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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 30
W
HILE the worlds attention
is focussed on the contin-
uing crisis in Europe and its
global fallout, another crisis is brewing
in Asia. More than one South-East
Asian country, among those that were
overcome by nancial crises in 1997,
has seen a substantial accumulation of
private debt, especially household
debt. In some, debt levels are high
enough to fear a nancial collapse.
This has come as a surprise, given the
resilience they showed at the time of
the global crisis of 2008.
Worst off is South Korea, the rags-
to-riches miracle that is now a member
of the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development
(OECD), the rich country club. Ac-
cording to a survey conducted by Sta-
tistics Korea and analysed by the
Korea Development Institute, six out
of 10 households in Korea were in debt
in 2011, and more than a third of them
were unable to meet their annual ex-
penses with their incomes. Debt also
weighs heavy on current incomes. One
in every 10 households spends more
than 40 per cent of annual income on
servicing that debt.
With these households having to
borrow more to stay aoat and others
joining their ranks, a large proportion
in 2001, more than 140 per cent in
2006 and an unsustainable 160 per
cent in 2011. The 2011 gure is higher
than the level that prevailed in the
U.S. before the subprime crisis broke.
An implication of this has been the
collapse of the household savings rate
in what used to be a high-saving na-
tion: from more than 15 per cent be-
fore the 1997 crisis to around 10 per
cent in 2000 and a low of 2-3 per cent
recently. Increasingly, instead of sav-
ing for the future, South Korean
households are consuming out of
what they hope would be tomorrows
income.
CHANGI NG LENDI NG PATTERN
It is indeed true that traditionally
banks in South Korea tended to over-
lend to the private sector. But there
have been important changes. Before
the 1997 crisis banks were substan-
tially publicly owned and their lend-
ing to the private sector was focussed
on the then-successful South Korean
corporations. Problems began when
in the 1990s South Korea chose to
open up and deregulate its nancial
sector, partly as a quid pro quo for
continued access to international
markets on which its growth was
based, partly to diversify into services
of households could be caught in a
debt trap that would force default.
This is exactly what happened in the
United States and elsewhere when the
subprime crisis broke. If that is re-
peated, the impact on the nancial
system experienced there could follow
in Korea as well. Already, a signicant
proportion of households in Korea
has more liabilities than assets and
cannot, therefore, clear dues by sell-
ing assets. In case of widespread de-
fault, the banks that lent to them will
not be able to recoup even a part of
their loans, leading to systemic prob-
lems of the kind that Asian emerging
markets seemed to have been insulat-
ed from.
However, the runaway growth in
household debt in Korea appears to be
a longer-term phenomenon, having
been under way since the 1997 crisis
in the region. Starting at around Ko-
rean won (KRW) 210 trillion in 1997,
the debt of households in Korea rose
to more than KRW 450 trillion in
2002 and stood at KRW 922 trillion
at the end of June 2012. The near-
vefold rise over 15 years has taken
the ratio of household debt to net
household disposable income from
less than 100 per cent before the turn
of the century to the three-digit mark
Asian debt mountain
The South Korean experience of an unsustainable, reinforcing
build-up in household debt is, in fact, a trend in South-East Asia.
31 F R ONTL I NE
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
led by nance because of a growing
loss of manufacturing competitive-
ness, and partly to meet the require-
ments set for OECD membership.
The process, which increased the role
of foreign nance in the South Korean
economy, also led to a shift of lending
away from productive investment
that had been the main target of di-
rected credit until then, into sectors
such as the stock market, real estate
and housing. That shift was nanced
with low-cost foreign nance, ac-
cessed in large measure by the private
sector in South Korea, and directed
less to the productive sectors and
more to non-tradable services with a
strong speculative component. This
created the circumstances in which
South Korea became vulnerable to the
boom-bust cycles typical of foreign -
nancial ows and to the contagion
that spread across the region in 1997.
