Part 3

Part No. 2 suggests at the outset one broad general remark, which we hasten to make. It is this. Beethoven, herein not original, but imitative, generally confines himself--in the sonatas as well--to making the second part mostly a mere elaboration of the first. Now, we beg--at all events, at this time of day--to dissent from, and traverse this. We are for making your first part long enough, and repeating it if you will; but for giving us mostly new ideas, yet in character, in the second. We are not afraid of the "as a whole" theory; _da capo_ we traverse the dogma that what you have got to do is, to give one good idea thoroughly worked out. Wagner has carried this to a wearisome excess. We want no opera or symphony constructed out of "four notes" or forty. We want not an idea, but ideas. Your vaunted elaboration does not disguise--or rather conceal--the essential sameness--which becomes tameness. And we don't want as sets-off mere "episodes." Beethoven's episodes, as here, are of course, interesting; but, because episodes (?) fragmentary, intercalated, rather than essential; postponements of the old "Hauptsache," rather than independent new ideas. Because this second part is essentially but an elaboration (often a mere repetition, in another key, of ideas already repeated--surely, for the most part, an exploded error?), we have little new to say. The harmonious progressions to the episodes will be studied and felt by every musician. The minor passage, la--do--mi--sol nat.--la, is fine, but not novel in Beethoven. The crash, _ff_, is characteristically grand; the whole elaboration full again of power--power that _is_, and prophetic power to do; power latent and patent. At the beautiful contrapuntal passage in E flat we are again reminded of the F Sonata. The melodious breathings--which must be studied--a little farther on, teach us the very beautiful and interesting lesson (another subject for essay) of the unconscious effect of imitation; and of the unconscious imitation which often lies in effect. The progressions and culminations are Beethovenially grand; in fact, the whole second part superior, if possible, to the first, once admitted the right or propriety of the _modus operandi_. As a whole, the movement stands four-square, noble, filling us with the benefit and pleasure of energetic beauty. This is life--_mens sana in corpore sano_; no hint or shadow of madness; youthful power, generosity, enthusiasm, valour, and hope. At that utterance when first heard, once more men must have felt "a man-child is born into the world;" and the government shall be upon his shoulders--note especially, the do, do, la, do sharp, passage, and other culminations. Here, though Beethoven has not surpassed, if rivalled, the "Allegro" of Op. 13, he has given it a worthy counterpart. We are invigorated, and cheered--nay, roused to enthusiasm; poured full of virtuous resolve and noble daring. _Lebe hoch der junge Beethoven! Au reste_--we should have to use much colder language for the other movements (except the splendid minuet, so superior to the trio, which also suggests incongruity--unless we like to call it contrast?). The andante seems in no way superior to Haydn, and becomes veritably _langweilig_. How inferior to the "Andante, Op. 26!" The rondo is, comparatively, mere trifling--we are inclined to say, unworthy of Beethoven. We have no real pleasure in playing it, but constantly think, "Oh, for the first movement!" Summing up this symphony, we may perhaps decide: On the whole, guilty of incongruity--of want of proper consciousness. Why this halting between the pastoral and warlike? If your "as a whole" theory is good for a movement, why not for a symphony? due allowance for contrast excepted. Certainly, it may be said, the symphony is of unequal value; and that had Beethoven given us all equal to the "Allegro," it would have been a truly great symphony, quite worthy of his great name. As it is, the allegro and minuet alone partake of the immortal.

SYMPHONY II. OPUS 36.

THE ADAGIO.

The worn-out despot offered a premium for a new pleasure; the critic would often do so for a new epithet. How shall I characterize this exquisite prelude? It is as the portico to the Walhalla of the gods. Here we have the real Beethoven in his _divine_ profundity--profound, _because_ beautiful; its very beauty constituting the depth, as it were, _thickening_ into it, like the ocean and heaven. This beauty, the true Proteus, is evasive; its import was not clear to the utterer himself, no message of the Divine is, to the human vehicle--

"A coral conduit ivory cisterns filling."

