Literature and Music - Modernism

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), In Search of Lost Time, from “Swann’s Way” (1913) excerpt.

Gustav Mahler:

Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde (1909) – Weng Wei – Der Abschied:

English Translation: …I stand here and wait for my friend; I wait to bid him a last farewell. I yearn, my friend, at your side to enjoy the beauty of this evening. Where are you? You leave me long alone! I walk up and down with my lute on paths swelling with soft grass. O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-bedrunken world! He dismounted and handed him the drink of Farewells. He asked him where he would go and why must it be. He spoke, his voice was quiet. Ah my friend, Fortune was not kind to me in this world! Where do I go? I go, I wander in the mountains. I seek peace for my lonely heart. I wander homeward, to my abode! I'll never wander far. Still is my heart, awaiting its hour. The dear earth everywhere blossoms in spring and grows green anew! Everywhere and forever blue is the horizon! Forever ... Forever ...

Walter and Ferrier (51 and 56): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PogZpvxq6Cg

Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926): texts of poems "Music" and Sonnet to Orpheus I, 3

  

Arnold Schoenberg, texts for quartet (George's Transcendence) and for the ending of Moses and Aaron.

String Quartet No. 2, opus 10, 4^th move. (1908), Kolisch, Gilbert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0GA20IaFVw

Moses and Aaron - 1938, Freiberg Orch. and Grundheber (2:10)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxrQDmmc4jg

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Doctor Faustus (1947), near the end, chapter 47, on Lamentations of Dr. Faustus; then, earlier texts of Kretchman on op. 111, and Adrian’s thoughts after Kretschmar, culture, and barbarism.

 

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

“Beim Schlafengehen” (1948) – Hermann Hesse:

GOING TO SLEEP Now that day has tired me, my spirits long for starry night kindly to enfold them, like a tired child. Hands, leave all your doing; brow, forget all your thoughts. Now all my senses want to sink themselves in slumber. And the soul unwatched, would soar in free flight, till in the magic circle of night it lives deeply and a thousand-fold.     (2:25):

Kiri Te Kahana, Davis, LSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbU66ttUcqo

Brecht and Weill

The Three-penny Opera (1928) Text of Mack song and ending...

Excerpts from Pabst film – (2:02, 15:30, 18:58, 22:40-26:40):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-igC0jAV_zQ&t=136s

Concluding remarks: 

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) on Pater's aesthetic:

“It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.”

--from “Sailing to Byzantium”

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

To illustrate what Mann's Kretchmar was referring to:

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in c minor, opus 111, second movement variations:

Claudio Arrau (9, 13:43, 15:29, 17:37, 18:14, 20:47)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ljq4MwzAbo&t=42s

 

Literature and Music - session two - Mozart and Beethoven

Rise of the Enlightenment after the Baroque: shared rule of the Bourgeoisie and the Aristocracy. For example, in England, Parliament (including the class of industrialists, business owners, professionals) and Monarchy.

What language can help to unify and streamline communication among these contending parties? The Classical era, partly homophonic music: melodies now within simpler harmonic structures.

Invention of Sonata form: themes in tonic & dominant, midpoint development, recapitulation. Invention of the new Opera as drama opening up conflict between individuals and society.

The new Classical Forms emphasize cohesion and integration of the whole as a communality: coherent, harmoniously ordered, testing and connecting the individual’s relationship to society.

Music – though supported by both the aristocratic court and the owning class – is by its wordless nature freed from the prosaic & didactic, from explicit aristocratic or bourgeois social representation.

Mozart (1756-1791)– Don Giovanni (c 1789)

Overture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemAKvtXL8w

Act 1/15 ‘Fin ch'han dal vino’ (Hvorostovski)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTT2RkrBsAs

 

 

Mozart’s gift is to cast a light of harmonious and beneficent acceptance on all he composes, no matter how dark or disordered.

 

Don Juan as a product of the Renaissance:

Tirso da Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla -the trickster of Seville and the stone statue

-a 1630 quasi-tragedy about the exploits & punishment of a Renaissance libertine.

Moliere’s play of Don Juan (1665) exposed the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.

Don Juan became the subject of a 1680 novel about a picaresque rogue.

Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte drew on many sources for his tragi-comic drama: collision between the vulnerable but finally triumphant “normal” world of couples, family, both aristocratic and middle-class mores about women and money

versus the figure of the unique individual sensibility, which can model and define the emotions and spirits of the community, investing them with new power and energy, inviting others to enter a new life, and yet which like Don Quixote can seem foolish and grotesque: this is the figure of the Romantic Genius, an intense force of energy and imagination, beyond good and evil, yet capable of inspiring.

