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.

Pathological States - a novel

In an earlier post, there's an excerpt from my unpublished novel "Pathological States" about a physician and his family living in Los Angeles in 1962. The novel is partly a fictionalized family memoir centered on a character a little like my late father, Dr. Perry Melnick, who was a pathologist and noted histochemist. Here's a brief summary:

"Pathological States - a novel"

It is 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eichmann’s execution, and above-ground nuclear testing. Dr. Morris Weisberg is a sixty-year-old pathologist, amateur violinist, and classical music lover. He discovers a disastrous instance of malpractice and a cover-up reaching to the office of his Hospital Director. During this year, the troubled, quixotic doctor struggles to find a way to confront the crisis.

Morris and his wife, Sandra, were born in Europe near the start of the twentieth century, and each was brought to America at an early age. In 1962, the couple is living in suburbia, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They have two sons. Both are aspiring artists in their twenties, and one is straight, the other gay. As they test limits and act out their resentments, the household begins to fill with revelations of excess and abuse.

At work and at home, communication fails, brutal buried truths erupt, and Morris begins to descend into maddening depression. He seeks refuge in his love of classical music and in his California garden. His glassed-in lanai there offers him solace – a place like L.A. itself of pleasure and escape, which ends up being a haunted, alienated space. As Morris plummets, his struggle to keep affirming his faith in science and music wavers. Dr. Weisberg becomes a powerfully moving, larger-than-life character, noble and destructive and terrifying.

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.