J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

At times, so eccentric are his textural solutions, the thought of Beethoven’s
deafness crosses one’s mind. William Newman raises the ‘gnawing, ever-present
question of how well Beethoven could actually hear the sonority of what he was
writing’, arguing that ‘no one who has practised the last five sonatas extensively can
fail to be almost painfully aware of continuing problems of balance, projection, and
clear sonority [musical examples showing the end of the Sonata op.101 and bb.118-19
of the Diabelli variations].’ 80
Of course, the pieces are what they are, and short of desperate expedients like
Weingartner’s arrangement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata for orchestra, these
‘problems’ are not easy to fix. With this music there is no real alternative to taking the
rough with the smooth. But what happens, listening carefully over time, is that one
comes to realise that the noise is an essential part of the music: at times the sheer
difficulty of following the musical argument compels attention as nothing else can.
A classical aesthetic might be defined as one in which means (orchestration,
say, or instrumental technique or textural complication) submit themselves humbly to
artistic ends; and would-be classical works are vulnerable to criticism insofar as this
perfect submission is lacking. As we move further away from this aesthetic, however,
means—even apparently unsatisfactory ones—force themselves on our attention as
ends in their own right. Thus John Daverio can speak of the ‘incomprehensibility’ of
Schumann’s music as a ‘constitutive aesthetic quality’ in its own right, 81 and Charles
Ives defends Brahms’s orchestration thus:
To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first
impression either of great translucence or of great muddiness, but in the latter there may be hidden
80 Performance practices in Beethoven’s piano sonatas (London: Dent, 1971), p.46.
81 ‘Schumann’s systems of musical fragments and Witz’, Nineteenth-century music and the German
Romantic ideology (New York: Schirmer, 1993), pp.50, 53; see also D. Ferris, ‘“Was will dieses
Grau’n bedeuten?” Schumann's “Zwielicht” and Daverio’s “incomprehensibility topos”’, Journal of
Musicology 22/1 (Winter 2005), 131-153.
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