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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2013
Beethoven's famous letter to ‘The Immortal Beloved’ still remains a central reference point for our image of his life and music. Gerald Barry's 2007 composition for bass voice and ensemble – simply entitled Beethoven – sets this text in its entirety, continuing an engagement with Beethoven's own words and presenting a striking juxtaposition of language and music. This article explores the ways in which Barry at times underpins and in other places undercuts the apparent meaning of the words, and how he presents a reading of the letter that is clearly alive to its inherent self-contradictions. Characteristically, Barry brings together a number of highly expressive and strongly contrasted musical characters in this work; an examination of aspects of his compositional language illustrates how material is propagated and form articulated, and explores the way in which these techniques interact in the creation of an expressive and emotionally charged whole.
1 Kramer, Lawrence, Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 299Google Scholar.
2 Kundera, Milan, Immortality (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 87, 89–90Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., p. 89.
4 Ibid., p. 90.
5 See, for example, Korsyn, Kevin, ‘Toward a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Musical Analysis 10 (1991), pp. 3–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Straus, Joseph N., ‘The “Anxiety of Influence” in Twentieth-Century Music’, The Journal of Musicology 9 (1991), pp. 430–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Kramer, Interpreting Music, p. 119.
7 Ibid., p. 125.
8 Ibid., p. 116.
9 Ibid., pp. 117–8.
10 Ibid., p. 117.
11 London Sinfonietta, Gerald Barry, London Sinfonietta Podcast 8. [podcast] 4 March 2010. Available at: http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/lsfaudio/london-sinfonietta-podcast-8-gerald-barry [Accessed: 7 September 2011].
12 May, William, ‘Interview with Gerald Barry’, Contemporary Music Review, 29 no.2 (2010), p. 183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Solomon, Maynard, Beethoven [Second Revised Edition] (New York: Schirmer, 1998), pp. 209–11Google Scholar.
14 These three works are nearly 40 years older than Barry's, all dating from the 1970 Beethoven bicentenary, which Beate Kutschke has explored in a specifically West German context: ‘The Celebration of Beethoven's Bicentennial in 1970: The Antiauthoritarian Movement and its Impact on Radical Avant-garde and Postmodern Music in West Germany’, The Musical Quarterly 93 (2000), 560–615Google Scholar.
15 Solomon, Beethoven, 246.
16 London Sinfonietta, Gerald Barry, London Sinfonietta Podcast 8. [podcast] 4 March 2010. Available at: http://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/lsfaudio/london-sinfonietta-podcast-8-gerald-barry [Accessed: 7 September 2011].
17 A work such as Bob (1989) has almost twice this number of sections in its ten-minute duration.
18 This is highly characteristic of Barry's recent music, and reaches an extreme in L'Agitation des Observateurs, Le Tremblement des Voyeurs (2003) where almost the entirety of the work is made up from two short sequences – one obsessively reworked in this way, the other directly repeated. The exception is a single brief trumpet solo that stands between them – its appearance made all the more remarkable, of course, in that highly restricted context.
19 This is a further characteristic technique of Barry's, and one he has employed over many years; conspicuous recent examples include Lisbon (2006) and First Sorrow (2006–7).
20 Solomon, Beethoven, p. 244.
21 This technique is also used extensively in a work such as First Sorrow.
22 Keller, Hans and Cosman, Milein, Stravinsky Seen and Heard (London: Toccata Press, 1982), p. 56Google Scholar.
23 Kevin Volans, Liner notes to Gerald Barry Orchestral Works, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland c. Robert Houlihan. Marco Polo, 8.225006 (1997), 3.
24 Kramer, Interpreting Music, p. 119.
25 Botstein, Leon, ‘Why Beethoven?’ The Musical Quarterly 93 (2000), pp. 363–4Google Scholar.
