Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph
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Before long this symphony took its place as one of the monumental humanistic documents of its time, and of all time. Its purpose is not to praise God but to exalt humanity. It is a vision of what an enlightened leader can do in the world. But Beethoven had not forgotten God. Some two decades later, in his last symphony, he would return to the question of the ideal society, the search for Elysium under the starry heavens. And again and again in his music he returned to an ending in joy.
At age thirty-two, Beethoven had once again mobilized a gift he had possessed since childhood, of making prodigious advances in a short period. In the genre of symphony he had made three leaps in less than four years whose scope is larger than most artists travel in a lifetime. Starting with, in his terms, the cautious and conservative First Symphony, by the Third he had created a work that, when its import and impact played out in the next years, remade the genre of symphony once and for all. In some quarters, at least, the symphony had already been declared the first of genres, based on what Haydn and Mozart had made of it. Beethoven had taken the development of the Classical symphony where Haydn and Mozart pointed it but in directions neither of them could have imagined. A new scope and ambition had entered the symphonic genre, and it would stay there.57
For Beethoven himself, the Bonaparte (eventually Eroica) Symphony did not so much begin the New Path as confirm and epitomize it. What did the New Path, his full maturity, amount to? In the long view, it was no complete departure. Rather, he took up his boldest and most personal mode, heard in the Pathétique and the op. 31 Sonatas, among other works, as his essential voice. By the force of his personality he went on to move the mainstream of music toward that voice.
But what one conceives oneself to be doing and what one is perceived by one’s public to be doing are two different things. For Beethoven the New Path (what later history would name the Second, or “Heroic,” Period) was mainly a private matter between himself and his Muse. For the public it was a different and grander issue. After the inevitable inertia of opinion, a growing chorus of musicians, listeners, and critics called the Eroica unprecedented, magnificent, terrifying, exalted: revolutionary and before long Romantic. Yet while many of his audience joined Beethoven to the spirit of the French Revolution, he never said anything to that effect (though never denied it, either).
In his Bildung and in his temperament, Beethoven was not a Romantic, and he never called himself a revolutionary. He based much of what he did on tradition, models, and authorities, and he never intended to overthrow the past. He was an evolutionist more than a revolutionist. Call him a radical evolutionary, one with a unique voice.
In practice, then, the New Path was not entirely new but more of a stylistic and technical consolidation. In terms of technique, he intensified the drive to integration, making more elements thematic throughout a work. His major works had always seemed distinctive, individual. Now they became intensely more so, each work a strong-featured and unforgettable personality not only in its material but in its very sound and fundamental conception.58
In The Tempest and the Eroica and the coming works of the New Path, Beethoven intensified and consolidated a particular conception of theme and form. Rather than following his usual procedure—learned mainly from Haydn and Mozart—of starting with extended themes from which he extracted motifs as building blocks, now sometimes he treated motifs as protean elements in the foreground. So he might conceive movements without themes in the usual sense, which is to say, he used motifs as themes, like the mysterious arpeggio that begins The Tempest, which seems like an introduction but turns out to be a generating idea, or the triad and chromatic slide that constitute the Hero theme of the Eroica.59 (The distillation of this motif-as-theme trend would be the Fifth Symphony.) Beethoven had begun to think of any element of music as potentially thematic; not only traditional melodic and rhythmic figures but even a single chord like a Neapolitan or a diminished seventh could be a unifying motif. Likewise a texture, a trill, a single pitch, silence—the simplest and most common elements of music. For him this desire to treat anything as a potential leading motif was not new on the New Path, but the tendency intensified categorically.
Now his handling of form became not so much more varied or experimental as more expressive, more flexible and responsive to the conception at hand. In practice, though, after the Eroica his forms largely became more regular than before. Which is to say that as the ideas themselves became bolder and more pointed (other times more lyrical and pointed) and his rhythm more dynamic, the formal outline became more individual and expressive, though not usually more complex or experimental—until the late music.
