The Influence of Palestrina:

‘You are the music while the music lasts’

Not to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as suggested by Forster, but to his Ninth belongs the distinction of being the most sublime noise to have penetrated the human ear. But what of the last String Quartets which Beethoven began working on after the Ninth? They are too intimate to be called sublime, yet their appeal is even greater. They seem to defy description, but Eliot seems to have put his finger on their special quality. In a letter to Spender, this is how he put it in referring to his favourite of Beethoven’s last quartets, No.15, Op.132:

“I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later works which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get sonething of that into verse before I die.”.

Eliot did, in fact, succeed in getting something of that effect into his last great poetical work, ‘The Four Quartets’, which was actually written under the influence of Beethoven’s last quartets. We have already discussed the technique whereby Eliot achieves the unique poetic experience of his quartets, vide DN 2nd Nov.’11. But how does Beethoven achieve the unique musical experience that that his own quartets represent?

Beethoven himself provides us with the vital clue. In writing to Karl Holz with particular reference to the ‘Grosse Fuge’ finale of Quartet No13, Op.130, he said, “You will find a new manner of voice treatment....” By this he meant that he had developed a new method of part-writing, ie. writing for diferent voices, in this instance the four instruments of a string quartet, these being the first and second violins, the viola and the ‘cello. But what was new about it?

Before entering his final creative phase Beethoven had undertaken a study of the music not only of the 18th century Bach but of the 16th century Palestrina. Bach’s influence was primarily as to musical form, witness the way Beethoven increasingly incorporated fugues and divisional variations on a theme into his last sonatas and quartets. Palesina’s influence was primarily as to musical language, and this was the key to the new sound experience of the quartets.

Palestrina was the master of the madrigal and the motet, polyphonic compositions of which the first were usually secular and the latter mainly religious. At least four voices, usually instrumentally unaccompanied, sang simultaneous melodic lines. These were differentiated from, but nevertheless complementary of each other, with one recognisable as being the cantus firmus or principal melody. Bar lengths were provided, nevertheless the flowing melodic lines gave the impression of a free-rhythmic continuity, as in the earlier monophonic plainsong style.

The adroit balancing of simultaneous strands of voices produced a highly complex yet richly mellifluous texture. This was quite different from what was produced by the later harmonic styles of writing in which one voice dominated while the others punctuated it with chords, rather than their being interwoven with it.

Beethoven had already written over a dozen string quartets in his early and middle periods. Yet these were predominantly in the non-contrapuntal or non-polyphonic pianistic and symphonic styles which were his forte at the time.

When twelve years after the last of these earlier quartets he embarked on the last five, he had just finished the Ninth Symphony, his health was fragile and he was deep into his deafness. In the private world into which he retreated he turned to the more intimate quartet format for the expression of his most profound and private thoughts and feelings. While his experimentation with form would continue in these quartets, he now sought a new medium of expression, a new language, as well. This he found in, or rather derived from, the writing style of Palestrina.

When you listen to the sombre opening bars of the first movement of the first of the last quartets, No.12, Op.127, you realise that there is something different about the sound. All the voices are speaking at once! It is that ‘new manner of voice-treatment.’ The four instruments have all got something to say, all of equal importance, all at much the same time. And they do not seem to be too concerned about the bar-lengths; they seem to express themselves extendedly and uninterruptedly on any subject. As a result there is an overwhelming sense of the density of the texture, the intricacy of the design and the continuity of the flow of the sound. This is primarily due to the contrapuntal nature of the writing.

The new medium also seems to have brought an influence of its own to bear on its new exponent. There is now an ethereal or other-worldly quality about the music. Yet the feeling it generates is not so much one of exaltation as of elation. It is that ‘heavenly gaiety’ that Eliot spoke of. It is not that Beethoven has become any less intense. As we have noted earlier, these quartets are the most intense of Beethoven’s productions. But now he has finally been granted the request we feel he had been making in his last piano sonatas, this being - in the words of Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ -”Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit still.

As we go on listening to Op.127, we realise something important about Beethoven’s ‘gaiety’ and ‘not caring’ that immediately differentiates him from Palestrina. The latter always wrote with his audience in mind, an audience he needed to please as much as he hoped to edify them. Beethoven was no longer interested in the audience he had captivated, and had wanted to captivate, with his Ninth Symphony. Some of the last quartets were, indeed, commissioned by and dedicated to patrons, but all of them were written with no other audience in mind but himself.

And this is why we find ourselves so rapt by the music of the last quartets. Beethoven may be speaking to and writing for himself. But his thought process is so skilfully recorded that it becomes intelligible and entirely convincing to us. We cannot help identifying with it. For, as Eliot puts it in the ‘Four Quartets’, it is “music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.” The musical process by which Beethoven achieves this effect actually corresponds to Wallace Stevens’ description of how the poetic process works in his poem ‘On Modern Poetry’:

“The poem of the mind is the act of finding What will suffice....”.(the poem must) “like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation speak words in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat Exactly that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible actor listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one.”

Yes, the two emotions, Beethoven’s and ours, become one. The contrapuntal style he learnt from Palestrina provided him with the musical language, the special texture and feeling he needed to give expression to what were to prove his final major musical utterances. And in the process to communicate with us at a deeper level than he had ever done before, deeper even than in the last piano sonatas. In our next and final article on this subject we hope to examine 127 and Debussy’s G minor quartet closely to find the points of convergence that must have led us to connect these two composers in the first instance.