SESSION EIGHT

November 3, 2016

BEETHOVEN THE MAN

Last Years

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

So wrote the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in the 20th century’s most famous poem about the end of life. Rage is a word often used to describe Beethoven. Gentle is not a word used to describe him, and he did not go gently.

Two weeks ago, in Session 6, we observed the great surge in Beethoven’s popularity in his early and mid-forties: more performances, more publishers vying for his works, and a soaring income from performances, sales, royalties, and annuities. This was soon followed by a major decline in the popularity of his music and in his income.

BEETHOVEN IN 1823 This sympathetic but realistic portrait at age 53 suggests that the continuous pain and discomfort Beethoven suffered contributed to his decline in composing, along with worsening health and behavior.

WORSENING BEHAVIOR Accompanying these declines was a marked decline in his health and behavior. In grief over the death of his brother Carl, Beethoven turned to anger, and a prolonged, expensive and ultimately futile attempt to gain legal control of his nephew, also named Karl after his Father, from the influence of what he considered an immoral and uncaring Mother.

This vendetta against his sister-in-law was only one of many signs of Beethoven’s increasingly erratic behavior. Franz Grillparzer, Beethoven’s long- time friend who would eventually deliver the eulogy at Beethoven’s funeral, remained sympathetic to Beethoven even as he documented his troubling behavior in a series of diary entries such as this:

The sad condition of the master during the latter years of his life prevented him from always distinguishing clearly between what had actually happened and what had been merely imagined…And yet for all his odd ways, which often bordered on being offensive, there was something so inexpressibly touching and noble in him that one could not but esteem him, and feel drawn to him.”

DECLINING HEALTH The final years of Beethoven’s life were years of great physical pain and suffering. His many illnesses, detailed earlier in Session Two, became more severe. His ability to care for himself declined further, increasing his discomfort and his risk from poor eating, excessive drinking, and prolonged exposure to cold, drafts, and bad weather.

In his final year friends who tried to attend to him noted that he ate almost nothing, but drank more and more. He complained of thirst, loss of appetite, and severe swelling throughout his body. Several physicians declined to attend him, fearing they would be blamed for his worsening illness, even for his death. One physician who did attend described him as “bent double with pain in his liver and intestines, with his feet and abdomen terribly swollen.”

From these symptoms the medical community has deduced that Beethoven was suffering from edema (“dropsy” in Beethoven’s time), a painful swelling of various parts of the body, which is now considered a major symptom of kidney disease. Other observers say he also had jaundice, the yellowing of flesh and skin often accompanied with high fever, chills and abdominal pain, now considered a symptom of chronic hepatitis.

FAMILY CONFICT As was so often the case, Beethoven responded to his misery by becoming obsessive about other mat-ters. As you already know, his long and ultimately futile attempts to rescue his nephew Karl from the clutches of Karl’s presume- ably evil and immoral Mother lasted until almost the end of Beethoven’s life and cost him a small fortune in legal fees and lost work.

KARL VAN BEETHOVEN, 1806-1858 Karl himself was deeply troubled by the incessant legal and verbal wrangling between his Mother and his Uncle. Despite Beethoven’s demands that he apply himself to his schooling, he was a poor student. A secret, illegal search of his rooms, arranged by Beethoven, yielded a gun. Karl’s own ambivalence was shown by his frequent running away from his Mother to be with his Uncle, then vice versa, despite each of them demanding that he cut off all contact with the other.

Seeking a way out of this emotional tangle, Karl joined the Prussian army, but even this did not end the family warfare. Desperate to avoid further con-flict, Karl attempted suicide in 1826, the year before Beethoven died. After his recovery, he reconciled with his Uncle and came to appreciate him, even spending several weeks at his bedside during Beethoven’s final illness in the spring of 1827.

DECLINING POPULARITY By age 52 the popularity of his compositions had greatly declined, as we see from a diary entry recounting a conversation he had with the editor of a visitor from Leipzig:

You will hear nothing of me here. What should you hear? Fidelio? They cannot give it, nor do they want to listen to it. The sym- phonies? They have no time for them. My concertos? Everyone grinds out only the stuff he himself has made. The solo pieces? They went out of style long ago, and here fashion is everything. At most Schuppanzigh occasionally digs up a string quartet.

