From the Eroica symphony onwards, Beethoven self-consciously became a composer with a mission: he would change the world through his art. His music became serious-minded and earnest, but it is debatable whether he changed the world. Not at any rate in the way his contemporaries William Wilberforce fought to end slavery, or Mary Wollstonecraft articulated the rights of women, or Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine – but Beethoven certainly changed his art.
This was Beethoven’s great significance, not through form or musical language, but in recalibrating what music was for. Single-handedly he turned it from genteel, ignorable after-dinner entertainment into an all-encompassing emotional experience, a way of perceiving life as a mighty struggle, the cry of the soul, the voice of conscience. He did not curry favour; rather, he was seeking a relationship with destiny: his music yearned to be the expression of humanity’s deepest desires and anxieties. Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart made music in the moment, for the moment. Beethoven challenged his listeners to return time and again to the unresolved conflicts that characterised his art. There would be no instant gratification, no easy triumph. Instead there would be ambiguity, dynamic conflict and doubt. All the composers of the next hundred years were affected by this profound change of purpose. It is no exaggeration to say that after and because of Beethoven music approached the status of a religion, complete with gods and goddesses for worshipping, a state of affairs that persists to this day.
Had he been a level-headed craftsman, like his friend Johann Hummel, composer and pianist, this transformation would not plausibly have caught the imagination of onlookers, but Beethoven’s own personality oscillated between poignant vulnerability and raging anger. He gradually subsumed his own personality – his frustrations, burdens and (mostly unfulfilled) desires – into his music and the result was highly combustible. Beethoven could not hide his unstable emotions from the music, nor did he use the job of music-making as a distraction from the difficulties of life. Whatever else Beethoven’s music may have been, it was certainly not intended to be escapist.
The cult of the isolated, divine or demonic genius, of which Beethoven was the first outstanding musical example, did not happen in a vacuum but rather as part of a general literary and artistic movement in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It is a movement often labelled Romanticism, although, like the terms ‘Renaissance’, ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’, it presents considerable difficulties when applied to music.
In a nutshell, the problem with labelling anything ‘Romantic’ is that it has subsequently come to mean virtually anything, from the poetry of Lord Byron to the songs of Taylor Swift. Don’t get me wrong, Swift’s contemporary High School take on Romeo and Juliet, ‘Love Story’, is a crackingly well-crafted pop song that I wish I’d written, but it has little in common with Pushkin’s poem ‘The Captain of the Caucasus’ or Schumann’s piano concerto, both of which also carry the descriptor ‘Romantic’. If ‘Romantic’ still means anything specific in the history of music, it best refers to a period when the composer’s or performer’s personal emotions, or sentiment, became paramount in the dialogue between music and audience. And Beethoven was the composer who began this transformation. Feeling is everything to Beethoven, as is the importance of his individual, original voice, and a generation of composers reverentially followed in his wake, equally obsessed with the passionate confession, through music, of tender feelings – or, as Jane Austen reminds us, ‘Sense and Sensibility’.
Beethoven and his contemporaries even made the natural world an extension of their feelings. A century earlier, God was the king of Creation and all nature reflected his power. Now, with the Romantic attitude, nature was all about humankind. Musicians and poets saw the countryside as a roughly hewn wilderness, supplying countless images to convey the swirling emotional torrents of the yearning lover. Of course, none of them actually had to work the land. You observed peasants from the comfortable distance of your artistic nook but you wouldn’t want to be one. They were more like present-day privileged Western students trawling the developing world and writing blogs about how the world’s poorest people enabled them to broaden their horizons.
When Beethoven wrote his sixth, or Pastoral, symphony, in 1808, celebrating the delights of rural nature, his home town of Vienna would still have been virtually unscathed by the industrial boom that was scarring the landscape and rupturing the communities of northern England. This was the same year in which William Blake evoked England’s ‘dark, Satanic mills’ in his poem ‘Jerusalem’, but Beethoven’s easy-listening Pastoral is not about the industrial rape of the countryside. It is not really about the countryside at all; nature is there purely as a metaphor for feelings, as it was for Wordsworth and his daffodils, Shelley with his skylark and Keats with his nightingale. As Beethoven’s contemporary Wordsworth put it, ‘And led by nature into a wild scene /Of lofty hopes’.
No one followed Beethoven’s lead in reflecting emotion through nature more passionately than his near contemporary Franz Schubert, also based in Vienna. For Schubert, the birds, the bees, the woods and the trees came into their own above all in song-writing, at which he was simply unmatched before the twentieth century. As well as nine symphonies and much chamber music, he wrote over six hundred songs before his death in 1828. Among them are three outstanding song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Mill Girl) of 1824, Winterreise (Winter Journey) of 1827 and Schwanengesang (Swan Song), collated and published posthumously. All three dwell on the pain of love, embodied poetically in the natural world. In ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (On the stream), from Winterreise, for example, a frozen brook represents the state of the distraught wanderer’s heart, beating powerlessly beneath a hard, icy surface. He will carve the name of his now hopelessly lost beloved into the ice with a stone.
