Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens

Abstract

Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens Mark Steinberg HISTORY SOMETIMES MAKES brothers of artists far separated by years. A flame can burn and then catch fire again generations later, a shared interest finding its energy taken up and vibrating anew. Many are those who have investigated our emotional landscape, whose revelations make us feel less alone and more noble. Rarer is the artist who grapples as well with our process of coming to know the world. Our own thinking is often mysterious to us, and we frequently recognize beauty in the fait accompli without knowing what led us there. The late works of Ludwig van Beethoven and much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, however, seem to engage vitally with the way in which our thinking helps us form the world as we know it. This is the idea behind an experimental and investigative performance my group, the Brentano String Quartet, put on at the 92nd St. Y in New York City in March of 2019. During a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, lines of poetry by Stevens were projected on a screen behind the quartet, fading in and out to correspond with events in the music. The text was projected just a bit at a time, full ideas brought to completion only over prolonged moments, as if being mulled over in the mind of the listener, summoned by the music. We made an attempt to have the music and poetry cohabit, neither usurping the attention completely, the two arts held in a fertile suspension. The music doesn’t need the words and the words don’t need the music, but we thought they shared enough between them to illuminate each other in some fashion, creating a new amalgam adding dimension to both. ________ During the intermission, before the start of the music, the audience sees these lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”1 priming them for the idea of art as an investigative tool: [End Page 168] the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (CPP 415) Beethoven in what is generally referred to as his late period often writes a sort of meta-music—music in which we can sense the process of creating music, and in which that process tells us about our ability to conjure sense from the world. Stevens, likewise, seems to write often about poetry itself, to meander in real time through the process of a poem’s taking shape, inviting us into the mind of the poet and sharing in his contemplations. This is precisely the sense I have always had in hearing the first movement of Op. 132. As when Stevens says that “the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is,” so does Beethoven write music, which, if it has an “aboutness,” is about composing itself, about ordering abstract musical ideas, both following and manipulating them to make a form that is built before our eyes. The quartet begins with a motif that is a bit of an obsession for Beethoven in his late period, a four-note idea that is, perhaps, his version of Bach’s having spelled his own name in musical notes. And so he speaks of both the complexity and perfection of his predecessor and of the idea of self-reference. The four-note idea is set forth as a sort of postulate upon which to build. Already in the introduction of the piece, the idea comes both right side up and upside down and intertwines with itself. It will rarely be completely absent from the proceedings, as if the laws of logic and perception are controlling what might otherwise seem an almost random succession of thoughts. It suggests a clarity of eye that is Stevens’s “things as they are” (CPP 135). As this motif is first introduced, the projections show: This is how the wind shifts:Like the thoughts of an old human,Who still thinks eagerlyAnd...