Sentimental Education
/Music and Sentiment
By Charles RosenYale University Press, 2011In his book Beethoven, Sir Donald Francis Tovey sets out to explain the great composer's expansion of classical harmony. Consider, he asks us, the sixteenth fugue of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier:
You see that [Bach] answers his subject in the dominant minor, and that he needs an extra bar in which to get smoothly back to the home tonic for his third entry...Now consider how you would like an answer in the dominant major. You may take it that, for the purposes of modulation—that is, for change of key—the dominant key of a minor key is always minor. That being so, the subdominant key will also be a minor. It is the key to which the home tonic is dominant, but now notice the peculiarity of the minor subdominant...
Wake up! I'm sorry. No more of that, I promise. You probably have no idea what he’s talking about. Classical music has an air of impenetrability and stuffiness about it (as you can see, even its musicologists are primly named), and Mr. Tovey shows us one reason why: though most people don't understand musical notation or the theory underlying it, nearly all classical music writing relies on it. Even in Gramophone, a magazine pitched to the general reader, theory lies under the surface, bubbling up now and then, mocking your incomprehension. How are you supposed to locate the development section of a Haydn sonata?Luckily, things have gotten better in the electronic age. Before the gramophone was invented, if you wanted to read about classical music, you simply had to learn to read music – you had to learn another language. But as recordings came into the household, if you wanted to read about, say, the Romantic composers and you couldn't read music, there was a rough short cut available: you could try to follow an author by listening to the music they wrote about, matching sounds to words and notes. Alas, you needed a pile of money for the stereo and huge record collection this approach demanded; neophytes stuck to Classical Thunder or Classics for Relaxation, if they bothered at all.Today, the initiate has a better option: YouTube. You’ll need to buy headphones, but that’s all. You don’t even need a computer, just a library card or a generous friend. YouTube has just about every piece of music you could need, and often in fine performances as well. (If you want free lessons in music theory or sight-reading, YouTube has that, too. Your patience, I promise you, will be rewarded.) For a tiny investment, it’s now possible to read a relatively advanced book about classical music and understand the gist of what’s being conveyed. More importantly, you’re also more apt to enjoy yourself.There still remains the task of finding good writing, and for that, one of the most reliable authors is Charles Rosen. He was just into a career as a concert pianist when he stumbled upon his matching gift for prose. The sleeve notes on his first Chopin record described one of the nocturnes he played as “staggering drunken with the odour of flowers.” “I had I had many thoughts about the piece," he told the Guardian,
That was not one of them. So I started writing the sleeve notes myself. People liked them and after a while a publisher took me to lunch. Before he even offered me a drink he said he would publish whatever I'd like to write. Eventually it led to many books and articles. But to begin with I wrote just to keep nonsense off my record sleeves.
His first book, 1972’s The Classical Style, is still a standard for anyone who wants to understand the musical world of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His newest, Music and Sentiment, endeavors to explain the metamorphosis of the representation of sentiment in classical music, from Bach and the Baroque to the moderns that few seem to stand or understand. To keep the book from growing unwieldy, he mostly confines himself to the initial presentation of a musical theme. Rosen makes few concessions to the uninitiated, and a mere decade ago, someone wishing to grasp what he has to say would have had to know music theory, or have a record collection which spanned three hundred years, from J.S. Bach to Alban Berg. Using our new tools, we'll follow him by skipping over the difficult theory and replacing the notation in his book with the actual music – difficult enough to conjure in your head even if you know the language.The Baroque era, which began around 1600 with Monteverdi and climaxed with Bach, was governed by what musicologists call “Unity of Sentiment.” Virtually every piece had a single rhythm, a single idea to express. A composer could thicken or thin the instrumentation, or add ornamentation to the melody, but the chief means of expressing emotion was harmony. “Affective meaning,” as Rosen explains,
is created by the relation of consonance and dissonance…a dissonance is not an ugly sound (some dissonances will seem exquisitely beautiful to any listener) but an interval or chord that must be resolved into a consonance…. Dissonance establishes an increase in tension, and consonance a release. Strictly viewed, everything in a tonal piece is more or less dissonant except for the tonic triad with which the work must end.
Think of the tonic triad as a home chord that a melody implies and at which it must finish. Listen here to Bach’s famous “Air” from his Orchestral Suite in D Major:
Although accompanied by no break in the continuous motion, the undulations of expressive intensity are extraordinary…the variations are so significant that we might like to claim that the sentiment has altered as the work proceeds, but there is no place where we can draw a line to differentiate one affect from another. We may retain the idea of unity of sentiment, provided that we understand that the basic sentiment is presented in an ever-changing chiaroscuro.
