FOUR
TONALITY
Beethoven reproduced the meaning of tonality out of subjective freedom.
Philosophy of Modern Music120
On the prehistory of tonality we find the following extremely curious comment by Schumann, Schriften I, ed. Simon,121 p. 36: Triad = time periods. The third mediates past and future as present. – Eusebius.’ Below this he wrote: ‘Daring comparison! – Karo.’
[110]
On the theory of tonality in Beethoven, remember above all that communication with the collective presented itself to him in the preexisting form of tonality, that the collective is immanent in his work through the universality of the tonal. Everything is based on it.
[111]
To understand Beethoven means to understand tonality. It is fundamental to his music not only as its ‘material’ but as its principle, its essence: his music utters the secret of tonality; the limitations set by tonality are his own – and at the same time the driving force of his productivity. (NB: The ‘insignificance’ of the Beethovenian melody can be expressed as that of tonality.) – Coherence in Beethoven is always achieved through a given formal element’s realizing, representing tonality, while the motive power driving the detail beyond itself is always tonality’s need for what comes next in order to fulfil itself. The form follows this rule in wider and wider circles. But at the same time, tonality and its representation circumscribe the social content of Beethoven’s music. It is the music’s bourgeois bedrock. The whole work can only come into being through tonality.
[112]
Just as tonality coincides, historically, with the bourgeois era, it is, in terms of its meaning, the musical language of the bourgeoisie. The categories of this meaning will need to be worked out, for example:
1 Substitution of a socially produced system rationalized by force for ‘Nature’.
2 Establishment of equilibrium (perhaps the exchange of equivalents underlies the form of the cadence).
3
122 Show that the particular, the individual, is the universal, that is, the individualistic principle of society. That is, the individual harmonic event is always representative of the whole schema, as
Homo oeconomicus is the agent of the law of value.
4 The tonal dynamic corresponds to social production and is inauthentic, that is, it establishes equilibrium. Perhaps harmonic progression is itself a kind of exchange process, harmonization a give and take.
5 The abstract time of the harmonic sequence.
All this needs to be pursued in detail.
[113]
What actually is tonality?* It must be an attempt to subject music to a kind of discursive logic, a universal concept. This implies that the relations between identical chords must always mean the same thing for them. It is a logic of occasional expressions. The whole history of the new music is an attempt to ‘fulfil’ this musical logic of mathematical proportions, whereas Beethoven represents the attempt to derive music’s content from itself, to develop all musical meaning from tonality. – NB: the nonsensical idea of regarding twelve-tone music as a substitute for tonality, whereas it sublates precisely the universality and the subsuming power of tonal relationships.
[114]
The earliest works – written in Bonn – that Beethoven published with an opus number are the Preludes running through all keys, op. 39, composed in 1789. They represent the purest case of a construction of tonality (the dialectical moment: retardations in modulation to create balance). That Beethoven included them in his oeuvre is probably to be explained by the fact that they record a fundamental experience.
[115]
Both things need to be said: that there are themes in Beethoven and that there are no themes. – Banalities, that is, the mere structures of tonality, are to be found in his work as much as in Schubert. However, if the triplets arranged around the triad in the transition group of the first movement of the Piano Trio op. 97 are compared to the superficially similar – and especially weak – transition in the first movement of Schubert’s A minor Quartet, the difference which emerges is the following: in Beethoven there is a dynamic, which strives towards a goal and reflects the effort to reach it. Hence, the accents point beyond themselves to the whole, whereas those in Schubert merely remain where they are. If, in Beethoven, mere nature – in the form of accents, syncopation, and so on (theory of syncopation needed) – simply stayed put as it does in Schubert, it would degenerate into a commodity, negating itself. Beethoven’s process is an incessant repudiation of all that is limited, that merely exists. Everywhere in his music is inscribed the injunction: ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne’ [O friends, no more these sounds].123
[116]
The analysis of melody in Beethoven must develop the antagonism between triad and second, and the resulting ‘insignificance’.
[117]
The above interpretation [cf. fr. 267] of the ‘mystical’ as the tangible relationship to a thesis which is, as such, intangible, not ‘plastic’, forms part of the observation that Beethoven compels the material to avow its essence. For the intangible thematic element I refer to, the pure function of which is to ‘speak’ – is nothing other than the pure material: triads and certain other harmonic and contrapuntal forms.
