Sunday, August 5, 2007

Unity, Genre, and the Last Movement of Beethoven's Ninth

I have been known, from time to time, to mount a most energetic defense of Beethoven’s symphonies against those who would dare to detract from them, and to praise them most vocally among those who admire them. Yet as I recently listened to the last movement of his ninth symphony played on the radio, I heard something quite different than my cherished image of the piece: I heard a succession and not a unity. What I mean by this is that, in a way they never had before, the sections of the piece appeared distant from one another, contained within themselves, and joined together in that they proceeded after one another, and not out of one another. In itself each section retained the individual force of that sublimity I remembered, but I found the whole diminished; where I remembered an unceasing motion forward, I heard only so many pauses.

I do not mean to appear to say I fell sick to the music. The reformulation and recombination of themes that I have long admired was still there, and there are few passages as at once forceful and elegant as when the four soloists combine. I even discovered something new to admire, and to consider: I heard, as I never had before, the alternation with which Beethoven employs his voices (by which I mean soloist, soloists, chorus, orchestra) while retaining the same tone. These elements were varied so as to alternate between the broad strength of orchestral or choral primacy and the precision of the soloist or quartet’s. This sort of alternation is curious here, for it is primarily a narrative virtue, and not a musical one, and music, in itself, hardly ever succeeds when it narrates.

Yet the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth is hardly music in itself. It is, and I do not think I had ever realized the significance of this, a poem set to music, with all the considerations that entails. All poetry is, of course, narrative, and if one is to combine poetry with music it would hardly do to leave off narrative virtues, lest the words become but another sound. And if that were the case the whole enterprise would be undertaken in futility; for the sound of men’s words cannot compare with their music. For this reason it is more often than not the needs of music that are conformed to the needs of words in such pieces. Yet Beethoven was not setting this poem to music on its own, but including it in a much larger, much more strictly musical work. His music could not support the words as it would have in a set piece: it had other obligations to fulfill. When Handel composed his Messiah he had access to all the tools of narrative variety and pacing, because his words had the primacy, yet Beethoven’s generic concerns gave that to his music. He could not compose a piece of music without wasting his words, and could not freely set his poem to music without weakening the bonds that bound his symphony together.

This may well be the central tension of the symphony (or at least its last movement). For all art stands and falls according the success with which it solves its formal problems; once you have found a way to say something, you have said it. Matter follows upon manner, and one cannot say something important without saying it well. The successive nature which I detected in Beethoven’s music was his accommodation of the aesthetic necessities of poetry; the interwoven reformulation and recombination of themes in his execution of this succession was his accommodation of those of music. One can see, as it were, the plan. But was it properly carried out? I have always assumed Beethoven’s Ninth was a successful work of art, but, then again, I had never heard the words. In point of strict fact, I still haven’t: I know no German. And, as I hope I have made clear, it is impossible to judge this work—or any work—without giving full justice to all those parts which contribute to its crisis of form (the proposition may also be worth considering that if a crisis of form is present, the work cannot be successful, but that is another argument for another day). For now I must recuse myself from this criticism on grounds of lingual deficiency, and shall have recourse only to enjoyment until such time as I have gained the German tongue.

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