The Classical Stereotype: Slow movements

Why 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. Peaceful. Nocturnal, like the night music we looked at earlier. Of course, this doesn't describe all slow movements, but it does describe many of the most famous—the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata or Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, say.

We've talked about a deep listening to this music at length in our discussion of Nocturnes, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it now, other than to remind us what it might feel like to let yourself get carried away by some music full of tenderness and longing, restraint and expressiveness all at the same time. The opening theme from the Amy Beach Piano Quintet:

These are the pieces that make people cry and make them classical converts for life. These are also the pieces that give classical music its reputation as boring, sleep-inducing background music.

But all slow movements are not made equal. In this chapter we're going to talk about four different ways of looking at slow movements: the beautiful tune, the storm-filled self-contained world, and the tense and unsettling.

Beautiful, heartfelt, tuneful

One problem is the context. Some slow movements work well by themselves, like the Barber Adagio for Strings or Ives' The Alcotts. But the majority were written to be sandwiched between fast movements which grab your attention and set the stage—and put you in a position where you're longing for a few minutes of respite from the drama.

As a cellist and pianist, I've always found it a bit ironic that my favorite cello music is from a piano concerto, and my favorite moment from a piano concerto is a cello solo. But you have to imagine we've just come from this movement of Brahms…

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, setting this melody to exactly these words by Hermann Lingg in a later song (translation from Richard Stokes).

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

But perhaps there is some ambiguity? The listener, after all, is the last link in the interpretation chain, and is entitled to experience whatever they experience. But 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?' Pretty unambiguous, if you ask me.

There is nothing that peeves musicians more than people calling something “relaxing” and “pretty” that they find tormenting or shattering. And when you add the context of Brahms' personal tragedy—his best friend Robert Schumann, driven to suicide, and Brahms with his own deep love for Robert's wife Clara, whom he could never have—it feels offensive in some way to feel relaxed and entertained as Brahms sobs into the piano.

If you listen to the movement again with all the context, it will be impossible not to hear the sorrow in it. Do you wish, then, that you had the correct context the first time you hear the melody? Honestly, I don't. Even with all the context in the world, you can still end up like the two music writers from our introduction contemplating the Brahms Piano Quintet, one calling it “bright ringing laughter” and another calling it “desolate indeed.”

There is a stormier section to this movement. I always thought of it as something external intruding on this introspective moment. But it never occurred to me that even this opening cello solo already contained an image like this one: a man lies dying, his grief trembling over him like a veil. He dreams that his beloved is calling outside but nobody lets them in, and he wakes up and weeps. Oof.

There will be many things that change your experience of a piece over a lifetime of listening to it. 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. This is the process of listening to classical music. I still think the first listen should let the composer and the performers speak to you directly, the way it was originally intended.

Storms

But I want to dive into the idea of the slow movement “storm.” Virtually all slow movements, no matter how simple, how peaceful and Nocturne-like they seem from the start have some sort of contrasting material.

The form is often called song form, or ABA, because the piece's start and end sandwich something different in the middle. This is not wholly unlike a Sonata-Allegro's development section, but the middle section of song form can be seemingly unrelated to the outer sections, rather than just a development on earlier themes. But there is a spectrum to just how much the middle section departs from the movement's basic mood.

Nocturnes take this form, too, even the short ones. When song form is used in an aria in an opera, it usually is more reflective, not advancing the plot. But in the hands of the great slow movement composers like Schubert, this form can expand to contain entire worlds and complete stories within itself, just as much so as the big Sonata-Allegro movements.

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

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

Like when dealing with 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 “joyful” music always makes us fall apart.

Stretching a Rubber Band

The next type of slow movement is the one full of seething tension, like pulling a rubber band to its breaking point. In these movements, the slower pace still gives us something different to listen to, but they stretch rather than release the tension.

In Schubert, we saw climaxes happening with volume and surprise. In Beethoven, with counterpoint and layering of voices in a fugue.

But Shostakovich creates the same amount of tension in the quietest passages with just dissonance, holding notes that clash with each other.

Take this passage from Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2:

This stretching can be found in so much of the music of Shostakovich (his ravishing Cello Concerto, for instance) and his compatriot Prokofiev, which reflects their lives under Stalin. Soviet and Russian composer Alfred Schnittke picked up the mantle from them. The tradition continues today in some of the music of Soviet-born composer Lera Auerbach.

But this effect was used long before them. The suspensions of Bach—places where he holds one note while another changes to create a dissonance—were early precursors. And even the slow movement from Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto (before the 2nd one we saw earlier) uses suspensions to great effect.

Beethoven does this stretching even in the first movement of his Op. 131 String Quartet. Some of the greatest slow movements are actually not in the middle of the piece. These often fall into some (or multiple) of the other categories, but when they happen, they stand out. The C-sharp minor piano sonata, “Moonlight,” is his most famous opening slow movement, but the opening fugue of the late C-sharp minor string quartet “stretches” just as much as Shostakovich but a century earlier.

The stretching is also not always unpleasant. Mahler's Adagietto from his 5th Symphony pulls you apart. It leans on its dissonances and harmonic ambiguity like Shostakovich. But somehow it seems to transcend pain and gives us a love letter to his wife Alma instead.

Mahler's 9th symphony takes this to the extreme, stretching its final movement Adagio for a full 25 minutes. We'll spend more time with Mahler 9 later. But in the next chapter, we'll cover the other “middle” movement: the scherzo.