BEETHOVEN

1 Regarding the desideratum in point 6 above: according to the modulation scheme, the second subject group is reached on p. 7 with the theme beginning with the tonic of B^b major (the lower voice of which, incidentally, is related to that of the ‘new’ theme of the development). But this theme (a) is skilfully kept somewhat noncommittal, not being perceived as a main figure; (b) is quite brief, only eight bars long, so that, given the gigantic dimensions of the piece, it ‘carries no weight’; (c) through the diminished seventh chord on F# it is interrupted by a much more characteristic figure (this is the truly dramatic antithetical moment of the movement). On p. 11 B^b major is reached once more, and the new figure which starts here, with the repeated crotchets, is melodically and harmonically much more plastic, much more ‘fulfilling’ through timbre and much more clearly set off from the movement than the figure on p. 7, and twice as long. But because so much has happened in the interval, it has the character of something coming afterwards – a consequent phrase. Thus, there is in the second theme group only one formal gesture which ‘points’ in a certain direction (cf. especially the p ˂˃ on p. 7: only the interpretation, not the subject matter itself, indicates the second theme), and then the consequent phrase – the ‘theme’ being omitted, or replaced by the dramatic moment of the development. However, the formal treatment after p. 11 makes it appear retrospectively as if the theme had been there after all – a consequent phrase to a non-existent antecedent phrase, which is yet suggested (the functional character of form). The purpose of the whole, despite the profound way in which the articulation plays on the traditional scheme, is to permit no independent, isolated Being in face of Becoming, just as the dialectic permits no such Being. Beethoven, the dialectician, has no truck with what is crudely called ‘thematic dualism’.

2 P. 12, four bars before the pianissimo entry, is the critical passage, the caesura of the movement, a dragging or falling which is only retrospectively revoked. Everything depends on the understanding of such bars. The immense difficulty of interpreting these four bars.

3 The ‘new’ theme of the development must perhaps be understood as determined by, precisely, the pure, intrinsic demands of form raised to the highest degree; these require the different element, the new quality, as their result. Immanent form as that which produces the transcendence of form. And here the unconnected nature of the second subject group comes into its own. The new theme is the song theme which had been omitted, circumvented. As a thesis it had been suppressed – now, as a result, it is demanded – and is at the same time recovered, in accordance with the schema previously suspended. Thus the theme, too, is now absorbed by the immanent form; that is, within the large coda of the whole movement it has its own recapitulation, pp. 67f. But there is an unusual situation here, too, in that the requirements of form are now suspended beforehand, by the functionless abrupt parallel fall (as later in Bruckner) of the transition to the coda, pp. 64f, E^b I, D^b, I, CI.

4 Precisely these moments point to the Romantic element, which is both contained and negated within the Eroica. Little in Beethoven is as close to Schubert as the development (for example, ‘An Schwager Kronos’, the Scherzo of the C major Symphony, and probably that of the String Quintet). Cf., especially, the Ctt minor entry on p. 21 and the continuation. Such passages probably prepare for the precipitous descent into the great coda. Clearly, given the immensely interwoven nature of the movement, the sense of form calls for a ‘lapidary’ counterweight as its own contradiction, for perspectives opening up the whole, a restored immediacy. [232]²⁰⁶

1 At the very end of the first movement the original – then interrupted – idea of the second subject group reappears as the last thematic event in the movement (apart from the chord syncopations). It is, as it were, redeemed, vindicated. Cf. Schoenberg’s notion of the obligation once contracted.²⁰⁷ – Moreover, this theme already contains the kernel of the motif – the repeated crotchets – of the consequent phrase which will follow it in the exposition, after the dramatic interruption.

2 Given the huge dimensions of the piece, Beethoven needs special means to hold it together – apart from the leading chords and modulations, he often uses syncopated chords or those forming pseudo-bars; these serve a double purpose: in contrast to the truly thematic sections they form ‘fields of dissolution’, while at the same time, through accentuation on and off the beat, they carry the tension forward or, as in the middle of the development, drive it to its highest pitch.

3 The complication introduced by the new theme of the development is balanced by the fact that the second section of the development, leaving aside the elaboration of the new theme in double counterpoint, is simplified in construction, is ‘lapidary’ as compared to the first part. (For example, the entry of the main theme in C, pp. 36f). A tendency towards octaves, a cursory treatment. This prepares for the sharp harmonic descent at the start of the great coda.

4 Genius in the treatment of the sonata schema. This is played with in a very profound way; that is, the exposition, immensely rich in figures and quite unschematic in its intent, nevertheless emphasizes the schema by means of certain characters used as if for orientation. For example, p. 5, last bar: ‘I am a transition model’; p. 7: ‘So you thought I was a second subject!’; p. 13, forte: this is now the closing section – so there’s nothing to interpret. If one immerses oneself single-mindedly in the movement, these formal intentions seem informed by a curious humour.

