Unknown Planet

The Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue) is Beethoven’s most complex work. It was originally to be the last movement of his String Quartet No. 13. However, it unluckily proved to be both technically challenging for the performers and bewildering to the audience, and was, instead, turned into its own stand-alone work.

Franz Welser-Möst has described how Beethoven creates whole worlds in his pieces, and the Grosse Fuge is no exception: through its complexity, he has conjured a vast cosmos of sound and invited the listener to delve into its mysteries. And yet, true to the promethean ideology undergirding much of his music, Beethoven left the Grosse Fuge open-ended, allowing the listener an opportunity to grapple with its fiery creativity, and to decide for himself or herself what meaning it could hold for them.

The Grosse Fuge is a double fugue on an immense scale. A fugue is a musical form dating back to the Baroque era in which one instrument introduces a theme (referred to as the subject), that will be passed among all of the other instruments. Throughout the piece, the subject returns, sometimes in full; other times, in fragments. In a double fugue, two different subjects are introduced at once, effectively doubling the piece’s information density. In addition, Beethoven has merged the double fugue with any number of other forms — sonata form, a single-movement symphony, or even opera — to create a “metagenre” that subsumes aspects of each form.¹ Combined with edgy dissonances and complex rhythms, the Grosse Fuge challenges listeners to stretch their ears and explore its rich sound world — a true promethean endeavor.

¹ Daverio, John. “Manner, Tone, and Tendency in Beethoven’s Chamber Music for Strings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, edited by Glenn Stanley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163.

—  Dr. Alexis Lawler worked in The Cleveland Orchestra Archives and completed The Prometheus Project while a Historical Musicology PhD student at Case Western Reserve University.