[118]
Seconds and triads are the modes by which the principle of tonality realizes itself. Triads are tonality as such, that is, mere nature; seconds are the form in which nature appears when animated, as song. One might say that triads are the objective and seconds the subjective moment of tonality. This seems to me very much in agreement with what Beethoven, according to Schindler, called the resistant (that is, alien) and the suppliant principles (cf. Thomas-San-Galli, Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 115 and my notes in that context124). Only its unity constitutes the system of tonality and brings about the affirmation of the whole (ibid.).125
In this form, however, the thesis is too undialectical. In their relationships within tonality as a whole, moments can revert to their opposites, especially as they become more extreme. Subjectivity can take on the expression of the resistant. This is the technical locus of the demonic. Approaching it, subjectivity veers into wretchedness.
The minor seconds in the ‘Appassionata’ seem haplessly to desire the suffering which extra-human tonality imposes.
[119]
The principle of the demonic in Beethoven is subjectivity in its randomness. – An interpretation of tonality is possible only through a dialectic; its moments cannot be defined as such. When the minor seconds expressing the demonic seem to summon fate by their very resistance – hell’s laughter as the objectivity of the subject – conversely, it is precisely the large intervals which can express pure subjectivity, long since estranged from itself in the seconds (NB: contrary to Hindemith’s theory126). But this came a good while after Beethoven.
In Beethoven, intervals larger than the octave seem to occur essentially only in the last phase, where they always tend to overstretch the subjective principle underlying the music, so that it becomes an objectivity attainable only through self-transcendence. Hence, this always happens in polyphonic structures, such as:
1 the ninth in ‘Seid umschlungen Millionen’
2 the tenth in the Fugue of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata
3 the tenth in the great Bb major Fugue [op. 133]. Check the Missa.
All of these imply a tacit recognition of the octave as the limit; the octave, so to speak, transcends itself.
[120]
Like every movement, each section in Beethoven helps to constitute tonality, while the negativity driving the music forward always stems from an awareness of the incompleteness of what has just been formed. I am thinking especially of the introduction to op. 111. – All Beethoven’s closing sections are ‘satisfying’, even the tragic ones. There are no closes ending on a question (but NB: the curious ending of the E minor Sonata op. 90), none that fade away, very few indeed that end sombrely (first movement of Sonatina for Piano in G minor [op. 49,1]). If darkness falls in Beethoven, it is as night, never as dusk.
[121]
Beethoven’s shorthand, his comment on the skilful use of chords of the diminished seventh [cf. fr. 197], and the passages quoted by Rudi [Rudolf Kolisch] concerning the metronome,127 should be brought together.
Question: the immensely incisive effect of the Arietta variations [of op. Ill], despite their character as mere paraphrase, faithfully following the basso continuo.
The C# at the end of the variations [bar 170f] (a ‘humane variant’, a ‘humanized star’). Theodor Däubler, ‘Der stummer Freund’, from Der sternhelle Weg [Leipzig 1919], p. 34.128
How decisive the smallest detail can be in Beethoven, through its simplicity. For example, in the last recapitulation in the Rondo of the Piano Sonata in D minor [op. 31,2], the stationary A in the soprano voice [bars 350ff], above the theme, or the augmented second in the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata [bar 19, bar 32, and so on], as a deviation from the major and minor second.
Tonality in Beethoven must be presented in a wholly dialectical way, as ‘rationalization’, in the double sense that, on one hand, it alone makes construction possible – indeed, that it provides the very principle of construction – and that, on the other, it opposes construction, taking on a certain repressive, compulsive character. In this context the moment of ‘superfluity’ in all tonal music should be mentioned; that is, the compulsion, for harmonic and tonal reasons, to say repeatedly things which, as such, need to be stated only once. Critique of the recapitulation. In it tonality is indeed the inhibiting principle in Beethoven’s work, the barrier.
