Naturally Beethoven
“All human activites toss around him like mechanism, he alone begets independently in himself the unexpected, the uncreated”
The overblown language his contemporaries tended to use to describe him, turned Ludwig van Beethoven – during his lifetime already – into one of the most enigmatic artists ever to have lived. After his death, innumerable others – at times consciously, yet often subconsciously – would nourish the ‘Beethoven myth’ with equally admiring phrases, songs of praise and interpretations. In particular, Richard Wagner’s statement with regard to the ‘favourable’ influence of Beethoven’s deafness on his creative urge was seen as a safe-conduct to read into Beethoven’s life an artistically justified story of suffering. Surrounding all fiction, there is a smattering of truth. Uncertainty with regard to his religious beliefs, the drama of the loss of his ‘immortal beloved’, the painful battle for the custody of his nephew Karl, thoughts of suicide, problems with composing, hearing disorders and financial worries: Beethoven went through all of this. In other words, it did not take long for people to come up with the romantic myth of the unworldly grumbler, who used his personal agony as a creative stimulus.
However, it is very much the question whether this tragic picture actually concurs with reality. After all, the Beethoven myth still remains a seductive, perhaps overly seductive cover story. A treacherous one, too, as forming such an image can highly influence the manner in which we listen to his music. Take a look, for instance, at the works by Beethoven that we can enumerate. The mere mention of his name immediately brings to mind his Symphonies Nos. 3, 5 and 9, as well as the Pathétique and the Appassionata Sonatas, Fidelio, and perhaps the incidental music to Egmont. Major works, certainly, but they quickly make one forget that not all music written by Beethoven is automatically based on dramatics or melodrama. However, we can ask ourselves whether the fabrications surrounding Beethoven’s life do not also form part of his story. Although the many tales told about the composer say more about our sense of feeling for heroism and drama than about the composer himself, at the end of the day the collective imagination also has a right to exist. Thus, according to the eminent musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, the Beethoven myth is separated from his factual biography by “a gap that is more than just the simple difference between true and false.”
Meanwhile, the naive desire to read into the art the most personal and deepest stirrings of the artist’s soul appears to have achieved a disturbing degree of perfection in the literature surrounding Beethoven. By far the best-known evidence of the superfluousness of such speculation is the truth behind the creation of the Symphony No. 2. As is common knowledge, Beethoven’s anguish became most perceptible in October 1802, when he wrote the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, by far the most famous ‘ego’ document of the then 31-year-old composer. In this ‘testament’ – more like a grotesque suicide note to his family, friends and the world at large – Beethoven wore his heart on his sleeve: desperation oozes through the words. In between the lines of this plea for understanding and affection, we can read not only his existential doubts, but also the panicky desperation of a musician who realizes that he is losing his hearing. However, it is doubtful that such legible anguish can also be heard in Beethoven’s music. Even though he was planning, at the time, an oratorio about the suffering and lonely Christ (Christus am Ölberge), the works that he actually created leading up to this period truly did not rank among Beethoven’s blackest compositions. Take, for instance, his Symphony No. 2. The remarkably light-hearted character of this composition, completed in April 1802, contrasts sharply with the mournful undertone that was to dominate his Testament half a year later. The ambiguously progressive opening bars, the elegance of the introductory movement, which gradually dissolves into Mozartian operatic drama, the surprising melodies in the Larghetto (which Beethoven would later echo in the slow movement of his Symphony No. 9), the clever way in which the strings and the winds alternate forte and piano passages in the Scherzo, the opulent conclusion of the Finale, which gives an ingenious twist to the spirited preceding brio: all these are elements that would defy any autobiographical reading. Despite all distraught tristesse or ‘testament-like’ lamentations, this is definitely music that stands firmly on its own two feet. Contemporary critics justly assessed this symphony as ‘new-fashioned’ or even ‘far-fetched’. Anyone comparing this to Beethoven’s first symphony would notice an excess of compositional audacity, daring, and sophistication. But tragedy? No way.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is another work to escape the tragedy-soaked Beethoven myth, as does the Symphony No. 2, placing the tormented artist in a less emotionally charged – in this case, one could fairly say ‘more natural’ – light. Incidentally, he completed the sketches for this blissfully rippling composition quite soon after writing his Symphony No. 2. In 1803 already, Beethoven jotted down a few cursory melodic fragments in his notebook for his Symphony No. 3, the Eroica, which later turned up in his Pastoral Symphony. Only a few years later – in 1807 – did Beethoven actually elaborate his sketches to create what would become one of his most high-profile symphonies. As is known, the sixth of this composer’s nine symphonies is not an abstract work of little substance, for Beethoven adorned his work with descriptive titles and a programme explanation based on the joys of pastoral life. In the first movement, Beethoven portrays the beatific feelings evoked by the countryside. To this end, he employs the sound of the bagpipe and bird imitations evoking the idyllic mood and rustic effects. He uses a constantly recurring melody that imitates the babbling of a brook in the second movement, and in the third movement he presents a number of country dances. The cheerful village party is interrupted in the fourth movement by a storm. After the storm dies down during the fifth and last movement, the mood changes into one of pantheistic serenity. The Symphony No. 6 is one of the few works in which Beethoven outlines an immediately recognizable, extra-musical content, by means of all these musical illustrations. Thus he endorses the eighteenth-century semiotic code of the ‘sinfonia caratteristica’: a ‘characteristic’ or ‘illustrative’ symphonic work, the embedded significance of which is immediately recognizable. It was a special gesture for Beethoven – whose instrumental works in general are considered to be of an unrecognizable, ambiguous or metaphysical character – to prostrate himself by means of such easily accessible symbolic language.
The discussion of whether music should or should not portray, or give voice to something was also held in Beethoven’s day. His own attitude towards narrative or descriptive music (programme music) was rather ambiguous: according to his pupil Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven enjoyed inventing numerous little stories to accompany his music, but he just as frequently sneered at composers who ‘pinned’ a subject matter to their music. We may assume that Beethoven – as always, searching for the limits of the musically acceptable – was carrying out some sort of experiment by adding images to his Symphony No. 6. In other words, he was trying to discover whether – and in which way – the symphonic genre would allow for illustrative, evocative programmes. However, as he himself stated, he kept to his resolution of ‘expressing feelings rather than depicting scenes’. Thus, Beethoven was not interested in composing a ‘soundtrack’; what he wanted was to transfer his quasi-religious feelings and love for nature in its purity. Moreover, he wished to grant the listener the freedom of choice with his descriptive titles of rushing brooks, dancing peasants and stormy thunderclouds. “You have to leave it up to the listener to envisage situations. Anyone who has any idea of life in the country can easily imagine what I am composing here.” The listener and his imagination: just for this once, they are allowed to go their own way, without any restraint…
Tom Janssens
English translation: Fiona J. Stroker-Gale
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