Interestingly, post-crisis adjust-
ment in South Korea (and elsewhere
in South-East Asia) did not lead to the
reversal of the liberalisation that en-
hanced the external vulnerability of a
successful miracle economy and in-
creased the fragility of its nancial
system. Rather, the role of the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (IMF) dur-
ing and after the crisis and the success
of foreign nance resulted in the gov-
ernment opening the doors wider to
foreign capital and diluting regula-
tion of the domestic nancial sector,
even while taking over and guaran-
teeing repayment of the debt that for-
eign nance had, without due
diligence, provided the domestic pri-
vate sector.
OVERBORROWI NG
Thus, both before and after the crisis,
overborrowing by the private sector
remained high, but the target borrow-
ers were now engaged less in produc-
tive activity and more in areas such as
nance, real estate and housing.
Moreover, after the crisis, bankrupt
nancial rms were displaced or tak-
en over by new players, especially for-
eign rms. This led, in turn, to the
importation into the country of the
practices that had characterised -
nance in the developed industrial
countries. Prime among them was a
sharp increase in lending to the retail
sectorhousing, automobile pur-
chases and personal creditwith the
risk associated with such fragmented,
large-scale lending being concealed
by pooling credit assets, securitising
these bundles and transferring the
risk. The net result is that in this third
phase, even though lending to the pri-
vate sector continued to be important
in South Korea, households have been
replacing corporates as leading
borrowers.
Excess borrowing is also a result of
the adverse impact of the growth pat-
tern after liberalisation on the distri-
bution of income. While developed
country status has increased the cost
of living and the consumption aspira-
tions of the population, incomes of the
poorer sections have not kept pace. In
I N THE NAMDAEMUN market in Seoul on September 20. Instead of saving for
the future, South Korean households are consuming out of what they hope would
be tomorrows income.
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 32
the event, as happened in the U.S.,
encouraged by an easy credit envi-
ronment, the poor have sustained
their consumption and diversied in-
to new economic activities with the
aid of credit. As the survey of house-
hold nances quoted earlier found,
while the top 20 per cent too bor-
rowed, the proportion of borrowers in
the bottom quintile in terms of in-
come increased the fastest. Moreover,
while the rich borrowed to acquire
real estate, the poor did so to make
ends meet.
The government and the Bank of
Korea are conscious of the dangers
implicit in this excessive debt over-
hang. They responded last June with
measures to reduce bank exposure to
the retail market and to induce bor-
rowers to shift out of oating rate
loans to xed interest loans.
The intention was to reduce the
impact of an interest rate shock on
borrowers under strain and unable to
meet their debt service commitments.
However, with nancial liberalisation
having created a layered nancial sys-
tem, this did not resolve the problem.
Stricter bank regulation may rein in
borrowing for speculation by the rich.
But the poor, who cannot but borrow,
have turned to the non-banking sys-
tem: mutual associations and credit
unions, in particular, which are un-
regulated and charge exorbitant in-
terest rates. That only worsens the
problem.
Clearly, South Korea is experienc-
ing an unsustainable build-up in
household debt, on a trajectory that
seems self-reinforcing. But South Ko-
rea is by no means an exception. It
merely shows up starkly a trend that is
widespread in South-East Asia. In
Malaysia, too, the ratio of household
debt to GDP has risen from 33 per
cent in 1997 to 78 per cent in 2011. As
a result, though it has a household
debt to disposable income ratio that,
at 140 per cent, is lower than that of
Koreas, it too is pointing to what
could be the future for countries like
Singapore (105 per cent) and Thai-
land (53 per cent).
Further, trends of the kind seen in
South Korea after the 1997 crisis are
visible in Malaysia too. Before the cri-
sis households accounted for a third
of loans provided by the banking sec-
tor, and credit to the corporate sector
accounted for 67 per cent of loans
outstanding. After the crisis that ratio
moved up and now stands well above
the 50 per cent mark. The composi-
tion of lending also points to the
changed drivers of credit in the new
business environment. At the end of
2007, housing loans amounted to 55
per cent of household debt, automo-
bile loans for 23 per cent and credit
card advances for a little more than 5
per cent.
