Beethoven xiv: Adorno on Beethoven iii (revised) - the late works

In approaching Beethoven’s late works, Theodor Adorno in his Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (pages 90-111) earlier explores “the renunciation of symphonic mastery" even in the Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral (1808-9) or in the Archduke Trio, opus 97 (begun in 1810) and in the last Violin-Piano Sonata, opus 96 (1812). This loosening of the grip of sonata structure – of conflict and resolution – occurs in works which are contemporaneous with the great sonata-form works Beethoven composed in his late thirties and early forties (for example, the Fifth Symphony, finished in 1807 and revised in 1809, and the Seventh Symphony from 1811-12). In contrast to the Appassionata’s first-movement struggle against the recapitulation, the Archduke Trio contains an “unobtrusive recapitulation.” Characteristic of this alternative version of the sonata form is a sort of “smiling play” which is “reticent and not triumphal” – in the Pastoral Symphony, for example, we hear a sort of “dillydallying as utopia,” “setting time free.” In such moments “of stand-still: here the memory of the human survives, that all reification is not quite serious, that the spell [of domination] can be suspended and we can be called back to the human.”

The spell of domination, as I tried to show in my previous post, is located by Adorno in the mechanistic “autocracy of the recapitulation” but also in the occasional moments of “ostentation…intended to present something magnificent [but] remaining simply empty” (75-79). Adorno is by no means referring to the cohesive intensity of the Appassionata, with its moments of violence as it drives sonata form into extremity. Rather he is identifying an opposed tendency when Beethoven’s music “takes on something brutal, Germanic, triumphalist” – not merely in Wellington’s Victory but even in the Piano Sonata, opus 31 #1, which is almost a parody illustrating “the entanglement of lucidity with pomp.”

Beethoven’s late works “show how it is possible for art to divest itself of the ‘self-deception’ of totality,” of such dominance (80). These great works were written in his late forties and his fifties – from 1817 to 1827, during the last ten years of his life. This achievement is the focus of the final seventy pages of Adorno’s book (pages 123-193). The first four pages reproduce “Beethoven’s Late Style” from Adorno’s Moments Musicaux, (pages 123-126), and the opening sentences are not infrequently quoted: “The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a rule, these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured…They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art.” The reprinted essay’s few pages offer a brilliantly compressed account of Beethoven’s own late aesthetic, accounting for the insertion of conventional formulas and phrases into the late sonatas and quartets – the decorative trills, cadences, the improvisatory embellishing fiorituras, abrupt breaks, sudden crescendos and diminuendos, the octave unisons of empty phrases, then passages of baroque polyphony, etc.  As we listen to these effects in the last sonatas, the Diabelli Variations, and the late quartets, the question Adorno poses is why these “conventions are made visible in their unconcealed, untransformed bareness.”

“Conventions are split off” in “fissures, rifts, and fragments,” in response to the fact that the purposeful subjectivity of unfolding Appassionata-like sonata structures “breaks away” or has broken down. All the often antique conventional effects – “as splinters, derelict and abandoned – finally themselves become expression…no longer of the isolated ego but of the mythical nature of the creative and its fall.” In this way, conventions and antique phrases become “expression in the naked depiction of themselves” – become emancipated: “To liberate these phrases from the illusion of subjective control, the emancipated phrase speaks for itself.”

Beethoven’s late works, Adorno writes, “still remain a process, but not as a development” like the middle-period sonata forms; the “process” of the late sonatas and quartets “is an ignition between extremes.” Extremes are forced together within the moment, where “the empty phrase is set in place as a monument to what has been – a monument in which subjectivity is petrified,” the now dying subjectivity of Beethoven’s past. The sudden “caesurae, however, the abrupt stops” are, however, moments of breaking free, for “the work falls silent as it is deserted, turning its hollowness outwards. Only then is the next fragment added, ordered to its place by escaping subjectivity,” the failing “light in which the fragmented landscape grows.” In his late creation of fragmented and juxtaposed phrases, Beethoven “as a dissociative force tears them apart in time, perhaps in order to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes” (126).

In the pages that follow the above essay, Adorno’s notes (for those are what much of his book is comprised of) offer many, often fragmentary insights into the five late piano sonatas (opuses 101, 106, 109, 110, and 111), the Bagatelles for piano opus 126, and the late quartets (particularly opus 132 in A minor receives more sustained treatment). The Ninth symphony, finished in 1825, is criticized as a reversion to the middle period – a late work not in his late style. There are some brilliant comments on the late style’s sudden “harsh contrasts” between fugal effects and chord-like “simplicity,” its “splitting itself into monody and polyphony,” and the purity and depth of its commitment to such fragmentation of effect – clear for example in the wondrous shifts of effect in the great last piano sonata, opus 111 – classical music’s last great piano sonata, marking, as Adorno explained to Thomas Mann, the death of sonata form itself. This is Adorno’s key focus, then: “To be purely the matter itself, to be ‘classical’ without adjuncts, classicity bursts into fragments. This is one of the decisive tenets of my interpretation.” Here is a link to Stephen Kovacevich’s brilliant performance of op. 111; the slow Arietta begins at 8:35: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E_amCDr77Q&feature=related.

