The Classical Stereotype: Slow movements

You can't understand anything until you have heard [the slow movement of Beethoven's A Minor String Quartet]… It proves all kinds of things—God, the soul, goodness—unescapably. It's the only real proof that exists; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. -Aldous Huxley, from Point Counterpoint

Does anyone else skip the [slow] movement when listening to classical music? Or do I just have no soul? -u/masurokku, reddit.com/r/classicalmusic

A bit of the slow movement from the Op. 135 string quartet, played by a full string orchestra and Seiji Ozawa:

How is it that the slow movements came to carry the mantle for classical music?

Slow movements are a bit of an acquired taste. As a teenager, I was more like redditor u/masurokku, skipping over anything marked Andante, Adagio, or Lento, the Italian indications for pretty slow, slower, and slowest (not to mention Largo). Now I find myself more aligned with Huxley.

The slow movement is what the lay person usually thinks of when they think of classical music: slow, quiet, beautiful melodies, like the Amy Beach Piano Quintet:

This music can feel just like the Nocturnes we heard earlier. It's often the music that features on playlists like “Calming Classical” or “Classical for Studying” or “Classical for Bedtime.”

Many slow movements, like Barber's Adagio for Strings or Ives' The Alcotts, stand well on their own.

But the vast majority—even the most famous, like the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata or Mozart's Clarinet Concerto—have one key difference from a Nocturne. They come after a fast movement!

The interpretation chain for a slow movement is not just

This Music > Performer > Listener

but is more like

The music before this one > Music > Performer > Listener.

These slow movements are not just there to be pretty, but to play a part in the tension and drama of the work as a whole. In this chapter, we'll look at the line they walk between tension and peace—when a slow movement can put us to rest, and when it can stretch us taut.

Calming Classical?

I've always found it a bit ironic that my favorite cello solo is in a piano concerto—and my favorite moment from a piano concerto is its cello solo. But you have to imagine we've just come from this movement in the Brahms 2nd Concerto…

and go into this, longing for repose…

Ah, to land in something so simple. In luminous B-Flat Major, without harmonic adventures further afield. The timbre of a beautiful solo cello with generous vibrato. A melody that moves gently to its neighboring notes but largely stays content to stay put.

As we said in the opera chapter, writing lyrics to something is a great shortcut to interpreting it. I might write something from a far-off dream, thinking of one's love in a distant memory, like:

My sleep grows ever quieter, Only my grief, like a veil, Lies trembling over me. I often hear you in my dreams Calling outside my door, No one keeps watch and lets you in, I awake and weep bitterly. Yes, I shall have to die, You will kiss another When I am pale and cold. Before May breezes blow, Before the thrush sings in the wood; If you would see me once again, Come soon, come soon!

Wait, what? My grief, like a veil, lies trembling over me? No, of course I did not write this. But Brahms did choose this, setting exactly these words to this melody in a later song.^†

Probably I would have come up with something a little less angsty for this tune. Or a lot less angsty. So much for simplicity and respite. Do you think the performers were even interpreting the music in the German Romantic way? Well… actually this video is from a workshop and you can see exactly what they were thinking—and they just sang the entire song with the lyrics. So, yes, I suppose they were.

But perhaps there is some ambiguity? As if to drive the point home, the clarinets quote the melody from Brahms' song Todessehnen (“Longing for Death”): “Ah, who will take from my soul this secret, heavy burden that, the more I conceal, the more strongly it grips me? Don’t you wish finally to break my tormented, anguished heart?” I guess the context is pretty clear.

Find yourself in the classical musicians' corner of the internet, and you'll find a barrage of complaints about people calling something “relaxing” and “pretty” that they find tormenting or shattering. Add the context of Brahms' personal tragedy—his best friend Robert Schumann, driven to attempt suicide, and Brahms with his own deep love for Robert's wife Clara, whom he could never have—and it can even feel offensive in some way to feel relaxed and entertained as Brahms sobs into the piano.

I've certainly felt a pang of guilt before, falling asleep peacefully to a piece where I know that the preceding people in the interpretation chain were all in anguish.

If you listen to the movement again with all the context in mind, it's hard not to all of a sudden hear the sorrow in it.

Do I wish, then, that I had the “correct” context the first time I heard the melody? Honestly, I don't. This is simply the process of listening to classical music. Sometimes you'll miss the composer's point, but receive something else instead.

Roland Barthes wrote, “freedom of listening is as necessary as freedom of speech.”

You can listen to a piece for twenty years and think one thing, and then hear a new interpretation and have it change all your assumptions.

Storms and Forms

But there's a moment in many slow movements—including this Brahms—where it feels like something external intrudes on an introspective moment. Our bedtime playlist creator forgot about the middle section of the piece. We get a storm.

