Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  But how would all this thunder and lightning fit into a symphony? A separate movement? That had been done a thousand times. What about this: The storm interrupts the repeat of the scherzo, as if it has broken up the dance and sent the peasants running for shelter. But how to make that work? What could make a transition from a jolly dance to raging chaos? Well, after all . . . a storm happens. There is no logical transition in God’s nature, so why should Beethoven have to make a transition? The storm interrupts the form just as it interrupts the dance. The storm breaks the form.

  For the last movement, the storm is over, the sun comes out, God smiles. Beethoven jotted on a sketch, “O Lord we thank thee,” but the published version leaves that implicit.31 “Shepherd’s song. Happy and grateful feelings after the storm.” The idyll returns. The folk emerge into the sunset with relief and thanks. He wouldn’t make it the usual fast finale, and certainly not a heroic one. This called for thankfulness, not dancing. A prayer of thanks in the glow of the sunset after the storm. Start with an alpenhorn sounding in the distance, calling in the herds.32 Not so slow as an adagio, but flowing and peaceful and beautiful, in 6/8, the old pastoral meter, almost all the movement in F major.

  Now find the notes. Throughout the symphony he wanted listeners to sense the consuming beauty, peace, and holiness of the country, feel it not just in the senses but in the soul. The rhythms needed to be gently loping like a horse cart, or babbling like a brook. Long repetitions of figures as in the Fifth, but to the opposite end: there fierce and fateful, here a trance of beauty. Themes like folk songs and country dances. In the harmony use more peaceful subdominants than dynamic dominants. Let them feel the timelessness, hear the shepherd’s pipe in the oboe. The sound of the orchestra spacious and warm, not hard and muscular like the Fifth or monumental like the Eroica. The feeling simple, flowing and piping and singing. Lots of woodwinds, not much trumpet. Save the trombones for the storm. The warmth of violas and divided cellos. Alpenhorn calls in the winds and horns. A portrayal of sensation and emotion without, however, the sensation of boredom. How to make the notes do these things, be that simple without boredom, was very, very difficult. Beethoven had always known this: the simpler, the harder. But difficult was good. Make it unmistakably pastoral but new.33

  In terms something like these the Pastoral Symphony took shape, flowing from its fundamental idea: what Beethoven’s time called a “character piece” and a later time called a “program piece.” For him that meant not a detailed portrayal of episodes but broader scenes and feelings, as in his funeral marches, which were not marches in detail but moods (still, with trumpets and drums and cannons). Here the point was not to paint pictures (though in fact he painted them) but to bring the listener to a particular kind of reverie, an exaltation that he knew intimately. Years later he wrote in a diary, “My decree is to remain in the country . . . My unfortunate hearing does not plague me there. It is as if every tree spoke to me in the country, holy! holy! / Ecstasy in the woods! Who can describe it? If all comes to naught the country itself remains . . . Sweet stillness of the woods!”34 And in a letter: “Surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” He meant an echo of all creation, a yearning for the divine.

  These yearnings and intuitions rose from the Aufklärung, which saw nature as the revelation of the divine and science as the truest scripture. In that respect Beethoven had a more immediate inspiration for his ecstasies and his symphony in what may have been his favorite and most-read book: Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence Throughout All Nature. Its author was Rev. Christoph Christian Sturm, a Lutheran theologian and preacher. Published first in 1785, Sturm’s book was widely read, reprinted, and translated. In a series of 365 meditations, one for each day of the year, keyed to the seasons, Sturm tours much of the day’s scientific knowledge while turning each entry into a little homily on the grace and goodness of God. For an example, here is Sturm’s paean to the seasons:

  If we examine the works of God with attention, we shall find . . . many subjects which may lead us to rejoice in the goodness of the Lord, and to exalt the miracles of his wisdom. During the budding spring, the bountiful summer, and the luxuriant autumn, when Nature . . . assumes her gayest and most splendid robes, hardened and callous, indeed must be that heart which does not throb with pleasure, and pulsate with gratitude, for such choice gifts. But when the north wind blows, when a biting frost stiffens the face of the earth, when the fields . . . present one wild and desolating view, then it is that men . . . will sometimes forget to be grateful. But is it true that the earth at this season is so utterly destitute of the blessing of Heaven . . . ? Certainly not.

