The Shaping Spirit:
Beethoven’s Last Quartets Christopher Hampton describes how Beethoven’s last quartet ‘provides a kind of summing-up of his quest for the essences of artistic form’.
Music has its fundamental place among the great forms of art. It goes back to the primitive beginning of human society, as a manifestation of magic, an invocation of the mystical, an expression of the primary emotions relating to love and war and death, the rituals of religious experience and the carnivalesque celebration of communal feeling. And when put to the service of religious worship – the liturgical demands, for instance, of the Christian churches – it has brought into being extraordinary forms of achievement in the great sung masses of Josquin des Pres, Palestrina, Victoria, Schutz, Bach and Handel, not to mention Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Developing out of this combination of word and sound, from Monteverdi onward, emerge the hybrid secular forms of opera, giving voice to the drama and conflict of individual experience, which is at its most intimate in the great song cycles of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, where the sound and meaning of words and music act upon each other to become at best an inseparable unity.
But in spite of all the evidence of the uses to which it has been put, it could be argued that music is the freest of all the arts in the sense that its primary material – sounds organised by pitch, rhythm and harmonic progression – remains independent of both the physical-visual demands of the external world (as in painting and sculpture) and the restrictive propositional semantic demands of language. And if the art of poetry comes closest in essence to that of music, still the poem depends on and is restricted by the extraneous multiple contexts and meanings of the words it uses.
Thus music moves in time through the energy of its melodic-rhythmic forms as ordered and driven by the sequential patterns of the notated sung forms given to it by the composer and the performer, without whom it can have no voice. Its logic works, that is, through the combinations of sound it creates in time out of silence and air and space, as a semantic structure contained within the multiple forms it launches upon the atmosphere.
And in its most highly developed forms it speaks an intellectual-emotional language of its own that is all the more satisfying in that it is independent of all other (extra-musical) forms of argument, even when it uses them.
Muss es sein? Must it be?
Take Beethoven – the Beethoven of the last piano sonatas and quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, where words – including those of Schiller’s ecstatic Ode to Joy – become yet another instrument to add to the invisible space-time dimension the music explores and expands and is determined by through the intensity and concentration of Beethoven’s thinking in the astonishing inventiveness and rhythmic energy of these works. This is nowhere more cogently argued in purely musical terms than in the seven movements of the C sharp minor Quartet, Opus 131. Here, it might be said, the germinal opening theme is taken up, transformed and expanded through each of the six movements that succeed it. And the originality of the formal structure of this work and the three other Quartets that were written in the year or so before the composer’s death takes music as far as it has ever moved into the realm of the transcendent and its continually renewable resources, so as almost to become, in T.S.
Eliot’s vibrant words, ‘Erhebung without motion, concentration /Without elimination’, though it is always (at least till the end of the work) in motion.
How this comes about is one of the mysteries of great art, which is ultimately inexplicable, though such strength is not secretive. It speaks directly to the listener in its own self-contained language through the clarity of the texture, the luminous articulation of line and counterpoint and rhythm, the energy and coherence of motivic development, from the brooding contemplation of the slow movements to the air-driven swiftness of the scherzos they so often emerge from. And this is a matter of the shaping spirit of the philosophy that lies behind it; the unfolding logic of the argument, the intellectual struggle pitched – as William Blake puts it: ‘with intellectual spears and long, winged arrows of thought’ against the contradictions of reality, which Beethoven had fought throughout his life.
And that philosophy is there, delicately affirmed in the music of the last of the Quartets, the Opus 135, which – with its intimacy, intensity and joyousness, its power to speak through the voices of its four instruments – provides a kind of summing-up of Beethoven’s quest for the essences of artistic form. For in this work, Beethoven even makes use of words to drive home his meaning. ‘Muss es sein?’ he writes above the three-note motif of the introduction to the last movement. ‘Must it be?’ Do I have to accept my fate? And the answer comes with the three-note sequence, ‘Es muss sein’ (‘it must be’) that follows, which forms the firstsubject theme of the movement.
Nor is it an accident that this tentative questioning motif and its resolution should follow immediately upon one of Beethoven’s most deeply felt and searching slow movements, Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo – a sotto voce meditation which is transmuted into a hesitant probing intensity as it moves, like a faltering heart-beat, a heart-beat missed, almost stopping, but recovered from, and renewed.
For it is this which gives rise to the tentative questioning Muss es sein? motif of the fourth movement. And its resolution then becomes the main theme of the movement, which is in turn buoyantly confirmed by the second subject, itself emerging out of the three-note motif, to return again, close to the end, in a pizzicato dance-like form, as light as air, before giving way to the last notes (the es muss sein assertion) of its celebratory fortissimo conclusion.
What more could one ask of the artist? In this work, as in the three others written over the final months of the composer’s life, the personal has become the universal, a triumph of art and its transformation of the self’s voice into forms that survive even the death of the self. And the Opus 135 is the last quartet, perhaps even Beethoven’s last work – intimate and affirmative, its final cadence an unreserved Yes to the Other in the self, as life-enhancing as the seasonal renewals of the natural world – an artifice that confirms rebirth, as the earth’s hidden roots their summer flowering.
We cannot ask for more. Es muss sein – the music says it all speaking ‘for the clarity of the stars /at their galactic distance... where they have so long stabbed /skies beyond the reach of thought’. And in this sense, facing the unresolved questions of reality, we are left to make of this music what it has to say to us, if in the end we can rise to it.
Christopher Hampton studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London,gaining hisAGSM in piano and conducting.He then taught English for 28 years at the University ofWestminster and the City Literary Institute.
His prose works include Socialism in a CrippledWorld (Penguin,London 1981) and A Radical Reader (Penguin 1984, recently reissued by Spokesman Press).His most recent poetry collection is Border Crossings (Katabasis,2005).
Es muss sein. It must be.