Across the Extremes. Notes on the late period of Beethoven

[Diego Agulló]

What´s going on here?


Whoever walks in darkness is less lonely if they sing.

The challenge is not how one´s own life becomes paradoxical but how one´s own contradictions are the gears of a machine appealing enough to still producing harmonic resonances

We usually read about Beethoven´s deafness but it´s not so common to read that Beethoven was speechless. Silence is the language that corresponds to the tragic hero. What does it mean?

Don´t throw away the ladder.

If talking about music is already a difficult task, what makes this task even more difficult in Beethoven´s late period?

In 1770 Beethoven, Hegel and Hölderlin were born.

Is it that art is a way of being in silence? Is music a way of silence? Is it that silence is the language of the artist? Tractatus 7: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. But what does Wittgenstein understand by sagen and sprechen? Was Wittgenstein a frustrated musician? Schumann asking himself: Should I become a poet or a musician?

Tractatus 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Robert S.Kahn on his book about the Grosse Fuge op. 133 asks what in God´s name is going on here? Why would anyone write something like this? He collects adjectives that have been given to the Grosse Fuge since it was compossed: atonishing, incomprensible, abstruse, bizarre, unharmonious, extravagant, inconsequential, unplayable, surpasses the bounds of musical performance, tiresome, waste of sound, impracticable, cerebral, repellent, unintelligible, impenetrable, pathological eccentricity.

The Grosse Fuge received only three public performances in the seventy five years after it was written.

Adorno perfectly knew that the late period of Beethoven does not permit itself to be spoken about so easily, there is an unusual difficulty in saying precisely what is all about.

Beethoven moved house 27 times.

The music of the Beethoven´s late period inhabitates the limits of the world. He not only drew the limits of the language of tonal music but also pushed them and expanded them without going beyond them, without being atonal, This is an example how a musician can undermine a system from inside the system, using tactics, not strategies. Not to suppress tonality but to turn it loose.

Wittgenstein knew that to define the limits of the language is a difficult task, however, this task should be perform from inside the language, never from outside, basically because the outside means the nonsense and only in case you have a ladder. What we cannot speak about, must we play music?

When Beethoven stopped playing on the piano, someone asked him about the meaning of what he had played. Beethoven´s answer was to play again on the piano the same music. Words are only mediations. Stendhal on his book about Rossini wrote: the domain of music begins when we are not able to speak. Is music the limit of language? But which language? which music?

Glenn Gould is dancing.

The late string quartets are no longer a dialogue between two reasonable people but rather an internal dialogism. Beethoven translates a microcosm.

To talk about the late period on Beethoven demands to bring into play the solipsism. Tractactus 5. The limits of the language means the limits of my world. 5.62. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said , but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. 5.621 The world and life are one. 5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.) Some of the last compositions of Beethoven are still considered as solipsim.

The question of the late period of Beethoven is the question about the limits of the world. It´s all about limits, how the limits are drawn. When somebody says: I don´t understand this, means that there is a incompatibility between the limits of this person´s world/language and the limits of what is to be understood. Being more precise, is not about expanding, the limits were already there, but rather lighting a little further. In this sense music can be a mirror if there is symmetry in the limits but much more better if music is rather a lamp that irritates your retina and demands a dilatation of one´s own limits.

They are well known the Joseph de Marliave´s words referring to the Grosse Fuge: the attitude of mind in which people listen to chamber music must undergo a radical change. Indeed, Beethoven is demanding from the audience another attitude, as Immanuel Kant and the Sapere aude (Dare to know), Beethoven says Exaudio aude (Dare to listen) and therefore to know.

Nietzsche and Adorno were musicians. Can we philosophize without words? Can music be philosophy?

But how do we understand music? in the same way as when we say the proposition It´s raining? Music is not true or false, music can not lie. If I say: It´s raining while I see the rain out of the window, someone could say: that´s true! But if I go out and immediately I step on the street and a cold drip drills my head before I can say that it rains I will know because my body feels the thrill of raining on my head. I think music is like this, music is much more precise than verbal thought. We can understand music without being able to talk about music.

Nietzsche: the ear is the organ of fear. Beethoven wasn´t afraid at all.

Beethoven was a survivor. The audacity to deepen one´s own spirit, the introspective journey, the inner wealth. Philosopher and musician share the same solitude and both can not integrate in a social environment. Own´s body becomes battlefield and space for research. The artist is the one who experiences dangers, risks.

