One of the last pieces Beethoven wrote for string
quartet and also one of his celebrated late quartets. It’s a one-movement
experiment in structure that was meet with a poor reception in its day.
The New
Yorker
Great
Fugue
Secrets
of a Beethoven manuscript.
By Alex
Ross
January 30, 2006
Last summer, a librarian at the
Palmer Theological Seminary, outside Philadelphia, reached onto the bottom
shelf of a basement cabinet and pulled out a lost manuscript by Beethoven. It
was a draft of an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer’s “Grosse
Fuge,” or “Great Fugue” (or, as the cover inexplicably said, “Grande Tugue”).
Once the property of a nineteenth-century industrialist-composer, it had
disappeared, “Citizen Kane”-style, into the clutter of his belongings, some of
which the seminary inherited. The manuscript was handed over to Sotheby’s,
which sold it in December to an unnamed buyer for $1.95 million. Shortly before
the sale, the manuscript was put on display. With some misgivings, I went to
Sotheby’s to have a look.
I had reservations because there
is something ghoulish about the cult of classical artifacts. Not even the most
ambitious new work—Pascal Dusapin’s new Faust opera, for example, which opened
last week in Berlin—inspires anything like the flurry of media interest that ensues
whenever a scrap of Beethoven’s or Bach’s handwriting turns up in some
Pennsylvania basement or Swabian attic. Even creepier is the attention devoted
to organic relics of the Masters; someone recently wrote an entire book about
Beethoven’s hair, and, a few weeks ago, Austrian television breathlessly
reported on a DNA analysis of an alleged piece of Mozart’s skull. Like radical
opera stagings, ventures in period performance practice, and gala birthday
celebrations, manuscript finds are all too easily exploited as part of
classical music’s wax-museum strategy, serving to reanimate the past, to give
it the veneer of the new.
Yet the pull of the past can be
hard to resist. There I was, staring transfixed at the pages on which
Beethoven’s hand had copied out the wildest, grandest fugue ever composed. One
reason that many distinguished people went gaga over this discovery—Lewis
Lockwood, the leading American Beethoven authority, said to the Times, “Wow, oh
my God!”—is that the Great Fugue is more than a piece; it’s a musicological
Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by
the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow
in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard
it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention. (“Your
cradle was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,” Oskar Kokoschka once said to Schoenberg.)
Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of
particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late
works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist
tendencies.
In fact, Beethoven was always
negotiating between the demands of his muse and the desires of the world, as the
history of the Great Fugue shows. It was written in 1825, as the final movement
of the String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130. Even before the first
performance, it caused puzzlement, according to Beethoven’s conversation books,
which allowed others to talk to him after he became deaf. “Why do you have two
eighth notes [tied together] rather than a quarter note?” the violinist Karl
Holz asked him. Evidently, Holz didn’t get a straight answer, for he posed the
same question several months later. (The conversation books are Sphinx-like:
many questions, few answers.) At the quartet’s première, in March, 1826, a
debate immediately flared up; some listeners were fascinated by the Fugue,
while others expressed the hope that Beethoven would replace it with a more
friendly finale, which, surprisingly, he did. A colleague created a four-hand
piano arrangement of the Fugue, so that people could come to terms with this
strange creation. (Back then, arrangements served the function that recordings
do now, spreading music to a wide public.) Beethoven found this version
unsatisfactory, however, and redid the arrangement himself, making sure that
the publisher paid him twelve ducats for his trouble.
What does the long-lost
manuscript tell us about Beethoven’s thinking? I had only half an hour to look
at it, with the indulgence of the Sotheby’s staff, and there is no guarantee
that I would have been granted any great insights if I had stayed longer. But
one thing that struck me was that Beethoven had tampered in an interesting way
with the first bars of the Fugue’s introductory section. The quartet version
begins with loud unison G’s, spread over three octaves and one and a half bars.
In his initial draft of the piano arrangement, Beethoven replicated the
original. Then, apparently, he decided that the G’s needed more strength and
weight. The manuscript shows that he squeezed in two extra tremolando bars,
expanding the moment in time. He also added octaves above and below, expanding
it in space. The dynamics increased from forte to fortissimo. For the most
part, the differences between the quartet and piano versions don’t seem
profound, but this insistence on the G’s stands out.
Musicologists have long seen
significance in the fact that Beethoven stresses G at the outset of the Fugue.
When the piece is restored to its former position, as the finale of the Quartet
Opus 130, a correspondence emerges: the first-violin part in the preceding
movement, the Cavatina, comes to rest on the same note. In opera, a cavatina is
generally an aria of a short and simple type; this one is as slow, gentle, and
lyrical as the Fugue is headlong, ferocious, and cerebral. First, it sings, and
then it sobs and shivers; one section is marked “beklemmt”—stifled, anguished.
This is apocalyptic lyricism, which knows that it cannot last. That the Fugue
so vehemently takes up the note on which the Cavatina ends seems almost like a
destructive act. Looking at the manuscript, I thought, Beethoven’s fury is even
stronger now. He is shaking his fist at the world.
