On Music

...We discover no Proustian creator, though one must have existed...

...Kerman admits from the beginning the subjective nature of our individual responses and tries to bring them into some kind of alignment with the insights that the techniques of analysis can give us...

...we learn that though he was technically preoccupied with the fugue, "his deepest study, then as always, was the totality, the integrity of the individual work of art," and Kerman supports this generalization throughout...

...Proust made an exhaustive study of the late quartets...

...The Sterbas, using a number of primary sources, took a psychoanalytic approach to their subject in Beethoven and His Nephew (Pantheon, 1954), a book which shattered the romantic-hero image for all time...

...Here, for 379 clogged pages, we are to play the academic game of technical analysis versus an "aesthetic sense????of things 'working,'" of observation versus intuition...

...Well, I suppose it makes little difference...

...After stating his intention to go further into a movement, a parenthesis greets us: "(And about time, the analytical-minded reader may grimly exclaim...

...invited the famous Capet Quartet to play private concerts for him in the disorder of his cork-lined bedroom...

...ON MUSIC By John Goodman Beethoven's Late Quartets The ordinary listener of music who loves Beethoven flees in terror from the late quartets, which he invariably considers obscure, forbidding and arcane...

...We want to understand something of the genesis of these works, even though our conclusions may be affected by the kind of analysis we subject the works to and the esthetic experience we bring to them...

...If this suggests possibilities for a Beethoven esthetic it is not surprising...

...Everyone approaches the quartets differently...

...In the third period of quartet writing, we learn of some interesting correspondences between the quartets and the Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony...

...Beethoven's late quartet music does demand, through its depth and strength, an approach to the composer's personality...

...For the lay reader this book will be very hard going because of its heavy burden of analysis and its quirky style...

...Inept fumbling with the English language is as degrading in dealing with Beethoven as in dealing with Shakespeare...

...The radical experimentation with cyclic form in the "B-flat Major" quartet, as well as numerous tonal and textural qualities, indicate further similarities between the music and the novel...

...As he might say, an illustration of the latter seems to demand quotation...

...In the middle period works, he "seems to have struggled to project in art the quality of human contact that he saw himself cut off from by deafness and by the daemon of creation...

...Indeed, the last quartets "go out and meet the listener half way...

...and even ordered a pianola roll of the "C-sharp Minor" quartet...

...This kind of inner coherence was pursued in the E Minor "Razumovsky" quartet of the second period...

...Another possibly valuable approach is suggested but not followed up in the chapter on the "Razumovsky" quartets...

...Only with the Eroica symphony does it become prominent...

...But this quality, Kerman finds, is not quite true of Mozart's music, or of Brahms', or even of the early Beethoven's...

...Joseph Kerman's recent survey of the subject (The Beethoven Quartets: Knopf, $10.00) attempts, often disarmingly, to ward off criticism of his dialectic by qualifying nearly everything...

...Thus the opening movement of the "C-sharp Minor," a slow fugue, enunciates the "themes" for the work, as does the opening scene of the novel, with the narrator's remembrance of going to bed in childhood...

...We find that the piano sonatas usually prefigure specific revolutions in the symphonies and quartets, and that Beethoven had "a finale problem" through most of his career...

...I came to them through a study of Proust, whose A la recherche du temps perdu, with its intense rendering of musical experience, is the best introduction to chamber music I know...

...The difficulty of this search is nowhere more obvious than in dealing with Beethoven's late quartets, and this is why the ordinary listener is willing to call them obscure and why the critic plunges into sterile analysis and woolly prose...

...The author likes to make rhetorical bows to his audience from time to time, and some of his apologies for the "intuitional" discussions are truly remarkable...

...This reaction is easily explained, for the listener's judgment usually derives more from music critics who wish to impress upon him the complex and esoteric nature of their art than from the music itself...

...Instead of Beethoven the man for a conclusion, we have the usual introductory exhortation to listen and engage...

...The Sterbas provide data only, data which now explain Beethoven's compulsive persecution of his nephew, Karl, to the point where the boy attempted suicide in 1826...

...Then on we move into the world of supertonics, triadic fifths, and the Neapolitan degree...

...Two more radically different quartet compositions can hardly be conceived...

