Chapter 1

The scowl

There are no right or wrong ways to listen to Beethoven’s music, but some are more accommodating than others. The first thing to get past is The Scowl. It is hard to avoid, for it confronts us everywhere, from album covers and dust jackets to monumental statues and those little white busts that adorn upright pianos. Even experienced listeners find it difficult to repress the stern visage behind the music. When we hear works such as the Fifth Symphony or the “Appassionata” Sonata that are intense and even violent, it fits. And we can be forgiven if we conjure up the image of a deeply furrowed brow when we listen to the gloomy, meditative first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata. The Scowl is an outward manifestation of inner turmoil, and these are the kinds of works that seem to come directly from the soul of their creator.

Yet when we listen to works that contradict this rictus of suffering—the laugh-out-loud Eighth Symphony or the tuneful, rollicking finale of the Piano Sonata, op. 79, for example—we struggle to reconcile what we are hearing with the image of a composer who was supposedly self-absorbed, turned inward, and uninterested in presenting himself to the world in any sort of agreeable manner. We are disappointed, moreover, by the very existence of such crowd-pleasing potboilers as Wellington’s Victory, complete with simulated cannon and musket fire, or Der glorreiche Augenblick (“The Glorious Moment”), written for the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to celebrate the restoration of monarchical rule across Europe in the wake of Napoleon. For many listeners, such works somehow do not represent the “real” Beethoven, that is, the scowling Beethoven.

What, then, are we to do with all those many works—the bulk of his output, in fact—that contradict The Scowl? One option is to listen to Beethoven in the way his contemporaries did. This involves more than playing his music on period instruments and attending to performance practices of his time. Our ears could benefit from a change, too. We cannot erase from our minds all the music we know from the past two centuries, but we can approach his works with fresh ears if we try to put ourselves in the concert-hall seats of Beethoven’s contemporaries.

To begin with, they had no notion of The Scowl. The average music-lover of Beethoven’s day knew very little about him as a person. The few images of him that circulated during his lifetime show a serious face, but this was true of almost any formal portrait of that era. The Scowl became iconic only later, reinforced by such turbulent (and popular) works as the “Pathétique,” “Moonlight,” and “Appassionata” piano sonatas, and above all the Fifth Symphony. In his own time, “Beethoven” was little more than a name. Even E. T. A. Hoffmann (of “Nutcracker” fame), who in the 1810s wrote lengthy and penetrating critiques of the composer’s works, seems to have known next to nothing about the person behind the music. Nor did the composer’s contemporaries know much about his deafness, especially if they lived outside of Vienna. The earliest published account of it appeared in 1816, and only toward the end of his life did critics began to speculate on how this condition might have been affecting his latest works. Not until after his death did the circumstance of deafness become central to the perception of his music.

1. Even when the performers smile, the composer scowls. The conductor Vasily Petrenko gestures toward a bust of Beethoven after a 2013 Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London. Created by Johann Nepomuk Schaller sometime after 1827, the bust regularly adorned the stage of Royal Philharmonic Society concerts from 1871 until the 1980s.

What is more revealing still is that even those in Vienna who were aware of his deafness, his unhappy love affairs, and his generally dour public countenance did not hear his music as an expression of his inner self. The reason for this was quite simple: they did not hear anyone’s music in this way. It would not have occurred to even the most sophisticated listeners of the time to hear music as a form of sonic autobiography. Audiences judged what they heard on its ability to move them. The notion that the emotions portrayed in a sonata or symphony might be those of the composer would have been quite foreign to Beethoven’s contemporaries. Literature was another matter: there, the idea of autobiographical art had taken hold more than a generation before, and Goethe was one of its chief proponents, at least in his early years. His works, he declared in his autobiography, were “fragments of a great confession,” and readers absorbed them as such.

Music, however, was slow to catch up. Listeners began to hear Beethoven’s works as self-expressive only in retrospect. When the first biographies began to appear, shortly after his death, audiences learned for the first time of the composer’s constant ill-health, and they began to hear the third movement of the String Quartet in A Minor, op. 132, labeled “A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity,” as Beethoven’s own personal song of thanksgiving. When they read about his profound love of nature, they began to hear the “Pastoral” Symphony as an expression of his love of nature. When they read in his correspondence of his resolve to “grab fate by the throat,” they heard the Fifth Symphony as a musical expression of that resolve.

It soon became an article of faith that Beethoven had bared his soul in his music. The French critic Chrétien Urhan deemed the Ninth Symphony a summary of its creator’s “entire life,” the “secret of his entire inner existence,” his “moral biography,” and the Russian biographer Alexandre Oulibicheff declared that what he sought in the composer’s music was “above all Beethoven himself, the innermost of his self.” “With Beethoven’s symphonies,” the German critic and literary historian Julian Schmidt observed in 1853, “we have the feeling that we are dealing with something very different from the usual alternations of joy and sorrow in which wordless music ordinarily moves. We intuit the mysterious abyss of a spiritual world, and we torment ourselves in an effort to understand it.…We want to know what drove the tone-poet to bottomless despair and to unalloyed joy; we want to gain an understanding from the mysteriously beautiful features of this sphinx.”

