Grosse Fuge

The Große Fuge by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) still gives hardened concert audiences reason to pause. Little wonder that his contemporaries roundly condemned it as the work of a lunatic or, at best, the misdirected musings of a former master who had lost his way in the void of deafness. For many years it was considered unplayable for both technical and aesthetic reasons. Modern summaries manage to find everything in the music: comedy, despair, freedom, strictness, order, mystery. The work was originally the finale of Beethoven’s staggering Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130. But after a problematic first performance—and with prompting from his publisher, who rightly believed the fugal finale would dampen sales—Beethoven substituted a more palatable movement. The Große Fuge went off to live alone as Opus 133. From the beginning it sounds fractured, even angry. The composer seems to have intentionally created a maximum sense of dissociation by playing on the skipwise fugue theme. Labeling it as a basic A-B-A form hardly improves our grasp of the whole; we do better to ponder controlled chaos as a working synopsis. The Große Fuge marks the outermost boundary of the “undiscovered country” that is Late Beethoven. And yet there are motivic connections holding it together and even, in concert setting, making it an apt conclusion to the Op. 130 Quartet. It is no small feat to have created a work that 200 years of astute critics are still puzzling and arguing over.

(c) Jason Stell