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One landmark in the reception history of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, in which Mann places his fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn into the role of the Faustian figure. Leverkühn’s culminating work is a great Faust Cantata entitled Des Fausti Weheklag or “Lament of Faust,” a multi-movement composition bearing an orchestral finale which “revokes” the idealistic message of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Manuscripts recording the genesis of Beethoven’s symphony show that he too had doubts about the choral finale based on Schiller’s poem, since he repeatedly made entries for a “Finale instrumentale” or orchestral finale, whose main theme was subsequently transposed from D minor to A minor when used as the principal subject of the rondo finale of op. 132. A page from the “DeRoda” Sketchbook of 1825 documents the transference of this passionate theme from the symphony to the quartet. In the end, of course, Beethoven remained committed to his remarkable Schiller setting for the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony. But it is worth pondering how the D minor theme not used in the symphony became the main theme of the finale of this second of the “Galizin” quartets, the work in A minor, op. 132. Noteworthy is the rhythmic and motivic kinship between the main theme of the first movement of the symphony and the theme Beethoven transferred to the quartet. While absorbing the preexisting theme into the quartet, Beethoven not only developed the subject and changed its key, but he also chose to preface the finale with a piercing dramatic recitative in the first violin, a gesture unmistakably linked to the quartet’s opening movement. The position of the recitative in the quartet reminds us once more of the Ninth Symphony, whose elaborate recitative passages at the threshold to the finale are bound up with the recall of earlier movements.
The nineteenth-century pioneer of Beethoven sketch studies, Gustav Nottebohm, already observed how Beethoven originally contemplated adding words to the instrumental recitative passages in the Ninth Symphony sketches, words that clarify why the recall of earlier movements is rejected in favor of the adoption of the idealistic Schiller text, with its musical setting in D major suggestive of folksong. Scrutiny of the manuscript sources of the symphony and quartet extends Nottebohm’s observation, and opens up a startling new perspective on these two intimately related works. What Beethoven weighed, in completing the Ninth Symphony, was nothing less than whether the vision of Schillerian collective harmony, of joyful community, could sustain itself against the contrasting modalities of the preceding movements, and especially the despairing character of the great opening Allegro in D minor.
As in the symphony, the quartet’s finale is prefaced by recitative, which here assumes a despairing, tragic character deeply grounded in the work as a whole. The recognition that Beethoven inserted the quartet’s fourth movement, the Alla marcia, at a late compositional stage suggests that he used it as a stylized foil against which the recitative makes its mark. Beethoven’s “Joy” theme and its ensuing variations in the choral finale assume the character of an optimistic march in D major, a march in which gradually all sections of the orchestra and then the vocal soloists and chorus join. In the A minor Quartet, by contrast, a Alla marcia in the major mode precedes the finale; its forthright confident mood is then countered by the darkly impassioned recitative. In this context, Beethoven has inverted and negated the narrative succession of the symphony in his quartet.
Still more thought provoking is the comparison between the symphony’s optimistic “Joy” theme and the crucial initial phrase of the Lydian hymn whose development sustains the climax of the quartet’s great central slow movement. The “Joy” theme circles around the third of D major, rising initially from F#. The opening phrase of the Heiliger Dankgesang in the quartet moves downward from F in a much slower tempo. Structurally, the opening of the Dankgesang is a dark inversion of the head of the “Joy” theme.
Fresh study of the sketches for the quartet thus shows that the parallels between symphony and quartet are closer than has previously been recognized, embodying an instance of “expressive doubling” whereby the quartet, while not “revoking” the Ninth in the sense of Thomas Mann’s character Leverkühn, acts as a dark companion work to the luminous chorale finale. As an investigation of “genetic criticism” (critique génétique), this project has twofold significance: it reveals a contrasting background to the compositional genesis of the idealistic Ninth Symphony finale, exemplifying how a shared narrative design can assume diametrically opposed embodiment in two related works; and it illustrates how related artistic ideas can tend to overspill the singular individual work of art, refusing containment within the project for which they were originally envisioned.