[233]

The truly magnificent aspect of the slow movement of the Eroica is that the recapitulation is drawn fully into the momentum of the development. Show at this point what form really means in Beethoven. Also the ‘Appassionata’, first movement.

The most characteristic feature of the Scherzo of the Eroica seems to me to lie in the first six bars, before the entry – emphasized by the doubling of the oboe – of the main theme itself. An attempt needs to be made – as a precondition of any interpretation – to describe the factual situation as exactly as possible. The six bars are not an ‘introduction’. The movement ‘begins with them’ (NB: the tonic!). Nor are they a mere tonal design against the background of which the theme stands out – that would be Romantic, quite un- Beethovenian; the character is too rudimentary and melodic for that. Nor, finally, does the theme ‘develop’ from the six bars (as at the start of the Ninth Symphony): it emerges fully formed – indeed, as a contrast. Rather, we have here a character kept ‘non-çommittally’ vague – it is also tonal through the modulation after the dominant – which precedes a ‘binding’ or committed character. This interchange dominates the whole movement, the committed character often being drawn into the uncommitted one, so that the whole is kept in suspension. Understanding of form is so important here because, in the late style, such formal subtleties and ambiguities reign supreme. A rebellion against facile formal language – even in the smallest detail, the meaning of the individual characters.

It seems to me that the comments in the previous entry open up the whole Scherzo of the Eroica, in that the ‘non-committal’ aspect of one part of a theme permits ever-changing lengths and thus the joking, the play. – According to Bekker, the problematic aspect of the last movement appears to be well known;²⁰⁸ but where are the problems? They are quite obvious; for example, the padding after the first statement of the (upper voices’) main theme. (NB: Bekker does not notice that bass and theme provide the main material, just as, in technical matters generally, he spouts nonsense, such as his assertion that from the Second to the Fourth Symphony there are no transition themes, whereas the first movement of the Eroica offers the very paradigm of such a theme.) It would be interesting to know why the Finale comes to grief. Beethoven clearly wanted to make the ossified variation form more fluid by inserting fugal elements in the manner of a development (as he later did with supreme success in the Allegretto of the Seventh), but here is bogged down in outward relationships.

When undertaking a critique of Beethoven, one must no doubt begin by constructing the problem that he faced. In the Funeral March and the Finale [of the Third Symphony] he clearly wanted to balance the first movement by providing syntheses of fully developed, closed forms and loose, open ones (song and variations). He succeeded in the Funeral March, but not in the Finale; but he failed here only because he overreached himself. The means was to be counterpoint. It can already be doubted in the Funeral March whether the devel- opment-like section is fully worked out, or is carried forward in a merely outward way, through arrangement. In the Finale the alternation of variations and counterpoint sections is a fine and novel conception, but is not yet mastered; it fails, not as a composition, but when measured against the problem set (is the same true of the Missa? ). – There is a clear rupture, for example, in the transition from the real main theme to the first episode, by means of the thematic bass; pocket score, pp. 176–7. Such potpourri-like, patchwork passages occur as late as the Finale of the Ninth. Naturally, Beethoven could have done this more ‘skilfully’. If he resorted to such means, the reason can be deduced a priori from the antinomies contained in the underlying formal problem: the irreconcilability of the open and closed principles. Very important. The B minor entry, p. 185, is a stroke of genius, as is the character of the G minor variation, p. 190. – The proportions are a very problematic element in this movement (this is somehow connected to the main problem). The andante section seems to me relatively too long, whereas the presto, in particular, is much too short. – The weakness of the movement seems to have been noticed by every dunce. But what matters is to explain the weakness. Cf. the great essay by Schoenberg on this point.²⁰⁹ [237]²¹⁰

On the Finale of the Eroica, again: he sought the characteristic synthesis because, in the deeper formal sense, he needed a contrast to the first movement; but at the same time he wanted to produce something no less committed than that movement. However, the leading citoyen and the Empire style²¹¹ cannot be reconciled: rupture between bourgeois ideology and reality.²¹² Lukâcs on idealism and realism not irrelevant in this context: the Goethe book.²¹³ (Evidence!)

