Beethoven's Little Song

Let’s talk about the last movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata.

This is a very, very difficult thing to do.

One, because you’re already thinking of this piece as a masterpiece, because who wouldn’t, faced with the connotations of that first sentence? And there is nothing that burdens music like knowledge of its greatness. In fact such an extensive mythos has accreted around the final movement of the Op.111 Sonata—re: its sacredness, its expressive power, its nibbling at the boundaries of what we think of as the sonata, or even art—that it’s sometimes very hard to listen to this piece as music, as opposed to civilisational artefact. By writing this I too risk contributing to precisely this problem—of people treating this work as an object, something to be either regarded from an awesome distance or reduced to its constituent parts, instead of something to be encountered, and lived with.

Two, because you just can’t talk sensibly about this music, sitting right in the heart of the classical tradition, without also talking about jazz (swing! shuffle! boogie-woogie!), minimalism, the musical limitations of the piano, the puzzling rite that is today’s concert experience, and even power, in its ordinary social dimensions.

That is a lot. But there’s also something pleasing to the thought that you have to write about Beethoven the way Beethoven wrote music, with a sense of grand and necessary overreach. So it’s worth a try.

At base, this movement has a simple structure: a theme followed by six variations. Beethoven calls the theme an “Arietta,” a little song—which, frankly, is a terrible name for it. To my ear, there’s really just one way in which the theme is songlike: it’s simple. It comprises one refrain in C major, repeated, and one in A minor, also repeated, and neither contains any real dissonances or harmonic forays. But the music is otherwise not very songlike at all. The melody is slow, rapt, confessional; the notes are presented processionally, with a texture much closer to chorale than song. This is still music: a huge pool of emotion, yes, but nothing on its surface moves.

Although there is a fixed quality to this theme, an expressive reticence, it is not frozen: it isn’t the titanic, glacial mass of the Hammerklavier’s third movement, or even the sedate self-obsession of the Appassionata’s. There are small freedoms here. For one, the Arietta begins on an upbeat—a musical intake of breath that prepares for the proper entry of the theme—that is impossible to hear as an upbeat.[1] With the result that, instead of hearing one upbeat followed by two bars with three beats, you hear one bar with three beats, then an off-kilter bar with four beats, before the music returns to the correct three-beat pattern.[2]

This rejiggering gives the melody, poised as it is, a kind of phrasal freedom; it sounds like speech, like breath. There’s another thing: in the Arietta the hands at times drift very far apart, creating an aural gulf in the piano’s middle. The mind often fills this sense of space with whatever it wants: a sense of loss, for some, for others, a gesture towards the sacred. Take this especially poignant moment in the theme, when a bell-like dissonance in the right hand floats over a fathomless D:

Almost unnoticeably, Variation 1 slips in, performing the simplest of alterations to the theme: borrowing the Arietta’s upbeat, it unfurls each beat in the bar into three notes, and adds chromatic touches to the voices as they shift around. The theme starts to move, and by that I really mean it starts to swing. It’s a real puzzle to me why people tend to describe this variation as lullaby-like, because it’s altogether too coy, especially with its chromatic colour—the effect is more wry, relaxed, discursive.

 

Variation 2 effectively doubles the perceived tempo by stuffing two swingy triplets into each beat, where the previous variation managed just one. The music takes on, slightly improbably, the character of a shuffle. At bar 34 we are treated to a walking bass:

And, at the exact moment the music leaps back into C major from A minor, we’re served a full fat bar of syncopated chords, so that the music suddenly judders like a live nerve:

 

 

Variation 3 erupts onto the page and in the ear. For those hearing it for the first time it invariably comes as a huge shock, because it sounds overwhelmingly like boogie-woogie. Each beat in the bar now contains four triplet units, driving a swing so intense you feel it in your teeth. Both hands bubble with Charleston rhythms; even the occasional chromatic deviation sounds quite a lot like ragtime decoration. On the page the music looks like terror; in the ear it is a joy so fierce it reaches frenzy.

Let’s talk about jazz.

