La Grenouille dans le Fauteuil

My thoughts, explorations and opinions about Music, Philosophy, Science, Family life; whatever happens. Shorter items than on my web site. The name of the blog? My two favorite French words. I just love those modulating vowels.

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Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Bruckner's 9th Symphony. Saved by the Bell.

I am so glad that Bruckner did not ruin his 9th symphony by adding a last movement, a finale, to it. Finales were never Bruckner’s strong point, and the 9th benefits greatly from not having one. After all, does anyone feel short-changed after the Schubert “unfinished.”?

The reason Bruckner’s finales are so poor harks back to his desire to live up to Beethoven’s example, and ties in with what Wagner did as a composer of Symphonic Operas, and Mahler as a composer of Operatic Symphonies. Brahms was rather different.

The problem, simply put, is this: How do you finish a long piece of abstract music, with no story to it, and no words, and make the ending really feel like the end of the whole thing, as opposed to just the end of the last part? Before Beethoven, this didn't really arise, since a symphony was essentially a set of pieces, like a set at a jazz club, where you would make sure the ending made a good ending, period. What you did half an hour before was beside the point. But Beethoven tried something more ambitious: pieces of music that might last up to an hour, and that felt like a giant single thing. How could you make that work, when you didn’t have a story as you would in a Shakespeare play? Let’s take a look at what Beethoven did in his finales.

Symphonies 1, 2, 4, and 8 don’t really count. In 1 and 2, he had hardly got going. The 4th is a wonderful old-fashioned Mozartian effort, in which the finale is a flashy pops number for the first fiddles. A sort of Viennese Hoe-down. Symphony 8 is odd. It gets very silly from time to time, the sort of silliness that comes in handy in opera, thus becoming a useful warm up for the 9th.

But suddenly, in the first movement of the 3rd, the Eroica, POWEE!! Never mind Schoenberg’s 2nd string quartet, THIS is the piece where music suddenly “breathes the air of a different planet.” Who knew that an abstract piece of music could be erected into such a huge, single-span arch without falling over? The second movement, the Funeral March, is heavy-duty stuff too, with a mind-crunching climax unnervingly similar to that of the first movement. The scherzo is peppy, fun, has no climax, and is generally inoffensive. A lesser matter. We can see where Beethoven is going now. The scherzo presents itself effectively as a lead-in to the very necessary, much looked forward to, deeply needed, cathartic climax: the Crowning Finale - worthy of balancing that epoch-shattering first movement. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. The finale of the Eroica is a patch-work affair of no real substance. For conductors it is irritating and unrewarding, as you have to keep memorizing those awkward bits of fugue that really contribute very little. It suffers from the affliction we shall find often in Bruckner: To make a worthy finale for a big work, it has to have a certain heft, as Aristotle pointed out. It’s got to be big enough to do the job. It mustn’t be trivial. But what do you do if you don’t really have anything to say, because all the important stuff has already been laid out in the early movements?

Beethoven’s 5th is probably the most influential symphony ever written, therefore justly famous. Yet eminence does not exempt it from difficulties, even though Beethoven worked really hard on the finale-problem in this one. He carefully made all three preceding movements brilliant, substantial, and inconclusive. The first movement has drive (everybody mentions that!) but it also keeps stopping! In fact, the very first thing it does, before you can possibly have a clue what the key, the tempo, or the meter is, is STOP. Then, next, it STOPS again. It keeps on doing it. So its ending, though driven, has a quality of puzzled, unreleased energy. Big question mark. The second movement is ethereal and Apollonian, except for those vacuous trumpet fanfares which sound so lame that I cannot help thinking we must all be playing them the wrong way. Beethoven couldn’t have meant that! But I don’t know what the right way is. And, confusingly, triviality is what ends the movement. So again, a giant question mark. The third movement, the scherzo, is a very clever part of a brilliant strategy. Just as the first movement kept switching from stop to go, this one keeps switching from quiet to loud. As it ends, the quiet takes over and gradually, mysteriously, evolves through a secret passage into the loud finale. Very clever. It makes the finale, without question, the outcome of the previous movements, organically welded to them; a triumphant outcome.

Unfortunately, its reason for existence is completed with its very first chord. The whole symphony became a journey leading to the finale, and a very successful one. But the end result is that the whole thing ends up like New Year’s Eve. We all sit around waiting for that stroke of midnight, and then, when it comes, there really isn’t much to do except pack up and go home to bed. So we kind of hang around for a while so as not to appear rude. Once again, as in the Eroica, the finale is sound and fury, signifying little except Beethoven’s sense of proportion in knowing how long it ought to last. The very end of Beethoven’s 5th is almost a joke. It’s as if Beethoven thought that by banging the home chord often enough, and redundantly enough, the sense of finality would somehow stretch backwards in time and magically encompass everything played since the beginning of the piece. Strategy rather than tactics. It almost works, but still adds nothing that was not spelled out the moment the finale began. Definitely an advance on the finale of the Eroica, but not really a success.

The 6th, the Pastoral, is where he really starts to get somewhere.
To be continued.
©2004 AJM

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