Chapter 11

“Beethoven”

The secret compartment of Beethoven’s writing desk, discovered and opened shortly after his death, amounted to nothing less than a time capsule, for it was there that he had buried the two documents that have since contributed most to his posthumous image, which might be thought of as “Beethoven”: the Heiligenstadt Testament (1802) and the letter to the Immortal Beloved (1812). These were messages, in effect, from beyond the grave, and they gave the composer a human face, one beset by physical and mental pain. When the Heiligenstadt Testament was published for the first time, in October 1827, it convinced the musical public beyond all doubt that understanding Beethoven the individual was the key to understanding his music. The revelation that his art alone had held him back from suicide electrified critics and gave them more than enough reason to justify hearing his life in his works. The public now knew that the composer himself had linked his suffering to his art.

Biographical interpretations of the music became the new norm almost at once. One critic, commenting on the Ninth Symphony a year after the composer’s death, identified Beethoven’s suffering as a source of strength. It was these trials that had enabled him to create “a complete portrait of his soul,” for the Ninth was his “autobiography, written in music.” The noted Berlin critic Adolph Bernhard Marx, in turn, heard in the String Quartet in F Major, op. 135, “the deepest, innermost soul of the composer in all its richness of sentiment,” an outpouring of “memories and sorrows.”

As more and more evidence of Beethoven’s life came to light, The Scowl grew ever more severe. Anton Schindler’s 1840 biography reinforced it, for he had experienced it firsthand—or so he claimed—as the composer’s on-and-off personal assistant in the 1820s. Schindler was the first to publish the letter to the Immortal Beloved, another relic of personal suffering. No wonder his readers accepted at face value his report of the composer’s explanation of the opening of the Fifth Symphony as “fate pounding at the portal.”

The idea of autobiographical music inspired the generation of composers who came of age in Beethoven’s wake. They recognized that while they could not imitate his style, they could readily promote their music as a projection of their own inner selves. Hector Berlioz encouraged listeners to hear his Symphonie fantastique: Episode in the Life of an Artist (1830) as a portrayal of his unhappy affair with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, and he made sure that the Parisian press knew about the work’s backstory. Robert Schumann wrote himself into his music in similar ways, using a veil of easily decoded musical ciphers in his Carnaval (1835), for piano, to portray himself and his circle of friends. Franz Liszt depicted his travels throughout Europe by associating the names of specific places with a number of his works for piano. Richard Wagner called attention to his personal experience of a storm at sea as the inspiration for the overture to The Flying Dutchman.

Critics consequently began to assume that all music—or at least all instrumental music—was somehow autobiographical. They heard Chopin’s Mazurkas and Polonaises as outpourings of patriotism for their creator’s native Poland. Bedřich Smetana was quite explicit when he gave his String Quartet No. 1 (1876) the subtitle “From My Life” and glossed the opening of its finale as a recreation of the high-pitched ringing that signaled the onset of his deafness. By this point, however, a noted Viennese critic could complain that “a composer could actually write ‘From My Life’ above each of his pieces of music, because from where should he otherwise take his music, unless he steals it?”

Closely related to the belief that instrumental music could be autobiographical was the expectation that music without words could engage with philosophical and even metaphysical ideas. Composers and critics alike looked to Beethoven as a model, particularly to such works as the “Eroica” Symphony (about heroism), the “Pastoral” Symphony (about nature), and the Fifth Symphony (about “fate,” if Schindler’s report is to be believed, and it was). Wagner, on the other hand, argued that Beethoven had recognized the expressive limits of purely instrumental music and had shown the way toward the “Music of the Future” in the Ninth Symphony by introducing voices and text in the finale.

The Ninth’s finale thus became an aesthetic battleground between those who, like Wagner, considered it a blueprint for the future of the art, and those who considered it an aberration, a one-time experiment Beethoven had pursued no further. The conductor Hans von Bülow, who allied himself with the latter group, consistently performed the Ninth without its finale. The like-minded Johannes Brahms, in turn, constructed the finale of his own First Symphony (1876) around a theme that blatantly evokes the “Ode to Joy” melody precisely in order to emphasize his own work’s exclusive reliance on instruments alone. No wonder, then, that von Bülow would call Brahms’s First “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

In the meantime, “Beethoven” was becoming monumental. An enormous statue of the composer went up in 1845 in the main square of Bonn, his birthplace. Others soon followed. They all scowl. The one in Vienna by the sculptor Caspar Clemens von Zumbusch, erected in 1880, literally looks down on us. More remarkable still is the statue created by Max Klinger for the 1902 exhibit of the Secession artists in Vienna. It portrays Beethoven as an ancient Greek deity, seated on a throne, draped by a cloth; an eagle before him recoils from the projected aura of intensity.

9. Max Klinger’s statue was the centerpiece of the Beethoven exhibition mounted by Vienna’s Secession art movement in 1902. This larger-than-life polychrome likeness portrays the composer as a Greek god or perhaps philosopher. The eagle normally associated with Zeus recoils in his presence.

