Motive and Meaning: 'Lebewohl' before and after Beethoven | Chapter I, Introduction

I. Perspectives of the Motive and the Motive’s Perspective

The opening gesture of Beethoven’s E flat Major Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, Lebewohl, even as a brief moment, captures in a microcosm his historical situation between two well characterized stylistic periods: his mastery of established “classical” idioms, and, simultaneously, the revolutionary individualism that made him an idol of the Romantics. The “horn call” implied by the right hand is a prototypical example of one of the most prolific motives of the German musical tradition, possibly even clichéd by 1810, when Op. 81a was completed. It was the conventional method of writing a cadence in a major key for a pair of horns. The expectation for a major mode cadence would have been so sufficiently instilled by the first two intervals that the “deceptive” minor sonority in measure two would provide a bit of a shock, bring the audience’s attention sharply into focus, and pique questions in listeners’ minds about its significance, perhaps inspired by the sonata’s plainly stated program.

While no one work from the First Viennese School could mark the pivot from the Classical style toward the Romantic, this “moment” represents an auspicious candidate because in it an expressly “classical” figure becomes so simply and economically redefined in a “romantic” way. It has the expressive economy of Haydn and Mozart, but the poetic resonance of the Romantics, due in part the the textualization of the motive itself by its inextricable linkage - a note for each syllable - with the word Lebewohl, meaning “farewell” but with a heartfelt and enduring connotation. Speaking of this gesture, the scholar Leonard B. Meyer observes: “This is no mere deceptive cadence; it strikes us as expressly anomalous. For this reason, we sense, though perhaps only intuitively, that it is significant. And so it is.” (1) The significance of this musical moment is the subject of the following study, not just with regard to Op. 81a, but to the inconspicuous tradition of works by a group of closely related German composers who make seemingly conscious reference to it.

The descending two part horn call is attributable to no one composer, but the opening gesture of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26, Op. 81a, is perhaps the most famous example. More conventional examples from the 18th century provide context for understanding the way in which the Lebewohl motto is so anomalous. However, Op. 81a does not stand without precedent in terms of atypical treatment of the cadential horn motive. No steadfast lines of influence can be cited as having specifically given Beethoven liberty modify the horn call as he did, but a survey of instances of the call (using its basic parameters) shows development of its rhythmic, harmonic, and textural aspects toward abstracted concepts like distance, memory, nostalgia, and eventually death and the death of tradition itself. Op. 81a provided the inspiration for Lebewohl, which was raised in works by Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, and Ligeti. Close readings of the scores in question as well as ideas from poststructural literary criticism, topic theory, semiotics, and memetics form the justification for understanding this motive, its history, and cultural significance. Lebewohl is a musical topic, a musical sign, a musical meme, and a narrative composed by those who chose to engage with and contribute to it.

Literary Criticism:

Because the opening gesture of Op. 81a bears the imprint of a word, the normally complicated issue of justifying an interpretation of a bit of music seems, at first, laughably simple. Looking at the score in this case leaves the viewer with almost no acceptable doubt as to the motive’s basic meaning to the composer. So why does that conspicuous word, meaning, appear in the title above? Due to the intellectual complexity of determining meaning in music, it is worthwhile to provide an exposition to these “close readings” which locates the frame of reference by which the meaning of this particular motive will be viewed throughout. In short, the motive’s meaning will be considered with respect to its use in the score, the comparison of these scores, and the artistic and social circumstances which fostered them. As much regard is given to the reception and accepted interpretation of the motive as is to the composers stated intentions, when those are provided. As a result, the motive’s meaning is under examination here because it is developed with each subsequent composer’s treatment of it.

Whatever larger questions remain about music’s ability to express or carry significance, there can be little doubt that Beethoven’s Lebewohl motive has succeeded in doing so. Still, general discussions of musical meaning and stylistic distinction are rife with controversy, and often the stentorian voices are also polemical ones. To deny music’s expressivity would seem hopelessly negligent of an intuitive truth: music does communicate on some level. For Charles Rosen, “understanding music in the most basic sense simply means enjoying it when you hear it.” While Rosen argues, speaking frankly, that there is no necessary specialized knowledge needed for enjoying or understanding music, it remains that taking our musical intuitions for proof of its expressive function is also negligent. Music’s meaning is neither unequivocal nor illusory, which severely frustrates any systematic or holistic approach to explaining it. As such, claims of unequivocal authorial intent should rightly be met with resistance.