Rather than detailing additional specific insights into the music (there will be another time and place for that part of my effort), I’ll conclude by mentioning two of Adorno’s more startling formulations. One is in response to Walter Benjamin’s conception of “the name,” of Adam’s task of naming in Genesis, as a form of prayer. Adorno sees Beethoven’s music as a similar process with a similar relationship to language (161-4). “Music saves the name as pure sound, but at the cost of separating it from things.” In enacting that separation, it conveys ultimately an awareness of death, of the self-awareness of the disappearance or “insignificance” of subjective individual experience. Music’s “gaze” may be on the human, but the art of music is “imageless:” like prayer, it is an “image of the imageless.” Later (on 176) Adorno likens imageless music’s “destruction of the particular,” of the relationship with the life of “things,” to the Talmudic prayer about the “grass angels:” “all perishes in the sacred fire.” And yet Adorno’s speculations paradoxically convey the power of prayer, aesthetic and secular as may be the hope embodied by Beethoven’s “demythologizing” late music (193). It is as if Adorno here seeks an art form that can withstand the terrible fire which consumed the period he survived of the Holocaust.

In the light of those speculations in extremis, the other extraordinary formulation I would mention speaks for itself (154): “In Beethoven, the spirit remains master of itself in experiences which are otherwise inevitably purchased with madness. These experiences, however, are not those of subjectivity but of language…Beethoven looks the bare language of music in the eye.”

Beethoven xiii - Adorno on Beethoven's Appassionata

A source of power in the Appassionata sonata’s first movement is that it keeps unfolding wave upon wave of creative transformation with relentless iterations and variations of its core motifs, so that the sections of the first movement begin to meld together. Each eruption of development becomes part of the creative flux: the differences between motifs are elided (the foreboding and ferocious first theme, for example, finds insistent echoes in the jaunty, striving third theme), and the differences between sections are all subsumed within the unfolding process: the initial statement of themes quickly and inexorably yields their massive development, and the restatement disintegrates into an enormous redevelopment in the coda. Here is a link to Barenboim’s great performance of the movement in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPR3pkcNbKI.
In Adorno’s Hegel-inflected formulation in Beethoven: Philosophy of Music, the movement maintains a defiant “diversity [which] evens out into unity but keeps diverging from it while the form remains an abstract sheath over the diversity,” a “sheath” comprised of the unity of sonata form. The continually unfolding sequences and motifs become examples of a tragic, subversive “subjectivity veering into wretchedness” (51) with the “individual moments estranged” (13) from the enveloping and enabling bourgeois conventions of sonata form with its false promise of freed and empowered expressiveness. The tragic power of the first movement of the Appassionata is that it transforms what is false and perfunctory into “a terrible beauty” (to use Yeats’ term), so that the eruptive music of the Appassionata sonata unfolds “a total becoming” within the dominating form which it inhabits (46).

Adorno’s earlier statements bear repeating here: “If Beethoven is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43). And: “By its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame (“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom, which are revealed as a deluded and null in comparison to the power of the music (46).

These formulations locate a paradox in Beethoven’s sonata suggestively reminiscent of a paradox in Dostoyevsky’s novels: in them, a protracted act of confession is expected and exacted from the protagonists, and yet their subversive voicing of the convention of confession is performed in such a way as to cast into question the very nature and substance of the confession. It is an index of their modernity or proto-modernity that the society-sanctioned forms are simultaneously fulfilled and subversively transformed. After Beethoven (or for that matter, after Dostoyevsky), one next step in the history of the arts is modern and postmodern travesty and pastiche.

Adorno offers many specific insights particularly into the Appassionata’s middle, development section in the “dialectical” first movement of the sonata (60). In this section, the sonata hugely expands the development and finally synthesis of the sonata’s two major thematic motifs not only in this middle section but in the coda as well (51-2). These “improvisatory” sections pit the resources of “fantasy” against the rigidity and restraint of sonata form, and they seem “haplessly to desire the suffering” of the confrontation, with its “extra-human” harmonies, their sforzando “minor seconds,” and the hammered chords and demonically driven arpeggios. These effects all place the listener, as it were, in mid-stream, in the midst of extreme turbulence, and instill a continual awareness of the “incompleteness of what has just been formed” – i.e., the open-ended power and shattering freedom of the creative process unfolding before us.

A significant crux for Adorno is the sonata form’s requirement that the original main theme be brought back by the “recapitulation” section after the shattering development. This reprise of the main theme is exposed, he writes, as an act of “crushing repression,” as “a trait of esthetic untruth” implicating bourgeois society’s imposition of and insistence on “the conjuring of static sameness amid total becoming” (44, 46). In the Appassionata, Beethoven refuses that complacent sameness by infusing the recapitulation with instability, continually generating newly energized details and accompanying the reprise with a low-pitched pulse of repeated notes, a constant agitation, quickly leading to the newly massive development of the coda. The sonata in this way exposes “the reprise as a problem,” subverting and upending “the moment of untruth in bourgeois ideology” (16) – and so for “Beethoven, then, the traditional forms are reconstructed out of freedom” (61).

