Beethoven The Fugue Essay

Ludwig van Beethoven’s prolific music career—emerged from the enlightened wave of 18th century classical music under the umbrellas of Haydn’s and Mozart’s legacies—began in Beethoven’s early years in which the young German was introduced to a wide range of musical works that became fundamental to the composer’s early compositional creativity. Years later at the turn of the 19th century, Beethoven’s heroic style, primarily seen through Beethoven’s 3rd and 5th symphonies, depicted a gradual deviation from the aegis of Enlightenment, and as a result, introduced greater emotional depth and revolutionary spirit in music that resonated beyond functions of the church and private parties. However, in the early 1820s, Beethoven’s arguably most transformative

A Fugue, literally meaning “flight” was a piece of music that often repeated itself of a single theme played in rounds or canons. Beethoven extended the traditional nature of the fugue by synthesizing the Große Fuge with different experimental variations that became an unrestrained expansion of the 18th century fugal institution. In turn, Beethoven’s Große Fuge eluded any established system of described form.5 Because of its enigmatic qualities, scholars have brought up the question as to why the German composer would bring back such an archaic form of music amidst his empowering heroic-style a decade before that pleased audiences and patrons across Europe. With many questions, Beethoven’s Große Fuge attracted the attention of music scholars and audiences for its difficulty and opacity that encapsulated Beethoven’s late-period life and musical development as a composer second to none. In the 1820s, Beethoven began to devote deeply to his string quartets and composed some of the most unconventional works of his time. His string quartet no. 14 in C-sharp minor op 131 was intended to be played without break--a seven movement quartet that challenged its players to the highest degree. Along with Beethoven’s physical struggles with hearing and increasing mental anxiety in the 1820s, Beethoven’s Große Fuge, for its raw intensity and emotional bearing,