward regions throughout the rest of the piece. GP major is never quite resolved, and the reappearance of this fugue in AP major does not explain the difficulties. Consequently there is no 'gap-filled' structure, yet Beethoven insists on duplicating the circle of fifths that in the first movement connected the development with the second group. But he intensifies it in a complete circumnavigation of the tonal system from AP to AP, linking the 'developmental fugue' at the centre of the form with the return of the second fugue. Instead of filling in a gap, the cycle becomes a self-enclosed structure, emphasizing AP as if by being equidistant from BP and GP it could mediate the dissonance in the movement (Ex. 6.25). Ex. 6.25. The relationship of At major to Bl> major and Gl> major

Somehow, within the circular motion the recapitulation appears to be squeezed out altogether. There is a section of the development that hovers around the tonic (bars 358-413), but this is merely used as a dominant to articulate a disfigured remnant in EP major of the initial fugue (bar 414). Is this supposed to be the recapitulation—something in the wrong key and with a theme that is hardly identifiable? Analytically, as an isolated structure it cannot function as a recapitulation. But if it is seen as a parallel to the first movement, its illogicalities begin to make sense. In that movement the recapitulation, caught up in the harmonic

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

229

motion, was a paradox of tonic return and subdominant deflection. In the Grosse Fuge that paradoxical tension collapses, and the ambiguity gives way to a blatant subdominant recapitulation (Ex. 6.26). Ex. 6.26. Grosse Fuge—parallels with first movement of Op. 130

formal gesture

MOVEMENT I development recapitulation group ii

GROSSE FUGE development recapitulation fuge ii

harmonic structure

Ek/Bt

The original paradox is so significant, in fact, that Beethoven takes the trouble to re-enact it in the alternative finale. Beethoven composed only three subdominant recapitulations, and all three are in this quartet: but only in the Grosse Fuge is the recapitulation 'lost' and the tonic deferred for so long (bars 453-510) that the form becomes highly precarious. The first movement was already unstable; by exaggerating the peculiarities of that movement, the Grosse Fuge begins to move beyond the realms of comprehensibility. In a kind of negative resolution of the structural problems, it intensifies the perplexities of the initial structure rather than neutralizing them. While elucidating the first movement's paradoxes by making them blatant, it deforms the initial structure to such an extent that the fugue is incomprehensible as 'sonata form' without the first movement as a commentary. The structure of the first movement thus supplies the esoteric logic behind the fugue's apparent 'madness' (see Ex. 6.27). Inextricably bound up with the start of the quartet, the Grosse Fuge pursues the initial contradictions to their ultimate conclusion, creating a finale that does not finalize.

230

CHAPTER SIX

Ex. 6.27. Grosse Fuge—parallels with first movement of Op. 130 harmonic fissure

harmonic correction

ι

11 recapitulation

B? Bt movement I: group 1

Ό\> El. —-—; 1 group II development group I I cycle of fifths G\>

harmonic fissure

Dl./Bl> group 11 I

harmonic correction

ι

11 recapitulation

Bt

Gl.

fugue I

fugue II

At

El. 1

Grosse Fuge:

development fugue I I cycle of fifths

At/Bt fugue II I

V If the Grosse Fuge sets itself against sonata form to the point of disman­ tling its coherence, then it is not surprising that the technique of fugue should be subject to the same critical destruction. When Warren Kirkendale reads the Grosse Fuge through the devices of Albrechtsberger's treatise on counterpoint and Bach's Art of Fugue, he unwittingly neutralizes the meaning of Beethoven's work. Bach's Art of Fugue asserts the mathematical order of the medieval world: Beethoven's smashes it. In the Grosse Fuge, the contrapuntal laws laid down by Albrechtsberger invert into a disorder of polyphony that dismembers the very logic which fugue symbolizes. As in the first movement, motivic counterpoint forces its logic to embrace the entire structure, in what Stravinsky calls "pure interval music," until the technique of unity col­ lapses in upon itself. Many commentators have pointed out that the diversity of the fugue is woven together by the singularity of its subject. Moreover, the fugal subject is moulded out of the same intervallic substance as the initial

231

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

motto, and in that sense it draws the work cyclically to its conclusion (Ex. 6.28). However, is it not only the subject that is fashioned from Ex. 6.28. Grosse Fuge—intervallic parallels between first movement and finale motto motif

m m 1

movement 1

V

ψ

^

Grosse Fuge

I

I X

I

I

I

I XX

£_*

these intervals, but all the textures of counterthemes and motivic cells that surround it. Beethoven spins out the complexity of the fugue with a frugality of patterns that invests even the tiniest elements of trills and appoggiaturas with motivic significance. The combination of fugal pro­ cedures and motivic identity creates an aura of abstract intellectualism that is often the focus both of the fugue's detractors and of its admirers. Those who acclaim the movement as "pure interval music" and those who reject it as eye music for deaf people are in fact saying the same thing: this is cerebral music. The problem with both views is that they often regard the fugue as something purely academic, fixed as calcula­ tions on a piece of paper. But the fugue is neither static nor silent; rather, it is a process that is performed, and as such it renders irrelevant all notions of purity and abstraction. This fugue is a narrative of destruc­ tion; but what is being destroyed is not revealed until the very end of the work. In the last 25 bars, the opening fugue reappears stripped of all the violence that had bedevilled it (Ex. 6.29). Beethoven knew exactly how to write this fugue: the subject, countersubject, and harmonies really work. What Beethoven does at the start is to make them not work; his technique is deliberately set askew to create a defective fugue. It begins with a dislocation of the rhythmic systems, to put the counterpoint out of joint. The 'gapped' subject is one that slips out of phase, punctuating

Ex. 6.29. Grosse Fuge—bars 716-733

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS

(OPP. 130 AND 133)

213

the off-beats to create a rhythmic conflict between the two contrapuntal voices (Ex. 6.30). But, as Cooper and Meyer point out,32 the rhythmic Ex. 6.30. Grosse Fuge—subject and countersubject

contradiction is far more complex than this, involving a slippage between harmonic and periodic structures both within and between the subjects; the 'gapped' subject is not only displaced but elongated at the start and compressed at the end, to conjure two asymmetrical phrases. This is matched—or, rather, mismatched—by a sequential asymmetry in the countersubject (Ex. 6.31). The laws for combining voices are made Ex. 6.31. Grosse Fuge—subject and countersubject

234

CHAPTER SIX

to sheer apart, and the interaction of counterpoint becomes a force of repulsion. These imperfections, asymmetries, and dislocations are the starting point for Beethoven's aggressive critique of fugal writing. And this is only the beginning of the rhythmic process. In the course of the fugue, the disconnection between contrapuntal lines becomes more chaotic as the distances between them are reduced to increasingly irrational fractions. This process is articulated in three stages. First the subject is gapped; it is displaced by one beat (bar 31) and set within a texture consisting of three rhythmic patterns deliberately fashioned at cross purposes to repel one another. Then in the second section (bars 11 Iff) the theme, caught in a similar texture, is displaced by half a beat, so that the subject and countersubject become more awkwardly askew, syncopating against the integers of the metre. But instead of resolving the theme back onto the beat, Beethoven makes resolution almost impossible; in the final stage the subject not only is syncopated but squeezes out its 'gaps,' compressing itself into a smaller space; the countersubject responds by shrinking into triplet figurations (bar 139), so that the two contrapuntal strands are reduced by utterly different ratios. In effect, the subject falls into the space between the former displacements in an even more contorted and fractional dislocation. Thus the process in the first fugue is one where it becomes increasingly difficult for the counterpoint to synchronize. At times the harmonic implications are so distorted that it is left for the the rhythmic texture to generate the momentum of the form. By deliberately destroying counterpoint and by pursuing a rhythmic process to utter disorder, Beethoven turns the fugue into a dynamic system of conflict, almost as a textural counterpart to the tonal tension of sonata form. There is no resolution here—merely the sudden damming of energy by the Gl> major fugue. The rhythmic disintegration is matched by a thematic disintegration in the central A\> fugue (bars 273ff). Kerman describes this section as an area of thematic transformation, but it is more accurately called one of thematic deformation, for the subject does not survive—not even in the recapitulation—rather, it becomes increasingly disfigured. Indeed, at the start of the developmental process the subject is relentlessly truncated, becoming shorter and shorter until all that is left of it is one solitary note (Ex. 6.32). To signal this disintegration, the theme itself is set against shorn-off bits of the subject, which pile on top of one another in different diminutions and inversions. The fragmentation is as economical as it is destructive, for these motivic bits are torn from the basic elements of the subject—the configurations fixed at either end of the theme (Ex.

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS

(OPP. 130 AND 133)

213

Ex. 6.32. Grosse Fuge—destruction of the subject

6.33). One consists of the first three notes (c); the other is the final trill (d). As the subject is whittled down, these fragments take over until the Ex. 6.33. Grosse Fuge—motivic 'head and tail'

theme is completely eradicated. And, as if to gesture towards the loss, the tonal system loses control and inverts from the flattest harmonies to the sharpest, shifting ten places round the circle of fifths within the space of 20 bars (bars 325-345)—At, Dl>, G\>, B, E, A, D, G, C, F. Conversely, with the return of greater harmonic stability (bar 350) the attempt to resurrect the subject begins. The fragments try to reconnect to form a theme, in a reversal of the original truncations. In fact, they

236

CHAPTER SIX

almost succeed, with a restatement of the subject in Gl> at the registral climax of the development (bar 370). But the theme fails to end: the closing trill extends for 27 bars, descending from Gl> down a scale to an attempted cadence in Bk It is as if Beethoven wanted to resolve the G!>-B!> disjunction by embracing it with the subject at the exact centre of the fugue; it is as if the resurrection of the subject could also revitalize the tonic at the point of recapitulation. But the tonic cadence is sabotaged, the trill fails to finalize, and the form continues its descent into dissolution. All that remain are the fragments. Indeed, the fugal abrasion in this episode is so intense that even the fragments break up into atomistic particles. Motif c is compressed into a string of triplets, which is then isolated and distorted to create highly astringent textures (bars 35Off). Similarly, motif d is reduced to a texture of trills; perhaps even its tail ornament condenses to form a mere appoggiatura, inscribed as part of the subject itself (Ex. 6.34). By the end of the development, the counterEx. 6.34. Grosse Fuge—bars 381-388 motif d trill

&

J=E

£

Mk

motif c triplet

iS gste

wSf

motif d appoggiatura

S

£±

W P^

S3

Sf

- W - *

Sf

Sf

Sf

point is just an agglomeration of intervallic bits of the subject which have been rhythmically distorted. As Kerman points out, Beethoven latches on to these seemingly insignificant fragments and reconstitutes them as a theme (Ex. 6.35). But the apparent obscurity of the process is in fact thematically logical. These elements are the remains of the two motifs:

Ex. 6.35. Grosse Fuge—Kerman's derivation of the new theme

238

CHAPTER SIX

originally the head and tail of the subject, they are broken down and reconstituted as the head and tail of the theme of the recapitulation (Ex. 6.36). It is the same subject, but after a process of thematic deformation. It is so disfigured and angular that it is hardly tonal or periodic—in fact, it is hardly a theme. Thus the recapitulation no longer has its stabilizing Ex. 6.36. Grosse Fuge—derivation of the new theme from the subject fragment c

m

fragment d

head

tail

recapitulation 416

subject

^ 1 , η Γ Cl |Γ

J.

U=i

hv ΓΜΓΡΓ D l 1 ^ p ^ p countersubject

function; rather, the central fugue is truly centrifugal, throwing out the elements beyond the recapitulation until no closure is possible—the cir­ cle of fifths has gone too far, while the motivic attrition simply contin­ ues. When the second fugue returns to arrest the process, it is no longer a quiet lyrical interjection but a dense and dissonant climax that grinds the music down to the point of aporia (bar 493). After 230 bars of unre­ lenting forte, rhythmic propulsion, and thematic abrasion, all that is left is the emaciated remains of the subject (Ex. 6.37)—no form, no theme, no rhythm; just disintegrated matter. The trill (d); the semitone (c); diminuendo. This, then, is the end of a process in which the aggression of the sub­ ject is progressively worn down by the contrapuntal friction. Every pos­ sible means of motivic, fugal, and thematic cohesion is pressed into its opposite—incoherence, disorder, violence. If this work locates itself within Albrechtsberger's treatise or the Art of Fugue, it can only be as a critique. If this is "pure interval music" constructed entirely out of motivic elements, then it merely gestures towards its own inability to unify the structure that such intervallic relationships are meant to pro­ duce.

511

poco a poco sempre piu allegro ed accelerando

Ex. 6.37. Grosse Fuge—bars 511-532

240

CHAPTER SIX

The work speaks of failure, the very opposite of the triumphant synthesis associated with Beethovenian recapitulations. What Adorno saw as the reconciliation of individual freedom and social order in the middle-period works is mercilessly inverted by this fugue. As Rose Subotnik writes, "it is through the recapitulation that the subject demonstrates its power to return to itself, no matter how vigorously and far it has traveled into the world of the object [the form]. In fact, the recapitulation seems to confirm the rational irresistibility of the subject's determination to return to itself, since it nearly always seems to emerge as the logical outcome and resolution of what had preceded." The logical outcome of this subject, however, is not recapitulation; the subject of this fugue does not return to itself—it is ground out of existence. The attempt to resurrect it merely conjures up some forked, contorted figure—a prophecy of Auschwitz, if one were to continue Adorno's line of thought. In Adorno's teleology of history only suffering is absolute, and for him late Beethoven signalled the beginning of the end of this miserable vision. If the dialectic of Enlightenment turned reason into barbarism, then somehow this fugue, with all its contrapuntal and developmental artifice, prefigures this history as the techniques of reason become those of tyranny. "Suffering," writes Adorno, "is the humane content of art." This fugue is a logical narrative of destruction. But it is not only the cerebral processes of the fugue that enact this devastation. In Adorno's aesthetic, "What the body signals is not first of all pleasure but suffering. In the shadow of Auschwitz it is in sheer physical wretchedness, in human shapes at the end of their tether, that the body once more obtrudes itself into the rarefied world of the philosopher." I mentioned earlier that this fugue is not a static abstraction but a process to be performed; if the process is one of destruction, then the physicality of its performance is one of violence, in which all somatic pleasures are eradicated. Performance here is no longer an exercise of power, as Richard Poirer suggests, but an object of Beethovenian domination and humiliation. The sheer technical impossibility of the fugue engenders not virtuosity but a struggle, where the rhythmic propulsion of the music pummels the body. Like the fugue subject, the human subject is fragmented by the jerky, frenetic muscular exertions that the score dictates. The work of art finally reveals itself as work, and the sweat of labour makes this commodity unacceptable. If this corporeal signification were not enough, the by-product of such technical demands is noise. This traditional symbol of chaos and barbarism is generated not only by the astringency of the textures but also by the accidental screeches, the out-

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

241

of-tune dissonances, the unintentional vibrations of strings, and the scraping of horsehair on gut. Such noises render the performance as imperfect as the counterpoint that initiates the fugue. The cacophony makes the instruments appear inadequate and the players insufficient. The motivic textures impose such physical strain on the performers and such deafening dynamics on the audience that the string quartet almost becomes a battery of percussion instruments. This is not pure interval music. There is more confusion than cohesion and, at times, more noise than pitch. In fact Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven never used unpitched instruments except to evoke what was regarded then as the barbaric, in the simulation of Turkish music. As Siegmund Levarie points out, noise signalled an assault on 'civilized' society, and it is precisely this onslaught of cacophony that shocked Beethoven's hearers. They were affronted by a contradiction—an uncivilized string quartet, a barbaric fugue, art as manual labour. This noisy finale was the very antithesis of what they thought their culture stood for. Beethoven, having forced open an aesthetic space for the contemplation of his music, seemed to be slamming the door in the face of his audience, with an indictment of the very society that his music was meant to endorse. It is little wonder that one of the early critics stigmatized the work as barbaric through allusions to 'uncivilized' races: "a sort of Chinese puzzle... [music] that only Moroccans can enjoy." Noise.