Even if we disregard the familiar self-pitying quality of these remarks, the facts were largely true. In his early fifties Beethoven was largely unappreciated, half- forgotten, and all for the most familiar reason: his music was out of fashion, out of the mainstream of the new, more romantic world of the 1820s. Although he was universally acclaimed as the great-est living composer, this did not lessen his increase-ing isolation, both as a man and as a composer.

FINANCIAL TROUBLES As Beethoven’s output as a composer diminished after age 50, so did his income: there were fewer concerts, fewer new pieces to be published, and fewer opportunities to be paid for dedicating his works to wealthy or powerful benefactors. Due to his near total deafness he had long since stopped conducting and performing in public. His only remaining sources of income were his annuity and interest income from his bank notes.

These were not sufficient to cover his expenses, which remained high. He continued to employ at least two servants at all times. He insisted on eating fine foods, well prepared, and on drinking a great deal of fine wine. His financial support of Karl was expensive, as he insisted that the boy should attend an expensive private school for which Beethoven paid the tuition. And his legal fees for the many legal attempts to wrestle legal control of Karl from his Mother were never ending.

The result was that Beethoven went rather deeply into debt, borrowing thousands of florins from friends and publishers, in return for future compo- sitions that were never finished, or even begun.

In all these financial ups and downs, he continued to be supported by his small circle of aristocratic patrons, many of them aging themselves. Even after the bankruptcy of Archduke Rudolph that support continued, to the very end of Beethoven’s life.

THE ROMANTIC GENERATION It was not only the Viennese craving for the latest fashion that led them to neglect Beethoven. The new generation of composers, born around 1810 and already prolific composers in their teenage years, had different interests and a different world view. These young masters, including Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin and Robert Schumann, admired Beethoven as insightful teenagers often admire their grand-fathers – an admirable old man but not relevant in their young lives. They did not wish to emulate his approach or the kind of music he wrote. The very things that inspired Beethoven – the noble aspira- tions of the Enlightenment, the revolutionary ideals of Napoleon, the vast political and social upheavals caused by wars and empires, were only history to them.

They were Romantics through and through. They had a new focus, a new artistic obsession, which was to express the secret, unpredictable, often chaotic emotions of our inner world, as they parade unpredictably through our minds and psyches. Their literary inspiration was two generations of romantic poets: in the English language Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and above all Robert Burns, all well-known throughout Germany in translation; and in the German language, Goethe and Eichendorff.

The generation of 1810 did not rebel against their musical Grandfather Beethoven; it simply turned in a different direction, cultivating new forms and a more lyric, less dramatic style that suited their own romantic purposes. They focused on short pieces, such as songs and character pieces for piano, that capture the essence of an emotional moment or a fleeting mood. Their major musical influences were not Beethoven but the 1790 generation, primarily Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber.

True enough, the shadow of Beethoven still cast a long shadow on Schumann and Mendelssohn both German-born (but not on Chopin, born in far-away Poland) – who wrote a few symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas in the old genres that Beethoven had brought to such a high level of intensity. But with few exceptions, their greatest works were not in these genres. As Robert Schumann put it so well:

On the whole, it looks as if the sonata has run its course. This is as it should be, for we cannot repeat the same forms for centuries.

“FASHION IS EVERYTHING” So if, as Beethoven said, “fashion is everything,” it had passed him by before his creative life came to an end. Throughout his life Beethoven continued to up-hold the ideals of the Enlightenment, of classicism, and of aristocratic excellence. Despite the cycles of history and fashion, old man Beethoven still had a lot of creative life in him.

