Beethoven's Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas
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Beethoven's Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas
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Overview
Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven’s intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon’s decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements—a pitch, a chord, a musical theme—that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew.
Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history’s greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226453910 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Beethoven's Symphonies
Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas
By Martin Geck, Stewart Spencer
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-45391-0
CHAPTER 1
Beethoven: Symphonist par Excellence
Flashes of lightning are a ubiquitous feature of Beethoven's symphonies, throwing light on something that the composer merely suspected he was carrying around within him but which then found forceful and eruptive expression in his music. The years between 1800 and 1824 are not viewed as a separate or special period by historians, and yet they frame an exceptional age in music, for they encapsulate a world of ideas that Beethoven succeeded in conjuring up in his symphonies not only for himself but for others, too.
Perhaps he himself was already thinking on a historical scale when in his late twenties he introduced his First Symphony to the world in April 1800, marking the start of a new century and prompting Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl to strike a rhapsodic note in his 1838 narrative Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener (The music festival; or, The Beethovenians), which describes a particularly memorable passage in the opening movement of the Eroica (bars 248–83) as "thirty-six bars of pure nineteenth century." The piano score alone made it impossible for students "even to suspect the power of this passage. [...] But what is instrumental music!" Beethoven's First Symphony marks the beginning of a new period in the history of the symphony and arguably also in the history of classical music in general. It will be worth our while, therefore, to examine the background to this radical upheaval within the world of music.
Within this context, two currents are of particular interest for our understanding of Beethoven's art. Historians traditionally see them as a succession of two distinct periods, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And yet — here as elsewhere — these periods overlap rather than moving from one to the other. Among the ideas associated with the Enlightenment is the belief that the individual discovered not only his or her dignity but also a sense of responsibility for what we would nowadays call "the bigger picture." Until then there had been the widespread, essentially Christian belief that "God is great, and man is small," and that the only great men were rulers and their agents, all of whom were acting at God's behest. It was in this spirit that Bach wrote his Cantata BWV Anh. I 13, Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden (Welcome, you ruling gods on Earth), for the Saxon royal family. Of course, mankind has always valued genuine human greatness, generally intellectual or artistic, but until the eighteenth century this was always seen as secondary. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment did it acquire its primary significance, bringing with it a new motto: "Every rational person can advance society, and a person of genius can unhinge the world."
The Romantics contrasted this conviction with their own empirical observation that genius constantly comes up against its own limitations whenever its flights of fancy clash with contemptible everyday reality. Beethoven goes to the very heart of this contradiction: the victories that his symphonies celebrate are hard won or else they are invoked by means of resources available only to music — especially his own.
Napoleon Bonaparte: The Prometheus of His Age and a Lodestar for Beethoven as Symphonist
In Beethoven's eyes, his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of genius, and there is no doubt that the composer identified with his hero throughout his entire life or at least judged himself by Napoleonic standards — and this remains the case even if Napoleon's decision to have himself crowned emperor in 1804 left Beethoven feeling bewildered and disappointed. His admiration for the Corsican ruler rested not least on the fact that Napoleon had achieved his position of preeminence in Europe not through hereditary privilege but on the strength of his strategic genius, in the process championing fundamental social changes of an altogether revolutionary kind. It makes sense to examine Beethoven's attitude to the Enlightenment through the filter of his admiration for Napoleon, for this particular perspective is by no means as one-sided as it may otherwise seem at first sight. It is an approach that brings us particularly close to Beethoven as a symphonist, for here we are dealing less with the Napoleon whom Beethoven acclaimed in 1820 as the "protector of right and of the laws" than with what the French call gloire, a term that encompasses both fame and merit. Like many of his contemporaries, Beethoven felt the greatest admiration for a man who had achieved the most tremendous feats through his genius alone, feats that served as a model for the great mass of the people and that also enabled the individual to find lasting glory. This recalls classical heroes such as Alexander the Great, with whom Beethoven is known to have identified, and it also means that Beethoven felt constantly stimulated to acquire a similar degree of fame by performing exceptional feats in the realm of music. (Quite how far Beethoven was capable of taking his identification with the figures of classical antiquity emerges from his attempts to gain custody of his nephew Karl, for in a court submission in 1818 he pointed out that Philip of Macedonia had taken charge of the education of his son, Alexander the Great, a right that Beethoven now claimed for himself in the case of his nephew.)
