Dubravka Tomšič and Beethoven’s Appassionata: How (Why) Does the Andante con Moto Work?

I  f experiences and only experiences have ‘intrinsic’ value, then it would seem that playing Beethoven’s Appassionata with great pleasure is no better, intrinsically, than a perfect hallucination.”
  —  Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason, p. 99.

T  he ‘Appassionata,’ in common with most of the works Beethoven wrote in the first decade of the 19th century, is a study in thematic tenacity. His conceit at this period was to create mammoth structures from material that, in lesser hands, would scarcely have afforded a good sixteen-bar introduction. The themes, as such, are usually of minimal interest but are often of such primal urgency that one wonders why it took a Beethoven to think them up.”
  —  Glenn Gould, 1974 liner notes.

Dubravka Tomšič performs this evening in Kansas City. Among the works on the program is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23, Op. 57, ‘Appassionata’. Her performance and interpretation of this belovèd piece manifest a charming, distinctly Slovenian perspective.

Slovenia is this beautiful, mountainous place with about 2 million people—83% Slovenian, 2% Serb, 2% Croat, 1% Bosnian, a few Hungarians, Italians, and miscellaneous others. Approximately one third of them live in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants—Ljubljana, Maribor, Kranj, Celje. The rest live in 6,000 villages—remarkably rural-alpinaceous (just 99.1 inhabitants per square km), a people whose birthright includes a vehement sense of individuality, urgency, and intense interiority. Not coincidentally, Gustav Mahler began his artistic career in Ljubljana, as conductor of the then Stanovsko gledališce (State Theatre) …

But the Slovenian ‘outward’ perspective is very much in sway today. Slovenia has the presidency of the Council of the EU during the first half of 2008, for one thing. It is the first post-communist country to hold the EU presidency, highly symbolic. And there are a phenomenal number of arts and cultural exchange events initiated by the Slovenian Culture Ministry, in this first half of 2008. It is part of the broader European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008.


And Dubravka Tomšič has, in years past, taken time out from her busy performing schedule to speak about her life in eastern Europe and about “Coping with Crisis: International Responses to Instability and Conflict in Eastern Europe and Eurasia” and the role of international music commissioning and touring and cultural exchanges in the sustainability of cities and societies. She is a veritable one-woman International Relations Council.

Each piece, each performance, is imbued with a remarkable inter-cultural wisdom that vivifies our understanding and appreciation of the piece. Beethoven’s Op. 57: the massive first movement; the brief, rapt variations in the middle; the massive bookend of a last movement—in Dubravka’s hands these have the effect of altering our perception of time. The fleeting middle movement makes me aware of the transitoriness of everything; makes me wonder how we humans can ever think that anything of value will last, at all. And yet, here is this sonata, standing as a testament to the durable, intrinsic value—in human endeavor, and in this music—transcending many generations. It’s an astonishingly optimistic feeling that Dubravka conveys to us through this Beethoven.


If there are intrinsically valuable things other than experiences, then our awareness of their value must be achieved through experience: what is ‘good’ in the Appassionata is appreciated in hearing it or playing it. In itself, it doesn’t enter our lives except by performance. And, if it’s unperformed, then (at least part of—) its value is unrealized. So non-experiential goods have ‘inherent value’, distinct from ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘instrumental value’. Robert Audi, a philosopher who has written about these topics, says that rationality allows, but does not require, that there are things of intrinsic value other than ‘experiences’. I rationally desire the intrinsic value of this belief in the durability of humanity that Dubravka expounds; I urgently want it. But there is this dramatic tension, a worry that it may not be so, a worry that some accident might prevent it. Dubravka the Acrobat, on a Beethovenian ‘tight-rope’, defies the odds, scoffs at danger.

O  ne way to see how construing some intrinsic desires as ‘rational’ makes sense is to consider how we assess rationality in people. Can we even conceive of rational persons who are indifferent to their own physical freedom or to their own happiness or suffering—not in the sense that they cannot sacrifice freedom or happiness or endure suffering for certain reasons, but in a sense that implies having no desire to achieve the former and to avoid the latter? It may be that we can be manipulated so as to have no desires whatever, at least for a time. But the question is whether one can conceive a rational person who has desires, but none that are both rational and intrinsic. This seems doubtful … The question here is whether there are rational intrinsic desires, not whether there are any that are non-egoistic.”
  —  Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason, p. 72.

Just as a defensible belief need not be ‘knowledge’, rational action need not be ‘successful’—need not achieve the goals and intentions of the actor. Rational values and rational desires need not be ‘correct’. Just as one can rationally believe a falsehood or rationally seek a goal by insufficient means, one can rationally value or have a rational desire for something that turns out to have a different value or, ultimately, be unworthy of desiring. This thought occurs to us during this sonata…

N  ature is at once psychologically economical and normatively generous. Perception under-determines belief, producing far fewer beliefs than it can support. But it over-determines justification, providing justifying grounds for far more beliefs than we normally form and yielding far more justification than we need as warrant for the many beliefs that we do form. Hearing is quite like seeing in all this. There is the auditory experience of the music; there are certain beliefs evoked by it; and there are dispositions to form beliefs should appropriate needs arise.”
  —  Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason, p. 14.

