Summary
Composer at the center of the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: Wagner’s greatest forerunner, whose Fidelio and Ninth Symphony stage the effort to induce spoken sound out of music against enveloping silence, and whose third-period masterpieces Adorno takes as the catastrophes of Late Style (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.471-474, 478, 498).
Details
- In Wagner’s prose account Beethoven opened up “the boundless faculty of instrumental music for expressing elemental storm and stress” but needed the word to find “the endlessness of utterance”: the anchor passage culminates in “Freude!”, set as crown on his tone creation (Wagner, quoted PDF p.471).
- Fidelio, his only opera, emerged in 1814 after much agonizing and rewriting (no fewer than three times) and was the work he called, with exceptional pathos and affection, his favorite child; like Così fan tutte it is a problematic, studiously middle-class work (PDF p.472).
- Its discordances: humdrum stock characters against Leonora’s and Florestan’s heroism, Pizarro monochromatically evil, Florestan’s imprisonment for unconvincingly obscure reasons and his release by a deus ex machina bordering on the absurd (PDF p.472-473).
- Florestan is discovered in his dungeon suffering imprisonment for having told the truth: “Wahrheit wagt’ ich Kühn zu sagen, und die Ketten sind mein Lohn.” (as printed, PDF p.473); Leonora’s rescue converges with the trumpet call signaling Don Ferrando’s arrival, and the prisoners are released into a C major rejoicing presaging the Ninth’s choral movement (PDF p.473).
- On closer examination the opera’s jubilant certitude is fraught with doubt: Florestan’s truth is never revealed, the crowd is hastily assembled, the couple’s love is namenlose, and the ending is an earnest hope that light might stay longer before gloom returns him to darkness, imprisonment and silence (PDF p.473-474).
- For Adorno he is a privileged figure, with importance attached to his late phase and “spätstil” (as printed); Mann’s Leverkühn declares he will “take back” the Ninth Symphony (PDF p.475, 478).
- Cage told Said he detested, and could never listen to, Mozart and Beethoven (PDF p.481).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schönberg, Late Style