Program note on Beethoven 5

            Beethoven wrote big pieces. Bigger than people had generally written up to that time. Bigger in the sense of being both louder and longer. And since this was a new venture, he had to experiment, inventing for himself new ways of making it work. The problem was essentially that of making large-scale musical structures that don’t collapse; that feel like a large span. Simply going on for a long time before you stop is no solution, as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book shows. Endless exquisite details are unlikely to generate a sustained drama. If you listen to a country music station or spend an evening in a jazz club, there will be a lot of music, and it will go on for a long time. But there won’t be that sense of a single thing being said; of a coördinated  argument being unfolded, of the sort that you do indeed get from a Shakespeare play, or from walking around a vast Gothic Cathedral; a palace like Versailles, or immersing yourself in an epic poem like Paradise Lost.

            And it was by no means obvious how such a sense of scale and integration could be achieved in music. Affecting though it is, music is entirely abstract. “The Language of Music” is an often heard phrase, but it is only an analogy, since music is not a language, for the simple reason that it does not refer to anything outside itself, except by contrived association. There are words in English, French, and Japanese for ‘window’, but there is no musical sound that means ‘window’ or ‘eating’ or ‘tax evasion.’ Thus music does not have access to the usual method by which art aspires to grandeur: - by close reference to something else, something which has grandeur intrinsically.

            When Shakespeare writes a five-act tragedy, the shape of the play derives from the shape of the narrative, which derives from the multitude and complexity of the events involved. Until the story is over, the play is not over, and we perceive it as not yet over. The masonry of a cathedral takes its scale from the huge, and functional, ground plan. The roof, as it were, cannot stop until it reaches the other wall. A vast canvas of a panoramic landscape uses the necessary features and proportions of such a landscape to justify and specify the size of the painting.

            But music has no easy way to drape itself over something already huge, thereby inheriting the shape of that already big thing.

            In human history, the emergence of language was the key to creating large-scale artistic and intellectual artifacts, such as the Odyssey, the Bible, the Aeneid, King Lear, Summa Theologica, The Upanishads, Harry Potter, David Copperfield. Music has always been associated with language, of course, in the form of songs, theatrical interweavings of representation and sentiment, ceremonial structures like weddings and coronations and football matches, and, of course, opera.

            But until about the time of Mozart (I offer no scholastic precision), the manner of extended music was essentially that of a chain. More could be added, and parts could be removed, without doing violence to the nature of the music. Handel’s Messiah for instance, is a chain of items from which excerpts can be lifted, and of which incomplete performances can be offered quite satisfactorily. Even the operas of Mozart have this chain procedure in their construction.

            But Beethoven was trying to find a way to make music intrinsically big, to write music that was in no way trivial, which could not be easily excerpted, and which could therefore accomplish grand statements of matters proper to music.

            His chief method of doing this was to move away from the chain way of building a piece, towards a container method, built chiefly on the so-called sonata form. A Bach fugue is a chain. The melody keeps reappearing in different guises, an unspecified number of time, until it stops. There’s a little more to it than that, but my description is not, strictly speaking, untrue. Beethoven worked more architecturally, writing pieces analogous to Greek Vases; the overall shape remains the same, no matter the size and complexity of the design and the details. This difference  gives us a new attitude to our orientation in time as taken up by a piece of music. A chain-fugue is experienced like an unplanned day, in which we don’t get a grasp on what will happen until it is over. With a Greek Vase, the object is, in effect, a map of itself, in which the base and the body and the handles and the opening are all in place and recognizable at a glance, so that, as you approach the details, you always have that holistic knowledge of how the parts relate to the whole.

            Thus it is that the huge first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony can be mapped, moment by moment, onto to the two-minute overture to The Marriage of Figaro. In spite of the huge difference in scale, the components have the same function, and appear in the same order.

            Scholars often assure us that audiences in Beethoven’s day were more familiar with the structural principles of sonata form that we are today, but I very much doubt it. In any case, Beethoven doesn’t rely on our knowledge of what ought to happen next to make his music work. If that was all it took, then huge musical constructions would already have been commonplace. The challenge was to fill his container-form in such a way that the progress of the music feels utterly convincing psychologically and emotionally, without any regard for technical knowledge. The Art that conceals Art.

            To accomplish that, Beethoven had to figure out how we hear musical sounds and textures, and more importantly, how we react to them in terms of emotion and appetite. What seems satisfying and what frustrating - what we relish and what fills us with expectation - how to avoid the boredom of note-fatigue (playing the same notes too often) and the disorientation that follows fragmentation (losing track of music that has too much variety), - and, above all, how to keep us all controllably, exquisitely, dissatisfied, by making us think we know what’s going to happen, and then making sure that it doesn’t quite, - until eventually, in a far distant corner of the landscape, Beethoven takes pity on us and sates our unmet appetites.

