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).

Beethoven's "sound world" - ii (Beethoven and Petri)

In 1961, when I moved from L.A. to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend U.C. Berkeley, I knew that the great virtuoso pianist Egon Petri lived nearby; I learned this from the liner notes on his recording of the late Beethoven piano sonatas, a recording that initiated me into hearing these works. Petri lived in Oakland, the border of which was located a few miles south of the university. Still seventeen years old, I looked up his phone number, called, and talked my way into a meeting. So it was that in October, I took the bus from campus to a stop near his apartment.

I met Petri twice. During the first session, we (and mostly he) talked – about music, about my studies and hopes, about his life and health, but mainly about music – about his teacher Busoni’s Bach transcriptions, about Busoni’s “objective” tone when he played Beethoven’s late sonatas. [Here is an Amazon.com link to Petri’s remarkable 1954 recording of those sonatas: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Sonatas-Egon-Petri-Recital/dp/B00005Q636/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339508&sr=1-1 ]

Only at the end of this first session did he have me sit down at the piano and play – “whatever piece you would like.” It was a case of ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Naïve and oblivious, I started playing for this master of Beethoven’s art the opening of Beethoven’s opus 111. [here is a YouTube link to Rudolf Serkin’s great performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs-Jn13FOIg&noredirect=1 ] After the opening Maestoso and a half page further, he interrupted me. “Yes, I see,” he said. “Now please play the opening of the Arietta.” And so I began playing the slow first page of this second movement, the last one of all of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, his valedicory to a form of which he was the foremost practitioner. At the end of the page, he interrupted me and said. “Your playing, it is very sensitive, very musical. But your technique! Primitive! You will need to work very hard.”

Petri was short, bald, a little stooped, but his wide eyes were full of wit and humor. He lived with his daughter and wife, and I heard sounds of them several rooms away. At the end of the hour, he invited me back in two weeks. In that session, we returned to opus 111, but this time he sat at the piano and showed me how to resolve some of technical problems I had struggled with – what pattern to notice, how to finger it, how to hold the hand to play it – for page after page. Then he put the book of Chopin’s Etudes on the piano rack and showed me how, in the Winter Wind etude, Chopin adapts some of the opus 111 patterns and harmonies, but without Beethoven’s brilliant structural innovation – the movement of harmony let alone the growth of motifs.

I did not see Petri again. At the end of the second session, he told me his health was weakening further, and he was going to live for a while down the California coast. He died a few months later. I felt (yet kept the realization at bay) how rare and valuable was the time I had spent with Petri; he embodied the searching spirit and intellectual acuity of a European sensibility that was dying even as I was growing into the 1960s, and that realization that death was part of this legacy was what I kept at arm’s length – not only Petri’s own closeness to death but also that twentieth century Europe had put to death many intellectuals along with all the rest. Yet I had kept persevering – contacting Petri, opening to him, learning what I could from him.

Just before I left his apartment, he handed me a note with the name and phone number of one of his favorite pupils, Julian White, from whom I took lessons for the next four years. “A fine pianist and a great teacher,” Petri said, gnomish, wide eyed, and he squeezed my hand. “You will learn very much from him.” And I did.

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.