  Sturm’s inspirational perorations are boilerplate and his attitude relentlessly Panglossian: everything God has created is perfect and good, and only our blindness and ingratitude can picture it otherwise: “All the arrangements of thy Providence, however extraordinary they may appear to my feeble intellects, are full of wisdom and goodness.” Still, Sturm’s torrents of facts from science and natural history are thorough and up to date for his time:

  In the center of the planetary system, the Sun, more than a million times larger than our earth, and at the distance of 82 millions of miles, rolls his majestic orb, round which revolve seven planets with their attendant satellites, all deriving their luster from the central luminary . . . Of these, the nearest to the sun is Mercury; it is much smaller than the earth, its diameter being only 2600 miles, and from its proximity to the sun, round which it performs its course in eighty-eight days, rolling at the rate of 95,000 miles an hour, is seldom visible to our eye.

  In Sturm Beethoven read similar accounts of the planets and the universe, the discoveries of the microscope, the formation of minerals and strata and fossils in the earth, the construction of the human eye and ear and heart, how tides and earthquakes happen, how fog forms and sap circulates, magnets, the structure and elements of blood, navigation and sunspots and hair, the population of the earth, husbandry, the lives of the bees, the forms of plants, the nature and properties of sound and how it is transmitted by air, the statistics of infant mortality, the structure of comets, the span of the Milky Way, the harsh but admirable lives of the Laplanders, the life of the herring, the marvels of the lobster. In the book Beethoven read of resurrection but not of damnation, nothing of miracle beyond the entire miracle of the universe. He read a survey of human anatomy that omits the generative organs, as if they did not exist. He found a condemnation of astrology not because it was heretical but because it was unscientific. He did not find much moralizing as such.

  Sturm’s book amounts to a general education in the sciences in 365 lessons, a high-Aufklärung endeavor in practical knowledge. His essential message is the perfection of nature, every part and particle of which is a revelation of God and a reason for rejoicing: “Wherever we direct our attention, whether to examine the beautiful and grand objects diffused over the face of nature, or whether to penetrate within the interior of the earth, we perceive that every thing is arranged with wisdom, and we everywhere discover the legible character and broad stamp of an Infinite, Almighty, and Supreme Being.” Sorrow and tumult are passing disturbances, themselves part of the divine order: “When the storm and the tempest have threatened, how soon has light been restored to the heavens, and joy and gladness again smiled on the earth!” In those terms Beethoven’s peasants rejoice in the finale of the Pastoral Symphony. Ultimately, Sturm preaches, the whole of creation is a sublime unity: “Every thing in the universe is connected together, and concurs to the preservation and perfection of the whole.” The microcosm of a musical form, Beethoven would surely have agreed, aspires to the divine unity of the macrocosm.35

  Whether or not Sturm’s treacly spirituality appealed to Beethoven, in its survey of science he gained a broad general education and an attitude toward the world, a vision of nature as divine revelation, as visible scripture and an endless hymn of praise: a holiness he found outside of scripture and ch
urches. All this, fashioned in his own way as always, helped form the foundation of the Pastoral Symphony and a great deal of his music to follow.

  But it was not all spiritual. It rarely is with an artist, least of all with Beethoven. The motivations galvanizing a work of art are a mingling of ideal and practical, spiritual and worldly, generous and competitive, high and low. With the Sixth Symphony Beethoven intended to show the world that Haydn, in The Creation and The Seasons, was not the only master of painting nature. Haydn was part of the inspiration for the Pastoral, in the sense that here, as in other works to the end of his life, Beethoven’s rivalry with his teacher was part of his creative ferment. (Mozart haunted him. Haydn dogged him.) Beethoven generally wrote in reaction to something. Sometimes it was in reaction to the past in various ways; here it is in reaction to Haydn and the pastoral genre going back at least to Handel’s “Pastoral Symphony” in Messiah. Sometimes Beethoven wrote in reaction to himself, as the Sixth is the anti-Fifth.