We cannot exactly translate or interpret it, only we feel that _were_ it translated, we should have a divine poem in a divine language. One could spend hours going into the details of it--for every note demands a word; those two opening ones namely. How characteristic! There is the Emperor Tone-Poet, Napoleon of music, commanding "Attention!" and not--God forbid!--for himself, but for his message. It is the "Thus saith the Lord" of the prophet (some Elijah) of old. Utterance so simple--so all-compelling! Those two notes, merely, are, as it were, like the slightest scratch of an apostle. Then the next three bars! They at once usher us into that ineffability of Beethoven's which we spoke of. We have no reluctance to admitting that originality is not particularly studied here. Nay, we are inclined to say something higher--the modesty and moral courage to reject originality is displayed. Beethoven had to deliver that "Thus saith the Lord!" and he did it. First feel, and then study, the _un_studied eloquence of it. It is one of the beautiful instances whose name is legion in Beethoven, of simplicity--

"In its simplicity sublime."

To me it says--"There! the storms _are_ all fought out. Peace, after all, is at the bottom, and in the heart." Or it is like a high man--say Beethoven himself--after the despicable petty disgusts, as well as chaotic horrors of life, falling back upon nature, the eternal star-glimmering universe--"they will not repel and deceive me, they are everlasting and sublime!" The phrase--like every great message--is really indescribable except by itself; the profound peace, or rather peaceful profundity of it, are unutterable--

"O that my tongue could utter"--

It is a great instance of height towering out of depth, high because deep, a peak in music, yet not clad with eternal glacier, except for its purity of heart, but eternal sunbeams.

After an interesting passage of "harmonious breathing" interposed, and the still more interesting one of chromatic part-repetition, the shakes--which are ultimately to play a great part--first make their appearance. The taste for the shake can soon degenerate; and Beethoven himself sometimes used it incontinently. But, when properly introduced, as here, and especially at the last, it is an ornament that has a more or less magical charm.

The next noble bit reminds us a little of the "Funeral March" in the A flat Sonata. Thereupon Beethoven, in his unconscious or conscious unconscious progress, promulgates some of these characteristic utterances of his--those harmonious and melodic breathings, so profound and pregnant with we know not what. Who or what moved him to his wonderful "progressions?" Truly indescribable tone-poet! so deep with tenderness, so rich with glow--glow is where Beethoven exceeded all of them, especially the Saxon school; he added glow to height, breadth, and depth; or, rather, his glow and depth--as in the sun--are like cause and effect, one.

Now follow those warblings--

"Wild bird! whose warble liquid sweet Rings Eden through the budded quicks,"

and "deep answering unto deep," which we mentally alluded to at the outset, hard to decipher, seraphically beautiful. In what a musical river, to employ another figure, or concourse of confluences, the inspired orchestra rolls on; for yes, verily, the river is inspired with utterance, big with its message. And this is no merely European river, but rather some tropical Zambesi or Amazon with its colossal origin and surroundings; or, again, the river that rolls from the throne of the Fountain of Life--which truth it seems to declare, in the magnificent emphatic passage (anticipating the choral symphony?) so originally grand, in D minor, in unison, mark that. It seems to say--"Hear that, and believe it. The rolling river which this universe is, does not flow from Chaos and Diabolus, but from Eternal Self-Justified Will--humanly named, in short, 'God'; as it were, takes its course through the bosom of God, as 'King John' wished the rivers of his realm to, through his." After this colossal passage, we seem to be invited to listen to the warblings and happy murmurs in the halls of heaven--the habitation of the blest, of just spirits made perfect. It is all delicately, crystallinely ineffable; and the language of imaginative sympathy itself can scarcely transcend the beauty and exceeding excellence of the whole movement--that profound inspiration--any more than it can transcend the beauty and exceeding excellence, amounting to divinity, of the universe, that "Midsummer Night's Dream!" THE ALLEGRO.

