major Trio op. 70.If the autocracy of the recapitulation turns out to be the real barrier confronting Viennese classicism as a whole and, above all, Beethoven – precisely because of his dynamism – the historical origins of this predominance must be traced. It is of recent date. It is not yet found in Bach. Or should one just say: not? For it is surely absurd to regard Bach, who died twenty years before Beethoven’s birth and belongs essentially to the eighteenth century, as an unquestioning, unwavering master of the old, artisan-like, pre-bourgeois school. There is every reason to suppose that all the formal problems concerning us here were already posed, explicitly and consciously, in his work, and that his antiquated features are those of a resolute harking back. (That Bach was completely forgotten by 1800 is one of the most momentous facts in musical history. Had it not been so, everything, including ‘classicism’, would have taken a different course. He was not, however, out of date, but merely too difficult. The forgetting of Bach is bound up with bourgeois leisure time, entertainment, and so on. A precondition of the whole of ‘classicism’ is the triumph of the ‘gallant’ over the ‘erudite’.) It can also be said that in Bach the primacy of the recapitulation is not so much undeveloped as negated, or avoided. Bach undoubtedly knew about the recapitulation. But in his work it is used not as an a priori element of form, but as an artistic means, a device: either in the sense of a refrain in a rondo, of a rhyme (for example, in the closing movement of the Italian Concerto, and in the Prelude of the ‘English’ Suite in G minor), or as marking a clearly felt and affirmative arrival (first movement of Italian Concerto; something similar is to be found only in the most successful recapitulations of Beethoven). Bach was thus entirely familiar with the effects of the recapitulation, but he restricted them with great critical severity. It should also be remembered, above all, that Bach’s recapitulations are not polythematic complexes but contain only the thesis. And that they belong to the concertante style: the tutti character of his recapitulations. It is especially illuminating that the avoidance of the recapitulation forms part not only of the archaic fugal form but also of the ‘gallant’, modern character of the suite, with its symmetrical division into eight-bar periods. This is at its finest in the allemandes and sarabandes, but even a genre piece in almost the nineteenth-cen- tury style, such as the Gavotte of the French G major Suite. In such pieces the perfect formal equilibrium, established without any trace of a-b-a rigidity, is perhaps the greatest triumph of Bach’s mastery of structure. In this he was more sensitive, less mechanical, more complex than the forthright subjectivism of the classical composers. In the fifty years after Bach’s death this ability was entirely lost, and in this very central sense the whole of classicism, including Beethoven, was retrogressive in relation to Bach, much as, from the point of view of construction, Wagner was to mark a step backward from Beethoven. The regression is connected to the mechanistic element which spread further and further in bourgeois music and finally imposed its diabolic power even on Schoenberg.
[187]
Postscript: when playing relatively sonata-like pieces by Bach, for example, the last movement of the Italian Concerto, one readily feels that thematic dualism, dynamic modulation, and so on were still in statu pupillari; unarticulated, not really developed to the full. But if, immediately afterwards, one plays a piano sonata by Mozart, the form, the separateness of the themes, and so on, seems curiously crude, as if already adapted to coarser ears. The dialectic of aesthetic progress. Or rather: in art we can read off clearly the ambivalence of all progress. – In Bach there is more outward, conventional constraint, but at a deeper level more ‘freedom’ than in the classical composers. There is a question about the substance of the religious element in Bach, which may already have stood for the human and, at any rate, was no longer fully intact. (Where is the truth of Christian art located?) Compare Pascal and Bach. Probably, ordo in Bach is really the moment of mechanistic rationalism.
[188]
An expression of pride, in that one is allowed to be present at such an event, to be its witness; for example, in the first movements of the Eb major Piano Concerto and of the Eroica. ‘Exaltation.’ How far this is the effect of the composition – a joy which rivets the listener’s attention to the dialectical logic – and how far the expression creates an illusion of such joy, rests on a knife’s edge. Expression is a préfiguration of mass culture, which celebrates its own triumphs. This is the negative moment of Beethoven’s ‘mastery of the material’, his ostentation. This is one of the points which criticism can engage.
