barbara barry

Invisible cities and imaginary landscapes

‘quasi una fantasia’: on Beethoven’s op.131

I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest,
of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives
them.
Italo Calvino.1

I
n his famous essay The hedgehog and the fox, Isaiah Berlin discusses
a fragment from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and interprets it in
a rather unusual way.2 According to Archilochus, ‘The fox knows many
things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Clearly, the hedgehog’s
1. Italo Calvino: Invisible one big thing is the defence tactic of curling up in a ball, spikes out, to
cities, trans. William Weaver repel an invader, although no one cares to spell out what the fox knows.
(London, 1997), p.147.
Nietzsche discusses how it Commentators in the past have taken Archilochus’s rather cryptic remark as
is essential to forget as well an implicit criticism of fox-like behaviour, where people flit from one interest
as to remember in order
to retain one ’s humanity. to another rather than focusing on a central plan of action. Hedgehogs don’t
He says: ‘Imagine the come off any better in the assessment stakes as they put all their eggs in one
most extreme example, the
most extreme example of
basket instead of having at least one version of Plan B.
a human being who does Berlin, though, has a different, and more positive view of both hedgehogs
not possess the power and foxes. Without pushing the distinctions to extremes, he contends that
to forget [...] All action
requires forgetting, just as singularity and diversity characterise different kinds of writers and, by
the existence of all organic extension, human beings in general. Hedgehogs are motivated by a single
things requires not only
light, but darkness as well’: governing principle which provides a core identity to the writer’s output
Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘On the and plays out in different works in a variety of guises. Proust’s ‘mémoire’
utility and liability of history is an example of such a core characterisation which opens out in a series
for life ’, in Unfashionable
observations, trans. Richard of vivid images, each with its own distinctive atmosphere and imagery –
T. Gray (Stanford, 1998), Combray, Balbec, Doncières, Venice. Nevertheless, the landscapes of place
p.89. Nietzsche ’s timely
meditation is explored are all refracted though a different kind of terrain, the narrator’s hyper-
in Borges’s famous story sensitive temperament, with its recurrent patterns of fantasy and anxiety,
‘Funes the Memorious’,
about a young man who played out in successive love relationships across the landscape of desire.
has suffered concussion Foxes, on the other hand, do not subscribe to any over-arching principle.
after a fall which left his They are often risk-takers, challenging existing norms of structure and
body almost paralysed, but
with a mind studded with language. Rather than a central concept, foxes often address specific issues
detailed memories. These through a range of contrasted solutions. Shakespeare, for example, focuses
memories, though, have
no organising categories or
points of reference but are a spectator of a multiform, Memorious’, in Labyrinths: 2. Isaiah Berlin: The hedgehog
vivid succession that he can instantaneous and almost selected stories and other and the fox: an essay on
neither connect nor forget, intolerably precise world’: writings (Harmondsworth, Tolstoy’s view of history
as ‘the solitary and lucid Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Funes the 1970), pp.87–95, at p.94. (Princeton, 2013).

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6 Invisible cities and imaginary landscapes ‘quasi una fantasia’

on failed leadership as conflict crisis in Macbeth, Richard II and Julius Caesar,