Art affects us as life affects us.

Art intensifies our experience. Art teaches us, makes us see what before we didn´t notice that was already there producing effects. Art is a tool to approach reality and get certain knowledge reaching parts of the experience that without art we could never reach.



SUSPENDED TIME: THE ZOOM IN
Beethoven and Giacinto Scelsi.

In 1825 the String Quartet op. 132 was composed. During sketching this piece, Beethoven was stricken with an intestinal inflammation, big pain. This body process of illness and recovery affected directly the composition of this quartet. The core of this piece is the third movement, the Adagio. Beethoven wrote a header for it: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, or in english A convalescent´s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode.

This Adagio represents Beethoven´s labor of minimizing the musical expression to its essence; it contains only two melodic ideas. He makes us see the structure, is the opposite of using ornaments, music is bare. Beethoven makes zoom in in music. The music leaves the striated space of the form to explore with the microscope the pure duration of time.

Giacinto Scelsi, another solitary man, didn´t suffer from intestinal inflammation but he got into a deep depression after his wife left him. As a therapy for this breakdown, and following neurotic patterns that remind us of Hölderlin, he spent his days with the simple task of playing the same note on the piano. Yes: the same note over and over again. This mystical trance, listening obsessively to the same note brought him to experience that sound is spherical. In just one single sound is the entire cosmos. Scelsi brought into his music the last quartest of Beethoven and if we listen to the Adagio we find the door that Scelsi went through: to reduce music into its most minimal essence.

But what happen exactly on this Adagio?
First of all, Beethoven makes unrecognizable the melody. How? The melody almost doesn´t exist because the tempo is extremely SLOW. The length of every single note is dilated, it makes us feel the duration of time sacrificing the melody. Scelsi will take this to the extreme: maintaining the same note all the time.

Indeed, what Beethoven makes in this Adagio is a reduction process, The phrase is being reduced three times. First from 8 notes into 5. Then from 5 into 3 and finally 3 into 2. Time has no direction anymore, there is no past resent and future, it´s like pure time or pure duration. Music stops, exists as a sphere, there is no where to go.





Beethoven, on this quartet makes a special use of the semitone (also on the first movement of the op 132, and 131 and the Grosse Fuge), or half note what makes the four lines of the four instruments independent but together. A semitone is the smallest musical interval commonly used in tonal music and it´s consider the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. Semitones are in Scelsi the main motif of his microtonality. Suspended time of the most painful illness but also characteristic of the neurotic behaviour. In 1944 Scelsi´s first quartet represents the beginning of the so called Scelsi´s second period. It´s interesting to mention that Beethoven´s Grosse Fuge appears in a highly disguised form in the first and last movement of his this Quartet. Beethoven´s use of the semitone appears mostly on his Grosse Fuge, this is one of the reason of its dissonance, but also in the Heiliges Dankgesang. If we listen to the 4th movement of First Quartet of Scelsi we can listen to the adagios of the late Quartets of Beethoven:

Scelsi String Quartet I by arditti quartet

And now let´s listen to a loop made out of the first notes of the Beethoven´s op. 127 2nd movement:

Loop op.127 2nd mov. by alban berg quartet


Beethoven was a freelance musician and wrote three of his late Quartets, asked by Prinz Nikolas Galitzin, for 50 dukats each. On the contrary Scelsi belonged to an aristocratic family and freed him from financial worries. This makes a big difference also in a compossitional level. For instance, Beethoven´s Grosse Fuge wasn´t accepted by his publisher and he had to write a new finale for the op. 130. The chance to experiment wasn´t so big in the case of Beethoven and this is why his most radical proposals can be found as moments inside his compostions or isolated movements surrounded by more tradicional ones. For instance, the 4th movement "alla marcia" that follows the Heiliges Dankgesang, or simply the finale that replaced the Grosse Fuge, music compossed to content audiences and not to satisfy experimentation. Regarding his op 95 Quartetto Serioso, he declared that is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public. This Quartet came to early. Exciting that Mahler had arranged it for use by string orchestra.


WAVES OF TIME
Beethoven and Debussy.