            One of the the specific workshop problems, one that bedeviled Brahms and Bruckner and Dvorak, and which still has not been conclusively solved, is the “Finale Problem” This is a craftsman’s concern rather than an audience matter. It’s a geek problem. Like designing an effective differential drive for an all-wheel drive vehicle, it’s fascinating for the geeks, not a big issue for the consumer. But, of course, it has a big effect on the way the vehicle handles.

            This is the “Finale Problem”. When you have a piece like a symphony, in several movement, how do you make the last movement, the finale, sound like a convincing final movement, as opposed to just a convincing next movement. As already discussed, in a play or a novel or an epic, the end feels like the end when the story is complete, when Hamlet and almost everyone else is dead. Finality is achieved by external reference.

            In Haydn and Mozart’s day, the usual way to end a symphony was with a piece of lighthearted froth for the first fiddles. The serious meat had been at the beginning, and then you are offered a light dessert at the end. This works fine socially, in engineering the concert as an event, but only by abandoning the initial musical purpose, rather than sustaining it. Indeed, this is a form of external reference, sending out big hints that a concert is about to end, no matter what the music heard earlier was like.

            Beethoven was looking for something more internal for his music, less of a pandering to human fatigue and impatience, more of a cosmic resolution. And the series of nine symphonies enables us to peak over his shoulder and see what he was up to in his workshop - what hypotheses he tried out, what different techniques he experimented with, until finally, astonishingly, in his 9th symphony, he throws in the towel and concludes that it is an impossible quest, and that the only way music can reach further than he has already gone is indeed to turn back to words, to shackle the power of words to put ideas into our heads while we listen to the music. To re-enlist external references. The opening words of the 9th symphony state this position quite explicitly: “Music isn’t cutting it. I need words.” or something to that effect. This is quite a capitulation, a confession, that music and ideas, bonded together in microscopic detail, can reach deeper into our souls than either can do alone. This act of prostration became the double-edged sword that Wagner grasped and wielded, changing the musical universe.

            But how is this different from, say, Handel’s Messiah? The difference is that in Messiah, the music bends to the will of the words, but in Wagner and Beethoven’s 9th, the ideas bend to the will of the music. Wagner does not set words to music, he sets music to words. But I get ahead of myself.

            Beethoven’s first two symphonies follow the Haydn “froth to finish” model. It is the third, the Eroica, that is the unprecedented giant leap. Beethoven’s ploy for the finale in the Eroica is to make it equal in weight to the gigantic first movement. This certainly gives his symphony the gravitas that it seeks, but it results in a sort of suite of four tone poems - four movements that are worthy of each other. But the first movement does not really culminate in the finale.

            The fourth symphony takes a break from the specific ‘finale problem’ and ends in froth. But the 5th and 6th symphonies, taken as a pair, are Beethoven’s major frontal attack on the Finale problem, and thus on the entire issue of Grand Design in music. He wrote these two works at the same time, they were first performed in the same concert, they address the same issues, and they are polar opposites of each other. The 6th, the pastoral, wraps up its whole message in a wonderfully memorable tune, played comfortably and often. Beethoven brought this technique back for his 9th symphony. The 5th, tonight’s symphony, maintains frustration through the body of the work, then releases it all in a triumphant victory finale. Beethoven brought this technique too, back for his 9th symphony, giving us therefore a tune both great and triumphant.

Symphony No 5 in c minor

So the success of the 5th symphony depends upon holding everything in check until the final burst of glory. Unlike the Eroica symphony, where the idea is ‘equal weight among the movements’, the 5th depends upon turning the first three movements into a sort of prelude to the last movement. There is something deliberately, and brilliantly, unsatisfactory about each of those first three movements. The first movement is hugely energetic, but short. It has far more fury than can be vented in so short a time, and moreover it can never make up its mind whether it wants to go, or to stop. The second movement just disintegrates. It’s a set of variations, not so much on a theme as on a sequence of misbegotten almost-themes, and as the movement progresses it falls apart more and more dramatically, ending with a brave front attached to a dismembered movement. The third movement combines mystery with brute force. But when the theme comes back after the middle section, the brute force is just missing. All we get is a ghostly recollection of what it had been, which drops into a tunnel, a no-man’s land, from which we at last emerge into the full sunlight of the much-yearned-for finale. At last, the music doesn’t have to dissemble, stops playing a shell game, and lays it all out in full glory.

Andrew Massey.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011