A source of power in the
Appassionata sonata’s first movement is that it keeps unfolding wave upon wave
of creative transformation with relentless iterations and variations of its
core motifs, so that the sections of the first movement begin to meld together.
Each eruption of development becomes part of the creative flux: the differences
between motifs are elided (the foreboding and ferocious first theme, for
example, finds insistent echoes in the jaunty, striving third theme), and the differences
between sections are all subsumed within the unfolding process: the initial statement
of themes quickly and inexorably yields their massive development, and the
restatement disintegrates into an enormous redevelopment in the coda. Here is a
link to Barenboim’s great performance of the movement in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPR3pkcNbKI.
In Adorno’s Hegel-inflected formulation in Beethoven: Philosophy of Music, the
movement maintains a defiant “diversity [which] evens out into unity but keeps
diverging from it while the form remains an abstract sheath over the diversity,”
a “sheath” comprised of the unity of sonata form. The continually unfolding
sequences and motifs become examples of a tragic, subversive “subjectivity
veering into wretchedness” (51) with the “individual moments estranged” (13)
from the enveloping and enabling bourgeois conventions of sonata form with its
false promise of freed and empowered expressiveness. The tragic power of the
first movement of the Appassionata is that it transforms what is false and
perfunctory into “a terrible beauty” (to use Yeats’ term), so that the eruptive
music of the Appassionata sonata unfolds “a total becoming” within the
dominating form which it inhabits (46).
Adorno’s earlier statements
bear repeating here: “If Beethoven is the musical prototype of the
revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that
has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a
servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of
music and society” (43). And: “By its power, his successful work of art posits
the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that bourgeois society
is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s
music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame (“explodes”)
the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom, which are
revealed as a deluded and null in comparison to the power of the music (46).
These formulations locate a
paradox in Beethoven’s sonata suggestively reminiscent of a paradox in
Dostoyevsky’s novels: in them, a protracted act of confession is expected and
exacted from the protagonists, and yet their subversive voicing of the
convention of confession is performed in such a way as to cast into question
the very nature and substance of the confession. It is an index of their
modernity or proto-modernity that the society-sanctioned forms are
simultaneously fulfilled and subversively transformed. After Beethoven (or for
that matter, after Dostoyevsky), one next step in the history of the arts is
modern and postmodern travesty and pastiche.
Adorno offers many specific
insights particularly into the Appassionata’s middle, development section in
the “dialectical” first movement of the sonata (60). In this section, the
sonata hugely expands the development and finally synthesis of the sonata’s two
major thematic motifs not only in this middle section but in the coda as well
(51-2). These “improvisatory” sections pit the resources of “fantasy” against
the rigidity and restraint of sonata form, and they seem “haplessly to desire
the suffering” of the confrontation, with its “extra-human” harmonies, their
sforzando “minor seconds,” and the hammered chords and demonically driven
arpeggios. These effects all place the listener, as it were, in mid-stream, in the
midst of extreme turbulence, and instill a continual awareness of the
“incompleteness of what has just been formed” – i.e., the open-ended power and shattering
freedom of the creative process unfolding before us.
A significant crux for Adorno
is the sonata form’s requirement that the original main theme be brought back by
the “recapitulation” section after the shattering development. This reprise of
the main theme is exposed, he writes, as an act of “crushing repression,” as “a
trait of esthetic untruth” implicating bourgeois society’s imposition of and
insistence on “the conjuring of static sameness amid total becoming” (44, 46). In
the Appassionata, Beethoven refuses that complacent sameness by infusing the
recapitulation with instability, continually generating newly energized details
and accompanying the reprise with a low-pitched pulse of repeated notes, a constant
agitation, quickly leading to the newly massive development of the coda. The
sonata in this way exposes “the reprise as a problem,” subverting and upending “the
moment of untruth in bourgeois ideology” (16) – and so for “Beethoven, then,
the traditional forms are reconstructed out of freedom” (61).
The symphonic equivalent of
the Appassionata is the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Eroica, composed
just a few years before. For Adorno, the orchestral work’s earlier genesis and its
more public “writ-large” gestures of “symphonic mastery” rather streamline the
effects of the work. Nevertheless, a tension is once again set up between the
“closed symphonic” (sonata) form and the “open” improvisatory organic episodes
of “epic” development. There are the harmonic collisions in the Eroica from the
opening bars on and the many other intentional irregularities, particularly –
once again – in the development and coda sections. The many developments Adorno
notes all conspire to reveal the turbulent and even tragic “incompatibility” of
those rival, “irreconcilable” conceptions – of the “open” and the “closed,” the
improvisatory and the conventional, the “epic” and the “symphonic” (105-6). In
Adorno’s Marxist-Hegelian view particularly of hearing such a work in isolation
in media remote from the concert hall, the collision of forms in the Eroica confirms
“the truth of the unreconciled condition of the individual in bourgeois
society” (120) – in part because one exists self-consciously both within and
outside the inhabited society [a version of this Hegelian formulation - stressing the music's ironic Goethean wisdom of simultaneously enacting 'within' and narrating 'outside' - can be
found, too, in Scott Burnham’s Beethoven
Hero (146)].
In my next post, I’ll attempt
to explore Adorno’s rather more detailed and remarkably responsive formulations
about late Beethoven and his self-consciousness about convention and innovation.
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