Music as Cultural Practice, 1800

III

The "Malinconia" movement is one of Beethoven's most richly problematical pieces; indeed, it is problematical twice over. The relationship between its "melancholy" Adagio and dancelike Allegretto pushes the conventional looseness and lightness of the Classical finale to a questionable extreme. Even before that question arises, however, the Adagio raises other, perhaps harder questions about the limits of Classical tonality as a musical language. The Adagio is problematical both in relation to the Allegretto and in itself.

The first of these problems appears as a candid provocation. On a superficial hearing, Beethoven seems to have made an esthetic blunder. Having composed a slow introduction of great intensity and originality, he follows it with a main movement that is too lightweight to relieve the earlier intensities and produce a satisfying sense of closure. The contrast, however, is too drastic to be naive, and in case we miss the point Beethoven spells it out in one of his characteristic sublimated cadenzas. The "cadenza" in this case consists of a condensed reminiscence of mm. 1–16 of the Adagio, followed by the signs of an impasse: a fragment of Allegretto, an awkward silence, a fragment of Adagio. (A correlative impasse is marked by the bass of this episode; its framing tones, F and F

, are, as we will see, in conflict throughout the Adagio.) The Allegretto then resumes its course, only to reach a moment of sudden slackening that nearly

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reduces it to the tempo of the Adagio. This new impasse precipitates a frantic Prestissimo close, as if to settle the issue of the movement simply by jumping from one extreme to the other.

How are we to take all this? One possibility is that the music is meant to dramatize the unstable mood swings common to certain psychological types: Beethoven's, for instance. But if the music is a serious portrait of the manic-depressive personality, it might have done a more convincing job on the manic end than the blithely conventional Allegretto. More credible is the suggestion that the movement is a study in Romantic irony, in which the Allegretto deliberately exposes the uncanny atmosphere of the Adagio (a mood, Beethoven notes, that must be evoked "colla più gran delicatezza") as a mere conjuror's trick. With Romantic irony in mind, we can even link the signature effect of the Adagio, its cyclical use of diminished-seventh chords, to Beethoven's well-known remark that "the startling effects which many ascribe solely to the natural genius of the composer are frequently easily achieved by the right use and application of the chord of the diminished seventh."^[27] In other words, illusions of immediacy ("startling effects") and nature ("natural genius") are the results of a practical technique (a matter of "right use and application") that is usually hidden from the listener. The technique is even easy.

From the standpoint of Romantic irony, however, what is really interesting about this movement is not the initial ironic impression, which is fairly blatant, but the way in which the impression is turned back on itself at the close. When the Adagio returns to interrupt the flow of the Allegretto, a second illusion can be said to collapse. This is the illusion of Romantic irony itself: the fantasy that the artist can control his creation from a position of transcendental self-possession.

The repetitions of the Adagio suggest the reality of what was taken for illusion, a reality that assumes the form of obsessional thinking: the haunting return of material that controls, rather than being controlled by, the artist. Drawing on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle , Peter Brooks has suggested that repetition of this unforeseeable, often uncanny sort is the basic armature of all narrative.

[27] Quoted by Philip Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets (New York, 1968), 43.

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Such repetition, he writes, "works towards the generation of significance" by binding (controlling, rendering intelligible) "the energy generated by deviance, extravagance, excess—an energy that belongs to the textual hero's career and to the reader's expectation." The binding effect constitutes an "obsessive reminder that we cannot really move ahead until we have understood the still enigmatic past."^[28] If Brooks is right, then Beethoven has shaped (or, more properly, misshaped) his quartet finale to produce a primal narrative effect—and this with the intent of exposing the epistemological rift between instrumental music as a transparent medium of feeling and instrumental music as the exercise of a technique. Within "La malinconia" as a whole, the issue of which term to favor, which turn of irony to prefer, is undecidable. This undecidability shows up strongly in the closing Prestissimo, which is easy to hear as either exuberant or trumped up—or as both at once.

