Free Listen to This by Alex Ross Page B

motion and join the trudge of the continuo section. The sopranos, too, follow a chromatic path. The upper instruments fall silent, as if the dripping has stopped and
life is spent. Fate’s victory seems complete. But then the bass suddenly reverses direction, and there is a momentous swerve from E minor into the key of G major. On the next page, the Resurrection begins.
    ROMANTIC VARIATIONS
    Bach died in 1750, and the Baroque era more or less died with him. Forms of rigid repetition lost their appeal as the Baroque gave way to the Classical period and then to the Romantic: increasingly, composers valued constant variation, sudden contrast, unrelenting escalation. Music became linear rather than circular, with large-scale structures proceeding from assertive thematic ideas through episodes of strenuous development to climaxes of overwhelming magnitude. “Time’s cycle had been straightened into an arrow, and the arrow was traveling ever faster,” the scholar Karol Berger writes. Music would no longer react to an exterior order; instead, it would become a kind of aesthetic empire unto itself. In 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in which he differentiated the Romantic ethos from the more restrained spirit of prior centuries: “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of Orcus. Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”
    For composers of Mozart’s time and after, the chaconne, the passacaglia, and the lamento aria would have been antique devices learned from manuals of counterpoint and the like. Yet they never disappeared entirely. Beethoven studied Bach in his youth, and at some point he came across the B-Minor Mass, or a description of it; in 1810 he asked his publisher to send him “a Mass by J. S. Bach that has the following Crucifixus with a basso ostinato as obstinate as you are”—and he wrote out the “Crucifixus” bass line. Beethoven was undoubtedly thinking of Bach when, in his Thirty-two Variations in C Minor of 1806, he elaborated doggedly on the downward chromatic fourth. Eighteen years later, a “Crucifixus” figure cropped up in the stormy D-minor opening movement of the Ninth Symphony. Thirty-five bars before the end, the strings and bassoons churn out a basso lamento that has the rhythm of a dirge: you can almost hear the feet of pallbearers dragging alongside a hero’s casket.

    Yet the ostinato is a nightmare from which Beethoven wishes to wake. The finale of the Ninth rejects the mechanics of fateful repetition: in the frenzied, dissonant music that opens the finale, the chromatic descent momentarily resurfaces, and when it is heard again at the beginning of the vocal section of the movement the bass soloist intones, “O friends, not these tones!” At which point the Ode to Joy begins. Beethoven might have been echoing the central shift of the B-Minor Mass—the leap from the chromatic “Crucifixus” to the blazing “Et resurrexit.”
    The lamento bass would not stay buried. It rumbles in much music of the later nineteenth century: in various works of Brahms, in the late piano music of Liszt, in the songs and symphonies of Mahler. It is a dominating presence in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, which ends with a slow movement marked Adagio lamentoso. Even in the first bars of the first movement, double basses creep down step by chromatic step while a single bassoon presses fitfully upward. (The scenario is much like the contrary motion of the upper and lower voices in Dido’s Lament.) The final Adagio begins with a desperately eloquent theme that contains within it the time-worn contour of folkish lament. In the coda, Tchaikovsky combines the modal and chromatic forms of the lamento pattern, creating a hybrid emblem of grief, somewhat in the manner of Bach’s chaconne. The