Page 222 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

A merry dance ensues, and the strangeness of the Handelian clues scattered throughout the early parts of the Sonata becomes apparent as they are transfigured by hope. Beethoven had been living in Vienna, where the great tradition was to leave them laughing—Schubert’s long, mournful sonatas fade away in transparent, luminous dances. Beethoven often ends his pieces with apocalyptic fury, vast fugues, Mahlerian transfigurations, but almost never with Schubertian dances. Here, having left Vienna behind for a five-month concert tour, he may feel safe
to act Viennese.
The threats, the clouds, the suspense, the sheer stormy opacity of the rest of the Sonata is now revealed as needless worry, and the interplay between the instruments is revealed as a form of hide and seek, of tag, a child’s game played by adults with themes from Handel as props. You can almost hear the king’s “aha” as he must have realized at last what the clues meant, and could celebrate with Beethoven and Handel the greatness of empire which was coded into the oratorio and Beethoven’s multiple homages to it.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four Hands, Op. 103, D. 940
Schubert wrote this Fantasia the last year of his life, the same year he wrote his last, great B-flat Sonata, D. 960, as he was dying of syphilis. Like Proust, who rewrote as he was dying his passages on death in his great novel In Search of Lost Time, Schubert was summing up his feelings about existence as they became not just theories, but matters of literal life and death.
What fantasia has four movements? Most fantasies are one-movement rhapsodies, maybe with defined sections, but not entire movements. This is a clue that this piece is in fact
a symphony in disguise, reduced to its Schenkerian simplici- ties and played as if by two children on the piano. But this is not a child’s piece, and its seemingly simple melodies disguise enormous depths, rhythmic complexities, and eschatological revelations.
Schenker was a German musicologist who believed that Beethoven could be reduced to a skeleton of important motifs, so that his message could be separated from the extraneous filigree with which he surrounded his truths, which he may have felt were too frightening just to blurt out. Yeats said the same thing about his poetry:
A COAT
I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.
At a certain stage in life, we realize that we’ve been trying to be polite about what we mean to say, and it’s time to dispense with politesse and just come out with it. Yeats was obsessed with mythological justifications for himself and for Ireland, with systems of poetry, and he realized at last that systems are like inner tennis: they distract us with large ideas so we can just hit the ball. At the end, we have to let the curtain drop away, forget the Wizard, and just be the old man of Oz.
It is a great miracle how Schubert starts with the most innocent of melodies, and builds it into a great cathedral.
The water gets deep very fast. The maelstrom on the second page is very different from the nursery rhyme of the first page.
222 The Music at Tippet Rise