Of course this ideas about suspended time demand to make a connection between the spheres of Scelsi and the bubbles of Pierre Boulez (See the text I wrote in 2003 about Memory and Perception in Pierre Boulez)
Beethoven introduces in music the suspended present and years later a tradition in french music will constittude a thread: Debussy-Messian-Boulez.

The problem of music from Bethoven becomes the problem of memory.
Beethoven late period went beyond romanticism. Beethoven has been considered the most crucial figure in the transition from classical to romantic, but in fact his music went far beyond that. There is an indubitable bridge between Beethoven´s late period and anti romantic movements of the end of the XIX century. Beethoven draws the end of modernity
Beethoven´s late period critizies Beethoven second period. Beethoven was aware that classicism became fictitius and artificial, too ornamental. That was the indecorum of Beethoven.

The late period is not about memory but about perception and liberating the imagination, not about depicting a story but producing suggestions, atmospheres rather than linear progressions, music doesn´t move but spins around itself. Time, like ocean waves, doesn´t go anywhere, but it moves, it oscilates rejoicing the tension of the non resolution. What later in the music of Schumann it has been called suspended present, probably the musician that most hated the develops in music.

Beethoven and Debussy, time seems to be suspended, the ambiguity of Debussy and his floating chords, the so called emancipation of sound, Beethoven drew already the possibility of music to become transformation, to emancipate from the sonata form.

Waves of time, the music becomes myterious oscillation, is not static like in the op. 132, music moves, not as an sphere but as waves of sound. Here Beethoven foreshadows Debussy.

Sonata 30. op 109 first movement (John Lill) by john Lill

Sonata 30. op 109 3rd movement by John Lill

Sonata 31. op 110 last movement by john Lill


Beethoven foreshadows Mahler dissolving already the Tonality. Beethoven and Bartók, Beethoven and Shostakovich and, why not, Beethoven and Messiaen (specially from the attack of the piano and how music becomes a machine with gears), Beethoven and Scelsi. Beethoven against the ability to memorize.



MUSIC ALWAYS WINS
Ethics in Beethoven.: It must be!

Beethoven had a very specific aim to communicate a certain Ideas throught his music. Ideas that philosophical as Adorno perfectly understood bringing in Hegel´s philosophy, but also ideas that express a certain Ethics. That means that in Beethoven´s music, and specificaly in some compositions, there is a message that must be heard. Beethoven believed in the power of music to communicate ethics.

The REMINDERS
The O Freunde nicht diese Töne, (Oh friends, not these tones!) from Ode to Joy (Schiller) of the 9th Symphony represents the most clear sign of the ethical reminders in Beethoven. In this case using text, but this is an exception. O Freunde nicht diese Töne is being expressed throught all Beethoven´s music in many different ways, and specially in the late period is a strong ethical statement towards a logic of Stimmungen which implies variations in affects, temperament, motivation, optimism, fear, illness, weakness, existencial despair, depression, creativity, etc.

Reminders are just a characteristic of Beethoven´s self consciousness. His music is self aware, music speaks to itself. The reminder plays the rol of bringing awareness about the Stimmung that has been dominating so far and brings the possibility for a shift, not only in compositional terms but with a clear ethical intencion: we can decide the mood, we can shift the Stimmung, we can encourage our selves. The motivation depends directly from this logic of Stimmungen.

Oh friends, not these tones! Rather let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds! Joy! Joy!

Reminders: we shouldn´t forget. The bass section of the orchestra (cellos and basses) are the narrators at the introduction of the Finale of the 9th Symphony. They not only have the task of narrating the summary but also to bring the new section Ode to Joy. We shouldn´t forget that the role of the ground Bass or Basso Ostinato was to keep persistently the main idea in order to remember. From Beethoven the problem of music will be the problem of memory.

THE BIPOLARITY
I will not enter into the discussion if Beethoven suffered from manic depression. He had, indeed, many reasons for it, mainly the fact of becoming deaf being a musician. The interesting thing is how on his music this bipolarity exists as a clear choice and not only as an unconscious result of an hypothetical illness.

Bipolarity means contrast. Being across the extremes. Euphoria to depression, melancholia to joy, weakness to Will to power, death to life. But also oscillations: JUMPING from one extreme to the other, without transitions, directly to the other side. A sudden leap, a shift in the mood can come out of a conscious decision, but not always. Beethoven´s late period abandones the tirany of the form to lead his music trought a kind of logic of affects. The transitions or the developments in the late Beethoven are no longer important.