Taken by itself, the Adagio raises similar questions even more acutely. Here the focus is on harmony, and in particular on the idea of the tonic as a center of orientation around which a coherent composition revolves. It will be necessary to go into some detail on this subject, but the basic situation is simple. The key of the Adagio is

major, but the music avoids even an imperfect cadence on the tonic triad, proceeds largely without reference to either the tonic or the dominant for some thirty-two of its forty-four measures, and ends on a half cadence that starts from the tonic minor—a sort of Picardy third in reverse.

is certainly the harmony that frames the Adagio, but it is hard to see in what sense the Adagio is "in"

. For that matter, it is hard to see in what sense the Adagio is in any key at all, for its various sections are all driven by local processes that are at bottom indifferent to tonal centering. Even on a Schenkerian reading, the movement forms "a dynamic, indeed a fantastic, statement of the organizing powers of the tonality of

major-minor."^[29]

The broad tonal thrust of the Adagio, then, is to problematize continuously the relationship between the main body of the music and its

frame. This structure replicates a fundamental narrative

[28] Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), 108, 125.

[29] William Mitchell, "Beethoven's La Malinconia from the String Quartet, Opus 18, No. 6: Techniques and Structure," Music Forum 3 (1973): 276–77.

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effect, the production of an uncertain primary narrative within a more certain secondary (or even marginal) narrative. In Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther , for example (of which more later), Werther's narrative is strictly speaking a mere construction by Wilhelm, the sympathetic but somewhat slow-witted "editor" of the novel. Beethoven thus once more narrativizes his musical successions in order to render musical succession itself a questionable process.

The Adagio, which is shown in Example 28, follows a concise but highly elaborated design that falls into six sections.

1. Thematic statement (mm. 1–12, 17–20). Measures 1–12 consist of three statements of a four-measure theme, the most important feature of which is that it closes with a turn. A fourth statement is deferred by the intrusive appearance of another four-measure passage consisting entirely of

2. Diminished-seventh chords (mm. 13–16). These chords appear one to a measure, ornamented by turns and alternating piano and forte. The passage forms a harmonically indefinite elaboration of the turn that ends each statement of the theme.

Between them, these first two sections carry out a process of harmonic entropy. The third thematic statement approaches its concluding turn from a G-major seventh chord. The "natural" (i.e., conventional) way to hear this chord is as the dominant of C minor, the supertonic. Instead, Beethoven interprets the chord as an augmented sixth of B

, and progresses to a B-minor six-four chord. The "natural" (i.e., conventional) next move is to the dominant of B. Instead, Beethoven goes on to the indeterminate collection of diminished-seventh chords that makes up the piano/forte passage. When the thematic statement resumes at m. 17, the B-minor six-four chord of m. 12 is reconstituted as a B-major seventh chord.^[30] There follows a

[30] The B appears explicitly in m. 18, but in a sense is already present in the diminished-seventh chord that occupies m. 17. As Richard Kramer ("Ambiguities in La Malinconia : What the Sketches Say," in Beethoven Studies 2 , ed. Alan Tyson [Oxford, 1977], 29–41) points out, the "C in the bass [of m. 17] simply retards thearrival of the root B" (34). Perhaps I should add explicitly that my own analysis is not meant at any point to deny structural continuities of this sort, but only to problematize them.

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Example 28
Beethoven, String Quartet in B

Op. 18, no. 6. Finale.

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3. Fugato (mm. 21–29). This extended contrapuntal passage begins in E minor, the normal resolution of the preceding B⁷ . E minor, the tritone of

is completely untenable as a tonal point of reference; the harmonic process of the fugato simply cannot be heard in relation to

. That process, in any case, admits only the most sketchy of tonal bearings in its own right. In strict alternation, major and minor triads travel around a circle of fifths in a repeating pattern. And as if starting from the tritone were not enough, the pattern rotates upward, perversely contradicting "the natural tendency of the fifth to descend to its root":^[31]

V⁷

V/V

V/V etc.

There is—can be—no sense of destination here; one place on this cycle is as good as another. Everything is decentered: even the basic unit of motion embodies a contradiction, as my Roman numerals suggest. Each major chord in the cycle is a dominant; each minor chord cancels a dominant. It is striking, moreover, that the fugato contains not a single nonharmonic dissonance. Its sonority is as purely triadic as that of the piano/forte passage is purely composed of diminished-seventh chords. I will return later to the affinity between these seemingly contrary sections. The fugato finally concludes on a C-major triad that is at once altered to C minor: here is the supertonic of

that was displaced by the B-minor six-four chord at m. 12.^[32] What follows, echoing m. 13, is a diminished-seventh chord that introduces a

[31] Richard Kramer, "Ambiguities," 30; Joseph Kerman (The Beethoven Quartets [New York, 1966], 77) makes the same point.

