Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

Here on display is one of the essential factors of Beethoven’s life: for well and ill, his response to every challenge was outsized. The greater the challenge, the more aggressive his response. He fought with most of his friends. He often improvised best when he was angry at the audience. He fell in love with unavailable women. His outsized reactions made him a chronically difficult man to get on with. That same drive to overreaction also, more than once, saved his art and saved his life.

Interesting characterization

He did not realize yet that it would never be good enough.

???

Before long, the New Path would lead him to an overarching and defining metaphor, the figure of the hero.

Self focused. problem?

From this point forward, that joining of passion and lucidity would mark most of Beethoven’s highest achievements.

Passion and lucidity

It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence—truly wretched for so susceptible a body that a sudden change can plunge me from the best into the worst of states.

Duty. Dharma

Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not, I am ready.—Forced

Dukha, when you accept it in devotion, is mahaprasada

He means the joy that was more than the pleasures of a good life. For an Aufklärer, joy was at the center of everything: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; Schiller’s god-engendered daughter of Elysium. Or call it peace, hope, joie de vivre, joy in work and in love. The things chronic pain and disease rob you of. That is the subject of his frantic last words, because that is what he feared most.

Real sense of joy. that his body's failings would be contrary to joy... Perhaps this was the lesson he needed to learn, that joy is beyond the body's outcomes?

Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence

Pervading sene of purpose . endure pain to achieve purpose

He believes in God, he believes God sees his heart and understands. But he does not say, “I must do what God put me here to do.” His gifts come from nature; the will to accomplish great things is his own. He does not believe God is chastising him. As authors of his fate he names the mythical Parcae. He does not pray for miracles because he does not believe in them—even if only a miracle could restore his health. His relationship to God would change and deepen over the years, he would draw closer, he would pray. But years later when a protégé wrote on a score, “Finished with the help of God,” Beethoven wrote under it, “O Man, help yourself!”

In a way, consistent with beliefs. In a way, not. consistent with idea that we are to help ourselves: effort matters. But inconsistent in that there is no I; it's the eliminating of the ego which is the goal

But to suffer without hope, without believing that the suffering has some larger meaning and purpose, requires great courage.

I agree : great courage . but I disagree : the purpose is the bettering of the self; aid in eliminating the ego

In losing his hearing, not only was he losing his most prized sense but with the end of his performing career he also was going to lose part of his identity and half or more of his income.

There it is. end of ego

As for unity within diversity, which is the primacy of form over content, he struggled for greater unity and at the same time for greater diversity than any composer had aspired to before. He could only have felt the time was right. After the darkest night of the soul he had experienced in Heiligenstadt, the world of music seemed to be holding out its arms and beckoning him to the future.

Complex paSsage

At the same time, if he did not yet know what he wanted for a sacred style, now he knew what he did not want.

Helpful too

“most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.”

Assertion of Freedom and regard for the freedom of others

At the same time, for him and his age music was called a kind of rational discourse on stated themes, a wordless rhetoric like an oration, or like a sermon founded on its verse of scripture.

Music represented an argument, a discourse

Napoleon was managing another of his balancing acts: keeping progressives around Europe convinced that he was a liberator and the fulfillment of the Revolution while convincing the reactionary rulers in Vienna that he had put revolution to rest.

Progressives want chanve, conservatives didnt want revolution

he encountered armies, heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. Since then Vienna has been full of armies in parades and exercises, preparing to fight the French. After the battles the city streets filled with soldiers wounded and dying, with funerals and mournful music. These scenes will find a place in the symphony.

From martial songs to funeral dirges

So his larger subject will be heroes contemporary and ancient: Napoleon and his fellow benevolent despots Joseph II and Frederick the Great, Hector and Achilles and Odysseus—not only a hero but the Hero as archetype: Napoleon as man and myth.

Wonderful SYnopsis

Musical ideas, when they come, are like characters in a novel; each appears to the writer with a face and a personality and begins to speak.

Not built but suddenly appear?