This makes a fine place to turn to Haydn and Mozart. The rudiments of the classical style are already here – what Rosen describes as “establishing a firm tonal basis, contrast, increasing excitement and pathos, and eventual resolution” – but “not the classical articulation,” the stark contrasts, the easily discernible changes in sentiment and the structure designed to support them.The resolution of dissonance remained a crucial part of the composer’s repertoire until twentieth century, when tonality itself became passe. Mozart and Haydn broke the Baroque mold, and essayed themes and melodies with techniques that often shocked their contemporaries, as atonal composers like Schoenberg would surprise their Romantic predecessors over a century later.To harmonic dissonance the Viennese masters added thematic dissonance: melodies no longer had to be monolithic, and very different sounds could be combined within a single musical phrase. But these clashing notes needed resolution, too. Rosen shows us Mozart's Viola Quintet in C major, a splendid example because the opposition is not only between disparate notes but different instruments, here the violin and cello:
dynamic contrast and echo effects were possible many years before the last decades of the eighteenth century when Haydn wrote his great trios, and so, certainly, was the addition of expressive ornamentation, but nothing like the astonishing and dramatic juxtaposition of two ways of playing a theme could have been realized before this time.
These early fireworks were changing the nature of music: dramatic shifts of sentiment used to be saved for the middle of a piece, well after the main themes were presented. Now that drama was being displaced to the beginning, resulting in more multifaceted, more complex, and more intense music.Ludwig van Beethoven represented these qualities in extremis. His was at once grander and more personal than his predecessors. This sometimes lent his music what music historian David Dubal calls an “ethical ring.” At times Beethoven seems to be dealing with existential crises and metaphysical questions, and in his Ninth Symphony and its “Ode to Joy” finale, with its call for universal brotherhood, he does that explicitly.What strikes you first when you compare him to Mozart and Haydn is his intensity. Consider his Third Symphony, done in heroic style (originally written for Napoleon, a dedication which the composer scratched out when the diminutive Corsican declared himself Emperor), where Beethoven takes the continuous increase of intensity to a new extreme, and does so in the middle of the piece, no less, not its climax. It begins at about 7:40 and continues for a minute (though to get the full effect, you need to start at the beginning):
all the articulated oppositions of the style that Beethoven inherited are realized now with an organization that is much more tightly knit and subtly unified. Starting with two opposed phrases, a rise and a descent, and then combining high and low registers together in a more intense expression, has the effect of narrative form. It has a plot.
Like almost everything else he did, Beethoven's crescendos were bigger than anything anyone had heard before. The beginning of his famous Hammerklavier Sonata (incidentally the largest sonata ever written at the time and for some time after) opens with an epic contrast, a clangorous double statement of fortissimo chords, followed by a soft and lyrical passage. Rather than combine the two, he brings the second into the world of the first chiefly by raising the volume.
Just as Romantic poets wanted to realize, not the underlying logic of experience, but its continuity – not a series of independent events, but the metamorphosis of one state of sensibility into another – so the precise and dramatic articulation of late eighteenth-century musical style....became not merely old-fashioned but even antipathetic for the most progressive musicians.
We have seen how Beethoven reduced contrast between notes by slurring them. This he did for lengths a little longer than those Mozart or Haydn would have contemplated, say, no more than one or two dozen notes, as we heard in the Hammerklavier. Chopin would slur notes for pages.Though the Romantics returned to something like the Baroque era's “Unity of Sentiment,” they continued Beethoven's expansion in other ways. One method was density. Listen to Chopin's first Nocturne in B-flat minor, Opus 9 number 1, published in 1833. After the first, brief statement of the theme, Chopin amplifies the intensity, not by any of the various means employed in decades past, but through an extravagant use of ornamentation:
In eighteenth-century music each chord and each note has a measurable harmonic distance from the tonic... and functions as if it were moving away from, or towards, resolution. This gives each phrase of a work a precise tonal significance that allows the listener to feel the precise degree of harmonic tension... The richer mediant relations that dominated the nineteenth century made a new range of affects possible but reduced the simple precision of harmonic meaning that was more easily audible to earlier listeners.
By the advent of the twentieth century, tonality itself seemed inadequate, just as the old forms of art seemed ill-equipped to interpret a modernizing world, and composers began to abandon it altogether, or fashion their own systems of musical organization.With Brahms, a contemporary of Wagner, we aren't there yet, but we can see how composers were beginning to adapt to the tonal revolution that was coming. In his Intermezzo in B minor, the top notes of the repetitive, descending phrases are held until the next phrase, and the second note is held until the third is finished. Each successive note “reactivates” (as Rosen has it) the note or notes above, allowing the sonority to build gradually, even a little obsessively:
The second half of the twentieth century still seems chaotic in retrospect with all of the competing ideologies: neo-tonal classicism, neo-tonal romanticism, orthodox dodecaphonic style, Darmstadt serialism, minimalism, neoclassicism, and so on. If serious music survives in something like its present form, in a decade or two we may have some idea of which fraction of these competing dogmatisms will remain seductive and coherent.
It's difficult to argue with this, but in his other career, as a pianist, Rosen has chosen to play many of the composers bound to these “dogmatisms.” So who better to explain them? Still, we can take comfort in the possibilities modernity affords us, and continue ourselves from the spot where he left off, learning about what we don't understand and searching for something striking, some sentiment that hits home.____Greg Waldmann, a Senior Editor at Open Letters Monthly, is a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.