BEETHOVEN THE COMPOSER

Symphonies

Only art and science give us intimations and hopes of a higher life.- Beethoven

The meaning of this quotation would have been obvious to those in Beethoven’s circle, especially to those raised on principles of the Enlightenment. To them, the purpose of art was to lead humanity to transcendence: overcoming or rising above some-thing to a superior state of being. In the Christian tradition, Jesus rose from the tomb into heaven – a transcendent act. In Schiller’s view, trans- cendence was achieving an inner harmony a social order that would permit the unfettered development all human beings – in his own words, “the fulfillment of beautiful possibilities.” For Schiller and all who were influenced by him, only through art could human beings transcend the mundane everyday world and reach a higher, more prefect realm of existence. That is why 19th century Europeans held art itself, and by extension, great artists, in such high esteem. And Beethoven, above all

SYMPHONIES BEFORE BEETHOVEN The symphony was the largest, most popular, most substantial, and most abstract musical genre of the Enlightenment. Haydn lavished far more care on composing his 104 symphonies than would have been required under his contract with Prince Esterhazy. Mozart wrote 41 more, many of them masterpieces.

While Mozart wrote his first symphony at age eight, Beethoven waited until age 31 – nine full years after moving to Vienna – to publish his, and only after publishing six string quartets, 12 piano sonatas, two piano concertos, 12 sets of piano variations, and several major pieces of pieces of chamber music.

Despite their importance, symphonies before Beethoven had a limited emotional range: they could be noble, witty, satirical, and even tumultuous; in other words, they perfectly reflected the somewhat superficial and limited emotional landscape of 18th century Europe. Before Beethoven, symphonies had never expressed the greater, deeper, more personal emotional landscape of the era of Napoleon. They rarely if ever had plumbed the heroic or the tragic levels of the human experience.

BEETHOVEN SYMPHONIES I have put Beethoven’s symphonies here, in our final session, last of all in the genres of Beethoven’s music that we will examine. They were the most important, most powerful instrumental genre of Beethoven’s day. They were socially and economic-ally important as well, for they drew large audiences to the hundreds of newly-built public concert halls. They are the most complex of his works to listen to, because of their length and the large number of instruments involved.

Beethoven symphonies have also inspired many writers to write about them, many dancers and choreographers to design dance interpretations of them, and countless musicians to create arrangements of them for every conceivable combination of instruments. Here is a poem by the 20th century American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Rockland, ME in 1892 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry:

On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the world again. With you alone is excellence and peace. Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain. Enchanted in your air, benign and shrewd, With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale, The spiteful and the stingy and the rude Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale. This moment is the best the world can give: The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem. Reject me not, sweet sounds! Oh, let me live, Till doom espy my towers and scatter them, A city spell-bound under the aging sun, Music, my rampart and my only one.

SYMPHONY IN E-FLAT MAJOR, 1804 Beethoven’s first two symphonies fit the mold of classical symphonies as de- fined by Haydn and Mozart. His third symphony, commonly called the “Eroica,” broke the mold in many important ways. In1804 it was a startling and unprec- edented work. As its nickname suggests, it was a heroic piece in many ways:

 in its length and complexity it was almost twice as long

 in its larger, more powerful-sounding orchestra

 in its greater range of personal emotions of its second movement (Funeral march)

 in the greater emotional weight of its final movement, now the equal to the first movement and of far greater consequence than the usually cheerful and breezy final movements of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies.

Many 20th and 21st century musicians consider the Eroica a high-point in musical history. In a recent poll of over 150 leading conductors throughout the world it was acclaimed the greatest symphony of all time by a wide margin.

As for the concert-going public of Vienna, it was divided on the merits of the Eroica. Some called it Beethoven's masterpiece; others said that the work merely illustrated a striving for originality that did not come off. A now- forgotten Symphony by com-poser Anton Eberl received better press reviews than did the Eroica.

SECOND MOVEMENT, “FUNERAL MARCH” In the second movement of the Eroica symphony, for the first time we experience music that expresses the stormy, even disruptive currents of 19th century so-ciety and politics. Beethoven was the first composer to fuse the tempestuous, conflict-ridden subject matter of the heroic style with the sonata form. Here, in the symphony’s second movement he went beyond the pleasantness and cleverness of the classical style, deliberately introducing aggressive and disruptive elements into musical form. The core of this Funeral March is the experience of tragedy. Death, destructiveness, anxiety, and aggression are all expressed here, but then transcended, yielding to an explosive third movement and finally to a jubilant final movement of great energy. The Eroica is a case study of Schiller’s philosophy of art, which promises that tragedy can never have the final word, only joy.

