Demystifying Beethoven's Große Fuge

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Richard Atkinson attempts to demystify Beethoven’s revolutionary Große Fuge for string quartet, Op. 133. This is a fair use educational commentary that uses excerpts from the following recordings/performances:

Excerpts from Beethoven’s late quartets (including the Große Fuge) :
Takács Quartet

Excerpt from B minor fugue from Book I of Bach’s WTC, BWV 869:
András Schiff

Excerpt from Bach’s 3rd Orchestral Suite, BWV 1068:
Deutsche Bachsolisten (Helmut Winschermann, conductor)

00:00 - Video intro
03:03 - "Overtura" (Introduction)
07:55 - Intense fugue #1
17:30 - Meno mosso (slow section)
22:16 - March/scherzo
23:30 - Intense fugue #2
38:14 - Discussion of replacement finale for Op. 130
43:23 - Extended "coda"

[GeodesicBruh]

Ironically, despite being deaf he must have had one of the best inner ears in musical history.

The more i come back to this work the more I understand that I don't understand how he could imagine any of this.

[stefanparrott]

That second fugue is probably my favorite fragment of any composition. It's insane to think it was written almost 200 years ago.

[FiveSharps]

I remember when a string orchestra arrangement of this quartet and Schoenberg's Notturno for Strings and Harp were programmed on the same evening at a concert in my college, and the sheer confusion in the audience when they realised this was beethoven, and not Schoenberg. Truly, one hell of a gorgeous piece.

[PatrickOfTav]

I remember a discussion which happened a long time ago between Hans Keller and Deryck Cooke during an introduction to Schoenberg's Op.31 Variations. Cooke, who thought music stopped at Mahler, said something to the effect that if you can't sing it it isn't music. Keller promptly sang the theme from the Schoenberg and then said to Cooke, "Now sing the Grosse Fuge".

[billguyan]

What I've found with Beethoven's late quartets is that no matter how long you've listened and familiarised yourself with them (and I've listened to them for decades) you frequently hear something you haven't noticed before.

[davidrothstein]

Although I have been listening to classical music for over 50 years, I first heard this composition only 10 years ago. I remember that I was literally paralysed for 20 minutes, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, this was Beethoven in 1825??? This was 100 years before it’s time! Many thanks for this fascinating video!

[luigivercotti]

People cry out "this sounds bad", I don't think so. Not holistically, not if you immerse yourself in the structure of its story. It only "sounds bad" moment-to-moment, and if you go down this slippery slope, all music, if you zoom in enough, sounds ugly, just like you can't see a beautiful picture if you only think about each pixel individually. People often misunderstand my very favourite composer, as I'm sure they did back in the day as well; "Singability", "Catchyness", these are all traits that can be powerful tools in a composer's arsenal, but not universal, and if you're gonna ostracise Beethoven for not constantly relying on them, you should think equally of Bach, with his long-winded, asymmetric, "nonsensical" melody lines. I love his Bm Mass to bits, but it is has even less straight-forward motivic appeal than this. My apologies if I'm about to get a little maudlin, but due to some... impactful, let's say, personal experiences and circumstances surrounding Beethoven's music, I find myself resonant with his works beyond others, I "get" what they're saying so clearly and unambiguously, and it is in his late period, starting the all-important 9th (that many people have brought up in the comments, as it has many similarities with this) that in one of his pieces, no matter if it lasts 5 minutes, or 15, or 50, that from the start to the finish, I have seen my entire life spring into being, pass all its twists and turns, and come to its end. It's not something I can describe in words, much less so in a youtube text wall no-one will read, but the cerebral gist of all this is that Beethoven's music is uniquely dynamic, like a living person, it is not a still frame, but an animation (I mean, it's in the very word). And, well, life can get very ugly and nasty and bad and painful and cruel at times, but it is only to the extent of that uglyness and cruelty that it can also be beautiful, joyful, and exuberant; Because these properties are the two sides of the same coin, like Yin and Yang, one contains the other. And it's not like it's so much of an "acquired taste" or a "hard listen"; Bruckner's 8th is way more of that in my opinion (and so absolutely worth it); It's nowhere near as "catchy" as this. All there is to it, you can't listen to Beethoven and really get it if you're not ready and able to hear a whole story. And I don't judge there, not everyone has, or wants, the time and energy to sit down and listen in this way; Still, people shouldn't be coming to the Große Fuge looking for light entertainment and then blaming the author when they don't get what said author never purported to deliver. Finally however, I can get not liking this even if you do listen "proper". My heart cannot understand it, but cerebrally, it's true people have different tastes and so on. I'm just saying it's not qualitatively different from the Eroica or the Appassionata or the 9th, so if you resonate with one you most certainly can do the same with the other.

