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.
Undated postcard adaption of Rudolf Eichstaedt’s “Beethoven at dawn in his study” (1899). Image courtesy of the Goethezeitportal
Beethoven (arr. Weingartner), Grosse Fuge (for string orchestra)
The Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi
Archival Recording: London, Royal Albert Hall, September 5, 1990
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.
Alexander Lawler
Alexander Lawler is a Historical Musicology PhD student at Case Western Reserve University. This is his third year working in the Orchestra’s Archives, having previously written “From the Archives” online essays (2015-2016) and designed a photo digitization and metadata project (2016-2017).
The Prometheus Project
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Symphony No. 1
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Symphony No. 7
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Overture to Coriolan
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Symphony No. 5
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Symphony No. 8
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Leonora Overture No. 3
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Symphony No. 2
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Symphony No. 6
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Grosse Fuge
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.
Read more >
Symphony No. 9
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony stands as the culmination of Beethoven’s twenty-four-year career as a composer of symphonies. The Ninth both sums up Beethoven’s artistic career and, with the choral finale, daringly points the way forward to new conceptions of what a symphony could say and be.
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