Legacy of the Littlehammer
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Dr Angus Wrenn on the Hammerklavier, late Beethoven piano sonatas and their influence upon the novel, poetry and the pictorial arts.
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"Hammerklavier" is unquestionably an apt and evocative term for use in a literary blog in the internet age, even if the keys of a modern computer keyboard are some way removed from their hammer-like precursors on manual typewriters. It is worth, however, considering the origins of the word. The German term dates from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when the modern piano (then fortepiano), as opposed to the clavichord or harpsichord, was coming to the fore, and when Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) composed his twenty-ninth piano sonata, in B flat major, Op 106. In the most literal sense it signifies ‘hammer keyboard’ (with an escapement mechanism) as opposed to the plucked harpsichord or pressed (and barely audible) clavichord. There is possibly a suggestion of patriotic pro-German sentiment, in the adoption of this German language term at a time when Napoleon, something of an erstwhile hero-figure to Beethoven and his exact contemporary Hegel, seemed to be overwhelming Europe. It is supremely ironic that Op 81a should be known, at least in Britain, as ‘Les Adieux’ since Beethoven had called it ‘Das Lebewohl’ and insisted on having all the tempo markings printed in German rather than the more commonly expected Italian. This habit continued with the two sonatas preceding Op 106, Op 90 in E major and 0p 101 in A major, which was also published as ‘fur das Hammerklavier.’ At one level, perhaps especially for German speakers, the title ‘Hammerklavier’ is almost neutral, unrevealing to the point of banality (might the same be said, in the francophone world for Debussy’s suite Pour le Piano? - so much less evocative a title than the same composer’s Suite Bergamasque.)
For no obvious reason, the word ‘Hammerklavier’ has come to be used only in respect of the longest of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas, Op 106, although Op 101 in A major, albeit considerably more compact in scale already boasts an important extended fugal section in its final movement. Indeed, Beethoven (or at any rate his publisher Artaria) may even have used it in association with the remaining last three sonatas after Op 106, in E Op 109, in A flat op 110, and in C minor Op 111. At the technological level, the late sonatas make use of the newly-added low E, and in the opposite direction, an extra octave in the treble. The final two sonatas especially feature important passages where the left and right hands are at opposite ends of the keyboard. If the frame of reference for study is thus extended to take in the sonatas op 101 to op 111, it will be seen that there are numerous literary works, either in German or in English, which allude to them in some way or other. In what follows, the influence of these so-called late sonatas, Beethoven’s last five, upon not only other composers but also practitioners of other arts, including the novel, poetry and painting, will be explored.
The doyen of twentieth-century British composers, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) mentions that the English novelist E M Forster (1879-1971) was an accomplished amateur pianist, able to play the more demanding Beethoven sonatas. Perhaps drawing upon that first-hand experience, Forster describes the heroine of his 1908 novel A Room With a View, Lucy Honeychurch, performing Beethoven’s last sonata Op 111 in C minor, at a fashionable soirée in Edwardian Surrey. The passion and vigour of the sonata might be said to parallel the sense of true love (for the lower middle-class Emerson, as opposed to the affluent suitor whom polite society intends for her, Cecil Vyse.) Ironically, when the novel was filmed by Merchant Ivory in 1985 with Daniel Day Lewis as Vyse and Helena Bonham-Carter in the role of Lucy, she plays not Beethoven but Schubert (the sonata in A Op 874.)
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The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was not himself a pianist in any significant sense, but he was introduced to Beethoven’s music by his school teacher, John Fisher during his teens and the composer remained an inspiration for him throughout his career. Beethoven makes an appearance by name as early as Hughes’s third volume Wodwo (1967) in the poem Ludwig’s Death-Mask, as well as, at one remove, in the poem Kreutzer Sonata. Here the primary allusion is to the 1889 novella of that name by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), about a wife’s adultery with a musician. Together the pair rehearse Beethoven’s so-called Kreutzer sonata, Op 47 in E major, for violin and piano. Ironically, Tolstoy in general was disapproving of Beethoven’s music, seeing it as excessively, and even dangerously emotional.
E M Forster was still alive when Hughes was writing this poem, though he had published no new novel in the four decades since Passage to India. He had however, during this long writer’s block as a novelist, together with Eric Crozier, contributed the libretto for his friend Benjamin Britten’s fourth opera Billy Budd (1951), adapted from Herman Melville’s novella, left unfinished at his death in 1891 and first published in the same year as Passage to India (1924.) Forster’s credentials as a musician are on an altogether firmer footing than Hughes’s. On the novelist’s ninetieth birthday, in 1969 Britten wrote:
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There is no doubt that E. M. Forster is our most musical novelist. And I don’t mean that he just likes music or likes going to concerts and operas, or plays the piano neatly and efficiently (all of which he does), but that he really understands music and uses music in his novels, and fairly frequently (Arlott, John, et al. Aspects of E. M. Forster. London: Arnold, 1969 81.)
Britten’s encomium is borne out by the fiction. Not only in A Room With A View, but also in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and later in Howards End (1910), where a performance at the Queen’s Hall in London of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony brings together the transgressive lovers Leonard Bast and Helen Schlegel, music plays a crucial role. The two of these novels feature episodes set in continental Europe and Italian opera is pivotal in the plots. Lucy Honeychurch might suggest the figure of the accomplished lady-amateur pianist, a commonplace in nineteenth-century fiction, but in fact she chooses to perform Beethoven’s far from ladylike last sonata Op 111. (Hughes’s Jennifer Estridge in Gaudete (1977), daughter of an ageing retired naval commander, might just represent the tail end of this social tradition of accomplished, genteel lady pianists. However, in both Forster and Hughes the playing goes far beyond the polite limitations of the drawing room, and late Beethoven is surely the very antithesis of salon music.)
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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, were both taught the piano and, according to Szegedy-Maszak, (‘Virginia Woolf and Musical Culture’ (48) in Virginia Woolf & Music, ed. Adriana Varga, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014) by the age of seventeen could play fugues together at the harmonium. Woolf certainly belonged to the social class which prized this accomplishment as part of the training of well-to-do young women educated, like herself, at home. Woolf refers to Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op 111 in her journals, in correspondence and in the novel The Voyage Out, as well as in The Waves. She also produced a Beethoven-inspired short story ‘The String Quartet.’ (1921) The heroine of The Voyage Out (1915), on the boat that is taking her to South America, is put in mind of Op 111:
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined, with the spirit of whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of Beethoven Op 111… like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea,rose, kissed it again, and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight.’ (Voyage Out 37 quoted in Adriana Varga , Virginia Woolf & Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, 70)
Varga calls this ‘a trajectory of ascent and transformed descent.’ Her correspondence with Saxon Sydney-Turner strongly suggests that Woolf did not herself play this sonata, one of Beethoven’s most demanding, but she does nevertheless seem to have had a powerful sense of the way in which the variations of the second and final movement of Op 111 disappear, as it were, into an infinite distance.
T S Eliot (1888-1965), Woolf’s friend, who also mixed with Forster in the 1920s and 1930s, produced his own response to late Beethoven in literary form with Four Quartets (1943) (the specific musical source was the string quartet Op 132 in A minor) and his older German contemporary Thomas Mann (1875-1955) devotes to Op 111 a crucial chapter of his novel Doktor Faustus (1947.) For this novel he extensively consulted Theodor Adorno (a composer and pupil of Alban Berg, albeit best known as the leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School.) Both Adorno (1903-1969), of Jewish descent, and Mann (himself aryan, but an outspoken critic of Nazism and married to a German-Jewish wife) were by the 1940s living in Los Angeles.
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Mann does not focus on Op 106 in Doktor Faustus, exploiting instead the sonata Op 111 but Adorno, whom he went to as an authority, does give the following most uncharacteristically humorous and self-deprecating passage, reminiscing of the sonata’s lifelong importance for him:
On the child's image of Beethoven: that I imagined the Hammerklavier Sonata an especially easy piece, thinking of the little-hammer play piano. I thought the piece was written for it. The disappointment, as I couldn't play it. (Colin Sample ‘Adorno on the Musical Language of Beethoven’ (380-1) in Musical Quarterly Vol 78 no 2 1994 378-923)
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Overall, it is harder (though not impossible, see paragraph 21 below) to find instances of the influence upon literature of Op 106 itself, among the five late piano sonatas also including Op 101, Op 109, Op 110 and Op 111.) Within the field of piano music there are, however, two important followers of Beethoven in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who specifically drew inspiration from the Hammerklavier, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Pierre Boulez (1925-2016.)
