Not which tones? The crux of Beethoven's Ninth

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 61-77

  Hinton, Stephen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61949203733     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/746792     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. A sample of seventeen recordings from the 1920s through the present contained six performances with the vocal appoggiatura and eleven without. Some of the conductors represented by more than one recording are consistent in all their performances, others are not. All three recordings by Bruno Walter, for example, do not include the vocal appoggiatura; two of these feature the bass-baritone Mack Harrell (1949 and 1953), the other William Wildermann (1959). Others belonging to this group of literalists are Wilhelm Furtwängler, represented by four recordings: with Rudolf Watzke (1942), with Paul Schöffler (1953) and with Otto Edelmann (1951 and 1954); Antal Dorati with Sigurd Björling (1967); and Claudio Abbado with Bryn Terfel (1996). Felix Weingartner and Leopold Stokowski have it both ways: Weingartner's recording, in English, with Harold Williams (1927) is without the appoggiatura; the one with Richard Mayr (1935) has it. Stokowski's recording with Donald McIntyre (1967) is without; the one with Eugene Loewenthal (1934), in English, has it. Other members of the appoggiatura group are: Willem Mengelberg with Willem Ravelli (1940), Arturo Toscanini with Norman Scott (1952), Roger Norrington with Petteri Salomaa (1987), and John Eliot Gardiner with Gilles Cachemaille (1994).
2. The meticulously prepared new edition of the Ninth Symphony, edited by Jonathan Del Mar (Kassel, 1996), supplies a footnote with the appoggiatura written out. In his critical commentary, Del Mar states that the first F "should be sung as G in the usual tradition of vocal appoggiaturas." The copyist's score that Beethoven gave to the Philharmonic Society (now housed in the British Library) includes a separate stave, added later, with the recitative written out in English and the G slurred to the F. Del Mar remarks, "It helps confirm that the note actually sung in performance at the time was G, matching bar 16." Additionally, Del Mar also refers to the sketches, where mm. 80-90 appear as a vocal solo, with the first note of m. 84 as an Fmusic sharp sign. The instrumental version, as in m. 16, is of course G. Although the G in the recitative is deleted in favor of F in the autograph score, Del Mar remarks that "this was surely a notational revision, not a musical one" (p. 53). Beethoven's revision, based on the interpretation being proposed here, is not merely a notational but also a "literary" one.
3. Rudolph Reti, The Thematic Process in Music (London, 1961), p. 28.
4. Janet Schmalfeldt has explored the "neighbor motion 5-6-5" in the minuet of Haydn's Symphony No. 104 in her article "Towards a Reconciliation of Schenkerian Concepts with Traditional and Recent Theories of Form," Music Analysis 10 (1991), 233-87.
5. That same motion, sometimes with minor inflections, imbues the motivic material of the entire symphony. With respect to the Ninth, James Webster has discussed in some detail the downward step 6-5, which he calls a "prominent ... pitch constellation," in his article "The Finale of Beethoven's Ninth," Beethoven Forum 1 (1992), 25-62.
6. The opening fifth A-E at the beginning of the passage could also be seen as echoing the beginning of the first movement, and the recitative therefore as embodying, in miniature, the progress of the whole work. Seeing the opening interval in this way turns the ossia Cmusic sharp sign (as an alternative to the E) into something of a riddle. The autograph score does not include either it or the preceding grace note. According to Del Mar (1996), both were added later by Beethoven to scores prepared by copyists. Nor does the ossia seem to serve any practical purpose, since the soloist is required to perform the high E in the next measure. It does, however, parallel the ambiguity of the appoggiatura on "Töne" at the end of the same phrase. The ascent from the third to the fifth degree, echoing as it does the opening of the "joy" melody, also makes sense both motivically and in terms of text-painting ("O Freunde!"), in which case the baritone's initial notes in the score embody simultaneously the opening and the resolution of the symphony, both the tones being rejected and those following in their stead. This is Augenmusik, of course, of the most recondite kind. But, given the care Beethoven took over correcting and modifying the various sources, it is hardly to be dismissed out of hand.
