31. Thayer/Forbes, 2:892–93.
32. When I say there is no “abstract” point to the recalls of earlier movements in the finale, I mean that their impression mainly conveys a narrative logic. At least in one “abstract” dimension, they are an extension of Beethoven’s constant habit of keeping the whole in view and basing a whole work on one set of ideas. This usually involves themes or motifs recurring throughout the piece, only not to the extent of more or less literal quotations as in the Ninth and other late works. As I said in a note in the previous chapter, at times the finale of the Ninth approaches the opposite of the “purely musical”: the “purely extramusical.”
33. That the form of the finale is unprecedented is in keeping with the rest of the symphony. The first movement has a development that is the least dramatic part of the movement and a recapitulation that does violence to the idea of a recapitulation. The second movement is an amalgam of fugue, sonata, and scherzo. The third movement comprises unusual double variations. The finale is an ad hoc form based around variations. Once again, in the symphonies only the Eroica has this kind of bending and tinkering with traditional outlines in every movement.
34. Translations of “An die Freude” here are based on the ones in Levy, Beethoven, but are largely my own.
35. Kinderman, Beethoven, 281. Kinderman first examined what I am calling the “God-texture” in the Missa solemnis and the Ninth, and explored how the two relate.
36. In my translation of the Schiller, I am assuming that “his suns” in the text means God’s suns, God having ended the previous verse. I’m translating the obscure German Plan in context with its military sense of “battlefield” rather than the usual “firmament,” which is not a standard sense of the word. Levy (Beethoven, 107) notes echoes of Psalm 19 in the Schiller verse.
37. Beethoven’s metronome marking for the Turkish march is dotted quarter = 84. In contrast to his penchant for exaggeratedly fast markings, this one is bizarrely slow. Only perhaps in a funeral would a military band march so slow, and that tempo would ruin the energy of the fugue that follows. Even in the present time, when many conductors give lip service to Beethoven’s metronome markings (mainly the fast ones), I have never heard anyone conform to that tempo for the Turkish march. It’s always taken some five to seven clicks faster, as I think it clearly should be.
38. To say that in the finale Beethoven symbolically embraces the East, via the Turkish march, is not to make him some sort of modern multiculturalist. It is rather to say that this echoes his interest in Eastern religions and the like. Turkey was an old enemy of Austria, meanwhile, and partly for that reason an object of Austrians’ fascination. In any case, Beethoven’s knowledge of Eastern cultures would have been severely limited.
39. Levy, in Beethoven, writes, “Beethoven had recognized that the theme for ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’ was contrapuntally compatible with the ‘Freude’ theme” (115), as if the combination were a happy accident. But there are few happy accidents in counterpoint. The uniting of the two themes in a double fugue reveals that this section had to have been sketched first. A successful combination of the Freude, schöner Götterfunken and Seid umschlungen themes had to be composed that way. Then the Seid umschlungen theme was retroactively placed first, on its own, in the credo. In fact, on p. 37, Levy reproduces a sketch where Beethoven worked out the double fugue in strict counterpoint, right out of Fux.
40. Ibid., 115.
41. When I say the Ninth was “neglected for decades,” I mean in the mainstream concert repertoire, which by the middle of the nineteenth century was becoming the museum that it has remained since. Among other things, it needed the new specialized conductors to shape performances. At the same time, in score and in its occasional performances, from the outset the Ninth had enormous impact on composers including Berlioz, Wagner, and Brahms.
32. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
1. Cook, Beethoven, 119n25. Czerny is usually a reliable witness, so his story of Beethoven’s planning to replace the Ninth Symphony finale has reasonable credibility. True, there is at least a possibility that Czerny made up the story to discredit the finale because he didn’t approve of it. As has been seen, this was a common practice in memoirs of the time, Schindler being the prime example.
2. Adolph Bernhard Marx, “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievement in This Field,” in Senner, Critical Reception, 1:59–75. Note that Marx had already arrived at the term “sonata form,” though this was before the full development of his conceptions in his theoretical writings.
3. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1403. History calls Hoffmann and Marx the most important of Beethoven’s contemporary critics, and they are the only two critics he ever thanked. Even in that, he was prophetic.
4. Botstein, in “Patrons and Publics,” says that through the journal Prometheus Beethoven was aware of “the claims of the early German romantics” including Schlegel, and his friends attended Schlegel’s famous lectures (103).
5. The “constraining boxes” I mean in relation to Marx’s writings and influence are mainly three. First, he made Beethoven the unquestioned king of composers and the virtual standard by which all music was to be judged. I suspect that did Beethoven’s reputation—and Western music itself—more harm than good. (Later in life, Marx wrote a biography of Beethoven.) Second, there is Marx’s rigid and oversimplified model of sonata form, which, as Charles Rosen has written, was put forth not as a description of what Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn actually did (which was far freer than Marx’s outline) but rather as a model for how composers should use the form. Marx’s influence had much to do with what Karl Dahlhaus (Ludwig van Beethoven) called the “ossified” handling of form in the later nineteenth century. (It was also what Wagner and his followers wanted to escape from. Of those who stayed true to the old forms, especially sonata form, it was mainly Brahms who understood how freely they were treated in the past and how pernicious was Marx’s ossification of them.) Third, in his writing Marx treats formal organization as largely a matter of themes, which is a distortion; Classical forms were more fundamentally a matter of key structure. Both for well and ill, Marx’s ideas dominated his time and soldiered on through most of the twentieth century. In large measure, his conception of Beethoven became the conception. In the late-century postmodern reaction against such norms, Beethoven himself was blamed for his dominance, as if he had deviously shaped his own future historical reputation. None of this, however, is really meant to blame Marx either, who was a brilliant theorist and, like Beethoven, not responsible for the historical consequences of his influence.
6. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 30. It is not clear which of the two Schott brothers Beethoven corresponded with.
7. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1301.
8. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 320.
9. Anderson, vol. 3, nos. 1300, 1349.
10. Ibid., no. 1345 (paragraphs added).
11. Kinderman, Beethoven, 327.
12. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 396.
13. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 154.
14. Thayer/Forbes, 2:938–39.
15. Ibid., 2:940.
16. Winter, “Quartets,” 40.
17. Thayer/Forbes, 2:938–41.
18. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 31.
19. Thayer/Forbes, 2:917.
20. MacArdle, “Family van Beethoven,” 543.
21. Sterba and Sterba, Beethoven and His Nephew, 238.
22. Ibid., 233.
23. M. Cooper, Beethoven, 63.
24. Sterba and Sterba, Beethoven and His Nephew, 277.
25. Anderson, vol. 3, nos. 1440, 1445.
26. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 343.
27. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1380.
28. Ibid., no. 1387.
29. Ibid., no. 1389.
30. Thayer/Forbes, 2:922–23.
31. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1390.
32. Thayer/Forbes, 2:946.
33. Mai, Diagnosing Genius, 127.
34. M. Coop
er, Beethoven, 444.
35. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1408.
36. Ibid., no. 1415.
37. Thayer/Forbes, 2:942–43.
38. Ibid., 2:919–20.
39. Ibid., 2:958.
40. Anderson, vol. 3, nos. 1427, 1428.
41. Landon, Beethoven, 190.
42. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 545n35.
43. Landon, Beethoven, 169.
44. Thayer/Forbes, 2:963–65.
45. Ibid., 2:954.
46. Breuning, Memories of Beethoven, passim.
47. Albrecht, vol. 3, no. 422.
48. Ibid., no. 422, notes.
49. Ibid., no. 423.
50. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 323.
51. Ratner, Beethoven String Quartets, 196.
52. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 446.
53. The recapitulation proper of the E-flat Major finale is preceded by a huge false recap in A-flat, the subdominant—an echo of the main theme, which twice jumps from the tonic to an accented subdominant on the second beat.