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SYMPHONY IN A MAJOR, 1812 Eight years later Beethoven completed his Seventh Symphony. The timing of its premiere, at the very end of 1812, led audiences to hear this symphony as a celebration of the defeat of Napoleon and of the joyous arrival of a new era of peace and justice. Overnight the Seventh Symphony became enormously popular. In addition to being played many times in its original form, it appeared in many transcriptions and arrangements: for wind septet, string quintet, piano quartet, piano trio, piano four hands, piano solo, and an arrangement by Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny for two pianos.

Of all Beethoven’s symphonies, the Seventh is perhaps the most transcendent: for it never reminds us of our mundane, work-a-day world, but of a far better world, the world we can only dream of, a world of boundless energy, joyous and liberating. It is a tremendous celebration that overcomes the pain of the prevailing social order, the pain of all restraints, unfettered by limitation, untinged by tragedy: in a word, transcendent.

SECOND MOVEMENT For the first time in his symphonies, the Seventh Symphony does not include a slow movement. No tragic, solemn, or introspective music here to disrupt the festive, celebratory mood of this symphony. Instead we get an allegretto movement – moderately fast - that is Beethoven’s greatest example of how to create monumental music with the simplest ingredients.

The building block of this movement is not a theme or melody at all but a brief rhythm of five notes that is repeated hundreds of times. It is never missing from a single measure of this nine-minute movement. Over the top of this rhythm Beethoven creates a great variety of themes, each helping to sustain the solemn but relentless mood of the movement as a whole.

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OTHER SYMPHONIES If you want to listen to other symphonies written before and after Beethoven, you will find links to these on our class web page:

 Mozart, Symphony No. 35, 1786

 Schubert: Symphony No. 9, 1827

 Berlioz: Symphony Fantastique, 1830

 Franck: Symphony in D Minor, 1888

Beethoven and Society

WHAT SHALL WE MAKE OF BEETHOVEN?

REPUTATION AS A MAN What shall we make of Beethoven? Let us end as we began, by considering Beethoven a child of the Enlightenment. Beethoven epitomizes the conflict between its dream of a just and compassionate world and the all-too-human behavior of people and societies that fail to live up to these ideals. What we know about Beethoven as a man mirrors this conflict on a personal level: he is a human being of great genius and grievous shortcomings:

 his quirky personality, vanity, rudeness; his rough, unkempt appear- ance; his excessive drinking and wild, unpredictable explosions of anger and abuse

 but also, his kindness and thoughtfulness, his often excessive response- bility for the welfare of others; the unrealistically high standards of morality to which he held himself and others, and his frequent disap- pointment and disillusionment when he, and they, did not measure up

 but also, his self-pity, his longing for attention and recognition, his unfulfilled need to belong, to fit in, to feel at home, and perhaps above all, to be loved and not just admired

 but also, his obsessive nature; his greed and jealousy; the manipulative nature of his business dealings, the rage he expressed about seemingly minor incidents; the harshness he showed toward men who were not his equal (almost all men) and especially toward women who were not as pure as he believed women should be (almost all women).

The contradictory nature of these qualities, and the extreme way they were manifest in his behavior, made it difficult for people to deal with Beethoven as a man. Some avoided him whenever possible; others wrote to him rather than dealing with him face to face. He was a prickly, difficult person to deal with. That was, and still is, part of his reputation.

But beneath this stormy exterior was a man of extreme compassion, who went out of his way to help and care for others, who found human suffering almost unbearable, who hoped against hope that people with the power to improve the world would do so.

REPUTATION AS A MUSICIAN And then there is Beethoven’s reputation as a com-poser. Even now, after 200 years, he reigns as the supreme representative of his violent, heroic age - the one composer who best expressed the majesty, the tensions, the energetic idealism, and the violence, of the world of Napoleon, Goethe, and Schiller.

Beethoven’s reputation as a composer had spread throughout Europe long before the end of his life. This reputation was uneven, ranging from almost idolatry in Austria, Germany, and England, to only lukewarm acknowledge- ment in France.

 Programs of the Philharmonic Society of London in the 1820s featured sixty performances of his symphonies and 29 of his overtures.

