Example 14
The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a rule, these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to lack sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling them. They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art,230 showing more traces of history than of growth. The accepted explanation is that they are products of a subjectivity or, still better, of a ‘personality’ ruthlessly proclaiming itself, which breaks through the roundedness of form for the sake of expression, exchanging harmony for the dissonance of its sorrow and spurning sensuous charm under the dictates of the imperiously emancipated mind. The late work is thereby relegated to the margins of art and brought closer to documentation. Accordingly, references to Beethoven’s biography and fate are seldom absent from discussions of his last works. It is as if, in face of the dignity of human death, art theory wanted to forfeit its rights and abdicate before reality.
This alone can explain the fact that the inadequacy of such a viewpoint has hardly evër been seriously argued – an inadequacy which emerges as soon as attention is focused on the works themselves rather than on their psychological origin. For the task is to perceive their formal law, provided one is unwilling to cross over into the field of documentation – where, to be sure, any recorded conversation of Beethoven carries more weight than the C# minor String Quartet. However, the formal law of the late works is such that they cannot be subsumed under the heading of ‘expression’. The late Beethoven produced some extremely ‘expression-less’, dispassionate compositions; for this reason critics are as fond of deducing a new, polyphonically objective construction from his style as they are of invoking the ruthless subjective personality. His inner turmoil is not always associated with a resolve to die or with demonic humour, but is often simply enigmatic, discernible in pieces which have a serene, even idyllic tone. The unsensuous mind does not shun expression marks such as ‘Cantabile e compiacevole’ or ‘Andante amabile\ In no way is his attitude straightforwardly covered by the cliché of ‘subjectivism’. For originally, in Beethoven’s music as a whole, the effect of subjectivity, fully in line with Kant’s conception, was not so much to disintegrate form as to produce it. The ‘Appassionata’ can stand as an example: though certainly denser, more closed in structure and more ‘harmonious’ than the last quartets, it is to the same degree more subjective, autonomous and spontaneous. Nevertheless, these last works take precedence over it by virtue of their enigma. In what does this consist?
Only a technical study of the works in question could help towards a revision of the accepted view of the late style. This study would concentrate first on a peculiarity which is studiously ignored by the current view: the role of conventions. Their contribution is well known in the works of the old Goethe and the old Stifter; but it is no less to be found in Beethoven, the alleged representative of a radically personal stance. This points up the question still further. For to tolerate no conventions, and to recast the unavoidable ones in keeping with the urge of expression, is the first demand of every ‘subjectivist’ procedure. In this way the middle Beethoven absorbed the traditional trappings into his subjective dynamic by forming latent middle voices, by rhythm, tension or whatever other means, transforming them in keeping with his intention. Or – as in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony – he even developed them from the thematic substance itself, wresting them from convention through the uniqueness of that substance. Quite different in the late Beethoven. Everywhere in his idiom, even where it uses a syntax as singular as that of the five last piano sonatas, conventional formulae and phraseology are inserted. They are full of decorative trills, cadences and fiorituras. The convention is often made visible in unconcealed, untransformed bareness: the first theme of the Piano Sonata op. 110 has an ingenuously simple semiquaver accompaniment which the middle style would hardly have tolerated. The last of the Bagatelles has introductory and closing bars like the distressed prelude to an aria in an opera – all this in the midst of the hardest rock strata of the multivocal landscape, or the most restrained impulses of a secluded lyricism. No interpretation of Beethoven, and probably of any late style, would be adequate if it were able to provide only a psychological motivation for the disintegration of convention, without regard to the actual phenomena. For the content of art always lies only in phenomena. The relationship between conventions and subjectivity must be understood as the formal law from which the content of the late works springs, if these are really to represent something more than touching relics.
