The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  More than an elaborator of musical forms, Beethoven opened the gates. Nothing could have been more ironic than Beethoven’s role as prophet and exemplar of a new European community of music, for there had never been a composer more isolated from his audience—by the deafness that prevented his hearing (except in his mind’s ear) what the audience would hear and by an irascible temperament that aroused enemies and tested friends.

  Yet there never was a time when a translingual art was more needed in Europe, for the languages of the marketplace had marked the boundaries of the nations that emerged from the parts of the Roman Empire. In the long run, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe would be messengers of the human comedy and create a legacy of Western literature. But in their time they were eloquent of national personalities, of the differences among peoples. The classical age of Western music—the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—was a time of spreading literacy. No longer confined to church and monastery, to noble courts or universities or prosperous merchant households, readers were beginning to be everywhere, even among women and the laboring classes. In the next decades the widely read books of Balzac and Dickens would remind Frenchmen and Englishmen of their special virtues and vices, and national literatures would create needs for the translingual arts.

  The lifetime of Beethoven, the era of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, saw the rise of popular government. As literature became public, as authorship became a paying profession, as poets, novelists, historians, biographers, essayists, and artists reminded Europeans of their peculiar hopes and idiosyncrasies, people were alerted to their right to govern themselves. Another art was needed to affirm their community. Haydn and Mozart opened a European concert world where language was no barrier—Haydn in his London triumph, Mozart with his international travels as a prodigy. But the grand gesture of public music, which transcended the community of music lovers, was to be the work of Beethoven.

  Beethoven’s conspicuous and enduring triumphs were with the orchestra and the symphony, in the new world of instruments. Yet, as Wagner observed, Beethoven would embody the singing voice in the myriad-instrument orchestra. His homophonic instrumental style offered an unmistakable dominant melody accompanied and reinforced by subsidiary voices, a top melody with chords beneath. Beethoven used the entire orchestra of strings and woodwinds to state his theme. This style already appeared in his First Symphony (1800), and was demonstrated in the familiar opening theme of the Fifth Symphony (1807) and the adagio movement of the Ninth Symphony (1823). The unforgettable simple element in each of these complex structures reached all who were puzzled by the contrapuntal elegancies of other master composers.

  He reached beyond the concert hall, too, when he wrote music on themes outside the world of music. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the music of instruments, in contrast to the music of words, did not aim to depict nonmusical subjects. Since the music of instruments was a merely ambient art, providing atmosphere for ritual or ceremony, it lacked the dignity of a fine art that produced a work beautiful in itself. “Program,” or “illustrative,” music developed in Europe about 1700, when instrumental music, borrowing the techniques of vocal music, was becoming a distinct respectable art. “Program” music could dignify the music of instruments. A program would guide the unprofessional audience, reassuring the listener that what he heard was not “mere” music but something significant in experience. The orchestra had powers—beyond words or even visual images—to express, to depict, and to narrate. So program music became vehicle and messenger to the whole community, not just to lovers of sonatas and concertos, not just to concertgoers, but to all who enjoyed nature, who loved, who felt joy or sorrow, lamented defeat, or rejoiced in victory. Program music was newly public.

  In this, too, Beethoven was a prophet and pioneer. Not until 1881 did the expression “program music” enter our English language for “music intended to convey the impression of a definite series of objects, scenes, or events; descriptive music.” At the same time a “program” came to mean a printed list describing the music in a concert. Then “absolute music” came into use for the opposite of program music and meant “self-dependent instrumental music without literary or other extraneous suggestions.” And some avant-garde music lovers (such as G. B. Shaw, who called it “abstract” music) gave this name to the oldest form of instrumental music. Beethoven would be pathmarker of the program music that dominated the West in the nineteenth century, the era of Romantic music. In place of Musiker (musician) Beethoven preferred to be known as Tondichter (tone poet). He sometimes protested against reading events into his symphonies, but he was not unwilling to help the public “understand” his music.