Even in countries where the esti-
mates suggest that retail lending is
low, such as China and Thailand, this
is because banks that do not lend di-
rectly to the household sector often do
so indirectly. They provide credit to a
second tier of intermediaries, often in
the informal nancial sector, which in
turn lend to households. While a large
proportion of these loans is for hous-
ing, other loans such as for purchases
of automobiles or to nance credit-
card receivables have also increased
considerably. The focus seems to be
on lending short-term or against as-
sets considered more liquid.
What we are witnessing is a repli-
cation of the trends observed in the
developed industrial countries. That
is perhaps inevitable since nancial
liberalisation or reform is aimed at
replicating the Anglo-Saxon model of
an efficient nancial structure in
countries across the world. As a corol-
lary, it paves the way for the spread of
the crisis from the U.S. and the United
Kingdomto Europe, and now possibly
Asia. Hopefully, Asian governments
would take note and halt and reverse
this process.
KI M CHOONG SOO, Governor of the
Bank of Korea.
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THE BANK OF KOREA headquarters in Seoul. The government and the bank are
conscious of the dangers implicit in this excessive debt overhang.
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
T
HE idea of the clash of civil-
isations trotted out by Bernard
Lewis and creatively expanded
by Samuel Huntington may nd itself
in the bin of discredited maverick the-
ories, but there certainly seems to have
emerged a surreal stand-off between
two brands of exceptionalism. On the
one side is the no-holds-barred, over-
the-top, variety of American liberalism
that nds freewheelingeven cart-
wheelingexpression in all kinds of
speech, including hate speech, in the
Western media and, on the other, the
touch-me-not prudish zealousness of
Islamists who respond with Pavlovian
predictability to taunting depictions of
the Prophet by rogue elements in the
liberalist hemisphere. Both seem to
hold their credo and creed, respective-
ly, dearer than the human lives lost in
this grudge match.
The posture of profound helpless-
ness with which the political leader-
ship in the United States reacts to the
chain of events let loose by the 14-
minute trailer, Innocence of Mus-
lims, is funny when it is not pathetic.
It is a rareed piece of casuistry and
proceeds something like this: we nd
the lm abominable and would like to
do something about it, but then our
hands are tied because anyone here
nous kitsch should generate any
traction, let alone ignite the kind of
passion that somehow ultimately
seems to redound to its perpetrators
advantage in the way things have
panned out. It would be clear to any-
one who saw the stuff on YouTube
that there was not even the pretence
of a lmic effort here. The trailer, and
reports suggest there may well be no
lm beyond it, was meant to be a red
rag, period. The only response to this
wanton offer to be insulted, in the rst
instance, should have been to pass.
There is probably a lot more such ex-
ecrable stuff oating around in cyber-
space, those who put them there
driven by a pathological Schaden-
freude that dees reasoning and hu-
maneness. To notice it, to pay it any
attention, is bad enough; to take of-
fence and take off on a short fuse is to
hand its purveyors smug victory.
The problem is compounded by
Islams circumscription vis-a-vis the
representational function of the liber-
al media. Pictorial depiction or repre-
sentation of the Prophet is anathema
to the faith and interpretation beyond
or outside the parameters set by or-
thodoxy frowned upon. The Quranic
text is a constant and its hermeneutics
largely conned to renement of the
has the right to say anything about
anything and anybody with the im-
munity provided by our First Amend-
ment. But try, with the same
malevolence of the lm-maker, or the
mischief of a neophyte testing this
paradisiacal liberalist freedom, saying
bomb or terrorist or boo aloud in
an airplane or the subway or any pub-
lic place, and the chances are you will
be promptly buried under a tonnage
of Homeland Security. The First
Amendment does not, either, help you
argue against the occasional gunman
who creeps out of the woodwork and
empties a cartridge on you in a movie
theatre in Colorado, or a gurudwara in
Wisconsin, or a busy street in the
heart of Manhattan, or a university
anywhere in the country, because
there is another amendment, the Sec-
ond, at work here, which makes the
right to the gun another exceptional-
ist premise that no number of such
killings and warnings about a ram-
pant gun culture has been able to un-
do. This is the given in, the price of,
American liberalism.