VI Evidently the finale, with the mandate "tantot libre, tantot recherchee" inscribed above it, pursues sonata form and the thematic texture of fugue until they almost fall apart in the extremity of the tonal and motivic processes; the work turns against the forms it evokes. This is destructive enough; but perhaps it is the interaction of these elements that engenders the most antagonistic aspect of the finale. In contrast to the first movement, the structural and motivic levels here do not collude to punctuate the form and its paradoxes; instead, form and motif, in the guise of sonata form and fugal texture, seem to undo each other as vying forces of organization. Fugue, with its uniform texture and tonal fluidity, disables Classical form in the same way that the contrast and tonal dynamic of Classical structures dismantle fugue. Consider the tonal structure of the fugue. Bonded to the first move-

242

CHAPTER SIX

ment, it nevertheless manoeuvres flatwards in ways that are symptomatic of fugal processes (as Kerman points out); yet sonata form tries to stimulate them into a dynamic of conflict. In this contradiction the form seems to make no tonal sense, since the conflicting tonalities all slip flatwards in a kind of anti-Classical gesture: the second fugue is in Gl>, the central fugue is in Al>, and the recapitulation starts in Ek Even the motion around the entire circle of fifths is a flatwards move from Al>, turning sharpwards only momentarily (bars 331-350). Forced against fugue, sonata form is disarmed in its attempt to animate the tonal structure, without a single sharpwards dissonance to propel the movement to its resolution. Or take the fugal texture: it is unable to assimilate the dynamic contrast and synthesis of sonata form. The different textures merely congeal in space rather than unfold in time, leaving sonata form bereft of the developmental process in which the material can work out the form. Without the implicative power of development, there is only a fractured structure of contrasts. Indeed, the attempt to stimulate the fugal texture with a process of motivic development merely increases the dislocation; the thematic fragmentation of the material turns fugal unity into a textural conflict, and the density of motivic significance in each voice merely creates a non-developmental sameness, stripped of all ability to cohere. Simply examine the initial fugue: devoid of implicative powers, and in an attempt to mimic a 'first group,' the fugue is a tonal structure that circulates three times around Bl> major, giving up its harmonic dynamic for a rhythmic propulsion that could almost go on indefinitely. There is no resolution for this static texture—it merely stops contingently and dissonantly. Or look at the central Al> fugue: the development of the subject merely fragments the elements until their uniformity of texture obscures the recapitulation. Nothing could be more remote from Paul Bekker's thematic interpretation of the fugue as a resolution of "freedom and necessity," since the motif is neither free in its thematic economy nor necessary in its fashioning of the form. Ultimately the Grosse Fuge is not some kind of hybrid or synthesis of various forms, but a structure in which sonata form and fugue not only dismantle their own systems but also coexist in an extreme contradiction against each other—a double vision that confuses any attempt to analyse the 'integrity' of the work. There is no binary opposition between the two: they simply inhere within each other as immiscible processes. The work, therefore, should not be grasped from a single-minded perspective or unpacked from a fixed centre—whether motivic, formal, 'Classical,'

DOUBLES AND PARALLELS (OPP. 130 AND 133)

243

or fugal—for this would merely tame the subversive nature of the work. Rather, analysis must surround the object with a 'constellation' of contradictory concepts—such as the coexistence of fugue and sonata form— to rehearse, as it were, the "confusion of Babel" that an early review attributed to the work. Of course, there are 200 bars of 'resolution' (bars 533ff), led by the scherzo-like march that, after being shunted aside by the development, is now gesturing towards some kind of victory. But what kind of parade is this? As with the A major twist in the previous quartet, the Utopian vision of Classical forms is conjured up at the last moment, seemingly divorced from the heroic process typical of Beethoven or even from the spiritual transcendence of the late sonatas. The Enlightenment sense of 'overcoming' carries no conviction. The victory parade of the Grosse Fuge is a sudden assertion, as though it were posing the question, can there be a resolution after such a process of disintegration and negation? There is an undecidability between the simulation of closure and a genuine resolution—and the overstatement of some twenty cadences testifies to that anxiety. The music has to close, and structurally it grounds the tonal tension, correcting the opening fugue (see Ex. 6.29); it even interpolates a reprise of the "Overturn" with its materials in reverse order and unified in the tonic, to evoke a kind of palindromic closure. Even the cadential cliches have the motivic function of concluding the giant motto of the quartet, with their peculiar lingering on A-Bk Indeed, to underline the point Beethoven replays the critical slippage from the start of the third movement (Bl>—A^-At), which originally not only outlined the motto but also turned the harmonic direction of the work away from the tonic (see Ex. 6.21). In the fugue, the recurrence of this slippage in the subject is counteracted by a multiplicity of A-Bl> cadences, which push the music the other way, towards the tonic (bars 610-636 and 681-715). But there is a sense in the finales of both Opp. 132 and 130 that the optimism is false, particularly as they recall the apparent naivety of the middle movements. If Beethoven critically deprives those movements of innocence, how much more do these codas destroy the work, expressing an ironic promise of what might have been: they jar as the final, irreconcilable contrast. After all, what makes the new finale for Op. 130 so disconcerting is its nonchalant smile, as if nothing had happened. But the curve of that smile already bedevils the end of the Grosse Fuge. This fugue is (to borrow Adorno's description of Mahler's symphonic finales) a "negative apotheosis," a finale of disintegration, a necessary denial of all the Enlightenment promises that the middle movements and the fugue

244

CHAPTER SIX

ironically recall. "Art is the promise of happiness," writes Adorno, "a promise that is constantly being broken." With the Grosse Fuge as a conclusion to Op. 130, perhaps the quartet in its "Galitzin" version should be seen in the same light, as a series of contradictory movements (gathered around a symmetrical motif) in which the parallels and symmetries are pitted against each other, refusing to resolve the tensions and fissures. Indeed, this work encapsulates all the disintegrative processes that Beethoven experimented with in the "Galitzin" Quartets—the dislocation of surface and function, the undermining of the dominant as the pivotal structure in the form, the dialectical tensions and contingent interpolations, the irreconcilable contrasts, the alternative systems of motivic logic that push the Classical functions into extremely precarious and ectopic structures—all these elements are concentrated into this one piece. Unity, with its possibility of closure, is blatantly inverted into an opposite process, a process at work in all the late quartets. But historically speaking, of course, Op. 130—with the problem of the alternative finale—is the only quartet that has never really closed; its unity is destroyed by the very double image that the opening movement toys with in its introductory and tonal gestures. Thus, ironically, the impossibility of closure in this work forms an apt conclusion to the progression of the "Galitzin" Quartets.

•

CHAPTER 7

·

Conclusion

that started out to explore a process of disintegration through dialectical, deconstructive, and eclectic techniques, closure itself might be an ironic gesture. But to conclude may be rendered less difficult by virtue of a certain consistency in the analyses of the quartets: the systems of motivic development, counterpoint, and variation, so critical in late Beethoven, seem to find a deeper structural significance as motifs are 'stretched out' beneath the variation, and interlocked in counterpoint to fill out an entire form and even a whole work. In this way the elements of musical construction are redefined and controlled by a logic that often contradicts the functions and patterns of Classical forms. It is precisely this alterior logic which creates a critical disturbance, pushing the dynamic of Classical composition and its motivic unity to such extremes that the structures become incomprehensible and seemingly incoherent. These quartets, while evoking the ungraspable and broken expression of the Sublime, posit an abstract, esoteric structure that can be dug out by analysis through an odd conflation of Schoenbergian and Schenkerian techniques. There is a method in the 'madness.' FOR A STUDY

Such a conclusion is not difficult to write. But for analysis merely to claim to have 'discovered' these alternative systems and to attribute to them a 'madness' contrary to Classical order is to reduce the quartets to a sameness that they obviously do not have. For a start, even the most eclectic analysis can never measure up to the structural idea of these works, particularly since Beethoven often covers up his musical tracks— even on the motivic surface, as some sketches indicate. There is no mechanical or simplified symmetry in the motivic structures of these quartets; analysis merely traces, perhaps too simply, the outline of a highly complex idea. In any case, it is clear from this study that the 'unearthing' of these giant structures has involved a whole array of techniques that speak of the diversity rather than the unity of Beethoven's method—if it can be called one. Each opening gesture of the three quar-

246

CHAPTER SEVEN

tets seems to stimulate entirely different patterns and techniques of expansion, from the symmetrical contrast of Op. 127 to the heterogeneous topoi of Op. 132 and the motivic abstraction of Op. 130. In each case, the 'palindromic complex' is created from radically different perspectives. It is not difficult to see how these systems function as critiques, particularly in the opening movements, where sonata form is defamiliarized or even deformed. Neither is it difficult to view the Grosse Fuge and the Heiliger Dankgesang as critical statements that dismantle fugal procedures and the dynamics of tonality in order to reconstitute them in peculiar ways. There is both a destruction and a restructuring of form in these processes. More problematic, however, are the middle movements, especially those of Opp. 130 and 132, which present a veneer of such naivety and normality that it becomes difficult to disentangle irony from humour and critique from nostalgia. In contrast to the extreme subjectivity of the outer movements, the inner movements display a certain "objectivity" in which the past floats as "debris" on the surface, to use Adorno's words, as if these pieces were simulating a Rococo or Classical style. For analysis to uncover their hidden abnormalities and to tease out their rhythmic and semiotic contradictions is a way of levering the gap between innocent imitation and a cutting critique. Since analysis prizes open the two qualities that Beethoven holds so tightly together, it must be emphasized that the analytical leverage is an exaggeration of the destructive processes in order to underline the irony that is often missed in the 'nostalgia.' What is vital, however, is not the subversive elements in themselves, but the ambiguity between the critical and imitative elements, evoking an expression too normal to be parody yet too peculiar to be nostalgia. It is this style that Beethoven turns to in the remaining quartets. These three quartets, therefore, comprise two extreme and opposite forms of critique that are juxtaposed to set each in relief: one brings its destruction to the surface, fragmenting the elements only to re-create the forms it destroys, whereas the other effaces its process of destruction only to undermine the normality it posits. In this way both processes deconstruct the 'ideologies' embodied in the historical styles and techniques that these works recall, and in the process they also undermine analysis, forcing it to confront contingency, disunity, deflection, and aporia. Thus analysis itself comes under the critical eye. It is made to think about itself and to reside in contradictions so that it can resist the type of Enlightenment reason that deflowers the object in its pursuit of knowledge.

CONCLUSION

247

Of course these quartets are more than critiques and certainly more than the destabilization of structures and signs in the analyses. The late style, as I mentioned at the start, is a diversity of styles and is multifaceted in its intentions and meanings. The quartets do not simply stand in a public space to document and criticize society; neither are they the incarnation of critical reason itself, as if the music and the analysis were one and the same. The emphasis on critique in this study is a matter of focus and not a means of reducing the quartets to a single function. Admittedly, Adorno's vision funnels the works into a single historical process from which there is no escape. His reading of late Beethoven is a diagnosis of history after Auschwitz, a teleological nightmare in which Adorno's critical resistance is re-enacted in his interpretation of the quartets. But perhaps his insights arise less from his totalization of historythan from the fact that Adorno's historical experience in the twentieth century parallels Beethoven's in the nineteenth; the lost hope of humanism, so blatantly demonstrated by the two world wars, provides Adorno with the negative vision to revisit the last pieces of a composer who also lived a damaged life. However, because of the searching nature of the quartets there are always moments that escape such singular visions. In these pieces the triumphant proclamations of the 'heroic period' rebound as a series of questions that disperse in all directions. There are no longer any answers that can hold the historical fissures and emotional contradictions of the works as a unity. Beethoven leaves the crisis open-ended. Can we make sense of history? Is there meaning in progress? Are there any foundations to build on? Is it still possible to believe in answers after the dethronement of God, the failure of Enlightenment, and the loss of Napoleonic hope? If these quartets register a historical collapse of meaning, then they formulate their questions as a blind search for some truth that is out of human reach. The demythologization of the aesthetic is certainly a critique, but it is one that is offered on an altar "to an unknown god" — and the smoke of this sacrifice may be blown in any direction. It is in this sense that the late works are 'spiritual.' They come, as it were, after an exhaustion of humanism, when the human spirit can no longer transcend and in its humiliation reaches out for anything, however anonymous, that might contain the hope of redemption. This cannot be expressed as a Promethean struggle; in fact, the movements that try to overcome with their critical violence and cynicism are the ones that are made to fail. What escape are the moments of vulnerability—the variations of the Et Quartet, the testimony of the Heiliger Dankgesang, and the remem-

248

CHAPTER SEVEN

brance in the Cavatina. Ironically, it may just be that such moments of human weakness, with their Christlike countenance, transcend the critique as the final, irreducible cry for redemption. Many people have wrought out of the riddle-like nature of the quartets meanings that are diverse and contradictory, from the cynical to the spiritual, from the catastrophic to the Utopian. They are all possible, not simply because of the plurality inherent in the interpretive act but because of the vast yet directionless search that Beethoven engages in. This also means that there is no stability in any of the readings—just possibilities and tensions between them. If the analysis in this investigation has overstated the critical procedures and suppressed the constructive elements, it has done so as a corrective to commentaries on these works that merely seek to impute a unity to them or assert their retrospective Classicism. It is not meant to block out alternatives. These quartets, as well as the techniques of analysis, must always be held in an extreme dialectical tension.

