Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The second-movement scherzo is an ineffably zany interlude. It begins with rising figures based on the first movement’s motto; over that phrase Beethoven places a swirling little waltz tune. This contrapuntal pair simply refuses to leave, dancing on chirpily through changes of key and texture in a display of Beethovenian minimalism. The middle-section trio is another instant shift of gears, its theme an ethereal musette.

  In the third movement, like one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s imaginary authors who breaks into his own fiction, the composer steps from behind the curtain and reveals what this movement’s bifurcating directions are about. It is labeled on the score Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, “Holy song of thanks to God from a convalescent, in Lydian mode.” The joyful dance that twice interrupts the hymn is headed Neue Kraft fühlend, “Feeling new strength.” The convalescent is, of course, Beethoven himself, recovered from a dangerous illness. Here too is Romantic territory: the artist as subject of his art.

  In this movement Beethoven makes the most physical of human experiences, illness and recovery, into a sublime evocation of spiritual peace and thankfulness, then overflowing joy. It is nominally double variations, laid out ABABA, but the hymn is varied more, each time more melismatic, songful, gently ecstatic. The solemn and archaic Heiliger Dankgesang recalls Palestrina and other Renaissance sacred works. Beethoven’s models were once contemporaries like Haydn, Mozart, Clementi, Cherubini. Now in the absence of great contemporaries, for inspiration he turned to composers of the past: Bach, Handel, Palestrina.55 The drifting F-Lydian harmony and the austere texture of the Heiliger Dankgesang unfold in a prayerful trance.56 Why Lydian mode? The reason may be a passage in one of Beethoven’s historical authorities, the sixteenth-century theorist Gioseffo Zarlino: “The Lydian mode is a remedy for fatigue of the soul, and similarly, for that of the body.”57 The dancing and ebullient Neue Kraft music breaks out in D major, its theme as vigorous and earthy as the hymn is ethereal and spiritual.

  Beethoven spent months considering how to follow that uncanny movement. For a while he imagined a dance movement called “Alla allemande,” but then he put that aside to be used in the op. 130 Quartet and replaced it with two movements. First, a short, jaunty Alla Marcia, assai vivace jolts us out of the song of thanksgiving. After what seems like only the first part of a march comes another startling and ironic turn: the march isn’t finished, but that’s enough of that. It dissolves, and the first violin gives out an impassioned quasi-recitative that serves as transition to an Allegro appassionato finale.

  The last movement is a surging, sighing three-beat rondo, relatively straightforward in layout, merely unforgettably beautiful. The sustained singing line that eluded the first movement flows here in a long, steadily intensifying theme.58 In the coda it climaxes in a breathless and breathtaking presto, the melody in a doubling of stratospheric cello and violin, the middle voices in a chattering accompaniment, and no bass line at all: the climax seems to be ascending into the air. The last pages are in a joyous A major.

  The finale, like the whole of the quartet, is something that might have inspired E. T. A. Hoffmann to one of his crazed-by-love fantasies. The connection of the apparently distinct worlds of Beethoven and Hoffmann may not be coincidental. By now Beethoven had read Hoffmann and probably other Romantic writers, and he always had his creative antennae open to the zeitgeist.59

  Whether or not the three Galitzin Quartets were designed with the possibility of being presented on a single program (it would be a frighteningly intense program for both players and listeners), there is no question that, for all their individuality, they took shape as some kind of unit—sharing material, forming a steady intensification of the principle of contrast until, with the String Quartet in B-flat Major, op. 130, contrast reached the verge of shattering the music.

