>Of course, if one saw the world through piss-colored lenses one
>would consider Louis II, and every other national leader since, only doing
>things for his own aggrandizement. Unfortunately, I discarded those lenses
>when I gave up listening to Black Flag and Discharge in favor of Vivaldi and
>Verdi.
But with Verdi, you've exchange piss for the red, white, and green lenses of Italian nationalism! Didn't Italian nationalists turn his name into an acronym for Vittorio Emmanuel, Reggio d'Italia, or something like that?
And gosh, if you're going to go for the classical canon, why pick the upper middlebrow elevator music of Vivaldi and the operatic bombast of Verdi? I saw a concert performance recently of a Verdi opera and it was striking how little substance there was to the music. You need the scenery and grand scale of a stage to take your mind off the lack of any element but melody. On that score, I'm with Adorno & Jameson. A long excerpt from Jameson's Marxism and Form says it best:
<quote> So it is that for Adorno the work of Beethoven stands as a kind of fixed point against which earlier or later moments of musical history will be judged. It is, of course, not a question of degrees of genius, but rather of the inner logic of historical development itself, and of a kind of accumulation of formal possibilities of which Beethoven is the beneficiary and which suddenly makes possible an unexpected carrying through to their conclusion of all the unfinished trends, a filling out of all the hitherto empty spaces, and an actualization of the potentialities latent in the musical raw material itself.
In musical terms, that unique reconciliation which is Beethoven's historical opportunity takes the form of a precarious equilibrium between melody and development, between a new and richer thematic expression of subjective feeling and its objective working through in the form itself, which no longer has anything of that relatively mechanical and a priori, applied execution of eighteenth-century music. For the sheer volume of the production of the great eighteenth-century composers resulted in part from the presence to hand for them of relatively simple schemes and formulae of execution. Nor had orchestration yet become so complicated and individualistic an affair: the court orchestras of feudal principalities do not yet have the variety of instruments, let alone the sheer technical virtuosity, of the later middle-class stage orchestra. For all these reasons the themes of the eighteenthcentury composers cannot be said to have achieved a genuine fullness of subjective being: a melody of Mozart is not yet selfsufficient and remains functionally conceived, bearing traces of the form of which it is an indivisible component.
Nor, on the other hand, does the Beethoven melody ever reach that extreme autonomy and overripeness of those devised by the hypersubjective composers of the later nineteenth century-let Tchaikovsky stand as their archetype for whom the contrapuntal work is reduced to a bare minimum, the working through of themes to perfunctory and monitory repetition, and in whose work the center of gravity of musical invention moves to sheer instrumental expressiveness and orchestral coloration.
Standing between these two extremes, the Beethoven melody represents a short-lived synthesis of the functional and the expressive: lengthy and articulate, it presents the appearance of autonomy while being at the same time shrewdly disposed and preformed with a view to the various developments, polyphonic or variational, which it is about to undergo. Reciprocally, the various subvoices of the development are still relatively independent and intrinsically meaningful, which cannot be said for those of late Romanticism; and they have something individual and personal about them which distinguishes them from their rather schematic and mechanical equivalents in earlier music. Thus subjectivity and the personal inform the score down to its smallest elements, but do so by working through the objective, suffusing and vivifying it, rather than by blotting it out and smothering it with the overwhelming harmonic and coloristic bias of later music. And what is true of the part holds, as we have already seen above, for the form as a whole, for the sonata as a short-lived possibility of meaningful organization on a large scale, in which the mind is momentarily able to glimpse a concrete totality, completely present at every instant of its unfolding.