7. Hanslick, in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, judged the last movement to lack beauty, to be "unschön." Essentially a classicist interested primarily in manifestations of the "musically beautiful," he sided with those who see the symphony as a whole as an "aesthetic monstrosity" (ästhetische Ungeheuerlichkeit). See Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1854; Darmstadt, 1991), pp. 50-51.
8. Schenker, inspired by similar basic values, insisted on understanding "tones" to mean "clearly forged themes" (mehr oder minder ausgeprägte Themen). Hence he was forced to see Beethoven's rejection of these tones, namely the "joy" theme, prior to its being sung by the baritone soloist as a "logical inconsistency" (logischer Lapsus), at least from a programmatic point of view. At the same time, however, Schenker claimed that the "inconsistency ... finds its remedy once again in Beethoven's musically absolute primal urge toward parallelism!" See Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven: Neunte Sinfonie: Eine Darstellung des musikalischen Inhaltes unter fortlaufender Berücksichtigung auch des Vortrages und der Literatur (Vienna, 1912);
9. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Portrayal of Its Musical Content, with Running Commentary on Performance and Literature as Well, ed. and trans. John Rothgeb (New Haven, 1992), p. 243.
10. "Dieser [der letzte Satz] führt nicht zu einem Schlusse, sondern zu jenem Rezitative zurück, das nun in ähnlichen, großen, alles gewöhnliche Recitativmaaß übersteigenden Melismen - so forderte es die Entwickelung des Menschengesanges aus dem Instrumentale - vom Baßsänger zu den einleitenden Worten gesungen wird." The review is reprinted in Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit: Gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830, ed. Stefan Kunze (Laaber, 1987), pp. 500437 (p. 506).
11. The contours of the melismas on "angenehm" closely follow those of the word "an" in the line "reichen an die Gottheit an" in the duet "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen" from an opera much admired by Beethoven, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. For mention of other intertextual references, including some to Zauberflöte, see n. 39.
12. Wilhelm Seidel, in one of the most eloquent of recent commentaries, has noted (echoing Hanslick and a number of other predecessors, including Wagner) that "the Ninth Symphony is a profoundly uneven [uneinheitliches] work. The discrepancy between its parts cannot be explained in a purely musical way. It demands an interpretation that goes beyond the purely musical. In denying the work an interpretation one also evades it." See Wilhelm Seidel, "9. Symphonie op. 125," in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, vol. II, ed. Albrecht Riethmüller et al. (Laaber, 1994), pp. 252-71.
13. Leo Treitler, in Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), asserts that the Ninth "more than any other work of the tradition ... demands an interpretation" (p. 55).
14. Referring to Treitler, Scott Burnham recently concluded that "one could make a case that this imperative is itself immanent in the work, that this work stages the act of interpretation more explicitly and directly than most others - by forcing the issue - and that the reception history of the Ninth is thus an inescapable part of the work." See Scott Burnham, "Our Sublime Ninth," Beethoven Forum 5 (1996), 155-63.
15. Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge, 1993), p. 86.
16. Wagner's wavering opinions placed side-by-side present a fascinating conspectus just on their own. Wagner had his uses for the Ninth. It was his confessional piece par excellence, "the symbol and cornerstone of my whole building," as he called it during preparations for the consecration of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1872; cited in Christa Jost, "'Fortschreitende Abstraktion': Wagners frühe Phase der Auseinandersetzung mit Beethovens Neunter Symphonie," in Münchener Beethoven-Studien (Munich, 1992), p. 201.