I often doubt, war can never cease, for its element is so great and potent in art--especially music and her twin-sister, poetry. Carlyle specially speaks of the "great stroke, too, that was in Shakespeare, had it come to that;" and, indeed, makes this--together with the "so much unexpressed in him to the last"--in short, his infinitude, the very thing which Schubert's kindred eye saw in Beethoven, differentiating him, his two chief points of admiration and test in general of a man. Besides, in our great historian himself--in Milton, too--we feel that there was a great stroke, as of the sublime Ironside; before him, in Dante; before him, in Homer--perhaps, Virgil; but not Horace. In our own day, the noble ring of our poet-laureate's verse, to mention no more, is at once a voucher for the same fact, apart from his "Maud," and more than one indignant utterance. The poetic imagination and classic beauty of all such men is not only concomitant with, but inseparable from, a "good stroke in them" (Dante and Cervantes were actually on the battle-field)--from an heroic element, the best thing they have. The greatest utterance--inspiration--cannot possibly come from any other. The hero is dear to God; the coward perhaps most despised of all. And why? The reason is philosophical enough. Because the soul of the universe is power--and without courage there can be no goodness. The grand doctrine of evolution, penetrating everywhere, has brought home to us, and borne in upon us, that there is not a field or a grove which is not the theatre of perpetual struggle--not one manifestation exempt from it. _Vae victis_ is the word of Nature herself, and the "struggle" is divinely ordained (competition is the salt of existence) for the elaboration of energies--the eventuation in higher life. What man would wish for the _dolce far niente_ of the Fool's Paradise? The world hath been groaning and travailing until now, and must for a long, long time to come; only one-fourth of it is even now "civilized," and in that civilisation what dregs and dens of barbarism seem ineradicable. All sorts of wrong still tyrannise; therefore, spiritually and physically, the warrior must stand forth great to wage war against the bad everywhere, politically and intellectually--against social evils, and art-darkness--against lies, and for truth--against weakness, and for strength; for Might _is_ Right in the universe--weakness is one with evil, strength with good. Only the good is strong; only the bad is weak.

We have been led into these remarks by dwelling on the fact, how frequently the warlike spirit manifests itself forth in our Beethoven--indeed, is irrepressible; nay, I am urged to say, cardinal. In spite of Beethoven's truly divine beauty, he is stamped and distinguished by power. When he issues young into the arena, we see "victorious success" gleaming on his brows. Handel is distinguished in the same way. Hence the secret of Beethoven's own hero-worship for him. Apollo is great, but Jupiter is greater--Jupiter Optimus Maximus. If Mozart, Weber, Schubert may, more or less, figure as the sun-god, they cannot figure as the god of the sun-god. We might almost say, the first notes of Beethoven proclaimed power. He had to go forth and do battle with things. Nor is his own struggle for existence (not mere being, but immortality--a life in immortality here; that is existence to your Beethoven) in his own life-element, so strong and chaotic, in his own soul progress, undepicted, or shadowed forth. With unconscious-consciousness did he do it--on, right on to the end, the bitter end; on the verge of blindness, insanity--we know not what. Rushing as he did, into the conflict, conscious only of power, Beethoven would have been struck had he seen what, through the long vista of "stifled splendour and gloom," that power boded and implied: he would have been awed, had it been revealed to him what that power represented--little short of the Nineteenth Century itself, with all its Hamlet doubts, and chaotic, yet germ-rich smouldering of transition, whereof more anon.

If the ineffable adagio--prelude of preludes (?), out, as Marx says, the last movement is the finale of finales--shows us the young God-disguised athlete, with the morning light on his brow, making ready to enter only the Olympian Games, the _allegro con brio_ shows him to us rushing into battle! The "heroic symphony" is by no means the first or last symphony heroic--indeed, could not have been written but for the pre-existence and exercise of that full power in the inspired young composer. Here is a grand epic outburst and onrushing worthy of that immortal masterpiece, and essentially one with it. We could almost say, not only the same power, but the same sort of power, is indiscernible in Haydn and Mozart. The style (which is truly the man--that to the man what the bark is to the tree) is so different--the man's dialect, as well as message; the phraseology altogether. These modulations are not those of Haydn and Mozart! (beyond praise grand is the _ff_ on the dominant of A minor--one of those glorious bursts and surprises of Beethoven's--we expect D minor); nor is the masculine fancy (god-like shall we say? and a Mozart's, goddess-like) theirs; and the great broad, quasi-Titanic strains and themes. This movement (Op. 36) is an advance on that of the symphony No. 1 (Op. 21), if in grade only, not kind. Here we see the young giant, not yet done growing, a little riper. There is no strain in it which we feel inclined to qualify, which "gives us pause," like the second motiv in its predecessor; all is homogeneous, epically great. But let us descend a little to details. At bars 1, 2, and 3, we imagine the firm tread of the warriors, singing (like the Ironsides before Dunbar--the 68th Psalm, "Let God arise,") on their way to victory, which they never doubt for a moment, not only because they are triumphant veterans, but on account (and more) of their cause. At bar 4 what a poetic rush (inrush) of fifes is suggested! then the great step is heard again; a great strain joins in; the chaunt of the warrior basses becomes more and more ominous; preliminary thunder is heard, and at last, with Olympian pæan and war-cry battle is joined;--great is the shock, and glorious is the struggle!

