Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (138 page)

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
.

The road to Elysium begins with the enlightenment of each individual, extends to one's brothers and lovers, and from there to the world. In addition to all the models and echoes that Beethoven infolded into the Ninth Symphony—Haydn's
Creation
and Austrian anthem, the
Marseillaise
, Handel and Bach, his own
Eroica
and
Fidelio
and Fifth Symphony, Mozart's
Abduction
—one more is significant. As I noted earlier, Beethoven's favorite Mozart opera,
Die Zauberflöte
, is among other things a parable of love: the earthy love of Papageno and Papagena, the exalted love of Pamina and Tamino, the divine and disinterested love of Sarastro for all humanity. The quarter-note simplicity of the
Freude
theme echoes Sarastro's sublime aria “In these hallowed halls.” At the end of the opera, Sarastro and his
Bund
consecrate the lovers as the highest force on this earth: “May power be victorious / And crown as a reward / Beauty and Wisdom / With an eternal crown.” Love was the vehicle of the lover's triumph, the meaning of their crown, the source of beauty and wisdom on this earth. With another metaphor but in the same spirit, Beethoven shaped the Ninth Symphony around Joy. It is his
Creation
, his
Marseillaise
, and also his
Zauberflöte
.

 

In the end, the Ninth Symphony presents us as many questions as answers. Its utopia is envisioned, not attained. It was neglected for decades before it found its triumph.
⁴¹
Yet the place in the world Beethoven intended the Ninth to inhabit is exactly where it ended up over the next two centuries: its
Freude
theme perhaps known to half of humanity, the symphony performed all over the globe, in East and West, often outside the concert hall as a great ceremonial work.

In an unprecedented way for a composer, far beyond the ambitions of the
Eroica
, Beethoven stepped into history with a communal ritual that does not simply preach a sermon about freedom and brotherhood but aspires to help bring them to pass. In the coming centuries, ideologies going by the names “democratic,” “communist,” “socialist,” and “Nazi” would claim the Ninth as their own. It would be exalted by tyrannies and it would celebrate the downfall of tyrannies. How one viewed the Ninth, it turned out, depended on what kind of Elysium one had in mind, whether that all people should be brothers or that all nonbrothers should be exterminated. The
Freude
theme would end up as the anthem of a Europe united after centuries of war. All of this is as Beethoven surely hoped, in some degree even foresaw. If we want to conceive something in the direction of a universal artwork, here it is.

The Ninth emerges from a whispering mist to fateful proclamations. In the finale, the
Freude
theme, prefigured from the beginning, is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. Which is to say, the 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!” run the telling lines in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of transcendent scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.

The Ninth Symphony, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, is itself Beethoven's embrace for the millions, from East to West, high to low, naive to sophisticated. 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.

32

A
FTER THE PREMIERES
of the Ninth Symphony and parts of the
Missa solemnis
, Beethoven's financial and physical miseries harried him no less. But he did not take vacations from his work or from promoting his work. Somehow his energy for both remained strong. Medical science of the day could not discern that his liver was killing him, but the effects were clear enough. While he waited to see if he was dying, he turned his attention to smaller, more manageable but no less ambitious projects: the three string quartets commissioned by Russian Prince Nikolai Galitzin.

Meanwhile, after loosing the Ninth Symphony on the world, he did not consider that work a settled matter. At some point after the premiere, Beethoven told Carl Czerny that he had decided the choral finale was a mistake and he intended to replace it with a purely instrumental one.
¹
What is to be made of this astonishing statement? The whole symphony was written toward the revelation of the finale, the Schiller ode, the
Freude
theme.

He did not explain his second thoughts about the finale. Presumably he would have spun it off as a freestanding piece, like a more elaborate
Choral Fantasy
. (He was to do the same with the finale of a string quartet.) One surmise is that he was not satisfied with its rambling and episodic course, its metaphorical gestures imposed from outside rather than motivated from inside the musical dialectic. In more pedestrian terms, he may have concluded that he had finally written something truly beyond the capacities of orchestras and choirs, given that the first three movements were already unprecedentedly difficult. Or perhaps the idea of redoing the finale reveals a touch of conservatism, a lingering uncertainty about the idea of sullying the instrumental, call it abstract, integrity of a symphony by putting in voices.

For whatever reason, in his notion about replacing the finale one sees Beethoven's integrity. He had envisioned setting “An die Freude” since his teens. The Ninth was his most ambitious symphony. It was a statement he wanted to give the world in a dark time. But if the finale did not work
musically
for him, he was ready to throw it out. In the end, of course, he did not write a replacement. He let the finale stand, and surely he was wise to. It has its issues, but its importance as an abiding image of freedom and fulfillment lifts it far beyond technical matters.

 

In May 1824, the same month as the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, a journal article in the new
Berlin Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
delved unprecedentedly into Beethoven's symphonies in their historical and technical dimensions. It was called “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven's Achievement in This Field.” The author was critic, theorist, and Beethoven devotee Adolph Bernhard Marx, who had founded the journal. In coming years he would be one of the men most responsible for naming and formalizing the idea of “sonata form.” Like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Marx in his approach to music was a paradigm of his era, which is to say, Romantic in his sensibilities. At the same time he stands as a founder of the modern discipline of music theory. In other words, Marx was a product of a time and a culture in the process of developing a systematic and quasi-scientific study of history. In the German conception, history was logical and progressive. For Marx, while Beethoven was rooted in tradition he was superior to anything that came before.