17. The much-cited coopting of the choral finale in Oper und Drama as the most significant item in the prehistory of Wagnerian music drama has, however, to be weighed against the less well-known but no less telling statement from the letter he wrote to Franz Liszt in 1855, echoing and preechoing, as it does, countless other negative judgments of the piece from the time of its premiere until today: "For Ninth Symphony (as a work of art), the final movement with the choruses," Wagner declared, superficially siding for a moment with Hanslick, "is the decidedly weakest part." His not wholly un-Hanslickian reason: "it is merely important for the history of art because it reveals to us in a very naïve way the embarrassment of a real tone-poet who doesn't know (after hell and purgatory) how finally (and finitely) he is going to represent paradise." The letter, dated 7 June 1855, is published in Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, vol. II (Leipzig, 1900): "Für die neunte Symphonie (als Kunstwerk) ist der letzte Satz mit den Chören entschieden der schwächste Theil, er ist blos kunstgeschichtlich wichtig, weil er uns auf sehr naive Weise die Verlegenheit eines wirklichen Tondichters aufdeckt, der nicht weiß, wie er endlich (nach Hölle und Fegefeuer) das Paradies darstellen soll" (p. 78). See also Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's Reception of Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1991);
18. Ruth Solie, "Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism," in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1988), pp. 1-42;
19. and Thomas S. Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge, 1995).
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Music and Words," trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Between Romanticism and Modernism, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 103-19 (p. 113).
21. David B. Levy, "The Contrabass Recitative in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Revisited," Historical Performance 5 (1992), 9-18 (p. 16);
22. and idem, Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony (New York, 1995), p. 102.
23. Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, p. 89.
24. Konrad Küster, Beethoven (Stuttgart, 1994), p. 384: "There is hardly anything special in the way the music is organized up to this point; the elements that Beethoven uses have been his stock-in-trade for some time - albeit not in this structural arrangement." (Der Sache nach ist daran, wie die Musik bis hierhin eingerichtet ist, nur wenig Besonderes zu finden, denn die Elemente, die Beethoven anwendet, gehören seit längerem zu dem Grundrepertoire seines Komponierens - allerdings nicht in dieser strukturellen Anordnung.)
25. "Beethovens umarmende Aufforderung an sein Publikum, jetzt angenehmere Töne anzustimmen, ist aber nicht nur auf die besagte düstere kurze Fanfarenmusik bezogen, sondern auch auf den gesamten ersten Teil der Sinfonie. ... Der Aufbau beruht auf Beethovens Umformung von Schillers achtstrophigem Gedicht 'An die Freude' in eine klassizistische dreiteilige Chor-Ode nach dem Vorbild Pindars." See Claus Canisius, Beethoven: "Sehnsucht und Unruhe in der Musik": Aspekte zu Leben und Werk (Munich, 1992), pp. 172-75.
26. The principal commentaries with partial transcriptions are Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, comp. Hermann Deiters and ed. Hugo Riemann, vol. V (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 26-32;
27. Gustav Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana: Nachgelassene Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1887), pp. 189-92;
28. Alfred Chr. Kalischer, "Die Beethoven-Autographe der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin," Monatsheft für Musikgeschichte 27 (1895), 143-69; 28 (1896), 1-80;
29. see also Antonín Sychra, "Ludwig van Beethovens Skizzen zur IX. Sinfonie," Beethoven-Jahrbuch 4 (1959/60), 85-101;
30. Sieghard Brandenburg, "Die Skizzen zur neunten Symphonie," Zu Beethoven 2: Aufsätze und Dokumente, ed. Harry Goldschmidt (Berlin, 1984), pp. 88-129;
31. Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter, The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), pp. 292-98.
32. In his monograph Aufbau und Sinn des Chorfinales in Beethovens Neunter Symphonie (Berlin, 1930), pp. 82-83, Otto Baensch relies on earlier authors' attempts at deciphering the sketches, while usefully pointing out some of the anomalies between the various readings.
33. James Parsons has dealt extensively with the word "Freude" as in "freundenvollere" in Ode to the Ninth: The Poetic and Musical Tradition Behind the Finale of Beethoven's "Choral Symphony" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Texas, 1992) [UMI: 9225007].
34. Schenker, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, p. 243.
35. See n. 12.
36. The sentiment is a common one, most famously expressed in Beethoven's letter of 19 September 1815 to Countess Erdödy: "We finite ones with our infinite spirit are born only to suffering and joy, and one could almost say that the elected ones achieve joy through suffering" (Wir endliche mit dem unendlichen Geist sind nur zu leiden und Freuden gebohren, und beynah könnte man sagen die ausgezeichneten erhalten durch Leiden Freude; quoted from Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, vol. III, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg [Munich, 1996], p. 161).
