Conquering the Great Fugue

Buried somewhere in the raft of comments appended to my last post, WB Stahl made a request for more details on last week's concerts:

"So tell us more about playing the Grosse Fuge. I thought it was fascinating..."

Happy to oblige, though I'm hardly an expert on the piece. This was actually my first time playing it, believe it or not, in either the original quartet form or Michael Steinberg's electrifying orchestral version. And that gave last week's rehearsals and performances a real sense of immediacy for me, which is something that's hard to duplicate in a performance where you've played the rep a dozen times or more.

To begin with, the Grosse Fuge is a bear of a piece to wrestle with as a performer, whether you're one of four or one in a sea of string players. And it can also be a maddeningly complex thing to listen to or study - Alex Ross of The New Yorker calls it "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven’s wake, it became a kind of political object. Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention... Benjamin Britten, who took pride in tailoring his music to the needs of particular performers and places, was heard to complain that Beethoven’s late works were at times willfully bizarre, prophetic of avant-garde, obscurantist tendencies."

That mind sound over the top - after all, it's just an oversized fugue, right? - but I understand the strong reactions the piece provokes. For one thing, the main fugue subject, which goes like this...

(click to enlarge)

...is almost entirely overwhelmed by Beethoven's subsequent counter-subjects after that initial unison blast from the performers. In a strange way, the subject is actually the least interesting element of the piece. The primary line our ears want to follow is a fast-leaping, snap-rhythm counter-subject that starts in the first violins as the violas insistently hammer away at the subject to no avail. The seconds and cellos (and basses, in Steinberg's version) jump in undaunted, and you're off on one of the strangest and most violent trips in all of Beethoven's output. In fact, the dynamic marking stays at forte or louder for every instrument for the next four pages of music. (That's four pages of a single-line part; it's probably more than ten in the score.)

So essentially what you have is four equal lines, all blasting away at maximum volume at the composer's instruction for 5 or 6 minutes at a clip, during a piece that is based on one of the most complex compositional techniques ever devised. It's totally crazy, it's the antithesis of good fugue writing, there's absolutely no way it should be anything but an ungodly mess...

...and yet, somehow, it isn't. I'm still not sure how that can be true, even after a week of performing the thing. In particular, I'm thinking of a passage midway through that first extended forte gallop, in which each section in turn switches abruptly from playing the snap-rhythm counter-subject to playing a furious run of triplets that leap from register to register and seriously threaten to derail the rhythmic stability of every player who hasn't made the transition yet. It's a train wreck waiting to happen, and yet, it didn't happen. And I was never seriously worried that it would.

Of course, having a conductor helps, and in the original version, that train wreck spot is a much bigger risk, since there's no one individual in charge of keeping everyone together. And that, I think, is the real fun of playing the orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge (beyond the simple pleasure of being able to make a lot more noise, of course.) With Osmo insuring that the overall pulse of the beastly thing wasn't going anywhere unexpected, we were free to just attack our individual parts with all the ferocity we could muster, and see where we ended up.

I actually found myself out of breath at the end of our first performance of the week, just from the effort and exhilaration of it all. I don't know whether the audience got as much out of it as we did, since there's no question that this is one of those pieces that is even more challenging to listen to than it is to play, but personally, I had a blast. (And I can't wait to play it on the stage of Carnegie Hall next Monday...)