...In trying to explain Beethoven's inscription of the third movement of the "A Minor" quartet, Kerman confesses: "I do not see what to make of that particular text unless we allow that Beethoven was, as he supposed, on some level inventing, imitating, manipulating, referring to or dealing with feeling...

...though talking about this is harder, always, than analyzing details of musical contrast...

...Finally, Kerman proposes that the quartets in "B-flat Major" (Opus 130) and "C-sharp Minor'' (Opus 131) epitomize in Beethoven's music the mature drives foi dissociation and integration, respectively...

...In brief, I would prefer to read the commentaries of Bernard Shaw, sometimes wrong-headed yet always eloquent, or rational "Prolegomena for an Esthetic of the String Quartet...

...As one who finds the late quartets ovemhelming in terms of my own esthetic and emotional response, I wonder whether this ultimate confusion of the man with his work and of criticism with its object is necessary...

...Proust's composer, Vinteuil (a composite of Cesar Franck, Beethoven, and others), leads a pathetic, unhappy life, but his magnificent septet enables the narrator at a crucial point in the novel to see "this unknown quality of a unique world, which no other composer had ever made us see...

...Later, in discussing the first movement of the "A Minor" quartet, Kerman says, "I scarcely know a piece of music that catches the feelings so tightly...

...But if this is a game, Kerman makes his own rules: In the last two pages he piously contends that critical knowledge is merely provisional when we finally engage the individual works...

...All the esthetic "problems" are there, brought to life in a novelistic structure that at times seems to echo the structure of the "C-sharp Minor" and "B-flat Major" quartets...

...To do this the critic needs a viable structure?logical or psychological????and a rhetorical mastery of his content...

...Still, after we have read Sir Donald Tovey, dipped into the Letters, examined the conclusions of Editha and Richard Sterba, the man and his art never really connect...

...Capet said that he had never heard "so profound an appreciation both of Beethoven's genius and of the players' interpretation...

...The growth of Beethoven's paranoia in all its stages is a fascinating and terrifying story and, as never before, we can now understand the "grandiose narcissism" of the man, the chaos of his thoughts, the incredible disorder of his personal life...

...They end by finding in the quartets not a coherent or unified esthetic of musical expression, but Beethoven the man, who may be made into a mystical visionary (by J. W. N. Sullivan) or a supreme technical genius...

...That, for him personally, was perhaps the essence of the heroic vision...

...Such shamans usually begin by admonishing their readers to keep an open ear and listen "with sensitivity...

...Without a Proustian analogy we will inevitably search out our own verbal means to render musical experience...

...Therefore????let's analyze...

...The answer is probably Yes—until criticism can undertake to show us the new orders and modes of feeling, not the feelings themselves, which the quartets appear to require...

...That the Quartet in B-flat is the most problematic and paradoxical of Beethoven's great works may even be shown in the composer's apparent willingness to drop its original finale, the "Great Fugue" (Opus 135...

...Nor can we come away with a wholly believable Vinteuil, a fictional ideal which would forward the myth of Beethoven...

...while the uniqueness of the "C-sharp Minor" quartet "lies exactly in the mutual dependence of its contrasted parts, or as some will prefer to put it, in their organic interrelation...

...As an artist Vinteuil is merely the instrument through which his higher self, embodied in his music, must speak in exhilaration and joy...

...Someday we will understand why this was also the year in which Beethoven composed his greatest quartet, the "C-sharp Minor...

...The authors make the obvious hypothesis that Beethoven's personal rebellion in every area of his life was responsible for his spiritual rebellion and, hence, the "modern" view of him as revolutionary hero...

...Kerman's book has many fine judgments of this kind along with many minor irrelevancies and an occasional verbal collapse...

...Without adequate criticism the listener must make his own analogies and find his own relevant forms...

...A mature Beethoven piece, I think I should be inclined to say, is a person...

...We are indebted for some of these facts to George D. Painter's biography, Proust: The Later Years (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1965), which traces with model thoroughness the relationship between Proust's life and his novel...

...They deliberately leave his music alone, of course, since their task was not criticism...

...one meets and reacts to it with the same sort of particularity, intimacy, and concern as one does to another human being...

...A survey of perhaps the grandest and richest subject in music deserves better than this...