54. Ratner, in Beethoven String Quartets, does not want to call the middle of the A Major’s first movement a development at all. He calls it “X (a parenthesis in the form)” (263). After it he places not a recapitulation but a second exposition, starting in E minor. Since I find the movement developmental from the beginning, I leave the usual designations in place but add a question that the piece seems to present us: is there really any exposition, in the usual sense of presenting well-defined ideas as a subject for musical discussion and eventual recapitulation? A frequent analogy of the Classical era was to compare musical form to an essay, which begins with a clear exposition of ideas and, toward the end, returns to them in summary. By the late quartets, that analogy has broken down. Beethoven is heading toward, I would not say true stream of consciousness as a retreat to the irrational, but rather an impression of free rhapsody anchored on covert rather than overt forms.
55. Solomon, Beethoven, 295.
56. As has been noted by various writers, the Heiliger Dankgesang does not entirely succeed in making its nominal tonic, F, sound like a tonic chord—at least, not until the end of the movement. In practice, to the ear the music tends to sound like an endlessly unresolved C major—which is part of its unique effect of suspension. Descendants of the Heiliger Dankgesang include the long string chorale in the Sibelius Seventh Symphony and the string background of the Ives Unanswered Question.
57. Kolodin, Interior Beethoven, 290.
58. The opening-motto theme of the A Minor—two half steps joined by a leap, usually of a sixth—often becomes not just line but counterpoint, all the way to the figure in m. 42 of the finale. That climactic figure joins, from the bottom, G-sharp–A, F–E, and D-sharp–E, which can be found, respectively, in bars 1, 2, and 3 of the quartet. Meanwhile the primal half step of the quartet, F–E, is all over the finale, starting with the accompaniment figure of the beginning in second violin and in the violins in the penultimate system of the coda.
59. I find Chua’s book on the Galitzin Quartets an interesting and worthwhile study, even if he is too beholden, for my taste, to fashionable academic theory. Rather than relating the quartets to the Romantic spirit and/or to the tumult in Beethoven’s life, he makes the Galitzins a deliberate critique of the norms of Classical discourse in music, and thereby makes Beethoven into a virtual poststructuralist: “By setting their own agenda of disruption and disorder, [the Galitzins] detail theory in a way that exposes its limitations . . . they constantly undermine analysis.” Therefore, his analysis will be “deconstructive” (9). All the same, if Chua is at pains to show how Beethoven deconstructs norms and models and traditions, he still has trenchant things to say about the construction of the quartets, including their motivic structure.
60. Dissociation is perhaps the single most common word applied by commentators concerning the B-flat Quartet, starting with Kerman in his book Beethoven Quartets. Kerman’s chapter on the B-flat and A Minor Quartets is titled “Contrast.”
61. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 444.
62. “Trance” is Kerman’s term in Beethoven Quartets for the central section of the A Minor’s first movement, which he calls “the most eccentric [development] Beethoven ever wrote.” But there is a reason behind it. As happens now and then but more often in late Beethoven, the development has to find its own ideas, because the rest of the movement is already developmental. The spreading of development out of the development section proper, thereby compromising the meaning and purpose of that section, was a problem that bedeviled composers for the rest of the century—at least among composers still using sonata form, notably Brahms.
63. In Beethoven, Barry Cooper tacitly accounts for the vagaries of the B-flat Quartet by citing the sketches, which imply that Beethoven set out on the piece with few plans: “[T]he quartet was thus being created as a kind of narrative, rather than a canvas where the overall outline is clear from the start” (330). I presume Cooper means a kind of narrative of its own compositional process. Cooper also says that after some dozen sketches for the theme of the finale, the Grosse Fuge took shape as it did “almost by accident.” While this smacks of Cooper trying to rationalize his own discomfort with the quartet or at least the finale, it also is a possible explanation, though others note that Beethoven had the final version of the finale theme early on (see Kinderman, Beethoven, 303). As is seen in the text, I’m more inclined to see Beethoven as deliberately pushing boundaries to the limit here, if not past it. That in turn may have been allied to a compositional process that deliberately avoided his usual habit of starting with a firm, if flexible, plan for the work. One clue in that direction is the coda of the first movement. In it I don’t hear Kerman’s sense that the reconciliation of the coda is “forced.” In the coda I hear Beethoven reviewing all the leading ideas, presenting them first in an even more fragmentary way than they were at the beginning, then smoothing them out at the very end. In light of thematic integration and general resolution as a goal of Classical style and of Beethoven himself, the open question of the end is whether anything in that direction has been achieved. Fragmentation, nonintegration, is the character not only of the first movement but of the whole quartet.
