Lecture 8, Question 2: Could Op. 101 influence artists in other media?

[Jill_Curtis Institute]

Op. 101 was very influential to later composers. Could its structure—a narrative that comes into focus only gradually—have been influential to artists in other media, such as novelists or playwrights or filmmakers?

[hartma...@gmail.com]

From my experience I find other pieces more influential: opus 111, opus 106, the bagatelles, some string quartetts, Kreutzer-sonata.
But I admit that I can only answer this from an amateur's side. There are some pieces of art that come up to my memory instantaneously.
If I was an artist the sonata that I would take as an anchor probably would be Waldstein or Les Adieux.
But I can say that opus 101 was fascinating me because of the March. Then I played the first movement which is technically easy. And I put some exercising into the last movement. That I consider a real difficult movement, absolutely written against the natural movements of my paws.
But I like opus 101 very much. However, it does not raise any wish to transform it into a different piece of art.
I have to admit that only after listening to the lecture I find the explanation of uncertainty interesting. I could find pleasure in listening to it and playing without a deeper explanation.
Even now, when this question is asked, I am wondering if I would start with this sonata as seed for a short story. But if I would do so, it would have a plot like:
A guy is stuck in his personal development. He is also not very happy in his relationship to a girl whom he adores.
By the way he is playing piano and he is stuck with this sonata.
Somehow, it does not come "naturally" for him. He has to practice a lot and he finds it difficult to form a continuous thread through the sonata.
He practices and practices but does not achieve a feeling of accomplishment.
Time goes by. He loses contact to the adored girl. Somehow, he can not emanate a certain sense of contentment and the girl does not appreciate his moodyness.
He becomes a business man, quite successful and remains a bachelor.
He keeps his hobby of playing piano and uses to play Chopin and Rachmaninov.
At a conference he meets a woman who arouses some interest in him.
He manages to appoint a date and they spend a nice evening (not night) together.
Although their conversation is lively and entertaining, there remains a shadow over her.
After a week they have another meeting (the woman lives in the same city as he) and the meetings become more frequent.
There is an erotic atmosphere but no opportunity to catch on to it. It seems to mold into a sincere friendship.
One evening he cleans up his scores at the piano and accidentally opens the volume with the sonata 101. He tries whether he can still play it.
The first movement he plays rather slowly, the second more in tempo, as he had practiced it quite well.
When he plays the third movement he suddenly thinks about the woman he has met. He associates the handling of melodies in the different hands with their talks and discussions.
After the intermezzo of the first movement he plunges into the last movement..
Amazingly, he can play it quite well, he indulges in the second theme.
When he comes to the fugue he feels as if he were drugged. (He has never taken drugs, he just imagines that it must feel like it.)
When he plays the final accords everything feels right and ok. He feels as if a knot has been untied that has had him
fixed since his youth. He calls the woman and asks her if she could still meet him today.
It is already late, they can only meet in a diner. He proposes her.

That would be my scenario :)

[elva.g...@gmail.com]

I really like this question because I was actually thinking about just as a genius musician can open new ways of doing things, so do artists of other media.

For one, I was thinking of Quentin Tarrantino's Pulp Fiction. It starts with a story, then goes back in time and switches story for story and only at the end are all the stories resolved. It's like "pulling a note" .

[Doris Fine]

Journeys, movements from one place to the next, lost, seeking a harbor, a home. Those are themes the literature of the 19th century developed, and which filmmakers in the 20th continued. The uprooting of place, of certainty in one's beliefs --these are the sources of the writers we return to again and again--Tolstoy and James, Thomas Mann and Flaubert. Some journeys ended well, but many not. Beethoven was emotionally in tune with his times, if not with the turn to alienation and despair in the later literature of Camus and Sartre. The English, like the Americans, felt it less than Europeans but the search for a "haven in a heartless world" is there as well in the works of Bellow and Roth, in TS Eliot and Auden. Today as we see the faces of the homeless, the immigrants lost at sea in a world riven by discord and violence --we can be sure that soon new stories of journeys will emerge. We are all "wanderers" now.