Brilliant is the case of the Adagio of op 132, The Heilige Dankgesang: Illness, proximity to death vs. life and Will to Power (creativity). On this Adagio, considered a big prayer but also a sublime meditation, the bipolar phenomenon is bring into play creating a strong contrast between the first section, that represent the illness and proximity of death, and the second section called by Beethoven Neue Kraft fühlend (with renewed strength). For future texts to explore the relation Beethoven-Nietzsche.

On his letter to his doctor Beethoven wrote at the end: notes will help who ever is needed. It was the need to create what saved him from the illness, the triumph of joy over pain. Here the dialectical lesson of Beethoven: illness exists as the power to recovery exists.

So in fact, the bipolarity is not only dialectical but simultaneous, on this Adagio the extremes are happening at the same time, are combined, crosslinked, illness and inner wealth are now one same single thing.

Going back to the so called early phase, the op. 18 number 6´s last movement, also called La Malincolia, shows already the choice of creating a new type of formal structure mixing and contrasting two opposite kind of materials. This will be repeated later on the Op. 135, 4th movement. Bipolarity is already expressed by the header of the movement: Grave-Allegro-Grave-Allegro. Perfect example of the contrast or opposition or inner struggle between despair and joy, this movement is called The Difficult Resolution. Under the introductory slow chords Beethoven wrote in the manuscript Muß es sein? (Must it be?) to which he responds, with the faster main theme of the movement, Es muß sein! (It must be!) This is definitely a big ethic statement for the sake of affirmative Will and self-suggestion.
After presenting the darkness Beethoven brings abruptly a fast unexpected refrain, it sounds even too naive, but it plays the role of calm and stability, center, in the heart of chaos; the identity is assured. But slowly the forces of chaos are finding holes where they can enter. The refrain becomes fragile and unstable until it happen again, the darkness is back, the fear comes in. Jumping from chaos to the beginning of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart in any moment (Of the Refrain)

Op 135 last movement by alban berg quartet

Op 135 last movement part 1 by alban berg quartet




GROSSE FUGE
Sometimes free, sometimes strict

1920´s: first performance after Beethoven´s death (1827) of the op 130 with the Grosse Fuge as final movement.

Seemingly unrelated outbursts. Assertive, sforzando. The cello trills. Zig Zag. Vigour. Excess of tension. Fortissimo. Frenzy. Bustle. Hurried development:

Proust and Beethoven. Both translate the inner book in the proximity of death, what makes to say only what is important to be said and in the only way it could be expressed: rushing and forgetting the ornaments. When there is a need to rush, fragments appear to be the best way of composing. The subject can not be expressed in a simpler way than through fragmentation

Beethoven creates parallel centers of gravity, intensities, disjointed play of forces. The Grosse Fuge is a big question mark. The Doubt is brought in: music is folded, between two, a critical junction, the themes are broken into pieces. Beethoven opens all the possibilities of certainty.

We should consider the Fuge in its organic articulation as a texture in uncessant transformation of shapes. Is there a thread?

PARTS OF THE GROSSE FUGE:

- Overture: presentation of the 2 main themes: Theme 1 (unison fortissimo followed by a variation in legato=Theme 1a), Theme 2 Meno mosso e moderato followed by a variation of the Theme 1, Theme 1b.
- PART 1 Fuge: presentation of the 3rd main theme (counter subject) + variation of Theme 1b as subject. Development, fragmentation and manipulation of subject and counter subject.
- PART 2 Meno mosso e moderato: as a counter subject + Theme 1 as subject
- Allegro molto e con brio: Theme 1a, scherzo
- PART 3 Double Fuge: develop of the Theme 1. Develop of the Theme 3 + Theme 1 + Meno mosso e moderato. End: odd progression of chords
- Allegro molto e con brio + fake end
- Summary: recapitulation + Allegro finale of the Theme 3.


The fuge as dance. There is something that plays the a constant rol: the rhythm, even if it´s cross-rhythm or syncopated, we still recognize perfectly the determination: the fortissimo and sforzando. It´s a static maniacal dance, an inner violent hurried dance. What creates a certain thread are no longer the subjects or counter subjects, niether the thems or melodies but rather a specific determination on the music, a Will to Power.