  The prototype of program music was Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, in F Major (the “Pastoral,” published in 1809 as Sinfonie pastorale). He described it in the advertisement for its first concert (December 22, 1808) as “A recollection of Country Life.” For each of the five movements he provided an explanatory inscription:

  (1) Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country

  (2) Scene by the Brook

  (3) Merrymaking of the Country Folk

  (4) Storm

  (5) Song of the Shepherds, Joy and Gratitude after the Storm

  This “program” came verbatim from a work by a little-known German writer entitled Musical Portrait of Nature. Beethoven’s familiar characterization of a violin part used in the first performance revealed his intention that his music should refer to something other than itself—“More expression of feeling than painting” (Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei). In this symphony his contemporaries heard a plain expression of Beethoven’s own feelings for nature, which seem to have been accentuated by his increasing deafness. In summer it was said that he stripped down to his underpants for long morning and evening walks in the woods. “Nature was like food to him,” the British pianist Charles Neate noted, “he seemed really to live in it.”

  In the music of his oratorio Israel in Egypt (1739), Handel had depicted the plagues, and the works of others had imitated birdsong, waterfalls, and battle sounds. Beethoven unified the stages of feeling into a coherent music drama. And program music would flourish with the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century, in the works of Weber (1786–1826), Berlioz (1803–1869), and Liszt (1811–1886). Later the music of Richard Strauss (1864–1949), in which the program threatened to drown out the music, helped account for the disrepute of “descriptive” music, and the turn to new forms of absolute “anti-Romantic” music. Later still, totalitarian governments made program music a way of enslaving artists to politics.

  Beethoven was the first of the great musicians to be a public man, an advocate through his music on the issues of his time. Bonn, where he was born and raised, was a center of sympathy for the French Revolution. As Napoleonic armies surged across Europe and twice occupied the Austrian capital of Vienna, Beethoven found it difficult to avoid public commitment. Unlike Haydn or Mozart, he was not satisfied to be a mere ornament for church or court. There was no precedent for the public role of his “Eroica,” his Third Symphony. In 1804, he had originally entitled the work “Bonaparte” in honor of the Napoleon (then first consul) who still seemed the “liberator” of Europe. But when Beethoven heard that Napoleon had made himself emperor, he was enraged, and in a scene witnessed by his friend Ferdinand Ries exclaimed, “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he too will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” Beethoven tore off the title page, threw it on the floor, and rewrote it with the title “Eroica.” When the work was published it bore the subtitle “To celebrate the memory of a great man.” But Beethoven’s political judgments oscillated with his personal fortunes and opportunities. Lionized by Talleyrand and Metternich, by the reigning czar, by kings and queens—the cementers of the old order at the Congress of Vienna in 1814—he com
posed especially for them, embracing the role of their prized entertainer.

  Beethoven’s background hardly suggests the revolutionary role he would play in Western music. Born in Bonn in northwestern Germany to a family of musicians, Beethoven was well set for a conventional career. His grandfather was musical director for the archbishop-elector of Cologne. His alcoholic father, noting young Beethoven’s precocious talent at the piano, tried to make him into a Mozart-style prodigy. Returning drunk from the taverns late at night, he would rouse the sleeping Ludwig for lessons. He failed in these efforts, for Beethoven would be a slow developer.

  Still, at twelve he was named a court organist and at thirteen continuo player to the Bonn opera. Through his mentor, the composer Christian Gottlob Neefe, he was introduced to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and in 1783 had his first composition published at Mannheim. Some would later describe Beethoven as “the last flower on the Mannheim tree.” He began the habit he never lost of reading widely in the classics, including Shakespeare. At fifteen, he was sent to Vienna to study with Mozart, who is supposed to have said that this young man would “make a great name for himself.” After only two months his mother’s death brought him back to Bonn, where he began to make his way, helped by influential aristocratic friends. Frau von Bruening, widow of the chancellor, engaged him as music teacher for her children. When Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, a Viennese patron of music, visited Bonn in 1788 he was impressed by young Beethoven and commissioned him to write a piece for ballet. Waldstein offered this over his own name, and then secured a number of other commissions for Beethoven. In July 1792, when Haydn passed through Bonn on his way back from London, he admired a cantata score of Beethoven’s composition, and invited the young man to be his pupil in Vienna. The timing was providential. Waldstein and Beethoven’s teacher persuaded the elector of Bonn to support Beethoven’s study in Vienna. And in November, Beethoven left Bonn, never to return. The forces of Napoleon were approaching the city. All his life Beethoven would be caught in the maelstrom of revolution and counterrevolution, in the age of Robespierre and Metternich.

  But Beethoven was not cut out to be a disciple. In 1794 his lessons with Haydn in Vienna did not go well. While Haydn charged very little for his lessons, Beethoven felt he was getting little. Beethoven began taking other lessons in secret, for his teacher was preoccupied and not demanding enough of him. Preparing for his second London visit, Haydn had actually invited Beethoven to join him. Then, on Haydn’s departure alone for London, the lessons ended. The two temperaments were plainly incompatible. When Haydn asked Beethoven to put “Pupil of Josef Haydn,” on his early publications Beethoven refused. He did dedicate to Haydn his first three piano sonatas, but ungraciously insisted that he had “never learned anything” from him.

  In convivial Vienna, Beethoven quickly became a social success, which was not irrelevant to his musical career. On arrival he was grateful for a garret room in Prince Lichnowsky’s house, but within a year he had elegant quarters. His musical talents were developing in these next seven years, which were relatively carefree, for he did not yet feel the threat of deafness. He took lessons on three instruments, studied counterpoint, and began filling his notebooks. Often compared with Leonardo’s, these notebooks reveal efforts to elaborate a major work from simple elements continually worked over. In Vienna Beethoven enjoyed applause as a virtuoso pianist and improviser, and toured Germany and Hungary. A rival pianist complained, “Ah, he’s no man—he’s a devil. He will play me and all of us to death.”

  Unlike the private preserve of the Esterhazy family where Haydn had spent most of his life, Vienna offered a more public audience. The city was a refuge for the rich, vastly more cosmopolitan than any country estate, but not yet threatened by the spreading fever of revolution. Noble families of wealth originating in Italy, France, Russia, or Hungary had established households there. And, after dining and dancing, music became their main urban entertainment. Rival families supported groups of musicians, quartets, and chamber orchestras. Playing a musical instrument and patronizing musicians was as acceptable an aristocratic pastime as hunting or attending masked balls. Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s friend and neighbor on fashionable Alserstrasse, was a pianist of high competence. The emperor himself played the violin. But the motley audiences who paid admission to urban concerts would hardly have been among Count Esterhazy’s invited guests. Beethoven’s first public appearance in a benefit concert for Mozart’s widow spread his fame across the whole community. Pleased by his piano concertos, the audiences came back. On April 2, 1800, at the first public concert all his own, he offered the First (C Major) Symphony, which was still in the Mozartian mold.

  The widening audience for orchestral music and for Beethoven’s work was revealed in the three earliest performances of the “Eroica.” First heard in August 1804 in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, in a room only fifty-four feet long and twenty-four feet wide, it was played again that December in the home of a wealthy banker. Then in April 1805 it was performed in the Theater an der Wien to a large paying audience. Located just outside the city walls, this spacious playhouse was said to be the largest on the Continent. It was the scene of the premieres of Mozart’s Magic Flute and Beethoven’s own Fidelio. Court officials noted that the occasion showed how music was appealing to not only the “higher and middle orders” but “even the lower orders.”

  About 1798, at the maturing of his powers as a composer, Beethoven, not yet thirty, began to be troubled by the ringing in his ears, the first hints of the affliction that would dominate his life. Perhaps originating in an attack of typhus or another dangerous illness about 1798, the deafness became increasingly troublesome. On October 6, 1802, from a village near Vienna, he wrote his premature farewell in a letter to his two brothers. This came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, for it was written in the village where he had hoped to enjoy the sounds as well as the sights of the countryside, but where he realized that his deafness would be incurable. After asking forgiveness for seeming “unfriendly, peevish, or even misanthropic,” he recounted his six years’ affliction “with an incurable complaint which has been made worse by incompetent doctors.” His deafness, he was now convinced, was permanent:

  Though endowed with a passionate and lively temperament and even fond of the distractions offered by society I was soon obliged to seclude myself and live in solitude. If at times I decided just to ignore my infirmity, alas! how cruelly was I then driven back by the intensified sad experience of my poor hearing. Yet I could not bring myself to say to people: “Speak up, shout, for I am deaf.” Alas! how could I possibly refer to the impairing of a sense which in me should be more perfectly developed than in other people, a sense which at one time I possessed in the greatest perfection, even to a degree of perfection such as assuredly few in my profession possess or ever possessed—Oh, I cannot do it; so forgive me, if you ever see me withdrawing from your company which I used to enjoy.

  His postscript, four days later, had the plaintive ring of a suicide note: “yes that beloved hope—which I brought with me when I came here to be cured at least in a degree—I must wholly abandon, as the leaves of autumn fall and are withered so hope has been blighted … even the high courage—which often inspired me in the beautiful days of summer—has disappeared—O Providence—grant me at last but one day of pure joy.”

  Some have explained the depth of Beethoven’s agony by the possibility, now widely doubted, that his deafness was due to syphilis. His canonical biographer, Thayer, seems to have suppressed any such “incriminating” evidence. The first serious suggestion came from Sir George Grove in the first edition of his standard Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1878). Syphilis would also help explain Beethoven’s strange combination of attitudes to women: his abhorrence of “immorality,” which led him to force his brother Karl into a painful marriage for appearance’s sake, his affairs with highborn women whom he could never marry, and (despite his professed belief that marriage was the solac
e he needed) his refusal to take a wife. Beethoven’s frequent changes of doctors and his obsessive efforts to save his wayward nephew from sexual temptations are more understandable if he knew he had a venereal disease. Perhaps some peculiarities we assign to his deafness had other causes.

  Yet, as Beethoven’s deafness worsened, so his talents grew and his performance became more magnificent. Increasing deafness, which made it impossible for him to perform as a virtuoso pianist or a conductor, forced him back into himself. Perhaps this focused his talent to compose his great works. After about 1801, when his deafness had become serious, he had to find ways other than performing to support himself. Mozart seems to have resisted publication of his compositions, but Beethoven had no choice. For most of his productive life his earnings came from selling his original music, either for publication or for performance by others. Hard pressed, he was tempted to sell works still uncomposed or never to be composed, and to offer the same work as an original to several buyers. By 1817 he complained, “I am obliged to live entirely on the profits from my compositions.” For posterity this has been lucky. Almost all of Beethoven’s music appeared in print during his lifetime, and at his death few of his manuscripts were found to have been unpublished.

  To nonmusicians, Beethoven’s achievement despite his deafness seems miraculous, but musicians assure us that a composer must be able to hear his music in the “mind’s ear.” Whatever the explanation or the difficulties, Beethoven the creator developed and his music deepened and broadened even as his deafness became complete.

  Critics divide his work into three periods: “Imitation, externalization, and reflection.” In his first period, from his move to Vienna until about 1802, he elaborated the classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart, and produced some of his most durable sonatas (including the “Pathétique”), the quartets of Opus 18, and his first two symphonies. His second period began to fulfill his distinctive talent—from the Third (“Eroica”) through the Eighth symphonies, his own opera, Fidelio, and the “Leonore” overtures. In the full flood of his years of fame after 1815, he produced fewer works. All were the product of long labor and some had the greatest subtlety and grandeur—such as his last five piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, the Diabelli Variations, and the Ninth Symphony. At his death in 1827 he seems to have been planning a Tenth Symphony.