On its part, political Islam could,
in the interest of its own credibility,
have been more politic in its reaction
to the scurrilous footage. It is as-
tounding that this piece of inert creti-
Clash of exceptionalisms
The Western media and the Islamists seem to hold their credo and
creed dearer than the human lives lost over Innocence of Muslims.
F R ONTL I NE
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 98
A MUSLI M-AMERI CAN looks to hand out pamphlets challenging the "Support Israel, Defeat Jihad" advertisement
(background) which was displayed on the walls of the Times Square subway station in New York on September 24.
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hammad by proxy. The work was
banned on its publication in 1958 and
the author narrowly survived a bid on
his life by two assailants in 1994. The
Iranian publisher, parliamentarian
and polemicist Ali Dashti was, after
the Islamic revolution of 1979, con-
sidered an apostate for his work
Twenty Three Years: A Study of the
Prophetic Career of Mohammad,
which challenged the miracles associ-
ated with Prophet Muhammad, and
although Ayatollah Khomeini did not
issue a fatwa against him like he did
against Salman Rushdie for Satanic
Verses, his death in 1984 is shrouded
in mystery.
Paradoxically, the Quran or the
hadiths do not specically proscribe
blasphemy (it is left to the sharia to
handle this), whereas the Bible does;
and it constituted criminal libel in
British common law since the 17th
century. But by the end of the 19th
century, and notably with Lord Cole-
ridges landmark observation in Regi-
na vs Ramsay and Foote (1883) that
mere denial of the truth of Christian-
ity is not enough to constitute the of-
fence of blasphemy and that if the
decencies of controversy are observed,
script alluding to Jesus having a wife.
The jury is out on the authenticity of
what Dr King fancifully calls Gospel
of Jesuss Wife, but it is but the latest
bid to determine his marital status
and relationship with Mary, a project
which apparently dates back to the
so-called Gnostic Gospels of early
Christianity.
Such academic or creative media-
tions in the narrative of Prophet Mu-
hammad would, however, be
considered blasphemous and invite a
seething backlash. The threshold of
tolerance for heterodoxy in Islam has
diminished over time as Muslim writ-
ers in the 20th century were to nd
out. The Egyptian scholar Taha Hus-
seins study in 1926 suggesting that
what was considered Jahilliya or
pre-Islamic poetry may actually have
been the work of Muslims providing
vignettes of Arab life after the advent
of, and not in the dark ages before,
Islam, raised a furore and cost him his
job at Cairo University. The Egyptian
Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouzs al-
legoric Children of Gebelawi was at-
tacked for its miscegenation of the
Judaic, Christian and Islamic proph-
ets and portrayal of the Prophet Mu-
prescribed canon. The Biblical text,
on the other hand, lends itself to wider
and wilder interpretation and artistic
liberties. As early as the third century
C.E., the Alexamenos Graffito in-
scribed on a wall of the Palatine Pal-
ace in Rome, discovered in 1885 and
now housed in the Palatine antiquar-
ian Museum, was lampooning the
Crucixion by showing a human g-
ure with a donkeys head on the cross.
The Gospels according to Mathew,
John, Luke and Mark have been con-
tinually second guessed by ecclesiasti-
cal and lay scholarship and, at a
ctional remove, by novelists like Ni-
kos Kazantzakis (The Last Tempta-
tion of Christ) and Dan Brown (The
Da Vinci Code) and lm-makers like
Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel ac-
cording to St. Mathew), Martin Scor-
sese (who lmed the Kazantzakis
novel) and Mel Gibson (The Passion
of the Christ). Indeed, the plot of The
Da Vinci Code, suggesting that Jesus
may have been married to Mary Mag-
dalene, has just stepped out of the
novel and lm into historical dis-
course with Prof. Karen King of Har-
vard University producing a fourth
century papyrus fragment in Coptic
99 F R ONTL I NE
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
even the fundamentals of religion
may be attacked without the writer
being guilty of blasphemy, it had be-
come a dead letter long before it was
formally abolished in 2008.
