Doug
----
>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.