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OnwardandUpwardwiththeArts
OCTOBER 20, 2014 ISSUE
Deus Ex MusicaBeethoven transformed music—but has veneration of him stifled his successors?
BY ALEX ROSS
B
Recent scholarship shows that Beethoven was perpetually buffeted by political forces.
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL ADEL
eetho ven is a singularity in the history of art—a phenomenon
of daz zling and disconcerting force. He not only left his mark
on all subsequent composers but also molded entire institutions.
The professional orchestra arose, in large measure, as a vehicle for
the incessant performance of Beethoven’s symphonies. The art of
conducting emerged in his wake. The modern piano bears the
imprint of his demand for a more resonant and flexible instrument.
Recording technology evolved with Beethoven in mind: the firstcommercial 33⅓ r.p.m. LP, in 1931, contained the Fifth Symphony,
and the duration of first-generation compact disks was fixed at
seventy-five minutes so that the Ninth Symphony could unfurl
without interruption. After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be
seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as
an austere memorial to artistic majesty. Listening underwent a
fundamental change. To follow Beethoven’s dense, driving
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narratives, one had to lean forward and pay close attention. The
musicians’ platform became the stage of an invisible drama, the
temple of a sonic revelation.
Above all, Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be
known as classical music. In the course of the nineteenth century,
dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs,and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and
center. As the scholar William Weber has established, this
fetishizing of the past can be tracked with mathematical precision,
as a rising line on a graph: in Leipzig, the percentage of works by
deceased composers went from eleven per cent in 1782 to seventy-
six per cent in 1870. Weber sees an 1807 Leipzig performance of
Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the titanic, turbulent “Eroica,” as a
turning point: the work was brought back a week later, “by
demand,” taking a place of honor at the end of the program.
Likewise, a critic wrote of the Second Symphony, “It demands to be
played again, and yet again, by even the most accomplished
orchestra.” More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of
Beethoven’s constructions—his way of building large structuresfrom the obsessive development of curt motifs—that made the
repertory culture of classical music possible. This is not to say that
Beethoven’s predecessors, giants on the order of Bach, Haydn, and
Mozart, fail to reward repeated listening with their cerebral games
of variation. In the case of Beethoven, though, the process becomes
addictive, irresistible. No composer labors so hard to stave off
boredom, to occupy the mind of one who might be hearing or
playing a particular piece for the tenth or the hundredth time.
And so Beethoven assumed the problematic status of a secular god,
his shadow falling on those who came after him, and even on those
who came before him. Already in his own lifetime, the hyperbole
was intensifying. In 1810, the author and composer E. T. A.
Hoffmann, celebrated for his tales of the fantastical and the
uncanny, published an extraordinary review of the Fifth Symphony:
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Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of
the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot
through the darkness of night, and we become aware of giant
shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us
and destroying within us all feeling but the pain of infinite
yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation,
sinks back and disappears. . . . Beethoven’s music sets in motionthe machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain.
This is criticism in a new key. Music is being accorded powers at
once transcendent and transformative: it hovers far above the
ordinary world, yet it also reaches down and alters the course of
human events. Beethoven’s music went some ways toward fulfilling
the colossal role that Hoffmann devised for it. Epoch after epoch,
Beethoven has been the composer of the march of time: from the
revolutions of 1848 and 1849, when performances of the
symphonies became associated with the longing for liberty; to the
Second World War, when the opening notes of the Fifth were
linked to the short-short-short-long Morse code for “V,” as in
“victory”; and 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninthnear the fallen Berlin Wall. “We ourselves appear to become
mythologized in the process of identifying with this music,” the
scholar Scott Burnham has written. Yet the idolatry has had a
stifling effect on subsequent generations of composers, who must
compete on a playing field that was designed to prolong
Beethoven’s glory. As a teen-ager, I contemplated becoming a
composer; attending a concert at Symphony Hall, in Boston, Iremember seeing, with wonder and dismay, the single name
“BEETHOVEN” emblazoned on the proscenium arch. “Don’t bother,”
it seemed to say.