The second subject in A is ushered in by those grand _third-less_ chords (long before our modern writers):--

[Music]

the chromatic passage being doubled two octaves below by the basses. The new subject, more absolutely melodious, still keeps up the same theme--(for, _apropos_, we may also look upon this allegro as some Homeric or Shakespearian recital of a great victory--recall the superb opening lines of "Richard the Third," the "warriors' wreathed brows, and their bruised arms hung up for monuments"). At first it is heard softly--like a reinforcement in the distance (we think of the Prussians at Waterloo, in the westering summer sun)--then as it were in a blaze of music bursts in. Immediately after, where its exquisite first half (so simple--mark that--but so eloquent and picturesque) reappears in the basses (high), we are rather reminded of Mendelssohn's "Huntsman's Song without Words," in A (the same key), Book 1; but--we need not say--Mendelssohn has not gilded gold, or improved the lily; for his fancy was distinctly lighter and smaller than Beethoven's--or, let us say, he had fancy, Beethoven imagination. And now a happy spirit of triumph sings in the basses; and then burst out some crashing Beethoven-chords, of which I will but point to the one _ff_ (5th bar of them); it is characteristically the 6--4 of D--not, as anticipated, the 5--3 of F sharp minor.

Then, after a foreboding crescendo--characteristic growth out of an initial fragment--and these two emphatic notes:--

[Music]

--Beethoven all over--the first part closes, so to say, in a breadth of thunder-peals and fiery rain. Technically, note the grand entry of D minor, and mi--do--si--la--mi in unison, with the 3rd omitted; and the minor-seventh chords, resolving into the tonic dominant of the minor (D^1), so exquisitely expressive--alike of the pangs of victory and the heroic resolution to endure them.

In the 2nd Part, on the way to G minor (Beethoven himself often never knew whither he was taking us, or at least the precise route--and so much the better!), we soon meet with a remarkable juncture of notes, viz., do and mi of the chord (G minor), with fa superadded:--

[Music]

This fa, at first sight perplexing, turns out to be a stray note (as it seems) of the minor seventh chord on its way to the seventh, which, however, ultimately appears (with beautiful effect) as the 3rd of the dominant-seventh chord (to C minor). This powerfully, painfully expressive dissonance is likewise to be found in his "Lied Vom Tode" (Op. 48), amongst other instances; and the opening to Schubert's "Wanderer" owes its intense expression to the same. The _raison d'être_ of such discords is perhaps to be found in the enhancement they give to the resolution. We could not bear them too long, or too frequent; but, as a passing reminder of the tragedy of life, they profoundly move and interest us; and, perhaps, discords in life (likewise instituted by no Dryasdust) have essentially the same _raison d'être_ and explanation--life is _agro-dolce_, not _dolce_ alone, and better so. Thereupon we have a new idea, surely as playfully felicitous and characteristic as the scherzo of the "Eroica" itself--like the warriors at sport after victory; or like a glimpse of the same by them, back in a pause in the battle, which soon recommences, with the shouts of the combatants and groans of the wounded and dying. A page farther on, we have a truly sublime episode; great is the chaunt on the earnest theatre (proclaiming Right must and shall win) made up of the sufficient chord of F sharp minor, and the basses moving in such a way as served as a model for Wagner; this is epic, heroic, indeed! and--even greater--Pelion upon Ossa, piled by this Titan fighting on the side of the gods, is the culmination. Semitone by semitone mount the basses; and over all the great clouds become richer in the setting sun, and pealing hosts of heaven (as it were) join in the shouts of the victors, crying--"Hosanna in excelsis! Alto trionfo del regno verace! Right _is_ done!"

