I was listening to the wonderful Andras Schiff lectures on the Beethoven Sonatas (link here). He gets to the last movement of the “Hammerklavier” and promptly points an accusatory finger at the performer:
It should really not sound like chaos. If it sounds like chaos, it’s the performer’s fault; you have the right as a listener to understand something of this fugue, and it is [the performer’s] duty…
He adds:
…really the more you think about this fugue, and the more you analyze it, you discover an incredible sense of order.
I am not disagreeing with him, but I must admit this constant putting-Beethoven-in-order gets on my nerves. It makes me want to yell at the guy in Starbucks when there’s no blueberry crumbcake. Probably no other composer has been so obsessively mapped (Google-mapped, Google-streeted, even); his schemes have all been “found out;” he has been explored down to the last nanometer of contrapuntal unfolding in the deepest inner voice of the world. What should by rights be remote, a breathtaking Timbuktu of tones, is instead littered, when you arrive, with the droppings of musicologists, theorists, selling Schenkerian souvenirs and helpful pamphlets comparing legions of past performances. They tell you with one voice: we have already been here. (Oh, but, by the way, why are you modern performers playing so boringly, so predictably?)
Yes, the listener has a right to “understand something of this fugue.” But the listener has other rights. They have the right to be thrilled by this fugue, for example, and I could list others: the right to be dazzled, confused, whirled around, amused, stunned, bewildered, frenzied, the right to join in, to be caught up, to laugh wickedly with Beethoven and to feel out of breath, winded by stretti, by the endless chain of interruptive entrances, by dizzy leaping trills, and then to welcome the D major section, to bask in the one breath of the fugal dragon, its transcendent inhale before the fire resumes.
Let’s call this Jeremy’s Bill of Rights of the Hammerklavier Fugue. It is amenable to amendments. Let’s concede that many performances, for all sorts of forgivable human reasons, veer unproductively towards chaos and its simpler cousin, mess. So, this inspires Schiff’s wise advice.
However, though the building is brilliantly structured, I don’t think it is supposed to appear–voila!–perfectly, miraculously, shining on the hill. It is not impregnable. It is not a castle. It is the opposite of fortified; every wall is fluid, every column quicksand. 
It is an impossible, Seussian creation that is crumbling constantly, toppling over itself, and yet remaining valiantly structured, somehow, a structure continually vying with decay. What’s more: the decay is embraced happily, as the food of fantasy; the dangers are laughed at and laughed off, into joyful oblivion.
A fugue (let us say) is like a teacher, piling one proposition or idea upon another in order to demonstrate and accumulate a larger, more complex organism of thought. In this analogy, the teacher first proposes something: “here’s an idea,” (this idea is the subject, in music theory speak). The teacher then builds upon this proposition; the second entrance intervenes and a whole set of other notes must be invented to go along with it (subject/countersubject::idea/consequences). Then comes the third entrance, and with this yet more must be done etc. etc. Reasons pile upon reasons. And yet the process, particularly at the outset, is terribly, intentionally transparent. It takes pains to explain itself. The subject is always presented alone at first–for simplicity’s sake, for clarity’s sake–for the “ease of understanding,” and to allow for subsequent progression into complexity.
The Hammerklavier fugue subject, the exposition, is a fascinating rethinking of this conventional process of “explaining itself.” It begins with the well-known leaping tenth to a trill:
This is the “ahem” of the theme; it coughs trillingly to let you know it has arrived. Then come descending passages, based on the skeletons of thirds (Bb-G-Eb-C-A-F):
These thirds have been well-documented as the idée fixe of the whole Sonata, and if you look back at the three preceding movements,, you can see that clearly (and if you don’t you’re an idiot). Now, thirds are marvelous things, and they can spin us off on rollercoasters through the most varied tonal regions, but–if you had to complain about them at all!–you might say they are a little too yielding, a little too multivalent, overly pliable, like me after a couple Cosmos. They are terribly consonant, which is theory speak for agreeable.
Beethoven addresses, then, this third “problem.” Somehow against the easy descent, he must interpose something else, something difficult. The sliding, lubricated logic of the thirds is delightful, yes, but ultimately empty; it must be arrested to have … meaning? (whatever that is). So, having rearrived at the F from which the theme began (clever, clever, Beethoven baby!), a new idea is proposed, which we might describe as follows …
Suppose you wanted to start on that F and get to the D above it in the middle of the next beat.