Perhaps, though, Beethoven’s
emotions were not so dire. Perhaps he simply wished to add some pizzazz, some
drama, to his opening. The introduction is marked “Overtura,” which is an odd
word to find in a fugue. In his later instrumental music, Beethoven sometimes
played with vocal stylings, with arialike solos and recitativelike interludes.
In the eighteen-twenties, the operas of Rossini were the rage, and Beethoven
was both irritated and fascinated by the phenomenon. With the pseudo-operatic
gestures of his late works, he seems to be paying half-ironic, half-sincere
tribute to the popular music of his day. Beethoven and Rossini met in 1822,
and, if Rossini’s report is to be believed, the old man expressed his delight
with “The Barber of Seville,” while also making condescending remarks about
Italians.
The Fugue is the consummation of
Beethoven’s strict contrapuntal writing, which he succeeded in integrating into
Classical forms. What if it were also some kind of crazed opera buffa, full of
arguments, misunderstandings, confessions, and reconciliations? It has several
passages of hushed expectation, corresponding to the favorite Rossinian device
of the “frozen moment,” in which all the characters onstage pronounce
themselves dumbfounded by some uncanny apparition or revelation. Also, its
placement next to the Cavatina creates a familiar dramatic situation. Rossini
wrote cavatinas of various kinds, but his preferred use of the form was as part
of a larger scenic sequence in which a heroine meditates upon some great mishap
in her life. First, seemingly overwhelmed by circumstances, she sings a slow,
sad cavatina. There follows a fast, florid episode, which later came to be
known as the cabaletta, in which the diva picks herself up, gets mad, and tests
the extremes of her vocal range and agility. I’m ordinarily a docile girl, says
Rosina in “Barber of Seville,” but if you cross me I turn into a viper. Perhaps
the Great Fugue is Beethoven’s cabaletta—the masculine, Germanic equivalent of
a diva on a tear.
My admittedly speculative theory
about the Fugue was influenced by a particular performance that was ringing in
my earphones as I went to and from Sotheby’s—the Takács Quartet’s recording,
which appears on a recent three-CD set of Beethoven’s late quartets, on the
Decca label. Over the past several years, the Takács players have been
recording the complete Beethoven quartets, and their survey, now complete,
stands as the most richly expressive modern account of this titanic cycle.
Their way with the Fugue may disappoint those who want to hear a narrative of
unrelenting struggle and agony; the players lavish all their inborn eloquence,
warmth, and tonal security upon the music, taking it out of the mystic realm
and making it more human. The performance makes the point that the tensions of
the Fugue gradually subside after the initial firestorm, in which a hundred and
twenty-eight consecutive bars are marked “forte” or above. The final section
has a zesty, almost goofy tone. It sounds much like the short, happy finale
that Beethoven later substituted for the Fugue.
The Takács players present the
Quartet Opus 130 according to Beethoven’s original grand design. They are
hardly the first ensemble to do so, but they make the strongest possible case.
This astounding work runs the gamut of musical knowledge, from sonata-form
cogitation to bel-canto aria, from peasant dance to counterpoint. In writing
the Fugue, Beethoven wasn’t turning from a more popular to a more inward mode
of composition, as Schoenberg thought; instead, he was showing, as Joseph
Kerman argues in his classic book on the Beethoven quartets, that in any given
genre or emotional world he would go to the extreme. In his last years, he went
from the “Ode to Joy” to existential despair, and then back to childlike
innocence. In Opus 130, he does it all in under an hour. This explains why, a
hundred and eighty years after the fact, someone would pay nearly two million
dollars for evidence of a menial arranging task that Beethoven considered a
waste of his time.
If any living composer can
challenge Beethoven on his transcendent turf, it is the eighty-two-year-old
Transylvanian master György Ligeti, whom the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center recently celebrated in a three-concert festival. Reinbert de Leeuw, the
conductor, dissolved the difficulties of the Chamber Concerto and the Hamburg
Concerto; the soprano Barbara Hannigan ran brilliantly amok in a scene from the
opera “Le Grand Macabre”; Pierre-Laurent Aimard made the piano Études glitter
and roar. With Beethoven on the brain, I listened most closely to the Horn
Trio, which Aimard, Mark Steinberg, and Marie Luise Neunecker played with
precision and heart. Ligeti wrote it in 1982, just as he entered his own late
period. It begins with a salute to Beethoven—a distorted variation of the
“farewell” motif from the Sonata Opus 81a. It ends with a Lamento, a ravaged
landscape full of dying cries, in which the composer seems to gaze back on a
century that killed off most of his family and much of his faith in humanity.
But the harmony never turns as dark as it should. Faint triads, stretched over
many octaves, provide a glimmer of hope. At the end, three tones glow in the
night: a G, low on the horn; a C, high on the violin; and an A, sounding weakly
in the middle range of the piano. Here, too, is a slight echo. The notes appear
in reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string
quartet, in F major; below them are written the words “It must be.” ♦
Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music
critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.”
He will publish his third book, “Wagnerism,” in September.