Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (144 page)

 

 

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 flowing 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.

What does the
Grosse Fuge
mean to the whole of the Quartet in B-flat Major, this enigma that crowns the most enigmatic work of Beethoven's life? Many guesses would be proffered over the next two centuries. The more relevant ones would call the essence of the B-flat Major Quartet irony, disjunction, paradox. The fugue brings the climax of those qualities. Here Beethoven the supreme master of form and unity used all his craft to conjure a vision of disunity unto chaos, comic in tone some of the time, in the end more provoking than joking, but with its own logic, however elusive.

 

Op. 130 had its premiere by the Schuppanzigh quartet in March 1826. Because he could not hear the music and also perhaps sensing trouble, Beethoven did not attend the concert. He waited at a tavern for a report. His friends arrived and assured him that much of the quartet had pleased and in fact the second and fourth movements were encored. What about the fugue? Beethoven demanded. One imagines hems and haws, glances exchanged among the friends. It did not go well, they admitted. “And why didn't they encore the Fugue?” he cried. “That alone should have been repeated!
Cattle! Asses!
”

Soon his chosen publisher Artaria began a campaign to convince Beethoven to spin off the finale as a separate piece and provide a kinder and gentler alternative.
⁷⁴
Artaria had paid some 400 florins, unprecedented for a quartet, and was getting a work that threatened to be unsalable. Realizing he had presented a challenge dangerous to the future of the quartet, Beethoven, when Holz presented him with the idea, took exactly one day to agree—and to name his price for the alternate finale.
⁷⁵
Artaria commissioned a four-hand piano arrangement to be published along with the separate string version. Thus the
Grosse Fuge
would be saved, and at the same time the B-flat Quartet saved from the
Grosse Fuge
. Beethoven lived just long enough to write the new finale. The first publication of the quartet, in any case, had the
Grosse Fuge
. Beethoven agreed to the alternative, but he did not disavow the original version.

In any case the fugue is the true finale. However strangely, it enfolds motifs, rhythms, tonalities, gestures, styles from each of the other movements. Most of all it pays off the contradictions that were first put forth on the first page—though in the end, without trying to resolve the dichotomies and ambiguities. But though the “Great Fugue” begins in violence, as if a return and revenge of the old contrapuntalists, near the end it arrives at its gentle and good-humored
allegro molto e con brio
. The gentleness and brio last to the end, and maybe there is the point: this epic, mad fugue begins in fury, but it ends in beauty.

What was Beethoven after in op. 130, his supreme enigma? Was he working toward some new kind of order in his music, in radically new, call them Romantic, directions? If so, in the time left to him he never wrote anything else like it.
⁷⁶
Had he despaired of the models of organic form and logic he learned from the past? Surely not; in the next quartet he drew closer to those models again. The Quartet in B-flat Major stands as an ultimate, the furthest extension of the Poetic style, an unanswered question. One of the first reviewers called the fugue “incomprehensible, like Chinese.”
⁷⁷

When he finished the three quartets for Prince Galitzin, Beethoven was not done with the medium. With no commission now, simply for himself, he went on to the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, which he intended to place at the opposite pole of the B-flat Major: after ultimate disintegration, ultimate integration. The opening fugue of the next quartet would be in itself the opposite pole of the
Grosse Fuge
. When he finished the B-flat Major he called it his favorite of his quartets.
⁷⁸
When he finished the C-sharp Minor, he called it his greatest.

33

A
S THE END
of 1825 approached, Beethoven seemed to have no awareness that his clock was running down, though it would hardly have surprised him. He had said long before that he knew how to die. He had come close any number of times, most recently from an inflamed colon. “Beethoven is now well again,” his publisher friend Tobias Haslinger wrote composer Johann Hummel, “but he is aging very much.”
¹
If Beethoven noticed that, he did not mention it. He may not have owned a mirror anyway. Starting in December, his attention was taken up by the new string quartet, in ­C-sharp minor. Riding on the energy of the
Galitzin
Quartets, this one was done without commission, for himself.

In November he was made an honorary member of Vienna's leading musical organization, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was a touching honor, especially since he had long owed the group either a refund of a commission or an oratorio to be titled
The Victory of the Cross
. (To try to accommodate him the directors suggested a new Biblical libretto,
Saul
.
²
It did no good.) The directors who approved his membership included composers Luigi Cherubini and Louis Spohr, neither of whom much approved of Beethoven's music, but they could not deny his position in the art.

His health gave him no respite. By January his eye inflammation had returned, on top of abdominal troubles—either his long-standing ones or a new variety. In fact his liver was failing, an ailment to which he contributed by drinking more wine than usual. In that, he seems to have been abetted by Karl Holz, his current chief factotum. In other respects, Holz served Beethoven well. He was an able musician, second violin in the Schuppanzigh quartet, and a devoted and insightful friend.

Holz wrote in a conversation book, “I would explain the difference between Mozart's and your instrumental works in this way: For one of your works a poet could only write one poem; while to a Mozart work he could write three or four analogous ones.”
³
Beethoven probably liked that. It speaks to the consistency of his narrative line—though it applies more to the early and middle music than to the late, which is more poetic than narrative. Mozart and Haydn are less allusive and more elusive. As Goethe observed, with works by “the newest composers” (mainly meaning Beethoven), “one cannot add anything more to such works from one's own spirit and heart.”
⁴
He meant that Beethoven gave listeners less room to respond in their own terms, to find their own meanings and stories.

Holz recalled walking with Beethoven when he was working on the quartets, stopping to jot down an idea. Once Beethoven joked, “But that [idea] belongs to the quartet after the next one [the C-sharp Minor] since the next one [the B-flat] already has too many movements.”

Holz admired the B-flat Major Quartet the most of the
Galitzins
, or at any rate told Beethoven he did, despite the
Grosse Fuge
. He asked which of them Beethoven liked most and got the reply, “Each in its own way! Art demands of us that we don't stand still . . . You'll find here a new kind of voice-leading, and, as to imagination, it will, God willing, be less lacking than ever before.” This was spoken “in an imperial style.”
⁵
Did Beethoven really worry that he had been deficient in imagination?