[122]
One of the concerns of this study will be to explain a number of peculiarities of Beethoven’s musical language. These include the sforzati. In all cases they mark a resistance of the musical meaning to the general gradient of tonality, while standing in a dialectical relationship to it. That is to say, they often emerge from musical events: in the theme of the variations of op. 30, no. 1, for example, the sforzato arises from the delay by one crotchet of the appearance of the tonic in bar four. In a corresponding way, after more protracted tensions the sforzati are usually ‘resolved’; that is, the strong parts of the bar are, as if to compensate, over-accentuated. (Ibid., bars 6 and 7.) Furthermore, there is a habit of closing a crescendo on I, the climax, with a piano (as has often been remarked). Probably a means of linking – always very difficult within the very ungraduated and limited field of dynamics. Instead of one thing closing and then (fragmentarily) something new beginning, the close is denied by the p – one could speak of a dynamic syllogism – while the cadence’s gradient is at the same time resisted. – Perhaps the late style was formed by the emergence of such peculiarities – in classicist terms it would be called mannerism. – The violin sonatas are especially rich in such features.
[123]
A theory of Beethoven’s sforzati will need to be developed. They are dialectical nodes. In them the metrical gradient of tonality conflicts with what is being composed. They are the determined negation of the fixed pattern. Determined, because they yield their meaning only when measured against the pattern. And therein lies the problem of the new music.
[124]
Are not the sforzati, which are deployed systematically from no later than op. 30, already shocks, expressing a power of mere existence alien to the self (or of a subjectivity estranged from forms and therefore from itself)? Do they not, at any rate, manifest a radical alienation, a loss of experience? If Berlioz sought to outdo Beethoven in this practice, then, probably, he was teleologically immanent in the earlier composer.129 However, the whole problem is to explain how Beethoven made the shocks immanent, turned them into moments of both form and expression. This corresponds exactly to Hegel’s theory in part III of the Logic, where he states that argumentation should absorb the strength of its opponent into itself.130 There is, altogether, a great deal of this in Beethoven. [125]131
The theory that the substance of tonal music consists of a deviation from the schema can perhaps be best corroborated through some instrumental works by Bach, in which the objectivity of the pattern is especially conclusive. In the fast movements of the Violin Sonata in C minor (the one with the Siciliano), (especially the second), there is hardly a note which is not composed ‘against the grain’, which is not unlike the expectation aroused, surprising, and the power of the piece lies precisely in this. Particularly with regard to the use of intervals.
[126]
In Romanticism, and already in Beethoven, there is a definite proportion between the melodic and the harmonic elements. Not only does the harmony support the melos, but the latter is very largely a function of the former, never autonomous, never really ‘song’. The reason for the central importance of the pianoforte in the nineteenth century before Wagner may be that it corresponded most exactly to this equilibrium of melody and harmony. In the same connection, the ‘inner voices’ – like melodies under fly-leaves – in Schubert and Schumann, and sometimes in Beethoven also (in the Adagio of op. 59,1, but also in slow movements for piano). The veiled, absent element of Romanticism is connected to this. The melody never entirely there (like a violin melody with accompaniment), but projected into the distance by the harmonic dimension of depth. Technical equivalents of the philosophical category of infinity. The style of piano- playing à la Schnabel,132 with its over-vivid rendition of ‘sung’ melodies, destroys precisely this element, making it too positivistic.
But exactly the same thing happened in the late phase of Romantic composition; Tchaikovsky as opposed to the melodies of Schumann, which never overstate the assertion: ‘That’s how we are’ (for example, the continuation of the march theme in the second movement of the Fantasia in C major).
[127]
An example of the false, Romantic fungibility of the theme in Beethoven is the opening of the development in the ‘Pathétique’ [first movement, bars 133ff]. Here we find both elements: the doing of violence, and illusion.
[128]
One of the main problems in interpreting Beethoven: playing very fast phrases (semiquavers) as melodies without slackening the tempo. ‘Passage-work’ hardly exists in Beethoven; everything is melodic and has to be played as such – that is, with an immanent moment of resistance. Especially striking in the first movement of op. 111.
[129]
Tonality is the principle on the basis of which key is possible at all.