When he finished the Eroica, Beethoven was no longer looking cautiously over his shoulder at the past. Now he saw himself as the peer of Haydn and Mozart. At the same time, his relation to the public had changed. He would never stop producing items designed for popular appeal, but in his major works he no longer worried about challenging his audience (though he still loathed bad reviews). Now he was prepared to make demands. If the Bonaparte Symphony was beyond his audience on first hearing, he expected them to listen again, and again and again. Here was a sea change from the attitude of Haydn and Mozart, who by and large wrote for the immediate pleasure of audiences and performers while incorporating subtleties for the delectation of connoisseurs.
Part of what was truly new in the New Path was a joining of Beethoven’s art and his Aufklärung consciousness. His music became more personal and intense partly because he found ways to connect his work to intensely held ideals, at the top of them freedom and joy. His politics were not revolutionary, not Jacobin, not even democratic, but very much republican: he believed in the sovereignty of constitutions and laws, like the British parliamentary system (with its king and its Houses of Lords and Commons). At the same time, like many liberal Germans he still had the echt-Aufklärung belief in the strong man, the benevolent despot, which is to say, the Hero. Even if some of his personal heroes, like Elector Max Franz and Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, were born to their thrones and he had no dispute with aristocracy in theory, his image of the hero was not in itself aristocratic in the hereditary sense. He believed in an aristocracy of mind and talent and spirit.
It was central to Beethoven that Napoleon was not highborn but self-made—the first such man in European history to wield such power. For all his eventual disgust at the dictator, that admiration endured. A French visitor of 1809 reported, “He was uncommonly preoccupied with Napoleon’s greatness and often spoke to me about it. Although he was not well-disposed towards him, I noticed that he admired his rise from such a lowly position.”60 (Actually Napoleon’s “lowly” origin was partly a myth. His family came from minor rural nobility; his father was a lawyer.) Now at the end of 1803, still determined “irrevocably” to go to Paris, Beethoven had a symphony worthy and appropriate to lay at Napoleon’s feet, whether figuratively or literally.
But for him the heroic image did not apply only to political and military leaders; it applied to anyone self-made, self-generated, capable and courageous, rising above the crowd and therefore a natural leader: a “free man.” Napoleon was that kind of free man and, inescapably, Beethoven perceived himself to be the same. He would model some—by no means all—of the works of the coming decade on the image of the hero, in many guises: the great leader, the strong man, hope of the people, or, as in the Fourth Piano Concerto, the brooding loner. So inevitably Beethoven, leading music on the New Path that he saw opening before him, became one of the heroes in his own stories.61 And part of his heroic voice was built on the French revolutionary style.62 For him a free society was one that allows a Napoleon and a Beethoven to rise as far as their natural gifts can take them. In France it had taken a revolution to make that possible. In German lands, however, by the time the Eroica appeared that dream of freedom had come to seem a dead relic of the past. In Austria particularly, society and social mobility were frozen in place, freedom of thought under relentless assault.
; The later Romantic generations of the nineteenth century saw his intensely personal music, and saw it rightly, as a revelation of the individual consciousness and personality: the individual as hero, fundamental to the Romantic vision of the world. To the degree that in his youth Beethoven absorbed the Kantian ideas that were in the air, he learned that freedom is required to become a complete human being and that every free person must think and judge for himself as an individual. That, Kant said, is the essence of Enlightenment. He also said that the world as it is perceived and interpreted by each person is all that is possible for human beings to know. The self is essentially the world. And like the Hero’s journey in the Eroica, that self is continually in flux, continually becoming.
Christian Neefe and the other Freemasons and Illuminati around Beethoven taught that the foundation of changing the world is first to remake yourself. While the Romantics mythologized the supreme Self, they rejected the Aufklärung delusion that individuals and societies can be perfected. Aufklärers proclaimed the triumphs they believed to be imminent under the rule of a free, rational, enlightened humanity grounded in the rule of enlightened leaders. The Romantics turned away from what Novalis called “the cold voice of Reason” and exalted the passionate, the unattainable, the unimaginable, the sublime, the great and terrible. (Given the reaction and repression that happened after the fall of Napoleon, there was little to exalt anyway but the unattainable.)
