# Beethoven Op.131: "Fugue as seed for the whole piece"



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

So I was reading this webpage on Beethoven Op.131 <Beethoven's opus 131 Analysis, presentations workshops and concert introduction - by Nils Henrik Asheim>, which a certain member on the forum cited in another thread.

I know some interesting things about this work; Beethoven uses a different form for each movement; and each movement continues on to the next without fully resolving (I don't need anyone explain them to me). And I do consider the work as one of the most sublime/ingenious pieces ever written for the string quartet; I do not intend to critique on its artistry, with this thread.

But this portion in the webpage strikes me as somewhat "exaggerated" in its claims:









Here's why; 
Beethoven chooses

a mostly diatonic theme (except the B#, which doesn't even have anything to do with the tonality of the subsequent movements) for the fugue.
sharp keys, all relatively closely related on the circle of fifths, for all the movements: DMaj/Bmin (##) , AMaj/F#min (###) , EMaj/C#min (####), BMaj/G#min (#####)

On the score, the first entry of the fugue subject (played by the 1st violin) contains tones: A, B, B#(C), C#, E, F#, G#.
The second entry (played by the 2nd violin) of the subject contains: C#, D, E#(F), F#,...

So in the first 6 bars, as shown in the score of the first movement, the fugue contains tones; A, B, B#(C), C#, D, E, E#(F), F#, G#.
That's already 9 out of all the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. (75%)

Let's assume Beethoven chose the key for the second movement randomly. (Assume F would be enharmonically equivalent to E#, Bb would be to A#, and Eb would be to D#, and so on).
What's the probability the movement will be a key with any of these notes: A, B, B#(C), C#, D, E, E#(F), F#, G# as its tonic?

[[ Here's a case similar to the Beethoven quartet:
Mozart string trio in E flat K.563 contains all the tones Bb, Eb, Ab in the initial theme of its first movement and,
all its 6 movements have tonality: BbMaj/Gmin (bb), EbMaj/Cmin (bbb), AbMaj/Fmin (bbbb). ]]

And notice that;

The tonalities of the movements of Op.131 are not even ordered in the same way as the tones of the fugue theme. 
Not all the tones representing the tonalities of the movements (D, B, A, E, G#, C#) can be found in the first entry of the fugue subject. D natural is missing in the first entry. If the one chromatic note used in the first entry was D natural instead of B#, I would have found the claims more convincing.
G# is used like 4 times in the first entry, even at the very beginning and the end. Any one of those could be "highlighted" to make it seem like there's an "ordered pattern" overall. (But even with that amount of "liberty", you can't have an "ordered pattern".)

How can we say that Beethoven "wrote the fugue as seed for the whole piece", as the webpage claims?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Musical analysts try a lot things that seem to make sense at the time, but ultimately having nothing to do with finding a piece's soul, or explaining why it's great. They try hard but are like grad student theses that try to explain humor by counting adjectives.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

This area of music theory, concentrating on various kinds of organic unity, especially hidden pitch and thematic correspondences like the ones suggested here, has always been dodgy, and has included a good deal of outright quackery. The grandfather of this sort of dubious unity questing was Rudolph Reti. His _The Thematic Process in Music_ (1951) was alarmingly influential for a while.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

This kind of "music theory" reminds me of people who look at perfectly good movies and try to find hidden messages and symbols in them rather than actually like, evaluate the movie as a viewer would.


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

Professor Robert Greenberg explained the structural layout of this piece in his lectures "the string quartets of Beethoven" in a clear and concise way, which could be helpful for listeners who want to dig a little deeper into this masterpiece (not as deep as professional analysis due to time limit).


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