One More Time on Beethoven’s “Tempest,” From Analytic and Performance Perspectives

Abstract

Recording and Score of Beethoven's Sonata (Malcolm Bilson, piano)[1] Processual approaches to the perception of form in this volume can claim venerable antecedents in respect to multiple musical dimensions. Such dimensions include motive, rhythm, harmony, cyclical designs, narrative features, and, most recently, hypermeter (see Temperley 2008). These approaches invite us-as performers and listeners-to adopt perceptual strategies that allow us to hear the music both backward and forward, as recommended by the post-Hegelian Theodor W. Adorno, and as mentioned several times in this series of essays. Following Adorno's path, Carl Dahlhaus became the most influential proponent of processual approaches to form. But, as James Hepokoski contends, his single-minded preoccupation with just one passage-the opening of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata-has come to be regarded by some as limited in scope, if not overblown. In my Schmalfeldt 1995 critique of Dahlhaus's ideas about the Tempest, I placed his views within the historical context of a Beethoven-Hegelian tradition. I have since sought to emphasize that, with or without the summoning of Hegelian ideology, there is much to be gained from the analytic technique of retrospective formal reinterpretation in studies of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music, composed both before the Tempest and in subsequent decades. Like others, I have addressed the interplay of well-established formal conventions and their transformations, while hoping to recapture, if tenuously, the processual nature of the musical experience for both listeners and performers.[2] It has been a pleasure to note that, since 1995, the idea of retrospective formal reinterpretation has been analytically implemented by others-most especially by William E. Caplin in his Classical Form (1998), and also by Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their Elements of Sonata Theory (2006). To return in this volume with William Caplin and James Hepokoski to the initial site of Dahlhaus's argument about the Tempest's first movement provides the occasion for me to offer a few new observations in response to theirs. This time I shall approach the movement primarily, but not exclusively, from the perspective of a performer whose experience of playing the sonata has undoubtedly influenced her analysis.[3] In the superb 2009 collection of essays on the Tempest, the articles by Caplin and Hepokoski, from which their essays in this MTO volume have been drawn, both address the first movement's complete exposition. In this volume, Hepokoski has chosen only, and wisely, to amplify his original discussion of Beethoven's first twenty-one bars, while enabling us to hear excerpts from some of the other sonata openings he mentions in his article. Accordingly, let me turn first to the passage that both Caplin and Hepokoski address here-the passage that must no longer, for either author, be considered an Introduction becomes MT.[4] On this matter, Caplin and Hepokoski adopt strikingly similar positions. That may come as a surprise to those who are familiar with the many differences in their respective theories. Caplin's argument can be gently caricatured as follows: How could any listener who understands the nature of classical introductions, main themes, and transitions possibly even consider hearing an introduction at the beginning of the Tempest? Hepokoski notes that Beethoven built startling instabilities into his opening, but he regards Dahlhaus's new-path pronouncements about processual form in the Tempest to be overdrawn-a declaration of cultural solidarity with a long line of Austro-Germanic writers and high-modernist twentieth-century composers. In short, the main-theme (or P-) function of the opening of the Tempest is generically unambiguous for both Hepokoski and Caplin.(1) For Hepokoski, if the two short Largo statements were simply removed from measures 1-21, the remaining Allegro modules would be obviously P- thematic-in other words, a main theme. …