 In Vienna, newspapers were filled with tributes to his genius.

 In Germany, a foreign critic noted that “the Germans esteem him the most distinguished musical genius of Europe, except for Mozart.” Influential literary figures such as Clemens Brentano and E.T. A. Hoffmann, worshiped him to the point of adulation.

But this praise was not universal. Other writers, composers and critics found his music deficient when measured against the standard of what classical music should be: balanced, objective, and moderate in all things. They denounced his music for its excessive fantasy, its mingling of styles and affects, its infringements on traditional rules, its too-powerful contrasts. One promi- nent reviewer wrote that “the characteristic features of such music readily incur the risk of overstepping the finely drawn boundaries of musical beauty, more especial-ly when the intention is to express force, selfishness, evil, impetuosity, and other extremes of passion.”

SCHINDLER What did the 19th century make of Beethoven after he died? In the fifty years after his death, what they knew was largely shaped by one curious man, Anton Felix Schindler. Born in Moravia, Schindler moved to Vienna when Beethoven was in his early 40s. He was a law student and an excellent violinist, who finally gave up the law to make a successful living in music.

For the last five years of Beethoven’s life Schindler lived in Beethoven’s house and served as his secretary and personal assistant. Thus he had complete access to Beethoven’s estate immediately after his death, and kept many of Beethoven’s personal effects and over 400 of the “conversation books” used by friends and visitors to converse with Beethoven after he became totally deaf.

In 1840 Schindler published a book, “Beethoven as I Knew Him,” which for many years was considered to be the most authoritative account of his life and music. Later in the 19th century, musical scholars began to find discrepancies in Schindler’s biography. Today Schindler has been largely discredited as a source of information about Beethoven’s life.

AFTER BEETHOVEN – WHAT? What did 19th century composers make of Beethoven? In a word, they found him very hard to deal with. The quality of his music made it impossible to ignore, but his music was too old-fashioned, too classical, to use as a model. Some composers, including Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, clung to the classical genres of sonata, string quartet, and symphony, but most of their best work was in the newer genres of the song and the character piece for piano. Other composers struck out in new directions, largely giving up the classical genres in favor of opera, as in the case of Wagner, or inventing new genres such as “tone-poems,” as in the case of Liszt.

BEETHOVEN’S LEGACY TODAY In the 21st century his legacy is as influential as ever. There is still a remark- able agreement that Beethoven’s music is the supreme expression of his violent, heroic age and of the conflict-ridden human condition. The judgments of history are clear about this.

Clear, but not unified. As new generations enter the world stage, new per- spectives appear that shed new light on Beethoven and his music. Here is the 20th century American poet, Adrienne Rich, in her poem, “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message:”

A man in terror of impotence or infertility, not knowing the difference a man trying to tell something howling from the climacteric

music of the entirely isolated soul yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego

music without the ghost of another person in it, music trying to tell something the man does not want out, would keep if he could

gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy where everything is silence and the beating of a bloody fist upon a splintered table

ANDY WARHOL PORTRAIT, 1957 The American artist Andy Warhol, despite his image as a revolutionary and provocateur, was powerfully drawn to Beethoven late in life. For several years he worked on a portrait of Beethoven based on the well-known, romanticized portrait by Joseph Karl Stiehler. Clearly unfinished, it has never been shown publicly.

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WHAT SHALL WE MAKE OF BEETHOVEN? Since his death the world has found in Beethoven not just an admired composer but a mythmaker, a model of heroism and a creator of beauty.

Whether by accident, luck, or intention, Beethoven was able to merge his most intimate desires with the collective striving of a world still pining for personal freedom, still believing in their heart of hearts the idealistic principles of the Enlightenment: virtue, personal responsibility, ethical action. He would be, and still is, the hero of all such people: a true Enlightenment hero, a deeply flawed man who overcame humble beginnings and personal tragedy to create music that speaks to the world with unprecedented power. That is why Beethoven mattered to the Viennese during his lifetime, and why he has mattered to every succeeding generation over the past 200 years.

And so, at the end of our eight weeks together, what shall we make of Beethoven?