For this conundrum—an artist almost too great for the good of his
art—Beethoven himself bears little responsibility. There is no sign
that he intended to oppress his successors from the grave. Althoughhe expected that posterity would take an interest in him—otherwise
he would not have saved so many of his sketches—he did not
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T
picture himself in the magniloquent terms employed by Hoffmann
and others. “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and
stupid,” he once wrote. And the music was the butt of withering
self-criticism. On the subject of his late string quartets, which
generations of listeners have hailed as a pinnacle of Western
civilization, Beethoven once remarked to his publisher, “Thank
God, there is less lack of imagination than ever before.” The
comment remains staggering after nearly two hundred years, not
merely because of the radical understatement—it would be like
Shakespeare saying, “ ‘The Tempest’ is not as trite as my earlier
plays”—but because of the implicit challenge to contemporary
musical life. To perform Beethoven to the exclusion of the living is
to display a total lack of imagination.
he continuing strength of the cult is evident in the
accumulation of Beethoven books. This summer, the composer
and critic Jan Swafford published a nearly thousand-page
biography, titled “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” (Houghton
Mifflin). It follows on John Suchet’s “Beethoven: The Man
Revealed” (Atlantic Monthly); Nicholas Mathew’s “PoliticalBeethoven” (Cambridge); Matthew Guerrieri’s “The First Four
Notes,” a cultural history of the opening motif of the Fifth
Symphony (Knopf); Michael Broyles’s “Beethoven in America”
(Indiana); and a novel, Sanford Friedman’s “Conversations with
Beethoven” (N.Y.R.B. Classics). These books, all from the past three
years, join a library of thousands of volumes, going back to Johann
Aloys Schlosser’s biography of 1827, which, just a few months after
Beethoven’s death, designated him the ne plus ultra: “His art
reached a level far above what others will attain.”
Swafford’s book is intended not as a specialist study but as a
comprehensive introduction to Beethoven’s life and music. It is the
heftiest English-language Beethoven biography since the
multivolume work undertaken in the nineteenth century by the
American librarian Alexander Wheelock Thayer—a project
completed and revised by others. Swafford, in his introduction,
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declares his fondness for Thayer’s Victorian storytelling and
belittles modern musicological revisionism. He writes, “Now and
then in the course of an artist’s biographical history, it comes time
to strip away the decades of accumulated theories and postures and
look at the subject as clearly and plainly as possible.” He also
distances himself from the psychological approach of Maynard
Solomon, who, in his 1977 biography, attempted to place Beethoven
on a Freudian couch. Though Swafford does not look away from
the composer’s less attractive traits—his brusqueness, his crudeness,
his alcoholism, his paranoia—the portrait is ultimately admiring.
Hoffmann, in his 1810 essay, appropriated Beethoven for the
Romantic movement. Swafford concurs with the more recent
tendency—adopted by, among others, Solomon and the pianist-
author Charles Rosen—to see the composer as a late manifestation
of the Enlightenment spirit, an artist who prized free thought
within rational limits. He “never really absorbed the Romantic age,”
Swafford writes. In this view, Beethoven instead stayed true to the
ideals that prevailed in his native city of Bonn, where Maximilian
Franz, the Elector of Cologne and the brother of the Habsburgemperor Joseph II, presided over a short-lived intellectual flowering.
Swafford is hardly the first author to observe how fortunate
Beethoven was to come of age in such an environment: his
grandfather, the Flemish-born musician Ludwig van Beethoven,
had served as Kapellmeister in Bonn, and Christian Gottlob Neefe,
his principal teacher, instilled in him progressive literary influences.
When Beethoven was in his early twenties, he was already thinking
of setting to music Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” with its call for
universal brotherhood. More mundanely, Bonn’s connections to
Vienna helped to establish Beethoven in the imperial city, to which
he moved in 1792.