and controlling fathers as authority figures in Hamlet and King Lear.3 Diverse,
inventive – foxes push boundaries of style by combining the logical and
the unexpected. They recalibrate style by juxtaposition and confrontation,
and interpolate different temporal strands into the main action. Like the
monologues in Hamlet and Othello, this ‘time out’ from the action on the
stage reveals previously unforeseen dimensions. Unpredictability also
opens up new relationships of parts to whole, deconstructing the narrative
as disjunctive time and re-viewing motifs. Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities is
such a kaleidoscope of fragmented images, eroded by time, but retained as
residues of memory.
Among writers, then, Proust is a hedgehog, Shakespeare and Calvino
both foxes. But singularity and diversity are not limited to writers. They are
complementary approaches in all kinds of creative activity – in painting,
as the allusion/illusion of space, and music, as the sonic structure of time.
Among painters, Raphael is a hedgehog, Leonardo and Caravaggio foxes.
Among composers, Bach is a good contender for musical hedgehog while
Stravinsky takes the prize for arch-fox.
In the distinctions between singularity and diversity in musical works,
singularity, at least in tonal works, is often identified as a unifying idea.
Rudolph Réti describes it as the prime motif from which the movement or
work unfolds,4 while Heinrich Schenker, also drawing on morphological
imagery, posits the fundamental linear/harmonic pattern as the ‘Gestalt’
3. See Stephen Greenblatt: that supports the movement’s hierarchy of ‘Stufen’.5 Looking at works the
Will in the world: how
Shakespeare became other way round, as ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’, systemic premises,
Shakespeare (London, 2005). such as dissonance/resolution in the key and relationships between keys,
4. Rudolph Réti: The thematic are realised by stylistic criteria as ‘play-ground’, and made concrete by
process in music (repr. individual composers’ choices. Play and interplay between ripieno and
London, 1978); Thematic
patterns in the sonatas of concertino in the early 18th-century concerto grosso, for example, provide
Beethoven (New York, 1967). the referential context for Bach’s individual contrapuntal realisations in
5. Heinrich Schenker: The the Brandenburg concertos and the first movement of his Concerto in D
masterwork in music, 3 vols minor for two violins, where successive fugal entries of subject and answer
(1925–30), ed. William
Drabkin, trans. Ian Bent, define the exposition of a ritornello movement (ex.1). Such identifiable
William Drabkin, Richard characterisations across a range of musical works can be described as the
Kramer, John Rothgeb &
Hedi Segal (Cambridge, composer’s imaginary landscape.
1995); Five graphic music Imaginary landscapes are part of contemporary mind-sets, especially in
analyses, ed. Felix Salzer fantasy and science fiction and movies, as alternative scenarios of reality.
(New York, 1969).
Such landscapes are located primarily in one of three zones: in a remote,
6. Immanuel Kant: The
critique of pure reason, fictive future; in a remote, possibly fictive past; and in a post-catastrophe
trans. Werner S. Pluhar, scenario of our world. But as Kant notes in the Critique of pure reason,6 our
intro. Patricia W. Kitcher
(Indianapolis, 1996),
perceptual ability to construct new worlds is limited by our hard-wiring:
pp.524–25. so inhabitants, robotic and human, of alternative worlds behave, at least in
Ex.1: Bach: Concerto for two violins in D minor BWV 1043, first movement, opening

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some ways, like our own. If musical compositions are alternative kinds of
reality, then the composer’s imaginary landscape is also a creative construct
of networks and narratives in which we identify the composer’s distinctive
turn of phrase. Alternative realities in music, fiction or film are not just
about external architecture of style but the internal architecture of fantasy
7. G. Gabrielle Starr: Feeling
and poetic memory. The imaginary landscape is also the landscape of the
beauty: the neuroscience imagination.
of aesthetic experience By contrast with the identifiable core characteristics used by hedgehogs,
(Cambridge, MA, 2013), p.15.
foxes are motivated by problem-solving through technique. Questions in-
8. Tim Hodgkinson has
recently argued that music is
trinsically posed by musical problem-solving, such as conflict/concordance
not necessarily a wholeness or parts to whole, impel innovative solutions of language and design that
as in stylistic unanimity may involve collision or interpolation as dimensions of structure. Problem-
but rather a collision of
otherwise incompatible solving may elicit radically different solutions to works written in the same
kinds of information, genre in close proximity of time, solutions that often upend expectations of
brought together as the
perceptual model of early style or design in one or more strategic dimensions. Not all such solutions
21st-century listening: Tim will necessarily be confrontational although some may. New realisations of
Hodgkinson: Music and the lyricism and fantasy in some works may coexist with fierce conflict in others
myth of wholeness: towards
a new aesthetic paradigm as alternative modalities of problem-solving.7
(Cambridge, MA, 2016). In the second model, where problem-solving involves both collision and
Hodgkinson’s stance is
the extreme point of the concordance of style dimensions, the musical work is conceived as invisible
issue raised by Adorno that city, how a musical work may be re-imagined.8 Beethoven’s C# minor
Beethoven’s late works are
a dissociative distancing Quartet, op.131, will be considered as a case study of an invisible city, marked
from the middle period by radical reinterpretations of compositional technique and collisions
works, effectively viewing of style between movements; and it is to this multi-dimensional view of
late Beethoven from the
perspective of dislocation problem-solving that we now turn.
in Schoenberg: Theodor

