Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (176 page)

64. Kerman,
Beethoven Quartets
, 315.

65. Having found a tendency to build the themes of the first movement of the B-flat in descending chains of thirds, I expected Beethoven to stick to that idea as he ordinarily does—one example being the ascending and descending chains of thirds in each movement of the
Kreutzer
. But I don't find those thirds in the scherzo. The main theme of the third movement is built on a scaffolding of thirds climbing by step: D-flat–F, F–A-flat, B-flat–D-flat–F. The
tedesca
theme is a simple third descent of D–B–D–G. As Kerman details (ibid.), there are other motivic, gestural, and tonal echoes throughout the piece, but it is hard to make a case for any particular three or four ideas living up to my (loose) requirement of a fundamental idea in a piece: it must keep happening. At the same time, that elusiveness of overriding ideas does conform to one überidea: dissociation.

66. Kerman's excellent summation of the B-flat Quartet: “The first movement . . . is Beethoven's
most
contrasty and enigmatic . . . the second movement stands out as his
most
precipitous and ill-behaved, the fourth movement as his
most
innocently dance-like. The
Cavatina
is his
most
emotional slow movement . . . As for the Finale, the Great Fugue, it not only beggars superlatives but obviously was written with the express purpose of beggaring superlatives (which is not to say that this was its exclusive purpose)” (ibid., 320). In describing the fugue, adjectives can only scramble to approach the reality. I confess I am embarrassed to try to write about it at all; I do it because it is my job. Two students of mine, in two different schools, seemed to be on the verge of breakdown when they gave class presentations on the
Grosse Fuge
. One of them had obsessed over the piece for months, among other things making it the ringtone on his cell phone. Needless to say, the
Grosse Fuge
was a favored work of Stravinsky and a row of other twentieth-century composers and music theorists. In a memorable concert of the James Levine years with the Boston Symphony, a string-orchestra arrangement of the
Fuge
began and ended a program, framing the Beethoven and Schoenberg Violin Concertos. The point was that the
Fuge
was the most avant-garde work of the evening, and the point was made.

67. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 332–33, 344.

68. If one wants, one can find the theme of the
Grosse Fuge
buried in the opening of the quartet, in the notes A-flat–G–E-flat–D, but to make the connection the first two notes have to be reversed, and the middle interval is a fifth rather than the fugue's sixth. For all my motif hunting, I'm not convinced by this connection. One interesting attempt at drawing the quartet together under some rubric comes from Ratner in
Beethoven String
Quartets:
“
The chief connection between the Great Fugue and Op. 130 is topical
.” Certainly some of the quartet falls clearly into topics: the “Cavatina” operatic, the
tedesca
a German dance. But Ratner believes there is virtually no moment in Beethoven and the Classical style that is
not
in some topic or other, a doctrine I don't subscribe to. Still, I think Ratner's ideas about topics in general are a unique and valuable contribution to understanding Beethoven and his predecessors.

69. Kerman,
Beethoven
Quartets
, 269.

70. Kirkendale, “Great Fugue,” 17.

71. Ratner rather tortuously calls the form of the
Grosse Fuge
a “Fantasia along the lines of a
variation-canzona
” and sees it as a sequence of topics: the B-flat fugue a march, the G-flat fugue an arioso, the 6/8 fugue a gigue (
Beethoven String Quartets
, 284). This is more specific than but similar to Kerman's view of the movement as a progression of character changes.

72. Kerman,
Beethoven Quartets
, 279.

73. Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 459.

74. Publisher Artaria showed a certain instinct for the nature of the B-flat Quartet when Beethoven considered publishing each movement separately, though nothing came of the idea (ibid., 460).

75. Ibid.

76. Kerman,
Beethoven Quartets
, 322.

77. Lockwood,
Beethoven
, 460.

78. Kinderman,
Beethoven
, 304.

 

33.
Plaudite, Amici

 

1. Albrecht, vol. 3, no. 419. In this letter to Hummel, Haslinger notes that his publishing partner Steiner is “elderly and also somewhat strange.”

2. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
Compendium
, 32.

3. Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 350.

4. Goethe, quoted in Botstein, “Patrons and Publics,” 77.

5. Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 442.

