Beethoven 250 - Unter der Oberfläche/ Beneath the Surface

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.

Beethoven’s string quartets, and the late ones in particular, are of central importance to me, not only as a composer who writes quartets himself. For years, the scores of Opus 127 and Opus 130 have been my bedside reading. I have read and analyzed them again and again—and yet, even the first eight measures of the “Alla danza tedesca” leave me perplexed. This is music I have never been able to understand, music in which every second note seems to contradict the preceding one. To approach it as a performer, to rehearse only these few measures, to abandon oneself to them, exploring their ambivalences, making decisions about them—all that is an enormous artistic challenge. In Beethoven’s late music, interpretation becomes speculation, a utopian issue. For as soon as I decide in favor of one interpretation, I rob the music of its ambivalence and thereby of its riches. That is why at this point interpretation must cease to be what it was before Beethoven. I must develop a different attitude towards this music. Yet how are we ever to make all the ambivalences of a work such as Opus 130 audible? It remains impossible. Ignaz Schuppanzigh, whose quartet gave the first performances of most of Beethoven’s late quartets, once complained that the music was unplayable. Beethoven’s reaction is legendary: “What do I care about your wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me!” We tend to reduce this answer to an element of arrogance, but I believe this is truly what Beethoven thought. His music, especially the works written towards the end of his life, are a direct expression of this idea. It is impossible for a completely plausible interpretation of a piece like the Grosse Fuge to exist. Is it utopian music?

When you are a composer, studying Beethoven can sometimes feel as if you were grappling with a giant, and you suddenly comprehend such dramatic-sounding statements as Brahms’s, who thought he could hear a giant marching behind him. I am currently working on my Seventh String Quartet. It is the second quartet in a cycle conceived as a “Study on Beethoven.” After finishing my first string quartet cycle with the Fifth Quartet in 2005, I felt the need to move into a new direction, and as soon as I began working, I realized that Beethoven would have to be the focus. I hardly ever make reference to specific works here, but while I am composing I keep coming back to Opus 130—a piece that leaves me speechless in its inexhaustibility, in the manner in which Beethoven juxtaposes struggle and liberty, in which he turns music into grounds for experimentation. The abruptness, the non-jovial attitude, the resistance is what we are confronted with here so impressively, but at the same time it is also the intimate moments, as in the Cavatina, when Beethoven speaks in the first person singular, when he sings out without ever being sentimental. This is something I admire infinitely in him: he may be brusque at times, but he is never cold. He always writes music with an ardent inner glow.

Perhaps 20 years ago I could not have spoken so enthusiastically about Beethoven. With the exception of the Seventh Symphony, for a long time his works seemed to me like a planet I could deeply admire, even fear, but not love. But spending a long time studying this music has profoundly changed my attitude. Beethoven, this we realize over and over, even after two centuries, is an inexhaustible reservoir. His music has visionary power. It has not collected patina or lost any of its impertinence. When the revolutionary fanfare rings out in the Fifth Symphony—a primitive musical gesture really —it does not leave us cold, but we experience something that is as outrageous as it must have been at the time.

Ultimately, encounters with this composer always lead me back to a phrase I find particularly shattering and moving. Beethoven inscribed it on the score of one of his most unwieldy works, which is also one of his most beautiful, one of his most important, but still almost hermetically inaccessible to this day—the Missa solemnis: “From the heart—may it return to the heart.” That is what it’s all about. That is why we make music.

Jörg Widmann holds the Edward W. Said Chair as Professor of Composition at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. In June 2019, his Labyrinth IV for Soprano and Ensemble had its world premiere at the Pierre Boulez Saal.