[32] For a complementary account of this chord, see Richard Kramer, "Ambiguities," 30–35.

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4. Reinterpretation (continuation) of 2: The piano/forte alternation (with turns) (mm. 29–32). Changes of chord and dynamics now fall every half measure instead of every measure, as diminished triads (p ) alternate with minor sixth chords ( f ) of

, C, and D. The essential process here is a melodic ascent by semitones in the upper voice from A to D. This pattern echoes, in inversion, a semitonal bass descent from

to F that, as Joseph Kerman notes in his analysis of this piece, undergirds mm. 1–12.^[33] The Dm⁶ at m. 32¹ is reconstituted as D⁷ at m. 32² , recalling the Bm–B⁷ relationship that links m. 12 to mm. 17–20. The resolution of this dominant seventh leads to a

5. Reinterpretation (continuation) of 3: The fugato (mm. 33–36). Beginning with G minor, the upward circle of fifths continues until it arrives at A minor, which is at once reinterpreted as the leading tone of

(m. 35; the

triad is immediately melted down into a diminished-seventh chord). Two points about this passage are especially noteworthy. If the first fugato had picked up where it left off, the G-minor triad of m. 33 would have been G major.^[34] The switch to the minor is mystifying, at least at first, though it does prefigure the ultimate switch in the "frame narrative" from

major to

minor. Meanwhile, the

sixth chord that follows the A-minor triad in m. 35 arises as a specific displacement of B major, which, as the dominant of E minor, would have been produced by the fugato cycle at this point. Hence the tonic reenters the Adagio by exactly reversing the semitonal friction that prompted its exit. In the same gesture, the tonic also curtails the process that would have returned the fugato to the tritonal E minor that began it. After this, the cello embarks on a series of turns that map out a

6. Coda (mm. 37–42). This is a powerful six-measure crescendo driven by a semitonal ascent in the bass from E to A,

[33] Kerman, Quartets , 77–78.

[34] I.e., the original fugato breaks off after arriving at F minor (m. 28); the next step, were the pattern continued, would have been G major.

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echoing the upper-voice ascent from A to D at mm. 29–32. The episode is perhaps the most problematical in the Adagio, and an exemplary instance of marked illocution in music. Measures 40–42 can be taken as a sequence on the model of mm. 37–39, and m. 38 arrives at F⁷ , so that from one perspective the coda is a prolongation of the home dominant and thus a restoration of the hegemony of the tonic. Expressively, however, what is most forceful about the passage is the melodic ascent of the cello with its turns and, within each three-measure grouping, the increasingly dissonant attacks by which the upper strings respond to each turn. This difference of accent, this interplay of voice and other-voice, reaches a powerful climax in m. 42. Here the first violin reaches the registral apex of the Adagio with a fortissimo attack on

As Kerman emphasizes in his analysis (77–79), G

, as F

forms the sore spot in this music; it persistently contradicts the tonic from m. 12 onward.^[35] The diminished-seventh chord to which the climactic G

belongs may "actually" form the upper tones of

/B over an implied root, but it sounds like some intractable, unheard-of dissonance that is in some sense the true ending of the Adagio. A related complication emerges from the succession of sonority types in mm. 37–39 and 40–42: minor triad, dominant-seventh chord, diminished-seventh chord. This succession forms a retrograde of the earlier one that leads from the diminished-seventh chords of mm. 13–16 through the dominant-seventh of mm. 17–20 to the E-minor triad that begins the fugato. In this context the coda, with its parallel ascents to climactic diminished sevenths, becomes above all an apotheosis of the diminished-seventh chord as an expressive, or even a structural, sonority.

Looking back over the main body of the Adagio (mm. 13–42), we may be inclined to argue that the primary organizing principle is not harmonic at all but something we might simply call empirical. There may be no genuine key of the Adagio, but the key to the Adagio is

[35] Kerman, Quartets , 77–79.

