Perceiving Irony in Music: The Problem in Beethoven’s String Quartets

[1.1] In a letter to Sir George Smart, Beethoven mentions his imagined audience for op. 95, the String Quartet in F minor: "NB. The Quartett is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public" (Anderson 1961, 2: Letter 664). In addition to specifying an audience for the quartet, Beethoven (not an editor) titled the work Quartett[o] Serioso (Longyear 1970, 649). The finale of op. 95 mostly conveys pathos (fully deserving of a "serioso" title) until a light-fingered, major-mode Allegro coda in meter emerges (more reminiscent of opera buffa than a tragic Beethovenian string quartet). Joseph Kerman describes op. 95's coda as such:Then, as though something silently snapped, a very fast alla breve section emerges in the major mode, a fantastic evocation of an opera buffa finale in which all the agitation and pathos and tautness and violence of the quartet seem to fly up and be lost like dust in the sunlight. (1971, 182)William Kinderman describes this "brilliant, exhilarating coda" as "problematic" since it "blithely ignores the dramatic tensions of the work up to that point" (1995, 293). In the words of Lewis Lockwood, the coda of op. 95's finale "has baffled many a dedicated Beethovenian" (2003, 329). Perhaps this is why Beethoven suggested the quartet never be performed in public. I understand why Beethovenians feel "baffled." How can they interpret a serious and tragic string quartet with an opera buffa coda? Perhaps Beethoven made an error, miscalculated, or simply solved a problem poorly.[1.2] Vincent d'Indy was frustrated by the coda: "one might imagine [that] some light Rossinian finale had strayed into this atmosphere of sustained beauty, and we think that no interpretation could palliate this error of a genius" (quoted in Watson 2010, 192). Yet Robert Hatten does offer an interpretation. Hatten suggests that if passages of a musical work are inappropriate to the context of an entire piece--such as the "error" of the op. 95 coda--then an "ironic interpretation would be one way to reconcile that inappropriateness as a compositional effect rather than a flaw" (1994, 135). Hatten interprets this coda--which he argues is "neither a miscalculation nor a poorly solved problem"--as ironic, describing it as a "shift in level of discourse" due to a sudden and extreme change to a contrasting genre (1994, 187-88).[1.3] Although irony is difficult to define precisely--Claire Colebrook describes irony as "curiously indefinable" (2004, 1)--many music scholars, including Hatten (1994), Michael Klein (2009), and Esti Sheinberg (2000), agree that irony involves contradiction. In his definition, Hatten describes irony as "a higher-order trope inaugurated by the contradiction between what is claimed (or observed, or done), and a content that cannot support its reality (or appropriateness). . .. there has to be a potential for reversal in interpreting what is 'really meant' by word or deed" (1994, 172). Irony is a compelling way to solve Beethoven's "problem" in op. 95, especially since scholars other than Hatten interpret op. 95's musical "inappropriateness" in this way. For example, Rey Longyear (1970) and Tamara Balter (2009) hear op. 95's coda as ironic, noting that the opera buffa ending destroys the quartet's seriousness. Is there something systematic that prompts these authors to interpret the musical "inappropriateness" of op. 95's coda as ironic? Is it simply contradiction--or is there something more?[1.4] One could ask the same question of language. For many years, music scholars have used knowledge about language to help better understand knowledge about music (e.g. Gjerdingen and Bourne 2015; Swain 1997; Bonds 1991). Linguistic theories may shed light on the way irony works in music, since irony is better understood in this domain. Scholars have identified many types of irony (Colebrook 2004; Muecke 1969). Douglas Muecke boils all types down to two principal kinds: verbal and situational (1970, 25) where "the former is the irony or the ironist being ironical; the latter is the irony of a state of affairs or an event seen as ironic" (1970, 49). …