T
W. Adorno: Beethoven: the
philosophy of music, ed. he C# minor quartet was the fourth of the five late string quartets,
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. written in 1826 after the completion of the three quartets, op.127,
Edmund Jephcott (Stanford,
1998). This perceptual re-
op.130 with the Grosse Fuge finale and op.132, dedicated to Prince
viewing, or, as described Galitzin. It has seven movements, more than any other Beethoven string
here as re-imagining, is quartet: five main movements, with a slow fugal first movement, spirited
discussed by Maynard
Solomon as a paradigm D major 6/8 second movement, medium tempo variations, Presto scherzo
shift away from implicit in cut common time and rhythmically incisive finale; and two short
classic/romantic frames of
reference in Beethoven’s introductory links or connectors.
late works, in ‘Beethoven: Two strategic re-alignments devolve from the opening movement as
beyond classicism’, in The slow movement in op.131: one is the re-alignment of dynamic weighting
Beethoven quartet companion,
edd. Robert Winter & between the movements; and the second is a striking repositioning
Robert Martin (Berkeley, of structure and perception. Despite the unusual position of the slow
Los Angeles & London,
1994), pp.59–73, reprinted movement at the beginning of the work, prime material in the fugue subject
in Solomon: Late Beethoven: and answer, in particular the chromatic semitone and D§, as seen in ex.2a,
music, thought, imagination
(Berkeley, Los Angeles & will be played out on a range of fronts across the work. The chromatic
London, 2003), pp.27–41. semitone and Neapolitan supertonic are featured in the finale as a critical
 part of the relationship between the framing movements (ex.2b); and as the
key of the second movement, D§ also forms part of the tonal plan of the
whole quartet. By contrast with these implicative roles of realisation for
the structural network, the fugue’s perceptual character at the beginning
of the work draws inwards as lyrical reflectiveness, and through folds of
contrapuntal layering, as closure. Without the directional implications of a
sonata allegro, momentum has to be jumpstarted for the second movement,
from C# to D. Just as the first movement is dialectical between structural
implication which ‘reaches out’ in realisations in the work and expressive
character which pulls inward on itself, so the connector between the first and

Ex.2a: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, first movement, opening, showing fugue subject
and answer

Ex.2b: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op. 131, finale, bars 182–202, showing chromatic semitone
and Neapolitan material

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Ex.2b continued

second movement breaks away from the soundworld of the first movement
by means of the chromatic semitone at a larger level (ex.3).
The fugue first movement of op.131 is part of the range of fugues
in Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and string quartets: powerful, rhyth-
mic finales in the ‘Hammerklavier’ Piano Sonata op.106 and the Grosse
Fuge in the Bb major String Quartet op.130, and the lyrical finale of the
Ab major Piano Sonata op.110. Fugal finales in the late works can be seen
to address two different but inter-related issues: one is solving problems
of contrapuntal technique to align horizontal lines of subject and answer,
transition and episode, within governing vertical harmonic premises, and
to order the fugal design within a tonal plan as crucial as in a sonata form
movement. The other challenge is the structural issue of the finale as large-
scale resolution, where earlier strands of the work are ‘revisited’ in the
context of the finale as reprocessed memory – what could be seen as the
Ex.3: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, first movement, bar 110–end & second movement, beginning

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Ninth Symphony finale scenario now reconfigured in fugal contexts. From

this perspective, the interpolated section in the Grosse Fuge, Meno mosso
ed moderato in Gb major, bars 159–232 is time replayed. Set within the
movement’s powerful confrontational stance, the Meno mosso ed moderato
section recalls earlier parts of the op.130 quartet: the lyrical second subject
of the first movement in Gb major, the flat submediant, and on the parallel
position of flat mediant, the Andante con moto, ma non troppo, in Db major.
9. Elaine Sisman discusses The finale of op.110 is an even clearer revisiting of remembered time. At
the locations of musical its midpoint, the fugue is intersected by a recitative which recalls the slow
memory, which are
reprocessed in the finale movement. Interpolated into the middle of the fugue, the recitative is a
of Beethoven’s Ninth window of time which temporarily suspends action by turning backwards to
Symphony in ‘Memory and
invention at the threshold of the slow movement. From a structural point of view, the recitative is literally
Beethoven’s late style ’, in the turning point, since the second half of the fugue ‘re-turns’ as a mirror
Beethoven and his world, edd.
Scott Burnham & Michael P. image, with the subject in inversion (exx.4a & 4b). But in a metaphorical
Steinberg (Princeton, 2000), sense, the recitative at the centre of the fugue is also a ‘returning point’,
pp.51–86. She also notes that interpolated memory as a kind of haunting from the musical past. As such,
fantasy was understood in
Beethoven’s time as both it recalls other such hauntings in Beethoven’s works, such as the ghostly
creative imagination and as replay of the Fifth Symphony’s scherzo in the finale and the quasi-operatic
a kind of reminiscence or
associative memory (ibid, scena of reappearance and disappearance of the earlier movements at the
p.56). beginning of the Ninth Smphony’s finale.9