[jmrecillas]

I think, my friend, this is the most anticipated video of the year, and not all the thanks in the world will extend and signs my gratitude to all the effort you put on every video you made. This is the best hommage to Beethoven on his 200 anniversary!

[jernejoblak]

Regarding the discussion about which piece should be the final movement of the b flat quartet; a similar thing happened with Beethoven's Waldstein sonata! He originally composed a different 2nd movement - Andante Favori (you can listen to it here on youtube). But when he played the sonata for some patrons and friends they suggested that it doesn't fit well with the rest of the work. Beethoven stormed off but then thought about it thoroughly, concluded they were right and composed the 2nd movement of the Waldstein sonata we all know and love today!

[LuxtremeDE]

Crazy to think that this came out of a real persons mind. Feels like Beethoven was fighting for his life in this piece. Given that he was completely deaf at this point it's even more insane. Great work on the video!

[pablov]

Beethoven was a genius, but he was insane!!! He had to be crazy to leave his own time, his own world and jump more than 100 years and meet Bartok, Webern and the late Stravinsky.
Thank you so much for create and share this video!!!

[ruanpingshan]

When I was in uni, a company was promoting a brain tonic called "essence of chicken".
I asked a friend what is tasted like, and he said it tasted like "a hundred chickens squeezed into a bottle".
The Grosse Fuge sounds like a hundred classical music pieces squeezed into a bottle.

[micheasz]

Beethoven is like history of music in a nutshell. Great video as always !

[davidbudo]

I share your love for fugal music, but not your knowledge. Your hard work driven by incredible passion is truly impressive and I appreciate all of it. Thank you for breaking down a piece of music that has broken me down to tears of joy, sorrow, anguish, rage, elation, and more. To Beethoven and to you, good sir. Cheers!

[olibssb]

Glad you picked the Takács Quartet recording. Love their intensity!

[okrhpyx]

In a way, I met my wife thanks to this incredible piece. We met at a chamber house concert organized by the startup Groupmuse, whose founder decided to start the organization after being immeasurably moved by a recording of the Große Fuge. Thank you, dear Beethoven, as well as Groupmuse, for helping me find the love my life. And thank you, Richard, for creating this brilliant video.

[tinibari]

Well I'll be damned, here's the big one. Literally.

[TGMGame]

The Große Fuge has been a huge inspiration for me. It's one of my favorites of Beethoven.

[fredhoupt]

Best music analysis video I've seen / heard this year. I am really surprised that you didn't mention the great fuge at the end of the Hammerklavier. The G.Fuge has so many textures that remind me so much of the H. fuge. Andras Schiff, in his famous lecture on the great H piano sonata makes it clear that the work was not pretty music at all. The Grosse Fuge fits this description to a "t", as we say. As a matter of my own sense, it seems to me that philosophically speaking, Beethoven had in mind to change the manner in which his audience would think of musical lines. He embarked on completely shaking up sonata writing with the Hammerklavier in 1817. He seems to have pushed chamber musical lines as far as he could go with the G. Fuge in 1825. Chamber music writing was never the same, was it? I mean you would still get the delicious Romantic era musical compositions yet to come. But, the Hammer and the Grosse were unprecedented and totally transformative. I also heard rhythmic motifs that appear in earlier works in his sonatas and quartets.

And, whoever said that Beethoven was not much of a fuge writer should eat their words after listening to this hyper complex monster.
It is not pretty music, as Schiff said of the H. It sounded to me that each instrument was existing in its own dimension. Hence the aural impression is of a 4 dimensional storm, hurricanes and tornadoes that intermingled with each other in fragments, bumped into each and then spun off in different directions. It sounds to me that in Beethoven's imagination he tapped into the creative and destructive powers of nature. The G. Fuge allowed us, so to speak, to see how the universe assembles, disassembles and smashes creation into shape and then repeats the process of tearing apart and assembling. No wonder why Gould was so enamored of this piece. A monster of a piece but totally necessary in the spectrum of what music could be. Beethoven said that the Hammerklavier would give generations of performers trouble for a long time to come. The same could be said for this grenade that he lovingly tossed into the medium of string quartets. BOOM.

[Виталий-яъю]

From a non-musician's perspective, I feel in this piece Beethoven "transforms" the somewhat abrasive original themes in such a way, so in the end they (as if naturally) shed their form and emerge in such blinding sparkle, it takes my breath away every time I hear it.

Also, I can't understand, after years of listening to this piece, how on Earth a deaf man could create such a miracle.