16 / 40
16 BEETHOVEN
The
Great Fugue
, with the well-nigh orchestral sumptuousness of its sonority, is
to be heard as an entity in itself, unshakeable, vertiginous, revolutionary: here
Beethoven pushes to the edge of the abyss the strictlymusical limits he imposes on
himself. It is an immense symphonic progression, but probably not a work of total
triumph, for the exultation of its phases of mounting élan almost always retains a
character of supreme gravity, a profoundly tragic resonance and colouring. The use
of fugue is an inflexible, powerful gesture, but not grandiloquent: it is a stroke of
genius on the part of Beethoven, which enabledhimto regain, through such formal
‘distance’, the expression of the unpredictable, the multiple, the autonomous.
Its specific language is a language of limits; it possesses the
supereminent right of the masterpiece, the right to melt away,
to break off from itself.