Swafford colorfully evokes Beethoven’s first years in Vienna: his
initial triumphs as a composer and a pianist, his canny
manipulations of patrons and critics, the terrifying discovery of
early signs of deafness, his apparent thoughts of suicide, and his
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defiant emergence, in the first years of the nineteenth century, as
the creator of the “Eroica” and the Fifth, the “Appassionata” and
Waldstein Sonatas, and the Razumovsky Quartets. At a time when
Napoleon was overturning the old order, Beethoven seemed to
launch a comparable coup, and he nurtured an ambivalent
fascination for the French Revolutionary milieu, to the point of
contemplating a move to Paris. Swafford plausibly suggests that the
“Eroica” is a tribute to the “power of the heroic leader, the
benevolent despot, to change himself and the world”—an
Enlightenment document with revolutionary trappings. As
Swafford recognizes, too much is made of the hoary anecdote of
Beethoven striking Napoleon’s name from the manuscript after
hearing that the leader had crowned himself emperor. He didindeed erase the phrase “titled Bonaparte,” but kept the words
“written on Bonaparte,” and referred to the symphony as his
“Bonaparte” even after Napoleon had taken an imperial title. The
subsequent decision, in 1806, to publish the work as a “Sinfonia
Eroica” may have had a pragmatic basis: at that time, Austria was at
war with France, and a Napoleon Symphony would have been ill-
advised.
Swafford has a marvellous chapter on the music of the “Eroica,”
restoring freshness to a very familiar score. He shows how
Beethoven composed not episode by episode but toward a
predetermined climax—a dizzying, collagelike sequence of
variations on an impish theme previously associated with
Beethoven’s ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus.” The striding E-
flat-major theme of the opening movement is related to the
variation theme (both are defined by B-flats above and below), and
its swift descent to a discordant C-sharp—an inversion of a more
innocent-seeming chromatic slide in the “Prometheus” theme—
creates an instability that leads to shocking orchestral violence and
finds resolution only at the very end. Furthermore, the usual imageof Beethoven the furious smith, binding all notes to a fundamental
idea, gives way to a welcome emphasis on the composer’s wit and
his love of dancing rhythm. Swafford ingeniously connects the
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“Eroica” finale—whose theme is based on the popular dance known
as the Englische —with a passage in Schiller’s correspondence that
sees the Englische as a symbol of an ideal society in which “each
seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever
getting in the way of anybody else . . . the assertion of one’s own
freedom and regard for the freedom of others.”
Impassioned and informed, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph”
stands far above the chatty biography by Suchet, a British television
anchor and radio host, who, when the documentary record thins
out, supplies fan-fiction scenarios of, say, Beethoven’s conversations
with Haydn. Yet Swafford lacks the elegant discipline of Solomon,
who traverses Beethoven’s life in four hundred-odd pages, or the
analytical precision of William Kinderman and Lewis Lockwood,
whose book-length treatments of Beethoven, published in 1995 and
2003, respectively, are rich in insight. A ruthless editor might have
saved Swafford from frequent repetition and occasional rhetorical
excess (“Surely in music there had never been a more beautiful, a
more profound evocation of tranquility and Arcadian peace”).
Still, Swafford’s exuberance is infectious, prompting the reader to
revisit works both famous and obscure. I found myself dwelling on
the “Harp” Quartet, a transitional piece from 1809 that often
receives little more than a glance in the Beethoven literature. (There
is, however, a monograph devoted to it: Markand Thakar’s
“Looking for the ‘Harp’ Quartet.”) Swafford spends a couple of
pages on the “Harp,” noting how a catchy little pattern in the firstmovement—rising pizzicato figures traded between instruments at
the end of the first-theme statement—becomes increasingly
significant. Indeed, the pizzicatos seem to overrun the score in an
almost anarchic manner, destabilizing its form and releasing rowdy
energies. You get the feeling that Beethoven initially believed he
was writing a market-pleasing throwaway and then found the
project growing steadily more tangled and complex. Or perhaps he
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meant all along to veer off course. The joy of listening to Beethoven
is comparable to the pleasure of reading Joyce: the most paranoid,
overdetermined interpretation is probably the correct one.
ow did Beethoven become “BEETHOVEN”? What prompted
the “great transformation of musical taste,” to take a phrase
from William Weber—the shift on the concert stage from a livingculture to a necrophiliac one? The simplest answer might be that
Beethoven was so crushingly sublime that posterity capitulated. But
no one is well served by history in the style of superhero comics.
