Beethoven and the Voice of God by Wilfrid MellersReview by: Lionel PikeMusic & Letters, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 78-79Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/736354 .

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Beethoven and the Voice of God. By Wilfrid Mellers. pp. viii + 453. (Faber, London, 1983, ?20.00.)

This book, a companion to the author's Bach and the Dance of God (London, 1980; see Music & Letters, lxii (1981), 357-61), presents a personal view of Beethoven's music. It deals with many of the piano sonatas, the Missa solemnis and the late piano works. In particular it seeks to communicate what these works are 'about'. Undertakings of this kind are usually received with scepticism: Stravinsky would not agree that music could express anything beyond itself, and others deny that music can philosophize. To have written both Bach and the Dance of God and Beethoven and the Voice of God was thus to risk outright disapproval, scorn and ridicule. As Mellers himself quotes from Kierkegaard, 'Without risk there is no faith' (p. 316); to put it another way, if there were indisputable evidence for the Resurrection there would be no place for religious faith. The same may well be true of this book: often the evidence presented is insubstantial; but perhaps we should not expect it to be any stronger.

It would have been misleading if Mellers had produced a book with all the trappings of scholarship when so much of the argument is speculative; and the work tries to shun academic accessories. Footnotes are entirely avoided, and the language tends to be chatty. Both these facets, however, are drawbacks: many readers will wish to pursue the cross-references in detail, particularly in view of the valuable parallels that the author continually draws with the other arts, notably literature. The idiosyncratic language is such as to annoy the serious reader and delay his understanding. Puns, assonances and alliterations are legion and are often used as if they were evidence for the author's conclusions.

The fact that this book represents a personal view needs to be made clearer, for the author is dogmatic in his assertions, and the unwary may be misled by his tone into believing that the views he expresses constitute eternal and unchallengeable truths. The very first paragraph makes such an assertion:

All the major composers of the nineteenth century except Bruckner were to tend to agnosticism; and even Bruckner's single-hearted though not simple-minded faith was compromised by the fact that, revering Bach and Beethoven equally, he expressed himself most consummately through the divisiveness of sonata rather than through Bachian formal absolutes.

Naturally, much depends on the degree of one's religious conviction or agnosticism; but the first statement quoted is certainly too dogmatic. Even more questionable is the assertion that Bruckner's faith was somehow that much less firm because he chose to compose in sonata form: indeed, there is no reason why the large-scale integration of contrasts and the concern with long-range debate between opposing elements should not be deeply religious. Several other remarks about sonata form indicate a lack of balance in Mellers's view, for example the following, on page 90:

... the Eroica is not only the most rigorously organized large-scale composition in Beethoven's work up to that point, but also in the history of music.... The Fifth [Symphony] is 'about' the birth of the theme latent within its motto and throughout the first three movements, but overtly heard only in the major apotheosis of the finale.

The Fifth Symphony may indeed be about the birth of a melody; but it may also be about all sorts of other things. Great music has too many layers of meaning to make it translatable with accuracy. Mellers admits as much when he states, in his Preface, 'musical analysis cannot and shouldn't be a science, since music itself isn't'. Music has at times been regarded as a science, of course; and from Jeppesen's The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance onwards, certain types of analytical method have been regarded as 'scientific'. The description 'scientific' implies that all elements of the music are examined from every possible angle and that all the available evidence is sifted and balanced before an assessment is made; but it also implies that music consists of finite 'facts' that can be subjected to scrutiny and examined in microscopic detail. The failings of 'scientific' analysis may well be that no single method attempts to take in every facet of a composition. Various methods may complement one another in the understanding of music, and at times

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various analytical methods have disagreed among themselves. But Mellers's use of the word 'science' in this context seems to imply that a 'scholarly' approach to the music is invalidated, and with this position I cannot agree. A scholarly-or even 'scientific'- approach seems to me preferable to the subjective, personal view presented in this book; though I would not denigrate the value of a personal view, provided that it is clear throughout that this is what it is. Mellers's work is definitely 'unscientific' in that it does not take all the elements into account. This is particularly so in his failure to make the reader aware of the complete bibliographical background of his subject. For example, although we hear much about The Magic Flute (Pamina's G minor aria in particular), the place of Haydn's late Masses or Beethoven's own Mass in C as precursors of the Missa solemnis is never discussed; and Warren Kirkendale's splendid article 'New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis' (The Musical Quarterly, lvi (1970), 665-701)-a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the theological background of the work-is never mentioned.

It is difficult to imagine for whom this book is intended. The author so frequently states the obvious that the university undergraduate can scarcely have been in his mind. Moreover, the misconceptions about musical history make the book somewhat misleading for the serious student. No one with any knowledge of the Italian madrigal could accept that 'Beethoven must be the first composer in history consciously animated by a desire to be original' (p. 21). 'Just how momentous the implications of the false relation were in European music was not fully evident until a composer such as Monteverdi wrote his madrigals . . .' (p. 167) is wide of the mark in view of the structural use Arcadelt made of the device in 'Crudele acerba', not to mention many chromatic works in a line stretching back tojosquin. The function of development sections is misunderstood in the discussion of the 'Waldstein' Sonata (pp. 113 & 115), for Mellers undervalues the tonal function (as opposed to the mere thematic working-out) of these sections. Furthermore, the mediant relationships of which Mellers makes so much in late Beethoven could with advantage have been traced back to the regular behaviour of tonality in minor-key sonata structures. The '4th up and 3rd down' melodic shape (as used in Opp. 1 10 & 11 1, for example) might have been shown to belong to an age-old European tradition of using the various permutations of this shape in contrapuntal music (it is a shape that works particularly well in imitation). Op. 110 is the more interesting not because Beethoven uses the shape but because he ignores its most obvious stretto workings. On page 168 we are told that the minor triad 'has in European music traditionally been associated with death'. No doubt many treatments of death are couched in the minor mode, but one cannot for that reason assume that all minor triads 'mean' death. This is symptomatic of a difficulty in Mellers's argument: he too readily asks the reader to assume that the features he identifies invariably have the same 'meaning' despite the changes in context.

The author's argument is that Beethoven, through his music, was in quest of a hidden song-the song that represents the voice of God. Thus those passages lacking an obvious tune are judged to be places where the composer was seeking the voice of God, or where that voice was absent. It would, however, have been difficult for Beethoven to produce sonata structures by using continuous melody: fragmentary material is bound to be present in this kind of composition. Mellers's analysis is a narrative account that is at times illuminating and on occasions Toveyesque. His argument is partly based on association between works, yet it is disappointingly short of evidence. Such lack of evidence is replaced by frequent references to existential theology, Blake and T. S. Eliot; but while admiring the scope of Mellers's reading, it is difficult to see how these cross-references and the clever play on words can substantiate the claims made in this book. In particular, the dogmatic tone is inappropriate to a highly personal view. While one cannot but admire the effort that has gone into this book, it must, alas, be said that the attainment falls short of the expectation aroused by the subject.

The volume is well produced (there are very few misprints) and reasonably priced. LIONEL PIKE

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