Audiences at the big concert venues of Manhattan — Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Met Opera — are often unenthusiastic or even sleepy, what my Sicilian family would call mezza morta: half-dead. But from September 20 to 22, a portion of one particular audience will be simply morta. In the catacombs of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, which house the remains of 30 families from the 19th century, the Calidore String Quartet will perform Beethoven’s enigmatic String Quartet, Op. 130, as part of the fifth season of Death of Classical’s “Angel’s Share” series.
Playing classical (or avant-garde) music in “weird,” “cool” spaces is nothing new. Experimental stages around the city range from the pastoral to the pungent. In June, I heard the New York Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Fifth in Prospect Park. That same month, pianist Yuli Be’eri performed a hodgepodge of improvised noises and Hebrew poetry on a legless piano set on a tiny barge floating outside a riverside sewer tunnel in Queens. Capitalizing on the visual fetishistic culture of today’s audiophobes — the seeming inability for people to just listen — the strategy has become a successful way of attracting newer, younger audiences.
The audience expected a string quartet, but they got a musical science experiment.
But Death of Classical, which has been staging concerts in spooky spaces since 2015, is different. They don’t pander. “I’m not trying, necessarily, to get a child to be hooked by a melody,” Andrew Ousley, founder and artistic director of Death of Classical, tells the Voice. “I’m trying to get people to feel something to the bones.” By bringing world-class musicians to cemeteries, crypts, and catacombs, the project also pokes fun at the idea that guys like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are irrelevant. Want to bury Beethoven? it seems to say. You got it.
Ousley grew up in Manhattan playing in rock bands. But when his late mother introduced him to pieces like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and, especially, Beethoven’s late string quartets, he was “converted,” a term he uses for people who have overcome their doubts about classical music and dared to embrace it. Such pieces — the heartbreaking and truly sublime (as in, so good it’s scary), Op. 130 included — “have a transcendental quality to them” and “speak to something that’s more than the sum of its parts,” he explains. They are pieces that “communicate something very profound in a very direct and understandable way.”
To open up “the mind and the emotions” to what the music is communicating, libations are provided before every show. “I find the most powerful and direct experiences I’ve had are just when I’m engaging all my senses, when I’m feelin’ the spirit,” says Ousley. But what feelings does the spirit of the Op. 130 aim to conjure in us? That’s anyone’s guess.
“Cattle! Asses!”
First performed in Vienna in 1826, when Beethoven (1770–1827) was sick with hepatitis B and completely deaf, the Op. 130 was met with dropped jaws. In the words of Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon, Beethoven “tried to carry his audience with him into a realm which their training and sensibility would not permit them to enter.” The audience expected a string quartet, but they got a musical science experiment.
The first five movements went over fine: a mostly sunny introduction, a jet-propelled Presto, a strolling Andante, a salutary German dance, and, finally, a melancholic Cavatina (slow, aria-like). The Cavatina became so popular in America in the 1880s that it was programmed by itself. But the last movement, later dubbed the Große Fuge (“Grand Fugue”) by Beethoven’s publisher, sent the audience’s bourgeois brains into paroxysms. Called “incomprehensible, a sort of Chinese puzzle” by a reviewer at the time, it is a 15-minute spider web of layer upon layer of four musical lines symbiotically vying with each other for prominence. A double fugue, it’s built on two themes, repeated, stretched out, compressed, and inverted, weaving around each other in a musical helix whose texture sounds as thick as a thornbush. It is the apotheosis of Beethoven’s effort to push the counterpoint of Bach and the Sturm und Drang of the late 18th century as far as it would go. But Beethoven did not attend the concert, and instead sat drinking wine at a nearby tavern, awaiting news. Upon learning that the audience loved everything but the Fugue, he reportedly cursed his response: “Cattle! Asses!” His publisher made him write a new, tamer finale, and the Grand Fugue was turned into a stand-alone piece. Calidore will play all six movements, ending with the Fugue, as intended.
Jeremy Berry, violist for the ensemble, tells me that the Fugue is “insane” and sounds “more contemporary than a lot of music written literally today.” He hears harbingers of heavy metal and rock ’n’ roll, while Estelle Choi, the group’s cellist, points to its hints of jazz. The quartet, which also includes violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, put out an album of Beethoven’s last five quartets in February, and performed the whole cycle of 16 quartets this summer. In their recording of the Op. 130, their pulse breathes like a healthy lung, and despite a tendency to rush and a timidity in some difficult passages, their unity as an ensemble is captivating. They’ll have to wrestle with the acoustics of the catacombs, which, Choi says, are “quite reverberant.” But, according to Ousley, the space has a “rich, primal acoustic” that makes the sound “bloom” with “a sort of golden halo.”
What would Beethoven think of all this? “He would totally be down for unconventional performance venues and exploring the darker sides of humanity,” Choi postulates. So sit your cattle asses down for the privilege of hearing this music as it was originally intended to be heard. Beethoven would be happy, for once. ❖
Beethoven String Quartet Opus 130 & Grosse Fugue
The Green-Wood Cemetery
September 20–22
Ben Gambuzza is a writer, pianist, book editor, and researcher living in Brooklyn. He is also the host of The Best Is Noise, a live classical music show on Radio Free Brooklyn. You can find his recital album, Baroque Jewels, Romantic Revivals, on Bandcamp and elsewhere.
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