This composer, too, was shaped by circumstances, and he happened
to reach his maturity just as listeners of an intellectual bent, such as
E. T. A. Hoffmann, were primed for an oversized figure, an emperor
of an expanding musical realm. The scholar Mark Evan Bonds, in
his new book “Absolute Music,” describes the “growing conviction
at the turn of the nineteenth century that music had the capacity to
disclose the ‘wonders’ of the universe in ways that words could not,
and that the greatest composers were in effect oracles,
intermediaries between the divine and the human.” As Bonds
observes, people had spoken of Mozart’s genius but had notreferred to him “as a genius.” With Beethoven, genius became a
distinct identity, fashioned by the self rather than furnished by God.
“O.K., if you put it that way.”
Politics also assisted in Beethoven’s
elevation. The disorder of the Napoleonic Wars, which redrew the map of Europe
and ended the Holy Roman Empire, caused many to look toward
music as a refuge. Amid universal chaos, Beethoven exuded supreme
authority. Moreover, the burgeoning of his reputation, notably in
Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, coincided with a
movement that the early-twentieth-century theorist Carl Schmitt
identified as “political Romanticism”—a pan-German nostalgia for vanished medieval Christendom and mythic national roots.
Beethoven, despite his cosmopolitan Enlightenment background,
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was not immune to such sentiments. Several recent scholarly
studies, notably Mathew’s “Political Beethoven” and Stephen
Rumph’s 2004 book, “Beethoven After Napoleon,” have scrutinized
Beethoven’s shifting alliances in his final years, detecting political
implications even in the otherworldly realm of the last string
quartets. This would seem to be the kind of work that Swafford
dismisses as so much posturing, but it sheds new light on the
origins of the Beethoven phenomenon.
Both Rumph and Mathew, who teach at the University of
Washington and at the Universty of California at Berkeley,
respectively, address the usual suspects—the Third, the Fifth, and
the Ninth Symphonies, “Fidelio,” and the “Missa Solemnis”—but
they also focus on a group of propagandistic scores that many
Beethoven enthusiasts would rather ignore. Napoleon occupied
Vienna in 1809, amid an upwelling of patriotic feeling in the
Austrian population, and Beethoven, notwithstanding his earlier
French proclivities, rose with the anti-French tide. In 1813, he
wrote “Wellington’s Victory,” an orchestral battle piece
commemorating Wellington’s defeat of Napoleonic forces atVitoria, and the next year saw the production of “The Glorious
Moment,” a bombastic choral cantata honoring the Congress of
Vienna and the resurrection of Austrian might. Earlier scholars
have dismissed these pieces as regrettable detours or treated them as
exercises in irony and parody. Both Rumph and Mathew take them
seriously, as stations in the development of Beethoven’s late style.
Rumph points out that the coda of “Wellington’s Victory,” with its
breakneck double fugue, anticipates the contrapuntal jubilation near
the end of the Ninth. Beethoven himself took some pride in the
work, annotating a critic’s negative commentary with the words
“What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.”
Biographers have long argued that the turmoil of the Napoleonic
period and the subsequent restoration of traditional monarchic rule
led Beethoven to escape into a private, visionary world. They also
tend to assume that his deafness isolated him from everyday
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concerns. Rumph, by contrast, offers a novel and unsettling picture
of a composer increasingly conservative in his beliefs, drifting
toward the aesthetic nationalism of the “political Romantics.” The
hallmarks of Beethoven’s final period—a growing fondness for
departed masters, notably Bach and Handel; a taste for polyphony
and counterpoint; a cultivation of free-spirited, sometimes naïvely
folkish lyricism—appear as signs not of progressivism but of
retrenchment. In this reading, even the Ninth Symphony, an
apparent burst of late-period idealism, becomes a somewhat
reactionary utterance, in which the imperious bass solo at the
beginning of the finale—“O friends, not these tones!”—asserts itself
as a voice of redemptive authority.
