In turn, part of that style was the geselliges Lied. Those sociable songs, intended to be proclaimed in company with glass in hand, were always strophic, meaning each verse was sung to the same tune. Generally the songs exalted friendship, fellowship, brotherhood, and joy.7 One example is Beethoven’s own Bundeslied (Song of the Confederacy), on Masonic verses by Goethe. It begins: “Whenever the hour is good, / Inspired by love and wine, / Shall we, united, / Sing this song!” On the manuscript Beethoven noted it was to be sung “in companionable circles.”8
On a larger scale was the memory of French revolutionary music that had been a major inspiration of the Eroica. These were pieces for public festivals that had a style at once popular and monumental. Here art became a communal ritual—in France largely to nationalistic and propagandistic ends, but artists had a deeper agenda. Poet Marie-Joseph Chénier wrote, “The ability to lead men is nothing else than the ability to direct their sensibilities . . . the basis of all human institutions is morality, public and private, and . . . the fine arts are essentially moral because they make the individual devoted to them better and happier. If this is true for all the arts, how much more evident is it in the case of music.” Robespierre wanted to teach a specially written “Hymn to the Supreme Being” to every citizen so all Paris could sing it at an outdoor festival.9
Another piece of the background was the relatively new idea of national anthems, their tunes designed to be inspiring, memorable, easily singable by the multitudes. Haydn had been inspired by the British God Save the King when he was commissioned to write Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which became the unofficial Austrian anthem. Haydn went on to write variations on the theme in his Emperor Quartet. (Beethoven also admired God Save the King and used it in piano variations and in Wellington’s Victory.) Beethoven surely envied Haydn his anthem. Another model, most potent of all, was La Marseillaise, the indispensable song of the French Revolution that set feet marching to overthrow the ancien régime and attached itself to the revolutionary spirit everywhere. (That is why, after he crowned himself emperor, Napoleon banned the Marseillaise. Revolutions were to end with him.)
So a trajectory in Beethoven’s work began in Bonn, rose to its apogee in the Third and Fifth Symphonies and in Fidelio, and came to rest in the Ninth Symphony, which resonated with the accumulated political and ethical ideas and energies of the previous decades. The Eroica exalts the conquering hero; Fidelio is a testament to individual heroism and liberation; the Fifth Symphony is an implicit drama of an individual struggling with fate. The Eroica and the Ninth have to do with the fate of societies. As to the road to an ideal society, the Ninth repudiates in thunder the answer of the Eroica.
No wonder that it cost Beethoven some trouble to finish the Freude theme after arriving at its opening phrase. By the time he needed the complete tune to compose the finale, he had gone through nineteen stages of work on it, mostly for the second part, which adds the seasoning of a leap to a note tied over the bar.10 A great deal was riding on this theme, not only the direction and fate of his most ambitious symphony but matters well beyond that. He intended the theme to be his God Save the King, his Austrian anthem, his Marseillaise. But those anthems were devoted only to nations. His ambitions for his tune had expanded exponentially. He wanted to write a universal anthem, a Marseillaise for humanity.11 To that end he demanded of himself that he create a popularistic theme like something that had written itself, an ingenuous little tune that everyone could remember and nearly anyone could sing.12 He wanted a theme to conquer the world.13
The Ninth Symphony begins in mist and uncertainty, on a hollow open fifth and the wrong harmony: winds and string tremolos on A and E. The A seems to be the keynote, but it isn’t. The sound of the beginning, like matter emerging out of the void and slowly filling space, had never been heard in a piece before. Yet its effect was familiar to the time: the beginning of the Ninth is a descendent of “Chaos” in The Creation. Haydn’s “Chaos” resolves into the C-major revelation of Let there be light! The chaos of the Ninth’s beginning resolves into a towering proclamation of forbidding import, the orchestra striding in militant dotted rhythms down a D-minor chord.14 D minor for Beethoven was a rare key, usually fraught: the Tempest Sonata; the tragic slow movement of the Piano Sonata op. 10, no. 3; the Ghost Trio second movement.