By which I mean, let’s talk about the fact that no one who discusses this variation seems to want to talk about jazz. Among the more well-known guides to the Beethoven sonatas, Tovey, Rosen, Fischer, and (of course) Schenker don’t mention jazz at all; Stewart Gordon, in his 2016 handbook, does, but in a way that places the observation at a cool distance, scare quotes and all: “The rapid division of three-note units in this variation has generated the frequently encountered observation that this variation sounds ‘jazzy.’”[3] We are meant to understand there is something suspect in the modern listener’s gut reaction to this variation, and that the listener who really appreciates this music should stop hearing jazz in it.

And, in one sense, this is entirely right. This music does not come from the jazz tradition at all: it is, most fundamentally, not improvised music. Neither is it influenced by the confluence in 1860s America of European musical sensibilities and vastly different musical traditions ferried across the Atlantic by the slave trade—as, for example, many of Ravel’s or Stravinsky’s works are. As an analytic fact, it’s easy to show that Variation 3 is far from a miraculous discovery of a new language: it’s just the logical result of a process Beethoven has set up in the previous two variations, viz. more finely dividing each beat into triplet units (in Variation 1, each beat contains one triplet unit; in Variation 2 two, and in Variation 3 four).

The accusation, in short, is that hearing jazz here is anachronistic.[4] But this claim is as meaningless as it is trivial: it suggests that we must listen to this music as Beethoven heard it, whereas we tend to think that the best composers speak across time—and thus that anachronism and displacement make their work stronger, not weaker. More fundamentally, there’s just no way that any of us can extract ourselves from the now, constituted as we are by it, so all artistic consumption post-moment-of-creation is anachronistic. But this is where the fun is. There is something disarmingly wonderful, something so serendipitous as to be anything but, about how as Beethoven reaches for ecstasy he constructs a sound that anticipates and intersects with a radically different musical tradition. Jazzy inflections are not at all new in the classical tradition (the French Baroque had its own tradition of improvised swing[5] and Bach uses some very jazzy syncopations in the second fugue in The Art of Fugue[6]), but here they are pushed with typically Beethovenian single-mindedness to new extremes. If you’re like me, and your ear can be dulled by familiarity, listening to Variation 3 can be a brute aural reminder of how radical and powerful even the earliest blues forms were, how they said things that other musical languages could not capture. And in the context of this movement, Variation 3’s power is heightened immensely through contrast with the surrounding material: in some recordings (Michael Korstick’s) this variation is like a magnesium fire, so metallically white-hot it is nearly unbearable, and in others (Mitsuko Uchida’s) it is a jubilant trance.

There’s one other thing worth pointing out: Variation 3, despite the swarms of densely feathered notes flooding the page, is slow music. All the variations in this movement take as their subject not the Arietta’s melody, but its harmony: and the underlying harmonic changes have not changed in speed at all (Beethoven even marks Variations 2 and 3 L’istesso tempo—the same speed—to underscore this point). It takes a bit of effort, but if you abstract your ear from each individual note, you can hear the long arc of the chorale humming away tectonically underneath it. A disorienting and mentally taxing experience, but worth the effort: when you do manage it, the feeling is both deeply pleasurable but also weirdly disembodied, as if your soul is leaving your body.
 

 

Variation 4 is two variations rolled into one. In the previous variations, both strains of the theme (the C major and A minor) are repeated exactly, giving each variation AABB form, but here each repeat is radically different, creating an A₁A₂B₁B₂ structure.

In the first subvariation, the theme is deconstructed: it collapses into a set of indistinct pianissimo chords, each of which enters lagging behind the beat. Low in the piano, these chords sound over a C/G drone[7] which rubs up almost imperceptibly against the changing harmonies above. This is the first time we hear the theme in a genuinely reduced form, and the first time the movement sinks into darkness. As a result this subvariation is both frozen and transitional; dull, yet drawn tight with unbearable tension.