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Brahms is often said to have suffered by virtue of coming after Beethoven and perceiving him as an overwhelming influence from which he had difficulty breaking free to find his own creative voice. (To return to literature, there is surely a closeness here to Harold Bloom’s application of the Freudian oedipal ‘family romance’ involving ‘revisionary strife’ (Harold H Bloom The Anxiety of Influence, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973 10) enunciated in his seminal 1973 monograph The Anxiety of Influence.) Brahms’s three piano sonatas are all early works, and the first, in C major, Opus 1, opens with a clear allusion to the first bars of the Hammerklavier sonata. As if acknowledging the insuperability of Beethoven, the later piano output of Brahms, apart from the Handel Variations and Paganini Variations, is largely confined to short klavierstucke, intermezzi and rhapsodies, and eschews full-length sonatas. After the son’s youthful rebellion the ‘father’, even though dead, remains undeposed.
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The twentieth-century French composer Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) also responded to Beethoven’s example very early in his life. His career, especially in its earliest years, might definitely be said to be characterized by an almost oedipal struggle. His father, an engineer from Montbrison, near Lyon, initially put up strong resistance to Boulez’s wish to study music rather than mathematics in Paris. Joan Peyser, in her admittedly overtly psychological biography Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (New York: Schirmer, 1976 22) tells of Boulez being taken each week, as a young child, to visit the grave of an older brother who had died in infancy. The dead older brother even bore the same name Pierre which was inscribed on the headstone they visited. From such a start it is not perhaps surprising to find a persistent strain of oedipal strife against father-figures in Boulez’s early polemical writings. He turned violently against his early teacher René Leibowitz, who had dared to criticize his pupil’s first sonata for piano, even though it was Leibowitz who had introduced Boulez to Schoenberg’s revolutionary twelve-tone serialist technique (hitherto banned as degenerate in Vichy-occupied France.) Even Boulez’s more famous early teacher Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) did not escape the youthful scorn of his most distinguished pupil, who dismissed the Turangalila symphony (1948) as ‘brothel music.’(Quoted in Banister, Peter, ‘The Offence of Beauty in Modern Western Art Music’, Religions, 2013, 4, pp. 687 – 700) Despite having come up with the twelve-tone technique, which Boulez wholeheartedly embraced (he even said composers who did not adopt it were ‘useless’ (Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 113.), Arnold Schoenberg by the early 1950s came in for dismissal a la Boulez. Critiquing Schoenberg, who had just died, Boulez published an article ‘Schoenberg est mort.’(1951) Boulez accused the Viennese master of effectively lacking nerve, going only half way in his serialism and limiting the technique merely to the organization of musical pitches in a score, by contrast with Schoenberg’s most progressive pupil Anton Webern (1882-1945), who had also serialized the elements of rhythm and timbre, from which Boulez proceeded to develop so-called total or integral serialism in Structures Book I for two pianos (1952.) This was recorded with Messiaen taking the second part, a rapprochement evidently having been effected.
Boulez indulged in conduct worthy of Beethoven himself with regard to his first piano sonata (1946.) Just as Napoleon’s name was struck by Beethoven from the Eroica’s dedication following his proclamation as emperor, so Boulez angrily deleted his dedication of the score to the luckless Leibowitz. The first piano sonata is a short, two-movement work which, for all its Schoenbergian harmonic language (the Austrian was still (just) alive and writing at the time,) the composer never disguised is formally modelled upon Beethoven’s 24th piano sonata, Op 78 in F sharp major (1809.) It is cast, like the Beethoven, in two rather than the normal three or four movements. Boulez’s second piano sonata (1947-48) is on an altogether larger scale, running to almost half an hour and comprising four movements. Critics such as Paul Griffiths and Dominique Jameux have noted the work’s debt to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata. As with Op 106, Boulez’s second sonata embodies the highly assertive mood of Beethoven’s opening allegro, and indeed Boulez quotes the fugal subject of the Hammerklavier finale on his first page. The next two movements reverse the order found in Beethoven, with the scherzo coming after rather than before the slow movement. The Boulez slow movement indulges in mediaeval tropes, just as Beethoven had used the antiquated tierce de Picardie and Neapolitan sevenths. As in Beethoven’s symphonic scherzi (the 3rd, 7th and 9th come to mind) Boulez’s scherzo in the second sonata repeats the trio section not twice but three times. Boulez’s final movement, like that of the Hammerklavier, is an increasingly ferocious fugue, which becomes ever more forceful and indeed all but impossible to follow, the pianist directed by Boulez to ‘pulveriser le ton’ (‘pulverise the sound’,) although, unlike Beethoven, the French composer ends with a short, calmer postlude.