Ex.4a: Beethoven: Piano Sonata in Ab major op.110, Fuga, beginning

 Ex.4b: Beethoven: Piano Sonata in Ab major op.110, Fuga, second half, beginning

Unlike the other late fugues, the fugue of op. 131 is not in a major key, nor
a finale, and does not ‘gather in’ the strands of earlier movement, as may
occur in the finale of end-weighted works. Conceivably, though, it is an
even more remarkable re-interpretation of fugue technique and expressive
characterisation. Just as the fugue as finale has two interrelated issues of
structure and technique, so the fugue as first movement projects two
dimensions of problem-solving, one within the fugue, the other between
the fugue and the finale. In the first case, how to answer the fugue subject
10. Douglas Johnson, Alan is critical because the successive array of subject and answer in the initial
Tyson & Robert Winter: The exposition opens up the movement’s ‘implicative space’ – as the tessitura and
Beethoven sketchbooks: history,
reconstruction, inventory tonal domain within which the whole action of countersubjects and episodes
(Berkeley, Los Angeles & will unfold. Faced with an intransigent problem in both real and tonal
London, 1985), pp.482–97; dominant answers, as revealed by the multiple sketches,10 the subdominant
Robert Winter: Compositional
origins of Beethoven’s opus solution for the answer reveals a critical component of the prime material,
131 (Ann Arbor, 1982), the Neapolitan D§ (ex.5). D§ will challenge the primacy of the diatonic
in particular, ‘Plans for
the structure of op.131’, supertonic, which appears in the reconfigured answer in violin 1, bar 100,
pp.127–34. and will inflect tonal digression to other keys in the first movement, as in the

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14 Invisible cities and imaginary landscapes ‘quasi una fantasia’

Ex.5: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, first movement, opening. Note the Neapolitan D§ in
the answer.