•

ISDG 1995

•

NOTES

·

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1. Oswald Jonas, "A Lesson with Beethoven by Correspondence," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 38 (1952), 217-18. This letter and Prince Galitzin's involvement with Beethoven are discussed in greater detail by Alexander Wheelock Thayer in Thayer's Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, 1964, rev. 1967), 923-28. 2. Quoted in Joseph de Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, trans. Hilda Andrews (Oxford, 1928; reprint New York, 1961), 225. 3. See for example Amanda Glauert's "The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 4 (1980). 4. Haydn's wit and the ironic distance it creates are skilfully analysed by Mark Evan Bonds in "Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony," Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 44, no. 1 (1991). 5. Rose Rosengard Subotnik gives a summary of Adorno's interpretation of late Beethoven in "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition," Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 29, no. 2, (1976), reprinted in Subotnik, Developing Variations (Minneapolis, 1991). 6. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, 1979). 7. See Theodor W. Adorno, "On the Problem of Musical Analysis," trans. M. Paddison, Music Analysis, vol. 1/2 (1982). 8. There are two texts in particular that exemplify these extreme opinions: Alexandra Oulibicheff, in Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Paris, 1857), says that "Beethoven was not mad but an imbecile," which apparently explains the oddities of the late style (282); in contrast, J.W.N. Sullivan, in Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (New York, 1927), regards the late works as the rarefied expression of a spiritual pilgrimage in Beethoven's inner life. The 'spiritual' aspect of these quartets has stimulated all kinds of metaphysical speculations, reflected in the appearances of these works in various novels, such as Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and possibly (as the elusive "little phrase") Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Ruth A. Solie, in "Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism," Explorations in Music, the Arts and Ideas, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1988), gives a lucid summary of the different interpretations of Beethoven as genius, prophet, madman, and so forth in the course of the nineteenth century. 9. Maynard Solomon, for example, interprets the late style in terms of the psychological turmoil in Beethoven's life; see Beethoven (London, 1977), 217-92,

250

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

and "The Creative Periods of Beethoven," The Music Review, vol. 34 (1973). 10. As early as 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann claimed Beethoven for Romanticism in a famous review of the Fifth Symphony (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 12). His late works came to be regarded as a source of inspiration for many of the later Romantics, not least Schumann and Wagner. The programmatic intrusions, imbued with religious and metaphysical connotations, are often associated with the ethos of the early Romantics, although Beethoven never publicly identified himself with that movement. Some commentators, such as Giorgio Pestelli, detect a certain experimentation with Romanticism in the tentative steps towards the late style; see Pestelli, The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, trans. E. Cross (Cambridge, 1984), 240-44. Rey M. Longyear describes the jokes and puns that riddle the late quartets as a form of Romantic irony: see "Beethoven and Romantic Irony," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 56 (1970). 11. Christopher Ballantine, for example, associates Beethoven's 'heroism' with the Hegelian dialectic of contrast and synthesis, constantly yearning towards a Utopian hope, which for Adorno would become a negative dialectic in the late works, expressing the impossibility of such a hope; see Ballantine, "Beethoven, Hegel and Marx," The Music Review, vol. 33 (1972), and Martin Jay, Adorno (London, 1984), 143-47. See also the exchange between Robert C. Solomon and Maynard Solomon: "Beethoven and the Sonata Form" and "Beethoven and the Enlightenment," Telos, vol. 19 (Spring 1974). 12. The quote is Beethoven's: Ludwig van Beethoven Konversationshefte, ed. K.-H. Kohler, G. Herre, and D. Beck (Leipzig, 1972), vol. 1, 346. The defeat of Napoleon, followed by the assembling of monarchs for the Congress of Vienna (September 1814 -June 1815), is often interpreted as the moment of a turn away from the revolutionary ideals associated with Napoleon and towards a "dead period" (A.J.P. Taylor) in which society succumbed to the rigid controls of Metternich's paternalistic rule, with its network of spies and censorship laws. Some commentators see this historical crux as the underlying stimulus for Beethoven's change of style, from the so-called 'heroism' of the middle period to the 'resignation' of the last. In the most detailed of these interpretations, that of Theodor Adorno, the rise of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, musically represented by Beethoven's middle period, dissipates into the petit bourgeoisie and the claustrophobic "administered world" of the Restoration. Rather than attributing the late quartets to the biographical ailments of Beethoven, Adorno fixes these works within the collapse of the revolutionary synthesis: the dynamic totality of the middle-period works shatters into irreconcilable fragments that alienate the pieces as a critique of society. These issues are discussed in Jay, Adorno, 141—44, and Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style." 13. See Alfred Mann, "Beethoven's Contrapuntal Studies with Haydn," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 56 (1970), and Gustav Nottebohm, Beethovens Studien: Beethovens Unterricht bet } . Haydn, Albrechtsberger una Salieri (Leipzig and Winterthur, 1873). If Warren Kirkendale is correct in identifying Albrechtsberger's manual as the source of ideas for the Grosse Fuge, then this was certainly not Beethoven's first investigation of these ancient techniques: Kirkendale, Fugue and Fugato in Rococo and Classical Chamber Music, trans. M. Bent and author (Durham, N.C., 1979). Around 1817 Beethoven had copied

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

251

in quartet score the Bl> minor fugue from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, book I, and the fugal episode from Haydn's Symphony No. 99. He also made various studies of modal harmony, borrowing Glarean's Dodecachordon and an uniden­ tified book by Zarlino from Prince Lobkowitz's library; and in the 1820s he copied various passages from Palestrina, including the Gloria of the Magnificat tertii toni. The implications of Beethoven's interest in the techniques of the past are discussed by Sieghard Brandenburg, "The Historical Background to the 'Heiliger Dankgesang' in Beethoven's Α-minor Quartet Op. 132," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 161-63, and Richard Kramer, "'Das Organische der Fuge': On the Autograph of Beethoven's String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1," The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, ed. C. Wolff (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 228. 14. The B-A-C-H theme is scattered among the sketches for the late quartets as an idea for an overture that never materialized; see Kirkendale, Fugue and Fugato, 222. Beethoven even wrote (whilst he was completely drunk) a canon on B-A-C-H, to the words "cool not lukewarm"; see Thayer's Life of Beethoven, 958. The motif has also been linked by Basil Lam in Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2 (London, 1975), 20, to another theme by Bach—the subject of the G minor Fugue from book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. As Leonard Ratner suggests in Classic Music (New York, 1980), 267-69, it is probably an archetypal figure of the Baroque, rather than a direct quote from Bach, which Beethoven is exploiting in these late works. Nevertheless, the presence of the B-A-C-H sketch­ es among the late quartets may indicate some kind of connection with the past inspired by Bach, particularly since the late pieces also incorporate clear allusions to other works by Bach; see Martin Zenck, Die Bach-Rezeption des spdten Beethoven (Stuttgart and Wiesbaden, 1986). 15. In other words, the tools of analysis are themselves historical products, and analysis cannot escape its own historicity, which has been focussed on Beethoven. The importance of Beethoven's music in the development of nine­ teenth-century analysis is discussed by Carl Dahlhaus in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), 10-11. 16. The issue of unity and its predominance in music analysis is discussed by Alan Street, "Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories," Music Analysis, vol. 8, no. 1/2 (1989). 17. Rumours concerning Beethoven's madness started as early as 1816; even Beethoven realized that the Viennese thought he was crazy. In 1844, a review of one of the late quartets describes Beethoven as a "sublime madman," but this was already a view held by some in Beethoven's lifetime. Henri Blanchard, "Silves musicales," Revue et Gazette Musicales de Paris, February, 1844; quoted in Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 229-30. Solomon discusses Beethoven's 'madness' in Beethoven, 256-57. Insanity was also a topos of the nineteenth-cen­ tury cult of genius; these works almost had to be 'insane' and incomprehensible if Beethoven was to be worthy of the 'genius' status ascribed to him. 18. For Michel Foucault, madness threatens analysis with an alterity that would demand a radically different thinking. The definition and oppression of madness since the rise of rationalism have been analysed by Foucault in Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1973). David Carroll, in

252

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 1-2

Paraesthetics (London, 1987), 107-18, discusses Foucault's fascination with the subversion of madness as a counter-discourse against established theories. 19. I use this word guardedly. "Deconstruction," one of Jacques Derrida's catchwords, was 'popularized' in the 1960s and 70s and is by now well-worn and perhaps otiose in some academic disciplines. The word is often taken to mean a dismantling of the work of art, as if it were the opposite of "construction," whereas it is a practice aimed at unmasking and limiting all kinds of 'ideologies' or authorities invested in particular structures. In fact, most of the time it is not the quartets that are undermined in this study, but the methods of analysing them. Thus deconstruction is a critical, not a destructive, process: it provides a way of analysing these works that conforms to Adorno's perception of them. This will become clear in the analyses, particularly those of Opp. 132 and 130. Raymond Monelle gives a clear summary of deconstructionism and its implications for music analysis in Linguistics and Semiotics in Music (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1992), 304-23. 20. See Carroll, Paraesthetics, 104.

CHAPTER TWO MOTIFS, COUNTERPOINT, AND FORM

1. See, for example, Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones" (1941) in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (London, 1975), 220; Rudolf Reti, The Thematic Process in Music (London, 1961); Deryck Cooke, "The Unity of Beethoven's Late Quartets," The Music Review, vol. 24 (1963), 30; David Epstein, Beyond Orpheus (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). 2. See Christopher Reynolds, "The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, II: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135," Acta Musicologica, vol. 60, no. 2(1988). 3. Cooke, "The Unity of Beethoven's Late Quartets," 32. 4. Paul Bekker, Beethoven (Berlin and Leipzig, 1911), trans, and adapted M. M. Bozman (London, 1925); Marion M. Scott, Beethoven (London, 1934); Gustav Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana: Nachgelassene Aufsdtze (Leipzig, 1887). 5. On balance and periodicity within Classical forms see Charles Rosen, The Classical Style (London, 1971), 58-59. The concept of a harmonic motion towards a goal as an organic expression of form is most profoundly embodied in the theoretical work of Heinrich Schenker; see, for example, Free Composition, trans, and ed. Ernst Oster (New York, 1979), chapter 5, 128. 6. For further discussion on the function of motifs in articulating the unfolding of a form, see Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms, rev. ed. (New York, 1988), 177-228. 7. Schenker, Free Composition, 93; Epstein, Beyond Orpheus, 17; Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. M. Whittall (Oxford, 1991), 202-18. 8. Rosen, The Classical Style, 40-41. 9. Quoted in Karl-Heinz Kohler, "Aspects of a New Picture of Beethoven,"

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

253

Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. R. Winter and B. Carr (Detroit, 1980), 154. 10. Robert Winter, response to Richard Kramer's paper "'Das Organische der Fuge,'" The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, ed. C. Wolff, 269-70. 11. Daniel Gregory Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven (New York, 1947), 179. 12. Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (London, 1967), 231. 13. Ibid., 233. 14. Heinrich Schenker, "Beethoven zu seinem opus 127," Der Tonwille, vol. 4 (1924), 39-41. 15. Of course, in Schenkerian thought the foreground repeat does not affect the Ursatz; see Schenker, Free Composition, 129. 16. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 212. 17. Emily Anderson, trans, and ed., The Letters of Beethoven (London, 1961), letter no. 67. 18. See Christopher Reynolds, "Beethoven's Sketches for the Variations in Eflat, Op. 135," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge, 1982), 47. 19. Anderson, letter no. 72. 20. See Lewis Lockwood, general discussion recorded in The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, ed. C. Wolff, 273. 21. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 212. 22. See particularly Schoenberg's analysis of Brahms's A minor String Quartet, Op. 51, No. 2, in "Brahms the Progressive" (1947) in Style and Idea, 430. Carl Dahlhaus discusses Schoenberg's analytical process in "What is 'Developing Variation'?" in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. D. Puffett and A. Clayton (Cambridge, 1987). 23. Lam, Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2, 12-13; Cooke, "The Unity of Beethoven's Late Quartets," 47; Epstein, Beyond Orpheus, 216. 24. Philip Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets (London, 1965; reprint Cambridge, 1978), 101. 25. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (1825), quoted from Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 227. At the first performance, the audience's utter failure to understand the work was blamed on Schuppanzigh's playing; but the second performance, for which a 'better' quartet had been found, proved equally incomprehensible, although Beethoven was told otherwise. In 1825 Beethoven apparently told Ludwig Rellstab that this quartet "must be heard several times." However, despite that advice, Rellstab himself described the work as one in which the youthful genius of Beethoven was "buried beneath the most disordered rubble and wreckage": quoted from O. G. Sonneck, ed., Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York, 1926), 187. 26. Blanchard, "Silves musicales," Revue et Gazette Musicales de Paris, February, 1844; quoted from Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 229-30. 27. Examples of this type of sonata form in Beethoven's music include the first movements of the piano sonatas Op. 31, No. 1, and Op. 53, and the finales of Op. 70, No. 2, and Op. 135. Also related are the forms in which the second group starts on the mediant, despite ending on the dominant, as in the first move-

254

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

ment of Symphony No. 8. The only 'mediant'-type sonata form, apart from Op. 127, that does not conform to the submediant second-group return is that of the Leonore Overtures Nos. 2 and 3. By using these movements as a foil for Op. 127, I am setting up what Max Weber would call an ideal type—a fictional model used to make sense of history. It would be futile to speculate whether the 'original' audience knew the 'rules of the game' for such a complex sonata type and had some 'conventional' blueprint in mind; Beethoven, however, was clearly creating something unique within the context of his own technique. 28. This decision to break from previous procedures in the tonal balance of the recapitulation is poignantly expressed in the trouble which Beethoven takes to modulate to the subdominant (b. 198), which is exactly the key which would be required if he were to keep the pattern established in the exposition of Et major to G, to turn the music to the expected submediant—A\> major to C. 29. Of course, in Schenkerian thought a modulation to the dominant and its tonicization is not a prerequisite that guarantees the organic structure of a 'masterwork'; a simple dominant chord, however fleeting, will suffice as the basic structural element in the unfolding of a form, which is in fact what happens in Op. 127. What is important here is the fact that the dominant has not been dramatized to articulate the form. However, it is almost invariably true that Classical processes involve the establishment of the dominant as a "tone striving for independence." As Jonas writes concerning Schenkerian theory, "The tendency of a tone to move to its fifth... and the tendency of that fifth to manifest itself as a fundamental—these constitute the sum and substance of the tonicization process. They also provide, in fugue and sonata, the first stimulus for formal organization." Oswald Jonas, Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker, trans, and ed. J. Rothgeb (London and New York, 1982), 3. 30. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 239. 31. Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 235. 32. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 239. 33. Schenker, Free Composition, 134. 34. This movement is an unusual sonata construction, and Schenker has left very little concerning this type of sonata form, where the mediant substitutes for the dominant; perhaps one can regard it as a variation of the minor-key sonata structure, with the mediant as a third divider and the structural division of § appearing just before the recapitulation as dominant preparation. See Schenker's discussion of Op. 53 in Free Composition, 135, and also Oster's footnote, 139. 35. After all, Op. 127 is surrounded by works where the tonal conflict encountered in the initial movement is only resolved in later movements; one need only think of the Piano Sonata Op. 101 and the Ct minor Quartet, Op. 131, where the resolution of the tonic is withheld until the finale. 36. William Drabkin discusses another example of this type of structural sonority in Op. 131: "Beethoven and the Open String," Music Analysis, vol. 4, nos. 1/2 (1985). 37. By turning the motif into a chord Beethoven is foreshadowing Schoenberg's concept of a motivic chord; see Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, 125-27.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 2-3

255

38. Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 230. 39. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 230.