6. Beethoven's final appeal about the Galitzin debt was issued five days before Beethoven died.

7. Albrecht, vol. 3, no. 444.

8. Marek,
Beethoven
, 603–5.

9. Fiske,
Beethoven's
Missa solemnis
, 21.

10. Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, “Is It True That Our Music Has Declined So Far That It No Longer Can Stand Comparison with the Old and Oldest Music?,” in Senner,
Critical Reception
, vol. 1, no. 87.

11. M. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 75.

12. Thayer/Forbes, 2:956. From the relatively little J. S. Bach that Beethoven was acquainted with, it is remarkable that he understood Bach's inexhaustible imagination.

13.
New York Times
and
The Guardian
, October 13, 2005—soon after Beethoven's lost manuscript of the
Grosse Fuge
four-hand arrangement was rediscovered in, of all places, the town King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia.

14. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 368–69.

15. Albrecht, vol. 3, no. 433n4.

16. Sterba and Sterba,
Beethoven and His Nephew
, 278.

17. Thayer/Forbes, 2:994–95.

18. Sterba and Sterba,
Beethoven and His Nephew
, 277–79.

19. Gruneberg's “Suicide Attempt” summarizes the “cry for help” interpretation. It points out that nearly all genuine suicide attempts succeed on the first try.

20. Sterba and Sterba,
Beethoven and His Nephew
, 279–84.

21. Thayer/Forbes, 2:998–1003.

22. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1502.

23. Breuning,
Memories of Beethoven
, 83.

24. Thayer/Forbes, 2:1000.

25. Ibid., 2:1001–3.

26. Ibid., 2:1004.

27. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1521.

28. Ibid., no. 1498.

29. Ratner,
Beethoven String
Quartets
, 238.

30. When I say Beethoven invested fugue with more emotion than anybody had, that is not to say that I believe he wrote the greatest fugues. For me, Bach did. Part of the reason I say that is that Bach seems to me a born contrapuntalist in a way Beethoven never quite was, for all his labors in counterpoint. Certainly Bach wrote expressive, even tragic fugues, but it was not his style to invest them with the full Beethovenian intensity of emotion, which rose from the Classical sonata style. Meanwhile, Baroque fugues do not have the variety of keys that Beethoven's do, which is also the influence of the sonata style.

31. As the text notes, keys like C-sharp minor are “shadowed” in strings, because they involve few open strings. The standard string keys are bright ones between one flat and three sharps, which have the most open strings. The keys of C, G, and F major contain every open string on every instrument. Even when the open strings are not used for those notes in playing, they resonate with the pitches. When the young Brahms drafted a piano trio in C-sharp minor, his violinist friend Joachim told him that was an awkward and ungrateful key for strings and he should take it down to C minor—which Brahms did, in the C Minor Piano Quartet. As I have said before, from the evidence of his first chamber opuses, I think from early on Beethoven had learned to make good use of the timbral contrast of bright and dark string keys. There is also the issue of which degrees of the scale the open strings fall on. In C-sharp minor the open strings are E and A—the mediant degrees. It's clear in the C-sharp Minor Quartet that Beethoven was aware of this and made use of it as part of the significance especially of the notes A and D, both in the fugue and in the tonal plan of the whole quartet. The first answer in the fugue is in the subdominant partly to emphasize D, another open string. The second movement emerges from dark C-sharp minor to D major, the Neapolitan, one of the brightest string keys. Harmonic C-sharp minor also includes a B-sharp, enharmonically a C, and in the first movement Beethoven makes memorable use of the cello's lowest note in its B-sharp incarnation. In contrast to the present, orchestral players in Beethoven's day regularly used open strings when those pitches came up. I've never seen a study of whether chamber players of the time did the same, though I suspect they did and that Beethoven expected the A in the fugue theme to be an open string, likewise the D in the answer and the E at the top of the line.

32. Winter, “Plans for the Structure,” 136; Lockwood,
Beethoven: Music
, 471.

33. As is often noted, the configuration of the beginning, B-sharp–C-sharp, A–G-sharp, two semitones joined by a leap, is yet another version of the leading motif of the A Minor Quartet and the
Grosse Fuge
motif—so it is shared by three quartets. Chua (
“Galitzin” Quartets
, 7) relates these to the “notorious B–A–C–H motif,” which I find a bit of a stretch, though they all involve two semitones separated by some sort of leap. I also don't see why the Bach motif is “notorious” rather than “famous.”