The symphonic equivalent of the Appassionata is the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Eroica, composed just a few years before. For Adorno, the orchestral work’s earlier genesis and its more public “writ-large” gestures of “symphonic mastery” rather streamline the effects of the work. Nevertheless, a tension is once again set up between the “closed symphonic” (sonata) form and the “open” improvisatory organic episodes of “epic” development. There are the harmonic collisions in the Eroica from the opening bars on and the many other intentional irregularities, particularly – once again – in the development and coda sections. The many developments Adorno notes all conspire to reveal the turbulent and even tragic “incompatibility” of those rival, “irreconcilable” conceptions – of the “open” and the “closed,” the improvisatory and the conventional, the “epic” and the “symphonic” (105-6). In Adorno’s Marxist-Hegelian view particularly of hearing such a work in isolation in media remote from the concert hall, the collision of forms in the Eroica confirms “the truth of the unreconciled condition of the individual in bourgeois society” (120) – in part because one exists self-consciously both within and outside the inhabited society [a version of this Hegelian formulation -  stressing the music's ironic Goethean wisdom of simultaneously enacting 'within' and narrating 'outside' - can be found, too, in Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero (146)].

In my next post, I’ll attempt to explore Adorno’s rather more detailed and remarkably responsive formulations about late Beethoven and his self-consciousness about convention and innovation.

Beethoven xii - Adorno on Beethoven

I recently finished reading Beethoven: Philosophy of Music by Theodor Adorno, and I’m tempted to try to “reduce” – literally and figuratively – some of his main formulations to a posting or two of commentary here. Reading his extraordinarily insightful yet fragmented and abstract commentary is, of course, a challenge. However, the book provides at times such a revelation, particularly about Beethoven’s late works, even as Adorno’s prose is designed to repel easy assimilation (the Jephcott translation is not unapproachable - is probably more approachable for explicitly being a set of fragments [Stanford University Press, 1998]). So, for better or worse, I hope here to make a bit more accessible some of that commentary.

Here is an early example of Adorno’s stark formulations:

“It is conceivable that Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf – because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today. ‘The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.’ Karl Kraus” (31). Then he quotes George Groddeck: “‘Beethoven went deaf so that he could hear nothing but the singing daemon within him.’” Later, Adorno comments on the composer’s solitude in the midst of “the plebian habitus of his humanity…which – suffering and protesting – feels the fissure of its loneliness. Loneliness is what the emancipated individual is condemned to in a society retaining the mores of the absolutist age” (45). As his music “goes beyond” the conventions of “bourgeois society,” Beethoven “exceeds the bounds of a reality whose suffering imperfections are what conjures up art” in the first place (47).

The first forty or so pages of Adorno’s book offer many such stark paradoxes (often seeming to mix Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) in what amounts to a sort of overture of fragments, a disassembly of motifs; these motifs are also presented in a more integrated fashion in a sequence titled “The Mediation between Music and Society” from Introduction to the Sociology of Music (43-49). From about page 50 to 123, the commentary focuses more fully on Beethoven’s middle period and particularly on the significance of sonata form with some attention to the powerful example of the Appassionata sonata (also, in the midst here, there is a chapter discussing the symphonies, the Eroica, etc.). The seventy pages following page 123 are focused more fully on Beethoven’s late works.

For Adorno, the significance of Beethoven’s music results, on the one hand, from its power as form, its autonomous structure of expression, and on the other hand, from its resistant engagement of his society’s “ideology,” its assumed values and power relations. This dual emphasis is clear at the very start of Adorno’s commentary when he declares that the “ideological significance” of Beethoven’s music is that it is “a voice lifted up, that it is music at all,” and this significance is heightened beyond the ordinary because, for Beethoven, the very possibility of having an uplifted voice is placed into question by bourgeois ideology – is falsified by its domination of thought and expression (6).

Beethoven’s music attempts to overcome that “crushing” domination and the seemingly patent “a priori untruth” and falsity of having a voice in the first place in such a society, and he does so by creating music which is continually in process, absorbing, moving, and dodging among conventions, and “unfolding truth” from “nothing,” from the barest motifs: “Beethoven’s work can be seen as an attempt to revoke the a priori untruth of music’s voice, of its being music at all, through its immanent movement as an unfolding truth. Hence, perhaps, the insignificance of its starting point: this is nothing…” (7). I’m reminded of the notion of “making music” I broached in my last post – that in performing Beethoven’s work, one seems to be not only witnessing but participating in the creation of the piece, the working out of motifs, the resolution of tensions, the upwellings of feeling: in short, we feel we are participating with Beethoven in ‘making’ the music.

