A
Splendid New Book on Beethoven
By Warren Boroson
Mozart, someone said, wrote
music like an angel.
“But Beethoven,” commented a
young man whose opinion I respect, “is…God.”
Now, I don’t believe for a minute that
Beethoven separated the heavens from the earth or fashioned a woman from Adam’s
rib or parted the Red Sea at just the right time, but I, too, am frankly in awe
of him. No one wrote music more thrilling, more exciting, more beautiful.
As for Beethoven versus Shakespeare as the
greatest artist ever, I listen to a lot
more Beethoven than I read Shakespeare--including the sonnets.
When the car radio is playing something by Beethoven
and I’ve arrived at my destination, I hesitate to switch off the ignition and
leave.
I love that episode in a recent Beethoven
biography: A winter’s day dawns in Boston and it’s not quite as frigid and
snowy, so someone opens a window and – to celebrate — and plays the Ninth
Symphony at full blast.
And I think that E.M. Forster was wrong:
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and not his Fifth is “the most sublime noise that
has ever penetrated the human ear.”
Franz Liszt once said, of Chopin, that he
came from another planet. So did Beethoven — although a very different planet from
Chopin’s. (I love Chopin, too.)
Every year, WQXR holds its Classical
Countdown, asking listeners to vote for their favorite pieces of music. I
always check the ratings, to make sure that Beethoven dominates the top ten — and
that his Ninth symphony is Number One. Just to make sure that God’s in His
heaven and all’s right in the world.
A new biography of Beethoven – Beethoven:
Triumph and Tragedy by Jan Swafford -- is just the ticket for a cold, listless
winter day. A pleasure to read, informative as all get-out. The author seems to
know almost everything worth knowing about Beethoven the man as well as Beethoven
the composer. Example: Where is the ear trumpet that Beethoven, going deaf,
used? Answer: Missing.
Some notes from this marvelous book:
He wasn’t good at arithmetic.
“…if he needed to multiply 62 by 50, he did it by writing 62 in a column 50
times and adding it up.”
His favorite opera: Mozart’s
Magic Flute. He called his hated sister-in-law the evil Queen of the Night; he
called his rather despicable friend Anton Schindler “Papageno”-- after the
foolish birdcatcher in Magic Flute. (Schindler wrote the first major Beethoven
biography, “a work of the most remarkable mendacity….”)
He knew his worth as a
composer. “He appeared to be devoid of doubts about himself.”
He was an angry man. Among
other objects of his anger: Vienna, where he lived for many years. “From the
Emperor to the bootblack, all the Viennese are worthless.” He also had unkind words
for Jews and for Italians – typical of people at the time. (Chopin also had
unkind words about Jews.) Writes the author: “…in the end, there is no
indication that Beethoven had any more animus toward Jews than he had to the
aristocracy, to the Viennese, to much of
the rest of humanity.”
B. denied learning anything
from Haydn, his teacher for a while, but he “emerged a far more sophisticated
composer.” Haydn himself would refer to Beethoven as “the Great Mogul”—the Big
Shot.
Around 1793, a musician ran
into a leading pianist of the day, Gelinek, preparing to take part in a piano
duel. His opponent was a young foreigner. “I’ll fix him” said Gelinek. The next
day the two met again. “The young fellow must be in league with the devil,” griped
Gelinek. “I never heard anybody play like that! … I assure you I’ve never heard
even Mozart improvise so admirably. Then he played some of his own
compositions, which are marvelous — and he manages difficulties and effects at
the keyboard that we never even dreamed of.”
His listener asked: “What’s his name?”
“He’s a small, ugly, swarthy young fellow and
seems to have a willful dispositiion. His name is Beethoven.”
A man who had heard Bach play
said that Beethoven sounded exactly like him.
Eventually Beethoven came to
believe that Handel was the greatest composer — his only superior. The greatest
living composer? After himself, Cherubini.
Aristocrats treated Beethoven
more or less like an equal. They mistakenly assumed that the “van” in his name
indicated he came from a noble background. It didn’t.
While counterpoint gave him
trouble, he had a special genius for improvisation. Once he improvised for a
friend, who lamented that such beautiful music should now be lost forever. “You
are mistaken,” said Beethoven, who then played the entire improvisation again,
note for note
In 1796, an Italian violinist
published an interpretation of the musical keys. C major was “a grandiose,
military key, fit to display grand events, serious, majestic.” C minor was “a
tragic key,” to display deaths of heroes, for example. D minor was “extremely
melancholy and gloomy,” while B flat major was “tender, soft, sweet,
effeminate”; E flat major, “a heroic key, extremely majestic, grave and
serious…”; A major, “laughing and cheerful.” Whether B. actually studied these
descriptions, writes Swafford, they are close to the way he tended to interpret
these keys.