Some comments on the Fourth Symphony, a splendid, much underrated work. Regarding harmony and form: the crux of the immensely precise and economical introduction (compare the First and Second) is the reinterpretation of G^b as F# (B minor). By contrast, the turning point of the development interprets F# as G^b, as a retransition to B^b The tension of the introduction is resolved only here: ‘functional harmony’. – How unschematically Beethoven thinks: the last four bars of the transition to the second subject group (pocket score, p. 14); the following theme of the second subject group itself and the later melodic idea (canon of clarinet and bassoon), p. 17, are ‘too alike’, especially the last two, and yet entirely compelling. Syncopation as such is used thematically in the movement as a linking element, somewhat as chords accented off the beat are used in the first movement of the Eroica; cf. p. 13 and the closing section, p. 21. (The brackets in Beethoven are identical, even if the content is very diverse. Important.) – The magnificent treatment of the development, which (mindful of the Eroica?) has a quasi-new theme, though still as a counterpoint, so that it is wholly absorbed into the intrinsic flow of the movement. The development always reminds me of Hegel’s Phenomenology. It is as if the objective unfolding of the music were steered by the subject, as if the subject were balancing the music. From the bottom of p. 27, the prototype of a symphonic elaboration. – The abbreviation of the motif after the minim passage, p. 16, is a touch of genius (‘flashing intention’). I could not get much out of the slow movement when reading the score, but saw it quite differently through a not particularly good recording under Furtwängler (too slow and sentimentalized). Especially the short, development-like section from p. 70 on. I could not properly imagine the force of the underlying voice in or the dynamic contrasts in the last movement (for example, pp. 125 and so on). The danger of reading.²¹⁴ By contrast, I can effortlessly imagine the harmonic proportions over the longest passages.

1 In the first movement of the Fifth Symphony the metrics need to be analysed. The movement is of extreme simplicity as regards melody, counterpoint and harmony. It would lapse into crudity if the treatment of rhythm (in which each bar is only one beat) did not introduce the utmost diversity. One needs to demonstrate:

The purely musical reasons for the irregularity. (Count out the main theme with the pauses – all the irregularity is based on this. It does not start on the upbeat!!)

The technique of irregularity (zeugma, constant tendency for the end of one phrase to overlap the beginning of another).

The function of the irregularity: a holding of breath (especially the alternating chords in minims in the development with the ff interpolations).

The relationship of irregularity to expression. The expressive idea of the movement generates the blockages, or vice versa.

2 The slow movement of the Fifth is a centrepiece for a critique of Beethoven. With one of the most beautiful themes (and because of it??), it is one of the most problematic pieces.

The over-long and imprecise formation of the consequent phrase of the main theme.

The failure to continue the march as second idea, which is replaced by mere transposition (weakness = bombast of the expressive element).

The tediousness of the figurative variations results from the paraphrases’ having no corresponding developments. Terseness lapses into a crude rigidity.

The unmediated contingency, the unrelatedness of the woodwind passage of thirds in contrary motion, magnificent as these are in themselves [bars 13Iff].

The dubious monumentality. Starting from the pithy bottom C in the theme of the second subject group [bars 32–7].

NB: As a composition, the finale of the Fifth, too, might well contain some very dubious features.

3 Regarding the physiognomy of Beethoven’s variants, passages such as the following deserve study:²¹⁵

In Beethoven’s variants, ornamentation – that which is most remote from humanity in music – becomes the bearer of its humanization.

Is the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony really good? In face of received opinion, it is hardly possible to raise this question. Yet I have my doubts. Compared to the wonderfully rich articulation of the theme, the variations, which dissolve it in continuous motions, come off badly – a naive ear would say that the theme is mutilated. And the variations remain too close to the theme, which is merely paraphrased, instead of engaging with it. – A theme as richly articulated as this calls for a total structure no less articulated: a contradiction between theme and form.* – The banality of the march-like woodwind chorus. – The inability to break away from AK – There is much to be said against it – for example, that the movement owes its monumental authenticity to the very crudity of its procedures. Schoenberg to Eduard [Steuermann]: Music is there to be listened to, not criticized. But is this not to condescend? Is this not the talk of philistines who do not want their enjoyment spoiled? Does not Beethoven’s grand, lapidary style contain, at the same time, the problem of its truth? Was it not for this reason that he abandoned his classicism? – This time the last movement, especially the development, seemed to me splendid. But something is not quite right in the entry of the second subject group, perhaps because of the thematic richness preceding it; however, unless my ear deceives me, the same applies to the use of modulation and to the functional harmony. And what impressed one most as a child, the bracketing with the Scherzo: is that not a literary effect, one which does not arise from the composition itself? This seemed to me particularly the case with the recurring episode which, after this development, was not at all needed [241]²¹⁶

The means of turning an unobtrusive accompanying motif into a decisive development model are already present in the Finale of the Fifth [cf. bars 46–8].

