ABSTRACT
This chapter develops Raymond Monelle's brief comment by examining the manner in which topics can be used to express irony and by offering an interpretation of the Scherzo of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 127 as a case study. This chapter proceeds from the assumption that the function of topics– as 'bearers of conventionalizes musical meaning', allows the ironic objectification of music. The ironic inflection of the opening topics of Beethoven's Scherzo– the fanfare and the 'learned style'– begins exactly this process. The incongruities create the effect of parabasis, in which the objectification of topics cues an ironic discourse and signifies an ironic consciousness. Beethoven produces a most 'unlearned' learned style, a fugue-like theme that goes wrong in so many ways that it eventually negates itself. The concept of Romantic Irony first occurs in the writing of Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven's contemporary and one of the leading figures of the emerging Romanticism.