It is declared by Wendell Kretschmar, the American musicologist in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1947), that, with his last sonata Op 111, a two-movement work in C minor, Beethoven brought the piano sonata as a historical form to its close. Statistically, that claim might in many ways appear to be borne out. After his younger contemporary Schubert (1797-1828), who outlived him by scarcely a year, no composer produced a long succession of major piano sonatas to rival Beethoven’s 32. Indeed Beethoven’s own final piano works were in different forms, the Diabelli Variations and short bagatelles Op 119 and Op. 126. Chopin produced only three piano sonatas (one of them an apprentice work), and Liszt a mere two (each confined to a single movement.) Debussy produced none and Ravel only a sonatina, while Rachmaninov published no more than two. Scriabin and Prokofiev were admittedly more prolific, with nine each. In the 20th century Second Viennese School only Alban Berg produced a piano sonata, and that a fairly short single-movement work at the outset of his career.
In the world since World War II perhaps only Michael Tippett (1905-1998), Elliott Carter (1908-20012), and Pierre Boulez produced major works for piano in this form. The quotation, on the very first page, of the Hammerklavier’s last movement theme might make Boulez appear to be a thoroughly neo-classical composer, overtly imitating a form inherited from a remote, distant age, like Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (1917) mimicking Haydn, or Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks (1938), indebted to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no 3. But strictly this is to mischaracterize Boulez’s radical endeavour. This, after all, is a composer who said that the solution to the problem of opera houses in the modern age would be to blow them all up. In comparable spirit, Boulez, going further than Marcel Duchamp in 1917, argues ‘it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed. All the art of the past must be destroyed.’ (New York Times 5 September 1971) Perhaps it should cause no surprise that Boulez was inspired by the Hammerklavier, as the composer was to go on and produce what became his most celebrated work, Le Marteau Sans Maitre (1955) (‘The Hammer Without A Master.’) Boulez’s second sonata indeed follows the movements of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier only to challenge and undermine the entire world of the conventional sonata in each case. Nowhere is this perhaps more apparent than in the final movement, which is a sort of atonal fugal structure, just as Beethoven’s last movement of Op 106 is a giant ‘fuga a tre voci con alcune licenze.’ Employing all the power of the latest pianos by Graf, Walter or the English fortepiano which Broadwood sent him– this may be another factor accounting for the sonata’s German rather than French or Italian name. By contrast all but the last sonatas by Haydn, as well as the early sonatas K279-284 by Mozart were most probably written for the harpsichord, an instrument which permitted no distinction between piano and forte. The first movement of the Hammerklavier sonata is very far from the sound world of Bach’s counterpoint, most of which can be performed on even a mere clavichord. At the turn of the twentieth century the conductor Felix Weingartner, a pupil of Franz Liszt, who had been the first pianist to take the Hammerklavier into his regular repertoire, found the music so monumental that he arranged the sonata for orchestra. Having said that Bach wrote for a much less powerful instrument, Beethoven does nonetheless appear to allude to the fugue in D major from Book II of the Well-Tempered Klavier just before launching into the Hammerklavier’s allegro risoluto fugue. This movement is as demanding upon the ear and also the brain as the Grosse Fuga with which Beethoven originally intended to conclude the string quartet Op 131. It employs a panoply of contrapuntal devices – inversion, transposition and cancrizans – before a quiet backwards statement of the theme leads to a vigorous conclusion replete with so many trills that form is all but impossible to discern. While Beethoven exploits the interval of a tenth, Boulez in the 1940s goes still further harmonically with his finale, although the coda is as soft and reflective as the backwards restatement which Beethoven incorporated into his finale. Just as Mann’s Wendell Kretschmar, in his illustrated commentary-cum-lecture from the keyboard, sees the final Beethoven sonata as bidding adieu to the sonata form, Boulez’s last piano sonata, his third, appears to confirm that sense of an ending of an era, at least in terms of what most listeners’ ears are capable of perceiving. Boulez’s Third (final and unfinished) Sonata (1957) is in seven movements (like the Beethoven quartet Op 131) and the performer is encouraged to play these in differing order from one recital to the next.