On the Pastoral: while the whole piece is dominated by the ideal of rusticity and its technical correlative, simplification, complexity is in no way sacrificed. This is, above all, a static music, yet filled, despite everything, with the utmost symphonic tension. That which is must become: the joy of repetition becomes a heightened bliss. I note the following: the theme of the second subject group (pocket score, p. 5), despite its extreme melodic and harmonic simplicity, is rendered expansive through the double counterpoint and through the canonic entries of the counterpoint (repeated at the end where, moreover, its composition is narrowed, not quite pure). (NB: What is theme and what counterpoint is left in abeyance, hence the pleasantly indeterminate quality of the expression.) – The metrical irregularity of the continuation, in which Beethoven wisely, through overlaps, leaves it open to doubt what has three beats and what has four. – The peculiar harmony of the whole, with a tendency towards the subdominant (cf. the trio), a shift of harmonic strata instead of progression; ‘functionless’. In the closing section the domestic servant is included in the composition. Profound humour, between happiness and apathy, as the exposition ends. – The formulation of the main theme: the timid impulse and the thankful, chorale-like consequent phrase (its character is that of the Finale). – The strophic arrangement of the development: shifts instead of actual modulation. The extreme abbreviation of the polyphony of the development to a mere linking element (NB: that is, no polyphonic obligations are contracted); instead, the onward-gliding of the late part of the development, from p. 17 (model: the consequent phrase of the chorale) until the start of the recapitulation. – The woodwind motif in the concluding section of the exposition, a mere ‘filling voice’ which is left behind as a residue. – In the coda I do not ‘understand’, in terms of the inner form, the variation of the theme of the closing section in triplets, that is, its function. I find this passage blurred. How difficult it is to understand music in terms of its deeper logic; how little all this has to do with ‘simplicity’ (p. 29). But how magnificent, by contrast, is the harmonization of the main theme directly before; a catching up. Even the wow-harmonized, static part becomes an obligation to think of the music in terms of degrees, but in such a way as to exclude any disruptive logic. – The touch of greatest genius, perhaps, is the theme of the clarinet in the coda, p. 32, formed from the closing element of the antecedent phrase of the theme, but still seeming fresh, above the ticking quavers of the bassoon: time as happiness. The indescribably deep intertwinement of composition and expression in the whole movement. The blissful melancholy of the end, where practically nothing is left.

In the slow movement the theme, almost as in Debussy, is a sequence of notes pared to the minimum. Impressionism does not admit the concept of the theme: accompaniment, background are paramount. Even this is realized, prototypically, in Beethoven, and thereby disposed of. Only the refrain-like, repeated, subjectively reflected theme stands out (dolce, that is, with expression), bottom of p. 37. Despite Berg’s scorn, I do not think Pfitzner’s interpretation – ‘How beautiful’ – stupid at all.²¹⁷ – The aimless, timeless, murmuring quality of the movement – also impressionistic,* for example, the return to the principal key on p. 39, the triple repeat of the bassoon motif on p. 42, then again, insatiably, on pp. 44, 45, the refrain theme (including the cadence) almost breaking in. – Of course, a more exact analysis would show how this movement is rendered symphonically dynamic, from the standpoint of expression, of the subject, which seems to become more and more immersed, lost, moved, drawing the music, the static element of the mood, with it. (NB: It is a basic feature of Beethoven that the force exerted by the developing symphonic objectification is always, as such, the subjective impulse. This is true not only in general for the production or reproduction of form, but specifically for the objective elements contributing to the development. Regarding Beethoven’s dialectical logic.) – The bird imitation has something mechanical about it, especially through the repetition – it is incomprehensible how he could cause such havoc within his own conception; here the mischief of the ‘concession’ already begins. At the same time, the fault is so innocently displayed that one is ashamed to criticize.

The Scherzo is, no doubt, the model for Bruckner’s scherzL NB: The sophisticated relationships of tonality. Trio in the principal key, or with B^b (mixolydian). – Only the coda redeems the modulatory ‘obligation’. – The scherzo itself has two unmediated elements, a form very unusual in Beethoven,²¹⁸ that is, the caricatured dance with the famous syncopation is practically as independent of the Scherzo itself as a trio, and is also in the same key. The movement is self-contained like a suite of three dances.

Even the programme of the Pastoral is spiritualized; it rises from naivety by way of self-alienation and reification (the humour of the third movement is aimed at convention, which is ‘wrong’) and an outburst of the elemental which sublates convention, to thanksgiving and humanity. Holidays as a phenomenology of mind. [243]²¹⁹

Pastoral, first movement. The repetition is not, as in Stravinsky, the outcome of a repetition compulsion, but, on the contrary, of relaxation, letting go. The bliss of dawdling. Dillydallying as Utopia.

The slow movement of the Pastoral: blithe regression – to amorph- ousness; thus without the malevolence of the destructive impulse. How is this possible?

In a grotto in Hellbrunn: hydraulically driven mechanical birds, with a cuckoo. Their last trace at the end of the slow movement of the Pastoral.

How is it possible that in Beethoven – even where antagonistic moments are simply absent, as in the closing movement of the Pastoral – symphonic tension is nevertheless created? Through the transition to the general. This happens, however, precisely through an act of subjective will [bars 32f]:

The Pastoral: the indescribably expansive effect of the organ-like passage in the coda of the last movement [bars 225ff|: not until the bottom C, sixth degree, but especially the chord of the ninth on F, very rare in Beethoven in this form. But – as often with outbursts in Beethoven – the passage becomes even more imposing in the retrospect of the diminuendo. In the Beethovenian form, the present creates the past.

