Public and confidential
Hans Keller
I3eethoven's Ninth will be heard under Solti in a live relay from Chicago next Wednesday (October 12) at 8 p.m, on Radio 3.
An article on the Ninth at this point in the history of critical omniscience? Is there a better-known, better-loved work? The Ring, Tristan, and The Mastersingers apart, has any musical composition been more widely discussed? Perhaps not, but What about the depth of these discourses — and, for that matter, of our knowledge of the music? As a matter of obtrusive fact, our sheer musical knowledge has been shallowing of late. Time was when With luck, people heard the Symphony once a year. However, they had got to know it, not in the concert hall, but by Playing a piano-duet arrangement of it. That way, they certainly got to know it. With the advent not only of the gramophone, radio, and television, but of a trans-world pop version of the joy tune (not to speak of its promotion to the Common Market's anthem), our power of concentration, the quality of our perception of both the tune and the work as a Whole, has declined to an extent which makes it possible for you to read the Spectator while you hear the Ninth — read this article, maybe, with a calm conscience: you're doing something for your culture, and will learn something about What you are hearing. Not from me, you won't. The replacement of knowledge-of by knowledgeabout has produced the primary cancer of our civilisation, complete with countless metastases. 'About' unconceptual, 'pure' music, in any case, there is little to be known conceptually, except amongst the unmusical, who are incapable of knowing it in the first place. On the other hand, those who aren't may indeed be interested in increasing their conceptual knowledge about their musical knowledge of music: either my words about music are about my experience of it and hence, I hope, about your own, or else they are sham. It follows that you can't read my article while experiencing the music — or that you can't experience it while reading my article.
Amongst all those essays on the Ninth, then, how many provide new knowledge about our knowledge of the'work? Do we include Sir George Grove's? Well. I don't, but Vaughan Williams does, and certainly include his extended Piece (`Some Thoughts on Beethoven's Choral Symphony'). despite its inanities. Then there is Wagner himself, of course, and Tovey. More important and less known in the English-speaking world, there is Furtwangler (in his Talks about Music) — and that's about it, except that I venture to include myself in this galaxy, because of what I had — and, below, have — to say about our experience of the finale, yours and mine rather than the gramophile's.
Meanwhile, my unlikely inclusion of Vaughan Williams requires elucidation; if it is justified, he may be able to tell us, or make us tell ourselves, more about the nature of this singular event in the history of Western thought — the composition of the Ninth together with its reception — than does the normal Beethovenian, the Symphony's predictable admirer. For VW was the very opposite of a Beethoven fan: 'I ought to explain that the early nineteenth-century idiom is naturally repugnant to me', and so is much of Beethoven himself, with whom — as VW's O.U.P. flap civilisedly had it in 1953 — he 'is in general out of sympathy'.
Nevertheless, the Anglo-maniac either knew his music or he didn't; he was never influenced by what he or anybody else knew about it. Now, for generations, the educated music lover and musician has grown up with a wide and knee-deep knowledge about Beethoven's 'problematic' finale; why, only last year in Germany, Michael Gielen inserted Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' between the Ninth's last two movements, in order to solve the finale's alleged problems and bring it nearer to joyless reality! This piece of 'creative' programme-building was urgently offered to me in my capacity as chairman of the committee planning the European Broadcasting Union's International Concert Seasons; it was the only time in 12 years that I rejected something out of hand, without even consulting my colleagues — nor did they subsequently blame me.
'I understand that the pious Beethovenite always makes an exception of this finale,' says VW, 'but then I am not a pious Becthovenite who 'deplores the finale and considers it to be "a pity", like the old ladies in Forster's Room with a View, who would only buy the head and shoulders of Botticelli's "Venus" because they considered the complete figure _"a pity".' Later in his study VW reminds us that 'the devout Beethovenite thinks the finale "noisy" and even "in bad taste": Yes, taste springs from knowledge-about: the naive enjoyer of the much-maligned, sublime 'Turkish' march variation of the joy tune is unaware of tastelessness, its and his.
'Enjoyment' is, for once, the word. Usually, that is, enjoyment is a mere function of musical understanding, whose substance may be sad, and usually is: 'All music is sad,' Schubert is reported to have remarked at a party, when invited to play something cheerful. But in the case of this finale, understanding is impossible without your being brought into a condition of profound joy. In VW's opinion, 'two composers, and only two, have been able to write music which is at the same time serious, profound and cheerful — Bach in the 'Cum sancto' of the B minor Mass and Beethoven in the finale of the Choral Symphony. Incidentally both these movements are in D major,' — as is almost everybody's joyous violin concerto.
The vulgarity of or in,the choral finale is, simply, the cultured insider's incomprehension of its deep joy, whose esoteric knowledge Beethoven made available to exoteric circles, to 'the whole world', without sacrificing any of the complexity of his late thought as it expresses itself in the lasting esotericism of the late quartets: quite literally, his is a unique achievement, a successful confidential communication to 'ye millions', every single individual among them. The people barred from the confidence because they just miss it — or, as they would say, miss out on it are those de-individualised by taste, the selfconscious esotericists themselves. `No, I do not understand Beethoven,' says VW, 'and yet when I turn to the finale, I sometimes think that I understand him better than the inner circle.'
How, then, did Beethoven do it? I am approaching my last and highest hurdle — the musical structuralisation of your own instinctive understanding of, perhaps, the greatest feat of, perhaps, mankind's greatest mind. So far as he (as distinct from us) was concerned, it all started in the most private and confidential chamber — that of the string quartet. When he wrote the first movement of the first Rasumovsky Quartet, that is, he decided upon one of his characteristic, impatient steps: jumping a natural stage in the evolution of sonata composition, he chose, not to vary the repeat of the exposition, but simply to omit it; instead, by way of his momentary return to the first subject in the tonic, he built a mental bridge between the expected repeat of the exposition and the ensuing development.
Henceforth until the present day, the repeat has been either reintroduced or, in Beethoven's (often detailed) image, dropped — but, outside classical concerto form, never varied. The choral finale makes amends. Composed against the background of sonata form (as was its forerunner, the Choral Fantasia's own variations), it drops, not the repeat of the expository variations, but the second subject proper we have been led to expect at the dominant stage; and now that we don't expect a repeat of the exposition any longer, it does, in fact, happen — for a moment instrumentally, but then in the unprecedented shape of a compressed and vocally varied repeat: if you like, the movement is composed against the background not only of sonata (which was to retain its background potency as long as the Grand Fugue!) but also of the concerto's first-movement form, whose solo exposition turns into the symphonic finale's vocal exposition: '0 friends, not these notes again!' Not a mere bloody repeat!
This is the unrecognized basis, then, of your joyful explosion as well as Beethoven's the simultaneous liberation from, and retention of the repeat: the human mind's primal urges, revolution and conservation, are rolled into one primal theme and its structural function — the 'Urthema' as Furtwangler called it. When it is played or heard or thought of as a mere tune, without the experience of what happens to it, its joy is divested of its Profundity and degenerates to the lev-el of 'cheerfulness', as VW unfortunately calls it. When the whole exposition is heard as a whole, on the other hand, another round of revolutionary retention still awaits us — the drastically modified recapitulation.
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