  The most obvious departure from convention in op. 130 is its six movements, each a distinct personality. Within each movement are further and more devious departures. The first page amounts to another ambiguous, not-quite introduction. It presents three disjunct ideas: an adagio chromatic moan that grows into chords that close in on F major; a pensive fugato on a figure that rises chromatically and then falls in a chain of thirds; then a sudden allegro burst of sixteenths, also based on a falling chain of thirds, over which is laid a little fanfare. This parade of contradictory gestures resembles the beginning of the A Minor Quartet, but here they are even more of a jolt:

  These are not just radically contrasting pieces of material; they are three distinct feelings—call them solemn, poignant, ebullient. By the usual Beethovenian/Classical logic, that beginning will set up themes, motifs, emotions, trains of thought that will unfold to the end of the piece. Even in the other late music, with its poetic rather than narrative frame of reference, much of that process still applies. But in the B-flat Quartet, the main thing that is going to apply is dissociation.60 Having spent his life pushing the envelope of contrast in pieces, most radically in the A Minor Quartet, how far could he push the contrast before the music fell apart?

  Call the B-flat the trickster brother of the A Minor. For the ears and sensibilities of its time, op. 130 did fall apart, to a degree that suggested its composer was afflicted likewise. The outlandish finale was proof of the madness of the whole. To the ears of the distant future, though, this and all the late quartets would be signs not of madness but rather of prophecy, music as an occult puzzle, eternally modern. It must be added that in tone most of op. 130 is neither crazed nor despairing but instead ironic and comic, though the humor is subtle and one movement is inexpressibly tragic.

  Beethoven called the first movement “a serious and heavy-going introduction” to a long quartet.61 The three mutually exclusive worlds laid out on the first page are not themes as such; they are snippets that foreshadow themes to come. The nonintroduction is concluded by a frame, a return to the opening adagio. Then the allegro sixteenths break out again, becoming the first theme proper. They rocket on for a while, accompanied by the fanfare figure. That sequence is punctuated with a recall of the fugato figure from the first page, now speeded up to allegro.

  Again we are in a warped sonata form, the solemn introduction popping up in various guises. There are more than a dozen changes of tempo and mood in the first movement. But the disruptions, on the whole, are in a spirit of irony and gaiety. The second theme turns up in G-flat major, a rare flat-side key for a second theme; partly because of its key, it offers a moment of lyrical calm before the chattering sixteenths return and lead to a subtheme that amounts to the sixteenth runs made legato, smoothing out the energy of the first theme. This is the only one of the Galitzins that calls for a repeat of the exposition.

  The short, antidramatic development sounds like a haunting interlude on a hurdy-gurdy, obsessive harmonies pulsing under the little fanfare motif (the pulsation is based on an almost-absurd snippet, bar 4 of the opening) and a soaring legato line that comes and goes. This is one of the places in Beethoven, reaching back to his earlier works (such as the Pastoral Symphony) but more common in these years, in which for a space of time the music essentially does nothing, in a compelling way.62 The trance of the development is broken by the rocketing sixteenths, the first theme returning; this is therefore the recapitulation, but hardly recognizable as such.

  In the late works that are founded on sonata form, Beethoven was increasingly uninterested in Classical recapitulations that return to the home key and repeat earlier material literally. When previous material comes back it tends to be dynamic, in flux. That, combined with a preference for harmony that rarely cadences and a melodic bass line that does not firmly anchor the harmony, explains much of the fluid quality of the music.

  The coda returns to the solemn opening idea of the movement, then the rocketing theme and the fanfare figure. So at the end the principal ideas are joined, but hardly in a sense of resolution. The coda falls into fragments, more dissociated even than in the beginning. In other words, t
he coda is not a resolution but rather questions whether anything has been resolved. Each bit of idea seems to run quickly out of breath, until a final four bars of racing sixteenths with the fanfare figure and a curt final cadence whose abruptness snubs a proper close.63

  The odd-numbered movements of the quartet are expansive, the second and fourth compact, the second-movement scherzo compact to the point of intentional absurdity: two repeated phrases obsessing on a snide little motif, a helter-skelter trio, great sighs from the first violin, and a repeat of the scherzo, all adding up to about two hilarious minutes. We expect a slow movement to follow and we do get an Andante, but subtitled poco scherzoso, “a little jokingly.” It begins with two bars of somber recollection of the first movement’s chromatic beginning, but that is a misdirection. The ensuing movement is bustling and genial, involving some marvelously fresh sounds. It is laid out in sonata form, now as consistent and uniform in material as the first movement is the opposite.64 In a section of the development marked cantabile, “singing,” each of the four instruments has its own figure, the four fitting together like a mosaic of variegated colors.65