The music itself was monumentalized in an edition of the composer’s complete works published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1862 and 1865 in some twenty-five oversized volumes. Musicians, critics, and historians now had access in a single place to almost everything Beethoven had written. Biographies followed in great number, and scholars began to decipher the hieroglyphic sketchbooks in an attempt to understand the utterances of a figure they regarded increasingly as a musical Sphinx.

The cult of Beethoven in German-speaking lands was more than just musical. It carried significant political and nationalistic overtones. His works provided the repertorial backbone of the massive music festivals that proliferated in the middle of the nineteenth century. The performers were at first largely amateurs, and for this reason the gatherings carried all the more powerful political overtones, for large public assemblies were otherwise severely restricted at the time. Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl’s 1838 novella Das Musikfest, oder: Die Beethovener (The Music Festival, or: The Beethovenians) takes place against the backdrop of one such festival whose centerpiece is the Ninth Symphony. Musical-political conservatives plot against its performance and succeed in repressing this “revolutionary” music with its message of brotherhood and social equality.

The centenary of the composer’s birth, in 1870, fell in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War, when German nationalism was approaching new heights, and Beethoven—or rather, “Beethoven”—provided the ideal cultural icon. Wagner’s widely read essay marking the event centers on the composer’s Germanness at a time when the nation-state of Germany, long an ideal, was on the cusp of becoming a reality. Such aggressive claims of culture would only intensify in the decades that followed, culminating in the appropriation of Beethoven’s art by the Nazi regime in 1933–45. The Third Reich used his works widely in its political rituals and propaganda films. Paradoxically, the Allies co-opted his music to rally hearts and minds to their own cause. The opening rhythm of the Fifth Symphony (short-short-short-LONG), Morse code for the letter “V,” became the sonic icon of “V for Victory.”

10. Klaus Kammerichs’ Beethon, a concrete statue erected in 1986 outside the Beethoven-Halle in Bonn, plays on the composer’s name: “Beton” is German for “concrete.” When viewed directly, it appears straightforward enough, but from an angle it reveals itself as a series of recessed flattened shapes. The monument, in keeping with more recent attitudes toward the composer, is playful and something less than monumental.

From the extreme right to the extreme left, political ideologies of every stripe have laid claim to Beethoven. Communist regimes of the Cold War era pointed to his message of egalitarianism. During the 1970 bicentennial celebrations, Willi Stoph, the de facto head of the East German state, declared that Beethoven’s music “culminates in the future image of a creative society, freed from exploitation and repression.” The ideas that he “shaped musically in his compositions” would ultimately be realized in the “victorious struggle of the working class” in a socialist society. The West, Stoph maintained, had sought to remove the connection between Beethoven and the Volk, exploiting his music for purely commercial gain and ignoring the social implications of his creations. Celebrations in the West, by contrast, emphasized the universality of Beethoven’s music. In 1972, the Council of Europe adopted the melody of the Ninth Symphony’s “Ode to Joy” as its wordless anthem, and it serves that same function today for that organization’s successor, the European Union.

The Ninth has become an icon of freedom in recent decades. Chilean women sang the Ode to Joy melody (as El Himno de la Alegria) outside the prisons where their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons were incarcerated during the era of Augusto Pinochet’s repressive regime of the 1970s and 1980s. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth in Berlin shortly after the fall of the Wall in late 1989, substituting Freiheit (“Freedom”) for Freude (“Joy”) in the finale. The idea goes back to an urban legend of sorts that began to circulate after Beethoven’s time, that Schiller’s “joy” was in fact a code word for “freedom.”

That same year, students protesting in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square played the “Ode to Joy” over loudspeakers to drown out government broadcasts. Six years later, the same government that had been under assault by those protestors hosted the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, and the event’s opening ceremony included a 126-piece all-female orchestra and workers’ chorus performing the Ninth. In Japan, group participation is paramount. Performances by choruses of thousands are regular occurrences, especially around New Years. Audience members often join in the singing as well, creating what one journalist has dubbed “transcendental karaoke.”

Not all responses to the Ninth have been so positive. Some find its optimism oppressive. “Those who choose Elysium,” as Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon observed, “yield up their individuality to the group,” and the massed choral portions of Beethoven’s setting reinforce this impression, for “fraternity is intolerant of difference.” In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the novel, the Ninth becomes an instrument of violence, torture, and repression.