[avedelato...@gmail.com]

One novel that Op. 101 reminds me of is Henry James's _The Ambassadors_ in that the novel opens with the radical uncertainty of its main protagonist, Lambert Strether, a middle-aged American from Boston given the task of retrieving the wayward son of friends who is leading a mysterious life in Paris. Strether feels out of his depth in Europe and feels wistful that somehow his present experiences should have occurred to him at a younger age, the age of the young man he is bound to draw back into the family orbit. In fact the novel opens with a question..."Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted." Perhaps Beethoven felt the same way about tonic A-major as Strether feels about his friend Waymarsh? In any case, the novel's ending surprisingly arrives at certainty, however, of a different tonality than Beethoven's--not very triumphant, but certain all the same! The reason for the lack of triumph has to do with Strether's ineradicable wistfulness about feeling superannuated, that life has passed him by, and yet accepting the fact with a gracious, calm maturity.

[gabrie...@gmail.com]

My post does not answer the question directly. To me Beethoven in general, and in the last period of his life in particular, is analogous to a surcharge secretion of the "flight or fight' hormone, or an over-stimulated sympathetic nervous system. I do not know if Beethoven ever rested in peace. I certainly do not rest in peace listening to his music, and that is exactly what attracts me to that music.

[clsn...@gmail.com]

Perhaps it is the other way around--plays influenced Op.101. "Oedipus" is a play in which the story is slowly developing, until the truth finally comes out. "Hamlet" is the same way. We start with a ghost making an accusation and the story slowly unfolds to the resolution. Stage plays have always used this kind of development. (But I can't imagine a 3-act play with the equivalent of a "march" for the second act.)

To me Op. 101 is more like a soap opera or like "Under the Dome," where we get partial resolutions throughout but are always left hanging, wondering if everything will ever be resolved. But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that Stephen King was influenced by Op. 101.

[greer...@me.com]

Yes. Especially in short stories as employed by O. Henry, E.A. Poe, and Rod Serling. Mr. Serling's
use of this technique was successfully applied to television in the "Twilight Zone" series. This structure has also been integral part of plots for television through the years.

[kmus...@gullotta.it]

Un possibile parallelismo andrebbe ricercato con la corrente cinematografica della Nouvelle Vague sviluppatasi in Francia alla fine degli anni ’50 dello scorso secolo. Come è noto questa nuova concezione cinematografica intende proporre il divenire nello stesso istante in cui prende vita. Scopo della filmografia della Nouvelle Vague è quella di proporre il punto di vista dell’autore (in questo caso il regista) che nel raccontare la realtà, che scorre davanti alla sua cinepresa, ne coglie l’essenza, l’anima.

[richard....@unibas.ch]

I immediately thought of Henry James when Bliss posed this question. But first, just parenthetically, I love The Ambassadors. Since my wife and I have an apartment in Paris we once traced Strether's movements through Paris on those first days of his return there, and especially his walk from near Palais Garnier to Luxembourg to read his letters. Yes, it is still all there as Henry James described it.
But there is so much of James that takes this path of uncertainty. Perhaps The Turn of the Screw is the supreme example, holding the tension of ambiguity to the very end with a finale which may or may not give an answer. Perhaps there is no one answer but it is up to every reader to provide his own answer as to the reliability of the Governess.

[richard....@unibas.ch]

I just made a specific reply to "avedelato" but here are some more general thoughts. Is your basic question not but a bit far-fetched? I am sure many works come to mind but are they really works influenced by opus 101 or are they perhaps the result of structures which many creative individuals have invented for themselves without the benefit of a profound analysis of this sonata as Mr. Bliss has provided us with. Almost any film by Hitchcock, such as his Rebecca after Daphne du Maurier, would fit the bill. And there is Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, which fits the bill even more than the original source, Rodenbach.s Bruges-la-Morte. But again I ask whether any such examples were inspired by opus 101?

[avedelato...@gmail.com]

Richard,

Mr. Biss posed the question, I believe, not me. I merely said that the James novel reminded me of opus 101, not that the author himself was influenced by the sonata to plot his novel the way he did.

My more general musings would be along the lines broached by Susanne Langer in her classic work, Philosophy in a New Key or Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel. I took Mr. Biss' question to be merely an invitation to let one's associations run wild, to play the glass bead game with cultural objects!

My full handle is ave de latour maubourg, perhaps now blvd latour maubourg? You might like to find it and muse on what novel staged a scene on that Paris street. That should be easy for you.