34. Given the importance of the subdominant in the C-sharp Quartet and the significance of D and A as N and N of V, Ratner (
Beethoven String Quartets
) calls the presence of the Neapolitan a “deep subdominant.”

35. Lockwood,
Beethoven
, 473.

36. In his “Musical Curiosities,” Beethoven editor Jonathan Del Mar traces the
ponticello
effect back to a few uses in Telemann and Boccherini, and in Haydn's Symphony No. 97—the latter the most likely place Beethoven heard it.

37. The key relations in the quartet all stress subdominants in relation to C-sharp minor: F-sharp minor and the “deep subdominants” of A and D. This creates a unique tonal world, largely avoiding more dramatic and dynamic dominant relationships except within the subdominant areas. The first movement also avoids E, the relative major of C-sharp minor. E major finally turns up in the scherzo. Most of the last page of the quartet is in F-sharp minor, turning to C-sharp major only in the last six bars. To my ear, the final cadence to C-sharp is detectably compromised.

38. From Schiller's essay “The Pathetic.”

39. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 370.

40. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 345–46.

41. Thayer/Forbes, 2:1002.

42. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1533.

43. Sterba and Sterba,
Beethoven and His Nephew
, 293.

44. John Suchet, “Therese van Beethoven (1787–1828): Beethoven's Sister-in-Law,” Classic FM, accessed December 20, 2013,
http://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/guides/therese-beethovens-sister-in-law/
. The winegrowers who currently own Wasserhof have preserved Beethoven's rooms and filled them with original or period furniture.

45. Thayer/Forbes, 2:1008–9. The translation given is Thayer's archaic “A pretty brother, that he is!” I've updated it.

46. Ibid., 1007.

47. Albrecht, vol. 3, no. 446.

48. Thayer/Forbes, 2:1013.

49. Ibid., 2:1015.

50. Sterba and Sterba,
Beethoven and His Nephew
, 293.

51. Mai,
Diagnosing Genius
, 90–91.

52. The solemn incantation on the first page of the F Major becomes a more chromatic cantus firmus–like figure later in the movement. That version happens to be, yet again, the motto and leading motif that open the A Minor Quartet and the theme of the
Grosse Fuge
.

53. I think the E-flat in the scherzo is intentionally a non sequitur in effect, but it was elaborately foreshadowed in the coda of the first movement, which is full of out-of-key E-flats.

54. Anderson, vol. 3, no. 1538A.

55. One memorable creative use of the
Muss es sein?
idea in the quartet is in Milan Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. Kundera, who studied music, makes the quartet finale a motif in the book, tying its question and answer into his grand theme of heaviness (the question) and lightness (the answer).

56. Another idea that the new finale takes up from earlier movements of the B-flat Quartet, mainly the first movement, is chains of thirds, which are all over the movement starting with the third-based main theme. The dashing sixteenths of the second theme recall a similar effect in the first movement, but that theme is also founded on a long train of rising thirds that climb, bar by bar: F–A / C–E–G–B-flat / D–F / A–C–E-flat–G / B-flat–D / F–A / C–E. The second phrase of sixteenths starts a new rising chain of thirds. The
fortissimo
climax of the coda features a sequence of triads descending by thirds in the lower voice, echoed a beat later in the upper voice. There is a worthwhile study to be done of Beethoven's use of themes and passages based on chains of thirds, going back past the
Hammerklavier
and
Kreutzer
Sonatas all the way to the
Electoral
Sonata.

57. For all my fondness for the alternative finale, I am inclined to agree with Kerman, in
Beethoven Quartets
, who essentially finds the fugue too much and the substitute finale too little, neither entirely satisfactory. In practice I vote for the
Grosse Fuge
because it crowns an enigmatic work with a climactic enigma of overwhelming power. Kerman finds the B-flat Quartet, on the whole, a not entirely successful stage of a journey in some new direction that Beethoven did not live to define. I tend to agree with that, too. I wonder whether the direction may have had something to do with the “new kind of gravity” Beethoven planned for the Tenth Symphony. If the B-flat is neither my favorite Beethoven quartet nor the one I find his “greatest,” for me it is the most fascinating one. It also contains some of the most beautiful and moving music he ever wrote.