Beethoven, Takacs and the Genetic Fallacy

Sunday, October 31st the following took place at CU:


"Quartet
by David Lawrence Morse


In this exciting new drama, brought to the stage by the Takacs Quartet and Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Beethoven rises above illness and tortured relationships to compose his most sublime music.  The drama explores the circumstances surrounding Beethoven's composition of the late quartets, integrating musical examples performed by the Takács. Following the drama, the quartet performs Beethoven's 
& nbsp;
String Quartet in A-Minor, Op. 132."

What this meant in practice was that for almost an hour and a half four actors narrated the story of Beethoven's last years and the circumstances surrounding his final compositions.  This was done in excessive detail, including, for example, the composers arguments with his copyists.  Mainly, however, it concerned his unhappy relations with his nephew and his vexed business dealings.  Plus his deafness, health problems, general cantankerousness and apparently squalid hygiene.  At various points, snippets of the compositions being discussed were played.

The volume of biographical detail was numbing and, as far as I can remember, seemed accurate enough.   It became, alas, interminable.  The portrait that emerged was of a very unhappy man, incapable of taking care of himself,  desperately lonely, abandoned to live in filth, his music the expression of a kind of inspired mania verging on madness.   

Assuming that this was true -- and there are reasons to doubt it -- how does knowing these details help us "understand" his music?  It certainly doesn't constitute music criticism.  Rather, its voyeurism. 

In fact, it diminishes the music, turning it into a kind of soundtrack for pathologies or of some sort of aesthetic of triumph over the sufferings of life through art. 

But the outer circumstances tell us almost nothing about the work.  The late quartets are exceptional on every possible level, but I especially admire a craftsmanship which has very little to do with "inspiration" and "genius", much less "the sublime", and everything to do with knowledge and diligence and hard work.  The shear elegance and ease of the part writing is amazing.  Even watching it being played, it's hard to understand how so much could be brought of four instruments with sixteen strings and four bows.

For an artist like Beethoven, the work was the life.  We should no more look his diet (or anything else) to explain his music than we should look to Liebniz' arthritis to explain the calculus. 


This is of course not to say the music is the same as mathematics.   The A minor Quartet is personal and stunningly intimate, but it's also bardic and mythic.  There are many ways music conveys meaning.  It's capable of irony, e.g., the little minuet that stage band plays in Don Giovanni.  It's also capable of literal mimesis.  After all imitation is an essential formal tool and the essence of counterpoint.  But it's also capable of literal mimesis, as in the Pastoral Symphony with its bird calls and thunder storms.  


One could argue the the Molto Adagio, played with great restraint and delicacy the the Takscs, incarnates in it's simple ABABA form the an alternation between the timeless - the Lydian chorale - and personal historic time -- the D major second subject.


D major is of course the key of the 6th Symphony.  Maynard Solomon in his Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, argues the the seeds of the late style are to be found in Beethoven's pastoral and rustic works, not in the major works of his heroic style.  He singles out the 7th Symphony, the Op 96 Violin Sonata and the Archduke Trio as examples  - one might also mention any number of the less famous piano sonatas.  The late works should be seen not as examples of some triumph of the will but as contemplations of musical expression, meditations on form, the animal delight of virtuosity, the joke, the dance, the elegy , ineluctable fate and the nature of time: human, divine and musical.