Beethoven would be the composer for the coming Romantic generation, who resonated with his proclamation of the individual as if it were a democratic revolution in tones. But Beethoven was not a Romantic, not a revolutionist, not a democrat. He was a republican who came of age in the revolutionary 1780s, all for fraternité and liberté, not remotely for egalité.63 The people as a whole were rabble to him. “Vox populi, vox dei,” he said late in life, “I never believed it.” In practice, the models of egalité he grew up with were those of the Freemasons and Illuminati, an equality of middle-class artists and bureaucrats and midlevel aristocracy—the society he lived in most of his life.
It is unanswerable to what degree the sense of humanistic individualism in his mature music, in the heroic style and otherwise, was a conscious matter or simply Beethoven being Beethoven, an individual to the point of solipsism. That was who he was, and his music came out of who he was. But as with any artist of any value, his art was a great deal bigger than he was. No better example of that than the Eroica. His individualism, his engagement with the zeitgeist, and his determination to serve humanity (despite his disdain for most of humanity in the flesh) made his music imperative for the Romantic generations—even the egalitarian Romantics. For his time and later, his music breathed a new sense of the individual engaged with the world, like a dancer caught up in the whirling patterns of the englische. With the New Path and the Eroica he unleashed emotional forces that had been unknown to music, of a raw power and individuality the eighteenth century had never imagined. He became a new kind of composer writing a new kind of music, yet he did it without pulling up his roots in the eighteenth century.
To discover new means of expression is to discover new territories of the human. It seems that such an ideal, not revolution, was what Beethoven considered to be his task, his duty. He had always believed he had it in him to do something like that. The difference now was that he knew how to do it.
In October 1803, Ferdinand Ries wrote to publisher Simrock in Bonn, “He wants to sell you the Symphony for 100 gulden. In his own opinion it is the greatest work that he has yet written. Beethoven played it for me recently, and I believe that heaven and earth will tremble when it is performed. He is very much inclined to dedicate it to Bonaparte, but because Lobkowitz wants to have it for half a year and will give 400 gulden, then he will entitle it ‘Bonaparte.’”64
In Beethoven’s sketchbook, after the last of the Bonaparte pages the creative juices were still running high. In the middle of the symphony sketches he noted down a folk-dance tune that would serve in the scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, along with two sketches trying to capture the sound of a murmuring brook, with a note: “the bigger the brook the deeper the tone.” There was a sketch for the Schikaneder opera Vestas Feuer; its melody would end up in Fidelio. Bonn had been on his mind through these months. Directly after the Bonaparte pages, with no pause for breath, he jotted down ideas for an epochal piano sonata that came to be named for its dedicatee from the Bonn days: Waldstein.
18
Geschrieben auf Bonaparte
IN LATE 1803, Beethoven returned to his cramped quarters as house composer in the Theater an der Wien. There Stephan von Breuning brought to see him a young Rhinelander named Willibrord Joseph Mähler. He was a civil servant of various artistic leanings: amateur singer, poet, songwriter, and portrait painter. Beethoven was generally pleased to make the acquaintance of anyone from his homeland. Even more to his credit, Mähler had been born in Ehrenbreitstein, hometown of Beethoven’s mother. When Mähler asked to hear something, Beethoven obliged, playing the variation-finale of the Bonaparte Symphony. When he got toward the end of the movement he kept playing, improvising new variations for two hours.
“There was not a measure which was faulty,” Mähler recalled, “or which did not sound original.” As much as the music, he remembered Beethoven at the keyboard, “with his hands so very still; wonderful as his execution was there was no tossing of them to and fro, up and down; they seemed to glide right and left over the keys, the fingers alone doing the work.”1 That day Mähler did not see the performer who broke hammers and strings with a power beyond the capacities of his instruments. Beethoven also had a most delicate legato. Carl Czerny noted that he often played his best in slow, soulful music; his “playing of adagio and legato . . . has yet to be excelled.”2
Given that Mähler was an amiable young man and a native of, as far as Beethoven was concerned, the best place on earth, in the next year he was able to persuade the impatient and fidgety composer to sit still for a portrait. The painting turned out odd and memorable, a companion to the Bonn portrait of old Ludwig, the composer’s grandfather. Both paintings are interpretations of the life of a musician. Grandfather Ludwig had himself rendered as an imperious man of importance, turning the pages of a score. Mähler painted Ludwig van Beethoven the younger as an icon of Genius.