In the field of literary criticism, which has long been a common and convenient interdisciplinary reference for musicologists, the validity of author’s intent and the independence of individual texts was sharply questioned in the 20th century. The result was unprecedented freedom for critics to impute meanings upon works, even those which clashed with authors’ own purported interpretations. This delimitation of text has become widely accepted, perhaps in part because it forms one of the provocative hypotheses underlying postmodern thought. The triumph of this post-structuralist perspective is that it greatly weakened traditional assumptions about the distinction between authors, their work, critics, and meaning, allowing an examination of the intertextual relationships between various works, with a shift toward interpreting a text according to the reader and their societal sphere. The “horn call” in Op. 81a is a prime example of something both textual and intertextual. Even without the attendant “Lebewohl”, this motive is inherently referential, drawing upon countless prior works which use it. Furthermore, it is a product of social construction, rather than an individual’s creation. Its persistent reappearance in music after Beethoven suggests that composers and listeners see it as something free and available to use, like a word or popular saying, making it particularly “literary”.

In music, Raymond Monelle addressed the delimitation of text by asking, explicitly: What is a Musical Text? The answer he provides rejects the simple idea that the score itself is a text. Instead, he argues that the text is congruent with the semiosis of the score: “A text is a semiosis, something understood - but understood textually.” The score is only an element of the interpretive process. Furthermore, a “text” is not simply one text, but the whole tradition of its performance and reception. As illuminating as this approach has been, there lies a danger within it. The author’s intent and circumstances cannot be deemed wholly irrelevant to interpreting the work, particularly for those artists whose cultural environment accepted as axiomatic the potential for artistic communication of authorial intent. Thus, the author’s intentions must be taken into account, in proportion with the influence of their social and historical circumstances, an environment where the author is an element and deserves consideration as such. Because of the programmatic nature of the Lebewohl motive, it transcends to a certain extent the subjectivity that attends other musical texts which have no extra-musical literary text to bolster their understanding.

That twentieth century philosophy calls into question constructed boundaries - between an author, their biography, their work, their readers, and interpretations - demands an intellectual comfort with ambiguity that is nearly analogous to a layperson’s understanding of the wave/particle duality of quantum physics, which is to say that the impression of discrete chunks of matter and solidness are biological constructions and, in part, a symptom of observation. Similarly, interfacing with an artistic persona vis-a-vis their work gives a discrete impression. But even the self is fragmentary and inextricable from its social context. Ambiguity, it seems, is both the result and the way forward for studies of musical meaning.

Topic Theory:

Leonard G. Ratner’s book Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style spurred musicologists to take up topical studies in the coming decades, and the theory is now a well vetted musicological method. Ratner summarizes it lucidly from the beginning:

From its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the military, the hunt, and the life of the lower classes, music in the early 18th century developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for classic composers. Some of these figures were associated with various feelings and affections; others had a picturesque flavor.

Thus, topics’ presence in eighteenth century classical music can be explained according to its cultural proximity to these traditions, all of which found representation in music within a widely known “thesaurus of characteristic figures.” For Ratner, this thesaurus is divided into three broad categories: dances, styles, and pictoralism. In his explication, horn calls fall under the general heading of a “style” and specifically that of “Military and Hunt Music”. He characterizes the latter by saying: “the hunt was a favorite diversion of the nobility; horn signals echoed and re-echoed throughout the countryside.”

Unlike every other well known instrument of its time, the horn was heard almost exclusively from a distance: over hilltops and across valleys, from the echoes of hunters or traveling coaches. In the seventeenth century, and for its entire prior history, the horn was truly meant to be an outdoor instrument and was primarily associated with the primitive pastime of hunting by the nobility. This tradition dates back to the medieval courts of France. While the horn’s history itself, perhaps more so than any other standard orchestral instrument, has left an indelible mark upon its extra-musical associations, what is known about its medieval and renaissance development remains incomplete. Scholarship in this area has uncovered scant notated evidence for the horn’s use in purely musical circumstances and has instead relied upon memoirs, court records, and iconography.