CHAPTER THREE UNITY AND DISUNITY

1. From a review of the Piano Sonatas Op. 10, in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 2 (1799), no. 21, column 25; quoted in Robin Wallace, Beethoven's Critics (Cambridge, 1986), 8. 2. For further information concerning the critics' stupefied reaction to the late works, see Wallace, 35-41. 3. In 1828, both the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung and the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung published articles ridiculing the late works of Beethoven; see Wallace, 41-42. 4. From a review of the Piano Sonatas Opp. 109 and 111, in Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 1 (March 1824), 95; quoted in Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music (New York, 1984), 78. 5. E.T.A. Hoffmann, "Kreisleriana," no. 4 of the Fantasiestucke in Callots Manier (Berlin, 1814-15), quoted in Pestelli, The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, 288-89; a complete translation can be found in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. D. Charlton, trans. M. Clarke (Cambridge, 1989). 6. E.T.A. Hoffmann, "Review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 12 (1810); trans. E.T.A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings. 7. Henri Blanchard, "Silves musicales," Revue et Gazette Musicales de Paris, February, 1844; quoted in Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 229-30. Of course, all these responses to the late works are rather one-sided. Some critics made heroic efforts to come to terms with these works and defend them, although few of these critics claimed to understand these pieces. Certainly by the late 1830s a small group of musicians, most notably Robert Schumann and the critic and composer Herrmann Hirchbach, were beginning to regard the late quartets with a veneration which Hirchbach expressed in a series of articles in the Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik in 1839. See Nicholas Marston, "Schumann's Monument to Beethoven," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 14, no. 3 (1991). My point is not that these quartets were uniformly incomprehensible—that would merely indicate their failure; rather, what is critical is their ability to cause divisions among intelligent musicians. Indeed, their critical disturbance, particularly Opp. 130 and 133, still causes critics and analysts to vacillate between affirming these works and discrediting them. 8. Quoted from Count Waldstein's entry in Beethoven's autograph album, dated October 29, 1792; see Thayer's Life of Beethoven, 114-15. 9. Ibid., 409. 10. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 245. 11. "Undecidability" is a catchword of Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists. The term has been borrowed by, among others, Arnold Whittall, as

256

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

in his discussion of twentieth-century music (for example, "Review Survey: Some Recent Writings on Stravinsky," Music Analysis, vol. 8, no. 1/2, 1989). "Undecidability" describes not so much a dilemma as a delight in the fact that signifiers on a page have such a multiplicity of meanings that decisions are impossible; in this way, deconstructive strategies are able to demolish fixed 'ideologies.' 12. For further information concerning the role of E.T.A. Hoffmann in shaping music history see Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London, 1985), 65, and Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 88-95. 13. Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, trans. L. Black (Bryn Mawr, 1963), 42. 14. Heinrich Schenker, "Organic Structure in Sonata Form," trans. O. Grossman, in Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches, ed. M. Yeston (New Haven and London, 1977), 52. 15. One need only glance at a Schenker graph of the movement to see the tonal coherence beneath the surface of contrast. In fact, V. Kofi Agawu, in Playing with Signs (Princeton, 1991), advises the reader to play through his graph of the first movement "to experience not only the logic, but also the conjunction in the harmonic unfolding" (p. 120). 16. See Deryck Cooke, "The Unity of Beethoven's Late Quartets." 17. For further information concerning chords as motifs, see Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, 125-27. For a more startling example of a motivic chord in the late quartets, see my discussion of Op. 127 in Chapter 2, especially Exx. 2.32 and 2.33. 18. Donald Francis Tovey, Musical Textures (London, 1942), 48. 19. Agawu, Playing with Signs, 120-21. 20. David B. Greene discusses the unusual proportions of this movement in Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music (New York, 1982). 21. There is an interesting parallel here with the fugue that begins Op. 131, which, as Kerman suggests, maps out the tonalities of the entire work. See Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 328-29. 22. Although the Bl> resolves to A several times in the passage from bar 30 to bar 50, its final resolution is delayed until the second half of the second group (bar 57 onwards) where the A is prolonged. 23. Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 6, 169; see Wallace, Beethoven's Critics, 58. It is in fact difficult to count exactly how many times this figure appears; it depends on where one starts and stops. However, it is certainly more than M's forty-six. 24. Joseph Kerman makes a similar observation (citing Roger Sessions) in The Beethoven Quartets, 361. 25. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, in "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style," 247-51, gives a lucid explanation of Adorno's scattered and difficult texts on this aspect of Beethoven's music. The reconciliation of the self-determined individual and extrinsic laws is not merely an esoteric theory of Adorno's, but is at the very heart of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic enquiries, as Terry Eagleton points out in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), particularly 13-28.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

257

26. See Thayer's Life of Beethoven, 851. 27. See Street's attack on the ideology of analytical unity in "Superior Myths and Dogmatic Allegories." 28. Martin Cooper, for example, in Beethoven: The Last Decade (Oxford, 1970), 418-22, gives the traditional organicist's view of "Beethoven's search for unification" and "the principle of unity in diversity" through fugue and variation. 29. Diversity-in-unity, on the other hand, is something of a truism and can be applied to almost anything. 30. The final Adagio is a variation on only the first segment of the movement; however, it is still based on the overall harmonic design of the Lydian hymn. 31. Adorno finds this type of contrapuntal anonymity particularly in the Missa solemnis; see "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa solemnis," trans. Duncan Smith, Telos (1976). 32. See Rosen, The Classical Style, 435-37. 33. For other examples, see Op. 109, third movement, variation VI, and Op. 127, second movement, bars 109-17. 34. Theodor W. Adorno, "Spatstil Beethovens" in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsatze 1928-1962 (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), 14-15. 35. In Ex. 3.27 the underlying motif runs against the articulation. This is not due to some kind of analytical sophistry; the stemmed pitches define the harmonic and linear logic. It is precisely because of this disconnection between surface articulation and underlying structure that the passage sounds unusual. 36. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 243. 37. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford, 1990), 55. Eagleton's essay on Adorno is reprinted in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 341-65. 38. Wallace discusses the major-minor contrast and its structural significance in expression in "Background and Expression in the First Movement of Beethoven's Op. 132," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 7, no. 1 (1989), 11-15. Ex. 3.26 is adapted from this article. 39. Quoted from Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 328. Also see Yves LacroixNavaro, "Le XV e Quatuor de Beethoven," Revue Musicale, no. 143 (February 1934), for a similar interpretation. 40. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 243. 41. Some of Kerman's adjectives and metaphors for this movement are: frustration, pure absurdity, high-strung, twitches with contrast, scream, hand clapped over the mouth, insecurity, hysterical greeting, screaming arpeggio, nervous crisis, failure of nerve, etc. Of course, I do something similar in my text. But metaphor need not be a bad thing. As Roland Barthes says concerning musical gestures, "only the metaphor is exact." Indeed, for Barthes the exploration of these expressive gestural elements restores music to its pulsating, physical, somatic essence and counteracts the normalizing tendency of analysis to focus on cerebral processes that bypass the motions of the body; see Barthes, "Rasch" in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. R. Howard (Oxford, 1986). 42. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (London, 1976), especially 9-10. 43. Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music (New York and London, 1988), 29-32.

258

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

44. Agawu suggests, in Playing with Signs, 121-26, that the disjunct surface of topics (topoi) does not align itself with the structural events of the movement, contrary to the normal procedures of the Classical style. 45. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 244. 46. Ibid., 243. 47. Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets, 111. 48. See bars 20, 39-40, 73-74, 91, 102, 118, 130, 150-151, 188-192, 212-213, 258-260. 49. See the bars cited in note 48 above. 50. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London, 1984), 9. 51. Glauert, "The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131," 116. 52. See Arnold Whittall, "The Theorist's Sense of History: Concepts of Contemporaneity in Composition and Analysis," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 112 (1986-87), and Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley, 1980), 58-59. 53. Carl Dahlhaus, "Some Models of Unity in Musical Form," trans. C. Prather, journal of Music Theory, vol. 19 (1975), 10. 54. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, describe a process in which the rational control of nature by Western civilization ends up as a ruthless control of human beings. 55. To put it crudely, Adorno associates the musical subject with the human subject—the free individual; the object is the external form or society with which the subject relates. Lambert Zuidervaart, in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 123-25, gives a clear explanation of Adorno's understanding of content and form. 56. Adorno, "Spatstil Beethovens," 17; the translation is from Jay, Adorno, 144. 57. Adorno discusses his view of Schoenberg's serial technique in Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster (London, 1987). 58. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben (Frankfurt, 1951), 80 (cf. Chapter 7, note 3 below). This reverses Hegel's dictum (in his Phenomenology) "The Truth is the Whole." 59. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London, 1973) 5-6. 60. Julian Roberts, German Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 271. 61. For further historical background concerning the concept of the Sublime, see Peter Ie Huray, "The Role of Music in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Aesthetics," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 105 (1978-79). In many ways, the Burkian Sublime is related to the Barthesian jouissance, discussed earlier; fear and bliss, like the rationality and irrationality in this work, seem to become one and the same, breaking down the binary opposition between the terms. A discussion on the relationship between Burke's Sublime and Barthes's jouissance can be found in Fredric Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue" in The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2 (London, 1988), 71-74. Adorno himself, in "Spatstil Beethovens," describes the late quartets as "sublime" works which are caught in some dialectically suspended state as they work against their

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 3-4

259

own logic, portraying the antagonism of social reality within the possibility of future reconciliation. 62. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). 63. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1973), 127. 64. Kerman, Musicology, 65. See also Ie Huray's article for the background to Hoffmann's ideas. Of course, one cannot blame Hoffmann for making a connection between motivic unity and the Sublime. What he found sublime was in fact the power of instrumental music to transport one to "unknown realms," far from the precision of words and concrete depictions. His attempt to justify a piece through the totality of a single idea may have been a way of combating critics who invoked the formlessness of the Sublime to insult Beethoven's music. See Mary Sue Morrow, "Of Unity and Passion: The Aesthetic of Concert Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 3 (1990), 198. 65. Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 81. 66. Ibid., 85. 67. Ibid., 100. 68. Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London, 1984), xii. 69. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofter dingen, trans. P. Hilty (New York, 1964), 114; quoted from Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1988),26. CHAPTER FOUR RHYTHM, TIME, AND SPACE

1. Much of the slightly Freudian imagery in this paragraph is borrowed from Terry Eagleton's appraisal of Edmund Burke's work on the Sublime in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 52-60. 2. The quotation, which comes from Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry (1757), is discussed by Peter Ie Huray in "The Role of Music in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Aesthetics," 96. In the same article, Ie Huray traces how Burke's Sublime became incorporated into nineteenth-century German music, via Kant's philosophy, and into the music criticism of Friedrich Michaelis. Michaelis' article in the Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 1, no. 46 (1805), describes the musical Sublime as an emotion created by notes that are sustained for unusually long periods (as in the Heiliger Dankgesang) or by music in which textures are complex and progress is constantly interrupted (as in the first movement of Op. 132). Perhaps it is significant that in the review of the A minor Quartet in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, no. 30 (1828), the critic, crushed by the Sublime, could pick out only sporadic moments of beauty and confessed his inability to grasp the immensity and difficulty of the work. There are in fact many instances of such confessions in the reviews of the late works, reviews which complain that it is impossible to say anything if Beethoven insists on breaking the laws of beauty. But what they describe is not so much madness as

260

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

the shattering energy of the Sublime. Such examples can be found in the reviews of the sonatas Opp. 109, 110, and 111 in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, no. 14 (1824), and in the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 1, nos. 10 and 11 (1824); some extracts are quoted in translation in Plantinga's Romantic Music, 78. 3. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 56. 4. Ibid., 56. 5. Walter Riezler, Beethoven, trans. G.D.H. Pidcock (London, 1938), 235. 6. Kurt von Fischer discusses this issue in '"Never to Be Performed in Public': On Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 95," Essays in Musicology, trans. C. Skoggard, ed. T. S. Evans (New York, 1989). A similar example of this type of contrast can be found in the finale of Op. 18, No. 6, in which the "Malinconia" introduction is juxtaposed against an Allegretto; Lawrence Kramer gives a deconstructive reading of this movement in Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley, 1990), 176-213. 7. As many commentators on the late quartets have noted, this recitative not only resembles that in the finale of the Ninth Symphony but also leads into a finale whose theme was apparently intended for the last movement of that very symphony. See, for example, Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana, 157-92; Thayer's Life of Beethoven, 890; Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade, 278 and 368. However, it seems that the theme was sketched well after the start of the finale, suggesting that it was never intended to be part of the Ninth Symphony; see Robert Winter, "The Sketches for the 'Ode to Joy,'" Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. R. Winter and B. Carr (Detroit, 1980). This does not negate the fact that the two finales are closely related, at least in time if not in their programmatic content. 8. The march was very much a socially functional element in Germany in the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. Beethoven himself wrote several marches intended for specific Austrian regiments (WoO 19 and WoO 24). The march, which is a rare genre in Beethoven's instrumental works and appears only in this quartet and in the Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101, would have been quite topical in the 1820s, signifying the external world in a very real sense. See the article "March" by Erich Schwandt and Andrew Lamb in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (London, 1980). 9. The minuet was an invention of the French aristocracy and was particularly popular at the court of Louis XIV. With the French Revolution in 1789 and the undermining of the aristocracy in general, the minuet, with all its ideological implications, was replaced to some extent by the scherzo—a change that can be observed in Beethoven's oeuvre. These issues are discussed in Meridith Littles's article "Minuet" in The New Grove; Eric Blom's "The Minuet-Trio," Music and Letters, vol. 22 (1941); and Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, 1983), 33-40. 10. Blom, "The Minuet-Trio," 169. 11. Ibid., and Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 283. 12. See, for example, the minuets in the "Diabelh" Variations, the Eighth Symphony, and the C major Quartet, Op. 59, No. 3. By the 1820s, the aristo-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