What we witness and “realize” in sound, in Adorno’s view of Beethoven, is music in the very process of creation: music that “brings forth itself...as a tour de force, a paradox, a creatio ex nihilo…a ‘floating’” experiment, forming music out of the simplest details, even as – in this Marxist-Hegelian view – its form is “mediated” and “comprehensible only in terms of its function within the reproduction of society as a whole.” The “liberated details” of his music enact and resist – through a process of estranged open-endedness – the concept that in “bourgeois” society all is “interchangeable” or “fungible,” that no individual detail (no musical note, banknote, or person) exists in itself and everything exists in relation to the whole (34). Beethoven’s reimagining in music of the relation of parts to the whole confronts and intentionally disturbs the typical bourgeois listener, for whom the “amusement” of music is embraced as “a way to defeat boredom” (8), as a distraction from the ennui familiar to Baudelaire.

“If Beethoven is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43), and the music does so by “reconstructing out of freedom” the otherwise self-deluded bourgeois assumptions about the power of self-projection and the free will to impose a masterful unity.

“By its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame (“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom, which are revealed as a deluded nullity in comparison to the power of the music (46).

Though my account here may well misrepresent (or at least fail to clarify) Adorno’s difficult formulations, I’ll keep trying and turn to Adorno’s treatment of the Appassionata sonata in my next post.

Beethoven - v

I want to apologize for the typos in the previous four posts. When one writes “adults like children” when one meant to write “adults act like children,” you know that proof-reading is needed.

The open-ended exploration of motifs, structure, and harmony notable in late Beethoven applies also to the exploration of rhythms; I’m thinking, for example, of opus 111’s final Arietta variations taking apart the rhythmic impulses of the theme – for example, in the second variation’s searching out the pressure points in the quickly pulsing fast sixteenth and thirty-second notes; or in the third variation’s locating the jazzy off-beats, the jetting sixty-fourth notes teasing out a hint of rhythm embedded in the original melody; or in the fourth variation’s transformation of these fast notes into hovering, trembling triplets which decompose rhythm into a sort of pure stillness. (Such explorations and disintegrations are, of course, apparent also in the wonderful Diabelli Variations, opus 120.)

Also, earlier I noted the idea that Beethoven’s late works are witnesses to catastrophe, baring conventions at the skeletal moment of their demise, rather than imbuing conventions with a masterful subjectivity, whether heroic (as in the middle-period works) or ironic. Of course, for the late works, ironic is a pertinent description because the appearance of willful mastery, for example in the first movement of the opus 132 quartet in a minor, is undercut not only by the earlier-mentioned passage beginning in measure 92, but by oddly inflated jolts of false rhythmic closure or by peculiarly inflected melodic gestures, uncanny and off-beat. Such ironic exposures and juxtapositions and such exploratory and often playful open-endedness in late Beethoven refuse any taming of the above noted “catastrophe;” they refuse any faith (in Adorno’s view, any ontological, Heideggerian faith) in the taming of the catastrophe by means of a subjectivity resuscitating the Romantic symbol or the idea of “organic” beauty.

The sense of being witness to apocalypse is especially apparent in the Grosse Fugue, opus 133, the first-written finale to the great, continually exploratory opus 130 string quartet. The ferocity of its fugal theme and of much of its subsidiary material insists simultaneously on fracture and control, violence and ordering form. A similar effect is achieved by the fugue ending the Hammerklavier sonata, opus 106. There is the constant insinuation of fragmented phrases taken up and repeated and repeated, for example, the implacable unfolding of sixths beginning in measure 97, or the especially puncturing trills repeatedly suffusing the sonata’s sound, starting for instance at measure 119. These fragmenting motifs are joltingly integrated into the unfolding fugal form. There is a sort of double violence in such passages, that violence intrinsic to the fragments themselves, which are ferocious in themselves, and the violence of their insistent repetitions, as part of the relentless working out of the ordering fugue.

Again, much of what I’m trying to describe is related to Beethoven’s prefiguring of an idea of modern form – what Benjamin and, then, Adorno called “allegory” (in Kafka and earlier, for Benjamin, in the seventeenth-century German tragic drama). This form represents the break with Romantic organicism (in which form is invested with the sense of passionate inevitability, with subjective will). That “break” establishes a move toward abstraction and the conflict that embodies between objective technique and eruptive expression. In the dynamic operating in abstract form (whether in Picasso’s Cubism or in Beethoven’s Great Fugue), there are fracture points, the cracks and fissures built into the objective form (indeed, into fate itself), which are sites of the abrupt breakthrough of subjectivity. The double violence I mentioned operating in this break or conflict is at work in modernist form: First, there is the inevitable violence of the eruptions from the primal well of feeling, a violence which no form can suppress completely. Second, there is the violence which results from the imposition itself of objective, controlling form. (I’m reminded of Freud’s late notions [1] of the destructiveness associated with Thanatos – the death instinct arising from the depths of the psyche – and [2] of the second destructiveness wrought by the conscience – by the super-ego – in strictly suppressing rather than sublimating the destructive impulse. Forgive this last comment; I just finished teaching a peculiar but intriguing course on Freud and Conrad, born in 1856 and 1857 respectively, each so different from the other and yet both darkly tragic-minded in many respects).

I’ll offer further commentary on Beethoven in my next post, on the objective forms (I almost wanted to write “juxtapositions”) and the subjective intensities which coexist strangely in his late works, and I’ll start with the Cavatina movement in the opus 130 string quartet and the return of the Arioso’s Adagio ma non troppo in the last, fugal movement of the opus 110 piano sonata.