In the U.S., the precedence of First
Amendment rights over censorship to
tackle blasphemy or sacrilege was set-
tled in the Supreme Court in Joseph
Burstyn, Inc. vs Wilson(1952) against
the revocation of the licence to exhibit
Roberto Rossellinis short lm, The
Miracle. The lm is a loaded parable
about a retarded rustic woman (es-
sayed by Anna Magnani) being plied
with alcohol and seduced by a tramp
whom she fantasises to be Saint Jo-
seph (played by Federico Fellini);
when she nds herself pregnant she
imagines it to be an immaculate con-
ception, is reviled and hounded by the
villagers, until she nds epiphanic re-
lease with the birth of her child in a
church on the hill. A tortuous course
that saw brushes with the licensing
authority, Church-inspired picketing
at the theatre screening the lm and
denial of relief by the trial court, led
the case to the Supreme Court where
the unanimous decision was in the
lms favour. On behalf of the Bench,
Justice Tom Clarke made the signif-
icant observation that it is not the
business of government in our nation
to suppress real or imagined attacks
upon a particular religious doctrine,
whether they appear in publications,
speeches or motion pictures. The ver-
dict at once made the plea of blasphe-
my or sacrilege untenable against
First Amendment rights and freed the
motion picture from censorship by
the state, society and the industry it-
self (lm-makers began to bypass the
Production Code of the Motion Pic-
ture Association so that it became ir-
relevant and defunct by the
mid-1960s). The blasphemy bogey
now nds little purchase in the Amer-
ican media sensibility.
Meanwhile, in his new work, Jo-
seph Anton: A Memoir, a literary ren-
dition of his years under the shadow
of Khomeinis fatwa, a combative Sal-
man Rushdie has just upped the ante
on the subject by identifying with the
writers of the French Enlightenment
who had deliberately used blasphe-
my as a weapon refusing to accept the
ages. Proling, baiting, bashing Is-
lam has, more so after 9/11, become a
stereotypical preoccupation in the
Western media, with even Hollywood
weighing in with its Islamic typecasts.
The Prophet Muhammad cartoons in
the Danish paper Jyllands Posten in
2005 which led to over a hundred
deaths, and this puerile movie trailer
now, are but the periodic spikes in the
graph.
For all their vaunted unalloyed
commitment to freedom of expres-
sion, when it looks like their markets
or trade may take a beating because of
it, Western governments, and media
in tow, have been known to quickly
temporise. When in 1980 the ITV
channel in the United Kingdom tele-
cast Death of a Princess, a docudrama
made by a British lm-maker about
the execution in Jeddah of a 19-year-
old girl of the Saudi royal family and
her commoner lover, the Saudi gov-
ernment pulled out all stops to see it
suppressed. The U.K.s Ambassador
to Riyadh was sent back, trade sanc-
tions threatened, the British press was
asking why a lm should be allowed to
put the market in harms way, and
London was soon scrambling to see
that the lm did not get any further
play in England. In the U.S., there was
a media ad blitz by ExxonMobil
against the lm and urging the Public
Broadcasting Service channel to re-
consider its decision to show it, the
State Department was asking the
channel to consider Saudi sensitivity,
and when it was eventually aired on
PBS (some cities did not show it), the
telecast was followed by an hour-long
discussion that looked like an expla-
natory disclaimer.
The latest entrant in the fray is a
strange French anarcho-libertine
weekly, Charlie Hebdo, which has just
lit its freedom torch from the raging
re following the infamous trailer
with another series of cartoons on the
Prophet Muhammad. The French au-
thorities naturally cannot but allow its
publication, and will not allow street
protests against it or the offending
lm strip. As comic relief in this hope-
less situation, Charlie Hebdo protests
the decision not to allow the pro-
testsbecause that too, you see, is
against the freedom of expression.
NAGUI B MAHFOUZ, Egyptian Nobel
laureate.
