St John’s Smith Square

The Revolutionary Drawing Room

18th August 2020

Arts of Fugue

Programme Notes

 

PREMIERE at 8pm on Tuesday 18th August: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn90ituzLog

 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) - Große Fuge, Op. 133

At the largely unsuccessful premiere of the original String Quartet, Op. 130 during Beethoven's lifetime, the audience, in typical fashion, demanded an encore of two middle movements. A disgruntled Beethoven supposedly exclaimed, "And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!" Beethoven and his publisher later agreed to remove the fugue substituting an alternate finale. The fugue was eventually published in 1827 as an entirely separate work bearing the opus number 133 and the title Große Fuge (Grand Fugue). The audience members at the premiere were apparently not the only "cattle" with regards to this monumental piece of music. Reactions from personages of high musical cultivation over time have yielded such responses as "repellent", "incomprehensible", "a confusion of Babel" and so forth.

Quite a different reaction came from Igor Stravinsky who famously remarked about the Große Fuge, "is an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever." Recall that Beethoven wrote this fugue in 1825.

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The musical technique known by the name "fugue" goes back as far as the Renaissance and the keyboard music of the late 16th century. It has never gone out of fashion at least where music is cultivated by the learned practitioner.

The most famous and possibly greatest composer of fugues was Johann Sebastian Bach particularly in his compositions for organ and keyboard including the absolute touchstone collection of fugues under the collective name The Well-Tempered Clavier. Haydn wrote at least four fugues specifically as string quartet finales thereby setting a precedent that has inspired chamber composers from Mozart to Shostakovich with Beethoven, Mendelssohn,

Schumann and Schoenberg along the way. Beethoven is arguably the greatest master of the fugue after Bach and fugues or fughetto passages appear all through his piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies. As for setting a Grand Fugue as the finale of a string quartet, Beethoven was well within traditional precedent. What was unconventional, indeed, confounding about the Große Fuge was its length, its emotional intensity and its extreme obsession with dissonance. If "difficult" was ever perfectly applied to Beethoven's music, the Große Fuge is the single most deserving work beyond question.

Clocking in at around sixteen minutes, the Große Fuge is far longer than any fugue Bach wrote. As a compositional form, it is way more than a conventional fugue. As with much of Beethoven's late music, the fugue has been analysed from many different perspectives yielding multiple structural interpretations.

A relatively simple and useful breakdown will suffice here.

The Grand Fugue readily divides into five parts. The first part titled Overture is a series of brief snippets that on first blush seem rather unrelated. Closer inspection reveals that it comprises a kind of table of contents, a terse preview of what is to come. Each of the snippets alludes to a section of the ensuing fugue, curiously, in reverse order.

The second part is the fugue proper, where, according to the tradition of the fugue, a melodic theme or subject is introduced by one player then picked up in imitation by each successive player until all four players are engaged in a complicated mesh of counterpoint with the subject at the centre of a discussion of truly equal parts. Beethoven makes things a bit more interesting from the start, however, in that he has not one but two subjects going at the same time from the very beginning, in essence, a double fugue. Whatever technical labels apply, it is a relentless imbroglio of urgent, dark musical counterpoint whose mood and chaotic complexity is nothing short of marvelously overwhelming.

The third part of the Große Fuge is a readily apparent section of repose and contrast to the blistering fugue. Where the fugue is spiky, dark, minor and dissonant, the third section is bright, major, soothing and lyrical all at a slower pace. Really a kind of fugue in itself, close inspection reveals that the music is built from exactly the same material as the primary fugue ingeniously transformed into a field of bright flowers swaying gently amidst the barbed wire and rubble.

The fourth part is the return of the brutal fugue. Hardly a repeat, here Beethoven subjects the fugal materials to the traditional battery of ingenious transformations including making the subject longer, shorter, playing it upside down and even backwards. Beethoven applies so much variation to the material that, in places, the music appears to explode into complete random chaos fraught with harsh dissonance, skewed rhythmic patterns and seemingly ungraspable complexity all subsumed in a terrifying darkness that suggests the word apocalyptic. 

The fifth and final part is Beethoven coming to our rescue (as he always does), where the fugue dissipates, the happy music from the middle reappears and everything is transformed into bright triumph if not outright humour. Beethoven knew exactly what he was doing and exactly how it would affect us and here he jovially slaps us on the back as if to say "everything is alright" and "wasn't that a great ride!" Most commentaries fail to mention one curious fact about the Große Fuge: It was not Beethoven's first. The final movement of the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat known as the "Hammerklavier" from 1818 follows nearly the identical formal structure yielding a monstrous fugue of practically the same length, albeit in a much brighter mood. It is illuminating to hear them side by side.

 

Copyright: Kai Christiansen

 

The Revolutionary Drawing Room

Adrian Butterfield – violin

Dominika Fehér – violin

Rachel Stott – viola

Ruth Alford – cello

The Revolutionary Drawing Room is that rare group, a string quartet that performs late 18th and 19th century repertoire with a sound derived from the beauty and flexibility of gut strings. The political upheavals of the time were matched by a breathless pace of change and the forging of new styles, forms and tastes both in the music and in the instruments used. The Revolutionary Drawing Room use original bows, or modern copies, and often employ more than one in a concert depending on the range of repertoire. They also enjoy talking to their audiences, explaining the background of the works they are playing and their choices of equipment and playing styles.

The Revolutionary Drawing Room also work with some of the world's top wind and keyboard players, such as Rachel Brown (flute), Colin Lawson (clarinet), Roger Montgomery (horn) and Geoffrey Govier (fortepiano), and their ground-breaking collections attest to the radical transformation their instruments were undergoing during this period.

The name 'Revolutionary Drawing Room' refers to the revolutionary years in Europe between 1789 and 1848. The 'drawing room' (the name deriving from the earlier 'withdrawing room') was where chamber music was performed in Georgian times, in the houses of musicians and their patrons. The dates are only a guide to give an idea of the period of music the group covers but they often perform works written both before and after these dates.

The ensemble, founded in 1990, has performed in Canada, Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Ireland as well as across the UK and has recorded for CPO (Donizetti and Boccherini quartets) and the BBC (Mendelssohn Octet).  Recent appearances have included concerts in the Gregynog, Maldon and Petworth Festivals and the London BachFest and they e are currently performing a complete cycle of Beethoven's Quartets over four years at St. John’s Smith Square (see below for details of the final concerts in this cycle). In July 2017 they played in the Music and Beyond Festival in Ottawa, Canada, with three concerts featuring Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets, and a "Soirée" appearance at the National Gallery of Canada.  Recordings include Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with Colin Lawson on the Clarinet Classics label and ‘A Viennese Quartet Party’ on Omnibus Classics, and their double-CD of flute quartets by Mozart and his contemporaries with Rachel Brown was released in September 2016 on the Uppernote label.

 

If you have enjoyed this programme you may like to explore the following links:

The Revolutionary Drawing Room: http://www.revolutionarydrawingroom.com

Exploring Beethoven’s String Quartets: https://thebeethovenproject.com/exploring-beethovens-quartets/2/

Stephen Johnson explores Beethoven’s ‘Grosse Fuge’ on BBC Radio 3: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124sbs

Andrew Clements introduces Beethoven: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/01/know-the-score-beethoven-where-to-start-with-his-music-250th-anniversary