Music at the Limits

Paul Kennedy, Fukuyama, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Thomas Friedman, Benjamin Barber

what if a new hybrid identity is being slowly made apparent, one for whom neither territory nor traditional identity will serve as they once did?

the older Beethoven abandons an anthropocentric classical worldview inherited from the Enlightenment and, like the literary and philosophic Romantics who were his contemporaries, he returns again and again to a transfigured or renovated classical world, even to the point of adapting classical Greek meters to organize his great Seventh Symphony in an attempt to “evoke the ancient pagan world via a fantasy reconstruction of its music.” This, says Solomon, is a Classic-Romantic revalidation of “the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic premises of Antiquity.” It is also, we need to add, yet another instance of what E. M. Butler has called the tyranny of Greece over

colossal symphony that resumed to dissolve boundaries between language and music, thus perhaps to restore the union of the arts rumored to have existed in ancient ritual drama

Esteban Buch in Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History

And what we have now, Solomon continues, is hardly the unitary hymn to joy but rather a composition whose “fusion of styles and procedures is matched by the multivalence of its forms, which constitute a palimpsest of superimposed hybrid structures—a set of variations; one or another sonata form; a four-movement cycle superimposed on a sonata-allegro concerto form with double exposition …; a cantata; a through-composed text-derived form; a suite; a divertimento; an operatic finale; and even a free fantasy.” Everything about the work echoes “resistance to the given. That is why it begins with open fifths, tonal indeterminacy, a sense of the void.”

Ninth Symphony, he was endlessly toying with the idea of replacing it with instrumental music and doing away entirely with the choral setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”

for a long time after Beethoven composed the choral finale to the

First of all, late-style Beethoven is not, as one might expect, all about reconciliation and a kind of restful summing up of a long, productive career. That is what one finds, for example, in Shakespeare’s late romances like The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, or in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, where, to borrow from another context, ripeness is all. In Adorno’s account of late style, there is violence, experimental energy and, most important, a refusal to accept any idea of a healing,

the late-style phenomenon overturns our ideas and experiences about the coherence, organic completeness, the wholeness of the work, which is tied together (if that’s the right way of putting it) in unexpected ways