[130]
The working-out of tonality in composition – a system which is at once prescribed and freely elaborated – can be demonstrated, perhaps, by the opening of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. The pre-existing, ‘abstract’ aspect of tonality is contained in the first bar, C I. But at the same time, in reflecting on itself – through movement (all musical elements, including rhythm and harmony, are functionally interrelated) – this harmony reveals itself to be, not C I, but G IV, through the theme’s tendency to move both forwards and upwards. It thus leads to G I, but because of the ambivalence of the first bar this G, too, is not definitive: hence the sixth. The following B
[bar 5] is thus not merely a ‘descending chromatic bass’. It is the negation of the negation. In that it belongs to the subdominant region, it implies that the dominant is not a final result (it is actually just another reflection of itself, a possible aspect of the chord of G, not something ‘new’. But as, unlike the opening, it does not manifest itself as self-reflection, but as something posited, as a quality bringing about a fundamental change, it is emphasized by the structure, both metrically ˂first note of the half-period˃ and by its harmonic isolation). The dominant of the dominant is thereby negated; but so, too, retrospectively, is the opening: it is not only G IV but also F V, and only through this double negation does it become concretely that which, through its concept, it was from the first, namely C major. At the same time, the seemingly new quality, the chromatically constructed bass, is retained as an achieved principle until the G, the true dominant of C, is reached. Moreover, the fact that the B with the chromatic step, that is, the new, is only a self-reflection of the old can be precisely demonstrated. For, again, the chromatic interval B-B is, melodically, only an imitation of the diatonic semitone interval C-B immediately preceding it. The fermata G [bar 13], too, in not yet being a result of C major, points beyond itself through the interjection of C minor. The latter, however, is only a reflection of the chromatic A preceding it in the bass. This, fundamentally, is Beethoven’s principle. – What is striking, and in need of interpretation, is the lack of secondary degrees [Nebenstufen].
The second subject is in E, because the most closely related keys needed for the modulatory construction of C major (which, in the entire course of the exposition, has never arrived at a full cadence) have already been used up. It is a free inversion of the main theme: seconds within the span of a fifth.
[131]
The change from major to minor is rare, as an expression of Romantic ferment, but highly effective when it occurs, as in the theme of the rondo in the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, and in the closing section of the first movement of the Piano Sonata in G major, op. 31,1. Also, the closing section of the last Violin Sonata [op. 96].
[132]
It is Bekker’s fateful error to have obscured the structural significance of tonality by his risible aesthetic of musical key (‘The last work in F minor that Beethoven was to entrust to the piano’133). Seeming close to an insight, he spoils it by his Romantic faith in tonal expression. See my critique of the aesthetic of key in ‘Zweite Nachtmusik’.134
[133]
The C# minor in the Piano Sonata op. 27,2 is already, as in Chopin, far from the C major norm. Include a theory of keys. – That of the Ct minor Quartet [op. 131] is quite different. It is related to Bt and to the augmented third. Its model is likely to have been the Fugue in C# minor from the first volume of the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’. An archaic Ct minor, as if it were an organ key. Why it has this effect is difficult to fathom (NB: applies only to the outer movements).
[134]
Absurd as it is to ascribe to key in Beethoven the decisive importance which Bekker accords it, there is something to be said for his view all the same: particular keys, with a certain rigidity, give rise to identical note-formations, almost as if induced by the arrangement of the piano keys. For example, in D minor, at very different periods:
[Cf. op. 31,2, first movement, bars 139–41 and Ninth Symphony, first movement, bars 25–7, first violin.] If a musical historian set about registering all Beethoven’s profiles, he could probably trace them back to a limited number of orignal types (some steps towards this in Rudi’s [Rudolf Kolisch’s] work on tempi).135 But never reveal to anyone that this might be possible, and under no circumstances should I do it myself. All the same: if someone else were to perpetrate such a bestiality, how much it might help me in my, I hope, more humane undertaking. ‘Such is life.’