In his left hand this icon holds a lyre, symbol of a musician in general and of Apollo the singer in particular. The right hand is extended and splayed in a peculiar way, which the painter described “as if, in a moment of musical enthusiasm, he was beating time.” He had learned that Beethoven was given to startling musical enthusiasms, vocally and physically. He also noted Beethoven’s blunt, square hand. For his portrait Beethoven is neatly and fashionably dressed, his hair cut in the French neo-Roman style. The face is impassive, the eyes piercing. This too is well observed: others noted that in public Beethoven’s face was often reserved and blank, his feelings visible mainly in the flash of his small brown eyes. In private, over a glass of wine, he might become jolly and teasing. In both public and private he rose easily to fury.
The background of the painting is as telling as the figure. To the left of the picture, Mähler explained, is a temple of Apollo.3 On the other side, behind Beethoven, looms a dark forest with a dead tree at the top. For the sunlit temple, read the Classical past, both of antiquity and of the eighteenth century that exalted reason and restraint: the rational. For the dark forest, read the wild, the mysterious, the emotional, the Romantic: the irrational. Which is to say that in the first years of the nineteenth century, at the moment Beethoven had embarked on the New Path, this artist already portrayed him as a bridge between Classical and Romantic. If Mähler was not a great painter, he was a keen observer of his subject as a man and as an incipient icon and myth. This would be Beethoven’s favorite portrait of himself, the one he kept with him alongside the portrait of his grandfather: two musicians in ideal and in action.
As winter came on in 1803, Beethoven involved himself
with finalizing the Bonaparte Symphony and exploring what it had unleashed, where it pointed on his New Path. The implications unfolded in a scarcely believable rush over the next few years, producing some works in the heroic vein, some not, but all of a phenomenal strength and freshness.
The main project of that year’s end was a Grande Sonate for piano in C major. It would be dedicated to his Bonn patron and mentor Count Ferdinand Waldstein, at that point away from the Continent serving in the British army. This sonata was the repayment of an old debt for the man who as much as any had helped launch Beethoven, a mentor and patron for the teenager and then a connection to important Viennese patrons. The two must have met after Bonn, but no record remained of it.
So op. 53 came to be called the Waldstein. Beethoven wrote it with the inspiration of his new French Érard piano and its four pedals and extended range, its action heavier and its sound bigger than the Viennese pianos he was used to. It had a foot pedal to raise the dampers, rather than the traditional knee lever, making pedal effects more inviting.4 With his usual forcefulness he told an acquaintance that he was “so enchanted with it that he regards all the pianos made here [in Vienna] as rubbish.”5 Perhaps for that reason, this twenty-first of his published piano sonatas would be the one most thoroughly involved to that point with exploring and expanding the instrument, in music of vibrant coloration. The very nature of the piano became the vehicle of a heroic journey that ends in overflowing exaltation.
The Waldstein Sonata leaps into life in medias res, with a sense of restless energy that will hardly flag throughout. Above the pounding rhythms are only scraps of motifs; at first the music is like an accompaniment in search of a theme.6 Mainly the effect is of a surging and singularly pianistic dynamism. The C-major opening immediately strays to G major, then drops to B-flat major straying to F, searching for resolution. The main relief from the irresistible drive is the sudden peace of the chorale-like second theme in a radiant E major, which sprouts a babbling variation in triplets. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the movement is that, for all its energy, most of it is soft: crescendos often lead to a subito piano marking; the few loud moments are placed in transitional sections or quickly choked off. The movement surges and drives, but most of it is actually piano to pianissimo. The governing idea is power under restraint, generating a fund of energy that never dissipates and never climaxes. As in the Third Symphony first movement, everything points forward.7