37. Baensch's study Aufbau und Sinn left itself open to criticism on two principal counts. One is the application of Lorenzian bar form as an analytical model that Baensch borrows from Alfred Lorenz's Wagner analysis and applies, unconvincingly, to the last movement of the Ninth. James Webster has chided this as "'bar'-form mania"; see his article "The Finale of Beethoven's Ninth," p. 37. The other potential target of criticism is Baensch's invocation of both Plato and Schelling in the interpretative parts of his study. Neither of these shortcomings - or rather, excesses - should detract from the fact that Baensch knew both the sources and secondary literature probably better than anyone at the time. His bibliographic control is masterly. Even though his conclusions are sometimes far-fetched, Baensch manages to say something interesting and provocative in nearly every paragraph of this ninety-six-page monograph.
38. The tradition of conceiving of symphony audiences as the Volk, in particular audiences at concerts featuring symphonies by Beethoven, is the subject of Margaret Notley's article "Volksconcerte in Vienna and the Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997), 421-53.
39. Baensch, Aufbau und Sinn, p. 54: "Der Älteste der Philosophen tritt hervor und singt das erste Baritonsolo."
40. Quoted from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford, 1973), pp. 182-96.
41. For an excellent discussion of Kant's music aesthetics and the immediate post-Kantian period, see Wilhelm Seidel, "Zwischen Immanuel Kant und der musikalischen Klassik: Die Āsthetik des musikalischen Kunstwerks um 1800," Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. Hermann Danuser et al. (Laaber, 1988), pp. 67-84.
42. The following studies rely heavily on Kantian precepts: William Kinderman, "Beethoven's Symbol for the Deity in the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony," this journal 9 (1985), 102-18;
43. and Johannes Bauer, Rhetorik der Überschreitung: Annotationen zu Beethovens Neunter Symphonie (Pfaffenweiler, 1992).
44. Maynard Solomon's description of Beethoven's Kantianism as "superficial" can be found in his Beethoven (New York, 1977), p. 38.
45. For references to Beethoven's opinion on Rossini, whom he regarded as "formless," see Baensch, Aufbau und Sinn, p. 63, n. 2.
46. Nicholas Cook (Beethoven: Symphony No. 9) writes: "If we hear the diversity of nature in the 'Turkish' music, or see an army marching past, or if for that matter we view it as the second tonal area within a sonata-like structure, then we may succeed in not actually hearing the 'grunts' of the bassoons and bass drum at all - or at least in not hearing them as 'absurd'.... This resistance [to wholly assimilating the Ninth within any single, definitive interpretation] can only be effective if we remain conscious of the incongruities, the incoherence, the negative qualities of the music" (pp. 92-104).
47. Robert Winter, "The Sketches for the 'Ode to Joy'," in Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: The International Beethoven Congress: Detroit, 1977, ed. Robert Winter and Bruce Can (Detroit, 1980), pp. 176-214 (p. 192).
48. Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York, 1966), pp. 262, 200. In the case of the Presto of op. 131, what is being evoked, Kerman says, "is not the opera house, but the village green or else the nursery." Also focusing on reception, he remarks that "we are to respond to these childlike strains as unguardedly as children to nursery rhymes, we are to be swept away by the Volkston of the half-dainty, half-clownish country dance." See also p. 202.
49. Heine, in his musical dispatches from Paris, refers to Beethoven's late music as "Erinnerungen eines Tones, Gespenster verschollener Klänge." See Heinrich Heine, "Lutetia: Berichte über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben," in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 9, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich, 1976), p. 358. The entry in question is dated 31 March 1841.