261

cratic minuet had long been superseded by the scherzo in instrumental works and by the waltz in society. 13. The pas de minuet a deux mouvements was one of the basic steps in the minuet of the French court. This pattern matches the rhythmic accents in the minuet of Op. 132, although Beethoven does not actually label the movement "Minuet." The following diagram is adapted from Littles's article "Minuet," The New Grove. Op. 132: rhythmic pattern of the minuet ν = plie

J

/1I/1J *

ν; Δ ν Δ R

L

I R

I L

Δ=έ1βνέ M ' =pasmarchi R = right foot L = left foot

14. The Rococo is not a style that critics have attached to this movement, but it must be noted that the second movement is abnormal in many ways within the convention of minuets and trios in multi-movement works from Haydn to Beethoven. Beethoven defamiliarizes the form so that it cannot simply merge into that tradition but stands out as rather peculiar—particularly in the context of Europe after the French Revolution. Instead of employing the buoyant, triadic qualities of the Teutonic minuet so frequently found in Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven uses the second movement to signify the aristocratic society of pre-revolutionary France. In fact, both the minuet and the musette were invent­ ed by the French court and were imitated throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. The former was a highly refined yet unaffected social ritual, in which the seating plan and the dance partners were all meticulously pre-arranged; its for­ malized spectacle is perfectly captured in the minuet of Op. 132, with its slender textures and its dignified, ma non tanto pacing of the pas a deux mouvements pattern. It is very different from either the robust German minuet or the faster Italian type. On the politics of the French minuet, see Richard Leppert, Music and Image (Cambridge, 1988), 88-90. The musette, on the other hand, was the very opposite of the social formalities of the minuet; it was an Arcadian fantasy cultivated by the aristocracy, to signify the sort of hygienic peasantry imagined by Marie Antoinette when she suggested that the poor should eat cake if there was not enough bread to go round. (This quotation is apparently apocryphal, but she did have her own exquisitely made porcelain milking buckets.) This gout franqais is particularly poignant in the 'trio' of the A minor Quartet, since the piece was originally an allemande (a German dance) which Beethoven redressed in the French style of the musette for Op.132—bagpipes and all. 15. Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 339-40. On monotony, see Mason's not particularly complimentary remarks on the minuet in The Quartets of Beethoven, 190. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, "Verfremdetes Hauptwerk: Zur Missa solemnis" in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsatze 1928-1962 (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), 179; translation quoted from Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style." Adorno's article has been translated into English by

262

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

Duncan Smith: "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa solemnis." 17. Some examples are the minuets in Op. 18, Nos. 3 and 4. 18. Hans Keller, The Great Haydn Quartets (London, 1986), 237. Keller suggests that the minuets of Haydn and Mozart are written against the background of the real dance, as deviations rather than imitations of it. For example, see the minuet in Haydn's D major Quartet, Op. 20, No. 4, where the sforzandos rub against the metrical structure, making dancing a rather tricky affair. 19. Barry Cooper, in "Beethoven's Portfolio of Bagatelles," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 112, no. 2 (1986-87), discusses the history of these bagatelles. See also note 21 below. 20. What the musette signifies is rather complex; it clearly evokes peasant life, but as an aristocratic imitation of such bucolic elements, it may also signify the rather hygienic, Arcadian dream of the aristocracy in their pretence at peasant life. See Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 52-53, and my note 14 above. 21. Most commentators have noted the direct quotation from an Allemande for piano, WoO 81, which begins in bar 164. However, the opening passage of the musette, as seen in Ex. 4.14, is taken from another Allemande for orchestra which Beethoven also arranged for piano; this piece is the eighth of a set of Twelve German Dances, WoO 8 (orchestral) and WoO 13 (piano). In both quotations, significantly, the barlines have shifted. See also Ex. 4.21 for the various eighteenth-century quotations that make up this musical 'collage'; this 'collage' is further complicated by Kerman's suggestion that the minuet is modelled on the minuet in Mozart's A major Quartet, K. 464 (The Beethoven Quartets, 253). 22. Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven, 191. 23. Gervasoni, La scuola della musica (1800); quoted in Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, 46. 24. Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade, 366. 25. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 262. 26. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 136. 27. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore, 1976), 22. 28. In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970), particularly p. xxii, Michel Foucault describes how sudden changes of knowledge can occur, seemingly without transition from one episteme to another, and so break history up into fragments that confront. Arnold Whittall has tried to apply Foucault's historical fissures in music history and analysis in "The Theorist's Sense of History." 29. For a comparison of Adorno's perspective of history with Foucault's, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "The Historical Structure: Adorno's 'French' Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 2, no. 1 (1978). 30. See Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 35. 31. The idea of time and the concept of progress in the eighteenth-century philosophy of history, particularly in the works of Turgot and Condorcet, are discussed by G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford, 1988), 146-48. Adorno (in Aesthetic Theory, 28) described the bourgeois view of history as an "undialectical unruptured continuum": this view has its counterpart in music history, par-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

263

ticularly for Schoenberg's arguments for the development of his atonal and serial techniques. Ironically, Adorno absorbed Schoenberg's arguments into his own grand narrative of history; see Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music. 32. Subotnik, "The Historical Structure," 37. 33. See Friedrich Schiller, "On the Sublime" from Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime; Two Essays, trans. J. A. Elias (New York, 1966), 204-8. 34. Jonathan Kramer explores these ideas concerning music and time in The Time of Music, 345-49. 35. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight (Oxford, 1986), 1094. 36. Susan McClary, "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year," Music and Society, ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary (Cambridge, 1987), 22. Although the term "bourgeois" is a useful label, and although the middle classes obviously had an impact on eighteenth-century society, it is not so easy to isolate them as a single social group, set (in Marxist fashion) against the aristocracy. The values outlined by McClary were also shared by the 'ruling class.' What these values embody is perhaps more the ideology of the Enlightenment, a movement which, as some commentators (such as Maynard Solomon) suggest, stems from the aristocracy and was embraced by the middle classes. These issues are discussed by William Weber in "The Muddle of the Middle Classes," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 3, no. 2 (1979-80), and by Maynard Solomon in "Beethoven, Sonata and Utopia," Telos, vol. 9 (Fall 1971), and "Beethoven and the Enlightenment." 37. See Subotnik, "The Historical Structure," 39-41. 38. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 252. 39. See Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music, 20-52. 40. Beethoven's quotation from the Piano Trio, Op. 1, no. 2, in this quartet is pointed out by Basil Lam, Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2, 26. It should be observed, however, that the Allemande in A, WoO. 81, which Beethoven also quotes from has a similar second section that moves sequentially in semiquavers around the circle of fifths. Beethoven may have consciously taken a section out of the piano trio, particularly as its melodic and harmonic structures are almost identical to those of the musette; both the trio and the Allemande, however, are obviously using a stock progression. 41. Subotnik, "The Historical Structure," 45. 42. Ibid., 48-50. 43. Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven, 190. 44. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 251. 45. On the rise of boredom in the eighteenth century, see Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 16-18 and 23-24. Weiskel discusses the ideas of absence and uneasiness in the philosophy of Locke and in the works of Addison and Burke. This was in England. Boredom was particularly pronounced at the eighteenthcentury French court, especially with the loss of transcendence and the concentration on the ephemeral and subsidiary manners of life in the Rococo; the monotony and boredom that typified the court forms of Versailles (which included the minuet) were simply covered up by whim and fantasy, by social games of

264

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

love (as in Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses), and by a luxuriously trivial exis­ tence, which were not a remedy for but merely a symptom of boredom. See Patrick Brady, Rococo Style Versus Enlightenment Novel (Geneva, 1984), 31-51. It was of course quite fashionable to be bored (and quite boring to be fashionable). 46. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 31. 47. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11-13. 48. This is precisely Adorno's critique of late Beethoven, particularly in "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa solemnis." 49. Indeed, Heinrich Schenker, in Harmony, trans. E. M. Borgese (Chicago, 1954), 59-63, finds the whole idea of using this mode defective, for in his view the modal system constitutes bad theory. To get around the implication that the piece is therefore also bad, he gives a purely tonal analysis of it in F major. To do so merely underlines the point that tonality is inescapable in the piece, but this does not mean that tonality is unambiguous here, for what key is it in? Beethoven says it is in the Lydian mode, Schenker thinks it is in F major, and other theorists think it is in C major. Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven, 195, discusses the C major implications of this supposedly 'Lydian' movement. 50. Vincent d'Indy, Cours de composition musicale, Book 2, 252, note; quot­ ed by Mason, 195. 51. Schenker notes that "each part [6-bar segment] has its own meaning in regard to form and harmonic development"; Harmony, 62. 52. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 256. 53. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Indiana, 1968), 46-Ά7; quoted in Anthony Newcomb, "Those Images That Yet Fresh Images Beget," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 2 (1983), 234. 54. There is a similar example in the first movement of the Piano Sonata, Op. 109, which underlines this point, for it too has a five-part structure as defined by its contrasting textures, yet because the contrast is moulded within the dynamics of sonata form there is a powerful sense of tonal linearity. The spatial form of the sonata works against the tonal structure; but it is the tonal structure that cre­ ates coherence while the spatial form disrupts it. In the Heiliger Dankgesang this process is reversed. 55. For further details on the golden section see Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music, 305-9. See also the golden-section analyses of works by Bartok and Debussy in Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion (Cambridge, 1983), and Erno Lendvai, BeIa Bartok: An Analysis of His Music (London, 1976). What is sig­ nificant in the Heiliger Dankgesang is not the golden section or the Fibonacci proportions in themselves (these merely provide a theoretical way into the music) but Beethoven's exploration of asymmetry through the intrusion of the Lydian mode into his language. 56. Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music, 319. 57. Thus in absolute time the fissure between the tonal and modal elements articulates a 3:2 relationship, since there are 240 quavers in the Adagio and 159 quavers in the Andante. 58. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 257. 59. Warren Kirkendale, in "New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

265

solemnis," The Musical Quarterly (1970), suggests that Beethoven borrowed both Glarean's Dodecachordon and an unknown work by Zarlino from Prince Lobkowitz's library. 60. Quoted from Lam, Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2, 27. 61. Schenker, Harmony, 63. 62. Beethoven, in fact, started to write his own counterpoint treatise, based on the work of his teacher Albrechtsberger; clearly, his knowledge of harmony and counterpoint was impeccable, and the rules he laid down were numerous and stringent. See Alfred Mann, "Beethoven's Contrapuntal Studies with Haydn." 63. Bar 194 is the 27th bar of the 44-bar Adagio—27:44=1:1.614. 64. Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 343. 65. Schenker, Free Composition, 129. 66. Revue Musicale (March 1831), quoted in Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 228. 67. This process is also used by Bartok in Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, where the chromaticism of the opening fugue is transformed into a diatonic version of the theme in the finale; according to Lendvai, this acts as a resolution of the emotional tension in the fugue of the first movement. 68. Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style," 254. 69. The different signs in the first movement are discussed by Agawu in Playing with Signs, 110-61. 70. Indeed, when Beethoven was struggling to sculpture the rhythmic pattern of the first theme, the early stages involved a rhythm with the upbeat on the downbeat, just as in the fourth-movement march; in fact, this rhythm also occurs in the coda of the opening movement (bars 159 and 161). Several commentators have discussed the rhythmic evolution of the 'march' theme of the first movement: for instance, Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana, 547; Paul Mies, Beethoven's Sketches, trans. D. Mackinnon (London, 1929), 15; and Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade, 359. 71. The 'Gedanke' is discussed by Alexander Goehr in "Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea Behind the Music," Music Analysis, vol. 4 (1985). 72. The Enlightenment sought to create self-enclosed systems of unity which could explain the world without resort to mythic, superstitious, metaphysical, or theological assumptions. Thus objective mathematical and scientific systems were at the heart of eighteenth-century thought. Although the nineteenth century reacted against the Enlightenment its methods remained intact, thanks particularly to the domination of science; and it is from this area that objective, unifying, self-referential systems have entered into the analysis of text and music in the twentieth century, particularly under the banner of structuralism. For a historical summary of the debate in the nineteenth century between absolute (Enlightenment) and programme music, see Anthony Newcomb, "Those Images," 227-31. 73. There are many instances of apparent nostalgia in the late works, of which the minuet and trio of the A minor Quartet is a quintessential example. It not only signifies the nostalgic dance forms of pre-revolutionary Europe but, as Kerman notes, is reminiscent of the minuet in Mozart's K. 464 (The Beethoven Quartets, 253) and is rather Haydnesque in its wit and surprises. On

266

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 4-5

Haydnesque elements in the late quartets, see Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 195. Maynard Solomon gives a more general discussion on Beethoven's nostalgic desire in his last decade to return to Bonn and, presumably, to his Enlightenment upbringing; Beethoven (New York, 1977), chapter 4, "The Last Years in Bonn: Enlightenment," and chapter 21, "The 'Return' to Bonn." 74. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 15-16. 75. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 267 (my italics). 76. Ibid., 265-66. 77. The psychological drama embodied in the Fifth Symphony became an important narrative strategy for the music of the nineteenth century; this is discussed by Anthony Newcomb in "Once More 'Between Absolute and Program Music': Schumann's Second Symphony," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 7, no. 3 (1984), 223-34. 78. On causality, see Fredric Jameson, "Beyond the Cave" in The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, 128-30. 79. Rosen, The Classical Style, particularly 111-38 on Haydn's quartets. Rosen describes Haydn's sonata forms as "no longer just the exercise of a whimsical imagination in a loosely organized scheme... but a free play of an imaginative logic" (120). 80. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3—42. 81. The commentaries on the late works by Joseph de Marliave, Romain Rolland, A. B. Marx, and J.W.N. Sullivan are excellent examples of this form of Romantic criticism. 82. Terry Eagleton gives a clear critique of structuralism in Literary Theory (Oxford, 1983), 91-126. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the deification of structures and systems served the Enlightenment as a substitute religion or myth; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3-42.