In the Ninth, the gestures that emerge from the void are stern and heroic, at the same time gnarled, searching, nervous, remote. If this is some kind of heroic image, it is a hero whose proclamations are raging and indisputable. What will prove to be the leading theme and motifs are first heard in measures 19–20:
This is hardly a melodic idea; call it one of Beethoven’s “speaking” themes. The rhythmic motif, da-da-da-dum, is of course essentially the same as that of the Fifth Symphony and any number of other Beethoven works. Another steady presence in the movement is the militant tattoo of dotted rhythms. The descending three-note bit of scale is the opening motif, inverted, of the Freude theme—a first, distant prophecy.
At the same time this beginning that emerges from nothing, filling in space, rising to a gigantic proclamation, suggests another metaphor that pervades the symphony. The beginning is an image of creation itself, of the creation of worlds, of societies, of individuals. It brought to music the idea that a work can evoke a self-creating cosmos. The beginning also involves the creation of a theme, which will eventually be the main business of the first part of the finale. Lying behind that is an image of the Ninth Symphony rising from silence to create itself, as a work rises from nothing in the mind of its creator. The last movement will return to that image. These images all work together. To say again: with Beethoven emotion, drama, image, and technique work in harmony (most of the time). Not only is the image of creation a fundamental idea and message of the Ninth Symphony, it is a central part of its effect.
This is the most complex first movement Beethoven had made since the Eroica, and a far more enigmatic opening than that symphony’s. As in the earlier work, the first movement is based on fragments more than sustained themes. Here the texture is filled with bits of ideas constantly batted around the orchestra. Which is to say that, like the Eroica, it is developmental from the beginning, the exposition of the sonata form vibrating with the restlessness of a development section.
In keeping, it has the late period’s tendency to float the harmony. After the first pages, there is no strong cadence to D minor until measure 429; this is the home key not as a foundation but as a long-awaited, hard-won goal. For long stretches there is no clear cadence at all. Such floating, unresolved harmony can create a feeling of suspension and reverie, but here it sustains an unrelenting tension.15 Part of the effect is that much of the time the basses are restlessly in motion, in scales and arpeggios and melodic lines, so the harmony has no solid foundation. The movement avoids the usual secondary keys related to D minor—F major and A minor or major.
In their formal import the first two pages are ambiguous: is the A–E tremolo a theme or an introduction? What about the D-minor arpeggio theme? (As it plays out, the tremolo is not developed in the movement like a theme, but the arpeggio is.) The tremolo returns on D–A for a moment, stabilizing the harmony briefly, for the last time in a long time. Then two things of considerable import happen. First, the stern arpeggio theme recurs in B-flat. Second, the three-note descending motif from the speaking theme in measure 19 begins to be treated obsessively, first in a nervous alternation of D minor and D major. Those three tonalities—D minor, D major, B-flat major—are going to be the principal tonal areas of the symphony. Throughout there will be a dialectic between D minor and major. D minor was for Beethoven often an ominous key, D major associated with gaiety, comedy, joy. And as in the Fifth Symphony, major is destined to win out over minor in the finale.
In a sketch, the emotion Beethoven applied to the first movement was despair. Its tone is not like the portraits of despair in his music going back to La Malinconia in op. 18 and the Pathétique and Appassionata.
In the Ninth the despair is something unfamiliar—unbending, elusive, relentlessly unstable. The tone of the music is close to Beethoven’s heroic style, but the instability questions that style and that ethos.
As with the Eroica, the second-theme section of the sonata form is complex, full of ideas, ambiguous as to where it begins. Just before the second theme there is a sudden lyrical warming, a brief, harmonically stable moment in B-flat—unmistakably a moment of hope. Melodically and rhythmically, this is the first clear prophecy of the Freude theme, beginning with its three-note bit of ascending scale:
The warmth persists through the next phrases, the second theme proper. Then restlessness seeps back in. That moment of hope in lyrical B-flat is not truly part of the form; it is an interjection, an anomaly. It does not return until the recapitulation, and only that once.16
The end of the exposition is the down-striding dotted-arpeggio theme in B-flat. That is the first truly stable harmonic moment since the opening pages. From there we hear what seems to be the usual repeat of the exposition, returning to the tremolo strings on A–E. But it is a false repeat. For the first time in a symphony, Beethoven goes on without repeating the exposition.
