Musik & Ästhetik, 2020, Jg. 24, Ausgabe 96

After 250 years of Beethoven, his epoch-defining dimension has become visible: the composer of the shift towards modernity, the revolutionary of the bourgeois age and the redefiner of musical intelligence, which remains a challenge to this day, for contemporary composition too. At the centre of Beethoven’s work stands freedom: the freedom of the artist from the imperatives of society, the political freedom of society and individuals, brotherhood and sisterhood among all people and, not least, the freedom of music from the constraints of functionalization.

In this essay, Beethoven’s arietta variations from op. 111 are analysed with reference to figured bass and schemata (Satzmodelle). The text focuses on a compositional constellation that Beethoven presents in the arietta. A sighing figure comes into conflict with the sustained note g, which plays an important role in the first part of the arietta. Beethoven harmonises this sigh in nine different ways in the course of the variations. Only at the end, in the coda, is the conflict between the sigh and the sustained note resolved: a triumphant breakthrough that recalls older interpretations of the sonata. Until the early twentieth century, the variations were interpreted less as a gesture of farewell than of persevering and continuing. The author also ties analytical questions to matters of performance practice, which have become trapped in a circular relationship in the sonata’s reception history: musicians play what exegetes tell them, but exegetes describe what musicians play to them. 

The revolutionaries of 1789 shot at Parisian clocks to stop the time, certain of the dawn of a new time. The notion of sovereign intervention in (musical) time also characterises the first movement of the Sinfonia eroica of 1802/1803. This by no means manifests itself only in the intensification of the formal process through moments of acceleration and compression, a heightening of functional ambivalences or the multiplication of harmonic, motivic, dynamic or sonic contrasts. Beyond these, the music conveys the impression that the course of the form includes signs of musical time overtaking itself, being ahead of itself or rushing itself. In the complementary counter-perspective, this is expressed as the intervention or irruption of a future into the present of music. Such findings lead to a reflection not only on musical time, but also on the categories of form and the subject. This applies not only to their self-relation, however, but also to their relation to historical contexts.

This article examines Adorno’s contradictory view of Bach from the perspective of music history, thus bringing it to light particularly clearly in relation to Adorno’s critique of Beethoven.

This text begins by emphasising the proximity of Beethoven’s music to Adorno’s thought. By comparison, Adorno’s relationship with Bach shows a greater remoteness, despite his profound love for the music, which sometimes even seems to exceed his love of Beethoven. The author also outlines the historical conditions of Adorno’s view of Bach, as well as the metaphysical rivalry that Adorno sees between Bach and Beethoven.