Even though there is no exact literary equivalent for Beethoven and what he represents in the history of Western music, literary judgments ultimately depend on the presuppositions about form and content described above. Thus the privileged position of a Tolstoy in the history of the novel proves on closer examination to have an analogous basis. The relatively late development of middle-class literature in Russia leaves the nineteenth-century Russian novelist in a position of great freedom: everything remains to be done in the area of Russian themes, there is not the oppressive fact of earlier generations of novelists and of shelves of novels that weighs on the successors of Balzac or Dickens. Yet these Russian novelists, by their very tardiness, are contemporary with all that is most sophisticated in novelistic technique - with Maupassant and the naturalists - so that the Russian realistic novel in general and Tolstoy in particular can be born fully grown. Technique elsewhere laboriously acquired can here seem flowing and natural, resulting in that peculiar and characteristic reconciliation between the subjective intention and the novel's objective social material which we associate with the name of Tolstoy and in which both social and individual experience issue from the novelists hand as though equally his own creations.
The dialectical structure of our negative judgments is even more apparent: think of the grimace and caricature to which we object in Balzac - is it anything more than a too hasty attempt to assimilate the objective social material characters, furniture, institutions-to the personal enthusiasms of the author himself, imperiously deforming and distorting it for his own purposes? Think, on the other hand, of the rather metallic brittleness of Flaubert, which results from too rigid and surgical a suppression of the subjective dimensions of the work, until the hero becomes as vacuous as a recording eye, in L'Education sentimentale, and the work is finally, in Salammbo, degraded into cinematographic phantasmagoria. Think of the " mannered" quality of Henry James: those great pauses between meaningful half-sentences, the close-ups of small areas of objectivity in an attempt to infuse them with subjective intention, in the way a random word surrounded by a pregnant silence becomes ominous with meaning. Think of the precariousness of the synthesis of Joyce, in which matter once again seems momentarily reconciled with spirit, all the objects and detritus of the city luminous and as though informed by subjectivity-except that the seams show; there is something willful and arbitrary about the relationship of the individual chapters to each other, and the new reconciliation is paid for as dearly as that of Schoenberg in music. The novel is always an attempt to reconcile the consciousness of writer and reader with the objective world at large; so it is that the judgments we make on the great novelists fall not on them, but on the moment of history which they reflect and on which their structures pass sentence.
There can therefore be no doubt that the privileged synthesis of Beethoven's works corresponds to some peculiar freedom in the social structure of his time. Historical freedom indeed, expanding and contracting as it does with the objective conditions themselves, never seems greater than in such transitional periods, where the life-style has not yet taken on the rigidity of a period manner, and when there is sudden release from the old without any corresponding obligation to that which will come to take its place. The dominant figure of Napoleon himself is symbolic of the basic ambiguity of this moment which follows the collapse of the feudal order in Europe and precedes the definitive setting up of the new ethical, political, and economic institutions of the middle classes which triumphed over it. He combines something of the fading values of feudality and sacred kingship with the frankly secular and propagandistic appeal of the charismatic political leaders of later middle-class society, yet at the same time can be assimilated neither to the bewigged absolute monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nor to the demagogues of the twentieth. Even the neoclassicism of the Napoleonic period is significant and points in two directions: for it seems to have been the last of the great Continental styles whichGothic or Renaissance, baroque or rococo-swept across Europe in successive waves, leaving a sediment of monuments behind them; while on the other hand, it is the first form of modernism as well, in that it is secretly pastiche, art about art, and registers the contradictions of the middleclass world through its own inner contradictions in a way that will be characteristic of every artistic movement to follow.
Thus Beethoven's reconciliation between the subjective and the objective faithfully registers the enlarged horizons of the revolutionary transition period itself, when the positive and universalistic thinking of the middle class during its struggle for power has not yet given way to the esprit de serieux of money, business, and Realpolitik; when the abstract idea of human freedom, whose optimism and heroics are eternalized in Fidelio, has not yet been transformed into an ideological defense of class privilege. And what is true for music holds for thought as well: philosophy, freed from the long constraint of theology, has not yet undergone the positivistic reduction to scientific empiricism, has not yet abdicated its rights to such newly invented academic disciplines as sociology or psychology, let alone begun to question its own validity in the manner of twentieth-century logical positivism. At this point in history thought is still out for the largest things, and it is to such a moment of possibility, such a moment of suspension between two worlds, that the philosophy of Hegel is the most ambitious and profoundly characteristic monument. </quote>
Doug