 

Act 1, #10 Renee Fleming as Donna Anna, prelude to “Or sai chi l’onore”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8UTemmlq8

At 2:10 – “Silently he approached me and tried to embrace me. I tried to free myself but he seized me all the harder. I screamed, but no one came! With one hand he tried to quiet me, and with the other he seized me so hard that I already thought myself lost….Finally my despair, my horror of the deed so strengthened me that by dint of twisting, turning and bending I freed myself of him.”

 

 

Act 2/2 ‘Ah taci, ingiusto core’ – Donna Elvira (Carlos Alvarez, Anna Antonacci)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IwaqfepCgc

Act 2/14Finale: Commendatore (Samuel Ramey, Kurt Moll)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHSPT6LRDx4

Ending of complete opera (Furtwanger, Salzburg, 1953) at 2:50:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYjqz7nToY

Requiem – (Peter Schreier - Staatskapelle Dresden)

“Requiem Aeternam” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsyPhvrEzPU

           “Dies Irae” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARO7ZjsXSkE

           “Lacrimosa” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE2muDZksP4

Beethoven  (1770-1827) –

Music focused on developing the basic elements of the classical vocabulary - and also focused on projecting the power of the individual - in large upwelling passages displaying emotional force and zeroing in on play with elemental motifs.

Appassionata sonata – Barenboim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ak_7tTxZrk

Last sonata op. 111 – Trifonov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcFFxvG8pWg&t=6s

Symphony No. 9, finale (1824) – [text 1785: Ode to Joy, by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)]

Anja Harteros, Waltraud Meier, Peter Seiffert, René Pape, National Youth Choir of Great Britain, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim (Royal Albert Hall, July 2012) [7:30-12:00]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChygZLpJDNE&t=2s

Beethoven xviii: hearing recordings in the early fifties (1)

In the 1950s, my family played various classical recordings on the living room phonograph. One I remember was a work which influenced Beethoven in his early period: the pianist Robert Casadesus with George Szell conducting the C-minor piano concerto by Mozart, his 24^th, K. 491, composed in 1786 (just a few years before Blake wrote his early “Songs of Innocence” and then of “Experience”).
Both Mozart’s concerto and Blake’s early poems project an open display of fairly fierce emotions and are more intense than more conventional contemporaneous works. The fact that Mozart’s dramatic concerto was in C-minor was also significant for Beethoven, for the most dramatic and intense works he published early were in minor keys, and particularly C-minor: the second of the three piano trios opus 1 and the first of the three early piano sonatas in opus 10 (his first published piano sonata, opus 2, no. 1, is in the related key of F-minor).

Even at the age of ten, I loved hearing the wonderful momentum of Casadesus’ rippling scales on this recording, charging ahead, and with the main theme and its repeated final punctuating phrase all beautifully phrased. Casadesus’ “sound” – the warmth, clarity, and restraint of his tone and approach – were, I remember, admired also by my mother, who was an amateur pianist and who loved playing Chopin’s first Nocturne, Schumann’s Arabesque, and Beethoven’s opus 7 piano sonata, no. 4 in F. (She had aspired to professional competence in the mid-1920s, studying during her University of Chicago years with a pianist who had in her turn studied with Cortot.)

This Mozart C-minor concerto recording, which my father would play on our living room console, was an early vinyl LP, the 1951 collaboration between Casadesus and Szell. Both pianist and orchestra perform the main theme with extraordinary clarity and force: it is a surging melody rising up the scale by thirds from the initial C and then descending the scale to a repeated, slightly jagged, drily voiced three-note phrase as it moves down the scale to final harmonic resolution.

That repeated jagged motif – da-Da Da, with the third note rising in pitch – is heard frequently throughout the first movement as a sort of unifying element and evolving punctuation. The pianist Casadesus and Szell were both famous for their clarity and cohesiveness, and these qualities are wonderfully present in their recording of the tragic force of the main melody and the subsequent unifying repetitions.

It is just that combination of qualities – cohesively evolving repetitions and the sense of tragic drama – which Beethoven’s early minor-key works value and develop. A good illustration is provided by one of his six early-period opus 18 quartets. My father and his friends often performed these works during their quartet evenings at our house during the Fifties, and the fourth quartet in C-minor reveals and transforms the influence of Mozart’s music and particularly the great 24^th concerto.

Opus 18 no. 4 starts with a characteristic theme, a surging opening comprised again of an upward moving melody and a descent in pitch accompanied by a repeated punctuating motif (these features echo the features of Mozart’s concerto). Beethoven’s repeated “punctuation” is a frequently voiced octave leap upward, as the opening exposition of the main theme closes in through brusque chords and more of those punctuating octave leaps toward harmonic resolution.