Beethoven´s biggest experiment: he burst the conventions of clasical music proposing new statements that will not be followed by the next generation, they will not be social accepted until the XX century.

The difficulty of the Grosse Fuge is just a matter of time: it requires time beyond any superficial approach. Beethoven is pointing the conventions to make us realize that it´s all about re-organizing the limits of our perception, taste, comprehension. It demands time to get access, requires an effort. It is a process of knowing each other and Beethoven is demanding again an effort from the audience to redefine the limits of what we call perception or understanding.

I don´t think the clue to approach the Grosse Fuge is to decipher the form or structure but rather to focus on three concepts: Simultaneity, Fragmentation and Dissonances.

The Grosse Fuge brings in the following idea: simultaneity of subjects in continuous variation and fragmentation without harmonic requirements.

The simultaneity can be understood as a competition or an inner struggle between non complementary elements that Beethoven brings them together. But also as a co-existence of the differences. This differences or contrast create the appearance of chaos but it doesn´t, it´s just a complex world.

The Themes are not only transformed and disguised under multitude of different appearances creating a kind of perspectivism but also undergoing a process of fragmentation. Melodies become paintbrushes, no longer recognizable as a line, they are cut and delocalized.

Beethoven opens the doors to the dissonances as Samuel Beckett will allow chaos to enter because is the truth. Beethoven´s music becomes less accesible and is not anymore music to please the ears but rather to challenge them. Within tonality, without abandon tonality he expands the limits of understanding music. It´s not that dissonances can also be music but rather there is no music without dissonaces.

Semitones: harmonic and melodic tension

The message in the finale of the ninth Symphony, composed one year before said: let´s put aside the dissonances and let´s be friends: agreement and concord. But the Grosse Fuge proposes a different message: let´s integrate dissonances because they are the truth. The consequences of questioning the harmony are not to have anymore the impression of an agreement. And sometimes there will be moments of comming together in a certain concord: the unison passage of meno mosso a moderato or Adagio con brio. In Beethoven the Weltanschauung (World view) is actually dictated by a logic of Stimmungen, a logic of affects.

How to understand community accepting dissonances and differences?

The gentle and soft section meno mosso e moderato (lyrical section) brings a peaceful mood, because there is no longer a competition and brings some relief after the long Fuge .

But is later when the meno mosso e moderato is introduced inside the Fuge, simulatneously with the main theme, with the instructions forte , the gentle becomes assertive and loud because this time there is a competition on going.

After the meno mosso e moderato part suddenly we arrive in a series of odd progression of chords, each followed by a moment of silence: Uncertainty, expecting the resolution which is abruptly interrupted by the Allegro con brio.

Quick summary, recapitulation and final happy end.

Beethoven brings together the opposition death-life, depression-will of power, yes, dialectical but he brings them simultaneously, showing that one need the other to exist. And the Grosse Fuge is the expression of that simultaneity (to realte with the Heiliges dankgesang)

The Allegro molto e con brio at the ent after the trilling section of the end of the moso e moderato: Negociating moods, bipolarity.

Disonances (existencial despair) against triumph of joy. The Grosse Fuge doesn´t express the disonances of the world (war, illness, proximity of death, depression) but the possibility of the Will to exist inside these dissonances. The Grosse Fuge is a fight.

What is the difference between a string quartet and and string orchestra? 4 musicians or 12, 21, 60.
It´s interesting to listen to the orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge, how the music becomes crowd and to realize how the music becomes more accessible in its orchestral dimension. There is a difference if we isolate 4 single elements than 4 groups of elements.

Grosse Fuge ORCHESTRA by klemperer

But if we put the two long fuges sections parallel we find a perfect symmetry in terms of length . This track brings both sections together:

Grosse Fuge x2 by alban berg quartet

Why have I done something like this? If we double the fuge, if we bend the fuge is not only to find a symmetry but to get a certain experience of how a crowd in fuge would sound like. This case is very different from the string orchestra. Now we have 8 instruments, actually 2 groups of singular elements in fuge. The result is the opposite than with the orchestra. An orchestration of the Grosse Fuge makes the fuge more accesible because each line becomes a choreography for many instruments that repeat the same line. This makes easier to identify and recognize every single line because it has been multiplicated. It´s easier to identify ten pepole moving exactly in the same way than one single person moving on its own way. But the fuge folded on itself makes the chaos bigger and reproduces accurately how a crowd in fuge would sound like. And not only that, if I have increased the chaos was to make more visible that still the fuge keeps an amazing unity. Of course the number of dissonaces are bigger but doesn´t make the whole more dissonant.