CHAPTER FIVE CADENCES AND CLOSURE

1. The de Roda sketchbook, devoted mainly to the last three movements of Op. 132, also carries some 'primitive' sketches for the Bt Quartet. See Joseph Kerman, "Beethoven's Sketchbooks in the British Museum," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 93 (1966-67), 79-80. Although no sketches for the Alia danza tedesca survive among the sketches for Op. 130, it had already been sketched as a movement intended for Op. 132. 2. Since the de Roda sketchbook probably dates from May 1825 (after the illness that had 'inspired' the Heiliger Dankgesang), it appears that Op. 130 was far from ready. 3. See Kerman, "Beethoven's Sketchbooks," 83; and Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford, 1990), 197-214. 4. Anderson, The Letters of Beethoven, letters nos. 1414, 1416. 5. The Grosse Fuge was the original finale of Op. 130, but it was subsequently removed, given a separate opus number (Op. 133), and replaced by a lighter finale written in 1826. Since I am analysing a particular period of

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

267

Beethoven's compositional style—the period of the "Galitzin" Quartets—I shall be dealing mainly with the Grosse Fuge and not with the alternative finale. As Kerman notes, by the time of the new finale Beethoven's compositional approach had undergone a considerable change. See Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 367-74. 6. Among the many commentators who have mentioned the suite-like character of Op. 130 (using "suite" euphemistically to imply the movements' disparateness) is Hans Keller, in a series of four lectures given at Manchester University and broadcast by the BBC in 1975. Leonard Ratner suggests in Classic Music, 270, that the topic of the fugue is essentially a gigue—the dance that closes a Baroque suite—and that it is therefore an apt conclusion for the quartet. 7. See Bekker, Beethoven, 331, and Romain Rolland, Les grandes epoques creatrices, V: La cathedrale interrompue, tome 2: Les derniers quatuors (Paris, 1943), 120-21 and 119-212. 8. Op. 135 reverts to a four-movement structure; perhaps Beethoven was content to use the largest factor of eight. 9. According to Schindler, the audience at the premiere enjoyed the central movements (and even encored the Presto and the Alia danza tedesca) but found the outer movements simply perplexing. See A. F. Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, ed. D. W. MacArdle, trans. C. Jolly (London, 1966), 306. 10. Maynard Solomon describes in greater detail the nostalgia of the postRestoration Viennese for the pre-Napoleonic age in Beethoven, 227-28 and 260-61. 11. Agawu discusses how Schenker's Ursatz and Ratner's cadential model relate to the balanced articulation of Classical forms in Playing with Signs, 51-56. Ex. 5.2 is adapted from this book. 12. Rosen, The Classical Style, 72. 13. Leonard B. Meyer gives a more detailed discussion o( this segment of Op. 130 and shows how it creates a hierarchical structure of closure in terms of its harmonic, rhythmic, and formal processes in Explaining Music (Chicago, 1973), 81-88. 14. Ibid., 82 and 87. 15. Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 268. 16. Keller, in the BBC lectures cited in note 6 above, and Reti, in The Thematic Process in Music, 127-240, comment not only on the thematic relationships in this movement but also on the way in which they impinge on the rest of the quartet. 17. Meyer, Explaining Music, 81-88. 18. Ratner, Classic Music, 391. 19. Borrowing his terminology from Roman Jakobson, Agawu has named these internal and external processes of signification "extroversive semiosis" (referring in this case externally to the mechanical clock) and "introversive semiosis" (referring to the cadential figures that gesture purely within the musical structure). See Agawu, Playing with Signs, 26-79. 20. See, for example, George Edwards, "The Nonsense of an Ending: Closure in Haydn's String Quartets," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3 (1991); and Bonds, "Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony."

268

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 5-6

21. There is, of course, no such thing as a literally monothematic work. As Rosen points out, in Haydn's monothematic structures there are several themes, although the initial theme is used to articulate the second group. See Rosen, Sonata Forms, 5. 22. Keller, BBC lectures (see note 6 above). 23. There are many examples of such recapitulations in late Beethoven; indeed, the Cavatina replicates the same harmonic 'progression' as the Andante, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Another example can be found in the second movement of the Piano Sonata, Op. 109 (bars 102-6). However, Haydn got there first (as Hans Keller would say). James Webster, in Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge, 1991), 138—45, lists several examples of this. In the Quartet in E major, Op. 54, No. 3, for instance, the tendency of Cl minor to usurp the dominant is realized by a dominant preparation that prepares for the submediant (bars 100-8); the tonic is merely juxtaposed at the recapitulation of the opening group. 24. Schenker, Free Composition, 134. 25. See Chapter 2, "Motifs, Counterpoint, and Form." 26. See, for example, Ratner, Classic Music, 101. 27. The word is Hans Keller's (used in his BBC lectures, cited above); see also his The Great Haydn Quartets, 124. It denotes a tonal structure which remains in the tonic for all its main thematic material, whether within a movement or between movements. 28. It is not unusual for Beethoven to quote from his own works; for example, he quotes Op. I l l right at the close of the "Diabelli" Variations, as well as a series of other pieces; see William Kinderman, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (Oxford, 1987), 114-18. 29. Lam, Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2, 42; Hugo Riemann, Beethoven's Stretchquartette (Berlin and Vienna, 1910). 30. Op. 110, third movement, bar 137: "L'istesso tempo della Fuga. Poi a poi di nuovo vivente (Nach und nach wieder auflebend)." 31. See Richard Kramer, "Between Cavatina and Ouverture: Opus 130 and the Voices of Narrative," Beethoven Forum, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Lewis Lockwood, and James Webster (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 179-89. 32. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989), 43-51. 33. Ibid., 49. 34. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 198. 35. Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, 236. CHAPTER SIX DOUBLES AND PARALLELS

1. In analysing the Grosse Fuge but not the alternative finale I am merely keeping to the title of this book, since the new finale is not part of the "Galitzin" version and falls outside the time span that this study investigates. However, I am not favouring one finale over another, since (as I argue in note 21 below) I hold such discussions to be utterly futile.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

269

2. Hans Keller posed this question in the first of his four lectures cited in Chapter 5, note 6 above. 3. Indeed, it is the only first movement in the late quartets to have repeat marks at the end of the exposition. 4. Beethoven may be recalling an earlier practice, although this is the only instance of an 'incomplete' key signature in the work and is not paralleled by the signature of the second group in the exposition. 5. David Brodbeck and John Platoff, "Dissociation and Integration: The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 130," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 7 (1983), 155. 6. Ct = B U V of E major (antipole of Bt). 7. See, for example, Meyer, Explaining Music (Chicago, 1973), 131 ff. 8. Leonard B. Meyer calls this dislocation of systems a "bifurcation" in Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1965), 176-77. 9. Beethoven could not have transposed the return of the second group down a fifth: see note 6 above. 10. See Marshall Brown, "Origins of Modernism: Musical Structures and Narrative Forms," Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. S. P. Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 79-80. 11. Rosen, Sonata Forms, 354-57. 12. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1976), 209. 13. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 306. 14. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 83. 15. See Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process, 209-14. 16. Such a view is expressed, for example, by Amanda Glauert in "The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131." 17. Reti, The Thematic Process in Music, 228-29. 18. Ibid., 235. 19. See Chapter 5, Ex. 5.23. 20. For a similar reading of the harmonic plan of this quartet, see Ludwig Misch, Beethoven Studies (Norman, OkIa., 1953), trans. G.I.C. de Courcy, 24-29. 21. It is unfortunate that this issue—"Which finale?"—leads to an utterly futile debate in which one movement is inevitably marginalized in exalting the other. Either the Grosse Fuge belittles the 'scherzo' or the 'scherzo' mocks the grossness of the fugue, depending on whether one prefers the sociability of a Classical aesthetic or the prophetic struggle of a nineteenth-century genius. Such a dispute devalues the fact that the 'scherzo' is wrought in a highly sophisticated and ambiguous form and that the Grosse Fuge is carefully calculated as an integral part of the quartet and is not some detachable monstrosity that ended up as Op. 133. The diversity of opinions on the Grosse Fuge is represented by Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, 306; I. Mahaim, Beethoven: Naissance et renaissance des derniers quatuors (Paris, 1964); Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 367-74; Marliave, Beethoven's Quartets, 221-22; Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (New York, 1963), 24, and 62-65; Mason,Tfce Quartets

270

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

of Beethoven, 229-38; Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process, 209-14; Richard Kramer, "Between Cavatina and Ouverture." 22. Lam, Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2, 50. 23. Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets, 138. 24. On the commentators who have remarked upon the suite-like character of Op. 130 ('suite' being a euphemism for disparateness), and on Ratner's suggestion of the aptness of the gigue-like topic of the fugue, see Chapter 5, note 6 above. Ratner also observes in Classic Music (270) that "March, aria and finally gigue, as the principal topics of [the fugue], fit in with the styles of the preceding movements." 25. See Ratner's comments cited above, and Bekker, Beethoven, 331. Rosen writes that the Grosse Fuge "has an introduction, Allegro, slow movement (in a new key), and a Scherzo finale as almost completely separate divisions" (The Classical Style, 441); thus it is possible to regard this compilation of diverse elements as a catharsis of the tonal and thematic disparateness that characterizes the quartet. In other words, the finale becomes a quartet within the quartet, with the diversity woven by the singularity of the fugue. 26. For an example of a sonata-form interpretation of this fugue, see Misch, Beethoven Studies, 6-7. 27. This evasion of 1826 is extremely complex because the 'scherzo' has an off-tonic theme in which Bl> is not defined until the very last note (bar 10); and, to make things more convoluted, the subdominant recapitulation is not a direct transposition of the theme down a fifth but starts down a fourth, with a subtle dislocation in the middle to cadence the theme on El> (bar 232). 28. Warren Kirkendale, "The 'Great Fuge' Op. 133: Beethoven's 'Art of Fugue,'" Acta Musicologica, vol. 35 (1963). 29. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, 24. 30. Also see Richard Kramer, "Between Cavatina and Ouverture," 176. 31. It would be beyond the scope of this study to trace all the work's motivic relationships; for a detailed investigation of motifs in Op. 133 see Ekkerhard Kreft, Die spdten Quartette Beethovens: Substanz und Substanzverarbeitung (Bonn, 1969), 200-26. 32. Grosvenor W. Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, 1960), 164-68. 33. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 279. 34. Numerically speaking, bar 370 is the halfway point in this 741-bar fugue. 35. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 292. 36. Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style," 249. 37. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 369. 38. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford, 1990), 42. 39. See Richard Poirer, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971). 40. Noise has always been a symbol for destruction and confusion. In information theory, it jams communication. For Jacques Attali, noise speaks of a crisis, a mutation of a musical code, which destroys the foundation of musical order; see Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi (Manchester, 1985), 33.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 6-7

271

41. It is precisely because of this inadequacy that various orchestral versions of the fugue have arisen. Indeed, von Biilow, Weingartner, and Furtwangler tried to popularize the fugue by bringing it onto the concert stage as an orchestral work. 42. Siegmund Levarie, "Noise," Critical Inquiry, vol. 4 no. 1 (1977), 21-32. 43. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 28 (1826); the quotation is taken from Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, 306. As Friedrich Kanne, in his review of the Ninth Symphony (1824), tried to come to terms with the Turkish style in the finale, he presented the nineteenth-century view of Turkishness' as the 'other' of civilization: "nobody would be so foolish as to assert that the composition is really in the so-called Turkish style... For the authentically Turkish lies in the arbitrariness with which a composer erases all the artistic laws accepted by cultivated nations." Quoted in Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge, 1993), 39. 44. Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 274. Indeed, in both the first fugue and its recapitulation the tendency is to move towards the subdominant. 45. Both Bekker, in Beethoven, 332, and Sullivan, in Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, 228-30, read the Grosse Fuge as a demonstration of the philosophical problem of freedom and necessity. The issue is not as marginal as it might seem, since Adorno also interprets music in these terms. 46. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, vol. 28 (1826), 310; quoted from Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, 307. An insult in 1826, "Babel" is for poststructuralism a compliment. For Roland Barthes, Babel (which is, after all, a jumble of contradictory discourses) speaks of jouissance: for him, the "cohabitation of language working side by side" is the entrance to "bliss." He writes: "Imagine someone... who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity... Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out." Perhaps such a man is Beethoven. See Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 3-4. 47. On Utopian forms, see Solomon, "Beethoven, Sonata and Utopia." 48. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago, 1988). The term "negative apotheosis" refers particularly to the finales of Mahler's Symphonies No. 6 and No. 9. 49. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 189. CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSION

1. See William Drabkin, "Beethoven's Sketches and the Thematic Process," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 105 (1978-79), 34. 2. See Theodor Adorno, "Spatstil Beethovens." 3. Exaggeration is not in itself a mendacious practice. In fact, Adorno stresses its importance in any critical analysis "to bring into bold relief the tensions in a force-field or constellation rather than smooth them over" (Jay). See Jay, Adorno, 15, and Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia, trans. E. Jephcott (London, 1973), 86 (cf. Chapter 3, note 58 above).

272

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

4. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3-42. 5. As Adorno notes, even the "I believe" of the Credo becomes a difficult statement in the Missa solemnis; see "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa solemnis," 120. 6. Acts 17:23. 7. The idea of redemption in art is cardinal in the earlier works of Walter Benjamin, and is in fact adopted, in a secularized form, by Adorno as the idea of reconciliation. The artwork, whilst registering the failure of the outer world, also contains a surplus of meaning that points to a Utopian hope that is more than mere ideology; in this way it gives a glimpse of the reconciliation denied to humanity at present. See Richard Wolin, "The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie," Telos, vol. 41 (Fall 1979), 107-11. The theological foundation of such secularized thought is itself part of this altar "to an unknown god." The Enlightenment, despite its fear of the supernatural, has never been able to free itself from its forms, either philosophically or musically.

•

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984). . "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa solemnis," trans. Duncan Smith, Telos (1976); originally "Verfremdetes Hauptwerk: Zur Missa solemnis" in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsatze 1928-1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964). . Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1976). . "On the Problem of Musical Analysis," trans. M. Paddison, Music Analysis, vol. 1/2 (1982). . Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1987). . "Spatstil Beethovens" in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsatze 1928-1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964). Adorno, Theodor W , and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979). Agawu, V. Kofi. Playing with Signs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Allanbrook, Wye Jamison. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Anderson, Emily, trans, and ed. The Letters of Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1961). Arnold, Denis, and Nigel Fortune, eds. The Beethoven Companion (London: Faber, 1971). Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Ballantine, Christopher. "Beethoven, Hegel and Marx," The Music Review, vol. 33 (1972). Barry, Kevin. Language, Music and the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text," in Music-Image-Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana/Collins, 1977). . The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (London: Cape, 1976). . "Rasch" in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. R. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). . SIZ, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Bekker, Paul. Beethoven (Berlin and Leipzig, 1911), trans, and adapted M. M. Bozman (London: Dent, 1925). Bent, Ian. Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1987). Blom, Eric. "The Minuet-Trio," Music and Letters, vol. 22 (1941). Bonds, Mark Evan. "Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony," journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 44, no. 1 (1991).