This formal law is manifest, however, precisely in reflection on death. If the legitimacy of art is abolished before death’s reality, then death can certainly not be assimilated by the work of art as its ‘subject’. It is imposed on creatures alone, and not on their constructions, and thus has always appeared in art in a refracted form: as allegory. Psychological interpretation fails to recognize this. By declaring mortal subjectivity the substance of the late work, it hopes to gain awareness of death directly in the work of art: this remains the deceptive summit of its metaphysics. To be sure, it perceives the disruptive force of subjectivity in the late work of art. But it looks in the opposite direction to that in which this force is acting; it looks for it in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this, as something mortal, and in the name of death, vanishes from the work of art in reality. The force of subjectivity in late works is the irascible gesture with which it leaves them. It bursts them asunder, not in order to express itself but, expressionlessly, to cast off the illusion of art. Of the works it leaves only fragments behind, communicating itself, as if in ciphers, only through the spaces it has violently vacated. Touched by death, the masterly hand sets free the matter it previously formed. The fissures and rifts within it, bearing witness to the ego’s finite impotence before Being, are its last work. Hence the surplus of material in the second part of Faust and in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years; hence the conventions no longer imbued and mastered by subjectivity, but left standing. As subjectivity breaks away from the work, they are split off. As splinters, derelict and abandoned, they finally themselves become expression; expression no longer of the isolated ego but of the mythical nature of the creature and its fall, the stages of which the late works mark out symbolically, as if in moments of pausing.
In this way, in late Beethoven, the conventions become expression in the naked depiction of themselves. This is assisted by the often- noted abbreviation of his style, which aims not so much to purify the musical language of its empty phrases, as to liberate these phrases from the illusion of subjective control: the emancipated phrase, released from the dynamic flow, speaks for itself. It does so, however, only for the moment when subjectivity, escaping, passes through it and harshly illuminates it with its intentions. Hence the crescendi and diminuendi which, seemingly independent of the musical construction, often shake this construction to its foundations in Beethoven’s last works.
He no longer draws together the landscape, now deserted and alienated, into an image. He illuminates it with the fire ignited by subjectivity as it strikes the walls of the work in breaking free, true to the idea of its dynamic. His late work still remains a process, but not as a development; its process is an ignition between extremes which no longer tolerate a safe mean or a spontaneous harmony. Extremes in the strictest technical sense: on the one hand, the unison of the empty phrases not endowed with meaning; on the other, polyphony, rising unmediated above that unison. It is subjectivity which forces together the extremes within the moment, charging the compressed polyphony with its tensions, disintegrating and escaping it in the unison, leaving behind the naked note. The empty phrase is set in place as a monument to what has been – a monument in which subjectivity is petrified. The caesurae, however, the abrupt stops which characterize the latest Beethoven more than any other feature, are those moments of breaking free; the work falls silent as it is deserted, turning its hollowness outwards. Only then is the next fragment added, ordered to its place by escaping subjectivity and colluding for better or worse with what has gone before; for a secret is shared between them, and can be exorcized only by the figure they form together. This illuminates the contradiction whereby the very late Beethoven is called both subjective and objective. The fragmented landscape is objective, while the light in which alone it glows is subjective. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As a dissociative force he tears them apart in time, perhaps in order to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.231
From Moments musicaux (GS 17, pp. 13ff) – written in 1934
After practising the Piano Sonata, op. 101. – Is the first movement the model for the prelude to Tristan? Quite different in tone, as if the (incomparably condensed) sonata form had become a lyric poem, entirely subjectivized, spiritualized, stripped of the tectonic. And yet, not only on account of the quavers and 6/8 rhythm, but because of the structural importance of the chromatic (derived from the alternating dominant in bar 1) and an element which is difficult to grasp – sequences of longing – especially in the development after the Ft minor entry [bar 41]. – The second movement exactly shares the character (and tempo!) of the introduction to the finale of the A minor Quartet [op. 132; fourth movement: Alia marcia, assai vivace]. The extraordinary, Schoenbergian passage up to the breaking off over Db [cf. bars 19–30] (extremely difficult to perform and very enigmatic). The equally curious canonic trio in two voices. Take this in a very agitated manner to generate meaning, and under no circumstances more slowly – despite the enticement to do so. Take the adagio introduction in quavers. A tension with the finale as in the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, only more inward, meditative, prefiguring the slow movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. – The literary quality of the reminiscence of the first movement, not inherent in the form but ‘poetic’, like the quotation in the introduction to the finale of the Ninth Symphony. – The Finale is the prototype of the late style, a kind of primal phenomenon. It has:
A tendency to polyphony (exposition throughout in double counterpoint, preparation for the fugue).