The second subvariation is an exercise in minimalism. The music climbs into the high registers; the left hand picks out wafer-thin chords, while the right unspools a crystalline chain of scales that obsessively circles around itself, seeming to repeat but never quite doing so. This unusual feature of the music—the way it changes while not seeming to change at all, the trick through which perpetual movement is used to generate stillness—makes it of a kind with the work of the great minimalists who would come much later: Glass, Reich, Riley.[8] It’s infuriatingly hard to describe how vulnerable[9] this music sounds, how tiny and breakable, especially when you reach the devastating A minor strain.

Something strange, even violent, happens here. Up to this point, every single bar of music has been derived strictly from the main theme. But at bar 96, almost unnoticeably, the music comes untethered from the underlying harmonic scheme:

Ask any pianist familiar with this work about this passage, and their eyes will glaze over a bit, because this passage, without fail, makes your hair stand on end. Why? The numinous halo of the high register, the tiny dissonance of the pulsing chords below? Well, yes, but there’s also something happening at an even deeper level, almost beyond the point of sensory experience: you hear the departure from the structure, the leave-taking that Adorno wrote about.[10]

Then the music drops an octave, and from what seems an impossible pitch of loveliness, it broadens into new deltas of feeling.

It’s worth taking a moment to realise how absurdly rare it is for a work to be this generous: to reach one expressive height, and then immediately top it, and then top it again. Music in the classical tradition, with its well-defined transitions and build-ups and climaxes, generally doesn’t admit this kind of indulgence. And yet here we have all of this happening, without any fundamental tension in the music. That passage above? It’s a stereotypically pop-ish I-vi-V progression, the kind that is quite happy to loop on forever in a chorus, but it’s made extraordinary by context and craft; it even introduces a new melody in the left hand that incorporates touching dissonances in its peaks.

Ordinarily, this rupture in the structure would signal that we are now in the coda, the concluding section of the work. And, true enough, the passage does finally comes to rest, rather self-consciously, on a supertonic trill.[11] This is typically a way of saying pretty decisively that the ending is here.

Except, of course, the ending doesn’t come.
 

 

Let’s talk about trills.

By which I mean, let’s talk about the piano.

The piano is a forgiving instrument: if a person who’s never touched a piano before strikes a key, they’ll produce just as beautiful a sound as Argerich or Cherkassky.[12] But the simple physical mechanism—hammers striking strings—which so neatly levels the aural playing field also brutally cripples the piano: once it makes a sound, that sound can only die away.

Beethoven hated this. I mean, really hated this. Perhaps the most obvious evidence for this is in some of his piano sonatas, where he writes dynamic indications that are impossible on the instrument.[13] But the trills—and his work is replete with them, whether violent (the Hammerklavier’s last movement) or lyrical (the Fourth Piano Concerto)—are another sign of his frustration at the instrument’s limitations. At root, trills are a way to make a piano do what it can’t: sustain a sound. But there’s something wicked about trills too, something multivocal and restless. By oscillating between two notes, they become dissonance, at once prolongation and interruption, a pinpoint mass of sound forced to shudder in one spot like a particle trapped in a field.

So that trill on the D? It doesn’t resolve. It’s a trill designed not so much to go somewhere as to suspend any musical movement, like a word repeated so often it loses meaning. And right when we’re on the brink of having the whole thing dissolve into noise, other notes creep in around the trill, giving harmonic context—and then, for the only time in the whole work, we modulate(!) into Eb major.

The trill, already by now one of the longest in the repertoire, implacably thickens into a shimmering triple trill.[14]

Now that we’re in Eb major, you’d really expect Beethoven to do something in this key. Instead the trill mounts upward (and we’ve been listening to a whole solid minute of trills now), until it dies away into single notes in the desolate Himalayan ranges of the piano. Out of nowhere the left hand growls out a note deep in the bass; this new line begins a descent as the right hand continues to climb.

At bar 118, a vast gulf opens up between both hands:

A lot has been written about this moment. Most commentators reach for religious metaphors: Schiff thinks the gap is the separation between heaven and earth; Seymour Bernstein thinks it enacts crucifixion (of all things!). Truthfully, what is extraordinary about this moment is how the huge chasm seems to express literally nothing at all. The notes are so far apart their frequencies do not interact in any sensible harmonic way; at those extreme ranges, all that comes through is the raw fact of the piano’s sound, bright and rigid at one end, a dark mineral clot in the other. The fact that the upper notes in bar 118 actually trace out a fragment of the Arietta melody doesn’t register. If I were forced to metaphorise this moment (and it really is too wonderful to be metaphorised), I’d say it sounds like possibility: this is one end of the piano, this is the other, and you are free to put anything you want between them. But the most honest thing to say about this moment is that it is a mystery. Something, as Wittgenstein might have said, to be deepened rather than explained.