Beethoven's "Sound World" - iv

In Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus about a German composer in (and of) the time of the Nazis, Professor Kretschmar’s lesson about Beethoven for the composer echoes Adorno’s discussions with Mann in L.A. in 1943. In my novel Hungry Generations, I tried to imagine what the conversations between the two might have been like then, in the midst of encounters with Schoenberg and other European expatriates (Beethoven, as well, appears in the fantasies of the novel’s main character, a young composer struggling to adjust to studio work in Hollywood).

In the upwelling of late music in the final movement of his opus 111 piano sonata, Beethoven – in Kretschmar’s and Adorno’s view – is casting into question the basic ground of the Arietta’s classical, “C major” conventions, making them ambiguous so that they seem to hover in the realm of the provisional, existing among many open-ended possibilities. The effect of the ambiguity and open-endedness in Beethoven’s last piano sonata is to lay bare the basic rules of classical music itself, with the result that its essential rules are exposed as one more artificial construct in the long history of musical artifice. The music destabilizes our sense of these rules by exposing them as artifice. The fertile outpouring of the Arietta’s variations (like the Diabelli Variations) achieves this baring and destabilization with extraordinary “late-style” detachment as he employs and juxtaposes the colliding forms of music past, present, and future – classical sonata or minuet, baroque “concertante” or fugue, brief nocturnal fragments: all are stripped to their essence and made to coexist, to collapse into one another. It is as if, having seen and absorbed it all, Beethoven achieves a sublime serenity before the violence of endless baring and collapse; such is the special beauty of the late works’ imperturbability.

As I mentioned in my last post, it was my recently reading of Michael Spitzer’s Music and Philosophy that has moved me again to explore these ideas (I first attempted to engage Adorno’s ideas about Beethoven – and Schoenberg – in my 1994 study of modern fiction and music, Fullness of Dissonance). Here I hope to offer some new commentary on and extrapolations of certain “Adornoian” insights Spitzer develops. (His book alternatively engages Adorno’s thinking quite brilliantly, analyzes the features of Beethoven’s late music, and argues systematically with other musicologists; what I’m responding to is obviously a very limited selection of those materials.)

In his late period, Beethoven increasingly employed abrupt shifts in harmony which undercut the sense of dramatic momentum characteristic of “heroic” middle-period Beethoven, the plummeting force say of the development section of the Appassionata sonata, opus 57. By the point of his opus 95 sonata for violin and piano, no. 10, or the opus 97 Archduke Trio, the moments of sudden, unexpected modulation to new keys seem to release the music from the willful drive toward climax, so that an air of improvisation, of released and aleatory imagination, prevails. A similar effect is achieved by what Spitzer terms moments of “caesura,” of cuts or fractures in the unfolding development of themes, so that the music opens to an upwelling of unexpected melody, inexplicable in terms of formal conventions of development. His crucial example is from the opening movement of the opus 132 string quartet, at measure 92, and he shows the link of the passage to a similar unexpected upwelling in the climax of the last movement. Of course, throughout the late quartets, there are instances of such unexpected, improvisatory seeming inventions (for example, the opus 130 quartet, hypnotically brimful).

In each of these effects – abruptnesses and caesuras disrupting the “order” of the music – the construction of the music is no longer absorbed into the sense of implacable dramatic mastery so characteristic of Beethoven’s earlier “heroic” style. In a sense, the musical material and its juncture points – the rules governing their construction – are exposed as arbitrary; they are no longer imbued with the sort of subjectivity which makes the middle period music seem inevitable and organic. I’ve been using several of the various terms employed to describe the effect of this late-style music: open-endedness and aleatory “floating,” a trembling and irresolution, the “quivering” Benjamin comments on, Spitzer’s “flickering” and his commentary on Adorno’s use of “schein” (meaning both bare image and the shining through of the transcendent).

The “uncanny” is another such term, and it is used by Adorno and Walter Benjamin (and among others, by Derrida in his gloss on Benjamin); this term emphasizes the sense of catastrophe, of the demise of forms, engaged so imperturbably in Beethoven’s late work, and it draws attention to his rather ghostly resurrection of seemingly dead forms, of Baroque and pre-Baroque conventions like canon, fugue, passacaglia, etc. – all of which forms become part of the improvisatory array of possibilities surveyed in and absorbed into Beethoven’s late sonatas, quartets, bagatelles, and other works. These forms can be seen, then, as “uncanny,” as ghostly archaic interpolations – as “petrified” objects, “expressionless.”

Those last phrases are from Walter Benjamin’s brief early essay on “semblance,” on beauty in modernity; objective or “expressionless…the beautiful semblance [is purged of] the false, the mendacious, the aberrant….It is this that completes the work by shattering it into fragments.” For Benjamin, allegory is the form which acknowledges the shattered fate of “the life quivering in art” and in existence. As in Kafka, allegory is the form which steps back from the Romantic hope for imaginative mastery, from smoothly integrated surfaces, and from the ontological solace of the organic symbol. Beethoven’s late music quivers or trembles, uncanny in its juxtapositions, its retrievals of the past, its fragmentations, and its explorations of possibility, ambiguously open-ended and distanced from the “heroic” and from false solace.