A bare quality. Two-part structure in octaves. The simple chords (derived from the first theme) leading to the theme of the closing section.
The popular-song banality of this theme itself, which at the same time is split up by changes of register. It is as if Viennese classicism, combined from the ‘learned’ and the ‘gallant’, were polarized again into its elements: the spiritualized counterpoint and the unsublimated, ««assimilated ‘folksiness’.
An extraordinary art, whereby the development does not seem like a textbook fugue (NB: the irregular responses to the theme: A, C, D, A) while remaining within the form.
The coda is especially interesting. When the middle section of the first theme, omitted from the recapitulation, appears in it [bars 325ff], it has the effect of something long past, forgotten, entirely remote from the present, and therefore infinitely touching – in rather the same way as the ‘Ach neige’ speech in the closing scene of Faust.232 Such shifts of the musical present did not exist before Beethoven. Wagner then marshalled such effects theatrically in the ‘Ring’, above all in the Götterdämmerung.
The immense accumulation of force before the entry of the recapitulation (similar to that in the first movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata), which takes on a sombre, threatening quality.
The close [bars 350ff] with the bottom D [properly: bottom E], a kind of metaphysical bagpipe effect.
The whole sonata eminently Hegelian. The first movement the subject, the second ‘alienated’ (at once objective and stricken), the third – were one not ashamed to write it down – the synthesis, sprung from the force of an objectivity which, in the process, proves identical to the subject, the lyrical core. [265]233
An attempt to understand melody formation in the late Beethoven, from the Adagio of the fHammerklavier’ Sonata.
[266]
On melody formation, and so on, in very late Beethoven (op. 106)
[267]
Unsociably, the very late Beethoven makes no concessions to domestic music-making. Faced with the last quartets the amateur violinist is completely out of his depth, as is the amateur pianist confronted by the five late sonatas and the Diabelli Variations. To play these pieces and even, for that matter, to listen to them is beyond such players. No easy path leads into that petrified landscape. But when Beethoven made the stone speak by carving figures in it with his chisel, the splinters flew under the terrible impact. And as the geologist can discover the true composition of whole strata from tiny, scattered particles of matter, the splinters bear witness to the landscape from which they come: the crystals are the same. Beethoven himself called them bagatelles. Not only are they splinters and documents of the mightiest productive process in music, but their strange brevity reveals at the same time the curious contraction, and the tendency towards the inorganic, which give access to the innermost secret not only of the late Beethoven but perhaps of every great late style. Although generally accessible in collections of Beethoven’s ‘piano pieces’, they are not remotely as well known as the sonatas – as if, in their atmosphere, breathing were difficult. But they reward the laboured breath with immense perspectives for the eye. Pianists should be encouraged to play the second late cycle of bagatelles,237 the pianistic demands of which are perfectly manageable, provided the musical exigencies are also mastered.
The first piece follows the schema of the three-part Lied form. A song-like melody, with independent counterparts from the outset, set out over eight bars and repeated with more richness of movement: the middle theme opens very matter-of-factly in the dominant key. A giant hand seems to thrust itself into the peaceful structure. A motif from the fourth bar of the middle theme is taken up, the rhythm being modified according to its law, and is split into ever smaller values. Suddenly it is no more than a cadence: the giant has only been playing, and the recapitulation begins with the final part of the cadence: the theme in the bass, the upper voice formed from the close of the cadence. Then, in a widening counterpoint, the theme appears in the upper part, cadencing to G major: the recapitulation shortened to eight bars. The coda, formed from an inversion of a motif from the middle theme, entirely polyphonic, with very harsh friction between seconds: the voices move apart, giving a view of the abyss between them. At the end the timid, late peace of the first part. – The form of the second piece is highly peculiar: it has no reprise or repetition of the beginning. An opening with a univocal, prelude-like semiquaver motion; flowing melodic quavers in contrast to it, both repeated. At the third entry an fp in the bass holds back the movement; then the quavers, in extreme registers, suddenly take on a mysterious expression; cadence and trenchant semicadence. The closing motif leads into a cantabile middle section, which is repeated irregularly and broken off. As in the first piece, a caesura instead of mediation: the opening motif appears at yawning intervals, is compressed, modulated to G minor. Tempestuous movement: unprepared sforzato suspensions threaten the G minor with an apparent Ft minor, then C minor with Db major. A new melodic motif in crotchets detaches itself from the semiquaver motion and, accompanied by triplets, grows more distinct and then self-sufficient: a quotation from the first movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. It