Using only the diatonic notes of the B-flat major scale, however, there is a bit of a “problem”:
Yes, you end up one note too high, on E-flat. Whoops. There are not enough notes within the scale to fill the rhythmic space. So. The easy solution would be to interpolate just ONE chromatic note somewheres or other. For instance:
Yes, then the little G# lurks subtly in the middle, helping us to fill the space between the consonances F and D in the desired rhythmic pattern. There are many similar options for Beethoven to “hide” his dissonance (like you would hide a nail or bolt behind some molding or whatever) … But Beethoven does not choose to hide his chromatic interpolation, his “wrong note.” No, he chooses the most “in your face” dissonance possible:
… such that the dissonance appears on the strong part of the beat. This dissonance argues forcefully with the tonic, a rather important note. (No, you jerk, not B-flat, B-natural!) Then he does the same, again, a fourth higher …
Aha. And then the telling detail: Beethoven now goes over that whole gesture once more:
I think any performer must ask themselves: why twice? Why duplicate a duplication? Why is this subject flirting with redundancy? Twice over this idea, and then perhaps you–the listener–are ready to move on to the next lesson. The lesson is (says Beethoven, sternly, also laughing): “the strong beat is the dissonance, the true note is concealed next to it.” Beethoven wants you, needs you, to grasp this before he begins extrapolating wildly upon it. (Wildly, indeed.) True, the dissonances are sprinkled within a framework of consonances, but they are sprinkled awkwardly, provocatively, and they begin to make their presence more and more overt, more and more difficult, more and more outrageous. For example, the last five beats before the second subject comes in:
Every first 16th note of each beat is a “wrong note,” for five straight beats! … a kind of constant meta-understanding which the listener must grapple with, or to put it in less technical terms: an unrelenting act of “being difficult.” (Quite natural to Beethoven, apparently, in his personal life.)
So the fugue begins by outlining a nice, pleasant chain of thirds, each on the well-behaved strong beat, and then drops in the subversive idea of a dissonant neighbor tone; Beethoven reiterates this dissonant neighbor tone idea so that you cannot forget it, a seeming tautology that allows the idea to be more effectively used as a jumping-off board; and then towards the end of the first statement, Beethoven allows himself to go berserk with dissonant neighbors, letting the principle fly. Somewhere, apparently, there is a lecture or essay by Anton Kuerti in which he says that the fugue subject is not as long as it seems in this first statement; that Beethoven simply adds an “appendix” in order to heighten the excitement before the entrance of the second subject. True, true, I say! But at the same time it seems a dry, academic, mildly boring way of saying that the first statement of the subject is completely bonkers. “Appendix, heightening excitement” or “completely bonkers”?: you decide which you prefer. I understand some people find “bonkers” a bit too familiar for a dead European composer.
The point is: even the very premise of the fugue has a desire to run on, to veer off, to run off the rails! Which is a magnificent, life-affirming way to begin a fugue: with a subject that cannot contain itself.
Beethoven has his reasons for extrapolating from the irrational, for building his edifice upon a quivering cornerstone. Let’s say, the subject could be described as the appearance of the irrational from the rational: the dissonances are the creeping mania of the fugue, its emerging wildness and refusal to be tamed. They are “logical” (real note plus or minus one half step) and yet after a certain point, their excess of logic becomes pathological, and they crunch into the texture, strengthening and mystifying simultaneously. And when this “bonkers” subject gets turned upside down, or backwards: it is like viewing a delirium in a mirror, it is an Alice in Wonderland world. Don’t forget, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. Everything in Beethoven’s fugue is mathematically justifiable, as Schiff carefully demonstrates, and yet what is the math’s effect? The most lopsided ideas emerge–portraits, seemingly, of insanity. There is no comforting equal sign. This fugue, in fact, engages the very idea of reason itself: reason as organizational principle, and conversely, reason gone mad, taken to absurd lengths.
So that I would propose that this fugue should not appear or aim to be a essay in order, eschewing chaos. I think it is primarily a play of opposites, a fiery binary: chaos/order. (And thus, one of the great deconstructive texts!) But I agree with Schiff that the chaos should not be random, or accidental; it should be born out of the order, and vice versa (… that is what makes the chaos so powerful, so radical: its orderly origins.) The two odd bedfellows should rejuvenate each other.
Or, perhaps, this fugue is about the inseparability of thought and its disintegration–the life cycle of seemingly immortal thought. Either way, it’s heady stuff, baby. Good work, Beethoven. I’m proud of you. I thought you were off your rocker but maybe you were just “playing” me the whole time.
