Dissociation and Integration: The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 130

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music. By and large the first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B6, op. 130, conforms to the principles of sonata form. Departures from typical Classical procedure, however, are frequent and striking. Nevertheless, as listeners we interpret the movement in terms of the Classical style, and our aesthetic experience is shaped by our attempts to understand Beethoven's "nonclassical" compositional choices in terms of the "Classical" ones he might have made.It was precisely this characteristic combination of the conventional and unconventional that made Beethoven's late style all but incomprehensible to most nineteenth-century listeners. As Amanda Glauert has argued in a recent essay entitled "The Double Perspective in Beethoven's Opus 131," the late works stirred opposition because they "threatened to expose the artificialities of Classical norms, by placing them in a questioning or ironic light." In her view, "the notion of musical norms was particularly strong at the time of Beethoven's apprenticeship, because it was supported by the general belief in the value of aligning oneself with the existing order of things-whether this order was seen in terms of respect for artistic traditions, or respect for nature, human and external." But because music is nonrepresentational, it could not hope to achieve a genuine natural order. Rather, in Classical music particular forms and expressive means were understood as "incarnations of the natural order"; in short, stylistic conventions functioned as a kind of "code of the natural."' That this arrangement was artificial is evident at once. But as a response to prevailing philosophical and aesthetic beliefs, it reveals great acumen and considerable practicality, and its artificiality was mitigated in large measure so long as composers and their audiences accepted composition as a "natural" play of expectation and fulfillment, the rules of this game being an agreed-upon set of stylistic norms.Glauert might have extended the analogy between composition and play somewhat further. Haydn and Mozart, as well as Beethoven, were well aware of the dramatic and humorous possibilities of compositional play; indeed it is the essence of sonata style. But in his late period, as we shall have numerous occasions to witness in op. 130, Beethoven retained existing strategies and procedures, while investing in them something other than their traditional, tacitly accepted meanings. Thus expectations are often left unfulfilled, and events of the most unexpected sort are common. Through this unilat-19th-Century Music VII/2 (Fall 1983). ? by the...

Musicological approaches to musical semiotics

“…For a remarkably similar analytical treatment of Op. 130,1, the reader is encouraged to compare Brodbeck and Platoff (1983). The appearance of this article well after the submission of my paper has made it impossible to credit their observations throughout where they match mine.…”