ends with the closing motif of the exposition section. This is taken up, modified polyphonically, a dynamic tremor running through it, then goes out like a light. – The third piece is a very simple, three- part song composed in ‘harmonic polyphony’. The first part is repeated, the second opens into a small cadenza. The recapitulation contains the opening section and its repetition in figurative variations. Coda from the closing rhythm of the exposition, maintaining a demisemiquaver motion; the four closing bars formed from the opening notes of the melody. – The fourth piece, presto, very closely related in its motifs to a variation from the Sonata op. 109, its tone pointing clearly towards the last string quartets, is the most important of the cycle. The harshest contrast between polyphony (double counterpoint and stretto ) and bare, almost monodie simplicity. A tensely polyphonic opening; a response in octaves with wild accents. The middle theme begins with the double counterpoint of the beginning, dissolving lightly into quavers; then, with octaves, the repeated F# of the opening intervenes roughly. A new beginning: again the F#. Then a drawing together in the stretto, followed by the main theme over an accompaniment of undisguised crotchet chords, leading directly to the repetition of the first part. The octaves at the close widen and form cadences. The trio: B major, over a bagpipe accompaniment of almost unprecedented crudity a no less simple theme; but this is a deceptive, horrifying simplicity which grows over-distinct in the harsh light of a crescendo and a diminuendo imposed from outside, as a country road shows the ruts and ridges on its surface in the oblique light of nightfall. Then, in solemn semibreves, one of the main motifs of the last string quartets is invoked: minor ninth chord as the most strident dissonance and again the terrible Pastoral. Faithful repetition of the Scherzo, extended by four bars: caesura. The whole trio once more; but after the caesura, as repetition, nothing but phantasmagoria. Close in the major. – Balanced mastery without terrors in the fifth piece. Tender, lyrical polyphony as in the second movement of the C f minor Quartet; the middle section very flowing – with a middle voice producing a glorious dissonance; in it, however, as always in Beethoven’s lyrical passages, latent symphonic energies, set free by a large, spread-out crescendo. The closing motif creates a relationship to the first part; its recapitulation is much shortened. – The last piece begins and ends with six presto bars which – with certain passages from the variations of the C f minor Quartet – are among the strangest and most enigmatic left behind by the late Beethoven: for the explanation that they are an ‘instrumental gesture’ cannot satisfy in the case of a master. All that will be said here is that the riddle lies in their conventionality. The piece itself is, again, lyrical in nature, its tone recalling the Feme Geliebte cycle. The first theme haltingly composed of motif fragments; then, modulating, a denser melodic fabric, with the fine point of an ornamental triplet motif at the end of the exposition. The middle section is derived from this, and the reprise underpins the triplets as accompaniment. It is extended by six ‘free’ bars; its second part turns back towards the main key. The coda, like the middle section, takes up the triplet motif and develops it in that the motif takes possession of all voices. Once more, almost like a rondo, the halting main theme. Then the presto bars break through the lyrical shell. From his mighty hands the master sheds some scraps. His form itself tends towards the fragment.
(GS 18, pp. 185ff) – written in 1934
The piano and orchestral works form a unity in relation to the chamber music.
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On the first movement of the A minor String Quartet [op. 132]. Extraordinary treatment of the form and its harmonic correlates. The development is hinted at. Its first part corresponds to the main theme, with elements of the introduction. The second intonation, after the general pause, begins (viola + cello in octaves) [bars 92ff] with a model derived from the main theme, which one expects to be elaborated. This, however, does not happen; instead, it closes like the first, followed by play with the introduction and first theme, transition to the reprise. Through anticipation of the theme even before the cadenza, but above all because it takes place in the dominant, not the main key, the development has a non-committal quality, although by and large it proceeds quite regularly. The latent modulatory tension and the indefiniteness of the development affect the coda, seventy bars long. Only here is the principal key restored. But as it must, after all, close, it does so as a second reprise, which abbreviates the three main figures but presents them once more in their original sequence and only then (on the re-entry of the theme over the sustained F of the cello [bar 195]) turns into the coda proper, which only now, becoming intensified, definitively develops the theme. All this is formed with unimaginable mastery of the irregular. – The introduction is drawn right into the movement, but not in the manner of a quotation; instead (with the long chorale notes and the interval of a second), it provides the cement which imperceptibly, as if it were the material itself, holds the movement together (much as does the motif in Tristan pointed out by Lorenz238).