  As fourth movement comes the lyrical three-beat lilt of the “Alla danza tedesca,” a transposed (from A to G major) and renamed version of the “Alla allemande” that Beethoven dropped from the A Minor Quartet. The title relates it to a German dance. It is an artless dance, laid out in a scherzolike form with a trio in the middle, amounting to a gentle and faithful parody of its model. Ordinarily when Beethoven repurposed a movement like this it was because it had thematic, harmonic, or formal connections to the new piece—or, as in the Kreutzer, he developed the rest of the piece on ideas from the reused movement. But in this quartet, every movement is a distinct individual, as if it were a play with each act featuring a different character (and the overall plot remaining cryptic). Meanwhile, in the main themes of movements 2 to 5 lie four of the most memorable melodies Beethoven ever wrote, none of them more limpidly, wistfully lovely than the tedesca.

  Again on display in the tedesca is the unprecedentedly varied scoring of all the Galitzins, encouraged by Beethoven’s new process of sketching on four staves. The ingenuous principal theme begins in violin alone for four bars, the next phrase done by the violins in octaves; the consequent phrase again moves from first violin to violins in octaves, then the whole tune returns in octaves. The movement is an array of subtly mixed colors. The whole of the Galitzins expanded the palette of the string quartet in previously unimagined directions.

  The first three movements of the quartet are comic/ironic in some degree. In most Beethoven, to say that would be to say that the core expression of the piece has these qualities, even though there may be shadowed episodes. To a degree this psychological pattern still applies to the late music at the same time that the music moved away from clear “narratives.”

  But in the B-flat, another Beethoven pattern is going to be put aside. After four movements, call them comic, ironic, dancing, and gently wistful, comes the “Cavatina,” one of the most elegiac and tragic of all movements by Beethoven or anyone else. It is a song of endless heartbreak, the models for which in his life were endless. Beethoven said he had never been so moved in composing a movement; even the thought of it brought him to tears. In his youth he had laughed at the tears of his listeners when he improvised. Now the tears were his own, and he did not scorn them. Though the movement is some seven minutes it seems much longer, because it has another of the wide-arching melodies of the late slow movements. The manifestly sobbing last section, in dark C-flat major, is marked Beklemmt, “anguished.”66

  From comedy to anguish to what? A fugal finale as Beethoven was now given to, but a fugue like no other: what he called the Grosse Fuge, “Great Fugue.” It is the one movement in all the late music that in the next two centuries never lost any of its reputation for strangeness. This music is eternally avant-garde. It may be that when Beethoven got to the finale of the quartet he had little idea of what he wanted. There are some twelve sketches for the finale theme. It may also be that even when he got rolling on the movement he did not realize how gigantic and relentless it was going to become.67 However it happened, it turned out to be some sort of fugue to end all fugues; call it Beethoven’s answer to Bach’s giant Art of Fugue boiled down to a single movement. As with Bach, this construction is founded on a single motif, which is the same as the principal motif of the A Minor Quartet:68

  As he worked on the A Minor, Beethoven tried out its opening motif as a fugue subject.69 That was the germ of the Grosse Fuge. In its course that theme is transformed in character while being subjected to every traditional technical and thematic device that Beethoven had been drilled in years before by his contrapuntal master Albrechtsberger. As the old pedant laid them out in his treatise on composition, the theme of a fugue or other piece can be augmented (made longer rhythmically), diminished (made faster), shortened, syncopated, and used in stretto (the theme in quick entries, as if stepping on its own heels). After he lists these devices (he does not mention inversion of the theme), Albrechtsberger notes, “But one can rarely employ all of these together in one fugue.” It is as if Beethoven remembered that sentence as a challenge. Now he determined to do just that, to wield all these devices in a single movement—in fugues of the last years having approached but never gone the full distance into this particular technical fanaticism.70

