Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

Missa solemnis is Beethoven’s personal faith as an individual reaching toward God, not an assertion of the credos and dogmas of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church.

Beethoven reaching toward God, not.a.Roman Catholic Mass

Surely in music there had never been a more beautiful, a more profound evocation of tranquillity and Arcadian peace, spun out in music of incomparable freshness and perfection of gesture and pace. There have been only those two interruptions, with their brassy fanfares. What follows is a rending scream.

Surely, there had never been more peaceful music. What follows.is a rendering scream. Richard Wagner would call it "the terror fanfare."

In the first movement of the symphony, for the last time he buried the hero and the heroic ideal once exalted in the Eroica. Now through Schiller he replaced that ideal with a new one: the perfected society that begins in the freedom, happiness, and moral enlightenment of each person, growing from inside outward to brothers and friends and lovers, from there in a mounting chorus outward to universal brotherhood, the world Schiller named for the ancient Classical paradise: Elysium.

Beethoven buried the hero and replaced him with inner peace and satisfaction; universal brotherhood - Elysium

the form is going to serve the theme rather than, as usual in music of the Classical period, the themes serving the form.

form is the theme

As in Fidelio (Freedom!) and the mass (Credo!), Beethoven picks out the words he most cares about: Millions! Brothers!

Emphasis: loving! brothers!

Conquering heroes and benevolent despots cannot do that for us. We have to find Elysium for ourselves.

Conquering heros/despots cannot do what finding inner peace can.

climax that requires the sopranos to hold a high A for a brutal twelve bars,

sopranos have to hold a high A for a brutal 12 bars

Ninth is also music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? “Be embraced, you millions! This kiss for all the world!”

Ninth is about.composing for listener

When the bass soloist speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, Beethoven’s words are addressed to everybody, to history. There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

When the Bass soloist first speaks on behalf of the deaf, moving

The older Karl got, the more Beethoven lost himself in suspicions, tried to control every part of the boy’s life. Beethoven had a reflexive hatred and jealousy toward anyone else who had a connection to his nephew, saw everybody but himself as a corrupting influence.

Relations with Karl.got worse

History would credit Brunonian medicine with killing more people than the Napoleonic Wars.

Brounian medicine killed more than the Napoleonic wrs

What is difficult is good:

What is difficult is good

Here is where the solipsism that had been with him since his youth, which his friends and admirers had always understood and largely forgiven, turned on him with devastating effect. And yet, now, finally, he bent. Holz and Stephan von Breuning pressed him to let Karl join the army as he wanted

solipsism did not allow him to see Karl as he was

The C-sharp Minor is an integration of the Poetic style with the organic quality of his earlier music. Each movement is tightly made, with one or two leading ideas and contrasts subdued (except in the variations). The textures are simple and open, which is to say Classical.

C Sharp minor quartet integrates classical and poetic styles

The circle around the deathbed had been counting days and then hours. Now they counted minutes. At 5:45, lightning lit up the chamber and there was a terrific clap of thunder. Suddenly Beethoven jerked into life, opened his eyes, raised his clenched fist into the air as if in defiance of it all, the whole mess of fate, the fickle gods, the worthless Viennese and corrupt aristocracy, the whole damned comedy. His hand fell, his eyes half closed. Hüttenbrenner had a hand under Beethoven’s head, the other over his breast. He found no breath, no heartbeat.

Mythic version of Beethoven's death

The funeral of March 29 would be remembered as one of the grandest Vienna ever put on for a commoner. Schools were closed.

Funeral one.of the grandest for a commener

pallbearers was Johann Hummel, among the torchbearers Carl Czerny, Franz Grillparzer, Tobias Haslinger, Karl Holz, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, and Franz Schubert—the

Pallbears list -- Grillpazer, Schubert, Hummel, Czerny

he wanted to appear as a new man in each work, even at the risk of making an occasional blunder, or of sometimes being scarcely understood by even a few people.

He wanted to appear as a new man in each work, even at the risk of an occasional blunder, eve at the risk of being misunderstood.

when your mounting ecstasy overflows in the midst of a generation yet unborn, then remember this hour, and think, We were there, when they buried him, and when he died, we wept.

Grilpazer's.funeral speech echoed Henry V

So much of what we know about Beethoven, we best forget when we come to his art. The limits and the pettiness of humanity held up against the illusion of the limitless in art were never more pointed as with him. He understood people little and liked them less, yet he lived and worked and exhausted himself to exalt humanity.

we try to forget the man when we understand his art