  But he did not intend to show himself to the world as a tasteless hack. In those days cognoscenti deplored pictorial music, those stacks of battle pieces, nature pieces, and their dismal kin—all drivel as far as Beethoven was concerned, likewise Haydn’s croaking frogs and crowing cocks in The Seasons. In the end Haydn himself had declared those pages of his oratorio “Frenchified trash.” Beethoven’s pupil Ries recalled, “He [Beethoven] frequently laughed at musical paintings and scolded trivialities of this sort. Haydn’s Creation and The Seasons were frequently ridiculed.”

  He laid out the Pastoral Symphony in clear traditional forms—except where he needed to break those forms.36 No pictures! Except for some pictures. As noted before, Beethoven was afflicted here with a certain aesthetic divide. He loved painting musical pictures, loved telling stories in music. Most of his overtures, including the ones to his own opera, outline the drama from beginning to end. His vocal music depicts nearly every illustratable image in his text. In other words, Beethoven loved doing things he considered to be tasteless, the kind of thing he laughed at in Haydn.

  So he created the Pastoral trying to convince himself and the world that he was not doing what he was doing. His ambivalence is captured in prose jottings on the sketches: “One leaves it to the listener to discover the situation . . . Also without descriptions the whole will be perceived more as feeling than tone painting . . . Who treasures any idea of country life can discover for himself what the author intends . . . All tone painting in instrumental music loses its quality if it’s pushed too far.”37 To underline his point he titled the Breitkopf & Härtel first edition “Pastoral Symphony or Recollection of Country Life, an expression of feeling rather than a description.” Certainly in the end, though, he made his intended point, in part: feelings trump pictures.

  The challenge of the Pastoral was to evoke timelessness and pastoral scenes without resorting to cliché more than necessary to establish the mood and the genre, and without eliciting boredom. Into that sense of timeless peace he intended to drop, virtually without preparation, the most violent and form-destroying music he knew how to write. So the voluminous sketches for the symphony, some of the most extensive for any of his works (simple is hard), are in part a record of battle with himself. It was as if his sensibility refused to recognize what his hand was writing as it put down ideas and identified them: “thunder,” “lightning,” and eventually (a later idea) the carefully labeled birdcalls that end “Scene by the brook.”38 (The literalistic birdcalls interrupt the coda of the second movement just as the literalistic storm interrupts the scherzo.) The many sketches—probably done fast—also reflect the fact that much of the Pastoral depends on timing, on the most minute details. There would be many repetitions of figures, he decreed, but how many? (His teacher Christian Neefe had written an article on the uses and abuses of repetition in music.) How should the birdcalls be done, in what succession and juxtaposition? Pages of sketches are devoted to that issue. The birds he chose all have traditional symbolism: the nightingale represents love, the cuckoo is the harbinger of summer, the quail associated with divine providence in the Bible.

  In part he intended the Pastoral to challenge the nature scenes in Haydn’s oratorios, its storm to outdo Haydn’s “Chaos.” But his was a covert battle waged not in the form of an oratorio but on Beethoven’s home ground, the symphony, and in the traditional formal outlines of a symphony—including the storm, his own version of chaos to echo and, he hoped, outdo Haydn’s. And there was a larger, more spiritual purpose. He had tried oratorio with Christus am Ölberge, and it had not worked so well. He had written a quite-fresh Mass in C that he loved, but of all his large works, it had been the hardest to sell and the least liked. With the Pastoral he approached God from a new direction. Call the Sixth Symphony another experiment, not his last but his most successful yet, toward a new kind of sacred music.

