Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

because it fell to him to get the state out of debt. In that he succeeded, meanwhile lavishly feathering his own nest.

Hypocrisy

This engagement with my art is what brought me out of darkness; this is what saved me from the tragedy of my marriage.

Work. in there, in focus, is answer, is help

As man and artist, the younger Ludwig van Beethoven was someone for whom ideas, ideals, and art outshone people in the flesh.

Interesting

If Johann van Beethoven did not inherit a full measure of his father’s musicality or intelligence, he still had some of Ludwig’s energy and ambition. In practice, that meant Johann was a perennial schemer and opportunist,

Ambition plus skill ambition without skill is schemer

As for his further ambitions in court and in the world, Johann turned, with a vengeance, to his little son Ludwig.

Directed His ambitions towards his son

MOST OF THE time the extraordinary begins in the ordinary.

True!

A rationalistic and humanistic spirit was gathering across Europe and across the Atlantic. Enlightenment—in German, Aufklärung—was the name for the spirit of the times.

Not all bad. feudalusm meh

1773, the pope dissolved the Jesuits, ending their traditional monopoly on education, after several countries had already banned them. The dissolution of the order was seen as a triumph of the Enlightenment. (Like many other triumphs of Enlightenment, it was short-lived, and the Jesuits eventually revived.)13 Chief Minister Belderbusch oversaw turning the Jesuit school in Bonn into a new state school, the Academy, and the regime began to enact reforms—part of the movement around Germany to restrain the power of the clergy and to put education in secular hands.

Education important Jesuits lost this power

The paper tracked the course of the American Revolution, the first political fruit of the Enlightenment.

Political fruit

in Germany of the 1770s a literary countercurrent flowered that exalted the violent, excessive, and subjective.

Science and reason give way to romantic

Friedrich Maximilian Klinger play about the American Revolution: Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress).

Storm and stress

Goethe and Schiller both washed their hands of Sturm und Drang, and it never really challenged the Aufklärung.

Ah, a brief wave

But its echoes helped create the period that came to be called Romantic, which

Enlightenment sturm and durg enlightenment romantic

the conflagration raced to the powder magazine,

Happens a lot

Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.”

Mom

Like Neefe too, Beethoven grew up a man of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment

he became a creator unlike his teacher, broad and rich enough to galvanize the musical reaction against the Enlightenment.

Wow!

And to serve humanity is to serve God.

Ok. Vedanta lot more realistic

Kant occupied the position in philosophy that Goethe did in literature and Beethoven in music.

Bridge between Enlightenment and Romanticism

“The entire pursuit of reason,” wrote Kant, “is to bring about . . . one ultimate end—that of happiness.”

True

Jefferson’s declaration also shows that the Enlightenment did not do away with God but rather placed Him at a remove from His creation: the Creator as cosmic watchmaker who crafted the perfect machinery of the universe and sat back to let His cosmic experiment run, like a wise parent leaving humanity free to find its own path. The goal of life is the pursuit of happiness, here and now. Religion and state are different realms.

Hmm

At the same time, Beethoven would be no more a conventional deist than he was a conventional anything else, and his ideas of God evolved along with his life and art. The older he got, the more he turned toward faith in a God who was present and all-seeing, who listened to prayers (though none of this was anathema to deists).

Hard to define deism

So many excesses of the Enlightenment, in all its forms great and terrible, rose from excesses of hope.

Interesting

In stark contrast to the French, German Aufklärers wanted strong governments, efficient bureaucracies, strong armies, powerful and enlightened princes.

Why different?

In a letter, Frederick wrote a virtual definition of enlightened despotism: “Philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes. They must think logically and we must act logically. They must teach the world by their powers of judgment; we must teach the world by our example.”25

Castes

Perhaps here he began to learn what Bach called “invention,” in which the whole of a piece elaborates a single idea. Here, for the first time, this giant of the past nourished a budding giant.

Invention - a piece is an idea

Beethoven was generally to be fondest of friends, family, and benefactors who were distant or, like his grandfather, dead. With those he saw intimately and regularly, sooner or later there would usually be trouble. But

Didn't like people up close and personal. i know people like that. sometimes i can be like that. i feel thats uncharitable

“Think of so many other frustrated designs and collapsed hopes of men, of friendships ruined, riches lost, courtiers fallen, empires vanished, or on the becoming and passing of nature, or on the vanity of all things . . . And then turn your gaze upwards!”

Things break. seek them not. Find Joy in Gd.

the broader Aufklärung ideals of reason, freedom, duty to humankind, the pursuit of happiness.

Pursuit of happiness is likely not of sense-pleasures

relentless sense of duty to one’s talent: what gifts you possess are owed to humanity. And, as an Illuminatus, he proclaimed the imperative of morality and how it must shape one’s life and work: to be a good artist, you must first be a good man.

This is all very accurate !

[To the end, Beethoven called himself a servant of humanity.]

To do for others

Variety must appear as the constantly varied effects of a single cause.

In many there is really ONE?

“Only art and science can raise man to the level of the divine.”]

I disagree. so can business, if done in good spirit

Anyway, neither as a teenager nor later did Beethoven uncritically accept anyone else’s ideas about his art. Everything had to be transformed into his own terms. Though he sympathized with Freemasons and benefited from their network, there is no record he ever belonged to a lodge.

Hold yourself back a little to analyze and get great results

Beethoven was not only incapable of taking any path but his own, he was incapable of understanding any path but his own.

Teenager!

Bonn remained a backwater where the progressive spirit was reflected, not formulated.

Spirit was reflected not formulated

If there was some justice in Johann’s demand, there was no intelligence in the way he went about it.

That happens

all ordinary horrors of the age, no less terrible for that.

Well worded

from a life of many cares and few satisfactions.

Life of may cares and few satsfactions

Christian Neefe had taught him to observe human feelings as subjects for his work—starting with his own feelings.)

Source of musical inspiration

combined with an indefinable aura of inner grace and a relentless ambition to learn and to rise in every sense of the term.

AMbituon as a positive

His conception of genius is that of the eighteenth century: a metaphor for a transcendent spirit that moves among and inhabits great creators, genius as a spirit one possesses, rather than the coming Romantic cult of genius as something one is in one’s very being, which elevates a person to the state of a demigod.

Genius defined

it was his sacred duty, not only to God but to the world, to place his gift at the service of humanity.

This is wonderful

“God, who knows and understands my deepest self, you know how I fulfill my sacred duties presented by mankind, God, and nature.”

Religious dutiful duty bound

Already in youth he had come to feel closer to the divine in nature than in church or scripture.

Bhakti?

He had been taught that the path to greatness starts inside, with the cultivation of morality, duty, discipline, and courage.

Hoorah

in Vienna the nobility liked to keep music for themselves.

Interesting dichotomy

Fux lectures his imaginary student that to make it work, you have to think ahead, not jump on a solution before you know where you are going.

Composing strategy

There is another insight to be gained in doing species exercises. As you learn one rule after another, you also learn that the rules are not immutable but form a hierarchy. You give up one rule for the sake of a higher rule, and ultimately what determines that choice is your taste, ear, and sensitivity. So the later stages of species counterpoint approach the subtle relativity of decisions that is free composition.

Some rules are more fundamental than others

“Whatever is difficult,” Beethoven would write, “is good.”

Project management for me :)