Opus 131 "Mystic Vision"

Is Opus 131 the greatest musical piece ever composed?  Most people have not heard of Beethoven's string quartet in C# minor, Opus 131, but I think it qualifies for that honor.  What are you looking for when you look for the greatest musical endeavor?  I look for an adjunct to my spiritual journey into what I call the "Phi Dimension".  This is a dimension greater then the 3 dimensions we can see, we can only feel it and accept it by faith.  It has a heavenly atmosphere. 

Music historian Harvey Sachs in his book "The Ninth" was written about the rightly famous tome by Beethoven his ninth symphony.  But he sates in the Postlude that when he was fifteen years old "I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet C-sharp minor, Op.131.  I was sitting in the living room of a friend's home when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi.  I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or '62:"  the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing:  the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating, like an exotic organism, in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard-a feeling that comes back to me when ever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin's statement of the opening, subject in the recording made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.

To see how Op.131 evokes this "Mystic Vision" we turn to J. W. N. Sullivan's book "Beethoven His Spiritual Development".  "All art exists to communicate states of consciousness which are higher synthetic wholes than those of ordinary experience, but in these last quartets Beethoven is dealing with states for which there are no analogues in any other art… The Quartet in C sharp minor is the greatest of Beethoven's quartets, as he himself thought.  It is also the most mystical of the quartets, and the one where the mystical vision is most perfectly sustained.  The opening Fugue is the most super human piece of music that Beethoven has ever written.  It is the completely unfaltering rendering into music of what we can only call the mystic vision.  It is that serenity which, as Wagner said, speaking of these quartets, passes beyond beauty.  Nowhere else in music are we made so aware, as here, of a state of consciousness surpasses beyond beauty.  Nowhere else in music are we made so aware as here of a state of consciousness surpassing our own, where our problems do not exist, and to which even our highest aspirations, those that we can formulate, provide no key.  Those faint and troubling intimations we sometimes have of a vision different from and yet including our own, of a way of apprehending life, passionless perfect and complete that resolves all our discords, are here presented with the reality they had glimpsed.  This impression of a superhuman knowledge, of a superhuman life being slowly frozen into shape, as it were, before our eyes, can be ambiguous.  That passionless, remote calm…. leads to the next movement, as a new-born creature in a new-born world.  The virginal purity of this movement, its ethereal and crystalline quality, suggests to us a spirit not yet made flesh.  After a brief introduction, which seems to usher in the act of incarnation, we find ourselves fully present in the warm, familiar human world.  And yet how different it has become!  The various aspects of experience that make up this human life surveyed in the variations that follow all have this different quality.  They have the delicacy of shadows, but without their suggestion of impermanence.  It is a transfigured world, where both our happiness and our prayers have become more pure and more simple.  There is an indescribable lightness in the air; our bonds have become gossamer threads.  And after floating through this outspread world we do, at that rapturous outbreak of trills in the last variation rise up on wings and fly.  And it is not only we, but all creation, that seem to be taking part in this exultant stirring.  If ever a mystical vision of life has been presented in art it Is here, in the sequence beginning with the fugue and ending with the last variation.  It is this sequence, more than anything else in Beethoven's music, that convinces us that he had finally effected a synthesis of his whole experience.  In these moments of illumination Beethoven had reached that state of consciousness that only the great mystics have ever reached, where there is no more discord.  And in reaching it he retained the whole of his experience of life; he denied nothing.  There follows and outbreak of the most exultant gaiety.  There is no trace in the Scherzo of anything but the purest joy.  Its most human quality is its humour, but humour so carefree and radiant is scarcely human.  The adagio introduction to the finale has all the quality of a sorrowful awakening.  It is as if the whole of the quartet preceding this movement had been a dream.  But that, we are passionately convinced, cannot be true.  The note of complete authenticity in that opening fugue cannot be mistaken.  But it is certain that there is a withdrawal of the vision.  It signifies, perhaps, a return from those heights on which no man may permanently live to this less real but more insistent world in which we are plunged in the last movement, a world where a heroism which is also pathetic marches to its end attended by yearning and pain."

Listen to Op.131 and see if you experience any of these stirrings in your soul.  Beethoven wrote this quartet when he was completely deaf.  He heard this vision with his mind.  By using the art of music to transfigure your mind and experience this special Phi Dimension you can live in the heavenlies by just recalling this opening Fugue.

In 1870, on the one hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, the German composer Richard Wagner wrote an essay commemorating the event. He had this to say about Opus 131: 

“Tis the dance of the whole world itself:  wild joy, the wail of pain, love's transport, utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, riot, suffering, the lightning flickers, thunders growl:  and above it the stupendous fiddler who bears and bounds  it all, who leads it haughtily from whirlwind into whirlwind, to the brink of the abyss - he smiles at himself, for to him this sorcery was the merest play - and night beckons him.  His day is done.”