The “cornet du chasse” was an important predecessor of the 17th century “cor de plusieurs tours,” which was a step toward to its modern descendant. This “cor de plusieurs tours” was a marked improvement in that it was compactly coiled and longer. Its lower fundamental pitch carried further distances and was portable enough to be a both convenient and necessary accessory for hunters. The Cor de chasse, a descendant of both the “du chasse” and “plusieurs tours” horns, was the prefered hunting and orchestral instrument by the late 17th century. It was commonly pitched in F, E-flat, D, and C, and formed a large hoop that made it easy to sling over one’s shoulder while on horseback. Regional lexicons of hunting horn calls were used for a variety of simple purposes: to greet one another, alert sightings of the prey, to announce procedures, and to celebrate successes. These calls were heard by anyone within earshot, whether of noble or common ilk; they became a common feature of the sonic landscape of the European countryside. That horn calls were once laden with nostalgia is clearly due to their original bucolic circumstances, which also explains their placement within the complex of topics that signify the “pastoral” as seen throughout the Western musical tradition. Their timbre and stylistic idiom together formed a clear symbol for hunting, wealth, nobility, masculinity, the pastoral, and, more fundamentally, the abstract concept of communication at a distance.

Unlike the majority of other instruments that were cultivated for soloistic or accompanimental purposes in sophisticated courtly music, the horn had to become assimilated into the performance tradition gradually and by a process of “taming.” The notable early instances of horn in purely musical settings by Cavalli and Lully are literal recreations of hunting scenes in ballets. Triadic multi-part writing was used, in keeping with the rustic idiom of the instrument and its performers’ general lack of technical or artistic expertise. These parts would have likely been played from the wings of the theater to give the impression of distance from the audience.

Count Franz Anton Sporck, a Bohemian nobleman, was an important early exponent of the cor de chasse, which he first heard at Versailles while traveling as a young man in 1680. Sporck was an avid promoter of music and saw great potential in the horn. He paid to have two of his employees dispatched to Paris to learn the new art of horn playing and then imported the technique to Bohemia, where it flourished. The improved sophistication of horn playing technique was an important step for making it a broadly marketable orchestral member.

The horn’s gradual assimilation into the orchestra of the early eighteenth century can be catalogued by its increasing appearance in operatic and courtly instrumental compositions of the time. In these examples, like Handel’s Water Music suites (1717), and Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto in F major, BWV 1046a (1721), horns are incorporated into the ensemble, but their use only represents a slight refinement of technical skills over those used in the field on horseback. In fact, the opening horn calls of BWV 1046a are near facsimiles of common Saxon greeting horn calls.

So strong were the associations of the horn with its history as an outdoorsman’s instrument, as a signaling device, and as an emblem for nobility and masculinity, that the very timbre of the horn could not be easily separated from these topics. The sound of the instrument and the idiomatic way of composing for it became a cipher for a musical topic which falls under the broader category of “pastoral.” Though the horn was afforded a voice of its own, arguably within the works of the First Viennese school, it never fully shed its historical identity.

Within the larger context of the topic of horn calls, Lebewohl represents a sub-category, one which can be said to begin with Op. 81a and to be foreshadowed in works by Haydn and Mozart. The significance of the Lebewohl topic is fluid, but grounded in the pathos of the German word “Lebewohl.”

Semiotics:

Since topic theory was introduced by Ratner in 1980 it has progressed a long way, particularly in its gradual merging with Semiotics. His Classical Music addresses only music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Through the works of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Robert Hatten, Kofi Agawu, and Eero Tarasti (among others), the issue of meaning in music has been elevated by a semiotic approach. Stated simply, semiotics is the philosophical or theoretical study of the processes of conveying “meaning” or “significance” with signs. Semiotic analysis represents a promising perspective for music, because music is highly referential, possibly even inherently so. Music nearly epitomizes signification, making it an ideal candidate for semiosis.