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Within the literary field, in an extraordinary, novel-length work from 1977, Ted Hughes’s Gaudete makes a couple of highly significant references to Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. Described by The London Review of Books as ‘a strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders’ , the poem runs to 200 pages and is in two parts, the first a narrative in free verse which at times comes close to prose, though its imagery is so vivid and concentrated that, arguably, its status as poetry is never in question. The second part comprises a long series of highly concentrated, brief elegiac lyric poems, inspired by Hughes’s recent discovery of the Indian vacanas, by way of A K Ramanujan’s Speaking of Shiva (1968.)
As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Hughes had switched for part II of the tripos from English literature to anthropology, and the legacy of this study is surely to be found in the obsession with shamanism which pervades this extraordinary sui generis work. Epigraphs quote from the mediaeval Parzival myth of Wolfram von Eschenbach as well as from the Greek pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus. The shaman here, an Anglican clergyman, is abducted to the spirit world then sent back transformed to a 1970s Devon parish, where, his character freed from puritan values, the changeling figure proceeds to embark upon a radical reinterpretation of Christianity whose objective is to impregnate as many of the women as possible in order to give birth to a new messiah. The women who come under the changeling’s spell include the two Estridge daughters, in their early twenties, who both fall for the Rev. Nicholas Lumb. The younger of the sisters, Janet, becoming pregnant, is moved to hang herself in the attic while in the drawing-room below her sister Jennifer plays the scherzo of a late Beethoven piano sonata.
The scherzo
Of Beethoven’s piano sonata opus 109
Is devouring itself, dragonish,
Scattering scales,
Havocking polished, interior glooms,
Trembling dusty ivy, escaping towards the sky
Through the wedding of apple blossom at the open French windows.’
Jennifer ‘leans her trouble to the keyboard’ and ‘Her father listens, appalled,’
The music flings in his face, it strikes at him.
With derisive laughter and contemptuous shouts
Her hands seem to be plunging and tossing inside his chest.’
Moreover
‘The music she plays bewilders the old man. He cannot interpret those atmospherics
And soundings and cries.
It is shouting something impossible,
incomprehensible, monstrous.
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producing a ‘hellish upset.’
Interestingly, although the first (hardback) edition of 1977 has Jennifer playing the piano sonata in E major Op 109, all subsequent (paperback) editions (p. 41) mention that she plays instead the sonata in A flat Op 110.
The Emory University archives do not disclose whether ‘opus 109’ was simply a typographical error subsequently corrected by the author himself or a member of Faber & Faber staff in the paperback edition, or rather whether Hughes actively decided that the scherzo of the later sonata made more sense for his purposes. Both works could be made to fit the description ‘devouring itself/ Scattering scales.’ The Op. 110 scherzo’s very brief trio in D flat major can be said to do this, with its numerous repetitions. Equally, the final bars of the coda of the scherzo from Op. 109, with its rapidly contrasted piano and fortissimo sforzandi and final crescendo, might be said to conform to this rubric.
