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 viii (on the late Beethoven sonata no. 30 in E)

The opus 109 piano sonata no. 30 in E major, a beautifully lyrical yet austerely “stripped down” late Beethoven work, withholding the loud conclusive and concussive sounds of earlier works; it was composed about six years before Beethoven died. This sonata is akin to the final piano sonata, opus 111, about which I commented in my Beethoven posts v and vi, and akin also to the penultimate sonata opus 110 which I tried to evoke in my previous post – vii.

The opus 109 sonata partakes of the features I tried to describe of “the sublime” in my last post. It was Egon Petri’s recording that first introduced me to the sonata; its clarity of phrasing and structure were the work of a master teacher, profoundly illuminating and prompting me to try exploring the music at the piano (someday I hope to discuss a great Roland Barthes essay examining the logic and value of the amateur sight-reading of Beethoven’s sonatas). Its first theme always reminded me of the Scherzo of the last quartet – such a fleet yet contemplative theme, so full of potential nuances. I more fully heard those subtleties of “breathing,” of phrasing and emphasis, when I listened to Rudolf Serkin’s wonderful recording from the early sixties; I admired the performance’s sense of being in process, of hewing the phrases and tones from the music’s edifice. His is the opposite of an unfinished performance; rather it is that Serkin abjures any impression of surface smoothness and focuses on the larger formal arc or shape of a sequence or movement. Every small, intentional strangeness of emphasis or slight fracturing of rhythm in the initial statement of the opus 109 theme calls attention to the wondrous promise of the larger form, of the highest level of coherence and meaning.

In short, the listener is grateful for the signs of struggle and even estrangement here; they indicate the presence of meanings and emotions below the beautiful ordered surfaces of the music. This effect achieved in Serkin’s performances of the late Beethoven sonatas is related to what I tried to say about the sublime – that there is in late Beethoven a level of aesthetic experience that moves beyond the perception of conventional beauty to the experience of an open-ended baring the building materials of the music, where the unexpected rifts become openings for unexpected, undreamt-of expression, akin to the sight of the Matterhorn and in its own way stirring awe and inciting the imagination, uncapturable, evanescent, and transcendent.

After less than twenty seconds of the initial lyric melody, the grand gesture of a loud and sweeping broken chord occurs in the treble, a sort of step up Matterhorn: a startling block of sound followed lower in pitch by another stamped chord, and yet the fullest, stamped loudness never occurs, for the grandness immediately evanesces into gentle, resolving chords; then within seconds, the pattern is repeated, except that the resolving chords are now made to stretch toward a new harmony and a swift rhythm in thirty-second note triplet arpeggios which sweep down the keyboard – but again the soft gentling occurs, even in these fleet triplets. This pattern keeps pulsing until it gives way once more to the beautiful lyric melody of the sonata’s opening. In Serkin’s wonderful performance, all these sequences, whether stamped or softened or stretched, partake of the special improvised angularity which is a sign of the uncanny presence of the sublime.

The middle movement of opus 109 is a stormy scherzo, a very fast march, but like Mahler’s marches, it undercuts itself with off-beat emphases and strange syncopations and, most of all, through the continual triplet tread, so that three note units seem not to spring forward but to turn back in a sort of contrapuntal conversation with itself – this is most evident about twenty seconds into the movement at bars 16 and following. Similarly, the harmony remains ambiguous; for all the stridency of the initial e minor theme, the movement keeps refusing to offer a conclusive assertion of e minor closure. Even the final bars, wavering between the conclusive and the exploratory, play with modulations to the G major complement to the movement’s key of e minor, then C major, and then some insistence on the unstable dominant seventh chord before the final e minor chord.

But it’s the final movement of opus 109 that is a most impressive instance of Beethoven’s late style. It is in variation form, like the final movement of opus 111 and the world-encompassing Diabelli set, opus 120, and I’ll later offer some thoughts about the form itself. But first, there are some wonderful YouTube videos of a Daniel Barenboim master class for Jonathan Biss playing the opus 109 sonata, particularly its last movement (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHgfuf-Nn-Q is the second in the relevant video sequence). Biss plays the theme with a beautiful sense of the structure of phrases, always alert to nuance and to the quieting approach to each cadence (there are some wonderful added details in Serkin’s similar performance of the theme, for example the B octaves struck to ring out the statement of the subsidiary theme after the double bar at bar 8). Then, with the first variation, Barenboim interrupts to call attention to the odd angularity and uniqueness of the sequence, so disconnected from the sixteen bars stating the theme. This oddity appears in the stretching of rhythm and phrase, in the ornamental double grace notes or thirty-second notes packed in before the emphatic initial beats of bars and in those beats themselves with their ringing tones, struck high above the previous range of pitches in the music. This variation’s taking apart of the theme, stretching it almost beyond recognition, is a first step in exposing and breaking apart the theme’s essential elements. (The fifth variation even recruits an antique fugue further to unfold the process.) This breaking down to essences and then reconstituting them in an improvisatory release of new music represents a process at the core of late Beethoven and is most evident in the final, sixth variation (beginning at bar 153).

Here in the sixth variation, the theme is reduced to its simplest common denominator, the most basic chords for two bars, and then the quarter notes are doubled, then multiplied by three, then by four, and then by eight. Finally, trills are introduced in the middle, then in the bass, and then in the high treble, as a sort of alert or alarm ringing out to accompany the continuing deconstruction of the original chords. And at the end all the trill and blur of thirty-second notes quiets down to give way to the moving simple restatement of the original theme, out of which an entire world of possibility had developed.

Variation form as Beethoven employed it in the last decade of his life differs from his use of it earlier. In the great c minor variations, opus 35, for example, there is an eloquent propulsiveness (and even a fugue there also) yielding breathtaking concluding cadences; even the tragic slow variations offer a tight dramatic structure. The purposeful momentum and focus on powerful drama give way to the new use of variations I’ve tried to describe in the previous paragraphs (and perhaps at a later point I’ll try to describe some of what the Diabelli set achieves). Of course, the fact that Beethoven continued to explore this form suggests the significance for him of the process of growth from an original germ of musical material; the organic germination process is at the core of his music, even as in the late period, it yields more and more open-ended deconstructions of exposed conventions, inspired explorations of abstract structures, and the improvisatory revivifying of dead or dying forms.