Though this movement is more somber than Mozart’s opening C-minor concerto movement, it’s clear that many of the effects I tried to describe in the latter are the basis of further experimental development in Beethoven’s C-minor quartet movement. Of course, Beethoven adds his unique aesthetic characteristic of creating music which is continually “working out” its motifs, testing new combinations of them, and inviting the players to feel as if they were participating in his building of the musical edifice, in his constructing this creative flux in time.

In my next post, I’ll turn to a recording of Beethoven’s middle-period Violin Concerto, which the family owned and heard in the early Fifties.

Beethoven xviii: more evidence of an obsession with the composer

A dream from the sixties: a drunken meal around a table, with plentiful wine and many plates of savory food. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, sits next to me, whispering; in the 1930s the troubled girl had fallen in love, unbidden, with Joyce’s friend Samuel Beckett, who is somewhere there roving about the room of my dream. Friends sit across from me, and at the end of the table is my great late teacher Thomas Flanagan, telling a story – sharp-edged, wry and witty.

At the head of the table sits Joyce himself, pivoting in his chair towards a piano conveniently placed by him, and he is playing away right through all the talk and clatter, the vodka toasts, Flanagan’s story and the laughter of its reception. Joyce plays no opera or Irish song: he is playing Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata.

Suddenly Lucia turns to me, puts her hand on my knee, and whispers – almost mouthing the words: “Do you love me?” I soon awoke into my 1965 life, but not before I felt the full force of her searching glance, her yearning words, and her delusion.

The dream has continued to reverberate in my imagination for almost a half century. In 1970, I wrote a story about a piano virtuoso, and the story continued to grow until 1990 when it became my novel Hungry Generations. The painting on its cover (based on Matisse’s “The Music Lesson”) shows the virtuoso playing the piano with his family sitting about and his new friend, a young composer, standing and listening. Beethoven is everywhere present – his picture on the wall, a volume of the sonatas on the piano lid, and the filigreed opening notes of his Hammerklavier atop the picture.

There exists a wonderful photograph of Joyce playing the piano with his son Giorgio listening as he leans over the closed lid. There is a painting on the cover of my study of music and modern fiction, Fullness of Dissonance (which was written in the eighties and published in 1994), and it is based on the photograph. The painting shows Joyce at the piano with not Giorgio, but Mann, Proust, and Schoenberg standing by the closed lid, listening.

The obsession – with a life of its own – does not stop. This is my seventeenth post about Beethoven, and of course several concern the Hammerklavier.

[Both of these cover paintings – visible in the right column of this blog – are by Jeanette Arax Melnick, my wife.]

I’d thought of writing about Tia DeNora’s 1995 study of how Beethoven’s aristocratic Viennese patrons early on helped to support and, in important ways, to shape the growth of Beethoven’s genius – its title is “Beethoven and the Construction of Genius.” But somehow I’d like to use more of these posts to explore why I love Beethoven – and so: my dream from the 1960s.

Beethoven xi: "making music"

 There is a photograph of me when I was eight or so, sitting on one of the upper stairs in our house and looking down at the hall, through the vertical bars of the banister. My open and rather serious face suggests that I was interrupted in the midst of listening to the music from downstairs, for my unpredictable older brother had just snapped a picture of me with his frequent clicks and flashes. A moment before, I had been listening to my father playing second violin in his weekly Friday night string quartet in Los Angeles (this evening in our living room).

One of Haydn’s scores of quartets and then one of Mozart’s nearly a dozen quartets were usually played by the four musicians, and the evening would often conclude with one of Beethoven’s six opus 18 quartets or one of the three from opus 59 (though sometimes one by Schubert or, if they were feeling ambitious, one by Brahms). Particularly Beethoven’s early quartets, opus 18, published when the composer was thirty, were a source of great pleasure to the players, usually two or three skilled amateurs including my father, and one or two professionals. I loved to listen from my perch in the hall stairwell to the four men “making music” – it was as if I were privileged to witness the process of building or sculpting or painting a masterpiece.

“Making music” is the phrase my father used, and it’s particularly relevant to Beethoven and especially significant for the early period chamber works and piano sonatas. One of the ideas I hope to develop in my Beethoven project is the idea that the performers of his sonatas and quartets, etc., feel as if they are participating in the construction 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 – the phrase which the philosopher Barthes employed for this experience is “musica practica.” This phenomenon is distinct from the sometimes virtuosic displays of professional musicians; it is rather to feel one is actively in touch with the unfolding form of the music. When I play through a Beethoven sonata or when my father and his musician friends played a Beethoven quartet, the experience seems like that of a sort of co-creator. Why this should be the case particularly with Beethoven is the question I will try to explore.

