Grosse Fuge

When Beethoven Goes Bad

It’s not music you choose to listen to. It’s also music you can’t stop listening to.

At least I couldn’t. I woke groggy and hung-over, after being awakened by a craving for potato chips at 11 PM. It’s the effect of a drug—Remeron—that's meant to jolt even catatonically-depressed people into paroxysms of hilarity and gaiety.

Works, too. But it does have this little side-effect—fierce cravings for certain foods.

Most of the time, it’s coffee ice cream. Last night it was potato chips. Followed—not wisely—by rum.

OK—the world of the hangover. Know that territory. It stays for a couple of hours, makes you miserable, goes away. Fluids and sweat help. Also getting out of the house. So I took my walk, and listened to the final quartet of Beethoven.

Or so I thought. It turns out that the Emerson String Quartet, for no reason that I can figure out, plays Quartet number 13 after Quartet number 16.

OK, whatever….

What I should have anticipated was that the Emerson would finish the quartets with…

…the GrosseFuge.

Let’s get this out of the way. It’s not music. It is Beethoven applying every last bit of reason against every last ounce of anguish. The effect—especially when listening with headphones—is of being locked in a cell with four howling and violent jackals.

“Repellent” is the word most people used about it in the 19^th century. Beethoven himself wrote—if the blogger can be trusted—“when the instruments have to struggle with monstrous difficulties…when each has different figures to cut across each other…amid a host of dissonances…when the Babylonian confusion is complete, the result is a concert only the Moroccans can enjoy.” (talkclassical.com) It was so disagreeable that Beethoven’s publisher begged him not to use it—as he wanted—as the last movement of the Quartet number 13. And Beethoven—not famous for tractability—actually acceded. And then published the Gosse Fuge as a stand-alone piece.

Well, I’ve heard it, of course. Turning on the radio, it will crop up from time to time. String quartet concerts…obviously. And there are arrangements for string orchestra and double piano as well.

It’s as ruthlessly logical as a psychopath. It’s also as fiendishly desperate as a junkie seeking his fix. It’s wildly unpleasant music.

Which is what Beethoven wanted. Or so I think, at least. Because I have been locked into the last quartets for the last month now, and, my take? Well, I just listened to it again. It’s aural rape. Beethoven replaces the string instruments with razors. And it’s structurally a hurricane—starting with gentle winds, then picking up in ferocity, raging, howling, battering. The eye descends, and a stupidly classical theme is produced. Then the virazón— the eye wall cracks and you’re into the fiercest part of the storm.

And Beethoven doesn’t spare anyone. He takes this snuff film of music through every last gash, every scream, every jolt of terror. The look of terror in the victim’s eyes? He shrieks with laughter.

And he wills it on himself. He puts himself on the rack and begs himself—torturer and victim both—to flail harder, remorselessly, unrelentingly. He glories in the blood spewing from his wounds; he kisses the whip that lashes his exposed viscera—all skin and muscle shredded now.

And this from a student of Haydn?

“This work is drenched with sex,” said a conductor years ago, referring to Debussy. The Grosse Fuge? Make no mistake—nothing de Sade wrote is as violent as this music.

That said…

…why is it healthy?

There’s nowhere he won’t go. He never backs down. He willingly dons the executioner’s hood and wills him to work. He faces every fear.

“Do you like the Grosse Fuge?” asks the blog talkclassical.com.

The question is stupid. Do you like brutality, ferocity, pummeling rage?

No.

But it’s there. And when, like the hurricane, it descends on you, you can only batten down, listen in terror as the winds shriek, the door rattles, the flower pots sail through the air and hurtle against your windows. It’s not music to be liked. It’s music to be experienced.