Mathew, in “Political Beethoven,” makes a less provocative
argument, though in the end his interpretation carries startlingly
broad implications. He portrays a composer perpetually buffeted by
political forces from the start of his career: several striking pages of
the book evoke the militarized sonic landscape of Vienna in the
Napoleonic years, with fanfares, marches, and belligerent songs
echoing from all corners. Beethoven adopted this militaristic vocabulary but translated it into a more rarefied instrumental
language. This displacement becomes even more pronounced in the
Ninth Symphony and the “Missa Solemnis,” which, Mathew says,
“retain a political ambience, with all the trumpets and drums,
hymns, and heroic outbursts,” but omit explicit political references.
The finale of the Ninth has the momentum of immense forces
being called up and mobilized for some mighty task. But what?
Esteban Buch’s 1999 book, “Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political
History,” documents the symphony’s status in ever-revolving
contexts, from German chauvinism to Marxist internationalism and
on to the liberal pieties of the European Union, which has annexed
the “Ode to Joy” as its official anthem.
“The late music turns its audience into exegetes,” Mathew writes.
The aura of history unfolding before our ears, of figures rushing
into the future at a prestissimo tempo, sends us into a fury of
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interpretation. Here, perhaps, is the core of the Beethoven
phenomenon. He achieved unprecedented autonomy, refusing to
abase himself before aristocratic patrons even as he took their
money. Most of his major scores make their argument in abstract,
nondescriptive terms, under the titles sonata, quartet, concerto, and
symphony. Yet a paradox hovers over this liberation from servility
and utility: in breaking away from its present, the music becomes
captive to its future. The Ninth and the “Missa Solemnis,” Mathew
writes, are “occasional works perpetually in search of an occasion.”
And, in harnessing their power to our own dreams and passions, we
are in danger of wearing them out, turning them into hollow
signifiers. There is a “perpetual risk of emptiness.” More than a risk:
the final chapter of Guerrieri’s “The First Four Notes” chroniclesE. T. A. Hoffmann’s vehicle of awe and terror being turned into a
meaningless blur of disco beats, hip-hop samples, jingles, and
ringtones.
an Beethoven ever elude the fate of monumental
meaninglessness to which he seems consigned? Mathew
concludes, persuasively, that we need to “recover a sense of thecontingent and the illogical” in him: his ambition, his opportunism,
his digressions, his lapses of taste, even his failures. Lesser
Beethoven creations such as “Wellington’s Victory” and “The
Glorious Moment”—the “bad” Beethoven—reveal a working
musician vulnerable to doldrums. And if you acknowledge the
surrounding clutter of Beethoven’s era—Mathew mentions such
curiosities as Ignaz Moscheles’s piano sonata “Vienna’s Feelings
Upon the Return of His Majesty Franz the First Emperor of
Austria in the Year 1814”—you may gain new tolerance for the
music of the present. The canon is a grand illusion generated by the
erasure of a less desirable past.
Among recent publications, the one that does the most to restore
Beethoven’s primal weirdness is the fictional one. Sanford
Friedman, a New York writer who died in 2010, at the age of
eighty-one, acquired a cult following for a series of novels, notably
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the 1965 gay coming-of-age story “Totempole.” The manuscript of
“Conversations with Beethoven” was left unpublished at his death;
N.Y.R.B. Classics has done a service in bringing it to light, since
intelligent novels on the subject of composers—or musicians of any
kind—rarely come along. Furthermore, this Beethoven novel
depicts not his years of triumph but his squalid final months, when
he often had the appearance of a decrepit monster.
