Evading the Tragic

...Schrade's book, with its refreshingly explicit title, I was confident that soon I should be engrossed in considerations of such relevant compositions as Bach's St...

...in fact, it is impossible to say whether the development of the sonata suggested the dramatic possibilities of pure music or whether the demand for a dramatic form produced the sonata...

...Wagner's Ring and Tristan...

...He has written whole chapters on music that no longer exists, such as the music of the Greek tragedy, the sole remnant of which is a scrap of parchment containing less than 30 notes...

...On this occasion, evidently feeling some compunction about omitting the entire history of the opera as we know it, he bluntly remarks that all the operatic developments since the time of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) are merely accidental modifications of the perdurable substance bequeathed to posterity by these Titans of music drama...

...The consistency of the great masters in avoiding unrelieved tragedy, and their conspicuous success in projecting a lofty joy that in no manner weakens or falsifies the tragic issues raised in their works, is one of the most impressive features of classical music (as well as being one of the principal distinctions between music and literature...

...Schubert's Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin...

...Instead of launching out boldly on a fresh exploration of this inviting subject...

...and the Ninth Symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler...

...But one can only illuminate the mysteries of the tragic in music if he is willing to confront these mysteries directly in the masterpieces of tragic music...

...Half way through the book and still deep in documentation of baroque opera, I realized that my expectations were wildly inappropriate...

...both in Beethoven and in music generally, was the profound unity between music and the cyclical patterns of myth...

...This he did through extensions of the introduction (à la Haydn), the coda (largely his own invention) and the development section (as in the far-ranging first movement of the Eroica...

...Haydn and Mozart, though occasionally deviating into pathos, never strayed far from the mock-heroic or the comedy of manners...

...Though never really abandoning the sonata, Beethoven greatly advanced the development of dramatic music by "straightening out" this essentially circular form...

...Dramatic music, in the sense in which the term is used to distinguish a symphony of Mozart or Beethoven from a suite by Bach, is indissolubly connected with sonata style...

...And so what with Dr...

...Verdi's Otello...

...Schrade were to defend his omission of instrumental music on the ground that pure music cannot be properly discussed under the rubric of tragedy...

...His own reactions should have convinced him of the great dramatic effectiveness of Beethoven's "returns": the sense of triumphant assurance as the long absent, long yearned for theme sounds again...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Evading the Tragic Presented originally as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1962-63, and offered now by the "President and Fellows of Harvard College" in an austere wrapper—stark white letters looming from a black background—Tragedy in the Art of Music (Harvard, 137 pp., $3.75), the most recent work of the noted German musicologist Leo Schrade, carries an impressive air of academic distinction...

...Pure music is properly approached only through the chaste discipline of grammatical analysis...

...Beethoven cast his works in an ethical form that was in a sense the opposite of tragedy because the "hero," though noble and suffering, eventually wins through to joy and peace...

...Thus when I opened Dr...

...He could not, however, remove every trace of its origin in the symmetric design of the neo-classicists...

...After picking my way through the first long, contorted sentences, crammed with classical erudition but devoid of musical references, I began to have doubts...

...It remained for Wagner to write the first major works of music in which tragedy is unqualified by either Christian faith or Romantic optimism...

...He was particularly hard on the Leonora No...

...Radically different from the nondramatic music of the early 18th century (the age of Bach and Handel), which may be imagined as the elaboration in a single and unaltered direction of an explicitly stated purpose, the dramatic sonata style of Haydn and Mozart established music as a necessary but unforseeable sequence of events...

...Beethoven's Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, his major piano sonatas, including the Pathétique, the Appassionata, the Hammerklavier and the Opus 111, the string quartets in E minor, F sharp minor, A minor and C sharp minor, and the Missa Solemnis...

...MatthewPassion...

...Regarding Beethoven's works as tone poems—as, that is, attempts to shadow forth from sounds the contours of mythic action—Wagner naturally objected to the disparities between the structure of the music and the shape of the myths...

...the other is tragedy as a kind of musical construction, a consideration inseparable from the whole problem of dramatic music...

...and for his ultimate compliance with convention, he was severely criticized by the next great composer in the instrumental succession, Richard Wagner...

...The rationale for this highhanded procedure must for the most part be inferred, for only once does Dr...

...Nor did Wagner appreciate Beethoven's brilliant adaptation for dramatic purposes of the traditionally static and discontinuous pattern of theme and variations...

...has there been a comprehensive or searching critique of this momentous theme...

...And it reveals much about the nature of music that the work of the first great tragedian and pessimist had to be based on a literary substratum...

...Another important reason for Dr...

...Schrade condescend to explain his collossal omissions...

...Why this should be so, and why music, more than any other art, should possess the magical power of representing with absolute conviction the highest fulfillment of man's desire for happiness is a mystery no philosopher has ever penetrated...

...Perhaps, then, the most important thing to be said about the tragic in music is that it has never prevailed as a comprehensive vision in absolute music, but has always been seen as a stage in the passage toward joy—the ultimate musical condition...

...Not since Friedrich Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, published in 1871...

...3, complaining that the recapitulation ran counter to the dramatic course of the overture's development...

...Schrade rambles along those well-marked paths of conventional scholarship that lead around, not through, uncharted territory...

...Thus with one wave of his cigar does this eminent professor of Musikwissenschaft dismiss Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Weber, Meyerbeer, Wagner, Verdi and Puccini...

...Renaissance and baroque opera, the planctus, and the tragic circumstances of the lives of the great composers, the author contrives to omit all the masterpieces of tragic music...

...Schrade's failure to get to the heart of his subject is his great predilection for discussions of cultural, historical, biographical and even linguistic phenomena in remote periods...

...In this view, it involved discovery and reversal, while generating effects of suspense and surprise...

...In his late works, Beethoven arranges variations like stepping stones across a pond so that he can traverse an extended range of mythopoeic material without having to return to his starting point...

...But what Wagner failed to see...

...Indeed, one cannot imagine a grander subject, or a more suitably learned scholar to deal with it than the author of Beethoven in France, Monteverdi—Creator of Modern Music, La Representation d'Edipo Tiranno, and Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century...

...The endeavor ran contrary to the whole character of music and would not otherwise have succeeded...

...Schrade's historical hobby-horses, his pure music prejudices and his penchant for culture, the subject of tragedy in the art of music becomes, in his hands, the quite different subject of tragedy before the art of music...

...One is the tragic "quality," which in largescale musical compositions is rarely totally pervasive, happy endings being the rule...

...Mozart's G minor Symphony and the viola quintet in the same key, as well as the D minor Concerto and the A minor Sonata...

...Such humanistic considerations, one is finally forced to conclude, play a much greater part in his thinking than does music itself...

...As for the topic which the Doctor would have been better occupied writing about, it has at least two distinct aspects...

...By elaborating the free sections of the sonata and by either eliminating or disguising the mechanical joints and repetitions that impede its forward thrust and continuity, Beethoven realized the full dramatic potential of the form...

...By confining himself to Greek drama...

...Nor can one conceive of another subject of comparable importance that has been so completely ignored...

...And yet I should not be surprised if Dr...