274

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brady, Patrick. Rococo Style Versus Enlightenment Novel (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984). Brandenburg, Sieghard. "The Autograph of Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132," The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, ed. C. Wolff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). . "The Historical Background to the 'Heiliger Dankgesang' in Beethoven's Α-minor Quartet Op. 132," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Brandenburg, Sieghard, and Helmut Loos, eds. Beitrage zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984 (Munich: Henle Verlag, 1987). Brodbeck, David, and John Platoff. "Dissociation and Integration: The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 130," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 7 (1983). Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1757). Burnham, Scott. "Criticism, Faith and the Idee: Marx's Reception of Beethoven," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 3 (1990). . "On the Programmatic Reception of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony," Beethoven Forum, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Lewis Lockwood, and James Webster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Carroll, David. Paraesthetics (London: Methuen, 1987). Cavett-Dunsby, Esther. "Mozart's Codas," Music Analysis, vol. 7 (1988). Cone, Edward T. "Beethoven's Experiments in Composition: The Late Bagatelles," Beethoven Studies 2, ed. A. Tyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). Cook, Nicholas. Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cooke, Deryck. "The Unity of Beethoven's Late Quartets," The Music Review, vol. 24(1963). Cooper, Barry. Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). . "Beethoven's Portfolio of Bagatelles," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 112, no. 2 (1986-87). Cooper, Grosvenor W., and Leonard B. Meyer. The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Cooper, Martin. Beethoven: The Last Decade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, rev. 1985). Dahlhaus, Carl. Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley. University of California Press, 1980). . The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. R. Lustig (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). . Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). . Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). . Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. D. Puffett and A. Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

275

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1988). . Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1984). Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978). Drabkin, William. "Beethoven and the Open String," Music Analysis, vol. 4, no. 1/2 (1985). . "Beethoven's Sketches and the Thematic Process," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 105 (1978-79). Dunsby, Jonathan. "A Bagatelle on Beethoven's WoO 60," Music Analysis, vol. 3 (1984). Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). . Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). . The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Edwards, George. "The Nonsense of an Ending: Closure in Haydn's String Quartets," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3 (1991). Epstein, David. Beyond Orpheus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979). Fischer, Kurt von. "'Never to Be Performed in Public': On Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 9 5 " in Essays in Musicology, trans. C. Skoggard, ed. T. S. Evans (New York: The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, 1989). Forbes, Elliot: see Thayer, Alexander Wheelock. Forte, Allen. The Compositional Matrix (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974). Forte, Allen, and Steven E. Gilbert. Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (London and New York: Norton, 1982). Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970). Glauert, Amanda. "The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 4 (1980). Goehr, Alexander. "Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea Behind the Music," Music Analysis, vol. 4 (1985). Gossett, Philip. "Carl Dahlhaus and the 'Ideal Type,'" Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 1 (1990). Greene, David B. Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1982). Habermas, Jiirgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). Hall, Stuart, and Bram Gieben, eds. Formations of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press,1992). Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977). Hoffmann, E.T.A. "Kreisleriana," no. 4 of Fantasiestiicke in Callots Manier (Berlin, 1814-15); ed. D. Charlton, trans. M. Clarke, in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). . "Review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, vol. 12 (1810); ed. D. Charlton, trans. M. Clarke, in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer,

276

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Hopkins, Robert G. "When a Coda Is More Than a Coda," Explorations in Music, the Arts and Ideas, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1988). Imbrie, Andrew. "'Extra' Measures and Metrical Ambiguity in Beethoven," Beethoven Studies 1, ed. A. Tyson (New York: Norton, 1973). Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1988). Jay, Martin. Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984). Johnson, Douglas. "Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven's Sketches," NineteenthCentury Music, vol. 2 (1978). . "1794-1795: Decisive Years in Beethoven's Early Development," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Jonas, Oswald. Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker, trans, and ed. J. Rothgeb (London and New York: Longman, 1982). . "A Lesson with Beethoven by Correspondence," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 38 (1952). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Keller, Hans. The Great Haydn Quartets (London: Dent, 1986). Kerman, Joseph. The Beethoven Quartets (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). . "Beethoven's Sketchbooks in the British Museum," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 93 (1966-67). . Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985). . "Notes on Beethoven's Codas," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). . "Sketch Studies," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 6 (1982). Kerman, Joseph, and Alan Tyson. The New Grove Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1983). Kinderman, William. Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). . "Beethoven's Symbol for the Deity in the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 9 (1985). . "Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, Opus 111," Beethoven Forum, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Lewis Lockwood, and James Webster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). . "Tonality and Form in the Variation Movements of Beethoven's Late Quartets," Beitrage zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984, ed. S. Brandenburg and H. Loos (Munich: Henle Verlag, 1987). Kirkendale, Warren. Fugue and Fugato in Rococo and Classical Chamber Music, trans. M. Bent and author (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979). . "The 'Great Fuge' Op. 133: Beethoven's 'Art of Fugue,'" Acta Musicologica, vol. 35 (1963). . "New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa solemnis," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 56 (1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

277

Kohler, Karl-Heinz. "Aspects of a New Picture of Beethoven," Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. R. Winter and B. Carr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980). Kramer, Jonathan. "Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135," Perspectives of New Music, vol. 11 (1973). . The Time of Music (New York and London: Schirmer, 1988). Kramer, Lawrence. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Kramer, Richard. "Between Cavatina and Ouverture: Opus 130 and the Voices of Narrative," Beethoven Forum, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Lewis Lockwood, and James Webster (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). . '"Das Organische der Fuge': On the Autograph of Beethoven's String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1," The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, ed. C. Wolff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Lam, Basil. Beethoven String Quartets, vol. 2 (London: BBC, 1975). Ie Huray, Peter. "The Role of Music in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Aesthetics," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 105 (1978-79). Ie Huray, Peter, and James Day. Music Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Leppert, Richard. "Domestic Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India," Music and Society, ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). . Music and Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Levarie, Siegmund. "Noise," Critical Inquiry, vol. 4 no. 1 (1977). Littles, Meridith. "Minuet," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980). Lockwood, Lewis. "Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music," Beitrage zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984, ed. S. Brandenburg and H. Loos (Munich: Henle Verlag, 1987). . "'Eroica' Perspectives: Strategy and Design in the First Movement," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Longyear, Rey M. "Beethoven and Romantic Irony," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 56 (1970). Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. "Adorno as the Devil," Telos, vol. 19 (1974). MacArdle, Donald. "Beethoven and the Bach Family," Music and Letters, vol. 38 (1957). Mann, Alfred. "Beethoven's Contrapuntal Studies with Haydn," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 56 (1970). Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1949). Marliave, Joseph de. Beethoven's Quartets, trans. H. Andrews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928; reprint New York: Dover, 1961).

278

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marston, Nicholas. "Schenker and Forte Reconsidered: Beethoven's Sketches for the Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 10 (1986). . "Schumann's Monument to Beethoven," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 14, no. 3 (1991). . "Trifles or a Multi-trifle? Beethoven's Bagatelles, Op. 119, Nos. 7-11," Music Analysis, vol. 5 (1986). Mason, Daniel Gregory. The Quartets of Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). McClary, Susan, and Richard Leppert, eds. Music and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). . Explaining Music (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Mies, Paul. Beethoven's Sketches, trans. D. Mackinnon (London: Oxford University Press, 1929). Misch, Ludwig. Beethoven Studies, trans. G.LC. de Courcy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953). . "Fugue and Fugato in Beethoven's Variation Form," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 42 (1956). Morrow, Mary Sue. "Of Unity and Passion: The Aesthetic of Concert Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 13, no. 3 (1990). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. C. Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). . Proust as Musician, trans. D. Puffett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Newcomb, Anthony. "Once More 'Between Absolute and Program Music': Schumann's Second Symphony," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 7, no. 3 (1984). . "Those Images That Yet Fresh Images Beget," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 2 (1983). Nottebohm, Gustav. Beethovens Studien: Beethovens Unterricht bet J. Haydn, Albrechtsberger una Salieri (Leipzig and Winterthur, 1873). . Zweite Beethoveniana: Nachgelassene Aufsdtze (Leipzig, 1887). Paddison, Max."Adorno's Aesthetic Theory," Music Analysis, vol. 6, no. 3 (1987). Plantinga, Leon. Romantic Music (New York: Norton, 1984). Pestelli, Giorgio. The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, trans. E. Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Radcliffe, Philip. Beethoven's String Quartets (London: Hutchinson, 1965; reprint Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Ramm, Agatha. Germany 1789-1919 (London: Methuen, 1967). Ratner, Leonard. Classic Music (New York: Schirmer, 1980). Ratz, Erwin. "Analysis and Hermeneutics and Their Significance in the Interpretation of Late Beethoven," Music Analysis, vol. 3, no. 3 (1984). Reti, Rudolf. The Thematic Process in Music (London: Faber, 1961).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

279

Reynolds, Christopher. "Beethoven's Sketches for the Variations in Ε-flat, Op. 135," Beethoven Studies 3, ed. A. Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). . "The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, I: An die feme Geliebte," Acta Musicologica, vol. 60, no. 1 (1988). . "The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, II: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135," Acta Musicologica, vol. 60, no. 2 (1988). Riezler, Walter. Beethoven, trans. G.D.H. Pidcock (London: Forrester, 1938). Ringer, Alexander L. "Beethoven and the London Pianoforte School," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 41 (1970). Roberts, David. Art and Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Roberts, Julian. German Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Rolland, Romain. Les grandes epoques creatrices, V: La cathedrale interrompue, tome 2: Les derniers quatuors (Paris: Editions du Sablier, 1948). . The Classical Style (London: Faber, 1971). Rosen, Charles. Sonata Forms, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1988). Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991). Schachter, Carl. "Rhythm and Linear Analysis: A Preliminary Study," The Music Forum, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Schenker, Heinrich. "Beethoven zu seinem opus 127," Der Tonwille, vol. 4 (1924). . Free Composition, trans, and ed. E. Oster (New York: Longman, 1979). . Harmony, trans. E. M. Borgese (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). . "Organic Structure in Sonata Form," trans. O. Grossman, in Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches, ed. M. Yeston (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977). Schindler, A. F. Beethoven as I Knew Him, ed. D. W. MacArdle, trans. C. Jolly (London: Faber, 1966). Schoenberg, Arnold. "Composition with Twelve Tones" (1941) in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1975). . The Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1967). Scott, Marion M. Beethoven (London: Dent, 1934). Solie, Ruth A. "Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism," Explorations in Music, the Arts and Ideas, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1988). Solomon, Maynard. Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977). . "Beethoven and the Enlightenment," Telos, vol. 19 (Spring 1974). . "Beethoven and Schiller," Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. R. Winter and B. Carr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980). . Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). . "Beethoven, Sonata and Utopia," Telos, vol. 9 (Fall 1971). . "Beethoven's Ninth: A Search for Order," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 10 (1986).

280

BIBLIOGRAPHY

. "The Creative Periods of Beethoven," The Music Review, vol. 34 (1973). Sonneck, O. G., ed. Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York: G. Schirmer, 1926). Steiner, George. Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). Street, Alan. "Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories," Music Analysis, vol. 8, no. 1/2 (1989). Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition," Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 29, no. 2 (1976); reprinted in Subotnik, Developing Variations. . "The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music, Language and Criticism since the Enlightenment," Critical Inquiry, vol. 4 (1978); reprinted in Subotnik, Developing Variations. . Developing Variations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). . "The Historical Structure: Adorno's 'French' Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 2, no. 1 (1978). Sullivan, J.W.N. Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); reprinted in Subotnik, Developing Variations. Taruskin, Richard. "Resisting the Ninth," Nineteenth-Century Mustc, vol. 12, no. 3 (1989). Thayer, Alexander Wheelock. Ludwig van Beethovens Leben (Berlin, 1866-79); rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes as Thayer's Life of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, rev. 1967). Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment (London: Faber, 1992). Tovey, Donald Francis. Beethoven (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). . Essays in Music Analysis: Chamber Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). . Musical Textures (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). . "Some Aspects of Beethoven's Art-Forms," Music and Letters, vol. 8 (1927); reprinted in Essays and Lectures on Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980). Walker, Alan. A Study in Musical Analysis (London: Barry and Rockliff, 1962). Wallace, Robin. "Background and Expression in the First Movement of Beethoven's Op. 132," The Journal of Musicology, vol. 7, no. 1 (1989). . Beethoven's Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Weber, William. "The Muddle of the Middle Classes," Nineteenth-Century Music, vol. 3, no. 2 (1979-80). Webster, James. "The Falling Out Between Haydn and Beethoven: The Evidence of the Sources," Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes, ed. L. Lockwood and P. Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). . Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

281

. "Traditional Elements in Beethoven's Middle-Period String Quartets," Beethoven, Performers and Critics, ed. R. Winter and B. Carr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980). Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Whitrow, G. J. Time in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Whittall, Arnold. "Review Survey: Some Recent Writings on Stravinsky," Music Analysis, vol. 8, no. 1/2 (1989). . "The Theorist's Sense of History: Concepts of Contemporaneity in Composition and Analysis," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 112, no. 1 (1986-87). Winter, Robert. Compositional Origins of Beethoven's Opus 131 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982). . "Plans for the Structure of the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor," Beethoven Studies 2, ed. A. Tyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wolff, C , ed. The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Wolin, Richard. "The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie," Telos, vol. 41 (Fall 1979). Zenck, Martin. Die Bach-Rezeption des spaten Beethoven (Stuttgart and Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986). Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