The development section, usually the most turbulent part of a sonata-form movement, is here the most relatively calm—though there is still an undercurrent of tension. It begins with a look back at the descending-arpeggio figure, now quieted. Nearly every phrase is a tidy four bars. But from the exposition he has hardly any normal theme to develop, so now he uses the leading motifs to create more sustained themes. Between that and the lack of an exposition repeat, he is aiming for a through-composed effect, the material constantly in flux, forming and reforming in new directions, self-creating. There are loud, vigorous moments in the development, but no shattering climax as in the Eroica. The shattering moment is the recapitulation.
Still without a cadence, still in restless rhythms, the development settles down for a sustained stretch in D minor. From there without warning the recapitulation seems to erupt out of nowhere, assaulting the music with extraordinary effect: a fortissimo D-major chord with an F-sharp rather than a D in the bass. Beyond a harmony with an unstable note at its foundation, the D-major chord itself seems vertiginous and disorienting. In D major now, the falling-arpeggio theme breaks out. Here are a major chord and key violent in effect. The moment negates everything a recapitulation and a major chord are supposed to be—a release of tension, a homecoming. Here perhaps for the first time the movement clearly reveals its roots in violence and despair. It is one of the most original, unexpected, hair-raising moments Beethoven had created since the searing development climax and wrong-chord recapitulation in the Eroica. There the hero was triumphant. Here he is sowing ruin.
If the effect of the movement so far has been developmental and through-composed, the recapitulation is largely literal, settling down the explosion of the recapitulation. Then begins one of Beethoven’s long codas, in length a quarter of the movement. It is a resumption of the development with some of its themes, but now as in the Fifth Symphony first movement, in the coda everything is made more intense, more forward-driving than the development proper.
At the end comes Beethoven’s last shock in the movement. In the basses pianissimo begins an eerie chromatic moan. Above it the winds enact a striding theme that is unmistakably a funeral march—in fact, it is derived from the Handel “Dead March” that Beethoven jotted down as he worked on the Ninth. Like the opening of the symphony, the chromatic moan rises, fills up the space until it has virtually taken over the orchestra around the deathly stride of the march, with its relentless dotted rhythms, louder and louder. Abruptly, with a return to the D-minor down-striding theme that has become nothing but death, the movement is over.
Even here, in this web of puzzles and images, Beethoven thought of the technical and emotional and symbolic at the same time. Over the years as he redistributed the weights and balances of the musical forms he inherited, more and more he was interested in end-weighted pieces, especially in the symphonies. As said before, this is a particularly difficult thing to do, to write a weighty and compelling first movement and then top it in the finale. The Eroica was surely intended as a step in that direction, but in musical terms as distinct from symbolic, there the finale arguably does not pay off the weight and the implications of the first movement. The Fifth may have been intended to be end-directed as well, and the triumphant finale is splendid, but the first movement still claims most of the attention.
In the Ninth he wanted the choral finale to be the goal and glory of the symphony. To that end, then, he radically destabilized the first movement, kept it unresolved, searching and not finding all the way to its end. By the end of the movement, everything is in flux, unsettled, so a climactic finale becomes indispensable. Here Beethoven definitively solved the problem he had grappled with for decades, making the finale the principal movement.