Raymond Monelle, in his book The Sense of Music, argues that music is essentially a “signifying medium” and rejected the belief that “purely musical signs” are apprehensible. According to this perspective, music only carries meaning according to a system of extra-musical references or allegories, whether direct or indirect, always dependent upon some social or biological construction. This idea places musical score itself in a special plane, where its meaning is always mediated and imparted obliquely by composers, performers, and critics (roles that are not mutually exclusive). Thus, the objective of semiotic study in music is to explain how it happens rather speculate upon the author’s intent. The contents of the semiotic medium (known as the semiosphere) through which musical meaning propagates are often common to a culture at large (e.g., eighteenth century Vienna). An analogy for this semiotic medium could be the mold for replicating a key. The mold enables the information coded within a key to be effectively transferred; for the purposes of opening a door, it does not matter that the copied key is not an exact atomic replica.

While semiotic studies have brilliantly explicated specifics of style and form, they have failed to establish a unified and overarching analytic scheme. Instead, musical semiotics has yielded as a compromise between these perspectives, a flexible approach that draws upon the relativism of post-structuralist thought without succumbing to total interpretive indeterminacy. As Monelle puts it, any attempt to create convenient and satisfying “reductive rationalism” results in the realization that “consistency [is] the enemy of insight.”

Memetics:

The liberated view of Lebewohl requires considering the basic motive as a “meme,” and taking the “memetic” perspective. Paradoxically, the study of musical memetics did not simply emerge from memetic study at large, but rather it furthers strands in contemporary musicology that contend with meaning in music through topic theory and semiotics. At roughly the same time that Leonard Ratner was laying the groundwork for topical musicology, Richard Dawkins was coining the term “meme.” Memetics is a theory of cultural transmission based upon an analogy with the essential tenets of Neo-Darwinism. In 1976, Richard Dawkins helped to popularize memetics and the “gene-centered” view in his book The Selfish Gene, which argues strongly that genes are the fundamental units of selection. Dawkins’ individual contribution was to extend by analogy the notion of gene selectionism into the realm of cultural transmission. This new field of Memetics draws a broad analogy between Neo-Darwinian gene-selectionism and non-biological, cultural transmission and change. Memes themselves are units of cultural information (analogous to genes) that propagate through culture according to their success as replicators and the gradual alterations that they are subject to. In this passage, Dawkins describes the etymological basis for “meme”:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.

Dawkins, showing some intellectual gamesmanship, carefully presents the new word by offering several mnemonic devices (sounds like ‘gene’, the French word même, rhymes with “cream”) to ensure the memorability of the neologism, making it an autological term: the concept of “meme” is itself memetic. Perhaps the best mnemonic device he doesn’t mention for “meme” is that when read, it seems to be saying: “Me, me!” The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “meme” as: “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” But in order to “succeed” as a meme, it must also have this important attribute: there must be some discernible and imitable parameters that allow for it to be apprehended and assimilated by many hosts. In the study of animal behavior, the memetic process helps many species develop rituals around mating and raising their young, as is the case with birds, their songs, mating displays, and nest building.

Musicologist Steven Jan offered one of the first and easily the most rigorous application of memetics to music in his book The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture. He makes a strong case for the application of memetics in music: “The time is ripe to apply the meme concept systematically to music, to develop a memetics of music.” The Lebewohl motive represents something memetic par excellence. It has distinct, though mutable, parameters which are easily replicable. As a unit of cultural information, it is a vessel for the concepts and emotions imbued by the composers who use it.

Steven Jan’s work indicates that memetics, as borrowed from the sciences, is gaining a foothold in musicology. Since musical semiotics has already achieved a kind of legitimacy, memetics may fare better as a music-analytic method under the umbrella of semiotics. After all, what is a meme but a kind of signifier that exhibits certain behavior? For the purpose of this analysis, taking the memetic perspective raises the possibility of regaining a sense of objectivity without also taking postmodern thought for granted.

Summary:

Any analogy for music with another realm of human activity is subjective and rife with inconsistencies, but some analogies are unavoidably apt. Theorists have grappled with the inconsistencies but rarely fail to make the comparison. What seems to go without saying is that music’s ability to communicate represents an enduring mystery, one that motivates doomed attempts at describing its modus operandi. The history of linguistic-analog musical explications surely extends beyond hindsight. Language as an analogy for music may be justifiable to a great extent, but it could be that in searching for broadly applicable analogies for the phenomenon of meaning in music, we should take one step beyond social constructs like language by exploring biological analogies instead. That formidable task will be waiting when the appropriate mind is ready to systematically address it, but this analysis will not attempt it.