On the Eighth Symphony: the retrospective, stylized, quoting aspect of the work has been noted; nor is its dignity in doubt. How do the two go together? In my view: the limitation, the invocation of the dix-huitième, is a means of making clear the pioneering, transcendent, ecstatic, frenzied aspect of the work (a sister-piece to the Seventh) all the more emphatically as a consequence of that very restrictedness. From the minuet-like first movement a giant arises – not in an absolute dimension (in Beethoven the immanence of style of the sonata is too deeply entrenched for that), but relatively: measured by what is enclosed, it seems gigantic. The centring on the finale after two genre-like but very enigmatic middle movements is very closely related to this. The analysis of the Eighth should be carried on along the lines of this dialectic. Cf. the note on coach and moonlight in the Larghetto of the Second [cf. fr. 330] – Jean Paul!!!

Further to my note on the Eighth Symphony [cf. fr. 249] I need to incorporate my experience of the Freischütz in Frankfurt in 1952.²²⁰ In the opera, the expression of the demonic succeeds magnificently whenever it irrupts into Biedermeier narrowness; the waltz, Kaspar’s indescribably splendid song of the vale of tears, Agatha’s aria, the bridal wreath. But when the music approaches the demonic without reference to the picture-book world of Biedermeier, as in Kaspar’s great aria, or when it touches on grace, as in the hermit scene, it is utterly uninspired, idling, an operatic cliché. This wisdom constitutes the idea of the Eighth Symphony – moreover, the finest moments in Beethoven never spring from the thing in itself, but always from a relationship. For the deepest reasons of construction, his dialectical image can never forgo the Biedermeier.

The gesture of standing firm is nowhere more grandiose than in the 12/8 section of the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony, where the fanfare of the full orchestra is answered, alone, by the first violins, but forte [bar 151]. The weak instruments stand up to the preponderant power, because fate has its limit in the human being, whose sound the violins are. The whole temper of Beethoven’s music resembles this sixth chord of the violins – and even the single Bk This is at the same time the metaphysics of the concerto form as practised by Beethoven, and perhaps as it always was.

The opening of the recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth was composed over and over again, on account of its transcendence. But it also represents the utter immanence of transcendence, which defeated Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. While expression is entirely foreign to it, the passage is a strict working-out of the original bars of the theme in the exposition – indeed, the transcendence itself is the full working-out of the origin. Music is reduced to its pure becoming: this causes it to pause. And even the new element in this passage was everywhere present already.

A standing firm in which²²¹ one apprehends fate directly. Stretching oneself is both the physical gesture of acceptance of fate, which one resembles, and a withdrawal from it. On waking up, we stretch our limbs. The gestie prehistory of Beethoven’s writing.

The theme of the Ninth is static; I have observed the touch of genius, the trick whereby, through the simple device of sequencing in the final two bars, it is, nevertheless, drawn into the dynamic flow. But Beethoven’s sense of form is so unerring that he makes up for this at the end of the first movement (homoeostasis!). It ends with the literal theme precisely at the point where it has really come to an end.

The accented chords used as a transition model in the first movement of op. 30,2 are, in principle, like a continuation of the main theme of the Ninth Symphony.

The entry of the recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth, with the chiaroscuro, is one of the passages in music most fertile in consequences. Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler. It is the greatest example of the harnessing of the Romantic moment to construction. In this regard:

1 The ‘extraterritorial’ aspect of the introduction is simultaneously preserved and abolished. Preserved in that the introduction is repeated, the theme being presented once more in statu nascendi. (NB:The static quality of the theme itself corresponds to its coming into being, even in the exposition: it is itself a result. ) The ‘colour’ of the hollow sound corresponds to that of Ft: firelight to wanness. What was introduction is now climax. In this way the Ff ‘fulfils’ the empty fifth in the most literal sense. What existed before the symphonic time becomes a standing still of symphonic time. One might almost say: the assumption is proved.

2 The F# becomes F on the weak part of the bar ([bar] 324); the A^b-A relationship reinforces (balances?) that of F#-F.

3 The counterpoint to the main theme 317 is taken from the closing section; from 320, from the continuation of the main theme of bar 25. In this way the ‘paradoxical’ problem of continuation posed at the earlier point is resolved differently (the paradox is unrepeatable): the tour de force of 21–3 now disappears beneath the impulse of the counterpoint of the basses, and through the repetition of the concluding part, which was the principal model of the development; once the recapitulation of 25 is reached in 329, it has, dynamically, the character of an response to the basses. This is underlined by the fact that the semiquaver triplet of that bass counterpoint is taken up by the violins, and imitatively by the woodwind.