Beethoven x - as a Shakespearean figure

I tried in my novel Hungry Generations to evoke Beethoven’s perspective on the creative process and on what his creativity might suggest about how we lead our lives (if you wish, click on the Amazon.com site at top of the right column). The novel’s protagonist, Jack Weinstein, is a young composer starting out in a Hollywood studio in 1972 yet devoted to writing serious classical music, and I have him visited by occasional fantasies in which his heroes appear – Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky (the “three bald geniuses”) and especially Beethoven. In writing the few sequences in which Beethoven appears, I liberally and distortedly quote from Beethoven’s own words, and I lace into his comments to Jack a fair number of (pertinent, expressive) echoes of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”  

Here is one sequence from the novel:

The three bald geniuses danced from the raw, gray daylight into the living room. Even the Viennese Jew, serious and aloof, smiled at what Jack played. The thin Russian said: “This is true drunkard's music, yes! Surpassing even the drinking songs of my Hungarian colleague there, sneering in the shadow. It's like the peasant dances I knew as a child; I will illustrate.” He danced and shouted to Jack's wavering beat, stomping his feet, jutting his legs like a Cossack straight out in air, stumbling, and brushing against Beethoven who roared into the room. He glared at the wispy, dancing Russian as short as himself. Karl Beethoven flickered at the door, looking like his uncle's son, the eyes blinking and shifting, even more possessed, a criminal's eyes. His uncle had seen enough and walked toward the piano.

Jack rose from the bench and edged to the table, where he sat before his new notebook, transfixed with alarm and pain and wonder.

Sitting at the piano before the inked sonata pages, Beethoven had an aura of tangled, electric hair sticking out from his head. He hunched before the keys and began to play loud and unhesitating. Obscenities flowed from his lips, snatches of Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and German. His eyes were fixed on Jack's score, and his hands pounded everything, playing wrong notes, extending and further distorting allusions to his own sonatas. The pale Hungarian sat again at the end of the table, the Russian on the couch, the Viennese Jew on the stuffed chair.

At Scherzo's end, Beethoven began to play a wavering snatch of his last sonata, opus 111, the opening of the Arietta. Suddenly he stopped and swung on the piano bench to face them.

“Our whole disassembly present?” he said, bitterly eyeing his nephew who sat on a straight-backed chair he had taken from the table to a corner, between the front door and the entry to the kitchen. Karl frowned there, hang-dog and accusative, looking at them all with punishing resentment.

“See my nephew Karl. I love him like a son, and he hates me. But I know I demand and impose. I am an ass. Write that down,” he said bitterly, and he pointed imperiously to the 1973 journal, its first page open on the table in front of Jack. “Write me down an ass! Write me down an ass-hole! It doesn't matter.” His voice was hoarse and loud with words he could not hear. “What matters is that we seek eternity, that we are condemned to everlasting redemption.”

Against the wind, Jack slowly shepherded himself across Speedway, across the Venice beach, to the shifting sand at the edge of the Pacific. His jacket flew open, and the wind buffeted him. Alone, he faced the dancing wind-driven waves and the wide current eddying far out in the frenzied ocean.
***

The eloquent irony of being “condemned to everlasting redemption” (this is Shakespeare’s good-willed fool Dogberry’s malaprop phrase) is central to the ambiguities of leading a difficult, even harmed life yet being devoted in music to “seeking eternity.” In my novel, then, I tried briefly to render the character of the disabled Beethoven as a self-aware creator, demanding of others and above all of himself. [The above excerpt is found on pages 88-89 of Hungry Generations; Beethoven makes another Shakespeare-aided appearance on pages 152-3 of the novel.] To get to the Amazon.com page for the novel, click on the cover image at the top of the right column.

Beethoven ix: Deafness and the creative process i

Last fall, I taught a Beethoven biography to first-semester students in a CWRU general education seminar. Edmund Morris’ short book appreciates the music, but it’s out of temper about Beethoven’s personality and behavior, and when the draft versions of the students’ Beethoven paper were submitted, many of the essays presented the composer as brutal and deranged, even psychotic. Granted Beethoven could be impolite, could bristle, but he was (1) deaf and (2) terrifically focused on his work, on realizing his monumental musical ideas.