Friedman takes inspiration from the notebooks through which
Beethoven communicated with friends and acquaintances once his
deafness had made ordinary discourse impossible. Frustratingly, the
“conversation books,” as these volumes are known, preserve most of
what was said to Beethoven but little of what he said in return: he
had not lost the power of speech, and usually had no need to write
down his own words. Much of the time, the chatter is trivial
(“What did the wax candle cost?”), but from time to time
Beethoven is asked a question that we would love to have him
answer:
Are you writing an opera or an oratorio?
You knew Mozart; where did you see him?
Was Mozart a good pianoforte player?
Friedman seizes on the frustration and makes it productive. He uses
the format of the one-sided dialogue to narrate the last months of Beethoven’s life, quoting relatively little of the notebooks
themselves but inserting much biographical fact and plausible
fiction. By keeping the composer largely silent, Friedman avoids the
trap of trying to capture his subject’s “true” voice or thoughts.
Instead, Beethoven speaks in the reader’s imagination. And, despite
the oblique method, the voice is all too vividly audible.
The novel opens in July, 1826, with the attempted suicide of
Beethoven’s nineteen-year-old nephew, Karl. The woes of Karl
dominated the composer’s final years to a disquieting degree. The
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boy’s father, Beethoven’s brother Kaspar Anton Karl, had died in
1815, and Beethoven subsequently waged a vituperative custody
battle with Karl’s mother, Johanna, whom he considered “extremely
depraved” and “malevolent.” In one letter, Beethoven dubbed her
the “Queen of the Night,” implying harlotry. Johanna had some
character flaws—she had been jailed for embezzling a pearl
necklace—but hardly deserved to have her son taken away, as
Beethoven eventually succeeded in doing. Moreover, Beethoven’s
efforts to guide young Karl were erratic, hectoring, and, at times,
abusive. In one passage of “Conversations with Beethoven,” Anton
Schindler, a devoted but devious associate, floats the rumor that
Beethoven was in some way responsible for Karl’s suicide attempt:
Most everyone I know is in complete sympathy with you; only
one or two hold you to blame.
It makes no difference; they are people of little
Please don’t aggravate yourself, it’s hardly worth
And there the conversation ends, with Schindler slinking from the
room, as the next interlocutor reveals.
Throughout the book, we register, in our mind’s ear, Beethoven
ranting, grumbling, pestering, pontificating, leering, sneering, and,
above all, complaining. Especially in his final years, Beethoven was
in constant misery, some of it ordained by fate and some of it self-imposed. Heavy drinking compounded other health problems and,
Swafford argues, proved fatal. (The theory that the composer died
of lead poisoning, publicized in the 2001 book “Beethoven’s Hair,”
has been undermined by further testing of his remains.) In
Friedman’s novel, doctors ask about blood in the stool and the
quality of his urine. There is squabbling over money, and an almost
total lack of serenity.
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Friedman does give glimpses of a tender, generous spirit behind the
raging façade. In a poignant moment, Beethoven is visited by young
Franz Schubert, who makes hapless efforts at chitchat (“Would to
God I could give you my unneeded fat!”) and nervously asks after
the Master’s opinion of his songs. “You didn’t find the ringing of the
convent bell overdone? Thank you, that makes me breathe easier.”
The episode threatens to become sentimental, with an august elder
saluting a doomed youth; yet a subsequent conversation, comparing
the talents of Schubert and Beethoven’s longtime friend Johann
Nepomuk Hummel, suggests that Beethoven actually prefers
Hummel’s estimable but seldom shattering music. Anyone who has
listened to major artists assess their heirs will find this scenario
convincing.