In the struggle to come into his own, the Hero shatters boundaries and conventions and makes things anew

Form and message

In terms of the symphony’s narrative, the hero has come into his own, but his task is unfinished

Heroism is doing the action without regard to the fruit of the action

From beginning to end there is a missing element in this funeral service: there is no hymn to God. It is a secular humanist ceremony, as it would have been in revolutionary France.

No God

From its beginning, the goal of the symphony is the englische.

Goal is equality? Egalitarian ?

Its purpose is not to praise God but to exalt humanity. It is a vision of what an enlightened leader can do in the world. But Beethoven had not forgotten God. Some two decades later, in his last symphony, he would return to the question of the ideal society, the search for Elysium under the starry heavens. And again and again in his music he returned to an ending in joy.

Great summary

He was an evolutionist more than a revolutionist. Call him a radical evolutionary, one with a unique voice.

Radical evolutionary

His music became more personal and intense partly because he found ways to connect his work to intensely held ideals, at the top of them freedom and joy.

Freedom and joy

His politics were not revolutionary, not Jacobin, not even democratic, but very much republican: he believed in the sovereignty of constitutions and laws, like the British parliamentary system (with its king and its Houses of Lords and Commons). At the same time, like many liberal Germans he still had the echt-Aufklärung belief in the strong man, the benevolent despot, which is to say, the Hero.

Benevolent despot

It was central to Beethoven that Napoleon was not highborn but self-made—the first such man in European history to wield such power.

Self made man was important

Although he was not well-disposed towards him, I noticed that he admired his rise from such a lowly position.”

He disliked Napoleon but apreciated his lowly birth

For him a free society was one that allows a Napoleon and a Beethoven to rise as far as their natural gifts can take them. In France it had taken a revolution to make that possible. In German lands, however, by the time the Eroica appeared that dream of freedom had come to seem a dead relic of the past. In Austria particularly, society and social mobility were frozen

Appreciates social mobility

he learned that freedom is required to become a complete human being and that every free person must think and judge for himself as an individual. That, Kant said, is the essence of Enlightenment.

Individual thought

While the Romantics mythologized the supreme Self, they rejected the Aufklärung delusion that individuals and societies can be perfected.

Beethoven thought society can be perfected

But Beethoven was not a Romantic, not a revolutionist, not a democrat. He was a republican who came of age in the revolutionary 1780s, all for fraternité and liberté, not remotely for egalité

Fascinating

His individualism, his engagement with the zeitgeist, and his determination to serve humanity (despite his disdain for most of humanity in the flesh) made his music imperative for the Romantic generations—even the egalitarian Romantics.

He disdained people

To discover new means of expression is to discover new territories of the human. It seems that such an ideal, not revolution, was what Beethoven considered to be his task, his duty. He had always believed he had it in him to do something like that.

He had a gift and a duty

In a country where everything in life and art was of concern to the censors, and arts involving words, with their infinite capacity for subversion, were of most special concern to the censors, a high-level bureaucrat like Sonnleithner was a good man to have on one’s side. That

Censorship

“Everybody has loved me and hated me,” he said. “Everybody has taken me up, dropped me, and taken me up again.”

Self awareness

the repercussions were more immediate and personal. He would always have enemies, and bitter ones—though he always believed them to be more numerous and bitter than they actually were.

Sensitive soul

But he was capable of bearing extraordinary burdens, including the ones he heaped on himself.

Such is a beautiful soul

the duty of self-improvement to make himself worthy.

Self improvement

When notes resisted him or life resisted him, Beethoven’s response was anger and attack—and when it came to people, suspicion and accusation.

Do i react that way?

the response to suffering is a noble, hymnlike middle movement, this one Andante con moto variations on a somber and almost immobile D-flat-major theme.

Noble suffering

“Thou has tried all means to draw me to Thee. Now it hath pleased Thee to let me feel the heavy hand of Thy wrath, and to humiliate my proud heart by manifold chastisements. Sickness and misfortune has Thou sent to bring me to a contemplation of my digressions. But one thing only do I ask, O God, cease not to labor for my improvement. Only let me, in whatsoever manner pleases Thee, turn to Thee and be fruitful of good works.”

Good prayer

house orchestra

House orchestra. Wow