On the late style: the first entry of the main theme in the cello [bar 11] is ‘extraterritorial’, a ‘motto’; only then, on the first violin, is it ‘in’ the piece [bar 13], while at the same time being concealed through appearing as a mere continuation of the recitative melody, not as an entry (cf. the tendency of the late Beethoven to avoid the tonic on I!). – The empty octaves of the second violin and the cello in the repetition of the theme [bar 23]. – The broken accompaniment of the first violin to the second subject group on the second [bars 49f]. The music has a shattered quality, added to which is the almost Chinese effect of the analogous passage in the reprise [bars 227ff], where the second subject group begins on the cello, the first violin follows in a seemingly imitative way, but after only three notes turns into a mere duplication of the cello, as if for Beethoven the cleverness of imitation were too stupid, as if he were ashamed of diversity where in truth there is only one thing (see note on the conceptual aspect of the late Beethoven [cf. fr. 27]). – The expression of the chromatic continuation of the second subject group, its ailing quality, at the same time lyrical and empty. – The bare two-part structure in the second intonation of the development. – The analysis of the movement leads me to the technical explanation of the bareness of the late Beethoven, from which the philosophical interpretation must follow. The so-called thematic work, which Beethoven had established, for example, in op. 18, is usually a dividing up and rupturing of something unified – of a melody. Not genuine polyphony, but the appearance of it within harmonic-homophonic composition. To the late Beethoven this seems uneconomical, superfluous. Where there is only one thing, where the essence is a melody, only one should appear, at the expense of harmonic balance. The late Beethoven is the first great rebellion of music against the ornamental, that which is not necessitated purely by the matter itself. He presents, as it were, the essence always intended by diaphonie work, as a phenomenon. No ‘beating about the bush’. In this way, through the assertion of the concept proper to the music itself, the ‘classical’ element, fullness, roundness, closedness, are lost. The late style, the splitting up into monody and polyphony, is inherent in the classical Beethoven. To be purely the matter itself, to be ‘classical’ without adjuncts, classicity burst into fragments. This is one of the decisive tenets of my interpretation. [269]239
NB: Last movement of A minor String Quartet not late Beethoven. Derived from sketches for the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies.
[270]
The striking divergence between the style of the late string quartets and the finale of the A minor String Quartet seems to me to be explained by the fact that the theme belonged to the complex of the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies and that Beethoven consciously exempted the symphonic style from the criticism represented by the late style. In this sense Bekker’s remark about the ‘backward-look- ing character’ of the Ninth (Beethoven, Beethoven, p. 271) is justified. Bekker also sees the epic character of the Ninth (ibid., p. 280).240
[271]
In late Beethoven the ‘harmonic rhythm’ (‘Piston’) is disrupted, that is, the harmonic stresses are largely separated from the rhythmical. This does not involve a displaced, syncopated use of rhythm as in Brahms (who took over elements, for example, from the slow movement of op. 103, from the late Beethoven, while softening them into something ‘organic’), but an intended rupture: the accents go largely with the metre, the harmonies against it. An aversion to the tonic on I. This is initiated in the late middle style and is one of the most important phenomena in the fracturing of tonality.
[272]
Regarding the separation241 of rhythmical and harmonic accents in the late style: in the trio of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata harmonic cadences are avoided, the whole harmonic element being in suspension (much III degree as six-four chords), while the metrical-melodic processes suggest cadences. A deliberate paraphrasing fracture. Moreover: the direct taking over of the repeated flat from the scherzo at the start of the trio; it becomes a kind of refrain. A similar procedure in the Prestissimo of op. 109.