[135]
By what subtle means is form generated in Beethoven. The main theme of the Eighth Symphony consists of an antecedent and a consequent phrase (both of four bars). The consequent phrase is repeated to lead into the ‘entry’, which is immediately treated as a transition. The problem with this section, with its extreme dearth of harmonic progressions (practically only I and V; distinct IV only after the ‘entry’), is the treatment of the consequent phrase, which gives the entry a formal meaning, that is, one that leads further. This is done melodically [cf. bar 7f, first clarinet]:
Although this closes on the tonic, the upward-leading interval G-A seems so weak that the repetition of the consequent phrase is felt to be necessary, since otherwise there would be no conclusion. The complete closure which is then attained in the repetition seems at the same time (one bar too early) like the start of the entry, and this metrical ambiguity continues to operate throughout the entire movement, lending it a further dynamic. And all this because in one place there was an A instead of an F (incidentally, according to a rule of harmony the tonic third is always regarded as weaker than the eighth). But how precisely formed, how thoroughly organized as language in all its values must a system of relationships be for a whole form to be decided by so subtle a feature.
[136]
To understand fully the impulse that drove Beethoven in his last phase to oppose antiphony, one should look at a certain bad example of such work from the nineteenth century, such as the last movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet. The feeble combination of themes. Beethoven must have rebelled against this element of musical language. Cf. my note on musical stupidity [cf. fr. 140].
[137]
Expression in music is valid within its ‘system’, and hardly ever unmediated in its own right. The enormous expressive power of dissonance in Beethoven (the semitone step collision between the chord of the diminished seventh and its resolution) is effective only within this tonal complex and with this array of chords. With more extensive chromaticism it would be rendered impotent. Expression is mediated by the language and its historical stage of development. In this way, the whole is contained in each of Beethoven’s chords. And precisely this makes possible the final emancipation of the individual element in the late style.
[138]
The category of the pseudo-vernacular136 might well be studied with reference to Mahler. It is an idiosyncratic idiom – one in which the senses speak their own dialect, free from the language to which Mahler inclined. Mahler’s banality is a means of making the great alien language of music, as it decays, speak as closely to us as if it were our mother’s. This false vernacular is a closeness remote from all meaning. – Is not such idiom always associated with the dissolution of the organic? – Consider Schubert’s ‘dialect without a soil’.137 Mahler composed many songs in the (Swabian [sic] ) dialect. This is a first stammering. [139]*
There is an element of musical stupidity, in a primary sense not derived from psychology – for example, certain repeated figures in violin solo cadenzas, or certain repetitions of a note instead of a sustained melodic tone, as in the ‘Virgin’s Prayer’.138 This moment is always associated with repetition. It is one of those eccentric moments which throw light on a much wider context – tonality itself. Seen from outside, it has the same inane tendency that is displayed by these formulae within it. Beethoven’s work is an attempt to overcome precisely this moment – a kind of mimetic naivety – within tonality, just as he was especially allergic to formulae of this kind.139 They occur only, and in damaged form, in his last works, whereas the ‘mimetic’ Schubert was insensitive to them: his variation movements, often a spinning-out of themes, are riddled with them. (NB: In this connection, the idiosyncratic element in, and against, Wagner.) – This is one of the missing links between Beethoven and the Philosophy of Modern Music. That is, the new music is not merely an expression of a changed spiritual situation, a quest for novelty as such, and so on, but actually represents a critique of tonality, a negation of its untruth, so that it has indeed a decomposing effect; and that is its best feature (followers of Schoenberg do not advance their cause by denying it – the reactionaries know better). This idea must be related to that of the objective untruth in Beethoven. [140]140
The real difference between our music and that of Viennese classicism is that, in the latter, within a largely pre-given and bindingly structured material, each minimal nuance, through standing out against it, takes on decisive significance, whereas in our music the language itself is constantly the problem, and not the turn of phrase. In this we are, in one sense, coarser and even more impoverished. Some quite radical implications of this can be traced: in tonality, in the cadence with the chord of the Neapolitan sixth in C major, the D-B interval is perceived as a diminished third, with the distinct character of a third; we might be able to hear it only as a second, since it becomes a third only with reference to the tonal system. Romanticism is the history of the decay of musical language and its replacement by ‘material’. That tonality lost its binding character; that its linguistic nature kept any transcendence of this form within narrow limits and always, in a sense, revoked it; and that there was much to which it denied expression: all these are different aspects of the same situation. But what if the expressive urge were finally to turn against the possibility of expression itself?
[141]