•

INDEX

absence, 42, 76-79, 88-90 Adorno, Theodor W., 5-6, 8, 10, 73, 76, 83, 102-104, 106, 110, 130-132, 137, 155, 162, 211, 214, 222, 240, 243-244, 246-247, 250nn. 11 and 12, 252n.l9, 258nn. 54, 55, and 6 1 , 262n.31, 266n.82, 271n.3, 272n.5. See also Enlightenment Agawu, V. Kofi, 66, 256n.l5, 258n.44, 267n.l9 Albrechtsberger, Johann Georg, 7, 24, 150, 201, 230, 238, 250n.l3, 265n.62 Allemande, 121, 124, 133-134 anacrusis, 49, 51, 112, 121, 122, 125-128, 205 analysis, 5-6, 8-10, 53, 55, 57, 74-75, 81, 102-106, 164-165, 246, 248, 251n.l5, 265n.72. See also theory Antoinette, Marie, 261n.l4 Arcadia, 109, 110, 261n.l4, 262n.20 aristocracy, 108-110, 113, 118, 121, 126, 260n.9, 261n.l4, 263n.36 Art of Fugue, 7, 230 Attali, Jacques, 270n.40 Aufklarung. See Enlightenment Auschwitz, 240, 247 Babel, 243, 271n.46 barbarism, 240-241 Bach, J. S., 7, 131, 230, 251nn. 13 and 14 Barthes, Roland, 257n.41, 271n.46. See also jouissance Bartok, BeIa, 143, 265n.67 Baroque suite, 164, 225, 267n.6, 270n.24 the Beautiful, 107, 162, 260n.2 Bekker, Paul, 11, 242 Beethoven, Johann van, 13 Beethoven, Ludwig van: late style, 3-10, 13, 52, 54-55, 75, 165, 247; middle period style, 8, 54-55, 73, 75, 104, 111, 211, 222, 240, 250n.l2 (see also heroism); reception, 1, 4, 6, 40, 54-57, 74, 103, 241, 255n.7; sketches, 7, 13, 17, 24, 163, 222-223, 245, 266nn. 1 and 2 WORKS bagatelles, 121,

·

DANCES

WoO 8, 133, 262n.21 WoO 13, 262n.21 WoO 19, 260n.8 WoO 24, 260n.8 WoO 81, 133, 262n.21, 2263n.40 Leonore overtures, 254n. 27 Missa solemnis, 11, 110, 257n.31, 272n.5 PIANO SONATAS

Op. 10, 255n.l; Op. 10, No. 2, 167 Op. 31, No. 1, 40, 253n.27 Op. 53, 40, 253n.27 Op. 101, 254n.35, 260n.8 Op. 106, 161 Op. 109, 11, 76-77, 255n.4, 257n.33, 260n.2, 264n.54, 268n.23 Op. 110, 11, 25-26, 77-80, 195-197, 260n.2 Op. Ill, 11, 76, 255n.4, 260n.2, 268n.28; PIANO VARIATIONS

Op. 35, 24-5 Op. 120, 260n.l2, 268n.28 STRING QUARTETS

Op. 18, No. 3, 262n.l7 Op. 18, No. 4, 262n.l7 Op. 18, No. 6, 260n.6 Op. 59, 55 Op. 59, No. 3, 261n.l2 Op. 95, 108 Op. 127, 3-4, 10, 11-53, 65, 70, 72, 102, 160, 164, 188, 223, 246-247, 254n.27, 257n.33 Op. 130, 3-4, 10, 11, 58, 163-244, 246; alternative finale of (1826), 4, 224, 229, 244, 267n.5, 268n.2, 269n.21, 270n.27 Op. 131, 3-4, 11, 58, 164, 222-223, 254n.35, 256n.21 Op. 132, 3-4, 10, 11, 53, 54-163, 190, 193, 223, 243, 246-247 Op. 135, 4, 11, 72, 253n.27, 267n.8 SYMPHONIES

No. 3, 111 No. 5, 54, 161, 266n.77

284

INDEX

No. 8, 254n.27, 260n.l2 No. 9, 260n.7, 271n.43 TRIOS

Op. 1, No. 2, 133-132, 263n.40 Op. 70, No. 2, 4 1 , 253n.27 Benjamin, Walter, 272n.7 Biedermeier culture, 7, 165, 188 binary opposition, 204, 207, 210, 242 Blanchard, Henri, 40 Bloch, Ernst, 131, 151 the body, 240-241 boredom, 137, 263n.45 bourgeoisie, 130-131, 155, 196, 262n.31, 263n.36 Brodbeck, David, 206 Burke, Edmund, 105, 107, 225, 263n.45 cantus firmus, 17, 24, 64,140-141 causality, 130, 160-162, 170, 210 chaos, 54, 73, 106, 155, 175, 193, 240 clock. See mechanical clock collage, 8,133-134, 190, 201 Congress of Vienna, 250n.l2 contrapuntal process, 13-37, 40, 52, 63-64, 70-75, 104, 148-150, 245 Cooke, Deryck, 11, 31, 58 Cooper, Grosvenor W., 233 Cooper, Martin, 126 critical theory, 247 critique: quartets as, 4-5, 8-10, 54, 92, 104, 110, 129, 137, 160, 165, 183, 193, 199, 201, 225, 230, 234, 238, 2 4 6 ^ 8 ; of analysis 5, 9-10, 74-75, 162, 238, 246 Dahlhaus, Carl, 12, 198, 216 deconstruction, 9-10, 80, 104-105, 245, 246-247, 252n.l9 defamiliarization, 40, 109-110, 246, 261n.l4 Derrida, Jacques, 170, 252n.l9, 255n.ll difference, 12, 83, 102, 104-105, 175 dominant suppression, 42-45, 47, 52, 185-186, 188-190, 192, 227 duplicity, 204-205, 210, 222 Eagleton, Terry, 83 eclecticism, 8-10, 245 end-accented structures, 169, 172 Enlightenment, 4, 75, 104-105, 109, 138, 160-162, 240, 243, 246, 258n.54, 263n.36, 265n.72, 266n.82, 272n.7.

See also reason Epstein, David, 11-12, 32, 33 expression, 87-92 failure, 6, 240, 247 Fibonacci series, 143-146, 264n.55 Foucault, Michel, 130, 251n.l8, 262n.28 Friedrich, Caspar David, 138 fugal form, 7, 25, 225, 230, 241-242, 246 Fux, Johann Joseph, 150 Galitzin, Prince Nikolas, 3-4 gap-filled structure, 208-209, 217, 219, 228 Gedanke, 160 gesture, 31, 37-40, 44-45, 50-52, 64-65, 87-102, 159-160, 214, 227 Glarean, 146, 251n,13, 265n.59 golden section, 143-146, 150, 264n.55 Grundidee, 72 Habermas, Jiirgen, 196 Hanslick, Eduard, 8 Haydn, Joseph, 4-5, 7, 54, 75, 160-161, 167, 177, 183, 251n.l3, 261n.l4, 262n.l8, 266n.73, 266n.78, 268nn. 21 and 23 Hegel, G.W.F., 7, 2 5 0 n . l l , 258n.58 . heroism, 6, 111, 243, 247, 250nn. 11 and 12 heterogeneity, 9, 104, 107, 130-131, 154, 156, 162, 164, 224 Hirchbach, Hermann, 255n.7 historical styles, 4, 7-10, 87, 130-131, 165, 246 history, 4, 6-7, 130, 240, 247, 251n.l5, 262n.31 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 54, 57, 73, 105, 250n.l0, 259n.64 HoIz, Karl, 13, 163, 194 humanism, 6, 32, 40, 247 idealism, 7. See also Hegel identity. See motivic identity indifference, 4, 108-110, 124, 127, 129, 131, 134, 155 d'Indy, Vincent, 140, 225 insanity. See madness intertexuality, 194 irony, 4, 129, 134, 161, 243-244, 246. See also wit irrationality, 5-6, 15, 40, 83, 88, 91-102,

INDEX 131, 148, 155, 160-161, 193, 210-211, 217. See also reason; paradox Jakobson, Roman, 109, 267n.l9 joke. See wit Joseph II, 109 jouissance, 88, 98, 158, 172, 258n.61, 271n.46 Kanne, Friedrich, 271n.43 Kant, Immanuel, 105, 129-130, 162 Keller, Hans, 111, 175, 183, 194, 201, 205, 262n.l8 Kerman, Joseph, 15, 17, 25, 42, 44, 55, 83, 87-88, 92, 128, 131, 141, 146, 151, 161,198, 213, 225, 234, 242, 257n.41 Kirkendale, Warren, 230, 250n.l3 Kramer, Jonathan, 90, 132 labour, 240-241 Lam, Basil, 31 Levarie, Siegmund, 241 logic. See reason Lydian mode, 8, 74, 138-140, 146-151, 153, 156-157, 160, 264nn. 49 and 55 madness, 6, 9, 40, 52, 54-55, 74, 88, 96, 102, 129, 161, 204, 210, 214, 224, 229, 245, 251nn. 17 and 18 Mahler, Gustav, 243 march, 126, 26On.8 Marliave, Joseph de, 44, 46, 110, 150, 225 Marx, A. B., 87, 110 Mason, Daniel Gregory, 13, 15, 122, 225 mechanical clock, 175, 177, 181-182, 186, 199-200, 267n.l9 metrical shift, 111-112, 114-126, 169-175 Metternich, Prince Clemens von, 7, 165, 222, 250n. 12 Meyer, Leonard B., 208, 233, 169, 175 Michaelis, Friedrich, 259n.2 military, 108, 110, 126, 128, 151 minuet, 8, 109, 260n.9, 261nn. 13 and 14, 262n.l8 monothematicism, 183, 268n.21 motivic identity, 73-80, 9 1 , 98, 222, 214, 240 motivic process, 5, 12-17, 26-37, 40, 52, 54, 58-80, 102-106, 110, 211-224, 234-238, 245

285

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 8, 54, 75, 160-161, 167-168, 261n.l4, 262n.21, 265n.73 musette, 109-110, 261n.l4, 262n.20 naivete, 8, 108, 110, 129, 134, 165, 193, 199, 243, 246 Napoleon, 6-7, 108, 247, 250n.l2, 260n.8 narrative, 108, 152, 181, 231, 156, 210, 227, 240, 266n.77 Nazarene painters, 138 Neate, Charles, 163 negation, 5-6, 8, 73, 75, 88, 95, 104-105, 111, 129, 138, 152-155, 158, 160, 162, 163, 171, 193, 199-200, 229, 243 noise, 240-241, 270n.40 non-response. See indifference nostalgia, 8, 110, 165, 183, 188,199, 246, 265n.73 Nottebohm, Gustav, 11 Novalis, 106 opera buffa, 108 organicism, 9, 57-58, 73-75, 79, 103, 105, 110, 132, 134, 138, 162, 254n.28, 257n.28 Oulibicheff, Alexander, 249n.8 Palestrina, 251n.l3 palindromic structures. See symmetrical structures paradox, 5, 53, 127, 137, 152, 164, 181, 200, 204, 206, 208, 210, 224-225, 227, 229, 241 parody, 49, 109, 165, 246 peasantry, 110, 121, 126, 261n.l4 performance, 125, 231, 240 Pestelli, Giorgio, 250n.l0 Platoff, John, 206 plurality, 10, 81-83, 87, 186, 200, 248 Poirer, Richard, 240 politics. See social meaning post-structuralism, 10, 104-105, 201 private sphere, 108, 196, 247 public sphere, 108 Radcliffe, Philip, 38, 151 rationality. See reason Ratner, Leonard, 166, 175, 270n.25 reason, 4-5, 52, 54, 79, 83, 92-106, 131, 146, 155, 160, 211, 222, 230-231, 240,

286

INDEX

246-247. See also irrationality; Enlightenment reception of the late works. See Beethoven redemption, 247-248, 272n.7 Rellstab, Ludwig, 253n.25 Renaissance, 7, 17 Reti, Rudolf, 8, 11, 175,223 rhythmic structure, 111-129, 233-234, 242. See also metrical shift Rococo, 7, 109, 183, 246, 261n.l4, 263n.45 Romanticism, 7, 55, 103, 250n.l0 Rosen, Charles, 8, 12, 75, 161, 167, 210, 266n.78, 268n.21, 270n.25 Scarlatti, Domenico, 166 Schenker, Heinrich, 8-9, 12, 17, 44, 52, 57-58, 8 8 - 9 0 , 1 3 1 , 141,147, 150-151, 166, 169, 186, 245, 254nn. 28 and 34, 264n.49 Schiller, Friedrich, 130 Schlegel brothers, 138 Schoenberg, Arnold, 8-9, 11-12, 31, 57, 60, 160, 193, 245, 253n.22, 254n.37, 263n.31 Schumann, Robert, 250n.l0, 255n.7 Schuppanzigh, Ignaz, 253n.25 Scott, Marion, 11 semiotics, 129, 156-157, 159, 175, 177, 181, 183, 190, 246. See also topoi serialism, 193, 263n.31 signified, 109, 221, 129, 147, 160 signifier, 109, 111, 221, 129, 147, 160 sketches. See Beethoven social code, 52, 76, 103, 105, 108-111 social meaning, 6-7, 103-104, 108-111, 126, 129-131, 137, 155, 165, 222, 240-241, 243-244, 247 Solomon, Maynard, 249n.9, 263n.36 sonata form, 12, 37, 40-44, 47, 66-67, 76, 88, 102-103, 131, 148, 160, 200, 206-208, 210, 225-226, 229, 234, 241-242, 246, 253n.27, 254n.34 spatial form, 131-132, 141-143, 146, 154-155, 160, 186, 242, 264n.54 Stravinsky, Igor, 230 structuralism, 9-10, 74, 88, 161-162, 265n.72, 266n.82 the Sublime, 54, 73,105-107, 129-130, 137, 162, 225, 245, 258n.61, 259n.64, 259n.2

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 240 suffering, 87, 152, 195-196, 240, 247 Sullivan, J.W.N., 249n.8 symmetrical structures, 47-52, 67, 132, 134,137,142-143,146,154-156, 160-161, 163-165, 184, 193, 224, 243-246 texture, 48, 64, 88-92, 102-103, 132, 134, 137, 141, 143, 198, 212, 214, 217, 219, 222, 227, 231, 234, 236, 241-242 thematic deformation, 234, 238 theory, 6-10, 37, 164. See also analysis. time, 111, 129-132, 137-138, 141, 143-145, 141, 154, 160, 162, 186, 242 topics. See topoi topoi, 246, 258n.44, 267n.6, 270n.24. See also semiotics Tovey, Donald Francis, 60, 205 Turkish music, 241, 271n.43 undecidability, 9, 55, 83, 86, 183-184, 210, 243, 255n.ll unknown god, 147 upbeat. See anacrusis variation process, 17-25, 63-64, 73-80, 96, 104, 245 Versailles, 261n.l4 vulnerability, 247 Wagner, Richard, 250n.l0 Wallace, Robin, 87 Webern, Anton, 8, 58, 191, 193, 200, 256n.l3 Weiskel, Thomas, 129, 137, 263n.45 Winter, Robert, 13 wit, 4-5, 167, 177, 183, 192-193, 199, 246. See also irony Zarlino, 146, 251n.l3, 265n.59