detour to Eb minor, bar 45. But in a work where the dialectics of conflict and
connection abound on many levels, D§ is a double agent: tonal dissonance
as chromatic conflict against C# minor within the fugue and finale versus
integral part of the large-scale tonal plan of movements.
The other level of problem-solving is the relationship of the fugue to
the rest of the quartet, and in particular to the finale. On account of its slow
first movement, op. 131 falls into none of the three main first movement/
finale models in Beethoven’s works: the matching model, where the finale
is in the same key and same or similar character to the first movement, as in
the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata op.57; the ‘tension/resolution’ model, where an
intense minor key movement resolves onto the tonic major finale, usually
open in character, as in the Fifth Symphony and also the Ninth; and the end-
weighted finale, where the finale is longer than the first movement, and in
some ways, a culmination of the whole work, gathering in its strands as well
as concluding the work. The Ninth Symphony is in this type as well as being
‘tension/resolution’ model, as is the String Quartet in Bb major op.130, with
the Grosse Fuge as finale.
Instead, the op.131 fugue, with its minor key reflective first movement,
proposes a different kind of first movement/finale relationship: from
inward reflection to defined resolution, via tonal digression and contrasts
of style in the interim movements. Interestingly, op.131 shares this first
movement/finale trajectory with op.130, as a connection between the two
works otherwise so radically different from many other perspectives. But
while the overall contour of the two quartets is similar, it is not identical.
As I suggested in a previous discussion of op.130, the contrast of the first
movement’s freer, more lyrical style to the stringent fugal finale can be
considered as a reworking of the model of the prelude and fugue, as paired
 ‘free ’ and ‘strict’ writing from Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. Beethoven
had played and studied the ‘48’ with his teacher Neefe when he was
about 13 and they provided one of the first and certainly most important
compositional models.11 In addition to its specific context in the prelude and
fugue, ‘free ’ writing appears in a number of different ways in the late works:
as expressive lyricism, in the first movements of op.127 and op.130; and as
recitative, where different temporal strands, as ‘time out’, are interpolated
into more structured contexts, like the first movement of the E major piano
11. Barbara Barry: sonata op.109 and the ‘Beklemmt’ section of the Cavatina of op.130. The
‘Recycling the end of Allegro moderato transitional link in op.131 between the second movement
the Leibquartett: models,
meaning and propriety in in D major, Allegro molto vivace, and the A major variations, Andante,
Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat ma non troppo e molto cantabile, uses recitative in a different kind of way,
major, opus 130’, in The as part of the tactics of exit and entry. Following the abrupt break from
philosopher’s stone: essays in
the transformation of musical the D major movement, recitative is dissolution that clears the ground for
structure (New York, 2005), the opening of the variations. It may have been in this expanded sense of
pp.156–77. Reference to
Beethoven’s study with technique and imagination that Beethoven described to Holz ‘a new kind of
Neefe can be found in voice-leading and no less fantasy than before’ in the late quartets.12
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, 2
vols, rev. & ed. Elliot Forbes
But there may also be a more particular sense of voice-leading and
(Princeton, 1964), vol.1, fantasy in op.131. While the substructure underpinning of the first move-
p.274. ment is a fugue, its expressive character, and perhaps even the work as a
12. Letter to Wilhelm von whole, as Leonard Ratner has suggested, is a fantasia.13 This reading of
Lenz in 1857, in Holz:
Beethoven: eine Kunst-Studie,
op.131 as fantasia, and especially the first movement, acquires interpretative
vol.4 (Kassel, 1860), p.216. perspective when compared to Beethoven’s other important work in
13. Leonard G. Ratner: The C# minor, the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata op.27 no.2, ‘quasi una fantasia’. Both
Beethoven string quartets: works open with the slow movement, a position virtually unprecedented
compositional strategies and
rhetoric (Stanford, 1995), in Beethoven’s works, with similar meditative character, piano dynamics
p.235. and legato articulation (ex.6). Both end with finales impelled by intense,
Ex.6: Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C# minor op.27 no.2, first movement, beginning

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driving rhythm. Slow first movement to rhythmically charged tonic minor

finale creates an overall trajectory from reflection to resolution, and from
contemplation to defiance.
Fugue as fantasia, then, can be sited within two frames of reference: one
as ‘strict’ writing, part of the range of fugue characterisations in the late
works; and the other as ‘free’ writing, which also appears as lyrical reflection
and recitative, realised here as fantasia. But this two-fold characterisation is
not limited to the fugue first movement of op.131.The double parameter
of ‘strict’ and ‘free ’ can be regarded as the Gestalt of the late works, the
hedgehog plan of campaign. This Gestalt is not identified as style/systemic
characteristics but as a blueprint of conceptual plans. In the first movement
of op.131, it is realised as vertical alignment, where fugue structure underpins
the movement as technique, and as horizontal unfolding, as inward expressive
style. During the course of the work, the ground-plan plays out as alternation
of ‘free ’ and ‘strict’ between the quasi-improvisatory linking movements
leading to more ordered forms of variations and finale (exx.7a & 7b). As
well as between movements, alternation of ‘free’ and ‘strict’ also occurs
within the variation movement. Towards the end of the movement, from
bar 220, a series of recitative-like entries for each instrument dissolves the
momentum into trills. By contrast with the use of recitative as dissolution in
the F# minor link between the second and fourth movements, the recitatives
in the variation movement are a point of reflection within the movement
and lead to the last variation, which is garlanded with trills, as if the trill as
dissolution of the recitative becomes integrated with the last variation as
metrical order. The same contour of suspension and integration using trills
near the end of a variation movement also occurs in the second movement

Ex.7a: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, third movement, leading to fourth movement, beginning
Ex.7a continued