To complete this survey of Beethoven’s continuing influence upon literature, returning from poetry to prose, two works from more recent decades stand out. Vikram Seth (born 1952) won the Booker Prize for his 1999 novel An Equal Music, which, though alluding in its title to a sermon by the metaphysical poet John Donne, very much hinges upon the chamber music of Beethoven, and specifically the String Quintet Op. 104. Despite this late opus number, so close to that of the Hammerklavier, the quintet in question is in reality a rearrangement by the composer of his piano trio op. 1 number 3, published many decades earlier than op. 106. The most recent addition to these instances of the influence of late Beethoven piano sonatas upon literature in English is also the one most specifically inspired by the Hammerklavier sonata. Daniel C Melnick may not be a name to mention in the same breath as Forster, Woolf and Hughes or Vikram Seth, but his 2004 novel Hungry Generations is arguably the work of fiction most extensively indebted to this sonata. It is set in Los Angeles, where Melnick was raised, and involves Robert, a young American composer of film music in the 1970s, under the influence of an ageing Russian émigré pianist Alexander Petrov, who back in the 1940s was on intimate terms with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Thomas Mann and Adorno in their wartime Los Angeles exile. Witness the following highly detailed extract:
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He took out a blue volume, softened and darkened with use, the second half of Beethoven’s sonatas. He opened it to the Adagio sostenuto of the Hammerklavier sonata and set it before him at the Knabe. The chords of mourning – quiet, passionate, con molto sentimento – flowed slowly from the piano. It was the profundity of their understanding of grief that Jack sought. He played the transition from F-sharp minor, moving a half-tone up from the grieving minor into G major. He held the gentle stillness of this beautiful acceptance in his hands, and the few, simple notes generated an openness even to the surrounding grief. Loud, staccato notes and chords interrupted. He no longer pressed the muting una corda with his foot, and the con grand’espressione theme ambled out, a possessed parody of the opening octaves and chords of mourning. Beethoven understood the exploded world, how the identical configuration of consonance or dissonance can keen or blast, kiss or spit, solace or enrage. Jack emphasized the vicious, driven syncopation, the snarls of melody, the demonic transformation of grief. (Daniel C Melnick Hungry Generations, p 96)
The reference to ‘consonance or dissonance’ in the penultimate sentence is telling, since, besides this example of his own fiction, Melnick is also a literary critic of some distinction and has published an extended interdisciplinary monograph on the importance of music in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Mann and others, called Fullness of Dissonance (Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music, Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994.) In addition to the episode quoted where the Hammerklavier sonata is performed, the overall structure of Melnick’s novel is derived from the Beethoven sonata, with its four sub-sections explicitly linked to the sonata’s four movements. As literary critic, Melnick makes the following statement:
In the early twentieth century, dissonance becomes the single most effective “language” music can speak in a century of disequilibrium like the one now ending. When modern novelists undertake the musicalization of fiction, their efforts lead not to the writing of harmonious, self-consciously beautiful “musical” prose, but rather to the use of a series of experimental, destabilizing strategies, which, under the guise of musicalization, assume and achieve the effect of dissonance in the novel. (Melnick, Fullness of Dissonance, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994, 8)
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Melnick goes on to specify the ways in which music affects creative endeavours in the literary sphere:
‘For Joyce, Mann, Proust, Conrad, Gide, or Woolf, musicalizing strategies include the temporal play with the suspension and dislocation of time, the experimental interplay and clashes in voice and style, and the ambiguous layering and fragmenting of narration itself.’ (Fullness of Dissonance 8)
By way of a coda to this brief survey of the importance of Beethoven’s largest and hardest piano sonata, it remains only to note that its influence extends beyond music and literature to include also the pictorial arts. The Welsh modernist painter Ceri Richards (1903-1971) produced a series of lithographs and indeed oil paintings which were inspired by the Beethoven sonata in the 1959. Music, and especially music for the piano were undoubtedly seminal in his creative career. As well as Beethoven, Richards also alludes to several of Debussy’s piano preludes, as Peter Pears, Britten’s greatest interpreter and a major art collector, testified (letter Times November 17 1971.)
Overall, it can be seen that this most substantial of Beethoven sonatas has, along with the other late works for piano, even after the elapse of some two centuries since its composition, continued to exert a profound influence upon not only leading subsequent composers and novelists, and a poet, but also an artist, a feat surely rivalled by few if any of the composer’s other works.
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Dr Angus Wrenn is a Tutorial Fellow at the Language Centre of the London School of Economics.
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WORKS CITED
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Arlott, John (ed.) Aspects of E. M. Forster. London: Edward Arnold, 1969.
Bloom, Harold H The Anxiety of Influence, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Boulez, Pierre Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Forster, E M A Room with a View, London: Edward Arnold, 1908.
Forster, E M Howards End, London: Edward Arnold, 1910.
Hughes, Ted Gaudete, London: Faber & Faber, 1977.
Mann, Thomas Doktor Faustus 1947 Frankfurt am Main: S Fischer Verlag 1947.
Melnick, Daniel C Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music, Rutherford New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1994.
Melnick, Daniel C Hungry Generations, Lincoln Nebraska: iUniverse, 2004.
Peyser, Joan Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, New York: Schirmer, 1976.
Sample, Colin ‘Adorno on the Musical Language of Beethoven’ Musical Quarterly Vol 78 no 2 1994 378-92.
Varga, Adriana (ed.) Virginia Woolf & Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Woolf, Virginia, The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth, 1915.
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