[wpaulsmit...@gmail.com]

Again, I'm only an amateur, but that entire darkness-to-light, uncertainty-to-certainty motif seems to have informed many art forms throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. Consider, for example "Tristan und Isolde" and "The Flying Dutchman." The trans-formative power of love. I'm also thinking of "Crime and Punishment." For me, as an individual reader, all of the darkness that pervades the novel is swept away at its conclusion by Sonya's decision to follow Rodion to Siberia. Finally, I would mention the absolutely remarkable Sibelius Symphony No. 2. There is a "darkness" that pervades the entire work that is only renounced in the final moments of the finale. For me, that finale is the greatest symphonic movement ever. No matter how many times I hear it, it affects me, powerfully.

[shen.m...@gmail.com]

Listening to op 101, it's almost like a story, and the transition to focus in the middle is unexpected. I'm not sure if I can articulate how I feel about this piece, maybe how I feel about it will change overtime.

However, I would agree that his work has influenced other artistis.

[Shannon Thomas]

Though I don't know of any specific works Op. 101 influenced, it certainly could have done so. Inspiration and influence can come from many different places and all art forms take and give a lot to each other. 

[arthur_...@brown.edu]

The progression from a complex questions to a strong personal complex emotion deeply felt by the author can be seen in many novelists filmmakers and playwrights . To give one example well known to many, Shakespeare in "King Lear". The witches brew only raises the complex questions that lead to a strong emotional and complex expression by the protagonist,ans the author, dealing with raw feelings to universal question of aging.

[kristinoh...@gmail.com]

Of course it is possible that Op. 101 influenced artists within their own work. But such is the case with all art and music, not just Beethoven. A painting can just as easily influence a musical piece, or a play can inspire a sculpture. I'm sure this piece and Beethoven generally inspired a lot of artists in his time and since.
However, I can't say that I find this the most inspiring of the sonatas we've studied.

[womanwithabook]

First of all, I don't remember such litterary works from that period. Even if there are such works, I don't know how you could tell if it's Beethoven's influence or just Zeitgeist.

[rebecca s]

i thought debussy a little bit during some parts.

[i.hy...@gmail.com]

I think many classical narratives feature a heroic character going through a descent/conflict, and coming back out if the genre is comedy, and not if it is a tragedy. Such examples are variations of Hercules, Hamlet, and so on. I think this is similar to the classical sonata form of exposition with a clearly established tonic key to begin with, moving into dominant, going through development then back to tonic in recapitulation. However, more recent works, particularly coming-of-age novels, feature characters who are conflicted to begin with, full of uncertainties and self-doubt, until they come to a realization. Such is a narrative that is so powerfully rendered in Beethoven's Opus 101. 

[robertg...@gmail.com]

The ability the step back and see the former things/idea in a new light or perspective as what happened in the reappearance of the 1st Mvt main theme just before the finale. 

[Jose Mendez]

Absolutely, and I think it certainly did. Take for example the third movement: "Langsam und sehnsuchtsvoll" (slowly and longingly) -- its melodic structure, rhythm and mood lends itself perfectly into Impressionism [makes me think of the early piano works by Debussy and Faure]

[George Konstantinidis]

It reminds me of novels or films where the main characters are being slowly discovered by us, the readers-viewers,as the narrator leaves hints here and there to arouse our curiocity and critical mind,in such a way that our interest keeps building up.I think Beethoven s late work is modern in that sence of uncertainty and constant searching that runs through all of it.

[Dalia King]

It makes me think of shows and large novels that slowly feed you a little bit of information about the characters, one episode or chapter at a time. This structure is widely used over many different types of media, and I wouldn't doubt that Op. 101 was one of the many influences.

[K P]

I think that the op.101 sonata can be placed in many scenes/settings in books, movies, and plays. This piece shows a sense of longing, or a want of a proper conclusion, that it can portray a character who may be in search of someone, a character who was separated with their family, someone who is in desperate need of an answer, etc. I think this sonata shows a real story; first, a wistful longing, second, a more aggressive march, and third, the total darkness, followed by another uncertainty and a final doubt-certainty ending. 

If this piece can portray a story, and can be used in scenes of books and movies, I think that it could have influences novelists, playwrights/filmmakers. 

2015年6月1日月曜日 9:34:33 UTC+10 Jill_Curtis Institute:

[Holly Anderson]

All artistic movements inwardly and outwardly reflect each other across literature, theatre and music and so I have no doubt that the idea of influence extends to this as well. Whilst I can't think of an exact example, the narrative created by Op. 101 feels very much like a film, in emotional segments.