Beethoven's "Sound World" iii

In the twentieth century, Beethoven has been the subject of a flood of commentary by musicologists, biographers, philosophers, composers, novelists and poets, reviewers and listeners, etc. In the 1950s, I read Donald Francis Tovey’s critically astute and highly informative essays, along with J. W. N. Sullivan’s stormy, impressionistic portrait – followed then in the 60s by Charles Rosen’s books on “the classical style” and finally Maynard Solomon’s biography. Since then, there have been multiple studies, some of them “pathographies,” some of them “new historicist,” and some of them responsive to Theodor Adorno’s analyses of Beethoven from the vantage point of “critical theory.”

In the late 70s, I was strongly influenced by Adorno’s “Introduction to the Sociology of Music,” “Philosophy of New Music,” his studies of Mahler and Wagner, “Minima Moralia,” and “Prisms.” Later, in the 80s and 90s, in the context of a ‘theory group’ in Cleveland, I read his “Dialectic of the Enlightenment,” “Aesthetic Theory,” and “Negative Dialectics.” In the midst of these readings, I wrote, revised, and published my study of modern fiction and the aesthetics of music, Fullness of Dissonance (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). By the end of the 90s, I had explored much of the panoply of current theories, which in part served to distance me from the movingly agonized logic of Adorno’s tragic vision and thought. Nevertheless, as I here address some features of Beethoven’s music, I realize that my thinking yet resonates with the Frankfurt School’s emphasis – in its thinking about art and discourse generally – on fragmentation and fracture as a means of achieving meaning and on abstraction as a defense against the falsification of meaning. In any case, let me try to suggest how some of this thinking is illuminating when discussing Beethoven and particularly his late works.

I’ll begin with Beethoven’s last piano sonata, opus 111, which I began to try playing when I was sixteen, inspired as I was by an LPs of Egon Petri’s and Arthur Schnabel’s performances; as I mentioned in an earlier post, I took a few lessons a year later from Petri in Oakland in 1961, and playing some of the sonata for him, I was deeply grateful for his revelatory commentary and then his playing of much of the sonata. Even when I was sixteen, I was drawn to the special quality of the Arietta, the second movement with which the sonata ends, to its strange trembling quality, its exploratory sense of open-endedness, of always delaying full resolution of harmony, of always proposing newly varied facets of melody and motifs, and of postponing full disclosure or rounding-off of any gesture.

The theme of the slow movement Arietta exists in the most basic tonic key of C major – for the piano, of course, the “white keys” scale. Yet the theme continually shifts to related keys – to the dominant G, and a destabilizing dominant G tone constantly pulses in the base as the melody hovers around or rather in and out of the tonic C. The theme continually shifts to other related keys, to the subdominant F or to C’s somber “shadow key” of A minor. While the ineffably simple gestures of the theme unfolds, the constantly recurring G and the continual shifts among keys create an ambiguity about where as a listener one can orient oneself. As the Arietta’s variations produce their world of abundant, continually exfoliating forms, the hovering or trembling we hear and feel in the music projects an ambiguous irresolution of effect. The ending of the movement witnesses this serene and fluent trembling, which the listener does not forget even with the soft striking of the final C chord.

That trembling or ambiguity which so moves the listener to opus 111 is linked to the ideas I mentioned before – fragmentation, fracture, and abstraction. Beethoven’s variations continually locate fractured bits of theme as material to explore. As the music strips its C major theme down to its abstract essence, it draws from its primal gestures unstable possibilities in harmony and form, which continually waver between convention and an ambiguous open-endedness. In a sense, Beethoven creates musical beauty by renewing basic conventions with such ambiguity, and the question arises then whether those essential classical conventions can ever be the same, whether the sonata’s evanescent beauty actually lays bare the death of those conventions, even as it endures or transcends them by means of the music’s trembling ambiguity.

The notion that ambiguity is at the core of Beethoven’s late works resonates, at least for me, for my responses constantly explore the questions of what harmony will come next, what melodic leitmotif, or what rhythmic fragment will next lead me into a new experience or music. Beethoven’s greatness results (differently but powerfully even in his “heroic” period) from the momentum of exploration, whether passionate or cerebral; always, it is the exploration and generation of brilliant, beautiful form which leads him on.

Of course, these issues about the embrace of ambiguity and open-endedness in the face of the “death” of classical form point to the “post-classical” or modern quality of Beethoven’s last sonata and of his “late period” generally. This idea is central to Adorno’s thinking about late Beethoven and also to Thomas Mann’s adaptation of Adorno’s thinking in his novel Doctor Faustus. Needless to say, it was an important moment for me when in the sixties I read Mann’s attempt to vivify opus 111 in his Doctor Faustus – with Kretschmar‘s lecture/performance of the piano sonata for Leverkühn and his friends. In reading that early chapter, I could not help hearing Petri’s voice speaking Kretschmar’s sentences. But more important is the complex of ideas and insights which offer a revealing way of perceiving what happens in Beethoven’s music. In my next post, I hope to suggest some of those insights (and note their emergence not simply from my own listening but, more significantly, in Adorno’s thinking, in Mann’s imagination, and in the work of later commentators like Michael Spitzer in his stimulating and helpful academic study, “Music and Philosophy;” reading Spitzer's account of what he terms the Arietta's "flickering" helped to revivify the memories I try to recount above).

