Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (59 page)

During the
fugato
the
basso
theme is inverted—turned upside down. Inversion is an old contrapuntal device, but Beethoven does not make this inversion casually: the scaffolding of the Hero theme was an inversion of the
basso
. In the middle of the
fugato
, the flutes dart in with the beginning of the
englische
theme, E-flat–G–E-flat–D. Then the horns enter on the same, but with a new last note suiting their nature as horns: E-flat–G–E-flat–B-flat. Those four notes are, of course, the head motif of the first movement's Hero theme. Here Beethoven “explains” where that motif came from.
⁵²
With his theme, the Hero is present, in person or in recollection. The section ascends to a climax, the
basso
in glory pealing out in the horns.
⁵³

He has shaped the finale as a steady intensification from the light style of a dance to a heroic voice, and has placed the exaltation of the
Basso del Tema
at the end of the third section. The fourth and last section of the finale is the apotheosis of the
englische
melody. Rather than carrying its accustomed lilt, it appears solemnly,
poco andante
. Here he transforms the
englische
into a hymn, its poignant leading voice the oboe that has been the main wind protagonist all along. At this moment near the end of the symphony, he makes his little dance tune into a song of great tenderness and compassion. As in the
Funeral March
, this is a hymn not to God but to Humanity. At the same time he gathers up more threads. In a web of subtle allusions in the third section, he recalls themes, colors, textures, feelings from the
Marcia funèbre:
the martyrs to freedom are recalled, woven into the pattern of life.
⁵⁴
Now the music has moved from a heroic voice to one inward, contemplative, commemorative. In that way the finale retraces the journey from first to second movement, from victory to mourning, outward to inward. Once again he builds to a
fortissimo
climax, the horns pealing out the
englische
theme.
⁵⁵
Slowly the music sinks from that peak to stasis and anticipation.

So ends the finale proper. Throughout the symphony, Beethoven has suppressed a sense of completion and closure. For that he has reserved the very end, an explosion of jubilation that is the climax not only of the finale but of the whole of
Bonaparte
. Mozart wrote that when he reached the end of a work he felt the whole of it resounding in the last chord. So it is here. The final pages are what the unfulfilled end of the first movement was waiting for, the true victory, the completion of the Hero's task. The coda is presented like the denouement of a great ceremony vibrant with horns and trumpets—like throngs, like all humanity exulting in a revolution triumphant, with a joy that obliterates everything else. The theme the horns proclaim is Hero and
englische
, leader and people united; the harmony is nothing but the tonic and dominant of the
basso
. The end celebrates humanity's imagined triumph, and no less Beethoven's real one.

 

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 the Hero, call its source in the finale's
englische
dance tune the People, who are humanity.

Whether or not Beethoven saw it consciously as such, here is an overarching metaphor. Like Napoleon, this enlightened Hero does not rise from aristocracy or from accident of birth but is self-created from his origin in the People, just as his theme is created from its origin in the
englische
. Thereby the self-created hero becomes a paradigm of all human potential. To exalt this kind of Hero is to exalt the People, the common clay. The Hero theme turns that idea into sound: it is based on a triad, one of the simplest and most common things in music. From that common clay, the theme is exalted.

In autumn of 1803, back in his flat in the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven wrote out the orchestral score of the Third Symphony. Its flowery title page proclaimed,
Sinfonia grande / intitulata Bonaparte / del Sigr. / Louis van Beethoven
. Then he turned his pen to other projects nearly as extraordinary. He knew beyond doubt that this was the best thing he had done. He hoped it would have a brilliant future. But he could hardly have imagined the implications of that future. The
Eroica
reframed what a symphony, and to a degree what music itself, could be and achieve. It would stand as one of the defining statements of the German Aufklärung and of the power of the heroic leader, the benevolent despot, to change himself and the world. No less is its exalting of such an individual a prophecy of the Romantic century, whose cult of genius would declare Beethoven the true hero of the
Eroica
.
⁵⁶

Before long this symphony took its place as one of the monumental humanistic documents of its time, and of all time. 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.

 

At age thirty-two, Beethoven had once again mobilized a gift he had possessed since childhood, of making prodigious advances in a short period. In the genre of symphony he had made three leaps in less than four years whose scope is larger than most artists travel in a lifetime. Starting with, in his terms, the cautious and conservative First Symphony, by the Third he had created a work that, when its import and impact played out in the next years, remade the genre of symphony once and for all. In some quarters, at least, the symphony had already been declared the first of genres, based on what Haydn and Mozart had made of it. Beethoven had taken the development of the Classical symphony where Haydn and Mozart pointed it but in directions neither of them could have imagined. A new scope and ambition had entered the symphonic genre, and it would stay there.
⁵⁷

For Beethoven himself, the
Bonaparte
(eventually
Eroica
) Symphony did not so much begin the New Path as confirm and epitomize it. What did the New Path, his full maturity, amount to? In the long view, it was no complete departure. Rather, he took up his boldest and most personal mode, heard in the
Pathétique
and the op. 31 Sonatas, among other works, as his essential voice. By the force of his personality he went on to move the mainstream of music toward that voice.

