Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Beethoven

The time has come to speak of Beethoven also.

1. Beethoven was not a great melodist, unlike Schubert or Mozart. While he rarely came up with long heavenly streams of melody, he was ingenious at creating inspired snippets, a few notes, a few bars, and then creating structures of improbable magnificence out of them. (The obvious example, of course, is the Fifth Symphony, built on four notes and a rhythm.)

So too with Murdoch. Extravagant plotting was not one of her gifts. The stories are usually simple, slow-moving. But what thunderous magnificence, what dreadful despair, what rollicking laughter she can build from her deceptively simple elements.

2. As with Beethoven, she was her own best editor. The structures as we have them, the symphonies, the novels, brook no editing. Not a wrong or excess note. Not a wrong or excess word.

3. In her beginnings she is generally more like Haydn, preferring the convention of the slow intro, prefiguring gently what is to come. Though, God knows, she is also capable, like Beethoven, of plunging is in in medias res, trusting that we will somehow be able to find our own way through.

The endings can also be quite conventional, with a lovely contrived coda warning the reader that she’s about to wrap things up. Or shockingly abrupt, as if she suddenly realizes she’s said everything she can possibly say about these people and it’s time to stop.

4. For someone with time enough and love, an entertaining and possibly revealing exercise would consist in applying and explaining the choice of musical keys to the novels. Why does this one seem so clearly E-flat major, while that one has the clear aspect of d-minor?