How to make what is at issue for him evident to the non-musician is a crucial question here. Of course, my students’ drafts were made subtler and less stigmatizing in their final versions, which reflected some added research and at least acknowledged other views. Perhaps they had been intrigued by the notion that a sort of 'monster' or ‘sacred monster’ should have composed the music, or perhaps they were merely offended by a person lacking the adjusted, communal temperament most of them favor. My hope is that in their future lives, further listening to Beethoven’s music will lead them to a more fully complex understanding of the composer.

What listeners hear is, of course, the crucial point about Beethoven’s achievement. They can hear a deep inwardness in his adagios and a triumph of the spirit in his allegros; in the Ninth Symphony’s opening, there is the sound of creation out of the void, and in moments of its finale, listeners hear the music of transcendence – it seems to some the voice of God. In certain movements, there is the deepest utterance of grief, and in others unleashed joy. And almost without exception, there is the sense of an unfolding order in the deaf composer’s works, not merely entertainment or empty occasion, but the presence of meaning. So the listener is confronted with the products of a deeply engaged, wide ranging, and immensely productive imagination, beyond the scope and ken of ordinary creativity.

Beethoven was severely disabled. He became deaf by the time he was in his early thirties, and this disability was a sort of tragic irony, for it is particularly harmful and isolating for a composer of music, and it is a stunning, meaningful paradox that his music should emerge from silence. Of course, in the face of any disability, isolation as well as peculiar compensating behavior frequently ensues. Deafness is an especially isolating disability, particularly in the era long before the development of effective hearing aids. One is cut off from hearing, from receiving communication, from participating in ordinary society. The result is, even in forbearing temperaments, the setting up of added barriers to save one from embarrassment and to compensate for one’s disability. One can seem distracted and absent minded, and so one can seem rude and “truculent” – such is Beethoven’s term in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 in which he explains the trauma of his fate to his brothers and asks for their help. In short, from 1800 to the end of his life in 1827, Beethoven was profoundly disabled by being deaf. This astounding fact intensifies one’s admiration for his achievement.

And so, despite his disability, it was Beethoven’s temperament to demand from himself the highest level of engagement, yielding in him a special forcefulness and intensity and producing music at the highest level of achievement. The demands he made exacted an extraordinary toll on him. The composer’s work differs, of course, from more routine employment, which in good circumstances can be left at the office or factory. Beethoven, however, was continually working out his demanding musical ideas – not merely on walks but continually.

In addition, at the level of basic humanity, this demand resulted partly from the responsibilities he felt toward his younger brothers, earlier toward his parents, and later toward his nephew. He needed to earn a fairly large sum for the purpose of maintaining them, and in the new role of self-employed composer (and an increasingly deaf and thus endangered one) he needed constantly to produce, perform, market, and publish his works. These pressures existed in addition to the creative pressures themselves.

There is much to say about the roles in Beethoven’s creative process of freedom and struggle, of will and fate (“it must be,” he writes in the initial measures of the last movement of his last work). I’ll turn in my next post to the ways in which some of these ideas relate to some of Beethoven’s early and middle period works.

Beethoven vii (on the sublime)

Certain art forms may seem broken up into juxtaposed fragments and are yet still capable of developing, something like a plowed field that is simultaneously upturned and the site of possible growth. The upturning exposes the disruptions and actualities beneath the surface, and it simultaneously readies the field for new growth. Such a process can be likened to what happens in Beethoven’s late works, which unite an exposure of basic ordering forms (an upturned baring of essential conventions) with unconventional lyric upwellings and improvised-seeming imaginative eruptions. Before considering that process in more of the late works, I’d like to explain as clearly as I can the relevance of an idea I’d mentioned in one of my earliest posts, the idea of the sublime.
Recently I taught a “Senior Scholars” course to a group of about forty or so people, some of whom are retired, some nearing retirement, and some widowed; early on in the course I tried to suggest the bearing of the idea of the sublime on modernity and specifically on Conrad’s evocation of the jungle and sea among other vistas and also on Freud’s idea of sublimation (Walter Kaufmann, Stanley Cavell, and Harold Bloom among others have of course made the connection between sublimation and the sublime in Nietzsche and others).

Examples of the sublime in Romanticism are a storm at sea or the dwarfing vista of the Alps, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting “Wanderer above the Mist” – the untethered human here is dwarfed by the snowy peaks and the seemingly limitless power of external nature. However, the human imagination is not simply “dwarfed” but is stirred to witness and give form to this power; "sublime" then is the name for both a particular occurence and a particular form of imagination, which heeds the call to create “sublime” art or, in Freud’s terms, to sublimate the power of such vistas. To mention Freud is to register that those "vistas" or forces exist not only externally in nature but internally in the psyche, in the instinctual forces of erotic love and of aggression, of Eros and of Thanatos (or the death instinct). So it is that the looming and supercharged forces of both nature and human myth can be termed sublime and are subject to sublimation. For example, in 1900 (the year Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams”) Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” gives form and voice both to the primeval jungle and to the figure of Kurtz, with his nearly mythic god-like arrogance – both contain emanations of the sublime. Similarly the sublime force of Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818-19) evokes the terror both of the encompassing sea and of the dying and dead men stranded on the raft.

Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” codified (in 1790) this idea of the sublime as a “representation of limitlessness,” existing in a region outside the normal bounds of beauty and beyond the reach of reason – a region of “chaos,” “the ugly,” and “the negative.” A storm’s threat of chaos and terror, for example, evinces an absence of the rational, a negation of order which challenges the imagination to encompass it. In its turn, the sublime work of art then “represents” such a vista of infinite power in order to draw the phenomenon into the compass of autonomous art. In a sense God-like nature meets its match in the Kantian “genius,” whose transformative representations reveal the existence of “soul” in nature. The composer of the Fifth Symphony and the Appassionata Sonata (circa 1805) embodies a version of that “genius.”

At one point in “Critique of Judgment” Kant writes that “perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance than the inscription from the Temple of Isis” evoking the sublime as the infinite power of nature: “I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be.” It is no accident that Beethoven kept this Kantian inscription in his rooms during his “heroic” period, for the immense power of his middle-period symphonies and sonatas projects this form of encompassing sublimity. Late Beethoven, however, explores a different form of the sublime, one associated more with torn-apart Osiris than the earth-goddess Isis – a sort of sublimity of dismemberment.

Beethoven’s late works thrive in the midst of disparity and open-endedness. It is as if a bargain is being made: organizing forms become more and more objective, the ordering conventions of fugue or variation are made more and more explicit, while the driven process of “heroic” mastery and the will undergoes a sort of disappearance and death and gives way to a new musical process. Beethoven’s “objectifying” of his earlier subjective mastery is – in Hegel’s thinking – to confront death. Hegel’s ideas, developing beyond Kant, can help further to illuminate Beethoven’s late music.

What emerges amid this new “objectivity” is, in Hegel’s conception, a new comprehension of “incompleteness,” “fragmentation,” and “process” – an opening up to another way of being. These qualities well characterize Beethoven’s late aesthetic yielding newly improvisatory invention, a sort of sublimity of “dismemberment.” “The life of the spirit,” Hegel writes in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), “endures and maintains itself” in the face of the death of the self, of identity; the spirit “wins its truth only when it finds itself in utter dismemberment.” Here then is the Hegelian sublime, which can help us comprehend what Beethoven is composing in the last decade of his life as he embraces objectivity and passes through the negation of his earlier aesthetic. To endure the death of the form to which the grand, heroic self had been committed yields “the magic power” which converts the “dismembered” self into sublime form: such at least are some Hegelian terms to describe Beethoven’s wonderful late productivity, and these terms help also to illuminate elements of the creative process in modernity (not least in D. H. Lawrence’s explicit evocation of Osiris in his late novella “The Man Who Died”).

Beethoven vi (on the expression of grief in late works)

I wanted to continue talking about how "subjective intensities" in late Beethoven well up in the midst of the new relationship to "objective" forms (often Baroque forms like the fugue). The two slow sequences prefacing and interrupting Beethoven’s final fugue in his opus 110 piano sonata, his thirty-first among thirty-two sonatas, are marked dolente, and this "Arioso" is full of sorrow, even as it partakes of the fluidity, the unstoppable flow of melody, characteristic of late Beethoven adagios (the beautiful and most extended example is the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, in which – as here – even the moments of halting seem extensions of or preparations for yet more lyricism).

Two effects in particular are poignant and powerful. One is a feature of the upward arc of melody, moving up through each trembling, unstable interval often of the seventh chord, cresting and then descending in painful half steps (measures 9 and 11, for example, at the beginning of the “Arioso dolente”). And the melody’s notes often reach up toward each of those trembling intervals, only to fall back a half step to create over and over the piercing dissonance of a flatted or minor second (from A-flat to G, from F-flat to E-flat). Particularly in the return of the Arioso, the recurrent melody searches through shifting keys, and the modulations from harmony to harmony are accomplished repeatedly through these poignantly painful flatted seconds, as if Beethoven wants to expose rather than smooth out the music’s search through the keys.