It is hardly surprising that a composer like Schubert should be attracted to poetic texts that placed emotions in the relative safety of natural metaphor. Relationships between young men and women of his unpropertied class were fraught with restriction and inhibition. The tragedy is we have no way of judging a mature Schubert’s thoughts on love because he didn’t live long enough to have them: he died aged thirty-one. Wilhelm Müller, the writer of many of his song lyrics, died aged thirty-three. The study of the first half of the nineteenth century in art song is the study of young men with very little true understanding of women – who are typically portrayed as unattainable, goddess-like, simple, uneducated creatures or just plain ‘cruel’ (that is, not interested in the men). Indeed, it is hard to find a composer of the nineteenth century who didn’t develop an infatuation or series of infatuations with his piano pupils, mostly single young women whose higher social status placed them – officially – out of bounds. A song like ‘Abendstern’, (Evening Star), composed at the time Schubert was enduring a burning but impossible love for his eighteen-year-old piano pupil Countess Karoline Esterházy, whom he called ‘a certain magnetic star’, treats with great sensitivity the pain and loneliness of unfulfilled love. Not many songwriters in history can match the touching pathos of the song’s plaint – ‘I am the faithful star of love… I sow no seed, I see no shoot, And remain here, silent and mournful’ – with such simple resources.
In a sense, Schubert is the inventor of the three-minute song with universal appeal, a form that is still thoroughly alive today, and one reason for this is his deliberate avoidance of the complex musical language he might have used in a symphony or string quartet. His songs were meant to sound like up-market folk songs: immediately memorable, lyrically easily understandable and relatively predictable in shape. The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert’s songs for voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably short, considering they are separated by two hundred years. The only thing that would shock Schubert about ‘Someone like you’ is the fact that a young woman is the song’s creator, not its object.
The Romantic spirit’s darker manifestation, much in evidence in Beetho
ven’s personality and creative output, was the idea that artists were in some way possessed of unnatural powers that it was their duty to give to the world, whatever the cost to their soul. For this aspect of their troubled genius Beethoven and his contemporaries had two irresistible fictional role models: Faust and Prometheus. Though myths centred on both characters had existed for centuries, they were revived with enormous impact in two epic works by a writer whose imagination gripped composers for the whole of the nineteenth century: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His Prometheus was published in 1789 and The Tragedy of Faust: Part One in 1808, the year of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony.
Faust, as portrayed by Goethe, was an intellectual who sold his soul to the devil for worldly knowledge, power and pleasure. Both Goethe’s play and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus of 1604 seem to have drawn inspiration from an actual alchemist, Johann Georg Faust, who lived in early-sixteenth-century Germany. Prometheus was a Greek god who championed mankind, stealing fire for them from Zeus, being tortured for eternity as his punishment. Romantic-era poets, painters and novelists were haunted by but irresistibly drawn to Prometheus, who was sometimes compared with Napoleon in poems and cartoons of the day, with spin-offs ranging from Blake’s ‘Prometheus Bound’ and Jean-Louis-César Lair’s ‘The Torture of Prometheus’, to Percy Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound and Mary Shelley’s hugely influential novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Beethoven tackled both figures, composing ‘Mephisto’s Flea-song’ in tribute to Goethe’s Faust, and a ballet score, The Creatures of Prometheus, in 1801. His was the first of a flood of musical responses to the two legends in ensuing decades.
Why were the figures of Faust and Prometheus so important to artists of the nineteenth century? Because they were both handy metaphors for the idea of the troubled, isolated genius whose gifts separated him from ordinary mortals, who represented the power that could be granted by divine (or Satanic) intervention. Beethoven was music’s first Faustian figure: a difficult, edgy, unpredictable maestro, a musical version of Lord Byron – mad, bad and dangerous to know (or so his mesmerised audiences doubtless imagined) – but many others were to follow. These included Hector Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique, 1829 and The Damnation of Faust, 1846), Felix Mendelssohn (Die erste Walpurgisnacht, 1832), Clara Wieck Schumann (‘Le Sabbat’ from Quatre pieces caractéristiques, 1835), Fanny Mendelssohn (Szene aus Faust, der Tragödie, 1843), Robert Schumann (Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, 1853), Franz Liszt (Faust symphony, 1857), Charles Gounod (Faust, 1859) and Gustav Mahler (eighth symphony, 1906).
Perhaps the most extreme example of the new wave of star performers who followed in Beethoven’s wake was Italian violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. Paganini was rumoured to have struck a deal with the devil himself, Faust-style, in order to acquire superhuman powers on his instrument and to put off the inevitability of death – a piece of fantastic spin fuelled by the fact that he refused the Last Rites on his deathbed and that his body was consequently not buried for another thirty-six years.
In Aeschylus’s fifth century BC telling of the Prometheus legend, Prometheus Bound, the rebellious Titan’s gifts to man, as well as fire, include the tools for civilisation: writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine and science. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, surrounded by the march of the Industrial Revolution, writers and artists grappled with a new scale of civilisation: bigger cities, methods of communication and, inevitably, more powerful armies and weapons. Beethoven clearly found the warlike times in which he lived strangely inspiring, given the number of his pieces that refer to victorious struggles of one kind or another (Coriolan, 1807; Egmont, 1810; King Stephen, 1811; Wellington’s Victory, 1813) or whose music has a martial theme, such as extended passages of several of his symphonies (especially the Eroica and the fifth).