For a while he studied with
Salieri – who famously did not poison Mozart.
Salieri severely criticized one of B.’s exercises. Later, Salieri
complained to B. that he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. “Then, Herr von
Salieri,” said Beethoven, “it can’t have been so utterly bad.”
He idolized Goethe – Goethe reportdly enjoyed B’s music for
Egmont. And Shakespeare, someone else said, was “his idol.”
Rodolphe Kreutzer was a
violinist whom B. had come to admire, and B. dedicated his A major sonata to
him. He didn’t know that Kreutzer didn’t like B’s music and apparently never
performed “the work that made his name immortal.” (He told Berlioz that he
found the sonata “unintelligible.”)
The third symphony, the
Eroica, was originally to be called Bonaparte. When B. learned that Napoleon
had made himself emperor, furious, he took the title page of his symphony and
tore it up.
While it took a long time
for many masterpieces, even those of Beethoven, to be recognized, the third
symphony was relatively quickly appreciated. In 1807, a fashionable magazine
called it “the greatest, most original, most artistic, and, at the same time,
most interesting of all symphonies.” B. himself, before writing his Ninth, said
the Third was his favorite symphony.
He was for liberty and
fraternity, but not for equality. “Vox populi, vox dei,” he said. “I never
believed it.”
He wanted to write a 10th
symphony, with no chorus. To create a “new gravitational force,” whatever that
meant.
He also wanted to write music
for Goethe’s Faust.
When he wrote his opera,
Fidelio, censorship was all over the place. There were to be no religious or
current political themes. The military had to be treated with respect. A man
and a woman could not leave the stage together without a chaperone. Certain
words—freedom, equality—were problematic. Not surprisingly, at first the opera
was banned. But after minor changes and some string-pulling, the performance
went ahead.
B. himself was unhappy with
the title, Fidelio, because he preferred Leonora—the actual name of the
heroine.
Sometimes the great Beethoven
tossed off some musical monstrosities.
One day he heard someone playing one of his hasty compositions. Who wrote that?
he asked. Told he was responsible, he said, “Such nonsense by me? Oh, Beethoven
what an ass you are!”
(Critics also belittle his
“Wellington’s Victory.”)
He wasn’t conventionally
religious. Haydn thought he was an atheist; he himself once said that Jesus was
only a poor human being and a Jew.
Who was the first critic to
truly appreciate Beethoven? None other than Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,
about whom the opera Tales of Hoffmann was written.
Who was Beethoven’s so-called
Immortal Beloved? The author indicates that we may never know the answer
A performance of his Missa
solemnis was so bad that “Here could be at least one day in his life when
Beethoven was lucky to be deaf.”
Mozart is alleged to have
loathed the flute. Beethoven himself wrote: “I cannot bring myself to write for
the flute, as this instrument is too limited and imperfect.”
The Fifth Symphony, like the
Third, was revolutionary. One composer, who had taught Berlioz, was so excited
and upset at the symphony’s conclusion “that when he tried to put on his hat,
he could not find his head.”
B. accomplished a miracle
during the years 1800-1808. He wrote six symphonies and the Choral Fantasy,
four concertos, 11 piano sonatas, nine string quartets, an opera, a mass, a
collection of overtures, a variety of immortal chamber music, and “a stream of
other works….” Lamented another astonishing musical genius, Franz Schubert,
“Who can do anything after Beethoven?”
So, what is the author’s
verdict on Beethoven the human being? “Beneath the paranoid, misantrhopic,
often unbearable surface, Beethoven was among the most generous of men.”
After his death, souvenir
hunters cut off all of the hair on his head. (After Haydn died, his head was
detached from his body and spirited off by phrenologists who wanted to study
his skull.)
Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt
Testament, in which he wrote of his growing deafness, was eventually owned by
the soprano Jenny Lind.
A suitable epigraph: “He
understood people little and liked them less, yet he lived and worked and
exhausted himself to exalt humanity.”
An unanswered question: What
helps account for B.’s genius? One tentative answer: His life was so utterly
miserable – unrequited love affairs, painful illnesses, scrounging for money,
fights with friends and relatives – that he buried himself in his one certain
source of pleasure and praise: writing music. And, as he boasted, he was known
all over Europe. (Of course, I, too, have had unrequited love affairs, painful
illnesses, etc., and have never amounted to anything. Go figure.)
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