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Ex.7b: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, sixth movement, leading to finale, beginning
 Ex.7b continued

of the C minor Piano Sonata op.111, as an imaginative realisation of the

parameters of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ ‘von anderem Planeten’ (exx.8 & 9).
If the dialectics of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ are the imaginary landscape of the
14. Anthony Storr: Music and late works, then how these elements play out in individual works – the
the mind (New York, 1992), fox-like methods of problem-solving – are invisible cities, as constructs
p.64.
of design and Affekt in alternative realities. While musical works often
15. Theodor W. Adorno:
Aesthetic theory (London & reflect the contours of experience of conflict and concordance, departure
New York, 1997), p.2. and return, as analogues of human journeys,14 they are nevertheless located
16. George A. Miller, Eugene in a domain discrete from physical existence. As Adorno says, artworks
Galanter & Karl H. Pribram: ‘detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world,
Plans and the structure of
behavior (Eastford, CT, as opposed to the empirical world.’15 As plans in the structure of behaviour,
2013). to paraphrase George Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram,16 invisible

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20 Invisible cities and imaginary landscapes ‘quasi una fantasia’

Ex.8: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, fourth movement, bars 225–33
Ex.9: Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C minor op.111, second movement, bars 160–66

cities are problem-solving strategies that help identify the Gestalt elements
of the imaginary landscape, and show how they play out in specific contexts.
The chromatic semitones in the fugue subject of op.131, for example, are
shaped as inward folding contour in the movement’s reflective context
by contrast with the strident pairs of chromatic semitones, confronted in
opposed tessituras, in the Grosse Fuge subject. Elements of the invisible
city as plan in the structure of behaviour accordingly play out, not only as
stylistic characterisation and contrapuntal techniques in individual works,
but through networks in formal platforms.
From this perspective, the subject and answer in op.131, as well as the
basis of contrapuntal discourse, also comprises a pitch collection which
is realised as macrostructure in the keys of the movements: D§, the focal
element in the answer and potentially digressive element in C# minor, is
the key of the second movement, Allegro molto vivace, which has a similar
role of discursiveness and play in the work overall; F# minor, as the key
of the fugue answer, is the key of the recitative-like link leading to the A

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major variation movement, Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile (both

D§ and A are marked with ‘sf ’ in the subject and answer, as in ex.5); the
pitch E, part of the fugue subject in C# minor, is recontextualised in the
fifth movement E major Presto; and G#, with which the work opens, as
minor dominant, G# minor, Adagio quasi un poco andante, is the reflexive/
reflective link, which leads into the rhythmically incisive C# minor finale.
Between the framing first movement and finale, the keys of the interim
movements form an ascending number of sharps in the key signature from
two to five, a conceptual plan that underpins the juxtapositions of style as
musical foreground.
Two pitches in particular in the conceptual tonal plan play salient roles
in its foreground realisation, one diatonic in C# minor, the other chromatic.
F#, as the key of the fugue answer, has an essential role in the diatonic
network of C# minor, enhanced in the answer by the expressive chromatic
semitone E#-F#, which features in the overlapping contracted entries after
the initial fugal exposition (ex.10a). F# also plays significant roles in the
finale, underscoring the opposite relationship between first movement and
finale. F# returns not only at the local level of the phrase, as F#-E#, the
inversion of the chromatic semitone in the fugue answer, but it also plays
a distinctive role at the larger level of form in the finale, featured ‘ff ’ at the
development as a critical part of the movement’s tonal design (ex.10b). But
there is also a sense that the opposite characterisation of first movement
lyricism and finale conflict is forefronted in the relationship of F# and C#.
The successive subject and answer entries of C# minor and F# minor which
unfold the musical space in the fugue are reversed in the finale coda as
contracted antithesis between F# minor and C# major. Instead of resolution

Ex.10a: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, first movement, bars 20–26
 in the tonic major, tension between the two keys is sustained to the very end
of the work (ex.10c).
By contrast with F#’s diatonic role, D§, the Neapolitan supertonic,
featured ‘sf ’ in the fugue answer, is chromatic in C# minor, and potentially
an agent of tonal digression and/or dislocation. As with F#, D§ occurs
similarly at two levels of organisational structure: one as the key of one
of the interim movements, and the other in the finale, to bring back and
replay strategic features from the first movement, as recapitulation for the
work. D§, as chromatic subversion in the C# minor fugue, returns in the
finale as a ‘revisiting’ that occurs, strategically, in the finale recapitulation.
In the recapitulation, the finale’s second subject returns first in D major (bar
216), recalling its earlier appearances in the work, in particular as chromatic
Ex.10b: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, finale, bars 78–81