  The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are more direct in their personalities than the Eroica and in that respect closer to the public, popularistic tradition of the symphony. The Sixth was made to be embraced and loved. Responses to the Fifth were less a matter of confusion than, for those immune to it, of fear and outrage. Basing a movement on a little motif was so outlandish that for years some took it as a joke unbearably prolonged. Some found the emotional world of the Fifth provocative and dangerous. For the many who thrilled to it, the Fifth was the essence of revolutionary and Romantic élan. Yet nothing in the Fifth Symphony contradicts Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven took the essential nature and formal outlines of the symphony he inherited and dramatized and intensified them, to a degree that might as well be called revolutionary. But he continued his radical evolution from within tradition.

  The first Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung review of the concert was commonsensical, the critic realizing that he had heard only a vague approximation of far too much music: “It is all but impossible to pronounce judgment upon all of these works after a single first hearing, particularly since we are dealing with works of Beethoven, so many of which were performed one after another, and which were mostly so grand and long . . . In regard to the performances at this concert, however, the concert must be called unsatisfactory in every respect.”39 He goes on to describe the breakdown of the Choral Fantasy.

  Soon enough, both symphonies triumphed, each in its own way. The incomparable Fourth Concerto had another fate. It received in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung one of the most rapturous reviews of Beethoven’s life: “the most wonderful, unusual, artistic, and difficult [concertos] of all those that B. has written . . . [the second movement is] uncommonly expressive in its beautiful simplicity, and . . . the third . . . rises up exuberantly with powerful joy.”40 Yet the concerto lay in obscurity for a long time, mainly because Beethoven no longer played his concertos, and virtuosos usually played their own. The performance of the Fourth and the improvisation of December 1808 mark the close of Beethoven’s two-decade career as a virtuoso.

  In the case of the Fifth Symphony, so much involved with echoes of French revolutionary style, history records two representative responses. In the midst of an early French performance, a soldier of the Napoleonic Guard jumped up in the audience and cried, “C’est l’empereur! Vive l’empereur!”41 And the composer Jean-François Lesueur, teacher of Berlioz, after the final chords emerged from the hall so excited and upset that when he tried to put on his hat, he could not locate his head.42

  The concert of December 1808 marked the end of some eight years of fertility hardly equaled in the history of human creative imagination. As of 1799, Beethoven had been a lionized young keyboard virtuoso whose boldest and best-known works were for solo piano and chamber groups with piano—and his most celebrated performances improvisations at the keyboard. In the eight years since then he had finished six symphonies and the Choral Fantasy, four concertos, eleven piano sonatas, nine string quartets, an opera, a mass, a collection of overtures, a variety of chamber music destined to live among the most powerful and innovative works of their genres, and a str
eam of other works from important to potboiling. In the process he had transformed most of those genres: symphony, string quartet, concerto, piano sonata, cello sonata, violin sonata, piano trio, and theme and variations would all bear his thumbprints from then on. In achieving that Beethoven had to overcome devastating disappointments in love, the assaults of painful and debilitating illness, and the steady decline of his hearing.

  For centuries to come, careers, triumphs, failures, and myths would be founded on the man and musician Beethoven became between 1800 and 1808. The concert of 1808 drew another line in his life and work, and stands as a defining reason why the young Franz Schubert, one of the most profound born talents in the history of the art, groaned, “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” For Beethoven himself, a similar question loomed in 1808: What now?

  23

  Thus Be Enabled to Create

  IN EARLY JANUARY 1809, Beethoven accepted the offer to become Kapellmeister of the court of Jérôme Bonaparte in Cassel.1 He had always wanted to be a Kapellmeister like his grandfather and namesake, one of the few steady jobs available for a composer. But by now he knew he would probably not go to Cassel, if he ever actually wanted to in the first place. Instead, he was busily involved in plans to secure a permanent annuity from a collection of Viennese patrons. The idea, and the outline of the agreement, had originated with Beethoven himself and had been promoted by Baron Gleichenstein and Countess Erdödy. Its gist was that in return for staying in Vienna, Beethoven asked to receive a yearly sum simply for plying his trade as he saw fit. The amount he hoped to receive was roughly the same as he had been offered in Cassel.