He lowers the needle.
The more Vernon has listened to this piece—perhaps forty times so far—the more convinced he is that Beethoven was wrong to listen to his dumbass friends and divorce the Grosse Fuge from it. Apparently others think so, too, since many quartets, like the Lindsay, have reverted to the original version. Not that Vernon understands the Grosse Fuge. Far from it.
Jesus, he loves the way these four Brits play. The second movement, the Presto, is one of those driving pieces Beethoven conjures out of nothing, the tiniest shred of a motif. The third, the Andante, oh god . . . it’s so beautiful. The first statement of the theme (is it a gavotte? an allemand?) is by the viola, and in the old days of first-violin tyranny you could never hear it properly. (Wait—could it be a bourrée?) There’s a moment where the music halts on a chord in a new key and then executes these dropping fourths that sound like an annunciation, like the end of a recitative in Messiah just before the trumpet sounds (We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye) and then a couple of measures later, everyone stops playing except for the first violin, which hits an accented note that sounds completely out of the key, Vernon has always wondered if it’s a tritone, but . . . Holy shit! He just now figured it out, just this moment—it’s a Neapolitan 6th!
Mark, listen—!
Time rushes on, to the fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca, serene and lovely, and then the side is over. Vernon sweeps Vargas off his stomach—the cat pooled against the score, blocking the bottom stanza with his butt—gets up to flip the record. “No,” he says to Vargas, walling off his lap with the sheet music. “I mean it.”
Now the Cavatina. Beethoven told an acquaintance he had never written anything that moved him so much. In the middle there’s an eerie passage he marked “Afflicted,” in which the lower instruments keep time in glacial eighth-note triplets like the tick of a cosmic clock, while the violin, in conflicting sixteenths, plays a halting series of notes that sound uncannily like a human voice, wandering and crying, unable even to formulate a question, let alone find an answer. (No facile “It Must Be!” comforts here.) Of all the violinists of all the quartets, Lindsay’s Peter Cropper best brings out a feeling of anguished incomprehension. He somehow can make a single note sound bereft. Then the opening song returns, and though it’s mainly a song of mourning, toward the end it rises to the hopeful major third above the tonic, first in the violin, then the cello. The piece dies slowly into silence on this same major third.
The Cavatina is the last piece of music on the Golden Record that went into space with the two Voyager probes. (It occurs to Vernon that Mark might not know this, since he was only a teenager when the Voyagers lifted off. That might be a good reason to call . . .) The record was nothing but a public relations stunt by Carl Sagan, as there’s essentially no chance that an intelligent extraterrestrial, even if the galaxy were crawling with them, would stumble across this microscopic mote in the vastness of space. But Sagan’s a genius. Even Vernon, against his better judgment, kind of loves the idea of the Golden Record. That lonely, frightened voice of Beethoven’s cavatina, deciding at the last moment to choose hope, sailing out of the solar system at 17 kilometers per second, having to wait 40,000 years before encountering another star system, Gliese 445—where maybe the unfathomable aliens are playing the Grosse Fuge.
Speak of the devil, here it comes, starting on that same hopeful G that ended the Cavatina, but twisting it immediately—up a half step, then jumping up a sixth and down a half step, repeating—into something serpentine and sinister. (Word through the grapevine is that Sagan is dying.) Vernon will never understand the Grosse Fuge. Sixteen minutes of cacophony. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe here, only here, Beethoven deliberately stepped beyond the edge of the comprehensible. (He’s only sixty-two. Some kind of cancer, they say. Maybe it was electromagnetic signals from outer space, kissing him back.)
Fugues are probably the most orderly form of composition that exists. Beethoven grew up playing Bach fugues. He wrote more and more of his own as he turned old and deaf, and failed in all his loves, and discovered his life was shit. So maybe this piece is about life’s chaos, and the attempt of the mind—never succeeding, but forever trying—to grasp it. Look, the most chaotic part is the first 158 measures. They play like a gradual breakdown of order, beginning in unison, then launching into a double fugue that’s jarring and complicated to begin with, then introducing polyrhythms with triplets, then adding a layer of sixteenths, and finally going completely off the rails with hammering triplets fighting against the fugue subject now racing along at four times its original speed and accented off the beat.
Then what happens? The four shouting voices come to a sudden halt, and starting in measure 159