When the moment passes, we are left in a tonal crisis: we are in the wrong key, Eb major, and Beethoven must find his way back to C. And so there begins the most Delphic passage in the work, a long and agonising modulation, replete with bewildering syncopations (the melody notes land, with wilful perversity, in the middle of each beat) and keys drifting in and out of focus. Amazingly, this whole move to Eb has nothing, really, to do with the theme and its variations; it has no home in the formal requirements or typical structures of the form. Commentators struggle to label this passage: Gordon calls it an “interlude,” while Tovey calls it a “modulating coda,” which forces him to awkwardly conclude that a “da capo of the theme” and an “epilogue” are still to come. The motivation for this passage is entirely expressive and anti-formal. This explains why the closed universe in Eb never presents a restatement of the theme, or any real development of it.[15] This passage is not there to say anything about the rest of the work. It’s there to disrupt it, to put a fault in the architecture.
 

 

Variation 5 arrives with a sense of homecoming so powerful that it becomes a physical sensation: the bass notes start chromatically tightening around a G, a C major arpeggio swells out of the bass, and order returns.

Almost universally this particular variation is described as expressing compassion or gratitude, which is both entirely correct and utterly senseless. Because compassion or gratitude aren’t really feelings, are they? They’re normative attitudes, other-regarding things, stances, positions that seem much too complex for instrumental music to express. And yet this music gets there. The why of this may never be fully parsible, but there are at least some sensible things we can say. There’s probably something in the fact that this music is returning after extended wandering in harmonic wilderness. But more strikingly, for the first time in the whole work the actual melody of the Arietta returns, although profoundly transformed. It’s no longer austere: the distance between both hands has been closed, the melody is hugged from beneath by a beautiful contrapuntal line, and the bass is a distant, benign rumble.[16]

The bliss of Variation 5 sustains itself for 29 bars—an absurdly long period to sustain this kind of emotional intensity, amplified by the fact that Beethoven actually introduces an extension to the theme for the first time—before we arrive at the last variation.

 

 

Let’s talk about variation form.

More specifically, let’s talk about a huge, even devastating problem which inflicts it, viz. its lack of any natural sense of order or finality. Most musical forms—binary, tertian, sonata, rondo—set out procedures which force an ending, so that every musical idea enters carrying the implied fact of its termination. But variation form has no natural end. Once a theme is introduced, you can, in principle, keep on varying forever, since no structural impulse checks the momentum you’ve built up. And so the history of the great works in this form is essentially a catalogue of ingenious solutions to this problem. A common one is to end a set of variations with a fugue, since a fugue’s relentless self-referentiality represents (you could convince yourself) the most internally rigorous way of examining a theme—you put a fugue at the end to say, basically, “Ok, now there’s really nothing left to be said.” Beethoven himself does this in the Diabelli Variations, as does Brahms in the Handel Variations. Another (terrifying, ingenious) solution is to superimpose a multi-movement sonata form over a variation structure. Rachmaninoff, who never shied away from dense, internally intricate structures, was particularly good at this. Yet another solution is to set up a cyclic structure and then interrupt it, as Bach does in his Goldberg Variations.[17]

The ending of the Op.111 does none of these things; it works its way into a far stranger conclusion. Essentially, Beethoven writes a work which has no end.

This needs a bit of explaining.

Thus far, each variation has used successively smaller note values. Variation 6 arrives at the terminal point of this process: the right hand takes up a trill on a high G, its individual notes now so finely divided that they have no particular rhythmic value at all.[18] Under this trill the right hand just about etches out the chorale tune, while the left hand vibrates in thirty-second notes which gently abrade the trill above.