"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, Paid with a voice flying by, to be lost on an endless sea. Glory of virtue to fight! to struggle, to right the wrong, Give her the glory of going on, and still to be."

THE LARGHETTO.

At the moment we write, all round us we see nature emerged--

"Nobler and balmier for her bath of storm."

The grim tempests of early winter have passed over, and after a South-Italian night--a perfect blaze of constellations, with the Evening Star incredible in the west, large, lustrous, evanescent--and Orion sublime in the forehead of the Night over the mountain--with Jupiter passed over, Mars and Sirius not far off, and the eternal cluster of the Pleiades (those beautiful heralds) winging its flight towards the north-west, and the leading star of the Ursus Major plunging through the dusk (yet shining) over Naples; after such a night, lo! the great amphitheatre of the world is a spectacle indeed! The mountain-island sweeps like a garden at our feet to the sea; the sea itself like an unspeakable floor or carpet spread out _for us_, bearing the islands--the "great globe itself"--so proudly on its nourishing bosom; and all round, out of a tender dusk (as it were, like Compassion) rises the snow-peaked world (like virtue clothing beauty, reason crowning power), the magnificent spur of the Alps--showing what mountains can do at an effort--called the Apennines, stretching down and around from Gaeta to Alicote, towering over treasures, as it seems, of unearthly beauty; Monte St. Angelo, with his colossal foot in the sea and roots in the world, his wrinkles lined with snow, looms and towers before us; on the right sweeps and bares itself the grand Bay of Salerno, and on the left the proud Bay of Naples, with its eternal Watch-fire, like a sentinel over all. Stupendous scene of beauty and power! and all that--on this heavenly morning, when the world once more seems made again, and to overpower us with its reiteration of Immortality--all that comes before us as a grand subject set to music in this larghetto of Beethoven's; all that, too--if the fancy may be allowed--seems in the key of A natural. Before _it_, we should like to hear this exquisite masterpiece--this, I will not say, Song without Words, but rather Te Deum laudamus--adequately performed, say by the Künstler of his "Vaterland." Here we have a sweetness and a serenity the more touching, because they are _not_ those of a Mozart, but a Beethoven; those of nature, "_nobler and balmier_ for her bath of storm" (human as well as physical nature); whether Mozart do or do not represent the storm already fought out, this is the sweetness, not of sweetness, but depth--the serenity, not of serenity, but power. And, indeed, we must hold, and urge, that however the objective may be of value, and rank pre-eminent in poetry, the greatest music has come down to us from perhaps the greatest subjective soul; and essentially, much of contemporary, morbidly-conscious music seems in comparison not only objective but material, not only material but sensational; the delusively brilliant (phosphorescently brilliant) product of a decaying time--we had almost said the elaborate effeteness of a written-out age.

This larghetto is of Beethoven's first period, ripened of course (strive as refiners may, they will scarcely be able to alter the time-honoured division, so obviously founded in truth). Haydn and Mozart are distinctly discerned glimmering through it, but not very much more; it is Haydn and Mozart _plus_ Beethoven, which makes all the difference. We repeat, it is _his_ serenity and sweetness, his youth (so full and rich--of such _infinite_ promise), not theirs. Theirs be the grace, but his the grandeur; theirs the amiability, but his the milk of human kindness--so broad and deep (as of a yet unsoured Hamlet, an Othello, a King Lear; for there are great characters in Shakespeare which we _can_ blend Beethoven with, but not the others). The details of the larghetto must be studied (say, at the organ). I will here only advert to its reminiscence of the andante (the exquisite episode) in the pastoral sonata, written about the same period, truly worthy of symphonic treatment, with the deliciously-delicate passage, as it were like a shower of sunbeams, of gold sparkles--

"In the æther of Deity"