[273]
The importance of the wide register in late Beethoven.
[274]
In op. 111 there are ‘basic shapes’. The following motifs are very closely related: GCBbB [1st movement, bars 19f], G C B C F Bb C [ibid., bars 36f] and the Ab major motif of the second subject group [ibid., bars 50ff]. Everywhere triads and second neighbour notes, but ‘rotated’. (Also the close [of the exposition; ibid., bars 64f].)
Example 14
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NB: On octaves in late Beethoven. The dragging passages in Beethoven, like the closing section of the first movement of the great B1, major String Quartet [op. 130, 1st movement, bars 183ff], passages in the developments of opp. 101 and 111. What do they mean? Link with Beethoven’s shadow. Even in early works, for example, the coda of the Finale of the D major Piano Sonata from op. 10 [bars 94ff]. (NB: These have a character of continuation, not statement.)
[276]
Example 15
The principle of syncopation and accentuation in middle Beethoven is heightened in the late work to the point where torrents rush through convention.
[277]
In late Beethoven, a kind of theme which might seem folkloristic and which I should most like to compare to verse sayings from fairytales, such as ‘Knusper, knusper Knäuschen, wer knuspert an mei’m Häuschen’ [Nibble, nibble mousey, who’s nibbling at my housey]. An example from the scherzo of the String Quartet in Cf minor [op. 131; bars 141–4 and so on.]242
Example 16
and especially in the last movement of the F major String Quartet [op. 135]. These passages all have something of the ogre about them.
[278]
The moment of distress in late Beethoven, for example, in the second movement of op. 130 after the trio. – Also, the gruff humour as a means of transcending form, of ‘smashing things up’. The ogre.
[279]
The stereotypes in late Beethoven are in the vein of ‘My grandfather used to say’.
[280]
Of relevance to certain themes of late Beethoven is his (canonic) dictum of 1825: ‘Doktor sperrt das Tor dem Tod. Note hilft auch aus der Not’ [Doctors keep our death at bay. Music too keeps woe away]’ (Thomas-San-Galli, Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 402).
[281]
A theory of the very late Beethoven must start from the decisive boundary dividing it from the earlier work – the fact that in it nothing is immediate, everything is refracted, significant, withdrawn from appearance and in a sense antithetical to it (my essay in Der Auftakt243). What is mediated is not necessarily expression, although expression if of utmost importance in late Beethoven. The real problem is to resolve this allegorical element. This complex precedes all technical and stylistic questions, which have to be determined and solved with reference to it. Late Beethoven is at the same time enigmatic and extremely obvious. – The boundary is doubtless marked by the Piano Sonata op. 101, a work of the highest, of inexhaustible beauty.
[282]
The rendering indifferent of the material, the stepping back from appearance which characterizes the late style244 applies much earlier to the chamber music – and only to it. The String Quartets op. 18, which, incidentally, were probably intended as a companion-piece to the six dedicated to Haydn by Mozart, which acted as a kind of pattern and masterpiece (cf. letter to Amenda), are already ‘much better quartet-writing’,245 more suited to each instrument, with themes more split between voices, than op. 59, which still belongs entirely to the classical Beethoven; they often have an angular, unpolished element running counter to sensuous balance (No. 3 is a virtuoso piece for quartet ensemble rather than a quartet). This observation supplements my comment that the Ninth Symphony is excluded from the late style [cf. fr. 223]. A strict separation of categories in Beethoven, contrary to Schoenberg’s opinion.
[283]
To understand the late style, see what the late Beethoven found superfluous in his earlier work, for example, by comparing op. 18 with the last string quartets. Not only do the empty phrases disappear, but even categories such as durchbrochene Arbeit [phrases fragmented between different instruments] take on, under the saturnine gaze, an ornamental, superfluous aspect and are eliminated. The unfolding of essence makes essence itself inessential. Very important. NB: A turning away from bustle. ‘Accomplishment’ as vanity.
[284]
In late Beethoven there is no longer any ‘fabric’. Instead of durchbrochene Arbeit there is frequently a mere division of the melody, for example, in the first movement of op. 135. At the very place once occupied by dynamic totality, there is now fragmentation.
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