Beethoven - Grosse Fugue, op. 133 (1827)
One of Beethoven’s most iconic traits was his love for stark contrasts, and juxtaposing extremes of emotion and musical writing against each other. While writing his 13th string quartet (op.130), he wanted to follow the classical tradition of ending it with a fugal finale, the likes of which you can hear in several of Haydn and Mozart’s string quartets (and Mozart’s quintets). He claimed to have difficulty writing fugues and was often challenged with incorporating fugal elements into a growing and forward thinking expressivity. The result for the op. 130 quartet was a gargantuan and gnarled fugue full of dissonance that took up 1/3rd of the total run time, right after a short and heavenly cavatina (which provides the extreme contrast I mentioned earlier). While the quartet was successful at the premiere, the fugue left the audience confused. A lot of musicians and critics hated it. At best it was called “incomprehensible, like Chinese” and “a confusion of Babel” and “inaccessible”. At worst, composer Louis Spohr called it “an indecipherable, uncorrected horror” (I’ll interject that Spohr is an ‘ok’ composer who lacked imagination but that’s just my opinion). Of course Beethoven, who at this point in his life was self-confident to “know” the mastery of his own music, was angry at the cold reception. He was especially infuriated that audiences wanted an encore of some middle movements and not this fugue. And the publisher begged him to write a new finale to the quartet. He caved to peer pressure and wrote a new finale to the quartet, a more modest rondo which also ended up being the last piece of music he wrote before his death. Since then the fugue has been published as a stand alone piece, though sometimes it is played in the original context as the ending of op. 130. And despite how ‘baffling’ it was and continues to be, we now consider it one of his greatest masterpieces for its counterpoint, expressivity, and how well Beethoven is able to manipulate the main theme. The fugue can be divided into roughly five main sections. It opens with an overture where the first theme is played in unison on all strings. It is a bold yet awkward melody that is then repeated with a new rhythm, and then followed up with a new lyrical subject overhead. The first fugue is rough and violent, no matter what recording I listen to it sounds like the players are scratching away and cutting their fingers, which is probably what gives off the first impression of being “incomprehensible” and harsh. While difficult to follow along at first listen, it is a dense double fugue based on the opening theme, and the inclusion of syncopation and stretti creates a dizzying effect. After that fugue ends, we transition to the third section, where now a new fugue begins in a much more peaceful setting. It sounds like a charming Mozartian adagio, where most of the dissonance in the theme before has been trimmed off to a smoother sounding double-fugue subject. It acts as the ‘andante’ of a multi-movement work, but its softness doesn’t take away from the complexity, as subject and countersubject begin playing in the middle of a canon based on the main theme. A short interlude takes us to the fourth section which is like a scherzo, and is just as charming and fun as the court dance minuet that the scherzo replaced. The charm stands out more when the theme is at its most lighthearted, but again we are confronted by the complexity of using more counterpoint devices, such as playing the theme in retrograde (backwards), and making it harder to follow along by displacing the rhythm as he did back in the first fugue. The coda acts as a kind of recap by bringing back moments and ideas from earlier, but then letting them disappear back into the aether, and then wrapping it all up in a satisfying bow with a simple final statement. Talking about the fugue doesn’t do it justice, and if anything listing the devices used makes it sound like this is a boring academic piece, even though it is anything but. And thankfully its genius was fully recognized in the 20th century, where enough retrospect has given the world time to digest and analyze it. Stravinsky famously said that it is “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever”. It’s easy to hear what he means because the fugue has this sense of immediacy to it, and what people in the 19th century called incomprehensible is what people today would call electrifying.