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DAN BROWN, author of "The Da Vinci
Code".
power of the Church to set limiting
points on thought. That, as we know
in hindsight, cut both ways, as the
man who exemplied the libertarian
spirit of the times, and is oft cited for
his dont agree with what you have to
say, but will defend to the death your
right to say it stand, also turned out
to be a trenchant anti-Semite. Unless
Rushdie, like those licentiously exper-
imenting with the U.S. First Amend-
ment today, sees Voltaire venting his
spleen on the Jews as primarily proof
of his freedom of thought and speech.
Here and now, however, the boot
is on the other foot. Subway stations
in the city of New York are soon to
have billboards with the public exhor-
tation, In any war between the civi-
lized man and the savage, support the
civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat
Jihad. A District Judge, invoking
(guess what?) First Amendment
rights, ruled against the New York
Metropolitan Transit Authoritys ini-
tial decision not to allow the adver-
tisement commissioned by an
ultra-conservative woman who runs
an outt called Stop Islamisation of
America and who will not sacrice
my freedom so as not to offend sav-
F R ONTL I NE
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 116
H
OW does one describe our
uncertain and volatile times?
Indians are fond of referring
to this period as Kaliyuga not only be-
cause this is what is apparently sug-
gested in some ancient texts, but
because so much of what goes on at
present ts in with the general descrip-
tion of anomie and disorder that is said
to characterise that epoch.
Consider just some of the features
of Kaliyuga that are listed in a passage
in the Mahabharata by the sage Mar-
kandeya: unreasonable rulers, who be-
come dangers to the people they
govern; greed, anger and conict as
dening features of social life; the pro-
liferation of sin and sinners, while vir-
tue languishes and declines; absence
of norms that provide stability to social
interactions; lack of respect for learn-
ing and the learned; and so on.
Even the double standards of much
of current public practice and their in-
tellectual justications are presaged:
(People) will practise morality and
virtue deceitfully and men in general
will deceive their fellows by spreading
the net of virtue. And men with false
reputation of learning will, by their
acts, cause Truth to be contracted and
concealed. And in consequence of the
shortness of their lives, they will not be
(however near or far from reality such
a perception actually is) to move be-
yond fatalistic depression. And so we
nd that even in artistic creation, the
anomie and nihilism gets reected.
But in the nest of such work, depres-
sion is transcended into something
much more, even into sublimity, and
the most tragic circumstances can
generate some sense of uplift of the
spirit.
One classic example of this in mu-
sic is to be found in the late string
quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Composed nearly two centuries ago,
they are nevertheless astonishingly
contemporary in the way they stretch
the boundaries of tonality and form,
their extraordinary combination of
deep sadness and continuing vitality,
even joyfulness. Romain Rolland has
remarked that Beethoven was capable
of feeling joy and sorrow almost si-
multaneously; the one did not exclude
the other but even required it, as two
poles of an electrical genius that de-
termined his particular form of
creativity.
The six string quartets and shorter
piece (Grosse Fugue) that Beethoven
composed towards the end of his rela-
tively short life would be remarkable
by any standards. He wrote them
able to acquire much knowledge. And
in consequence of the littleness of
their knowledge, they will have no
wisdom. And for this, covetousness
and avarice will overwhelm them all.
And wedded to avarice and wrath and
ignorance and lust, men will entertain
animosities towards one another, de-
siring to take one anothers lives.
(The Mahabharata Vana Parva, Sec-
tion CLXXXIX, translated by K.M.
Ganguli, Bharat Press Calcutta, re-
printed by Munshiram Manoharlal
Publishers and available online
through the Gutenberg Project).
Far too much of this is familiar to
us in our everyday lives at all levels,
including geopolitically. But it also
shows that we are not alone in think-
ing of ourselves as living in times of
general dissolution and despair. We
know that in Hindu mythology the
end of Kaliyugaand the beginning
of another time cycle starting with
Satya Yugacomes about through
the active intervention of Kalki, the
10th avatar of Vishnu who battles the
dark forces. But this battle is not an
easy one: it leads to the destruction of
everything before something new
(and presumably better) can emerge
in its place.