Grosse Fuge for Pianoforte 2 hands:



Animation machine of the Grosse Fuge





SOLITUDE

Rilke on Letters to a young poet describes solitude in the following terms:

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.


As Maynard Solomon has pointed out, in 1814 Beethoven´s artistic career reached its lowest point with patriotic works such as Wellingtons Sieg or Der glorreiche Augenblick. On words of Solomon, these works, filled with bombastic rhetoric and patriotic excesses, mark the nadir of Beethoven´s career. In them his heroic style is revived, but as parody and farce. Rather than moving forward to his late style, he regressed to a pastiche of his heroic manner.

On the contrary, in this year Beethoven reached the highest point of popularity and social connections. It shouldn't be a surprise that at the same time he ended in conformity.

But later on the late period, the situation was very different. When Beethoven was isolated from the society, considered as a madman, and not anymore into the musical trends of that moment, he would bring music into a level never known before. Again Solomon pointed out rightly: his music would be created out of the composers imagination and intellect rather than through a combination and amplification of of existent musical trends. In Beethoven´s late style an apparently unprecedented style comes into being, one whose tendencies and formative materials are not readily identifiable in the music of his contemporaries or immediate predecessors.

The space where Beethoven´s late style was generated had nothing to do with success, fame, personal situation within a social power relations or being supported by patrons. I think his late style was possible because his solitude was vaster than ever. His isolation from society implied an inner trip, a taking care of the world that he carried inside of him. Rilke continues: the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. In this sense we must understand Beethoven´s choice. He didn´t bet for success or fame because actually that implied that his music became shabby and his vocation petrified and no longer connected with life. In order to stay alive, and in this sense I call him survivor, he kept alive his artistic career because he placed his solitude above everything else and this is the way the late period should be also understood, as the artistic choice of taking the risk of being beyond social and contemporary world propelled by a self confident impulse from the very deep heavy vast solitude.

And here is where Beethoven showed his freedom, freedom of following own artistic needs, freedom of placing one´s own solitude above everything else.

As Fernando Pessoa would say: to be a poet is not my ambition, it´s my way of being alone.

MUSIC HAS HOLES
The center is abandoned, the action is moved to the periphery, a hole appears across the extremes
Adorno and Deleuze together?

It´s usual to read about the differences between Deleuze and Adorno: for Adorno, reality is necessarily dialectical and irresolvable contradictions, while Deleuze denies the notion of a correct rendering of objective reality and introduces the notion of univicity of being , no dialectical but rather an absolute leap of perception. But is it possible to find a common denominator for both philosophers?. First of all, they both invoke the kind of art which resists or defies representation. But going further I will try to show how to apply in the late Beethoven the Deleuze and Guattari´s ideas about music and to connect them with Adorno´s ideas about the late Beethoven.


- IMPROPRIETY

Adorno talks about impropriety and unsuitability: what appears in the late period isn´t simply what appears to be. Adorno means appearance of the non appearance: either because its curious inauthenticity or because excessive simplicity, the themes and melodies no longer appear as themselves but as signs of something else. They are cut, disturbed, they are only sketches, possiblities. Understanding themes as subjectivities, in the late period the themes are disturbed, they are in inmanent distant respect themselves.
Beethoven becomes fragile
Tonality is withheld and at the same time broken.
Alienation and schizofrenia.

The deterritorialization of the refrain (Ritournello) happens for the first time not in Schumann but in the late Beethoven
To relate with the the concept of Inadequacy in Deleuze (chapter 8 of Logic of sense), about the floating signifier in Levi-Strauss. Deleuze describes this Antinomia: having two series which are related to each other in continuos imbalance or distance, that implies continuos readjustments.
This continuos imbalance or distance is represented by the idea of Asymptote.


- DISAGGREGATION of the central principle. Disintegration, dissociation and dissolution of the form. The classical burst into fragments, says Adorno. Actually Beckett used also the same image of something that burst out to refer to Beethoven´s Ghost trio: a hitherto unkown art of dissonances, a weavering, a hiatus, a punctuation of dehiscence,a stress given by what opens, slips away and disappears, a gap that punctuates nothing but the silence of a final ending“

What does burst mean? Dehiscence, premature open of a wound or a plant to release its contents.