50. August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (Stuttgart, 1947).
51. Rudolf Steglich, "Motivischer Dualismus und thematische Einheit in Beethovens Neunter Sinfonie," Festschrift Heinrich Besseler zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Karl-Marx- Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, 1961), pp. 411-24. "Allerdings hat Beethoven, indem er Wer den Gesang mit dem Wort zu Hilfe rief, wirklich ein Unvermögen demonstriert, aber nicht eigentlich ein Unvermögen der Instrumentalmusik, die nicht allen Menschen deutlich wird, sondern ein Unvermögen der Menschen, welche die Melodie mißverstehen und ausschweifend mißbrauchen. Wenn er nach dem Verklingen der Schreckensfanfare die Singstimme mit den Worten beginnen läßt 'O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!', so meint er damit ja nicht die Presto-Fortissimo-Klänge der Fanfare, die gar nicht von den Freunden verübt werden, sondern jene ausschweifende, Ordnung und Sinn der Freude-Melodie vergewaltigende dritte Variation samt ihrer Coda" (p. 422).
52. William Drabkin, "Composer and Convention: Beethoven's Progress as a Symphonist," liner notes to the cycle conducted by Leonard Bernstein, catalog number DGG 2740216-10 [1980].
53. Ernest Sanders, "Form and Content in the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," Musical Quarterly 50 (1964), 59-76; see also his article in this volume (pp. 54-60).
54. James Webster, by contrast, stressing the "complex, multi-sectional construction of Beethoven's finale," states that "for this music, concepts like 'sonata form' will not do." See his article "The Finale of Beethoven's Ninth," Beethoven Forum 1 (1992), 25-62 (p. 27) and see p. 61.
55. A conspectus of analytical approaches is included in Michael C. Tusa, "Noch einmal: Form and Content in the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in Beethoven Forum 7 (forthcoming), 111-35.
56. In his article "Mozart - Schiller - Beethoven: Mozarts Modell für die Freudenhymne und die Fusion der Embleme im Finale der Neunten Symphonie," Hudební vêda 2 (1993), 109-28, Hans-Werner Küthen identifies Mozart's Offertorium de tempore "Misericordias Domini," K. 205a (formerly K. 222), as a model for Beethoven's Freudenmelodie. Nicholas Cook (1993) writes of "an entire network of Mozartean references," including at least one to Die Zauberflöte (p. 92).
57. Michael Steinberg refers to "close and particular resemblances of the Beethoven Ninth recitatives to those in a piano concerto by Ludwig Böhner" (see Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener's Guide [New York, 1995], p. 54).
58. Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, 1994).
59. Theodor W. Adorno, "Spātstil Beethovens," Der Auftakt 17 (1937);
60. rpt. in Moments musicaux (Frankfurt/Main, 1964), pp. 13-17. "So werden beim letzten Beethoven die Konventionen Ausdruck in der nackten Darstellung ihrer selbst" (p. 16).
61. Maynard Solomon, "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), 289-305;
62. also in Probleme der symphonischen Tradition im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Siegfried Kross (Tutzing, 1990), pp. 145-56 (p. 151).
63. See n. 11.
64. J. W. N. Sullivan: Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (London, 1927), p. 105.
65. Lewis Lockwood writes of the recitatives "[telling] us that the process is that of a struggle for the creation and discovery of musical material that will be adequate for the expression of human brotherhood and joy embodied in Schiller's Ode," in "The Four 'Introductions' in the Ninth Symphony," Probleme der symphonischen Tradition im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 97-112 (p. 111). In light of the foregoing, one could also say that the recitatives tell us of the material's inadequacy as well.