In the novel, Beethoven is writing his final quartet, the luminous
and larky Quartet in F, and gives a few warnings to a servant boy to
leave the manuscript alone. Otherwise, the act of composing music
goes unobserved. There are references to the Quartet in C-Sharp
Minor, Opus 131, which Beethoven finished just before Karl tried
to kill himself, but these concern mostly the title page. Beethovenhad planned to dedicate the piece to a friend and patron, yet a few
weeks before his death he decided that it should honor instead a
Baron von Stutterheim, who, after Karl’s suicide attempt, had
arranged to have the young man assigned to his regiment. In
Friedman’s telling, Beethoven has become fearful that Stutterheim
will withdraw the offer, on account of gossip, and hopes to influence
the Baron by changing the dedication. Beethoven’s friend Stephan von Breuning has trouble believing that Opus 131 will be put to
such a use: “No doubt he would be greatly flattered, nay more,
thunderstruck! Are you sure you wish to make such a princely
gesture?”
Opus 131, which indeed bears the Baron’s name, is routinely
described as Beethoven’s greatest achievement, even as the greatest
work ever written. Stravinsky called it “perfect, inevitable,
inalterable.” It is a cosmic stream of consciousness in seven sharply
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contrasted movements, its free-associating structure giving the
impression, in the best performances, of a collective improvisation.
At the same time, it is underpinned by a developmental logic that
surpasses in obsessiveness anything that came before. The first four
notes of the otherworldly fugue with which the piece begins
undergo continual permutations, some obvious and some subtle to
the point of being conspiratorial. Whereas the Fifth Symphony
hammers at its four-note motto in ways that any child can perceive,
Opus 131 requires a lifetime of contemplation. (Schubert asked to
hear it a few days before he died.) It seems impossible to reconcile
this music with the sordid family drama behind the Stutterheim
dedication. Yet “Conversations with Beethoven” forces this task on
us. The novel refuses to wallow in the mystery of genius: instead,through a kind of photographic negative, it gives a picture of a
mind fuelled by extreme dissatisfaction, almost thriving on squalor.
When Friedman arrives at Beethoven’s final hours, the gloom lifts a
little. A familiar tale has the dying Beethoven shaking his fist at the
heavens amid a thunderstorm. Given the fabulist tendencies of
Beethoven’s friends, there is no reason to believe the story, althoughmeteorological records confirm the thunderstorm. I am happy to
have Friedman’s alternative version, which is told through the
person of Johanna van Beethoven, the sister-in-law for whom
Beethoven conceived such an irrational, consuming hatred. (The
reported appearance of the “Queen of the Night” at Beethoven’s
bedside was sufficiently surprising that many biographers, Swafford
included, assume a case of mistaken identity.) Friedman invents a
scene of reconciliation between them, albeit one in which
Beethoven is hallucinating visitations from his mother and from the
Daughter of Elysium in the “Ode to Joy.” The novel ends with a
long letter from Johanna to Karl, contesting the shaking-the-fist
story: “Your uncle’s countenance . . . far from defiant, was utterly
grave and beseeching. Just what your Uncle asked for, I have noidea, naturally; but I suspect that it was something for which there
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Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became themagazine’s music critic in 1996.
are no words, something—Fist indeed! his hand was cupped as
though holding a small bird. In my opinion what he asked for, and
in fact, received , was permission to die.”
The one fairly reliable story we have from Beethoven’s deathbed is
less poetic, though fully characteristic. Three days before the end,
Schindler reported in a letter that Beethoven had said, “Plaudite ,amici , comoedia finita est ” (“Applaud, friends, the comedy is over”).
We know that the composer liked the phrase, because “Applaudite
amici” appears in the sketchbooks for the “Missa Solemnis,” over
the fugue theme of the Credo. It is evidently a paraphrase of the
last words of Augustus Caesar: “Since the play has been so good,
clap your hands.” Beethoven may have found the anecdote in
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s “Macrobiotics, or the Art of
Prolonging Human Life,” which is mentioned in the conversation
books of the “Missa Solemnis” period. Perhaps Beethoven was
mocking his doctors; perhaps he was mocking the priest who
administered the last rites; perhaps he was mocking himself. In any
event, he was laughing about something as the curtain came down.
He presumably did not know that, like the Emperor Augustus, he was about to undergo deification. ♦
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