Like all the late music, the Ninth was not a new direction for Beethoven as much as a continued deepening and expansion of trends that had been in his music all along: bigger pieces, more intense contrasts, more complexity and more simplicity. The instrumentation follows suit. The Ninth and the Missa solemnis have the most colorful, variegated, innovative orchestration of his life. The Ninth’s massive sound reaches far beyond the modest colors and textures of the eighteenth-century orchestra that Beethoven wielded in the First Symphony. Symphonies of that earlier time were written mainly for private orchestras that might have five or six violins, two or three violas and cellos, one bass. In the Ninth, string lines are often doubled in octaves; there are four horns and, in the second and last movements, trombones. The premiere involved a string section two to four times bigger than that of the usual palace or theater orchestra; the music is geared for that size string section, plus doubled winds. Given Beethoven’s evolution of orchestral technique and color since the middle symphonies, it is astounding how innovative and fresh are the orchestral styles of the mass and the Ninth, shaped when their composer was close to stone deaf. That orchestral sound was to be a prime model for the coming Romantic generations of composers. Inevitably, in the symphony there are mistakes and miscalculations that Beethoven was not able to hear and fix in rehearsals. At times, the winds sound thin and unbalanced amid the massive string and brass sonorities. But mostly the sound is powerful and brilliantly variegated.
Can we glimpse what sort of meanings are adumbrated here? The end of the first movement leaves everything unresolved, unsettled, and unsettling. But the unfolding of Beethoven’s music over the decades suggests a trajectory of symbol and implication.
The end of the first movement is Beethoven’s third and last funeral march. The first two, the op. 26 Piano Sonata’s “Funeral March on the Death of a Hero” and the same on a grander scale in the Eroica, were high-humanistic, echt-revolutionary evocations written in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, honoring a military hero as the highest exemplar of human achievement. In the Ninth, with his last funeral march, Beethoven buries another hero but in a far different, far more bitter and disillusioned context.17
Written in the height of the idealism over Napoleon, the Eroica first movement depicted the creation of a hero, the other movements the aftermath of his triumph. In the wake of the fall of Napoleon, the destruction of what he once appeared to stand for, came the police states that followed the Congress of Vienna. Across Europe, the age of heroes and benevolent despots was finished. So among its implications, the first movement of the Ninth Symphony depicts that bitter end—the deconstruction and burial of the heroic ideal, once and for all. That is the “despair” Beethoven wrote of. In the Eroica the conquering hero brought peace and happiness. In the Ninth the hero brings despair and death.18 But within that despair are moments of hope, and it is those moments that prefigure the Freude theme.19
Each movement of the Ninth begins with not exactly an introduction but rather a kind of curtain-raiser. In the first movement it is the whispering emergence
from the void. In the second movement it is bold, dancing, down-leaping octaves in strings and winds and, as an impudent interruption, crashing F-to-F octaves in timpani. Beethoven places the scherzo as the second movement instead of the usual third, something not unprecedented but new to his symphonies. Beethoven had stopped calling these movements “scherzo” after the Fourth Symphony, perhaps because he did not like the joking implication of the word, which is irrelevant to the tone of the Fifth Symphony scherzo.20
All the movements of the Ninth are grounded on D and the scherzo is in D minor, but not a tragic D minor. It is a vivacious, puckish, indefatigable moto perpetuo. Those qualities in a minor key give the scherzo a distinctive tone, a tinge of irony. At the same time there is a frenetic quality that recalls Beethoven’s sketch years before, imagining “a celebration of Bacchus,” something on the order of a revel, a drunken frenzy in manic counterpoint.
The movement is another of his graftings of fugue and sonata, the scherzo section a fully-worked-out sonata form. At the same time it has the familiar scherzo–trio–scherzo layout. The gist of the treatment is that the opening tune is both fugue subject and sonata-form first theme, introduced in a fugue and thereafter developed as a theme. This is Beethoven’s most complexly contrapuntal scherzo—at the same time, with its kinetic and memorable subject, one of his most crowd-pleasing.
The harmony is far more stable than in the first movement, but from the beginning there is a wild card: the timpani, which is apt to barge in with its Fs in octaves rather than the time’s almost unvarying D–A tuning of a movement in D.21 Besides unsettling the D minor of the theme, in the development the timpani’s Fs take the music into F and E-flat major, and they usher in the recapitulation.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 96