Part iv: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

[These thoughts on Schnittke can be read either individually or in order parts i to iv - see i through iii below - or altogether on the "Art of Travesty" page. Also, for my discussion of Joseph Conrad - specifically "Speech and Silence in Conrad's vision of Russia" - see the Conrad page here.]

   The disintegration courted in each Schnittke score both distorts and salvages the contents of his society's music—its classical inheritance, its popular kitsch, its military marches, its buried religious forms, its peasant modes. He recycles these forms of music in such a way as both to salvage them, harmed and fractured as they are, to expose their fracture points, and to reveal the extremity which shadows survival in any totalizing order and which harms the members so “ordered.” As Adorno observes about Mahler, in Quasi Una Fantasia, “the individual’s fractures are the script of truth….In them any social movement appears negatively, as in its victims: the marches in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are heard and reflected by [and from the standpoint of] those whom they drag away.” Similarly, in Schnittke’s travestied marches, tangos, or baroque obbligato, the distorted resurrection of haunted form itself becomes a mechanism of confrontation. The effect achieved here is similar to that of “the marginal, undomesticated element” in Mahler’s music, as Adorno describes it: “[That element]—archaic, outdated, [and] inimical to compromise—bound itself to traditional material, [which] was thereby reminded of the victims of progress, even musical victims: those elements of language ejected [but also calcified by tradition were] endowed with power in order to resist power. The shabby residue left by triumph accuses the triumphant.” Schnittke’s own accusatory and uncompromising travesties are akin to Adorno’s idea in Negative Dialectics of thought which scrutinizes itself and confronts its own complacency; music today must equally measure itself and be “measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, [or] it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”

Taruskin, in his discussion of the composer, makes use of the idea of ‘negative dialectics’ in order to characterize Schnittke’s use of resolution as a sign of degeneracy, as an ironic consonance, so that the noise of great affirmative gestures is exposed as noise. As we have seen, Adorno’s conception can lead to a still deeper understanding of the ways in which this composer’s art aspires to reach through and redeem the haunting and negated discards of history. Such music attempts not only to voice what Adorno calls, in Mahler, “the shriek of horror at something worse than death: pogrom music,” but to restore the life-after-death of history’s broken, extinguished, discarded elements. The notion of restoring the potential of what falls between the cracks of history is developed by both Adorno and his colleague in critical theory Walter Benjamin. Their shared aim is to formulate a critical witnessing of what is suppressed by societies based in rationalized domination and the manipulation of reason. The stance of such witnessing shapes and underlies the late- or post-humanist identity of Schnittke’s postmodern art.

Benjamin and Adorno help us to clarify, in particular, the relationship of Schnittke’s art to grieving. In a discussion of the modern fate of storytelling—analogous in key ways to musical form for a composer like Schnittke—Benjamin suggests that the vanishing remains of life and of an entire tradition can be reclaimed as images, in the “transmissible form” of aesthetic figments. As such music gazes backward like Benjamin’s Angel of History on its vanishing tradition, on the history of musical form, its simultaneous complicity and defiance become apparent in the face of the power of the encompassing society. Music like Schnittke’s witnesses there all the discarded forms, the dashed hopes for transformation and the struggles against silence, which are lodged like “chips” of Messianic hope and expectation in musical history, as in human history. This looking backward exerts a profound pressure to hear what has been silenced, to redeem what has been cancelled, to restore the suppressed to expressivity and an existence in the world of sound. The fertility and wit of Schnittke’s retrievals of past musical gestures—for example, his travestied Classical and Baroque effects—are examples of such resurrection and reconnection, not in a complacent ‘neoclassicism’ but as a means of showing us how grotesquely haunted and pregnant with suppressed possibility is our present in the light of the transformative expectation of us implicit in past art.

Travesty is Schnittke’s mechanism for affirming the expectation that the capacity to generate meaning can endure in the face of unmeaning, of the death of meaning in a commodified and media-dominated world. Travesty becomes productive as a form of mourning. The elegiac generosity and wit of his retrievals of a whole range of music—from hymn and fugue to tango and punk—coexist with the effect of grievous shock which his voracious imitations achieve, sometimes in the very brutality of their sound. In this way, his art creates a double perspective which joins a stark veracity of critical witness with the voracity of travesty, and this double strategy energetically exposes the brutal power of domination in contemporary society, as it simultaneously testifies to what is left out, what has been discarded in the garbage bin as invalidated and invalided. Experiencing the brilliant wit and grief in his musical travesties, a tentative community of listeners is developed. Each of us becomes a witness to the dwarfing excess of power and the haunting distortion of our own complicity, yet each of us also participates at least as auditors in an act of startling and even healing generation, giving voice to what survives, however banal or eccentric or deformed by the scarring dialectic with society’s force.