4 In the interest of drawing everything in, of the triumph of immanent form, the music dispenses with the epic stanza form. The theme is dynamically expanded within itself, but begins only once: as this happens, the B^1, in the exposition, crucial to the second stanza, is, with a stroke of genius, itself made an element of the now continuous thematic complex. There is now ‘no stopping’, even while the theme pauses.

The vision, the transcendent aspect, is the moment in which immanence is apprehended as totality. The idea of the awed shudder.

(Ninth.) The entire recapitulation retains the first theme’s tendency towards imitative spinning out and ‘narrowing’. Consistency.

On the Ninth: the headlong quality after the long development before the entry of the recapitulation from [bar] 288 on: almost like the end of Hamlet. Time relationships no longer mechanical but determined by meaning. Very important.

How the gigantic complex of the first movement of the Ninth is really only there for the sake of the few bars at the start of the recapitulation, to show that immensity could not exist without the whole movement – that’s how it should be with all good prose. [257]²²²

In the first movement of the Ninth one is struck by the immense economy despite the huge dimensions.*

In the first movement of the Ninth there are signs of a ‘non-commit- tal’ style of instrumentation, dissolved into solo voices, which is quite new in Beethoven; these are found at the beginning of the development and in the great coda.

Perhaps the urge to make music speak – in the sense defined above [cf. Fr 68] – is the true reason for the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, the contradictoriness of this urge being the reason for the questionable aspects of that movement.

Critique: the problematic character of Beethoven’s polyphony can be shown, for example, in a passage at the start of the development of the Ninth Symphony, bar 180. It concerns the relations between voices, between the first violins and the solo bassoon. They enter in octaves; then a bassoon G converges on that of the violins; then the two voices lead off in contrary motion (octaval impurities also found, for example, in the canonic passage in the second subject of the Finale of op. 59,1).²²⁴ But one has to decide: either octave doubling, or independent voices. And yet, the matter is not so simple. For the ambiguous character of the passage, suspended between stasis and development, is emphasized precisely by the ‘impurity’ of the passage, that is, its technical indeterminacy. Beethovenian content is itself a function of technical inconsequen- tiality – and yet, objectively, this inconsistency remains. This whole dialectic needs to be unfolded if one is to state the truth about Beethoven. – The entry of the principal model (the second main section of the development, as often in Beethoven) in bar 219 has the character of a decision, an abrupt subjective shift. But this decision is not one of subjective expression, but is far more a resolve to look the objective in the face – ‘let’s face it’. It has the character of alienation – of a subjective, but violent, transition to objectivity. This is no doubt the decisive turning point in Beethoven’s dialectic.

The relationship of the symphony to dance may be defined as follows: if dance appeals to the bodily movements of human beings, the symphony is music which itself becomes a body. The symphony is the musical body – hence the specific nature of symphonic teleology, which does not lead to a ‘goal’: rather, by virtue of the symphonic process, music is revealed as a body. The symphony stirs ‘itself’; stands still, moves on, and the totality of its gestures is the intentionless representation of the body. A relationship to Kafka’s death machine in the Penal Colony. The corporeal nature of the symphony is its social aspect: it is the giant body, the collective physique of society in the dialectic of its moments. Study this in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. The music extends or ‘stretches’ itself, for example, in the unison semiquaver passage in the exposition [bars 15f and 49f]; it ‘rears up’, collapses; and all this is taken over and misrepresented by programme music, which makes music a representation of the body instead of the body itself.

That it is possible to see the Pastoral, but no later ‘symphonic poem’, as programme music, is very closely connected to this. As a body, the Pastoral is still capable of experience. This capability is already lost to Berlioz. If the closing section loses itself in a freewheeling suggestive of the motion of a coach, the symphonic body is able to feel this motion in itself. The music is drawn along in the coach. Honegger has to imitate the racket of a locomotive²²⁵ because the music is no longer able to apprehend the locomotive’s movement within itself.

The contrast between the intensive and the extensive type is perhaps the explanation of the famous duplexity of Beethoven’s works. The first movements of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are among the purest examples of the two types. The late style is the collision between these types. A prerequisite for understanding the very late Beethoven is therefore an awareness of their divergence. In other words: what did Beethoven miss in the integral works, the first movements of the Third, Fifth, Ninth, the ‘Appassionata’, the entire Seventh? This question takes us to the threshold of Beethoven’s secret. It asks what idealism left by the wayside in the triumphal advance of progress. Mahler’s whole work is an attempt to answer this question. The Pastoral is closest to him. On the question of a specifically symphonic quality – the existence of which Schoenberg is undoubtedly wrong in denying – there is a reference in Strauss to Berlioz’s theory of instrumentation, where he recommends a study of string polyphony in Beethoven’s quartets, as opposed to his symphonies, and where he touches on the crudeness of the string writing in the latter.²²⁶

The theme of the disruption of the idyll through its own self-transcendence recurs again and again. It will need to be interpreted as a question. The evidence, apart from that already noted:

The close of the Ferne Geliebte cycle (cf. early German Romantic painting, Friedrich and Runge).