[189]
Regarding the critique of Beethoven: sometimes, if one listens closely to its idiom, his music has something contrived, a calculation of effects, much as in studio paintings, or effective tableau:t; and precisely this moment of ham-acting is exposed to obsolescence. It is the reverse side of the mastery of material, and is often to be found in passages of the highest genius, such as the close of the funeral march in the Eroica (which, as a whole, is not free of contrivance, perhaps as a result of the work’s prescribed, ‘imitated’ expressive type). Only the late style is entirely exempt from this. What brought it into being?
[190]
Beethoven’s style of rebelliousness prefigures in certain ways the conformism in that of Wagner: in its gesture of effrontery. The scene in Karlsbad; the lawsuit over ‘van’; the ‘brain-owner’ episode.165 The music shows traces of this in certain moments of interruption (for example, in the slow movement of the G major Piano Sonata from op. 31), which are intended to present something magnificent but remain simply empty. Even in the Larghetto of the Second Symphony there are such moments. Haydn’s expression ‘the Grand Mogul’.166 – Some magnificent pieces by Beethoven, above all the overtures, sound from a distance like a mere ‘boom boom’.
[191]
On the bombastic element:167 Plaudite, amici, comoedia est finita.168
[192]
Hitler and the Ninth Symphony: Be encircled, all ye millions.169
[193]
There are passages in Beethoven where the music seems to take on an envious squint, for example, the start of the development in the first movement of the E major Trio op. 70.
[194]
Rage, in Beethoven’s music, is bound up with the priority of the whole over the part. As if rejecting the limited, the finite. The melody is growled in anger, because it is never the whole. Rage at the finitude of music itself. Each theme a lost penny.
[195]
The connection of the parts to the whole, their annihilation in it, and therefore their relation to something infinite in the movement of their finitude, is a representation of metaphysical transcendence, not as its ‘image’ but as its real enactment, which only partly succeeds – or is mastered? – because it is performed by human beings. This is where the connection between technique and metaphysics – however ill formulated at this stage – is located. Beethoven’s art achieves its metaphysical substantiality because he uses technique to manufacture transcendence. This is the deepest meaning of the Promethean, voluntarist, Fichtean element in him, and also of its untruth: the manipulation of transcendence, the coercion, the violence. This is probably the deepest insight I have yet achieved into Beethoven. It is profoundly connected to the nature of art as appearance. For however palpably and non-representationally transcendence may be present in art, nevertheless, art is not transcendence, but an artefact, something human, and ultimately: nature. Aesthetic appearance means always: nature as the appearance of the supernatural. In this connection, see I A 3 from the book with Max [Horkheimer] and The Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 55, footnote.170 [196]*171
On the previous note, cf. the following remark of Beethoven’s quoted by Bekker [Beethoven], p. 189: ‘My dear fellow, the surprising effects that many people ascribe to the natural genius of the composer are often enough achieved quite simply by the correct use and resolution of chords of the diminished seventh.’ Except that, according to the previous note, precisely this is ‘natural genius’. Cf. the notes on the philosophy of music in the green book between November 1941 and January 1942.172
[197]
The concert overtures often represent, in relation to the symphonic style, a further simplification. In Beethoven, the poetic element is subjected not to a prolific elaboration but, on the contrary, to a drastic reduction at the expense of mediating characters. An antithetical bareness – nowhere is the classicist element in Beethoven more pronounced than here. The overtures of Coriolan and Egmont are like movements from symphonies for children. William Tell is somewhat similar. Because of this, despite the striking effects, certain weaknesses of Beethoven, which are splendidly mastered elsewhere, show themselves here. Hence the crucial importance of these pieces as key to the critical moment in Beethoven. A certain rough- fistedness, a lack of concern for detail such as is found in Handel, and thereby an emptiness. (The Egmont overture in particular, despite its more lucid articulation, or even because of it, is deeply unsatisfying.) Here, because of the lack of material to work on, the impressive force of the symphonic element takes on something brutal, Germanic, triumphalist. The entanglement of lucidity with pomp, the element of usurpation in the Empire, comes to the fore. Cf. in particular the F major 4/4 section of the overture to Egmont [Allegro con brio; Eulenburg, pocket score, pp. 34ff], where simplification results in a the crudity of a fanfare. This is, furthermore, a triumph without a conflict. Such a coda would have presupposed a far more dialectical development – which in this piece is merely hinted at.