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an act of exchange or alternation, an opposition of intensities: of major against minor, minor triad against major seventh chord,

against B/F , the fugato against its reversed form, counterpoint against ornamented block chords, piano against forte, succession against retrograde—ultimately, Adagio against Allegretto. And yet harmonic relationships, all of which entail recognition of

as the tonic, form the very means by which tonal coherence is rendered most questionable in this music. The Adagio may very well take the opposition of intensities as the plot of its primary narrative and consign tonal articulation to the subsidiary position of the frame. The coda, however, makes it impossible to say where the main story ends and the frame resumes. The tonal voice and its empirical other-voice cannot be disentwined. Like any good narrative, the pattern of "La malinconia" is ultimately a bafflement.

We are now in a position to ask whether the narrative effects of "La malinconia" have any specific literary affiliations. The answer may lie in an aspect of the music that I have so far left out of account, namely its intention to express melancholy. Two streams of discourse converge on this topic, one psychological, the other literary. Both are ancient in origin, endowed with new life during the Renaissance, and still active throughout the eighteenth century.^[36]

In eighteenth-century medicine, melancholy is preeminently associated with a disordered imagination that can cause physical illness or even death. Melancholy is an impediment to the conduct of life, and incidentally to the conduct of narrative, as witness one of Words-worth's neurotics:^[37]

[36] My account of melancholy draws largely on Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943; rpt. Princeton, 1955), 156–71. Dürer's engraving Melencolia , which was widely reproduced throughout Germany, has occasionally been suggested as a source for Beethoven's Adagio.

[37] On melancholy and associated disorders in eighteenth-century medicine, see the overview in Alan J. Bewell, "A 'Word Scarce Said': Witchcraft and Hysteria in Wordsworth's Experimental Poetry of 1797–98," ELH (English Literary History) 53 (1986): 357–90. Eighteenth-century melancholy was also an impediment to musical performance, as C. P. E. Bach observes in his treatise on the art of the keyboard: "In languishing and sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad. Here, however, the error of a sluggish, dragging performance must be avoided, caused by an excess of affect and melancholy" (C. P. E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments , trans. William J. Mitchell [New York, 1949], sec. 13).

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No word to any man he utters,
A-bed or up, to young or old:
But ever to himself he utters,
"Poor Harry Gill is very cold."

("Goody Blake and Harry Gill," 121–24)

As my quotation indicates, melancholy keeps its medical associations in literary discourse, but literature also provides a melancholy of quite another sort. The bridge between the two is an association of melancholy with sensitivity of soul; taking its impetus from Ficino, this idea became almost proverbial. As one Renaissance commentator put it bluntly, "melencolia significa ingegno": melancholy signifies genius. The literary result is the pensive melancholy of the quester after transcendental truth, a figure most familiar from Milton's "Il penseroso." The pensive quester, however, is as removed from the conduct of life as his depressive counterpart. Cloistered in his lonely tower, the penseroso figure acts only by thinking.^[38]

These two versions of melancholy come together in a narrative effect typical of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century fiction. At certain moments, a narrator will lose the ability to narrate as the concomitant of a sudden surge in subjective intensity—perhaps depressive, perhaps revelatory, often both. E. T. A. Hoffmann provides a remarkable example in his story "The Doubles." A puppet show "in the customary Italian manner" approaches its close when

the puppeteer, with a fearfully distorted expression, stuck his head into the puppet stage and stared out at the audience with lifeless, glazed eyes. Punch on one side and the doctor on the other seemed

[38] A brief excerpt:

. . . Let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear
With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What worlds, or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.

(85–92)

It is worth noting, apropos of Chapter 4, that medical melancholy is associated especially with women, pensive melancholy with men.

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appalled at the sight of the gigantic head; then they recovered . . . and began a very deep, scholarly argument about the nature of the head. . . . The doctor said that when Nature had created this monstrosity she was making use of a figure of speech, a synecdoche, in which a part is used for the whole. Punch, however, insisted that the head was an unfortunate fellow whose body got mislaid because of all his thinking and his crazy thoughts and who, completely lacking any fists, could defend himself from boxes on the ear and pokes in the nose only by cursing.^[39]

The intrusion of the puppeteer both continues the show, deferring the promised closure, and expands the Italian comedy into a meditation on the rhetoricity of all things. At the same time, the swelled-up subjectivity signaled by the woeful disembodied head strips the puppeteer of his ability to carry a narrative forward. In particular he loses his power to "get the upper hand" over his puppets—the hand being his chief narrative instrument, as it is (for Hoffmann) the writer's. Language itself fails this puppet of his puppets. As Punch observes, in taking over the narrative power that the puppeteer has lost, the poor fellow can defend himself only by cursing.