For Beethoven — especially as a symphonist — the concept of gloire is paramount because it radiates a far greater physicality than any ethical concept, making it an apt way of giving musical expression to such a notion and allowing Beethoven to pick up various traditions of vocal and instrumental music designed to glorify the state, starting with the official music of the French Revolution, and at the same time creating something new.
On January 26, 1793, Beethoven's friend Bartholomäus Fischenich of Bonn wrote to Charlotte Schiller — the wife of the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller — to spell out the twenty-two-year-old composer's artistic plans: "He proposes also to compose Schiller's 'Freude,' and indeed strophe by strophe. I expect something perfect for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and the sublime." At this date Beethoven had just left for Vienna armed with a scholarship from Maximilian Franz, the elector of Cologne, whose court was in Bonn. Indeed, Franz may well have been all the keener to accord Beethoven an extended leave of absence since French Revolutionary troops had marched into the Rhineland in October 1792, leading to a state of uncertainty: a regular season of plays and concerts could no longer be expected, with the result that the young court musician was eminently expendable in Bonn.
On January 21, 1793, the French king, Louis XVI, had been guillotined in Paris, marking the start of the Reign of Terror and prompting even an ardent champion of the French Revolution such as Schiller to ask himself what had become of its ideals of liberté, égalité et fraternité. Published in 1799, his poem "The Song of the Bell" includes a line clearly intended as a warning against the "might of flame": "Woe, if it casts off its chains, / And, without resistance, growing, / Through the crowded streets and lanes / Spreads the blaze, all fiercely glowing!"
How did Beethoven react to all this? That he was interested in Schiller's ode as early as 1793 and was determined to turn it into something "great" is unsurprising while at the same time being far from self-evident. Schiller had been born in 1759, eleven years before Beethoven, and was then at the height of his fame as a literary revolutionary. His early play Die Räuber (The Brigands) had been published anonymously in 1781 in an attempt to circumvent the censor and soon became the subject of an impassioned debate because of its rebellious thrust, with the result that it was repeatedly banned. His Ode to Joy was tossed off in a moment of exuberance in 1785 only for him to dismiss it fifteen years later as a "bad poem," but for Beethoven in 1793, this was no obstacle to his seeing in it a reflection of his own ideals of freedom and fraternity at this time.
We do not know whether Beethoven was a genuine supporter of the French Revolution, but we may assume that he at least sympathized with its aims from afar. The motto of his composition teacher in Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, was "I love the great men of this earth but I hate bad princes more than bandits." Beethoven himself added an entry to the album of Theodora Vocke of Nuremberg in this same crucial year, 1793: "Love freedom above all else; never deny the truth (not even on the throne)."
Even as early as 1812, the preliminary sketches for what was to become the Ninth Symphony contain the entry "Detached fragments, like princes[,] are beggars", a radical reinterpretation of the line "beggars become the brothers of princes" from the first version of Schiller's ode. This hardly suggests that Beethoven had abandoned the ideals of the French Revolution by this date.
We find him writing to his friend Nicolaus Simrock in Bonn in August 1794, "It is said that a revolution was about to break out — But I believe that so long as an Austrian can get his brown ale and his little sausages, he is not likely to revolt," and it seems possible to read into these lines at least a secret sympathy for the Jacobin movement. Given the prevailing censorship affecting all correspondence during this period, he could scarcely have expressed himself any more clearly than this.
Be that as it may, a new chapter in Beethoven's political life opens with Napoleon's appointment as commander in chief of the French armies and his coup d'état of November 9, 1799, when he became first consul and France's absolute ruler for the next ten years. Beethoven was not alone in regarding the Corsican commander as the proverbial phoenix rising up from the ashes of the French Revolution, for he was repeatedly portrayed as such in both literature and the visual arts. Even Goethe admired him in this role — unlike Schiller, Goethe had never been a fan of the French Revolution, but he now hailed Napoleon as the Prometheus whom he had celebrated in the poem of the same name that he had written in 1774 during his Sturm und Drang phase. No less a commentator than Nietzsche was to write in his Twilight of the Idols that Goethe "had no greater experience than that ens realissimum called Napoleon." Elsewhere Nietzsche argued that "the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon."
There is no doubt that the profession of faith that Beethoven addressed to Archduke Rudolph in 1819 sums up the whole spirit of the Age of Napoleon: "In the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives." And even though Beethoven did not have loyal conversationalists such as Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Friedrich von Müller, and Johann Peter Eckermann to record his every word, he did have his Conversation Books, which include the following entry about Napoleon noted down in January 1820, only a few months after his letter to Archduke Rudolph: although the Corsican ruler had fallen victim to his own hubris, he had had "an appreciation of art and science and had hated the dark. He should have held the Germans in higher regard and protected their rights. [ ... ] But he everywhere overthrew the feudal system and was the protector of right and of the laws."
