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THE 'GROSSE FUGE'
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THU 'GROSSE FUGE' 141
simple, average listeners deeply at a first hearing, and is- recorded (in
the Lener performance) for the gramophone. Among these uncompli-
mentary terms are dour, uncouth, inconsequential, laboured, extrava-
gant, cerebral, obscure, impracticable, foolish, mad, illogical, formless,
meaningless, and experimental; all of which have been used in the
newspapers during and since 1927.
The voluminous Beethoven literature inspired by the Centenary
(1927) contained-so far as I have observed-practically nothing on
the fugue or on what it stood for in the composer's art. Even the
great Beethoven numbers of MUSIC AND LETTERS, for instance, con-
tain only one reference to it, and that no more than a passing one.
Such an omission is as curious as would be the omission of the
' Hamlet ' group of plays from a discussion of Shakespeare, because
this fugue is as significant in respect of Beethoven as those plays of
tragic failure are in respect of Shakespeare. It proves that even in
1927 the work did not live, even in the special spheres of Beethoven
literary culture; for if it had lived there--as for instance the C minor
Symphony, the Mass, and the Choral Symphony live-it would have
sprung forward as constantly as they did to afford illustrations and to
point remarks.
Circumstances having made the fugue more or less topical in this
country of late, it has naturally been mentioned frequently; but every
one of the references to it that I have seen contains some error, either
of simple historical or formal fact, or of judgment-which is proof
that no English critic has apparently given the work the attention
it requires before remarks on it can be authoritative.
The first hearers of the fugue (Vienna, March 21, 1826) heard it as
part of the quartet in B filat, which was published after Beethoven's
death as op. 130. In this quartet is the famous Cavatina. The
Cavatina happened not to impress the audience as of any particular
sianificance, but they encored the Presto (the second movement) and
the Alla danza Tedesca (the fourth). The fugue astonished them by
its unusual character and wearied them by its length. Beethoven
therefore took it out of the quartet, and a year later wrote the finale
that forms the present ending.
Actually the fugue is not only necessary in the scheme of the
quartet, but it is an essential part of the group of quartets of which
the B flat is No. 2 :-A minor, op. 132; B flat, op. 130; C sharp minor,
op. 131; and its full ' interpretation ' is possible only with the help
of the three quartets in their entirety-even the theme of the fugue
is, in one way or another, ' common ' to certain other movements.
The new finale-by comparison very simple, and in mood free of all
ambiguity-is not dramatically a member of the family of movements,
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142 MUSIC AND LETTERS
and once in a while performers remove it and put the fugue back
in its original place.
Now the Vienna audience of 1826 naturally had no chance to know
anything about the fugue before they heard it; and experienced in
Beethoven's music though the Schuppanzigh Quartet were (Prince
Rasumovski's private quartet), it can hardly be doubted that the
performance they gave was a pretty bad one. All string quartet
music is unpleasant when done badly; but this particular specimen
must be literally hideous when so treated; and the audience were
justified in rejecting it. The contemporary critic who may have
given it a bad notice would be justified likewise; though if he had
learned wisdom from similar experiences of Beethoven's music since
the time the ' Eroica ' had appeared twenty-odd years earlier, he
would have written his notice with an open mind.
I have not found any accounts of the playing of the fugue for more
than fifty years after this first performance. Artaria published it in
the May following Beethoven's death in the March; but if such a
quartet as Schuppanzigh, Franz Weiss, Karl Holz, and Joseph
Lincke could not master it with the composer guiding them at re-
hearsal, no other group of instrumentalists during the next two
gernerations could do anything with it. But the same situiation
prevailed with regard to other works of Beethoven in the middle of the
century. The Choral Symphony, for example, was not played and
sung well until Wagner trained an orchestra and choir for it in Dresden
in 1846; and according to what Wagner says about the way the chamber
musicians of the middle of the century dealt with the other late
quartet movements of Beethoven-which was ' hazily '-we may be
sure those musicians would leave the fugue alone. Some of them told
Wagner that practically all the posthumous quartets were ' sheer
nonsense '; just as Karl Reissiger, who had made a fiasco of his
attempt to do the Choral Symphony a few years earlier than 1846,
told him that the music of that symphony was ' formless, savage,
fatiguing, unintelligible, and the blunder of a genius gone astray.'
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THE 'GROSSE FUGEI' 143
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l144 MUSIC AND LBTTERS
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THE 'GROSSE FUGE ' 145
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146 MUSIC AND- LZTTERS
(there are two fugues in the work, the first in B flat, the second in
A flat) merry, energetic, buoyant, and so forth; which is obviously
how it appeals to him; though in truth this is a theme cramped into
the interval of the diminished fifth, (D to A flat), rebellious of its
confinement, and almost desperate in its effort to escape into the
open-which it contrives to do after the great full close in D minor
(bar 109, and the end of part 1 of the Columbia recording).
Only one writer on the work as received through the gramophone
is so intimate with the music that it moves him. This writer is
the critic who speaks of the recording in The Times on January 3;
and what he says is: ' The whole of the first section of the fugue [the
fugue in - B flat, as described above] is one great tempest of
exhilaration, in the mood, had Blake only known it, of his " Nothing
can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God and in
the abysses of the accuser "; while the rest gives us progressive phases
of meditative acceptance, and reconciliation, and victory.'(1)
The opposition to the ' Grosse Fuge ' for nearly a hundred years,
settling into such (as they now seem) repellent expressions as
Dr. Ernest Walker's ' uncouthly inconsequential,' is easy enough to
understand; just how easy, I will illustrate by these ' chosen words'
from Ruskin's ' Lectures on Art ': ' Human nature is kind and
generous; but it is narrow.and blind, and can only with difficulty
conceive anything but what it immediately sees and feels: people
would instantly care for others as well as themselves if only they
could imagine others as well as themselves.' This fugue, like all
similar works, is a manifestation of the mind and soul of its creator,
and it was not cared for simply because the people could not imagine
the Beethoven it embodies.
How very swiftly we can ' imagine ' things with a little help I
leamed once again on February 2, when I lectured on this piece to the
students of Birmingham University. We were together for two hours,
speaking freely on all subjects having relation to the composer, his art
in general, and this example of his art in particular-considering its
form, and listening to it sectionally through the gramophone: and
not only was there a desire for the two hours to be expanded to three
(1) Very far is this from something said eighty years ago of music hard to
understand then, but easy now, the Chopin mazurkas, which is no stronger
than the contemporary criticisms that were levelled at all the progressive
works of Beethoven, from the third symphony onwards: ' The composer
satisfies to a disgusting degree his paslon for writing unnaturally. He is
inexhaustible in his diiscovery of forced transitions, ugly distortions of
theme, and ear-splitting harmonies. Aknd he rakes everything together that
may ?roduce the effect of odd originality, by the unn tural position of
notes.
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THE 'GROSSE FUGGE' 147
And then, for that unutterably lovely ascent in the last part of the
music-after that dancing scherzo has come the second time-I find
this other echo in the Francis Thompson:
I shall have no rest until I have the fugue, have mastered it from
start and finish, and worked out to the full these affinities.'
My object in these rather informal remarks is merely to arouse the
interest of the music-lover in the ' Grosse Fuge,' and to invest the
subject with a little more seriousness and reasonableness. We have
no cause to be proud of what we have thought of the work for the last
hundred years-rather the reverse. But we need not be ashamed that
it has taken us all that time to learn how to understand and play it,
for its spirit is so exceedingly fine and lofty that a century was
required in the process of education. Nor ought we to blame
Beethoven for making the music so very hard: what he had to express
could not have been managed in any simpler way.
SYDNEY GREW.
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