In Goethe's Werther , Werther's ability to narrate collapses repeatedly, most strikingly when, as often happens, he encounters a story that parallels his own. Human sympathy then proceeds to merge with narcissistic brooding; Werther obsessively focuses the other's story through his own until both stories grind to a halt. At one point he recounts the narration of a love-crazed peasant. Having made an attempt at rape, the peasant also attempts to disguise rape as seduction:

At last he also admitted to me, shyly, all the little liberties [his beloved] had allowed him, and how close she had let him come to her. He broke off two or three times, repeating the most animated protestations that he was not saying this to blacken her, as he put it, that he loved and valued her as before. . . . —And here, my friend, I strike up my old song again, the one I shall sing eternally: If I could only place this man before you as he stood before me, as

[39] From Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann , ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago, 1969), 248.

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he still stands before me! If I could tell you everything properly, so that you should feel how I sympathize with his fate, and must do so. But enough.^[40]

Werther, too, breaks off two or three times, each time to proclaim how his feelings paralyze his narrative. And matters are worse than Werther thinks. It is only after he has surrendered the narrator's position for that of the reader that Werther recognizes how completely he has been thwarted: "Now that I read this page over, I see that I have forgotten to tell the end of the story."

As a narrative of melancholy, Beethoven's Adagio can be taken to reenact the subjectively funded collapse of Werther and of Hoffmann's puppeteer. The music narrates in order to fail at narration, to reach the point of narrative rupture at which the subject breaks through, both dislocated and dislocating. I am thinking in particular of the sections most antithetical to tonic (or tonal) orientation, the piano/forte alternation of diminished sevenths and the original fugato. I suggested earlier that these passages, one based on unrelieved dissonance, the other on perfect triads, are only superficially unlike. Both passages are sonorously "pure," both inhibit orientation toward

in the highest degree, and both are reiterative rather than progressive—static at the core, surges of motion (registral in the sevenths, harmonic in the triads) that goes nowhere. The two passages, in short, form an uncanny doubling that resonates later when the Adagio returns in the Allegretto. And like Werther in particular, the personal subject of "La malinconia" assigns so much expressive force to these intrusions that they fissure his narrative.

Nor is this effect merely general. The story of the crazed peasant brings Werther to the point of narrative paralysis by revealing the extreme to which Werther's own story tends. When "love" leads Werther's double to attempt a rape and fantasize a seduction, these actions expose the lining of desire and aggressiveness that Werther's idealization of his own love conceals. Overpowering passion, it seems, must overpower: if not its object, then—as Werther's suicide attests—its subject will do. Between Beethoven's piano/forte sevenths and the fugato, a similar, if less drastic, play of extremes may

[40] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther , trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan (New York, 1957), 102.

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hold court. Melancholy finds its most strident expression in a harmonically meaningless texture of diminished chords; the fugato unveils the most radical tendency of such an expression, such a melancholy. Set in virtually mechanical motion by a tritone harmony, the triads of the fugato are as meaningless, as "unnatural," as embedded in technique as any diminished-seventh chord could hope to be. Nature, for the moment, has disappeared.

True to the intermingling of depression and pensiveness, Beethoven's fugato represents both a surrender to melancholy feeling and an effort to master it, both a dislocation of structure and an assent to the force of insight. Something similar even applies to Werther, who attempts to revalue his suffering as a sign of profound inwardness. Similar, too, is Wordsworth's alpine spot of time, which reaches its apex at the very moment when nature disappears into a still-unfolding narrative.

For Beethoven, the capacity of music to break away from nature is a central compositional issue. Perhaps his famous habit (he once called it a bad habit) of immediately writing down his every musical idea represents an effort to stabilize as well as to remember the music in his mind's ear. For if music originates "in the head," then music, like thought, is subject both to the vertigo of epistemological uncertainty and to the sudden eruptions of subjectivity that manifest themselves as impediments to narrative, signs of an inability to proceed meaningfully in time.