64. Kerman, Beethoven Quartets, 315.
65. Having found a tendency to build the themes of the first movement of the B-flat in descending chains of thirds, I expected Beethoven to stick to that idea as he ordinarily does—one example being the ascending and descending chains of thirds in each movement of the Kreutzer. But I don’t find those thirds in the scherzo. The main theme of the third movement is built on a scaffolding of thirds climbing by step: D-flat–F, F–A-flat, B-flat–D-flat–F. The tedesca theme is a simple third descent of D–B–D–G. As Kerman details (ibid.), there are other motivic, gestural, and tonal echoes throughout the piece, but it is hard to make a case for any particular three or four ideas living up to my (loose) requirement of a fundamental idea in a piece: it must keep happening. At the same time, that elusiveness of overriding ideas does conform to one überidea: dissociation.
66. Kerman’s excellent summation of the B-flat Quartet: “The first movement . . . is Beethoven’s most contrasty and enigmatic . . . the second movement stands out as his most precipitous and ill-behaved, the fourth movement as his most innocently dance-like. The Cavatina is his most emotional slow movement . . . As for the Finale, the Great Fugue, it not only beggars superlatives but obviously was written with the express purpose of beggaring superlatives (which is not to say that this was its exclusive purpose)” (ibid., 320). In describing the fugue, adjectives can only scramble to approach the reality. I confess I am embarrassed to try to write about it at all; I do it because it is my job. Two students of mine, in two different schools, seemed to be on the verge of breakdown when they gave class presentations on the Grosse Fuge. One of them had obsessed over the piece for months, among other things making it the ringtone on his cell phone. Needless to say, the Grosse Fuge was a favored work of Stravinsk
y and a row of other twentieth-century composers and music theorists. In a memorable concert of the James Levine years with the Boston Symphony, a string-orchestra arrangement of the Fuge began and ended a program, framing the Beethoven and Schoenberg Violin Concertos. The point was that the Fuge was the most avant-garde work of the evening, and the point was made.
67. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 332–33, 344.
68. If one wants, one can find the theme of the Grosse Fuge buried in the opening of the quartet, in the notes A-flat–G–E-flat–D, but to make the connection the first two notes have to be reversed, and the middle interval is a fifth rather than the fugue’s sixth. For all my motif hunting, I’m not convinced by this connection. One interesting attempt at drawing the quartet together under some rubric comes from Ratner in Beethoven String Quartets: “The chief connection between the Great Fugue and Op. 130 is topical.” Certainly some of the quartet falls clearly into topics: the “Cavatina” operatic, the tedesca a German dance. But Ratner believes there is virtually no moment in Beethoven and the Classical style that is not in some topic or other, a doctrine I don’t subscribe to. Still, I think Ratner’s ideas about topics in general are a unique and valuable contribution to understanding Beethoven and his predecessors.
69. Kerman, Beethoven Quartets, 269.
70. Kirkendale, “Great Fugue,” 17.
71. Ratner rather tortuously calls the form of the Grosse Fuge a “Fantasia along the lines of a variation-canzona” and sees it as a sequence of topics: the B-flat fugue a march, the G-flat fugue an arioso, the 6/8 fugue a gigue (Beethoven String Quartets, 284). This is more specific than but similar to Kerman’s view of the movement as a progression of character changes.
72. Kerman, Beethoven Quartets, 279.
73. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 459.
74. Publisher Artaria showed a certain instinct for the nature of the B-flat Quartet when Beethoven considered publishing each movement separately, though nothing came of the idea (ibid., 460).
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 125