That sense of the materials of the music being exposed – of its modulations and melodies being unpacked in all their vulnerability and power is reminiscent of an effect to be encountered in the late works of other artists – one thinks of Michelangelo’s late works, the Dying Slaves, in which the artist’s working the stone is exposed to view rather than smoothed over in the perfections of the earlier sculptures. And there is Yeats in his final decade making explicit the process of creation from “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” And the composer, the sculptor, and the poet each incise their materials with what is a notably steady, purposeful, even serene hand. It is as if, in their late works, these artists have finished with the well-hewn mastery of technique in their earlier great works and seek out a new relationship to their art, to its technique, one that willingly exposes the process itself. And in the Arioso passages of opus 110, Beethoven achieves this effect in order to create a beautiful and moving upwelling of grief.

The second remarkably poignant effect Beethoven creates in these parts of opus 110 involves the phrasing of melody, the creation of a certain brokenness of utterance. This is particularly the case in the second appearance of the Arioso, interrupting the two iterations of the fugue (and as I tried to show in my previous post, the use of fugal form here is itself significant in late Beethoven). In the equivalent passage to the opening melody in measures 9-11, each of the rising and falling notes is voiced essentially as a sigh or short gasp or, rather, a crying out (measures 116 and following). Each central note of the melody is sounded not at the start of the beat in a triplet but in the middle off-beat, then always moving toward a second note of the melody, in cries which yearn for what follows, but each two note phrase is immediately broken off, giving ways to instants of punctuating silence on the beat, and so the triplet breaths of melody move on in broken off-beat cries. This effect is brought to a pitch of intensity when each two note phrase repeats the same pitch, echoing rather than descending, so that each cry pierces as it echoes (in measures 125 and following). At the end of the Arioso (in measure 130), these two note phrases become even briefer echoes, tiny thirty-second note cries, nearly silenced.

The stripping down to bare utterances of pure grief which Beethoven achieves in these passages of the sonata is to be found also in another guise in his thirteenth string quartet, opus 130. The slow movement, the Cavatine, of this late Beethoven quartet, has a middle section marked “Beklemmt” or anguished. Much of what I’ve described above in the Arioso can be heard even more poignantly in this sequence, for the violin’s sounding of those sighing cries is more “speaking” and heart-breaking than what the piano can achieve. And it is especially powerful that these same exploratory effects of the flatted seconds, the off-beat echoing cries, and the rest lead within a few seconds to the assaultive opening chords of the Grosse Fugue, with its declaration of a new dimension of music. The logic of that sequence of movements seems to pose the question of what is to be done in the face of the death of earlier classical musical forms, the end of their order, their period of grace.

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).

Beethoven's "Sound World" - i

I’d like to try to develop the idea of the “sound world” a composer creates and inhabits – and which we listeners are privileged to inhabit with him or her. In the first posts, I'll try to establish how I was initiated into the sounds of classical music and particularly Beethoven. My parents were devoted to classical music. My father played the violin, and there were frequent “quartet evenings” at our house, during which he played second violin, for the most part. Undoubtedly, I heard his quartet play some Beethoven during my childhood, though it was not until I was a teenager that I clearly recollect hearing him play some of the opus 18 quartets. My mother played the piano, and the Beethoven sonata she turned to most often was the early opus 7 (again, I clearly remember her performance only when I was a teenager).

There were several record players in the house, and undoubtedly the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and his other symphonies must have filled the house. (I certainly remember opera emanating from the Girard in my brother David’s room, starting when he was 13 and I was 8; there were choral sounds – perhaps the “Ode to Joy” movement of the Ninth, probably the recording by Toscanini, who obsessed the family – emerging from my 16-year-old brother Philip’s room at the other end of the upstairs hall.) The Melnick household was turbulent and confusing for an eight year old, and though I loved the presence of music there, it was difficult to concentrate and fully absorb it, given my spry, distracted disposition as well as my circumstances (in which adolescents and adults would act like children, even as the child was made to witness and experience adult intensities).

During the year I was 8, then (that would be 1951-2), there were piano lessons I took, which taught me not much beyond the basics. At the age of 11, lessons were resumed, and I began playing simple Haydn minuets, Clementi’s easier sonatas, etc. It was not until I was 14 that I initiated resuming lessons and began truly exploring the keyboard music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. By then, my brothers had moved out of the house, and things were a bit more stable; I lived with my parents in West Los Angeles, and then in 1958 we moved to the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, a block from the V.A. hospital where my physician father worked. During the next three years from the age of 14 to 17, when I went away to college, my love of music fully flowered.