So far, so logical. But here’s the rub: Beethoven never completes this variation. We should expect, by now, to hear each strain of the theme twice in Variation 6—AABB form. But we get only A, the first strain, before the theme just cuts itself off with a new five-note figure.[19]

Immediately after this strain, a delicate set of scales, recalling Variation 4, takes us up and down the keyboard. And then, in the last three bars, the opening upbeat motif of the theme enters in quick succession across wildly different registers, bringing the work, abruptly, to a close.

I want to stress how aggressively weird this ending is: there is no real melody, or sense of the three-beat bar. The motif makes leaps so large its notes don’t properly connect to each other. The final chord is muted, throwaway, terse. If so minded, you could argue pretty persuasively that this ending, with its awkward phrasing and gangly harmony, is pathetically inadequate to what has come before—all that generosity, that heavenly length.

Yet all this happens because Beethoven, in this movement, treats variation form as a process of liberation. Every variation loosens the leash slightly, gives the theme a bit more freedom, until not only do we escape the idea of rhythm (the trill), the theme itself becomes liberated from its own structure. The work opens up, opens up, opens up, and then it is nothing.[20] In a sense, it trails off into infinity. The ending Beethoven writes, the one which registers as actual sense data, is a conceptual ellipsis: it gestures back to the opening and opens up, for the last time, that gap between the hands that signals the possibility of creation, as if the real music was still sounding. 
 

 

Let’s talk about Covid-19.

I kid. Let’s talk about the modern concert experience.

It’s hard to imagine music less suited for the concert hall than Op.111’s concluding movement. For a start, it’s far, far too intimate, and even then not so much intimate (which implies contact or communication) as innermost. There is no point at which the work turns gestural,[21] in the epic manner at which Beethoven was wildly gifted (think: his symphonies, piano concertos, a good third of the sonatas). Its length, its spaces, its griefs, and joys, are all private. The idea of listening to the Op.111 resounding from a stage dozens of metres away while you’re seated among strangers, strikes me as a terrible transgression of this music. But more fundamentally, this piece just does not cohere with the idea of concert performance. The concert hall is basically a dictatorial space: we are at the command of the performer, and we are instructed into awful passivity. The music lays an ironhanded claim on our time; we cannot ignore it as we might a painting in a gallery. The usual procedures by which we try to construct community/ intimacy/understanding are (in traditional concerts, at least) forbidden. You cannot speak to those around you; you cannot ask the pianist to repeat a particular passage you either loved or didn’t really understand; nor can you ask the pianist why a passage was played a certain way. Even the most basic way in which we respond to music—with movement—is forbidden (although, perversely, this rule is applied only to the audience; the conductor is free to dance).[22]

Which isn’t to say that nothing rescues the traditional concert. Musicians take many more risks in live performance than they do on record; there’s a shared and indisputable vulnerability to concert-music. Nothing you hear at home will replicate the earth-shaking force of an orchestral climax experienced live. And, to be honest, lots of music really works, when presented in the imperious take-it-or-leave-it form that the concert hall demands. But for this Arietta, the concert hall does not suffice. This music is altogether insufficiently authoritarian. Its posture is one of vulnerability and confession; it asks for the option of being turned off at any time. Freedom is such a basic part of its meaning/organization/texture that it is deadened by live performance, reified.

How to listen to this, then?

Answer: there isn’t a how. The music will justify itself to you, or it won’t. As basic and obvious as this point is, it bears repeating that nothing in what I’ve written above is not in the music. If it’s not there in the conscious mind it’s certainly there in feeling. This music makes no special claim to our time or attention; it’s too good for that.

The Arietta starts sweet and still, a little desolate, and grows intimate; it starts constrained and grows free. Our little song is something to keep close these days, where we’re each lodged in lonely, intimate spaces, wondering about small freedoms.

 

ASHISH XIANGYI KUMAR is a junior diplomat in the Singaporean Foreign Service. He writes on music and runs an eponymous YouTube channel.

Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees (Sixteenth century). Pair of six-folded screens; ink on paper. 5.2 ft x 11.6 ft. Tokyo National Museum.

A PDF of this essay is available here.