Ex.10c: Beethoven: String Quartet in C# minor op.131, finale, bars 371–end

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Ex.10c continued

interpolation in the fugue’s tonal fabric. The second subject is then replayed
in C# major, grounding the key of the work as tonic major. This ‘double’
key recapitulation is reminiscent of the first movement of the ‘Waldstein’
Sonata, where the E major second subject in the first movement exposition
returns in the recapitulation, first in A major, a third below the tonic as E
major was a third above in the exposition, and then in C major, as the key
of the movement and work. In op.131, partly because of the chromatic role
of D§ in the tonic key and partly because the first movement is not a sonata
movement with its own recapitulation, the finale acquires the large-scale
function of recapitulating the Gestalt elements from the fugue within its
own declarative role as the conclusion of the work. In the finale coda (bar
329), the Neapolitan makes its final appearance pp before disappearing off
the stage in a work where it has played the tactics of interpolation – game,
set and match.
While D§ is chromatic in C# minor, contesting the ground of tonal
direction and deflecting closure, D§ is also diatonic within more local F#
minor contexts – and this diatonic framing connects the two salient pitches
of op.131. It is diatonic at the local level of F# minor as subdominant fugue
answer (ex.5), and in other F# minor contexts, such as the Allegro moderato
link to the variation movement in A major, a key in which it is also diatonic.
Pitch functions of either concordance or conflict accordingly depend on
specific levels of context as well as their location in the tonal network. The
Neapolitan supertonic in a minor key, which featured as agent of conflict
in middle-period works like the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata op.57 and the E
minor ‘Razumovsky’ String Quartet op.59 no.2, returns in op.131 in new
demeanours, recontoured in the fugue from confrontation to interpolation.
In addition to its specific role of chromatic semitone in C# minor, D§ is
replayed throughout the work as musical memory. Side by side with its
function of chromatic interpolation in C# minor, D§ is also reframed within
diatonic contexts of F# minor and A major, as part of the work’s larger, and
more encompassing tonal networks, and played out as dimensions of ‘free’
and ‘strict’ writing in the work’s compositional strategy.

T
he imaginary landscape in Beethoven’s late works, as a problem-
solving scenario, elicits highly innovative, fox-like solutions in the
structure of musical behaviour. Within this landscape, ‘free’ and
‘strict’ writing play out in each work as the individual contours of invisible
cities. ‘Free ’ writing appears as improvisatory recitatives, interpolated as
‘time out’ into more ordered contexts of sonata, variation and fugue, and
provides connecting links between movements in the work as a journey.
As a counterbalance to this more exploratory side, ‘strict’ writing, in fugue
and variation not only appears in new expressive guises, but as a part of
Beethoven’s innovatory thinking, ‘borrows’ recitative and trills from the
‘free ’ side in the recontouring of musical space. In the imaginary landscape,
focal pitches are reinterpreted later in the work, as large-scale anchors of
time and structure. The ‘play-ground’ of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ can be seen as a
kind of blueprint, actualised as imaginative solutions of style, relationships
of parts to whole and numbers of movements.
In constructing new solutions to the issues of narrative and networks
in the late works, the dramatic plan of sonata design was not so much
abandoned as repositioned in expanded concepts of the declarative and the
reflective, and between structural paradigms as defined order and all kinds
of play, ‘quasi una fantasia’. The dialectics of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ writing, then,
can be seen as the conceptual background for problem-solving solutions as

the musical times Spring 2017 25

26 Invisible cities and imaginary landscapes ‘quasi una fantasia’

plans, not only in the structure of behaviour but of campaign. Contrasted

solutions, as in the opposite narratives of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies,
are now replayed in the groundplan of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ in op.130 and
op.131: and in each case, the pairs of works are both contrasted in style and
connected as structural premises. The compositional strategy of ‘strict’ and
‘free ’ in the late works projects striking profiles of lyricism/ confrontation
and digression/resolution, re-imagining the imaginary landscape through
the diverse soundscapes of invisible cities.