On the theory of Beethoven and the symphony, Schelling’s concept of rhythm in the Philosophy of Art.²²⁷ [264]²²⁸

Text 2a: Beethoven’s Symphonies

Text 2b: Radio and the Destruction of Symphonic Form 229

Only a crudely realistic view of the work of art, which conceived it in terms of the familiar distinction between the lasting thing and its mere sensuous shadow, could regard the intrusion of radio reproduction into a symphony by Beethoven with indifference. As Paul Bekker was the first to emphasize, the form of a symphony was not that of a sonata for orchestra, which could be conveniently isolated as an abstract scheme.* Specific to this form was intensity and concentration. It was the outcome of a compact, concise, palpable urgency: the technique of motivic and thematic work. Economy of composition conceded nothing to chance, but deduced the whole from the smallest units in a virtual way – something which the serial technique now wishes to accomplish literally. Identical elements were not, however, repeated statically but were, to use the term invented by Schoenberg as the heir to the procedure, varied develop- mentally. From the basic material, the symphony spins out non- identical elements in time, just as it affirmatively discloses identity in a material which, in itself, is disparate and divergent. Structurally – as Georgiades, too, has stressed – one hears the first bar of a classical symphonic movement only when one hears the last, which redeems the former’s pledge. The illusion of pent-up time – so that movements like the first of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, or even the very extended one of the Eroica, when properly performed, seem to last not seven or fifteen minutes, but only a moment – is produced by that structure, no less than is the feeling of a compulsion which does not exclude the listener: symphonic authority as an immanent property of meaning, and finally of the listener’s absorption by the symphony, of the ritual reception of the individual within an evolving whole. The aesthetic integration of the symphonic structure is at the same time the pattern of a social integration. Bekker, since his treatise on the symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, has sought its essence in its ‘socio-genetic power’. This theory is undoubtedly wide of the mark in that music, once rationalized and planned in any way, is no longer an immediate sound, but is functionally adapted to social conditions. In general, art is able to posit no real social forms from within itself. Music has not so much been socio-genetic as it has elicited from individuals the ideology that they are linked, has strengthened their identification with it and therefore with each other. Rationalized, this was the disciplinary blessing which Plato and St Augustine already felt. The symphony celebrated the working, antagonistic bourgeois society as a unity of monads, for that society’s benefit. The school of Viennese classicism, almost simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution, integrated scattered individuals in the spirit of the age; from their totally socialized relationships a harmonious whole was meant to spring. Aesthetic appearance itself, the autonomy of the work, was at the same time a means within the realm of practical purposes. The totality of life actually reproduces itself through what is divided and in mutual contradiction. This truth authenticated aesthetic success; the deception lay in the individual’s absorption. This inspired exalted feelings. By so diligently enveloping both the musical detail and the individual listener, it drowned out the awareness of an unreconciled condition. That illusion is dispelled by the radio, which executes the revenge on great music immanent in its role as ideology. No-one listening to a symphony in the bourgeois-individual situation of a private residence can mistake himself as bodily enfolded within the community. To this extent the symphony’s destruction by the radio is also an unfolding of truth. The symphony is decomposed: what comes from the loudspeaker contradicts what it has itself been. The memory of a life maintaining itself however painfully within antagonism is replaced by a cast taken from it, in which the individual no longer recognizes either his own impulse or himself as emancipated. At most, it impresses him heteronomously, serving his need for power and glory and thus his consumer psychology. What was once a socially necessary illusion passes over into the individual’s socially controlled false consciousness of himself and of the whole, ideology as the pure lie.

This is manifested most obviously in the absolute dynamic of the symphony, sound volume. A chair-sized model of a cathedral is different to the original not only quantitatively but in terms of meaning: if the proportion to the body of the beholder is modified, that which gives the word cathedral its luminosity falls away. Similarly the synthetic power of a Beethoven symphony depends at least in part on the volume of the sound. Only if this is larger, as it were, than the individual is he able to reach the interior of the music through sound’s gateway. However, not only sound volume as such but the extent of the range from fortissimo to pianissimo contributes to the plasticity of the symphonic sound, which constitutes its meaning: the narrower this range, the more precarious the plasticity, and thus the experience supporting the symphonic space. No technical progress can obliterate the loss of all this on the radio. The listening conditions in a private room would not tolerate a sound which, like that in the concert hall, is larger than the individual. Anyone who wanted to experience such a sound with works whose qualities presuppose the categories of a giant orchestra, such as Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, would need to travel far from habitation in a car fitted with loudspeakers, in order to achieve something similar, and even then it would probably be distorted. Admittedly, if the radio receiver does not respect the acoustic and social conditions of listening, if it persists in emitting the original dynamics in a private room, then it does still break through the neutralization even today. But in that case the phenomenon is immediately transformed into a wild protest, a barbaric uproar. Not only does it crassly contradict the existing situation and impel agitated neighbours towards the telephone, but it is as alien to the original as, on the other hand, its original form is to a house plant. No way out of neutralization. Even with stereophonic sound it is hard to restore music’s spatially encompassing function. What is left of the symphony is a chamber symphony, as if the world spirit had taken special care to ensure that the chamber symphony, and the chamber orchestra in general, should have evolved in precisely the age of mechanical reproduction. The modifications to the radio symphony at the sensuous level are a mortal threat to its structure also.