Pushback against “Beethoven” has been strongest around the time of anniversaries. The decade of the 1920s (with its double commemorations of 1920 and 1927) witnessed a turn toward expressive objectivity in all the arts, including music, which led Hermann Abert, one of the leading music historians of his generation, to observe that “an exasperated attitude toward Beethoven is now making itself felt among younger persons. They find his pathos oppressive, exaggerated, even intolerable; they consider his pointed subjectivity a downright calamity for the art.” The bicentennial celebrations in 1970 elicited even sharper critical responses. The “metacollage” Ludwig van by the Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel proved especially controversial. The score consists of fragments literally cut and pasted from Beethoven’s published works; any number of musicians can realize Kagel’s piece by playing any portions of it they wish on an instrument of their choice, in any order and in any combination. The effect is to defamiliarize the music: we hear snippets of works we know in entirely new contexts, timbres, and combinations. Intentional (but unprescribed) distortions of volume, tempo, and timbre enhance the sense of alienation. “The music of the past,” as Kagel noted, “should also be performed as music of the present.” His surreal black-and-white film of the same name, also from 1970, is an overt critique of the contemporary culture industry and its objectification of Beethoven and his music. Scowling busts play a prominent role.

The challenge of making Beethoven sound fresh lies at the heart of the Norwegian sound artist Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, which elongates a single recording of the Ninth Symphony over a span of twenty-four hours without any distortion of pitch. The first movement runs about five and half hours, the finale eight and a half. For those who have the time, it is indeed revelatory. Anyone who has heard the open fifths at the very beginning in slow motion will likely hear any subsequent “normal” performance quite differently.

Performers continue to wrestle with Beethoven, at times almost literally. At the Ojai (California) Festival in June 2018, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja presented a program entitled “Bye Bye Beethoven,” which ended with a deconstruction of the Violin Concerto. The orchestra musicians began to leave the stage shortly before the end of the finale, knocking over their stands in the process, as if in protest, and the soloist, who had soldiered bravely on alone, crumpled to the floor before finishing, drowned out by a grotesquely amplified and intentionally distorted Beethovenian mash-up. The music had collapsed, in effect, under the weight of its own tradition.

In the meantime, Beethoven’s hold on popular culture continues unabated. Of memorabilia there is no end. The collection of the Biblioteca Beethoveniana in Muggia (Trieste), Italy, houses more than 11,000 items that range from sculptures and paintings to advertisements, postage stamps, medals, coins, pins, lamps, neckties, wine bottles, pipes, and matchboxes.

Filmmakers recognized Beethoven’s potential early on. The composer’s love life was the focus of the Austrian silent film Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (“The Martyr of His Heart,” 1918), and in 1920, Bell & Howell produced a short silent film entitled Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, in which the composer overhears a young woman playing his music on the piano and offers to play for her himself. “Snuff the candles and I will improvise for her in the moonlight,” he declares. With the house lights turned down, the theater organist would no doubt have supplied the necessary music to extend well beyond the film’s three minutes. More extended biopics soon followed, most notably Un grand amour de Beethoven (“A Great Love of Beethoven,” 1937), directed by Abel Gance, again focusing on the composer’s love life, as does Immortal Beloved (1994). One prominent online database lists more than a thousand films, documentaries, or television productions that use the composer’s music in their soundtracks. Beethoven can be a presence even when we don’t hear him: a camera sweep of Norman Bates’s bedroom in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) reveals that this decidedly unheroic character has been listening to a recording of the “Eroica.”

Songwriters, in turn, have mined Beethoven’s catalog repeatedly. Walter Murphy reworked the opening of the Fifth Symphony into his “Fifth of Beethoven” (1976), which figured prominently a year later in the soundtrack to the film Saturday Night Fever. In “Questions” (1976), Manfred Mann added words to a rather less well known but no less arresting source: the slow movement of the Violin Sonata in C Minor, op. 30, no. 2. Billy Joel underlaid a text to the slow movement of the “Pathétique” Sonata (op. 13) to create the song “This Night” (1984). The rapper Nas sampled the Bagatelle in A Minor, WoO 59 (“Für Elise”) in his “I Can” (2003), and Alicia Keys drew on the opening movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata (op. 27, no. 2) for her “Piano & I” (2011).

What might Beethoven have thought of all this? He in fact sanctioned a reworking of the slow movement of his Piano Sonata op. 2, no. 1, in 1807 as a song, with a text by his lifelong friend Wegeler (“My happiness has disappeared! My peace is gone!”). As to performances that seek to transform his music more radically, let us not forget Czerny’s account of Beethoven moving his listeners to tears through his keyboard improvisation and then mocking those tears as soon as he stopped playing. Beethoven could reflect on his own art from multiple perspectives.

Listeners across the globe have done so as well. The appeal of Beethoven’s music transcends differences in race, nationality, creed, age, and sex. “That dubious cliché about music being the universal language,” as Leonard Bernstein observed in 1970, “almost comes true with Beethoven. No composer who has ever lived speaks so directly to so many people.” His music is profound yet approachable: it draws us in even while challenging us. We hear in it something that captures the human condition in ways that words and visual images cannot. Our responses are for that very reason all the more visceral and profound.

Beethoven had every reason to portray himself as a modern-day Orpheus, that mythic musician whose art was so magical that it allowed him to move back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead. Beethoven’s music helps us understand—and even believe—the core element of that myth: the power of music.

Chronology