In light of these remarks, it should come as no surprise to learn that Beethoven seems to have attempted to make contact with Napoleon as early as the spring of 1798. According to a later tradition, he frequented the Viennese quarters of the French general Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte at a time when Bernadotte was attempting to implement the demands of the victorious French as enshrined in the Treaty of Campo Formio, terms that included the opening of a French theater in the Austrian capital. Bernadotte is said to have seized the opportunity to suggest that Beethoven might consider writing a Napoleon Symphony and to have used the violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer as an intermediary in order to familiarize Beethoven with the newer French revolutionary music of composers such as Gossec, Catel, and Cherubini.
Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that Beethoven's first two symphonies — which were written between 1799 and 1802 — contain unmistakable echoes of French revolutionary music. The first subject of the opening movement of the First, for example, recalls the theme of an overture that Kreutzer, who since 1795 had been professor of violin at the newly founded Paris Conservatoire, wrote for the marathon concert designed to fire the people of Paris with revolutionary enthusiasm during the War of the First Coalition.
The suggestion that Beethoven was merely paying lip service to a local fashion loses much of its force when we recall that between his First and Second Symphonies he wrote his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, to a scenario by the choreographer Salvatore Viganò. First performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on March 28, 1801, when it ran for over twenty performances, Beethoven's "heroic-allegorical ballet" was based in turn on a mythological poem, Il Prometeo, written in 1797 by the Italian poet Vincenzo Monti, the opening canto of which was inspired by Napoleon's military and political achievements. There cannot be any doubt about the parallels between Prometheus and Napoleon: Monti specifically made such a connection in his dedication to the Corsican leader.
Beethoven's music also contains clear echoes of the official anthem of the French Consulate, "Veillons au salut de l'empire," prompting Peter Schleuning to write that "the ballet must be seen as a homage to Napoleon as the contemporary who was to complete the mythical education of humankind and perhaps also as a mythologically phrased appeal to the French Consul to liberate all the other European nations that were still languishing under feudal rule, a hope that all progressive thinkers entertained at this time."
In his Third Symphony Beethoven picks up the theme of Prometheus/Napoleon that he had explored in his ballet and applies it to the medium of the symphony: the final movement's main theme is identical to the theme of the final movement of the ballet. Even more striking is the fact that Beethoven begins his Third Symphony with a kind of pre-echo of Prometheus's apotheosis in the final section of the ballet, with the result that the symphony as a whole builds inexorably from its first to its final movement. This is not a meaningless parallel, for it is linked to the initial subject, as is clear from the fact that Beethoven originally intended to call his Third Symphony "Napoleon" or else to dedicate it to Napoleon. The title page of a copy of the work that was prepared in August 1804 reveals that Beethoven scratched out the line "intitolata Bonaparte" and added the words "Written for Bonaparte" in pencil.
According to the later reminiscences of his pupil Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven is said to have reacted to the news that Napoleon had had himself crowned emperor in Paris on December 2, 1804, by tearing up the title page of the original score — now lost — and exclaiming: "So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man. Now he will also trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition."
This is certainly plausible, although it is entirely possible that the whole affair was far more prosaic than this. After all, Beethoven had sold the score of his Eroica Symphony to his patron, Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, for 700 florins and dedicated it to him for a further eighty gold ducats, and so any public reference to Napoleon was probably ruled out from the outset lest Lobkowitz, as a high-ranking member of the Austrian aristocracy, were to be offended by such associations. But even if Beethoven took Napoleon's coronation as an excuse to distance himself from the emperor, that would still not mean that this was the end of the matter for him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beethoven's Symphonies by Martin Geck, Stewart Spencer. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Beethoven: Symphonist par ExcellenceNapoleon Bonaparte
Orchestral Weight
Delusions of Virility
Structure
Jean Paul’s “Cloven Hoof”
Nine Symphonies
Prolegomenon
On Idle Speculations
On Portentous Prologues to Ebullient Finales
On Elemental Beginnings
On Archetypal Images
On Memorable Fugato Passages
On Striking Dissonances
On “False” Entries
On the Escapades of the Timpani
On Highly Expressive Foreshortenings
On Beethoven’s Fondness for the Eroica
On Crossing a Threshold
The Symphonies
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica)
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67
Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125
Notes
Bibliography
Index