The classicist type of the symphony from Beethoven’s middle period has given rise to an idealized image of creation out of nothing. This comes into being only to the extent that the initial motif which, as a derivative of the triad, is largely stripped of qualities, is at the same time played with such emphasis that, although in itself quite insignificant, it takes on an aspect of utmost relevance to what is to follow from it. The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, properly performed, must be rendered with the character of a thesis, as if they were a free act over which no material has precedence. Technically, this requires extreme dynamic intensity: loudness, here, is no mere sensuous attribute; it is the condition of something spiritual, of structural meaning. Unless the nothing of the first bars is realized at once as the everything of the whole movement, the music has bypassed the movement’s idea before it has properly started. The composition is reduced to inconsequentiality, no tension is accumulated. But the less the listeners – especially those bombastically invited into music culture by the radio – know about the unmutil- ated work, the more exclusively they are exposed to the radio’s voice, the more obliviously and powerlessly they succumb to the effect of neutralization. What had been memory’s benign support becomes its foe, memory-less perception. The structure of the radio symphony is polarized into contradictory elements, the banal and the Romantic – elements which then coalesce in the light music towards which the radio symphony tends. The primal cells in Beethoven are nothing in themselves, mere concentrates of the tonal idiom to which only the symphony lends voice. Torn from its context, their artful irrelevance becomes the commonplace which, as the initial motif of the Fifth, was to be exploited up to the hilt by international patriotism. Moving intensifications or melodically distinctive second ideas become emotional templates or portentously beautiful passages. The intensive totality of the symphony deflates, to become a chronological sequence of episodes. No doubt, symphonic intensity can never be quite eradicated, nor transcendence towards the whole entirely expunged from the individual detail. But they are poisoned. The remnants appear like ruins of an absent or obliterated context. In other words: like quotations. For this reason, only the pictorial aspect of the music remains. Not Beethoven’s Fifth is heard, but a potpourri of its alleged melodies – at best, musical information on the music, not unlike that of which a visitor to a performance of William Tell complained, finding the whole drama reduced to a compilation of apothegms. Yet the Romanticization of as essentially un-Romantic a music as Beethoven’s, its translation into a kind of musical popular biography,* plays fast and loose with the very aura which the usual radio transmission of traditional music presumes to safeguard. The exceptional state which music represented up to the dawn of the technological age is levelled down by overstrained glamour to the prose of the barren everyday condition. What is overthrown is the idea of the festive, which Georgiades, in his work on Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, described as essential to Viennese classicism. Perhaps, even in its hour, it was already a subjective performance intended to rescue something objectively vanishing.

[…] No symphony of Beethoven is immune to its depravation. This, however, is to say nothing less than that the works themselves are not self-sufficient, are not indifferent towards the time. Only because they transform themselves historically, unfold and wither in time; because their own truth content is historical and not a pure essence, are they so susceptible to that which is allegedly inflicted on them from outside. This verifies what is taking place within them, the advance of muteness. The phenomena of radio are an index of the general tendency, of the decline of the traditional works themselves and of the approved musical culture. Only as ghosts can the dissociated works survive their downfall.

* [In margin:] What is magnificent in the theme is the distribution of stresses.

* [In margin:] Like impressionism, the movement combines a dynamic looseness with an aimlessly static quality.

* [Below the line:] (Deliberately spare in form, unlike op. 106 or the first movement of the B images

major Quartet [op. 130], for example.)

* Cf. Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler, Berlin 1918, pp. 8f.

* Cf. T.W. Adorno, ‘Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’, in Dissonanzen, Göttingen 1958, pp. 9ff [now GS 14, pp. 14ff].

EIGHT

VERS UNE ANALYSE DES SYMPHONIES

Text 2a: Beethoven’s Symphonies

Text 2b: Radio and the Destruction of Symphonic Form 229

EIGHT

VERS UNE ANALYSE DES SYMPHONIES

Text 2a: Beethoven’s Symphonies

Text 2b: Radio and the Destruction of Symphonic Form229

Text 2b: Radio and the Destruction of Symphonic Form 229