The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130.

Martin, Robert L.

Daniel K. L. Chua presents detailed analyses of the three string quartets commissioned by Prince Nikolai Galitzin of St. Petersburg from Ludwig van Beethoven and completed between 1823 and 1825. Aside from the opening paragraphs, which relate the Prince's concern about whether a note in the viola part of op. 127 should be D[flat] or E[flat], the book has no information on Galitzin, the context of the commissioning, or the early performances. We have, instead, technical analysis mixed with substantial doses of philosophy of music, based mainly on the work of Theodor Adorno, and "poststructuralist" discussion. Chua's central analytic claim is that the Galitzin quartets "explore a process of increasing disintegration" (p. 4). By contrast, Beethoven's last quartets, opp. 131, 135, and the replacement finale for op. 130 written after op. 135, are said to reflect "a change of style sometimes (mis)taken as the reintegration of Beethoven's language."

Chua's analytic tools are refined and formidable, and a huge amount of analytic work is shown, especially reductions, "Schenker graphs," and charts of various kinds - I count more than eighty. I suspect that I am not the only reader who needs to be led carefully, at least once, through the process by which Chua's analyses were created. One doesn't simply "see" or hear how, for example, the roughly three inches of notation of Ex. 2.5 constitute a reduction of more than fifty-three measures of the development section of the third movement of op. 127, or how the twenty-seven notes of Ex. 2.6 are a "motivic-harmonic reduction" of the eighty-four measures of the trio of the same movement. I am not objecting to the analytical techniques themselves but to the absence of explanation. It is not clear exactly what claim is made on behalf of the reductions, and it is not clear how to evaluate their success. Even issues of scholarly provenance are left unclear. Some examples, such as those on pages 142 and 147, are labeled "Schenker graphs." The others are presumably "Chua graphs," but I could not find it explained how their principles of construction differ from those of Schenker. It is, finally, surprising in a work as self-consciously theoretical as this one, that the obvious meta-analytical question - what is the relation between the graphs and the experience of the listener? - is so totally ignored.

Let me press this point with one further example in which Chua does explicitly address the listening experience. He argues that at the beginning of the coda of the first movement of op. 132 Beethoven "creates . . . contradiction by setting parameters against one another," in this case placing the motif (F-E-G[sharp]-A) in long notes against the melody of the Allegro (p. 80). Chua describes the motif as "severely mangled by extreme registral dislocations as the pitches dart from stave to stave"; he concludes that the juxtaposition is "hardly perceptible." I find, on the contrary, that the juxtaposition is wonderfully clear to the ear, especially because of the suddenness of the whole notes in the texture, and especially if the cellist, violist, and second violinist connect the whole notes into a line in the way that good chamber music players know to do. But perhaps more to the point, if Chua finds this "hardly perceptible," what can he say as to the perceptual basis for his motivic reduction of the entire first movement of op. 132 to a single line of (apparently) six measures (p. 71)?

On the "poststructuralist" front, Chua claims to have discovered an "analytical paradox," which he describes variously:

The very logic that analysis tries to uncover is also the cause of the illogicalities in the works. In a desire to rationalize these quartets, the analyst is caught in a kind of irrationality that questions the nature of analysis itself. (P. 5)

These quartets can disable the very theory that tries to grasp them. (P. 8)

These works are recalcitrant and do not always conform to the theories that manipulate them into immutable structures. . . . By setting their own agenda of disruption and disorder, they derail theory in a way that exposes its limitations. . . . If the critical force of these quartets is to be preserved, then analysis must become a struggle between a theory that encloses the work and a work that disables theory. (Pp. 8-9)

As analysis actively constructs the quartets, the quartets are just as actively deconstructing theory, laying bare the assumptions and 'ideologies' deployed against them and forcing them into a state of aporia - a path that is impassable. (P. 9)

I see only confusion, not paradox, here. Surely no one supposes that musical works need to be consistent (whatever that might mean), or that an analysis that finds inconsistencies thereby becomes inconsistent. Perhaps two ideas are run together: first, that many analyses overlook complexity in the quartets through a too-strong desire to see unity, and second, that the author's own account is admittedly one-sided (see p. 248). I take Chua's point to be simply that all of the theoretical frameworks he mentions - "the smooth unfolding of the Schenkerian Ursatz, the motivic transformation of Schoenberg's 'developing variation,' the formalism of Hanslick, the thematic process of Reti, or the long-range tonal dynamics of a Rosen analysis" (p. 8) - are at best partial, and that he will seek insights from all.

Chua's main philosophical idea, on which I find myself unable to comment, is that the quartets constitute a critique of society. I cite a few relevant passages to give the reader the flavor of the view:

For Adorno, the late works deliberately shatter the unity and coherence of the middle-period style and become critiques of the very language that they use, pointing to some kind of failure that is ultimately traced to society. Through these quartets, Adorno puts humanity on trial. All the promises of the Enlightenment, he claims, are relentlessly broken in a dialectic of history in which reason oversteps its boundaries and inverts into a coercive and ultimately irrational (dis) organisation of society. (Pp. 5-6)

His [Adorno's] reading of late Beethoven is a diagnosis of history after Auschwitz, a teleological nightmare in which Adorno's critical resistance is reenacted in his interpretation of the quartets. (P. 247)

Chua's study is multilayered; the layers are rich and complex, interwoven with subtlety and sophistication. Although I profited little from most of the analysis, for the reasons given, I did find the discussion of the Cavatina of op. 130 (pp. 193-98), both enlightening and moving. Chua connects the "Beklemmt" section to a "moment of psychological breakdown" from the Piano Sonata in A-flat major, op. 110, and writes of the connection:

Lodged within this movement, then, is the remembrance of some inexplicable anguish in the past, etched in a previous piece and described in that score as "Ermattet" (exhausted). In an almost Proustian sense, the "Beklemmt" section is a recollection of lost time, in which the recovery of a previous artefact allows for an experience to be relieved, no longer in the time span of the sonata but constricted in the brevity of a memory. (P. 196)

ROBERT L. MARTIN Bard College