Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (174 page)

41. Kinderman, in ibid., makes this connection of the Kant quotation and moments in the mass and the Ninth.

42. The relation of the Eucharist to salvation in Catholic doctrine is complex and much debated, so of course I don't propose to present the matter fully.

43. Kirkendale, in “New Roads” (686–87), writes that the quiet brass chorale that begins the Sanctus recalls the “tower music” tradition in German lands, in which trombones and other brass intoned popular religious songs from town towers, their music sometimes compared to a chorus of angels. He notes that Beethoven wrote three chorale-like equali for trombones at the request of a towermaster in Linz. Here is another example of how the
Missa solemnis
is intimately involved with tradition while remaining unique.

44. The autograph calls for the soloists alone to sing the
Pleni sunt coeli
and
Hosanna
, but over the years most conductors have used the full choir. I vote for that, for several reasons: the chorus projects the splendor of the music better; soloists can't balance the orchestral tutti; and the movement needs the contrast of a choral section between two segments for soloists. There is a similar ambiguity about who sings the
et incarnatus
. I find it deeply moving with the tenors of the choir, unsatisfying with a tenor soloist in his relatively bland low register.

45. The
Pleni
and
Hosanna
fugues, both short and unrelated in theme, tempo, meter, and texture, form one of the most bewildering stretches of the mass. They obliterate every norm of Classical continuity, form, and relationship of material.

46. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 687–88. Kirkendale points out that Beethoven would have performed organ improvisations during the Eucharist in the church jobs of his teens. In the score Beethoven has an organ, so he could have used it for the
Präludium
, but he preferred to create an organlike effect in the orchestra—and the effect is quietly stunning. The scoring and the chromaticism of the
Präludium
are virtually proto-Wagnerian. Its central section emphasizes the generative motif.

47. From the beginning of the violin solo, there are sixteen measures of G major in slow tempo without an accidental. The first accidental is a chromatic appoggiatura on D-sharp. Finally there are some modulations, but mostly the music stays close to G major.

48. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 689.

49. The contrast of the searching, roaming harmonic style of much of the mass and the long dwelling on G major in the “Benedictus” is another example of what I mean about Beethoven's late style: he became both more complex and more simple.

50. When Beethoven “explodes” the form with the storm in the
Pastoral
Symphony and the war music in the
Missa solemnis
, he violates the form for a reason—for the sake of a dramatic, programmatic, pictorial effect that is, as the term goes, “extramusical.” True, some have made efforts to integrate these moments into a logical, “purely musical” framework, including calling the storm the introduction to the symphony's finale, or a transition. In the case of the
Pastoral
these ideas are not entirely irrelevant, but what I am saying is that these theoretical constructs contradict what Beethoven intended, which is that these elements are
not
to be considered part of the form but rather do violence to it, for extramusical reasons. Again: for a composer of Beethoven's level,
form is another means of expression
. As I will show, in the finale of the Ninth he stretches the extramusical dimension still further, in the context not of a familiar formal outline but rather within an episodic, ad hoc form. In other words, in the finale of the Ninth there is no formal norm to break, so the programmatic elements (especially the recalls of earlier movements) take a further step toward what we might call the “purely extramusical.” Perhaps the same could be said of the Agnus Dei in the mass, but that has a simpler and less episodic formal layout than the finale of the Ninth. In the Agnus Dei, in other words, there is a clear-enough form to make breaking it meaningful.

51. In the choir, from the
tempo primo
at m. 190 Beethoven strings together fourteen falling thirds by m. 232.

52. M. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 272.

53. I would argue that all the greatest works of religious art are, in the end, universal, because they move us in human terms whether or not we subscribe to their faith. Bach's
St. Matthew Passion
is the archetypal example. I will speculate that the
Missa solemnis
is personal because Beethoven, being who he was, could not make it otherwise. Bach, by contrast, seems to me to be more conscious—perhaps with the support of his sect—of making biblical stories and religious doctrine universally human: the
St. Matthew Passion
is immediately about the death of Christ, but also about the universal experience of death and loss. There is the way that in his sacred music Bach subsumed the emotions of opera, the genre he never got around to writing.

