Music and emotion
Damian Thompson says we can learn a lot about Beethoven if we look beyond the symphonies
Beethoven Unwrapped is the title of the year-long musical celebration marking the opening of Kings Place, the new ‘creative centre’ at King’s Cross. But does Beethoven, of all composers, need unwrapping? The answer is yes, more than ever, if the process allows us to examine his music without constantly genuflecting in front of the symphonies.
The Kings Place festival includes only one live Beethoven symphony: the First, played by the Avison Ensemble next March. That’s fine by me. A full cycle would have distracted attention from performances of the complete piano sonatas, violin sonatas, cello sonatas, string quartets, piano trios — and, significantly, neglected string trios, works for wind and songs. Beethoven Unwrapped helps answer the question: how would we view the composer if he hadn’t written his symphonies?
That may seem a pointless exercise in alternative history, since there are movements in the symphonies which are integral to the development of Beethoven’s musical language: the explosion of possibilities in the Eroica, in particular, helped create the space that Beethoven needed for experiments in sonata form which were cut short only by his death. Still, let’s suppose that he was unable to write for a symphony orchestra. I’m sure that he would have found other pathways to his supreme achievement: the music we refer to as ‘late Beethoven’.
Beethoven’s music is commonly divided into three periods: early, middle and late. Sometimes their styles are described as ‘classical’, ‘heroic’ and ‘sublime’. I’ve listened to Beethoven almost every day for 40 years and these three styles still jump out at me. They overlap, of course, but one would expect nothing less from an artist whose personal life was so spectacularly untidy.
For the first decade of his career, Beethoven was pouring new wine into old bottles, expanding and foreshortening sonata form with unexpected modulations and cheeky dissonances. Then, around 1800, his music acquired revolutionary overtones of defiance. Although Beethoven was far too subtle an artist to paint his moods in music, this ‘heroism’ is impossible to disentangle from his battle against hearing loss. In the early years of his disability he avoided social events ‘because I find it impossible to say: I am deaf’. But the symphonies say it for him, in eruptions that he could still hear, and in countless touches of orchestral colour that he wished he could hear: think of the piccolos that dance above the thunder in the Fifth Symphony, or the Pastoral’s shepherds’ pipes, the very sound that Beethoven failed to pick up when a friend pointed it out to him during a walk in the countryside.
So I’m almost embarrassed to admit that the symphonies sit neglected on my CD shelf, while my collection of the late piano sonatas and string quartets grows monstrously. Concentrating on ‘sublime’ Beethoven seems snooty, like insisting on premier cru claret. But the truth is that this music isn’t just better than that of the earlier periods. It initiates us into a new musical order in which melodies sound like divine improvisation, though in fact they are undergirded by the tightest counterpoint since Bach. As Edmund Morris points out, Beethoven’s climaxes are created contrapuntally: the wildest of all, in which violins, viola and cello ‘squawk and scream like frenzied vultures’, occur in a fugue — the Grosse Fuge of the String Quartet Op. 130.
Beethoven’s revolutionary polyphony didn’t appear out of nowhere: we can watch it grow in the piano sonatas and the earlier string quartets. Sometimes the foreshadowings crop up in the strangest places, such as the variations on ‘God Save the King’. They are present in the symphonies and concertos, too, but the thread is difficult to follow because Beethoven did not live to complete a symphony in his fully evolved style. The Ninth does not really belong to the third period. There are many fingerprints of lateness, but what relegates it to the ‘heroic’ period, ironically, is its chief innovation: the sung text. All that rhetoric about men becoming brothers under the wings of joy sounded windy when Schiller wrote it in 1785; by 1824 it was embarrassing bombast. One can’t help thinking that it deserved to be adopted by the European Union.
And, besides, by the 1820s Beethoven’s thinking had moved beyond naïve egalitari anism. The relief of suffering lies at the heart of the late music: Beethoven said so explicitly when he inscribed the Molto adagio of Op. 132 with the words, ‘Holy Song of Thanks by a Convalescent to the Divinity’. But only in the last few years have musicologists properly explored the notion of the composer as a musical philanthropist. Maynard Solomon sees the last masterpieces as the product of a deep transformation brought about by an emerging sense of what music can achieve for humanity. In his Tagebuch, the notebook he kept from 1812 until 1818, Beethoven roamed restlessly over classical literature and the sacred texts of world religions in search of ideas to support his new conviction that he must ‘live life for others’. His behaviour at the time was more cantankerous than ever; but, as Solomon points out, Beethoven’s belief in the healing power was not just theoretical.
As a young man, he had played the piano to a bereaved young mother, ‘talking in tones’ rather than offering conventional condolences. In his final decade his creative endeavours were directed towards a universal condolence inspired, in part, by the timelessness he discovered in the newly fashionable ‘BhagavadGita’. It’s not easy, admittedly, to identify the philosophical motivation of any piece of music. But it is possible to flesh out Solomon’s thesis with musical analysis. In an essay published in 2006, for example, Birgit Lodes shows how in the first movement of his String Quartet Op. 127 Beethoven replaces the tension of sonata form with non-directional motifs that conjure up the cyclical rhythms of the Indian religions that fascinated him.
This is an exciting time for Beethoven scholarship. Until recently, scholars and music lovers were so overawed by the ‘sublime’ late works that they tended to cordon them off, as if their greatness rendered them untouchable. That’s understandable. They represent the pinnacle of musical achievement: in a sense they lead nowhere because they are the product of insights so personal that they cannot be successfully built upon by other composers.
Yet, in another sense, they lead everywhere: Beethoven intended them to be used as spiritual exercises with which to transform the experience of suffering. It has taken us nearly 200 years for scholars to grasp this point; but, now that they have, we can understand the full implications of Artur Schnabel’s observation that this is music better than it can ever be played. ❑
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