Part i: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

i

The music of Alfred Schnittke, who died in August 1998 at age sixty-three, embodies crucial features of the postmodern fate of art. Its signal quality is an encompassing passion for transformation; its lustful and consuming energy seeks to absorb the entire tradition of music, from medieval chant through classical conventions to punk rock. New transformation, new appropriation, is its formal prerogative, whether in music of repose and silvery calm or in the midst of frenzy. Like Karamazov’s buffoonery and the Idiot’s fit, his music consumes all the energy in the Hall of Music, deranging, zapping, and travestying all the disintegrating forms and ruined or falsified vocabularies resounding in the Hall’s grave air. With its “polystylistic” pastiches and travesties of earlier composers, this music has proved to be widely compelling to audiences in Russia and also in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The reasons for its impact reflect on both the nature of postmodernism and the situation of music in recent decades.

In the nineteen-nineties, two discussions of the composer helped to clarify his impact and influence. In 1996, the larger of these studies appeared, Alexander Ivashkin’s Alfred Schnittke in Phaidon’s Twentieth Century Composers series. Here we learn of Schnittke’s Russian, Jewish, and Catholic German background, his early exposure to Viennese musical culture, the formative impact of Shostakovich’s work, and the influence of his teacher Philip Gershkovich’s conception of a polystylistic music, which would echo and absorb the full range of music from pre-Baroque to Webern and beyond. Ivashkin is particularly interested in exposing the hidden content of Schnittke’s music, its “submerged symbolic element” and “spiritual content.” He argues on the basis of its musical echoes of various liturgies that Schnittke’s music conveys and depends on a particularly Russian form of mystical Christianity. Given the extraordinarily wide range of sacred and profane echoes in Schnittke’s music, it is a bit reductive to zero in on its “mysticism.” More interesting than the putative hidden content here is, I think, the intention itself of hiding content. That there are multiple levels of suggested and obscured meanings is characteristic of its musical formations. The significance of its multifarious form is not that it bears a specific meaning but that it enacts the promise of meaning when no meaning can be “spoken”—when meaning-making has become packaged and propagandistic, a usurped if not obliterated activity.

The capability of music to express the potential for meaning when meaningful utterance is obliterated by a society’s apparatus of cliché is a subject approached ten years ago in Richard Taruskin’s delving study of the crises of identity shaping Russian musical history, Defining Russia Musically. It is Shostakovich’s music which Taruskin sees as offering Schnittke a model of musical “polysemy,” a term for the strategically ambiguous voicing of multiple “subtexts and multivalent meanings,” expressing—or, better, insinuating—potentially and simultaneously both “freedom and constraint.” In the repressive context of Soviet society, music (famously, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony) offered “its blessed polysemy, [which] afforded…a consolation no other art could provide.” The dire sense of the Soviet context is most evident in Taruskin’s chapter on Schnittke. In his analysis of the “posteverythingist” composer, Taruskin notes that the late Soviet version of the “’semiotic’ or signaling aspect, a traditional characteristic of Russian music”—say, in the use of “discord”—is transformed by this music into a sort of screen onto which any meaning can be projected in “whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.” Given its ambiguous and ironic recycling of “prefabricated associations” and bathetic clichés, “the result is socialist realism minus the socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy.”

Taruskin is undecided about Schnittke’s realization of this aspiration, and he spends some pages exposing what he perceives to be tasteless and omnivorous exaggeration and bathos: “No other composer so fearlessly recycles cliché.” Yet he also identifies the gamble implicit in Schnittke’s ambiguously transforming into extreme travesty and irony all the bloated entities of musical cliché (whether Soviet dreck or commercialized pablum or academic still-lifes). Where Taruskin perceives the risk of loss—of the failed gamble—Ivashkin hears a quasi-messianic Russian Orthodox strain in Schnittke’s music. Both formulations would do well to acknowledge more generously its key feature: its voracity, a voracious welcoming even of failure and collapse, or especially these, for the lust of appropriation in this music is matched only by its sense of mourning. (In his opera, Life with an Idiot, Schnittke has Proust, Dostoyevskian doubles, and all the others wildly, absurdly waltz about only to collapse in acute pain before our eyes and ears.)

A certain hesitation is understandable in the face of such lustful musical extremity, as we witness the imaginative voracity intensely charging each of his best scores, continually assimilating and transforming musical materials into deracinated and destabilized ambiguity. (One is reminded of Edward Said’s Adornian conceptions—in Musical Elaborations—of transgressive music and of performance as “an extreme occasion.”) Such music enacts a passionate, uncontainable consuming of all music in its path, “without respite, which makes us, the spectators[/listeners], gasp with anguish at the idea that nothing will ever be able to stop it.” These are Artaud words, in “Theatre and the Plague,” describing Giovanni at the climax of “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Ford’s boundary-violating, genre-exploding Renaissance drama. Schnittke similarly explores a region of transgressive and outrageous travesty, yet it simultaneously ranges into a zone of outraged grief, of mourning for the death of the very forms its so prodigally travesties.