The voices are wrapped around each other.
Harmony becomes a forgotten convention because it produces the ilussion of unity.

Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand Plateaus, Postulates of Linguistics, in opposition to the arborescent type, Beethoven prepares the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the centers forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dissolves and transform itself. When development suburdinates form and spans the whole, variation begins to free itself and becomes identified with creation. (...)

Beethoven introducing variations without center in music approach the idea of rhizome that Pierre Boulez will bring into the limits, making audible nonsonorous forces through placing all sound components in continuous variation.

1819-23 Diabelli Variations op. 120

Instead by Form, the matter is organized by forces, intensities, the center is disseminated in a net or weave of forces.

op 132. 2nd mov. Allegro by alban berg quartet

- UNIVOCITY

Against decoration and ornamentation, the late period is excessive simplicity, bare. There is not anymore question and answer, is just one single thing but displaced from itself. It´s not anymore important to exhaust fully the themes. This is what Adorno calles Principle of condensation, forms are rarely consumed, it´s enough to mention/enunciate to exhaust.

- HOLES

Beethoven turns out the hollow space of the sonata form, concave becomes convex.
Adorno also talks about interruptions, hiatus, silences, ruptures, pure tension between the extremes. The technique, instead harmonic transitions, is to JUMP. There are no mediations, only, like in Hegel, through extremes. Music has holes.

Deleuze in Critical and Clinical describes Beethoven´s Ghost trio: there is a kind of central erosion that first arises as a threat among the bass parts and is expressed in the trill of wavering of the piano, as if one key were about to be abandoned for another, or for nothing, hollowing out the surface, plunging into a ghostly dimension where dissonances would appear only to punctuate the silence.

On the other hand, the floating signifier needs emptiness to emerge.

If now we visit Deleuze and Guattari about Holey space in Treatise on Nomadology:The war machine, we are tempted to think that Beethoven was a smith, inventing a holey space within the striated space of the sonata form. Beethoven produces the emergency of the rhizome in the striated space of the classicism.

- POLARIZATION.

Beethoven wasn´t atonal but polarizes the tonality. Dissociation into two extremes: monody and poliphony, with the exception of the fuges.

Deleuze Guattari: Refrain: Not to supress tonality but to turn it loose.

- TRANSVERSALITY

Adorno means pure tension across extremes, when unity is just an illusion and the whole a self deception.

Deluze about Proust will demand to have the right to incompliteness and to patches: the fragmentation means to exclude the logic unity and organic totality, there is no previous unity but they are an EFFECT, they come afterwards, a posteriori: but the unity appears as a fragment (paintbrush) inside the sistem. Transversality is what makes that allows each part to keep its difference and at the same time to be connected and to communicate.


- Adorno: the late period speaks about the language of the archaic, of children of savages and God. Deleuze: only children artists and schizofrenics can inhabitate the inadequacy because there are displaced towards themselves.




CODA

Beethoven remains.

I will never die.

This text is dedicated to Miguel Copón.

Special thanks to Jorge Ruiz Abánades.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristoteles: Poética
Adorno: Beethoven
Proust: À la Recherche du temps perdu
Benjamin: Literarische und ästhetische Essays
Wittgenstein: Tractatus,
Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schyzophrenia
Deleuze: Proust and the signs
Deleuze: Critical and Clinical
Deleuze: Spinoza, Practical Philosophy
Deleuze: Cinema 2. The time image
Nietzsche: The Gay Science
Leonard B.Meyer: Emotion and meaning in music
Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind
Robert S.Kahn: Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge
Michael Schneider: Musiques du nuit
Peter Kivy: New Essays on musical understanding
Antoine Hennion: La passion musicale
Max Steinitzer: Beethoven
E. Fubini: El Romanticismo: entre Musica y Filosofia
Robert P. Morgan: Twentieth Century Music
Patrick Donnelly: Grosse Fuge
Jim Merod: Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile:Audio (Il)literacy, or Beethoven’s Triumphant Despair
Maynard Solomon: Beethoven
Beethoven´s letters, with explanatory notes by Dr. A.C. Kalischer.