And the thrills and spills in this piece get even more harrowing. The time-shifting in the second movement of the Appassionata is not ‘apocalyptic’ per se but it is intensely eventful, and it reveals to us the radical non-necessity of the human condition and the occurrences within a given life. Nothing has to happen. Everything is contingent. Some of it happens logically and is amenable to rational desire and action. And other of it happens illogically, uncontrollably, unpredictably. Dubravka launches herself from the platform, executing three turns in mid-air…

T  o say that Hegel and sonata-allegro form rejected Newtonian temporality is not to say that either one presented change as ‘apocalyptic’. Where one fears or hopes that change will be apocalyptic, the past is seen to have been completely repudiated and the future is regarded as a radically new beginning... The very popularity of sonata-allegro form suggests that most middle-class people of the time [1770s - 1830s] did not feel they were undergoing an apocalypse. In the temporality projected by sonata-allegro form, the present calls a future into being. This future is genuinely responsive to the past, unlike the future in an apocalyptic temporality. Yet it also feels like a fresh occurrence, an eventful occurrence, and not one that happens by logical or mechanical necessity—i.e., unlike future occurrences in Newtonian deterministic temporality... The thrust of Newtonian temporality is to see all occurrences as predictable and ‘uneventful’—as occurrences that cannot not happen.”
  —  David Greene, Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music, p. 18.

The second movement, the Andante con Moto: a short theme and variations on a slow, reverential tune in D-flat, comprising two eight-bar sections with repeats. The second ‘section’ starts in A-flat major, with variations as follows:

• derivative of the original theme, with the l.h. playing up-beats;
  
• elaboration of this theme, in sixteenth notes;
  
• embellishments, in thirty-second notes; and
  
• a reprise of the original theme, with small, destabilizing changes.

Instead of resolving peaceably, the closing pair of diminished 7th chords, the first pianissimo and the second fortissimo, propel us right away into the third movement, quite unexpectedly, even though we have heard this and played it ourselves often. How is it possible that this can perpetually captivate us as it does?


It does it, I think, by creating a special urgency—a sense that something eventful is ‘next’; a futurity that we feel intense desire to be part of and to find out about; something that we wish intensely to know or believe, and we don’t know what it is yet. Beethoven (Tomšič) will tell us, and we look forward to this, urgently.

T  he key to feeling the powerful pull of the future in the first movement of Op. 59 [and in Op. 57 and other works] is recognizing the shape of the first theme, of the exposition as a whole, and of the movement as a whole, and then realizing that these shapes are identical. The key to hearing this shape is to notice the discrepancy between the places where the note-to-note continuity is broken. In the sonata forms of Beethoven’s predecessors, the points where the flow halts usually coincide with the points where change occurs, and it is precisely these coincidences that create the identifiable entities or sections that are analogous to one another in the various sonata-allegro movements. In Op. 59 Beethoven gives his listeners clues enough to assure them that they are hearing a sonata-form movement, yet he deviates from the expectations the form implies by putting strong caesuras [half-notes, held, as though a pause in development, as though on one end of the arc of a trapeze ... ] in the middle of themes and in the bridges, while the note-to-note continuity is so strong that one does not hear articulated ‘sections’ that could be identified as a ‘bridge’ or as an ‘exposition closing’.”
  —  David Greene, Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music, p. 73.

You see, some things we believe are believed ‘through’ (and on the basis of—) one or more other things we believe. The former beliefs are indirect, ‘inferential’ beliefs. But what we believe non-inferentially through, say, perception is not believed on the basis of some other belief. We believe it directly, from the experience. These beliefs are ‘perceptual’ beliefs. Something outside us produces belief without needing any prerequisite justification. The priority isn’t temporal, although there may be (and often is) a temporal gap—the rapt variations of this second movement, bookended by the first and the third movements of the Appassionata. The first movement is an arc; the second movement is executed in mid-air; the third movement is the trapeze caught and a new arc again.

But each of us different people has different capabilities—different capacities for action and for belief-formation. It seems evident that the virtuosic playing of which Dubravka Tomsic is capable enables her to believe ‘directly’ and ‘perceptually’ what others of us can only come to believe ‘inferentially’. We marvel at this. The virtuosic acrobat, the mighty Dubravka, intuits directly where the trapeze will be, at the instant when it will be needed and met. By contrast, any acrobat who anticipates the trapeze through inferential belief is a bad, soon-to-be-injured acrobat. More than mere musical virtuosity, Dubravka’s account of the Appassionata is a consummate demonstration of the importance of primal urgency, and of mindfulness of time and of the future. She shows us that, in this era of inter-cultural flux and globalization, it is possible and desirable (necessary?) to be a virtuosically urgent futurist. Working without a net.

• Dubravka Tomšič webpage
  
• Almen B, Pearsall E, eds. Approaches to Meaning in Music. Indiana Univ, 2006.
  
• Audi R. The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality. Oxford Univ, 2001.
  
• Greene D. Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music. Routledge, 1982.
  
• Hatten R. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Indiana Univ, 2004.