Marx begins the article by reviewing the history of the symphonic genre, its relationship to the instrumental sonata, and the achievements of Mozart and Haydn. His language appears to be inspired in some degree by Hoffmann's rhapsodic musical writings. For Marx, Mozart's G Minor Symphony “demonstrates the expression of a restless, unsettled passion, of a struggling and fighting against a powerfully intruding agitation.” Here is the Romantic atmosphere in music criticism: dramatic and expressive terms that could as well be applied to a play by Goethe or Shakespeare. When it comes to Haydn, Marx reflects the general decline of sympathy toward the symphonies, finding in them a certain impurity: “It seems as if [Haydn's] feeling, especially his childlike, untroubled joy . . . sometimes seizes upon certain extrinsic objects and blends their representation into the expression of the emotion itself.”

He arrives at Beethoven, whose symphonies he views through the complementary lenses of the evocative and the technical: “In the areas of the sonata and the symphony, Beethoven began at Mozart's level . . . Even if many a moment shone forth more freshly and brightly than in the more gentle Mozart and echoed the Haydn school, and even if a greater, more deeply founded unity became manifest in Beethoven's compositions, the basic idea was, nevertheless, the same . . . His more advanced development led to a higher cultivation of the sonata form.”

Probably for the first time in print, Marx takes note of Beethoven's expansion and intensification of the development section and the coda in sonata form, and his replacement of the minuet with the scherzo in the symphonies and elsewhere. He notes that the critical conceptions that grew up in the time of Mozart (here he leaves out Haydn) could not cope with Beethoven's innovations and his singular voice: “As long as Beethoven followed Mozart he received their applause. But in that period whenever they suspected the distinctive qualities of his music . . . it was considered to be an aberration or some kind of excess . . . Those arbiters stayed where they were, but art didn't, nor did Beethoven.”

In this article Marx is more interested in expression than technique. His gist is that Beethoven always paints particular emotional states and often specific images. Years before, he had responded to the
Eroica
with a series of poems full of heroic imagery. Here he tours symphonies 1–7 and their leading themes with evocative commentary: “Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emerged from the indefinite lyricism that we believed to find in Mozart's earlier symphonies . . . However, it does not exhibit a single feeling but rather a series of spiritual conditions, with deep psychological truth. It is the struggle of a strong being against an almost overwhelming fate.” In the lyrical second subject he finds “the painful lament of a deeply wounded and yet unweakened soul.” And so on, through the symphony. He concludes, “We could regard this symphony as the first to advance beyond the Mozartian point of view.”

He cites
Wellington's Victory
, with its portrait of a battle, and applies the same kind of narrative to the
Eroica
. By this point in history, he writes, instrumental music was “no longer a dead artifice for expressing one's subjectivity and feeling . . . The orchestra became for [Beethoven] an animated chorus engaged in dramatic action.” With the
Eroica
, “[e]verything now was united:
psychological development
, connected to a series of
extrinsic
[i.e., extramusical] circumstances, represented in a thoroughly
dramatic action
of those
instruments
that form the orchestra.” At the end of the article he concludes that whether or not a given reader agrees with his particular interpretations, he will have succeeded “if it is only recognized that a piece of [instrumental] music was capable of stimulating an idea or definite representation.”
²

With Marx we approach the nineteenth-century elevation of music, especially instrumental music, to the summit of creative endeavors, “the art to which all other arts aspire.” One of the reasons for that elevation, as exemplified in Marx, is that the perception of instrumental music began to subsume the qualities of literature, drama, poetry, psychology, and philosophy. Music, especially instrumental music, became thereby the most all-embracing, the most universal art. At the same time, instrumental music could achieve that status while remaining tantalizingly indefinable—the indefinable and unknowable being echt-Romantic qualities. Music became a transcendently evocative and emotional language beyond words.

By Marx's later writings, Beethoven had become not only the emperor of composers but the prime model for all future music, the standard against whom all others were to be judged. Through the nineteenth century and into the next, that was where Beethoven's legacy rested, bestriding and virtually climaxing the history of his art. From the throne others placed him on, he loomed intimidatingly over later generations of composers. In that process, Mozart and Haydn were all but delegated to the status of his precursors. At the same time, by calling all of Beethoven's work a series of virtual tone poems full of “dramatic action,” Marx helped solidify the nineteenth-century triumph of program music.

Beethoven himself was not particularly historically minded (as distinct from aware of the musical past) and too busy working out the next piece to be steadily concerned about his influence. But he read this article of Marx's and was impressed by it. There is no way to know how much he felt the critic had read his mind, as such. Beethoven had always been interested in creative responses to his work, in the ways others made his music their own. Once in a letter he had thanked E. T. A. Hoffmann for his poetic attentions. Now he thanked Marx. Writing to publisher Adolph Schlesinger in Berlin, Beethoven sent word that “I hope that he will continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of art. And surely that ought gradually to throw discredit upon the mere
counting of syllables
.”
³
By the latter he appears to mean critics who blandly cite musical themes and formal outlines, comparing them to people who analyze the meter of a poem and think they know what it means. Beethoven preferred Marx's more expressive and imaginative style. Later he wryly wrote to Adolph Schlesinger's publisher son Moritz, “I request you to give my compliments to Herr Marx in Berlin and ask him not to be too hard on me and to let me slip out occasionally through the back door.” He had some idea of how influential Marx was going to be, and he wanted to prompt the critic to cut him some slack.
⁴