[198]
Regarding the critique of heroic classicism:
‘Absorbed in money-making and in the peaceful warfare of competition, it [bourgeois society] forgot that the shades of ancient Rome had sat beside its cradle. Nevertheless, unheroic though bourgeois society may seem, heroism had been needed to bring it into being – heroism, self-sacrifice, the Reign of Terror, civil war, and the slaughter of the battle-fields. In the stern classical tradition of the Roman Republic, its gladiators found the ideals and the forms, the means of self-deception, they needed, that they might hide from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the struggle in which they were engaged, and might sustain their passion at the level appropriate to a great historic tragedy. In like manner, more than a century earlier, and in another phase of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed the phraseology, the emotions, and the illusions of the Old Testament as trappings for their own bourgeois revolution. As soon as they had reached the goal, as soon as the bourgeois transformation of English society had been effected, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, transi, by Eden and Cedar Paul, London, 1926, pp. 24–5)
This passage has the most far-reaching implications, not for a critique of the heroic posture but for the category of totality itself – in Beethoven as in Hegel – as a transfiguration of mere existence. And just as, from this standpoint, the Hegelian transition to the whole seems questionable in all its stages, so, too, does the superiority of the ‘objective’ Beethoven over the more ‘private’ and, as it were, more empirical Schubert. However much more truth there may be in the former, there is as much more untruth as well. The whole as truth is always also a lie. But, were not the ‘stern classical traditions’ of the Roman Republic themselves already a lie the Roman as a bourgeois in fancy dress? Cicero no less than Cato? Was not Marx, in this part of his construction of history, too naive? Cf. the conclusion of the Philosophy of Modern Music.173 [199]174
In the light of this note the problem of the late Beethoven would need to be stated as follows: how is it possible for art to divest itself of the ‘self-deception’ of totality (as the quintessence of classical heroism), without thereby falling victim to empiricism, contingency, psychology? Beethoven’s last works are the objective answer to this objective question.175
[200]
Beethoven’s Socratic profile. – Lack of feeling for animals, Thomas- San-Galli [Ludwig van Beethoven], p. 98.
[201]
On Beethoven – What I find so suspect in Kantian ethics is the ‘dignity’* which they attribute to man in the name of autonomy. A capacity for moral self-determination is ascribed to human beings as an absolute advantage – as a moral profit – while being covertly used to legitimize dominance – dominance over nature. This is the real aspect of the transcendental claim that man can dictate the laws of nature. Ethical dignity in Kant is a demarcation of differences. It is directed against animals. Implicitly it excludes man from nature, so that its humanity threatens incessantly to revert to the inhuman. It leaves no room for pity. Nothing is more abhorrent to the Kantian than a reminder of man’s resemblance to animals. This taboo is always at work when the idealist berates the materialist. Animals play for the idealist system virtually the same role as the Jews for fascism. To revile man as an animal – that is genuine idealism. To deny the possibility of salvation for animals absolutely and at any price is the inviolable boundary of its metaphysics. – And to this the sombre aspects of Beethoven are precisely related.176
[202]
* [Above the text:] Very important regarding Beethoven.
* [Above the line:] Cf. in this connection, ‘effrontery’, green book [cf. fr. 191]