The Last Beethoven Overture This Study Is, Above All, the Outcome of A

1 The Last Beethoven Beethoven, deaf, working on the manuscript of the Missa Solemnis (painting by Josef Karl Stieler, 1819) Overture This study is, above all, the outcome of a long-lasting personal concern that goes back to the period of my first music lessons and my attempts to play Beethoven’s music on the piano. My passion for certain musical compositions, the care to interpret them in the way, with the sensitivity and in keeping with their creator’s intentions might be translated as follows: I wish to perform as if he could hear me and could recognize himself in the music I performed. I was filled, at a very early age, with the desire to know as much as possible about his personality, his life, the events and the circumstances that led to the birth of his work. It is obvious and easy to prove, based on Beethoven’s own notes and the testimonies of those who have written about him for nearly two hundred years, that there were external triggers, such as social and even historical events or happenings, which activated certain musical themes that his genius and sensitivity gave expression in the form known to us today. In this study, I will speak, at the appropriate time, about situations, contexts and events of this kind: family problems, like the affair involving his nephew Karl, 2 or sentimental issues, like the “Immortal Beloved” (Der Unsterbliche Geliebte), the drama entailed by hearing loss, the evolution of event on the European stage during the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic periods, etc. It may be noted, also by way of a personal observation, that an artistic interpretative exercise we embark on for a longer period in life may also have, in addition to the effect of acquiring certain artistic skills, another result, which is by no means negligible. The music we play forms us just like, if the comparison does not seem unlikely, prayers form those who are dedicated to spiritual life practice. To some extent, we play music in order to become the beings we aspire to be. We play music to crystallize our personality according to the artistic ideal we acquired at a particular point in time, through one of those intimate visions that reveals to us, through the exalted lens of adolescence, the sublime face of destiny. My suggestion that musical exercise and religious practice are somehow related is, I hope, not far-fetched, and while the similarity in question may not be generally valid, it certainly has personal relevance. I believe that at least two of the classical figures I am familiar with endorse this similarity: Bach and Beethoven. Who could dispute that Bach’s music is simultaneously a hymn, a prayer and a work for the glorification of God? Or who could have countered Beethoven’s belief that music is a revelation above metaphysics and religion, the primary revelation of the Absolute? Step by step, the composer whose music you perform over the course of many years devoted to a pianistic career becomes a form of your own sensitivity and, without understanding exactly how, he turns into an element and a measure of your artistic personality. This situation is probably also valid on a broader, general level. Without ever clarifying its nature, the performer’s relation to the music of a particular composer becomes personal, because each and every time, the former resurrects, gives life to the latter through the very act of interpretation. The forms of the creator’s sensitivity, his inner pace, his 3 architecture of sound, the vision incorporated into his work act slowly but surely on the performer, refining and, perhaps, converting him. Beyond technical ability and interpretative sensibility, I think that what is at stake is certain mystical fusion between a good musician and the music he aspires to instantiate. I use this term because it appears to be more relevant. When one of Beethoven’s sonatas or Bach’s fugues is performed, for example, what happens is more than the mere transposition into sound of a music score: a musical universe is literally instantiated into being. In this sense, the musician must take upon himself, at a profound and genuine level, the character, the spirit, the personality of the music he performs so that its translation into sound may exude the atmosphere of a mystical initiation. Through its very substance and character, music lends itself more than any other art to analogies with religious practice, even with what is known as ecstasy. In fact, initiations, incantations, chants and liturgies all have a musical background and a mystical purpose. Let us not be afraid of this term: there is nothing suspect about the mystical character of music, even of secular music, for the term essentially amounts to a simple fact – communion, fusion, participation. What else is music but the communion between composer, performer and listener? These three entities coexist at the level of experience in the mystical space created by music, in a space where limitations dwindle away and individualities dissolve unto the horizon of sound like the scent of lilac melts into the odor of commonality. Unlike other artistic products that have material consistency, such as painting, sculpture, photography, film, literature, etc., music cannot be congealed in a material support, since it exists only insofar as it is made, that is, interpreted. The canvas on which sounds are woven is the very canvas of time, and this is fluid, flowing. Passage is its very condition, for music is, effectively, each and every time, the action that shapes transition in sonorous form, providing audible support to the silent flow of time. The fact that it is composed in writing, entrenched in a music score simply means that there is a system of graphic signs that we, as 4 artists, can turn it into a music performance, but for this instrumentalists and musical instruments are needed. In other words, we must constantly produce and reproduce music, which always comes down to reforging a personal relationship with the composer. We must recreate the music he created in order to have a world in common. We may leave aside the fact that in reality, music can now be stored on various media and that it can technically be reproduced as many times as we wish and in however many places in the world simultaneously. The problem remains the same: someone or something must set into motion an entire audible edifice that we, listeners, with our auditive structures and predispositions, interpret as a music system. Second, this study represents a strictly theoretical undertaking. I wish to present, according to my own understanding, the connections formed throughout the nearly three decades of disease between Beethoven’s hearing impairment and his musical creation. Beyond the medical situation that he responded to with understandable panic, with a mixture of helplessness, tremor and depression, which brought him close to the brink of suicide in around the year 1803, the loss of hearing opened an agonizing horizon in the composer’s existence, a horizon against which he waged his battle with destiny. This is the theme, his perception, which led him to take on the image and role of a Hero, of a Titan, strained under the bleak attempts of the divine machinations that he met with courage and, sometimes, even with defiance. It was from these strains that some of his most complex, powerful, expressive and innovative works gushed forth, from his Third and Ninth Symphonies to the piano sonatas and several other compositions for strings. The heroic model he adopted certainly saved him. This circumstance of titanic emulation helped Beethoven to carry so far, in the creative sense, his difficult and somewhat ironic impairment. Still, we have to admit that outside of this romantic model of approaching 5 destiny by recourse to the Heroic and Titanic figures – grandiose epitomes of classical Greek culture – we may find it very difficult to ascertain the composer’s relationship with God in the Christian sense, the way in which he integrated his vision, his sense of life predicated thereupon. Of course, the Missa Solemnis in D major Op. 123, the Ninth Symphony and several other works or parts thereof confirm our view that like Bach, his model and favorite master, Beethoven composed music for the glorification and exaltation of God. And if this is entirely true, then our mission to understand his transitioning through such different cultural and religious models becomes even more difficult. Speaking strictly from a musicological standpoint, this may be of lesser importance, but in any case we must admit that Beethoven’s work, to which we shall refer in aesthetic terms, is the creation of a concrete individual with idiosyncrasies, ideals ambitions, values and life choices, revised sometimes with anguish, with diverse and constant crises and sufferings throughout his life, with passions, loves, disillusionments and frustrations, sedimented, layer by layer, in his intricate personality, from which masterpieces could suddenly erupt at the most unexpected of times. The relationship with the Absolute, whether or not we call it God, was a constant feature in Beethoven’s evolution as a creator and, if we read the themes of his major creations, we may infer that this was a living relationship, on a purely personal level, assumed as a steering force in life and as a form of embracing destiny. Even though, at times, he may appear to have been struck by destiny and engaged in a struggle against God, this merely confirms the resilience of his taut relation with the divine. After all, you cannot resist, you cannot stand face to face with someone you do not believe in, whom you cannot glance at questioningly, whom you cannot challenge in any way.

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