66. Paul Bekker's theory of the symphony is most succinctly summarized in his 1918 pamphlet Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin, 1918). A pioneer in the field of music sociology, Bekker was interested above all in the genre's sociological significance, its function as the public art form par excellence. It is a significance that the Ninth, according to Bekker, embodies more than any other work. Bekker cherishes the ability of Beethoven's symphonies to "form a unified, specifically individualized essence from the chaotic mass of the audience," to create what he calls "Gefühlsgemeinschaften. " This he calls the symphony's "community-forming" (gesellschaftsbildende) function: "Es ist die besondere Art und das Maß der Kraft, in der dieses Kunstwerk Gefühlsgemeinschaften zu bilden vermag, also seine Fähigkeit, aus der chaotischen Publikumsmasse ein einheitliches, bestimmt individualisiertes Wesen zu schaffen, das sich im Augenblick des Hörens, des Kunsterlebens als unteilbare, von gleichen Empfindungen bewegte, gleichen Zielen zustrebende Einheit erkennt. Erst diese gesellschaftsbildende Fähigkeit des Kunstwerks bestimmt seine Bedeutung und seinen Wert. Die Kraft des Gesellschaftbildens also bezeichne ich als die höchste Eigenschaft des sinfonischen Kunstwerks" (p. 17). Bekker's is a familiar narrative: the symphony's history after Beethoven is traced as one of decline brought about by Romantic introspection. In Bekker's version, the decline is halted only by Mahler's intervention, in particular by his Eighth Symphony, also a work with chorus. The reading presented here, however, suggests that the generic essence of the symphony, as identified by Bekker, is not only embodied by the Ninth's finale; it is also its subject matter, especially in the baritone recitative. That is the reflexive, self-referential point of the hermeneutic crux. Beethoven was more of a Romantic than Bekker's theory could admit.
67. Walter Frisch, Brahms: The Four Symphonies (New York, 1996).
68. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, 1980), p. 616.
69. Peter Szondi, "Friedrich Schlegel und die romantische Ironie, mit einer Beilage über Tiecks Komödien," in Schriften II (Frankfurt, 1978), pp. 11-31 (p.31).
70. Ludwig Tieck, Die verkehrte Welt: Text und Materialien zur Interpretation, ed. Karl Pestalozzi (Berlin, 1964), p. 110: "Aber während das Fidelio-Finale und der Schluß der IX. Symphonie diese Freude mit letztem Aufwand aus Elysium zur Erde niederzwingen wollen, bescheidet sich die Ironie damit, im Endlichen momentan den Blick für das Unendliche zu öffnen. Sie verharrt prophetisch in der Vorläufigkeit."
71. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H. H. Houben (Wiesbaden, 1959), pp. 382-83: "Übrigens werden Sie zugeben, daß der Schluß, wo es mit der geretteten Seele nach oben geht, sehr schwer zu machen war, und daß ich bei so übersinnlichen, kaum zu ahnenden Dingen mich sehr leicht im Vagen hätte verlieren können, wenn ich nicht meinen poetischen Intentionen durch die scharf umrissenen christlich-kirchlichen Figuren und Vorstellungen eine wohlthätig beschränkende Form und Festigkeit gegeben hätte."
72. For an in-depth study of Goethe's irony, see Ehrhard Bahr, Die Ironie im Spätwerk Goethes: Studien zum Westöstlichen Divan, zu den Wanderjahren und zu Faust II (Berlin, 1972).
73. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1974).
74. Glenn Stanley's review appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997), 464-83 (pp. 475, 479).
75. In his book The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130 (Princeton, N.J., 1995), Daniel Chua raises the issue of irony in the late quartets. Writing about the middle movements of ops. 130 and 132, he notes that they "present a veneer of such naivety and normality that it becomes difficult to disentangle irony from humour and critique from nostalgia" (p. 246).
76. The quartets "are written in a style of historical extremes; the contemporaneity of the Große Fuge jars against seemingly innocent reincarnations of eighteenth-century styles, with Beethoven not only digging up his pre-Napoleonic sketches, but imitating pre-Classical dances, re-creating the Rococo, the Baroque, and even the Renaissance" (p. 7). "There is no stability in any of the readings - just possibilities and tensions between them" (p. 248). These comments, focusing as they do on late Beethoven's eclectic mix of styles - old and new, high and low - could readily be adapted to apply to the Ninth. Reflexivity and incongruity in Beethoven's late works, especially in the late quartets, are discussed as part of an aesthetics of paradox in Sylvia Imeson's study "The Time Gives It Proofe": Paradox in the Late Music of Beethoven (New York, 1996).
77. Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 199.
78. Andreas Eichhorn, "Warum stimmt Beethovens Neunte Symphonie traurig?" in Festschrift Winfried Kirsch zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. P. Ackermann et al. (Tutzing, 1996), pp. 204-12.
79. Richard Taruskin, "Resisting The Ninth," this journal 12 (1989), 241-56 (p. 250).