A German-Jewish émigré drove from Brentwood in West L.A. through the Valley to our remote Sylmar home to give me weekly lessons. Mr. Schumann assigned me typical fare: Bach Inventions and then a Partita, Mozart sonatas, the Scenes of Childhood by Schumann (no relation), and of course some Beethoven sonatas – first the easy opus 49 sonatas and then opus 90, not hard but not easy. More important than his assignments and instruction (comprised of encouraging advice mostly about interpretation rather than technique), Mr. Schumann loved to play the piano for me, so during the last twenty minutes of each session, he would fill our suburban tract home with music – above all, Beethoven. He was preparing the Waldstein sonata, opus 53, to play in recital, and at the end of several lessons I heard him perform the wonderful pulse and whir of the sonata’s repetitions – its pulsing chords and whirring arpeggios and continually unfolding melodic motifs. These mini-recitals, with my sitting to one side of him and turning pages, constituted a crucial education for me.

Also, in these years, I finally had my own small portable record player. I particularly remember receiving individual records discarded by my older brother Philip, whose record collection burgeoned with new boxed sets. Among the LPs were recordings of Klemperer (the cover photo showing one half of his face bright and benign, the other shadowed and sinister) conducting the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Szell conducting Schubert’s “Great” Symphony, Schnabel playing Schubert’s last piano sonata, and much else. I was particularly stirred by the record of Egon Petri playing Beethoven’s last three sonatas. The LP prompted me to work through those compositions time after time – I played them at a slower than indicated pace, but at whatever tempo they gave me great pleasure. Petri’s record educated me about what I would later want to call Beethoven’s organic form – his capacity to shape motifs so that they constantly grew, even as they contributed their energy to the encompassing arc of a movement’s structure. I came finally to understand the nature and power of form – whether sonata, variation, fugue, aria, or dance.

Some great performances of Beethoven's last piano sonatas and other music in HUNGRY GENERATIONS

Please see my latest posts on Beethoven and four June 2011 posts about modern music and recommended performances. Also, Beethoven appears as a character in my novel "Hungry Generations" (about the friendship between a young composer in L.A. and a great emigre virtuoso pianist in the early 70s) - an excerpt is in one of my early blog posts.

Piano Sonata No. 29 in B Flat Major (Rudolf Serkin playing the Hammerklavier Sonata);
Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 3 (Arthur Schnabel playing the Hammerklavier sonata); also there is Sviatoslav Richter's performance of the Hammerklavier on Praga (not the inferior alternative recordings).

For additional recommendations, look at my recent "modern music" posts 23-25. The following recordings of more modern music, along with the Beethoven below, are important to my novel Hungry Generations.
Murray Perahia Performs Béla Bartók (Piano Sonata; Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs; Suite; Out of Doors; Sonata for 2 pianos & 2 percussion) (Murray Perahia playing Bartok's Sonata)
Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia (Peter Serkin playing Stravinsky's Sonata)
Glenn Gould Plays Schoenberg, Berg, Webern (Gould playing Schoenberg's Suite, op. 25, etc.)
 
Also: Beethoven: The Last 3 Piano Sonatas, Nos. 30-32 (Rudolf Serkin playing the late sonatas)
Richter the Master, Vol. 1: Beethoven - Piano Sonatas (Sviatoslav Richter playing the late sonatas)
Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 (Arthur Schnabel playing the last piano sonata)

Let me add a few more recordings of music important for my novel "Hungry Generations." There is Penderewski's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima: http://www.amazon.com/Penderecki-Anaklasis-Threnody-etc-Krzysztof/dp/B000002S5H/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296338836&sr=1-1. Also, Zimmermann's piano works: http://www.amazon.com/Zimmermann-Piano-Works-Tony-Wirtz/dp/B000CCS9B8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339063&sr=1-4.

My novel's main character the aging pianist Alexander Petrov achieves some incredible effects in his performances, particularly of Schoenberg, who is one of 'the three bald geniuses' haunting the other main (and younger) character Jack Weinstein's imagination (along with Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok). The significant effects achieved by the playing of the novel's pianist Petrov are suggested by, among others, Vladimir Horowitz's incredible performances (for example, he recorded the Scriabin Sonata #3, which the son Joseph Petrov performs in the novel: http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B0000CF325/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-2 or http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B000003EOZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-1, which contains the third sonata). Similarly, there is Sviatoslav Richter's powerful performance, for example, of Scriabin, Debussy, and Prokofiev (with a range of sound from immensely forceful to terrifically gentle, a range akin to that imagined for Sasha Petrov): http://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Debussy-Prokofiev-Sviatoslav-Richter/dp/B00000E3ZX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296340158&sr=1-5

Finally, the first recording I heard of Beethoven's late sonatas was by Egon Petri: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Sonatas-Egon-Petri-Recital/dp/B00005Q636/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339508&sr=1-1