But what one conceives oneself to be doing and what one is perceived by one's public to be doing are two different things. For Beethoven the New Path (what later history would name the Second, or “Heroic,” Period) was mainly a private matter between himself and his Muse. For the public it was a different and grander issue. After the inevitable inertia of opinion, a growing chorus of musicians, listeners, and critics called the
Eroica
unprecedented, magnificent, terrifying, exalted:
revolutionary
and before long
Romantic
. Yet while many of his audience joined Beethoven to the spirit of the French Revolution, he never said anything to that effect (though never denied it, either).

In his
Bildung
and in his temperament, Beethoven was not a Romantic, and he never called himself a revolutionary. He based much of what he did on tradition, models, and authorities, and he never intended to overthrow the past. He was an evolutionist more than a revolutionist. Call him a
radical evolutionary
, one with a unique voice.

In practice, then, the New Path was not entirely new but more of a stylistic and technical consolidation. In terms of technique, he intensified the drive to integration, making more elements thematic throughout a work. His major works had always seemed distinctive, individual. Now they became intensely more so, each work a strong-featured and unforgettable personality not only in its material but in its very sound and fundamental conception.
⁵⁸

In
The Tempest
and the
Eroica
and the coming works of the New Path, Beethoven intensified and consolidated a particular conception of theme and form. Rather than following his usual procedure—learned mainly from Haydn and Mozart—of starting with extended themes from which he extracted motifs as building blocks, now sometimes he treated motifs as protean elements in the foreground. So he might conceive movements without themes in the usual sense, which is to say, he used motifs
as
themes, like the mysterious arpeggio that begins
The Tempest
, which seems like an introduction but turns out to be a generating idea, or the triad and chromatic slide that constitute the Hero theme of the
Eroica
.
⁵⁹
(The distillation of this motif-as-theme trend would be the Fifth Symphony.) Beethoven had begun to think of any element of music as potentially thematic; not only traditional melodic and rhythmic figures but even a single chord like a Neapolitan or a diminished seventh could be a unifying motif. Likewise a texture, a trill, a single pitch, silence—the simplest and most common elements of music. For him this desire to treat anything as a potential leading motif was not new on the New Path, but the tendency intensified categorically.

Now his handling of form became not so much more varied or experimental as more expressive, more flexible and responsive to the conception at hand. In practice, though, after the
Eroica
his forms largely became more regular than before. Which is to say that as the ideas themselves became bolder and more pointed (other times more lyrical and pointed) and his rhythm more dynamic, the formal outline became more individual and expressive, though not usually more complex or experimental—until the late music.

When he finished the
Eroica
, Beethoven was no longer looking cautiously over his shoulder at the past. Now he saw himself as the peer of Haydn and Mozart. At the same time, his relation to the public had changed. He would never stop producing items designed for popular appeal, but in his major works he no longer worried about challenging his audience (though he still loathed bad reviews). Now he was prepared to make demands. If the
Bonaparte
Symphony was beyond his audience on first hearing, he expected them to listen again, and again and again. Here was a sea change from the attitude of Haydn and Mozart, who by and large wrote for the immediate pleasure of audiences and performers while incorporating subtleties for the delectation of connoisseurs.

Part of what was truly new in the New Path was a joining of Beethoven's art and his Aufklärung consciousness. 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. 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. Even if some of his personal heroes, like Elector Max Franz and Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, were born to their thrones and he had no dispute with aristocracy in theory, his image of the hero was not in itself aristocratic in the hereditary sense. He believed in an aristocracy of mind and talent and spirit.

It was central to Beethoven that Napoleon was not highborn but self-made—the first such man in European history to wield such power. For all his eventual disgust at the dictator, that admiration endured. A French visitor of 1809 reported, “He was uncommonly preoccupied with Napoleon's greatness and often spoke to me about it. Although he was not well-disposed towards him, I noticed that he admired his rise from such a lowly position.”
⁶⁰
(Actually Napoleon's “lowly” origin was partly a myth. His family came from minor rural nobility; his father was a lawyer.) Now at the end of 1803, still determined “irrevocably” to go to Paris, Beethoven had a symphony worthy and appropriate to lay at Napoleon's feet, whether figuratively or literally.

But for him the heroic image did not apply only to political and military leaders; it applied to anyone self-made, self-generated, capable and courageous, rising above the crowd and therefore a natural leader: a “free man.” Napoleon was that kind of free man and, inescapably, Beethoven perceived himself to be the same. He would model some—by no means all—of the works of the coming decade on the image of the hero, in many guises: the great leader, the strong man, hope of the people, or, as in the Fourth Piano Concerto, the brooding loner. So inevitably Beethoven, leading music on the New Path that he saw opening before him, became one of the heroes in his own stories.
⁶¹
And part of his heroic voice was built on the French revolutionary style.
⁶²
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 in place, freedom of thought under relentless assault.