 

31. You Millions

 

1. Levy,
Beethoven
, 20.

2. Cook,
Beethoven
, 11. One of those sketches is highly reminiscent of the slow movement of the
Pathétique
.

3. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 264–65.

4. Levy,
Beethoven
, 28.

5. Cook,
Beethoven
, 14.

6. Winter, “Sketches,” 182–84.

7. Kirby, “Beethoven and the ‘Geselliges Lied,'” 120.

8. Solomon, “Masonic Thread,” 151.

9. Donakowski,
Muse
, 50–51.

10. Winter, “Sketches,” 183. As Winter notes, those nineteen stages of sketching the
Freude
theme did not necessarily take much time. Six or eight attempts at a theme can be the work of an hour or less.

11. Cook,
Beethoven
, 94. “A
Marseillaise
for humanity” was the apt phrase of Edgar Quinet in the nineteenth century—though he also spread the erroneous rumor that Schiller's censored original poem was “An die Freiheit” (To Freedom).

12. Winter, in “Sketches,” calls the
Freude
theme a “synthetic folk song” and places it in the tradition of folk roots in Haydn and Mozart. Without entirely disagreeing, I am more inclined to place it in the popularistic tradition of the
geselliges Lied
, the social song, which may subsume folk music but has its own tradition. Also I think national anthems are a relevant model, and they are not usually folk songs, though they may utilize one. I'll opine that in comparison to
An die Freude
, Haydn's anthem is the better tune, arguably the finest of all national anthems. In comparison, the American
Star-Spangled Banner
is notoriously awkward to sing, with too wide a range.

13. There is an often-repeated story that even as Beethoven planned the
Freude
theme as the focus of the choral Ninth, he also resisted the idea and sketched a purely instrumental finale. That idea is attractive given that, in the end, as the text will address, Beethoven had second thoughts about the finale. But Winter, in “Sketches,” gives a convincing rebuttal to Nottebohm and later writers who thought a sketch marked
Finale instrumentale
was intended as an alternative for the Ninth finale. (That theme ended up in op. 132.)

14. One of the most striking things about the Ninth's beginning is how A sounds like the tonic until, at the end of the first tremolo section, Beethoven adds a D against the A and E, anticipating the D-minor arpeggio and undermining the A in a quite disorienting way.

15. After the return of the tremolo idea on D–A in the beginning, there is no real cadence to D minor until the D pedal of m. 328, and that is a weak cadence. The first strong cadence after the opening is to B-flat at the closing section of the exposition. There is no true perfect authentic cadence to D until the return of the closing section just before the coda.

16. After the moment of lyrical warmth in B-flat, there is an echoing phrase in a sudden magical turn to B major a couple of pages later.

17. Solomon, in
Beethoven
, writes about the dissolution of the heroic style, after which “[t]he task he would set himself in his late music would be the portrayal of heroism without heroics, without heroes” (295). I don't, however, find much implied “portrayal of heroism” in the late music. The centrality of brotherhood in the Ninth and the spirituality of much of the late music are not concerned with heroic ideals at all.

18. Note that Wagner, for whom the Ninth was an obsession and in many ways a starting point, in the
Ring
cycle depicts the failure of the masculine principle of power and heroism, embodied in the heroic fool Siegfried, and the triumph of the feminine principle of compassion, embodied in Brünnhilde. In that, then, he also echoes the Ninth. The beginning of the
Ring
, that enormous, slow-unfolding E-flat-major chord that evokes the Rhine, is one of many descendants of the Ninth's opening, others to be found in Bruckner and Mahler.

19. Tovey never more clearly revealed his willful hostility to fundamental thematic relationships than when he wrote of the B-flat interlude in the first movement of the Ninth that its resemblance to the
Freude
theme is “superficial and entirely accidental.”

20. Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 430–31.

21. The scherzo of the Ninth is one of Beethoven's excursions in unusual timpani tunings, another striking example being the tritone tuning at the beginning of the dungeon scene in
Fidelio
.

22. A long-standing and unresolved question over the fourth horn solo in the movement debates whether Beethoven had an early valved horn available, or whether he wanted a great many stopped notes—the solos are possible to play on an open horn, but barely.

23. Solomon has called the Ninth “an extended metaphor of a quest for Elysium.” What defines that search is the way the
Freude
theme is foreshadowed from the beginning. That is the kind of foreshadowing Beethoven usually did, but this time it involves a text in the finale and thus more tangible images, all the prefiguring at the service of shaping an absolutely end-directed symphony.

24. Cook,
Beethoven
, 101.

25. Levy,
Beethoven
, 20. It was to his Illuminatus friend Körner that Schiller wrote about “An die Freude” in 1800: “It still remains a bad poem and represents a stage of my development that I have since left behind in order to produce something respectable.” All the same, because everybody already knew it, Schiller published it in his collected poems, but deleted some of its more extravagant prerevolutionary sentiments, among them “beggars become brothers of princes.”

26. Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 113.

27. Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 422.

28. Friedrich Schiller,
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry
, quoted in Solomon,
Beethoven Essays
, 11.

29. My score of the finale has the tempo of the opening as dotted half = 90, which is a long-standing engraver's mistake. Beethoven's actual intended tempo was dotted half = 66, which is awkward but at least performable for the opening fanfare. But that tempo is unworkably fast for the bass recitatives, which Beethoven insisted he wanted done in strict time. In strict time, a pulse of 66 for the bar would turn the recitatives into waltzes. At the same time, 66 for the fanfare buzzes past the opening harmony so fast as to negate its impact—even more so when it comes back later as a crunch of all the notes in the scale. In contrast, Beethoven's tempo of quarter = 88 is entirely reasonable for the first movement (one often hears faster performances), likewise 116 for the second movement (again, modern performances are sometimes faster). Metronome 60 and 63 for the third movement are reasonable, but many take it slower and I prefer it that way—Beethoven's metronome mark seems to me to damage the sense of reverie and timelessness in the slow movement. For a survey of problems in these and other metronome indications in the symphonies, see C. Brown, “Historical Performance.”

30. None of the earlier movements recalled in the opening section of the finale are quoted literally: the first adds C-sharp to the first movement's A–E tremolo; rather than a false tonic, the harmony now sounds vaguely like the dominant seventh of D, which it actually is. The bit of the second movement is in A minor, not D minor; the beginning of the third movement is properly in B-flat, but in winds rather than strings. All those changes help integrate the snippets into the tonal and timbral spectrum of the D-major finale, with its stretch of B-flat and its frequent emphasis on the wind band (all but one of the recollections are mainly in winds).

31. Thayer/Forbes, 2:892–93.

32. When I say there is no “abstract” point to the recalls of earlier movements in the finale, I mean that their impression mainly conveys a narrative logic. At least in one “abstract” dimension, they are an extension of Beethoven's constant habit of keeping the whole in view and basing a whole work on one set of ideas. This usually involves themes or motifs recurring throughout the piece, only not to the extent of more or less literal quotations as in the Ninth and other late works. As I said in a note in the previous chapter, at times the finale of the Ninth approaches the opposite of the “purely musical”: the “purely extramusical.”

33. That the form of the finale is unprecedented is in keeping with the rest of the symphony. The first movement has a development that is the least dramatic part of the movement and a recapitulation that does violence to the idea of a recapitulation. The second movement is an amalgam of fugue, sonata, and scherzo. The third movement comprises unusual double variations. The finale is an ad hoc form based around variations. Once again, in the symphonies only the
Eroica
has this kind of bending and tinkering with traditional outlines in every movement.