The middle section of a slow movement is often called the B section, because the form is roughly an ABA. The beginning and the end are the same, but something “happens” in the middle. Just as the first movement sets up the slow movement, the A section sets up the B section. ^📖

Here is a bit of Schubert's penultimate piano sonata, D.959 in A Major.

The opening gives us a clear, memorable theme and mood for the A section:

Like long sonata-form movements, long slow movements need a sense of a long line. For me, Barnatan handles this Schubert line so beautifully, not breaking up all these small phrases into opportunities to smell the roses but taking this whole opening statement in a single breath. Even with the left-hand octaves marking time every measure, it still feels somehow like it soars rather than plods.

But then after he closes the opening section, Schubert begins to search, almost as if in a sonata-form development…

In “My Dream,” Schubert wrote, “For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love. . . . Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus were love and pain divided in me.”

Never was there a more apt description of the tension held in his slow movements, and how his major-key music, which “should” be joyful, makes us fall apart.

As love and pain were divided for Schubert, so most slow movements contain the duality of tension and relaxation. Each party in the interpretation chain can change the balance like a slider on an equalizer by looking for one or the other. Schubert can offer opportunities aplenty for pain; a pianist might look for the love; a listener might be confused and hear just a bit of both.

The effects will become more extreme if composer, interpreter, and listener are all aligned.

Stretching a Rubber Band

In Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2, the tension is unambiguous even in the slowest, quietest passages. This is one of his most often-played pieces of chamber music, with a well-loved slow movement, and yet I've never seen it show up on any “relaxing” playlists.

Shostakovich creates the tension by pulling a rubber band to the edge of its breaking point—slowly and deliberately—and then holding it there.

This stretching—created with dissonance and long-held notes—can be found in so much of the music of Shostakovich and his compatriot Prokofiev, especially the works that reflect their lives under Stalin. This specific brand seems to be a specialty of composers under Soviet rule—Alfred Schnittke and Lera Auerbach picked up the mantle from Shostakovich and Prokofiev, often pushing further.

The resulting effect is disturbing, even painful. But somehow I still find it beautiful, for some definition of the word, and I want it to stay. It is the sensation of a massage that finds a tender spot and lingers. It is the sensation of looking at the photo of a moment or a person now gone.

These slow movements, from his Cello Concerto to his string quartets, pull you apart and don't put you back together—they would need another movement for that. Sometimes Shostakovich will oblige, sometimes not—you have to wait and see.

But this technique, at its extreme in Shostakovich, can also be seen throughout the repertoire, used long before Shostakovich.

Bach's recorder duet from the Sonatina (“little sonata”) Actus Tragicus, above, may sound less grating to our modern ears than Shostakovich's music.

The two musicians can't seem to come together for more than a moment, one constantly slipping into dissonance, and then the other. But this repetition gives us the same sensation precisely because we know that these notes can be played together. Each time they separate we desire their resolution more and more.

This creates tension so instantly and effectively that the Actus Tragicus doesn't even need a fast movement to start it—he just dives right in with this Molto Adagio (very slow).

The Ambiguous

It can be tempting to look at the Shostakovich and the Bach and come up with a shorthand, something like stretching = pain (even if it feels good). But shorthands are trouble in classical music. As we've seen time and again, every time we think we've established a rule, we see it disproven, a constant reminder to return to first principles and just listen to each moment and see what it evokes.

The Adagietto in Mahler's Fifth Symphony is ripe with dissonance and chromaticism—the use of those notes, often grating, that don't belong to the home key. But the magic of Mahler is that dissonance and chromaticism hold so much nuance and potential.

Mahler leans on all of its dissonances (appoggiaturas), but this time in service of a love letter to his wife Alma. The pain feels like yearning—related to the Shostakovich-like feeling of looking at a photo of someone who is gone—but this time it is the photo of someone who you will see again soon.

Or at least historians tell us that this piece is a love letter. The interpretation chain doesn't end with Mahler. Leonard Bernstein, one of the great conductors of Mahler, played this movement by itself at funerals (namely, Robert F. Kennedy's)—so actually, it was exactly like looking at the photo of someone who is long gone.^💬 Then again, Bernstein might even perform the movement differently when it's in the context of the whole symphony.

When you go to a concert hall, you might get an Adagietto of love or an Adagietto of death / why not both at the same time. Sometimes the conductor's interpretation might be strong enough that it directs your thoughts to a specific person. Or you might go to the concert and supply the person yourself, willing the music's ambiguity to form around your experience.

Or, of course, you could just not think about anyone at all, and just feel the pull of the dissonances and the releases of the resolutions.

Regardless, how a listener perceives the slow movement is not just about what comes before, but also what comes after. In the case of Mahler's Adagietto, it is followed by a celebratory finale.

In many other pieces, what comes next is a scherzo, a light, fast movement that clears the air. We'll look at these next.