It can be hard, in such a situation
Beethovens last quartets
It is apt as a musical representation of our times: full of tragedy,
injustice and farce, and also full of humour and hope for the future.
117 F R ONTL I NE
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OCTOB E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
when he was completely deaf, and
could not possibly hear them in any
aural way, although obviously his in-
ner ear was still delivering to him this
magnicent music. By choosing a
smaller and relatively more intimate
formatthe string quartet with four
instruments that are mostly equal and
constantly engaged in dialogue and
the creation of harmonyhe also in-
dicated that this less ambitious
grouping would be more able to cap-
ture the complexity and intricacy of
his feelings than a larger agglomer-
ation like a full orchestra.
In this music Beethoven captured
(as closely as can be expected of any
one set of musical compositions) the
richness and variety of human emo-
tion, in ways that are both very in-
ward-looking and directed outwards.
Partly because of this, this is challeng-
ing musicnot just technically for the
musicians playing it but for listeners,
both intellectually and emotionally.
There are sometimes wild contrasts,
drastic swings of tonality and exten-
sions of formal structure, sudden
moves from phrases of extraordinary
beauty to harsh and aggressive chords
that can grateso much so that some-
times they can even be bewildering.
So this is not approachable music.
But perhaps for that very reason, it
rewards those who do approach it.
Take the String Quartet Opus 131
in C Sharp Minor, which Beethoven
himself considered to be among his
best worksand which is generally
recognised to have a perfection that
is beyond controversy (Robert Simp-
son writing in The Beethoven Com-
panion, Faber and Faber 1971).
Richard Wagner described the rst
movementa fugue in which the four
string instruments have separate
voices that follow and then merge in a
wondrous intermingling of supremely
elastic and longing phrasesas the
greatest expression of melancholy in
all music. Yet melancholy is a rather
tepid and even misleading word for
this music. It is indeed an expression
of great tragedy, but so distilled that it
almost seems to draw from that trage-
dy a pure and heart-wrenching beau-
ty, a mystic vision of something that
can only be called other-worldly.
There is something calm, even pas-
sionless, about this clear-eyed assess-
ment of the great sorrows of existence,
similar in some respects to the ap-
proach of the sage Markandeya.
But, of course, it would be impos-
sible for anyoneand certainly not
someone as full of human passion as
Beethovento maintain for too long
such a state of serene bliss born from
knowledge. In the later movements,
and then in the last quartets, he shows
once again the tempestuous and
forceful nature of his character and
indeed his volatility of temperament.
But the most extraordinary work
of all is probably the last quartet,
which has been found over successive
generations to be completely mind-
boggling because it is so hard at rst
even to grasp what exactly Beethoven
is doing. This is a shorter work than
the others, but no less complex for
that. After an eccentric rst move-
ment, in which combinations of
phrases and tonalities are exploited in
all sorts of ways, there is an explosive
Scherzo (joke) movement, which
erupts into a thrilling close. The slow
movement is more tranquil and
thoughtful, but the memory of the
earlier hyperactivity lingers and
seems to be just under the surface.
Indeed this music has been described
by Robert Simpson as deep contem-
plation without relaxation. The last
movement of the last quartetprob-
ably the last thing Beethoven ever
wroteis subtitled the difficult reso-
lution. At rst, it seems easier to ap-
proach, but this is weird and
enigmatic music, sometimes serious
and sometime jocular, but character-
ised by enormous amounts of con-
trolled energy and ultimately vitality
and love of life. It seems to express his
deant attitude to sorrow: you will
not succeed in bowing me utterly
down! Precisely because it is so hard
to comprehend, it remains contin-
uously engaging and fascinating.
This may be why it is so apt as a
musical representation of our times:
full of tragedy, injustice and farce, but
also complex enough to be full of hu-
mour, love of life and (despite every-
thing) hope for the future.
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LUDWI G VAN BEETHOVEN. He captured in his music the richness and variety of
human emotion in ways that are both very inward-looking and directed outwards.