The Grosse Fuge Grows On Me
February 11th, 2007 Posted in beethoven, classical music
I take back what so casually a declamation I made in the last post. It was something about my initial listenings to the huge pile of birthday music sitting on the frontlefthand side of my desk right now at the current mo. Specifically I said that the Beethoven quartets sounded good, but lacked the biting dissonances that grab my throat like the twentieth century boys’ stuff. Well, today I listened to the Grosse Fugue, op 133 and that has changed up my mind.
It’s plenty dissonant, in both tonal and rhythmic manners. It’s quite a shocker actually. Usually it is only, say, Prokofiev at his most mechanical (Symphony No. 2, say) or some extra avant gardey young fella like Schnittke who can really bemuse me on the first listen with a piece. This is absolutely definitely the first time Beethoven (or… pretty much anyone before 1900) has made me scrunch up my ears trying to pick out what the hell is going on.
The real killer so far is the first section of the piece, about 5 minutes in, where it sounds as though there are multiple metres going on. It’s spiky. It’s all spiky and angular. Later there are what sound like semitonal trills, (perhaps this is a big influence on Shostakovich’s late period trills) this isn’t straightforward stuff in the slightest. I like it a lot. Apparently Schoenberg was caught by this opus as well… but now I can’t bloody find the quote from him.
This really has a lot of promise to me right now.