  What emerged from this extravagant ambition grounded in tradition was a “revolutionary” work. In other words, in its hyperbolic and obsessive way the Grosse Fuge continued and intensified what Beethoven had been doing all his life. But nothing had approached its fortissimo ferocity, its manic and relentless counterpoint, its dissonance and aggression. The finale, like the Ninth Symphony’s, is an ad hoc form seeming to enfold several movements in one: a fugue in B-flat as quasi–first movement, a second fugue in G-flat as slow movement, another in B-flat as scherzo. At that point, as with so many things in the B-flat Quartet, the analogy breaks down.71

  The Grosse Fuge begins with what Beethoven called the “Overtura.” With that designation he may have wanted to distinguish this introduction from a prelude, the usual preface to a fugue. In it the main theme is declaimed starting on an off-tonic G, starkly in four octaves, fortissimo, with explosive sforzandos on the middle notes. Thus he introduces each note of the theme individually, laying it before us like a building stone. Then, echoing the first movement, we hear a parade of snippets of music to come: the theme in lilting 6/8, then slow and soft with lacy figures woven around it. In the “Overtura,” as in parts of the Ninth Symphony, we again find music about its own creation: a movement that begins by running through a kind of summary of its content.

  Then the first fugue explodes in B-flat at a fortissimo whose rage never relents for four manic minutes. It has only one real harmonic cadence en route, to D minor. It is a double fugue, with a wildly leaping line in dotted rhythms serving as subject, the opening theme as countersubject. What is difficult is good: part of the effect of the music here is the suffering of the players. They have to contend with the awkwardness of the string writing, the constant leaps of more than an octave that require them to vault up and down over an intervening string while sustaining a fierce intensity for minute after minute.

  The B-flat fugue is laid out in the traditional alternation of “exposition,” sections with entries of the theme, and “episode,” sections of free variation on the material. But the effect is of an almost featureless, harmonically chaotic rant. Everything gradually quickens and intensifies: triplets enter, then sixteenths, and then the theme begins to be syncopated, placed on the offbeat.

  Again as in the B-flat Quartet’s first movement, things will proceed in juxtapositions of disjunct material jammed together without transitions. The B-flat fugue stops almost as if hitting a wall. Then begins a meno mosso, pianissimo second fugue in G-flat major, its key echoing the second theme of the first movement. This section picks up the idea from the “Overtura,” weaving fl
owing figures around the theme. The fugal treatment is looser here, and so it will be from now on. The meno mosso is more serene, amounting to a fuguelike interlude more than a full fugue.72 Equally important is the character transformation, Beethoven taking his main theme in directions from ferocious to lyrical.

  There follows a third section, in B-flat, beginning as an as-if fugue whose subject is another transformation of the main theme, picking up the lilting 6/8 fragment on the first page. Lyrical at first, the rhythm like a gigue or a scherzo, it segues into a new fugue in A-flat that builds to the ferocity of the first fugue as it rhythmically augments the main theme and adds trills. After this section builds to a gigantic, tortured climax, the meno mosso version of the fugue returns in A-flat, briefly, and likewise the 6/8 version in B-flat, no longer treated fugally but instead gentled into lyrical gaiety. It is as if in the Grosse Fuge the idea of fugue itself disintegrates en route. As Beethoven put it in the subtitle to the movement, tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée, “partly free, partly in strict counterpoint.”73

  Just before the coda everything dissolves into fragments, much like the end of the first movement: a recall of the opening fortissimo fugue, then a couple of bars of the meno mosso second fugue. The music seems to ask, Which will it be, fury or peace? The coda returns to the stern proclamation of the “Overtura,” as if to look back across a journey that began on a distant peak. Then the fury drains out of the music, leaving delicate trills and a gentler recall of the theme that rises in a long crescendo from pianissimo to a fortissimo conclusion.