As with industrial and scientific progress, so the symphony orchestra, which in the hands of Beethoven and Schubert increased in size and volume with every première. By the time he was halfway through his nine symphonies, Beethoven had at his disposal double-basses, which had supplanted the gentler bass violones, to fortify the bottom end of his sound. And as well as a full complement of strings – anything from twelve to thirty violins, four to twelve violas and the same number of cellos – his fifth symphony of 1808 added a very high-pitched piccolo, very low-pitched contra-bassoon and three trombones to the line-up for its noisy final movement. He surpassed himself at the première of his stirring seventh symphony in December 1813, with a violin section featuring four other distinguished Vienna-based composers of the time: Louis Spohr, Johann Hummel, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Antonio Salieri (the man quite wrongly accused in popular fiction of having conspired to murder, or at least silence, his ‘rival’, Mozart). The big hit of the evening was the second movement, the Allegretto, which has remained a public favourite ever since, notably providing the moving musical climax of the 2010 film The King’s Speech. The symphony was being composed as Napoleon’s Grande Armée was retreating from Moscow and though Beethoven did not mean it as such, the Allegretto’s steady, funereal character has been associated ever since with that chilling cortège of half a million doomed Frenchmen.
The scale of Beethoven’s seventh symphony was to be overtaken in a dramatic way, however, by the ambition of his ninth and final symphony. Indeed, the shadow of this mighty Choral symphony was to loom majestically over the entire nineteenth century.
Much has been made of the fact that the fourth and final movement adds a large chorus and four solo singers to the already sizeable orchestral forces, the first time such a multitude had been glued on to the symphony. But large choruses, soloists and orchestra were bread and butter to Bach in his Passions, Handel in his oratorios, Mozart in his Requiem and Haydn in his grand choral works. Beethoven, inspired by study of and admiration for Handel and Bach, merely had the idea of appending to a symphony something you might expect in an oratorio. The reason for the additional singers was not just to fill the hall with a magnificent noise but to proclaim Beethoven’s hopes for the future.
In the face of political and social uncertainty, his answer to the anxieties of the hour was an appeal, originally written by German Enlightenment poet Friedrich Schiller in 1785, that all people should unite in brotherly joy and revere the Creator – a brotherhood, incidentally, in which beggars and princes would be equals. He had first expressed an interest in setting the poem to music when he was in his early twenties, before the full weight of the Napoleonic Wars began to envelop Europe. It may therefore be an unusual mixture of youthful dreams and mature exhortation, yet the ‘Ode to Joy’s’ arrival in the final movement of the Choral symphony, revealed to the world in two subscription concerts in May 1824 – one packed with friends and admirers, the other virtually empty as the public struggled with Beethoven’s modernity – is surely one of the most riveting and uplifting eighteen minutes in all nineteenth-century music.
The most significant thing about Beethoven’s ninth, though, is not his introduction of a choral element into the symphony per se; it was his demonstration that the symphony as a form could and would thereafter mean anything it wanted, the bigger the better. This monumental new piece announced to the next generation of composers that the symphony was now to have an epic dimension. Never has an invitation to young composers been more enthusiastically embraced. For better or worse, the coming decades were to be about music taking on the task of reforming humanity, dreaming up a new Utopia and leading the arts to unite mankind. I am not exaggerating: composers of the second half of the nineteenth century really did believe that this was their role. And the Messiah who had rallied them to the cause was Beethoven.
Even the modern world has found it hard to shake off this legacy. When the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989, a special performance there of the ninth symphony was broadcast around the world, with the word ‘joy’, (Freude!) replaced with the word ‘freedom’, (Freiheit!), lending those extraordinary events (its organisers doubtless believed) profundity, universa
lity, meaning.
The irony of what happened after Beethoven’s ninth, with composers from Berlioz to Wagner indulging in preposterously overblown claims for the importance of their work for the future of humankind, is that what Beethoven himself did next was the exact opposite.
In the last two years of his life, now profoundly deaf and mostly bedridden by severe illness, Beethoven withdrew into a private sound world, composing six string quartets of astonishing, unapproachable intensity. They were modern not by the standards of 1826 but by the standards of a century later. These late quartets are almost embarrassingly private. It is as if he was working out some tortured mind game on the page, or distracting himself from an unbearable sadness. Most of his contemporaries didn’t know what to make of these late quartets. It was as if someone had time-travelled from 1930 and played twentieth-century music to the mystified people of 1826. Could Beethoven hear the music of the distant future? If this was it, his vision was a bleak, uneasy one. The late quartets have a musical detachment about them, an intensity without warmth, and it seems as if the Pleasure Principle of the previous decades has been replaced with an urge to experiment with harmony at all costs: they are beautiful in an unsettling way.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 16
