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Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit, an ability to make use of not only your strengths but also your weaknesses, an ability to astonish not only your audience but yourself.
The title Elector meant that the Archbishop of Cologne, residing in Bonn, belonged to the group of traditionally seven princes granted the privilege of voting for the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, whose throne lay in Vienna.
But what the D Major Sonata suggests, in terms philosophical and psychological, is that the material of comedy and tragedy is the same, that joy and suffering are made of the same things. Here is something articulated in tones that reaches a far-sighted human wisdom.
Recall Schiller’s words on the englische: I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A spectator . . . sees innumerable movements intersecting in the most chaotic fashion . . . yet never colliding . . . It is all so skillfully, and yet so artlessly, integrated into a form, that each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the
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There are many resonances social and musical in the densely woven fabric of movements Beethoven fashioned in 1803, which was finally published in 1806 as a symphony now called Eroica. With it he reached his full maturity by joining his Aufklärung ethos with his music. In the framework of metaphors and symbols conveyed by means of a few words—Bonaparte, Marcia funèbre, Eroica—and otherwise in notes, shapes, forms, analogies, there is a final crucial point. Das Thema of the first movement was made from the finale’s Prometheus bass and the englische melody. If the theme of the first movement is
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All these chamber pieces form an illustration of something Beethoven said more than once: he based all his pieces on a story or an image and wrote the music to fit it. Recall the Romeo and Juliet backstory in his first string quartet. But in all but a few cases, Beethoven as a matter of policy did not tell the world what his model stories were. They were his own business, another part of his workshop that he did not want the world snooping in. He wanted his listeners to write their own stories, their own poems, to his work. Which is to say that he was too wise in his art to compromise one of
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Throughout the symphony he wanted listeners to sense the consuming beauty, peace, and holiness of the country, feel it not just in the senses but in the soul. The rhythms needed to be gently loping like a horse cart, or babbling like a brook. Long repetitions of figures as in the Fifth, but to the opposite end: there fierce and fateful, here a trance of beauty. Themes like folk songs and country dances. In the harmony use more peaceful subdominants than dynamic dominants. Let them feel the timelessness, hear the shepherd’s pipe in the oboe.
The concert of December 1808 marked the end of some eight years of fertility hardly equaled in the history of human creative imagination. As of 1799, Beethoven had been a lionized young keyboard virtuoso whose boldest and best-known works were for solo piano and chamber groups with piano—and his most celebrated performances improvisations at the keyboard. In the eight years since then he had finished six symphonies and the Choral Fantasy, four concertos, eleven piano sonatas, nine string quartets, an opera, a mass, a collection of overtures, a variety of chamber music destined to live among
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Pope Pius VII had excommunicated Napoleon and stood as a powerful voice of resistance in Italy. To address that problem, in July 1809, French troops broke into the Vatican and kidnapped the pope. He was held in luxurious exile for five years.
It was that year when his music finally found a reviewer equal to it. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a critic, composer, painter, and in his later years creator of fantastical tales that made him one of the most celebrated German authors. Hoffmann wrote operas and after he died had an opera written about him, Tales of Hoffmann. He had changed his name to include Mozart’s middle one. In all capacities he was a defining voice of the Romantic spirit. His two Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung articles of July 1810 on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony live in history as the first important exposition of
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In essence there were three German giants around the turn of the nineteenth century who served both as completions of the Aufklärung and prophets and instigators of Romanticism: Kant in philosophy, Goethe in letters, Beethoven in music. Romantics were in the process of making all of them into myths.
With Klein’s life mask and bust, the visual corollary of the Beethoven myth entered the zeitgeist. But no earlier portraits had that look, and neither did later ones done from life by artists who were observing what was actually in front of them, the man rather than the myth. Beethoven did not look like that bust most of the time. Except in his rages, his face was usually impassive, the major animation being in the eyes. The Klein mask and the bust he made from it are not a “real” portrait of a genius. They are the face of a man scowling because he is angry and uncomfortable and frightened.
In his art Beethoven was reaching beyond the sorrows of lovers and friends, the rough jokes, the clashes of armies and exaltation of heroes that had inspired his work. Now for Beethoven, Sturm’s book melding science and religion joined with a sense of primeval mystery. Beethoven was pulling away from the earth, to a higher angle of view. At the same time he was singing more within than ever, starting with the locked inwardness of the deaf man who can hear only the songs in his own head. No less was Beethoven headed for the childlike, the naive, the utterly simple, all these qualities more than
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In Germany and Austria it was to be a peace enforced by relentless repression. Metternich was determined to sacrifice liberty to stability, to the eternal “legitimacy” of thrones and aristocracies. In essence the state decreed that, to the greatest extent possible to enforce, history was to stop moving. The status quo was all. Politics were erased from public life. There were to be no more dreams or dreamers, only tranquil and submissive subjects. As Emperor Franz I informed a delegation of schoolmasters, “I have no use for scholars, but only for good citizens . . . Whoever serves me, must
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The 1819 Carlsbad Decrees of the German Confederation deepened the reach of the police state, setting up a system of regulations and surveillance on all university students and faculties and suppressing political societies. Any professor removed for “subversive” opinions was banned from teaching for life, and no student expelled from one school could be accepted to any other university. Any published material more than twenty pages long had to be submitted to censors. A central investigating committee was set up with virtually Inquisitional powers.
In this period Beethoven wrote Ferdinand Ries that the ideal for art was the combination of the beautiful and the unexpected.
FOR BEETHOVEN THE Ninth Symphony in D Minor, op. 125, had a long background. It marked a return to roots in his life, his art, and his culture. Those roots reached back to his youth in Bonn during its golden years of Aufklärung, when he first determined to set “An die Freude,” the Friedrich Schiller poem that in fiery verses embodied the spirit of the time. The intellectual atmosphere he breathed in Bonn included the philosophy of Kant, the Masonic ideal of brotherhood, the Illuminist doctrine of a cadre of the enlightened who will point humanity toward freedom and happiness. Passing through
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Another model, most potent of all, was La Marseillaise, the indispensable song of the French Revolution that set feet marching to overthrow the ancien régime and attached itself to the revolutionary spirit everywhere. (That is why, after he crowned himself emperor, Napoleon banned the Marseillaise. Revolutions were to end with him.)
Humankind, help yourself! Beethoven shaped his last epic to that end, written in a dark time to keep alive Schiller’s poem and its exaltation of freedom, without which there can be no true joy, no hope for a better world, no all-embracing brotherhood, no Elysium. In Austria, meetings of more than a few people outside one’s family were forbidden, and one could be arrested for speaking the very word freedom.
Examples in the next generation include Chopin’s preludes. In a historical perspective, with the op. 119 Bagatelles it becomes far more imaginable that in another seven years the young Robert Schumann would publish Papillons, his wild, autobiographical collection of parti-colored miniatures evoking a masked ball.
His friends arrived and assured him that much of the quartet had pleased and in fact the second and fourth movements were encored. What about the fugue? Beethoven demanded. One imagines hems and haws, glances exchanged among the friends. It did not go well, they admitted. “And why didn’t they encore the Fugue?” he cried. “That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!”
In the spring Beethoven had a visit from piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, who had decided before his daughter Clara was born that any child he fathered was going to be one of the greatest pianists in the world. (He later resisted but failed to prevent Clara, at eighteen already famous across Europe, from marrying Robert Schumann.)