This particular study attempts to retreat from this philosophical fray in two ways. First, it takes the perspective of the music itself. Replicated musical units, arbitrary as they may be, mediate between groups in society (composers, performers, critics, etc.) and survive beyond individual lifetimes and stylistic periods. Their litany of iterations over history by subsequent individuals or groups of composers represent distinct microcosms of the aesthetic and cultural conditions that fostered them. So, while individual composers, schools of thought, and formal approaches are multifaceted and interdependent, a motive, like the horn call used in Beethoven’s Op. 81a sonata, is both singular and dependent upon no one individual or group. The second way is by interpreting a meta-narrative according to this music’s-eye perspective that does not aim (foolishly) for objectivity but rather for coherence. Since the works which reference Beethoven’s Op 81a self-consciously engage with an esoteric tradition, a fabricated continuity can be applied to them in order to isolate a particular historical vein in which elements of the whole tradition may be manifested in the lower level of a single motive. In order to do this, one must isolate the unit of music in question, divorce it from any single composer, and notice its various attributes when rendered at different points in the history of music.

Footnotes:

1. Leonard B. Meyer. Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. (Berkeley: University of California, 1973) 247.

2. An often quoted passage from Stravinsky’s autobiography Chronicle of My Life, states: “I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all.” On its face, this seems to be a troubling conjecture, particularly coming from one of the Western tradition’s most celebrated artists and thinkers, but, as it is seen here, the quote often appears out of context. As it turns out, Stravinsky amended it later: “The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.” Stravinsky, in fact, acknowledges what he had hoped his stupidest critics wouldn’t assume he was denying.

3. Charles Rosen. Music and Sentiment. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2011) ix.

4. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault among others in the poststructural tradition applied resistance (to the extent of outright rejection) to the validity of author’s intent. Barthes’ 1967 essay La mort de l’auteur did exactly that by rejecting as false the previous assumptions about the relationship of the author’s stated intentions and biographical circumstances to the work itself, assumptions which Barthes saw as too limiting and misguided.

5. It has reached even popular audiences through celebrity endorsement, as is the case with the icon David Bowie who, in 1995, stated: “All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.” It seems that postmodern thought caters nicely to the anti-establishment inclination in vogue with modern culture.

6. Raymond Monelle. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2000).

7. Camille Paglia, a critic of poststructuralism said “the notion that there is no person behind a text” is “pernicious.” Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. (Yale University Press: 1990) 34.

8. Leonard G. Ratner. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. (New York: Schirmer, 1980) 9.

9. Ibid. Page 18.

10. An important example is Tielman Susato’s 1545 publication “Battles, Hunts, and Bird-songs”.

11. The earliest surviving example of the horn used as an assimilated member of the orchestra occurs in Carlo Agostino Badia’s opera Diana rappacificata con Venere e con Amore in 1700.

12. Horace Fitzpatrick. The Horn and Horn-playing: And the Austro-Bohemian Tradition from 1680-1830. (London: Oxford UP, 1970).

13. Raymond Monelle. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2000).

14. Just as in literary theory, constructed formal distinctions in biology are deeply problematic, due to the superficial distinctiveness of individuals, herds, species, and genera. Within the process of reconciling and uniting the various branches of biology known as the Modern evolutionary synthesis, scientists arrived at a “gene-centered” view of evolution, brought to fruition by the work of W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and John Maynard Smith among others. Genes are the units of DNA that code for specific traits. The gene centered view proposes that genes behave “selfishly” in the sense that those whose phenotype improves an organism’s reproductive chances will be promoted within the gene pool by natural selection. This view broke from a tradition that prioritized the perspective of an individual organism to the detriment of a theory that reconciles Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics.

15. Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) 192.

16. “Meme.” Merriam-Webster.com, Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2014. <http://merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme>.

17. Jan, Steven. Memetics of Music 2007.