Utopian Music? The Exception as the Quintessence
Jörg Widmann
The first Beethoven piece I learned as a clarinetist was the “Gassenhauer” Trio Op. 11. As a young person, I was fascinated by the relationship between severity and youthful impetuousness in Beethoven’s early music. But even at the time, my perception of the composer was shaped in a decisive way by the Seventh Symphony, which I first encountered in the famous recording Carlos Kleiber made with the Vienna Philharmonic. This, to me, was the epitome of soulful music—but also of music that is uncompromising in its boundlessness, its bacchantic inebriation, its mercilessness. Richard Wagner referred to the Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony as the “apotheosis of dance,” and perhaps summed up an important aspect of the work. On the other hand, there are moments in this score that are not beautiful, chords that can no longer be called aesthetic. I think we often unfairly mock Beethoven’s contemporaries, whose sense of aesthetics was overwhelmed by his music. Carl Maria von Weber, himself a great innovator of orchestral sound, said about the Seventh’s last movement: “Now he is truly ready for Bedlam.” I am convinced that we cannot possibly have any concept of what this music sounded like to contemporary ears. T he beginning of the fourth movement manically circles a single idea. Earlier, in the first movement, Beethoven doggedly repeats a syncopated rhythm over multiple pages—with such insistent perseverance that visually the score resembles a wallpaper pattern. In the finale, he manages to obfuscate the accent of the measure in such a way that the listener is led astray for minutes. The resulting pulse, the energy is tremendous. Accents on off-beats become the new rule, which is then suspended again. In Beethoven’s music, we learn to love the exception as the quintessence.
28
