THE BEETHOVEN-DEBUSSY CONNECTION:

'Their magnanimities of sound'

No.12, Op.127. is the first of Beethoven's last quartets. It therefore represents the first of his essays with the 'new manner of voice treatment" referred to last time (DN 24th Oct.'12). Listening closely to it makes you realize many things about Beethoven's late style.

The typical formal sequence of movements for quartet-writing is followed, viz. sonata, variations, scherzo and rondo. Yet, the approach to form is oblique and terse rather than obvious and expansive. Form is now swamped with the new sound, reminding us if the outlines of Monet's cathedral just decipherable through lashings of painted light. This effect is achieved not only by the richly contrapuntal texture, but by the fragmentary or sketchy nature of the themes and their developments. There are frequent changes of pace, register, dynamics, tempo and rhythm. all contributing to a highly impressionistic overall effect.

The contrapuntal technique adapted from Palestrina is completely transformed to suit Beethoven's purpose. Not only is its continuity broken up by fragmentariness, its ethereal quality is sometimes underdrawn by or interchanged with episodes of sheer lustiness. All this deepens the music's total impact. as if the four strands of sound are variously deployed to every part of our being - "blood, imagination. Intellect, all running together."

Claude Debussy

The sense of thematic continuity is strong. The primary subjects of the second, third and fourth movements are all traceable to the majestic opening subject of the first and generally follow its harmonic structure. Thus, the movements flow from one to another.

There is also a childlike quality about the themes, especially in the last two movements. These have an arpeggio-like entirely diatonic construction, not straying beyond the basic notes of the scale, and keep to the higher register. They are not breathtakingly beautiful, but utterly delightful in a whimsical way. Yet, they are frequently interrupted by heavy-handed episodic material in the lower register. We have the impression of lambs dancing and frolicking with elephants looking on and joining in from time to time.

The music has a tendency to dissolve into wispiness and sometimes nothingness. This is specially so of the slow movement which is closest to Palestrina. The variations on the gravely contemplative theme go on flowering in ethereal profusion. Then comes a pause and a plunge into the submediant key. Thence the theme becomes increasingly remote from the original until, after further modulation via the tonic to the subdominant, it becomes almost unrecognisable. It is a melodic distillation process, the theme being squeezed out to its essence, finally to emerge as a disembodied shadow of itself.

What we realize is that in renewing his language, Beethoven has taken his revolutionizing of form to yet another level. He has developed beyond his former logically ordered narrative to a form of musical stream of consciousness. Hence the fragmentary, impressionistic nature of the writing. But hence, too, the underlying consistency as subject matter is repeated or recapitulated and formal unity is maintained.

What the four strands of instrumental voices achieve is an ongoing juxtapositioning of opposite impulses - gay and grave, laughter and tears, tender and robust. But never does depth give way to shallowness. The stream of consciousness is always intense, always profound, the heart or total inner man is ever in evidence.

What we realize it the perspicacity of Eliot in his comments on Beethoven, both directly and via his 'Four Quartet' references. There is readily apparent the "heavenly or more than human gaiety"; the way the "music is heard so deeply that it is not heard at all" as "Beethoven in his later works strove to get beyond music" so that the "music reaches the stillness". Above all, there is the sense that Beethoven has now achieved "a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything."

Beethoven

Coming to Debussy's string quartet, this is a rare instance of a relatively early work being a composer's greatest. This is because here Debussy, having developed a new musical language, continues to respect classical form. This is one of his few works that does not have a descriptive title. The quartet has the traditional four movements. Structural cohesiveness coupled with Debussy's unique quality of sound is what brings it close to the level of Beethoven's last quartets.

The movements are closely connected through the principle of thematic generation characteristic of Beethoven's late style. The haunting first subject is caricatured, recreated and inverted in the other three movements, while the second subject is likewise echoed. Within movements there is thematic recurrence as well as contrast. Thus a distinct thought process is at work.

This thinking. In turn. Is apprehended sensuously or emotionally through the harmony. And here, we note that fundamental tonality, or the sense of key, is never abandoned. Bitonal, atonal and whole-tonal exploration is done to enlarge the range of thought or experience but is never allowed to disrupt ultimate tonality. Every movement ends in a concord.

Contrapuntal writing is employed as an occasional alternative but it is not the main technique. This is fundamentally harmonic. With one voice taking the melodic lead while the rest provide chordal support. But this, too, is done in a new way. The other instruments fill in the harmony as it were independently of the lead in what has come to be called the layering effect.

This is done by the application of successive blocks of chords and by supplying pulsating ostinato-like accompanying figures, And there is a constant building up of climaxes through the repetition of figures with mounting intensity. The most moving and prodigious of these is in the second subject of the slow movement.

After rising step by step the progress of the climax is interrupted by a series of rapid breaths, when the subject takes the final step to appear in its full beauty, ninth chords being here in evidence. We are reminded of a similarly, albeit less exquisitely, achieved climax in the first movement of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony.

So, due to thematic continuity and adherence to tonality, Debussy's new musical language achieves its finest expression in this quartet. The layering. block chordal and climactic techniques combine to "charm magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas" of sound never heard before.

We may therefore conclude that Beethoven in the last quartets and Debussy in his own quartet reached their utmost heights of expression by exceeding the frontiers they had already arrived at. Beethoven, having revolutionized form, went onto create a new language for himself. Debussy, having revolutionized language, resorted to traditional form to communicate it ideally. We can but be grateful that in these works the two composers evidently felt that they had, in the words of Yeats, "no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound."