Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  A related problem was the sheer size of the programmes that were undertaken in Beethoven’s day, some of which seem almost to have been calculated to guarantee indifferent performances. One such was the concert of his own works that Beethoven himself had organized at the Theater an der Wien on 5 April 1803, a mere two months before he took up residence in Oberdöbling and began serious work on the ‘Eroica’:

  The programme contained the First and Second Symphonies, the Piano Concerto in C minor (soloist Beethoven) and the first performance of the oratorio Christus am Oelberge. It began at 8 a.m.; by 2.30 everyone was exhausted and angry. But for dear, kind Prince Lichnowsky… the day would have been a fiasco. He it was who thoughtfully provided baskets of bread and butter, meat and wine, fed the hungry men and persuaded them to try again. Even then the oratorio was not a great success. For once the crowd instinct was right: Beethoven had misjudged his style, as he himself admitted later.1

  Only the previous year Beethoven had confided in a friend, the violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, that he was dissatisfied with his works so far. ‘From today’, he said, ‘I intend to take a new road.’ The ‘Eroica’ was therefore Beethoven’s first symphony in what he thought of as his new style.

  The first proper review was of a performance in January 1805 and appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on 13 February. The reviewer began ominously with a gushing eulogy of Beethoven’s First Symphony as ‘a glorious work of art’ with ‘an extraordinary wealth of lovely ideas treated in the most splendid and graceful style, with coherence, order and clarity reigning throughout’. Having established this point of comparison he put the boot in. In essence, he said, this new Third Symphony was

  a daring, wild fantasy of inordinate length and extremely difficult to play. There is no lack of striking and beautiful passages in which the composer’s power and talent are obvious; but often the work seems to lose itself in utter confusion. It begins with a powerfully scored Allegro in E flat, followed by a Funeral March in C minor, treated fugally towards the end.… This writer belongs to Beethoven’s warmest admirers, but in the present work he finds very much that is odd and harsh that enormously increases the difficulty of understanding the music and almost completely obscuring its unity.2

  The same critic was still more dismissive of another performance in April, this time criticizing the symphony’s inordinate length, recommending that Beethoven shorten it and saying it had lasted ‘a full hour’, which does suggest much slower tempi than would be usual today. The performance he was referring to took place in the Theater an der Wien and was the work’s true public premiere, which the composer himself, now very deaf, conducted with a flurry of distracting gestures and ferocious glares. It was scarcely a triumph. The orchestra was as much at sea as the audience, and at one point the pianist-composer Carl Czerny heard the heartfelt cry from the gallery of a man who, no doubt bitterly thinking of his entrance fee, shouted in exasperation, ‘I’d give another Kreutzer if only it would stop!’ Baffled as many of Beethoven’s listeners might have been, they probably would not have gone as far as the wise men of Prague Conservatory a little later who, when the ‘Eroica’ was performed there, declared it ‘morally depraved’ (ein sittenverderbendes Werk). Nor did it help the symphony’s immediate reception that it was not finally published until 1806, which made the parts more accessible and reliable than those transcribed by copyists. After that, with one or two notable exceptions, its fame and acceptance grew rapidly the more it was heard.

  All the same, there was at the time no lack of dissenting voices of those who thought the ‘Eroica’ was an incoherent din, and some people just never did acquire a taste for Beethoven, who seemed to them to grow ever more outlandish, his late works being quite impenetrable. George Onslow (1784–1853), a French composer with an English father, said in an interview with Joseph d’Ortigue, a music critic, ‘Beethoven’s last quartets are mistakes, absurdities, the daydreams of a sick genius… I would burn everything I have composed if I ever wrote anything resembling such chaos.’3 And on 6 February 1881 John Ruskin—himself a musical dilettante of the Mendelssohn school—wrote in a letter to his friend Dr John Brown: ‘What you say of Turner is such a joy to me, but how did you get to understand Beethoven? He always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.’

  Ironically, seeing that Beethoven had been planning to use this symphony as a calling card for his move to Paris, it seems not to have been performed in France until 1825 when it was cautiously given, together with the Seventh Symphony, in a private performance. Afterwards a member of the orchestra generously allowed that ‘these two symphonies contained some tolerable passages; and that notwithstanding length, incoherence, and want of connection they were not unlikely to be effective’.4

  In some ways it was the ‘Eroica’ that fixed the symphony as music’s leading form in the nineteenth century. Its expansion of musical language—its fluidity of form, the stretching of the harmonically permissible with brutal dynamic contrasts—led inexorably to Wagner and the cementing of a kind of Teutonic hegemony over the century’s musical taste. This was often fiercely opposed by composers of other nationalities (especially French), who found themselves comparatively helpless before the near-universal acceptance of German culture’s brand of high moral seriousness as the sine qua non of ‘proper’ music. The self-proclaimed new style in which Beethoven had written the ‘Eroica’ was much later to be named his ‘symphonic ideal’, as will be seen in the next chapter. The imperious, buttonholing quality that made its first movement so impossible to ignore was exactly what some people disliked about the ‘Eroica’ and Beethoven’s later symphonies, particularly the Fifth and the Ninth. They were all too clearly public music designed to sway and edify: arguably the earliest manifestation of a certain hectoring quality that was to become more evident in later Germanic symphonists such as Richard Strauss and Mahler (‘Listen, damn you: this is serious! It’s for your own good’).

  There was always opposition to this awed weightiness in France and Italy. Years ago at a concert in Florence I saw a programme note whose writer said the glory of Bach was that he committed one to nothing other than formal beauty, so it was hard to become bored with him, but that Beethoven demanded constant attention like ‘a mutinous adolescent’—a phrase I have never forgotten. In the twentieth century, transatlantic musicians also managed slowly to haul themselves from beneath the stifling horse-blanket of the German classics. ‘If I hear another bar of the “Eroica,” I’ll scream’, Glenn Gould remarked when interviewing himself about Beethoven.5 Elsewhere he described Beethoven as ‘the one composer whose reputation is based entirely on gossip’.6 He was more specific when singling out Beethoven’s so-called ‘middle period’, which is usually dated as having begun immediately after the Heiligenstadt crisis. The ‘Eroica’ therefore qualifies as its first major work. ‘In this period’, Gould said,

  Beethoven offered us the supreme historical example of a composer on an ego trip, a composer absolutely confident that whatever he did was justified simply because he did it. I don’t know any other way to explain the predominance of those empty, banal, belligerent gestures that serve as his themes in that middle period… All in all, I’d have to say that Beethoven’s most consistently excellent works are those from his early period, before his hearing started to go—let’s face it, that did affect his later work—and before his ego took complete command.7

  The contemporary American composer Ned Rorem makes no bones about Beethoven being someone whose music he simply doesn’t need in the way that he needs French music, despite having performed many of Beethoven’s piano works in public and ruefully conceding that he (together with Schubert) is ‘untouchable’. Untouchability, of course, is the worst aspect of the Pantheon’s fossilizing tendency in that it leaves no real middle course between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection. John Cage reportedly disliked Beethoven while Michael Tippett was a devotee. Benjamin Britten famously rep
udiated his early obsession with the composer, saying in 1963, ‘Sometimes I feel I have lost the point of what he’s up to. I heard recently the [last] Piano Sonata, Op. 111. The sound of the variations was so grotesque I just couldn’t see what they were all about.’8 This judgement makes Britten sound indistinguishable from any of Beethoven’s more querulous Viennese critics a century and a half earlier.

  Yet for certain contemporary composers Beethoven is a figure to whom they find themselves returning. After taking Beethoven somewhat for granted for much of his life, Harrison Birtwistle has said:

  Nowadays I have a completely different feeling about Beethoven, in a way I couldn’t have felt in the past. He’s a composer who never, ever, does what you expect him to. And what he does is never contrived. There’s an early piano sonata—No. 11 [the B flat major, Op. 22, of 1800]—it’s a bit like an embryonic ‘Hammerklavier’. I thought it was extraordinary. In one sense you know the harmonic language but everything seemed new, as if for the first time. In some ways these thoughts [about Beethoven] have made me qualify my feelings about music I don’t like. Or didn’t like. Or didn’t think I liked.9

  Yet if Glenn Gould liked some of the early Beethoven (though the sonata Birtwistle singles out happens to be one that Gould particularly disparaged), there are modern musicians who find the late works indispensable. While conceding that Beethoven is not really a regular topic of conversation among his contemporaries, the composer Colin Matthews admits that ‘they (like me) are likely to be drawn much more to the late sonatas and quartets than to the symphonies. The late works mean a great deal to me personally—and I don’t think anyone writing quartets can possibly shut their ears to these so great works.’

  That a modern composer can still experience this difficult music as a source of inspiration is surely an impressive indication of just how far ahead of his time the visionary old composer was. And not merely ahead of his time, either, but sometimes outside it altogether. If when you hear the slow, songlike theme that opens and closes the last movement of the E major Piano Sonata, Op. 109, the conviction suddenly comes that this is music for the end of the world, trying to get your inner sceptic to refute the idea is fanciful. My guess is you will fail, and Beethoven’s serene and weightless song really will be the one the world ends to: terminal stillness finally made audible.

  8

  THE SYMPHONIC IDEAL

  Familiar as the ‘Eroica’ is (even over familiar), it is still easy to underestimate the symphony’s sheer intellectual achievement and the shock it caused. Beethoven was quite aware of its greatness. Later in his life he admitted it was his favourite of all his symphonies. Back in 1805, regardless of whether they liked it or not, most people who heard its early performances in Vienna had to concede that it opened up new musical terrain. From then on the Beethoven symphony became a genre of its own, different in kind (and not merely in length) from its Classical predecessors. Yet the shock of the new prevented many from seeing how firmly rooted the ‘Eroica’ still was in traditional forms; and for the next century people would argue about whether it still qualified as a greatly expanded Classical symphony or was, on the other hand, the first example of a Romantic symphony. Beethoven’s creative struggle from about 1800 onwards was increasingly concerned with form: specifically, with how to shape music—and especially a large-scale work such as a symphony—in a way that would retain its coherence while expressing something radically new and personal.

  We now think of the high period of the Classical style that owed so much to sonata form as being that of Haydn, Mozart and the early Beethoven. Beethoven’s ‘early’ period covers roughly the fifteen years between 1785 (the year of his three piano quartets when he was still fourteen) and 1800 when he was a lionized pianist-composer. At that time the compositions that most helped him make a name and a living remained approachably within the late Classical style of Mozart and Haydn, such as his first and brilliant Op. 18 set of string quartets (1798–1800) and the tuneful if vapid 1799 Septet, Op. 20, a work Beethoven later came to loathe for its enduring popularity even though ironically it was probably his bestselling work in his own lifetime. By the same token his first two symphonies (1800–1802) and first three piano concertos (1795–1802) were well received. Still falling within the recognizable Classical confines in terms of their length and overall structure they nevertheless contained effects and ideas unconventional and daring enough to sound fresh and individual while not being too challenging for most listeners. Increasingly, though, Beethoven was dissatisfied with the limitations of the form he had inherited. It was obvious to him that Haydn and Mozart had reached independent pinnacles of perfection in their symphonies that effectively made their brands of orchestral sonata form something of a ne plus ultra, if not a dead end, even though dozens of lesser composers were still aspiring to that symphonic style. If Beethoven knew anything, he knew he was not a lesser composer.

  Giulietta, Countess Guicciardi, from an anonymous miniature on ivory that was found among Beethoven’s belongings after his death. Society gossip in 1800–1801 implied she was a notorious flirt. She became a student of Beethoven’s and he evidently fell helplessly in love with her. It is likely that the very hopelessness of their social divide occasioned much of the despairing tone of the Heiligenstadt Testament in October 1802.

  CREDIT: BEETHOVEN HAUS, BONN, COLLECTION H. C. BODMER

  The intellectual task he set himself was to work out a new and personal way of moving his music forward. Amid his popular compositions were already one or two that presaged a more radical style, especially the ‘Grande Sonate Pathétique’ for piano, Op. 13 of 1797–1798 that epitomized the stormy significance the key of C minor held for him. It still adhered largely to the basic structure of sonata form, but nobody else could possibly have written it. The work’s passionate nature established him in the Viennese press as a Tonkünstler or ‘artist in sound’, significantly a description Beethoven preferred to that of ‘composer’.

  Perhaps even more important to his stylistic development were the two Op. 27 piano sonatas (1800–1801). He described each as ‘quasi una fantasia’, and there are few remnants of traditional sonata form in either. The second one in C sharp minor became known as the ‘Moonlight’ after the poet Ludwig Rellstab regrettably thought it conjured up ‘a boat in moonlight’. This did wonders for the piece’s celebrity while traducing the earnestness of the composer’s intentions, which were surely not banally pictorial, for all the reflectiveness of the first movement and the passion of the last. The work seems to have been written under the influence of Beethoven’s infatuation with a student of his, the seventeen-year-old Countess Julie Guicciardi. Certainly it was dedicated to her. Despite his occasional pretensions to having aristocratic blood (so much for his proclaimed egalitarianism: a legal case later in his life obliged him to admit that the ‘van’ in his name was not the equivalent of the German ‘von’), Beethoven was a commoner. His passing passions for aristocratic women were never going to lead anywhere, but an implied romance with a young countess undoubtedly helped this sonata’s nearly instant fame. Both its first movement, as well as the entire companion sonata in E flat major, have an improvisatory quality that Beethoven’s contemporaries would have recognized from his public performances but would not have expected in a published sonata. The ‘Moonlight’ in particular inhabited a dreamy musical realm no one had encountered before, and its first movement had the additional attraction that any amateur pianist could get his or her fingers around the notes and play it with suitably swooning demeanour. Not for nothing was this movement the party piece of E. F. Benson’s fictional Lucia, endlessly performed for her variously fawning and catty listeners at one of her soirées in Riseholme. And, like Lucia herself, many an amateur has judiciously abandoned any attempt to play the much more demanding last movement within anyone’s hearing.

  Joseph Schutz’s coloured etching of a masked ball in the Hofburg Redoutensaal during the Congress of Vienna, during which Beethoven’s Seventh Symp
hony and Wellington’s Victory, or the Battle of Vittoria were performed.

  CREDIT: DE AGOSTINI / GETTY IMAGES

  By now Beethoven’s attention was increasingly focused on giving his music motivic ideas that he could develop in various ways and make to bear cumulative significance. In orchestral music this could be achieved by assigning the motifs to different combinations of instruments at their various appearances, thereby casting them in new light, and by expanding them or otherwise altering them to release unsuspected potential. It was a method that, if handled skilfully, could give the music an overall sense of unity that the ear understood without knowing quite how. In this way individual ideas could be ‘composed out’ during the course of a movement or even over an entire symphony. It was this radical form of music that Beethoven perfected at a stroke in the ‘Eroica’. The musicologists Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson were to call it his ‘symphonic ideal’.