But all this lay in the future. Listeners in Beethoven’s own lifetime regarded him more in the manner of Shakespeare, a figure about whom they knew even less but whom they admired all the more as an author of immense emotional and technical range, an author capable of transcending any one particular genre or mood. Readers marveled in particular at Shakespeare’s ability to juxtapose not only contrasting and diverse characters in a single work (Iago and Desdemona, Lear and Cordelia, Shylock and Portia) but also contrasting and diverse modes of drama. The shift from tragic to comic and back again occurs with stunning frequency in his plays, and they heard the same sort of contrast in Beethoven’s music. It is scarcely coincidental that the composer’s contemporaries likened him to Shakespeare on more than one occasion, or that he himself was a devoted enthusiast of the Bard.

As we listen, then, it helps to remember that Beethoven’s audiences regarded all composers rather as playwrights, musical scores as the equivalent of scripts, performers as actors. And they valued the variety that came with such emotional elasticity. When a Viennese critic of the time called Beethoven “our Proteus,” he did so with pride and respect, for like the shape-shifting sea-god, only the Protean artist had the ability to take on whatever form he chose. Such an artist could transcend the limits of self-inclination and embrace any imaginable emotion or state of mind. “To be truly free and educated,” as the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel noted at the time, “an individual would have to be able to tune himself at will and at any time philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, à l’antique or à la moderne, in an entirely arbitrary fashion and to any degree, in the way one tunes an instrument.”

By this line of thought, Beethoven tuned and retuned himself constantly. He was nothing if not Protean, consistently capable of assuming new guises in his art. He adopted a certain sense of distance while composing. As Hoffmann put it in his 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven “separates his ‘I’ from the inner realm of musical tones and commands that domain as an absolute ruler.” Beethoven could and no doubt did use music as an outlet for his personal feelings on more than one occasion, but to assume that this was his standard way of composing leads to a rather narrow mode of perception, one in which we welcome those works that correspond to The Scowl and marginalize those that do not.

2. Beethoven in 1818, sketch by August von Kloeber. The gaze is contemplative, not scowling.

The astonishing variety of Beethoven’s music compels us to look elsewhere for a common creative denominator. Paradoxical as it may seem, Beethoven’s ability to adopt multiple perspectives toward any given object was a constant feature of his inner self. He approached music in much the same way he approached everything in life. He liked to look at whatever was before him—a musical idea, a name, a word, a poem, a social situation, even another person—from many different angles and explore their implications and consequences to the fullest.

The best-known example of this in his music is the four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony. The motif (with its distinctive rhythm of short-short-short-LONG) returns repeatedly throughout all four movements but never in exactly the same form. Beethoven changes its pitches, intervals, harmony, and instrumentation, and at times retains only the rhythm. Having presented the idea in unison at the very beginning of the first movement, he proceeds at once to manipulate it: the first violins, second violins, and violas toss the brief fragment around among themselves, almost as if they were playing a game of tag, changing the pitches slightly each time. The other instruments of the orchestra soon join in, and we hear at once how malleable this brief and seemingly simple musical idea really is. Even when Beethoven introduces a contrasting lyrical theme—marked dolce (“sweetly”)—we hear a variant of the four-note motif rumbling along underneath in the low strings.

This sort of intense thematic manipulation is basic to almost everything Beethoven wrote. He liked the challenge of making something out of almost nothing, and better still, making many somethings out of a single almost-nothing. The greater the contrast the better. The opening of the Piano Trio in D Major, op. 70, no. 1 (“Ghost”) begins with a loud, almost violent downward four-note unison gesture that is repeated in rapid succession by all three instruments playing in unison, each time starting on an ever-higher note. The idea could scarcely be simpler. But after the fifth time, the cello, without warning, inverts this downward figure and turns it into the beginning of a lyrical melody that soars upward and then goes on to serve as the principal theme for the movement as a whole. Whether we realize it or not, these two very different themes reveal different perspectives on a single basic idea. The sketchbooks bear repeated witness to thematic manipulations of this kind. Once he had alighted upon a musical idea, no matter how brief, Beethoven would jot it down and begin to explore its potential by looking at it from multiple perspectives.

Beethoven treated language in much the same way. At the beginning of the finale to his last string quartet, op. 135, he added words beneath the movement’s two principal motifs. The cello opens by asking, Muss es sein? (“Must it be?”), the words set to a simple three-note motif that moves down and then up, in a contour that mirrors a questioning tone of voice. The words are not meant to be sung, though the three syllables fit the notes precisely. The tempo is slow, the mode is minor, the mood somber. This darkness disappears the moment the tempo shifts from slow to fast and the mode from minor to major. Here, the motif moves up and then down, emulating the contour of a declarative statement, for it is at this point that Beethoven provides the answer to the question by inverting the order of the opening two syllables: Es muss sein! (“It must be!”). Exactly what “it” is has long been a matter of speculation. Beethoven labeled the whole movement “The Resolution Achieved with Difficulty,” but the object of that resolution has elicited widely varying explanations extending from the trivial (the composer’s response to his cook’s request for more money) to the metaphysical (a joyous acceptance of mortality). This in itself points to the ability of the music to take us in multiple different directions at the same time. Like words, notes are capable of manipulations that can change their meanings entirely.

Beethoven’s correspondence is full of such verbal permutations. He once closed a letter to his friend Nicholas von Zmeskall, who happened to be a baron, with this curious string of variations:

adieu Baron Ba…ron ron/nor/orn/rno/onr

and glossed it with a mixture of French and German: “Voilà quelque chose aus dem alten versazAmt” (“There is something from the old pawnshop”), punning on the German word Versatzamt (pawnshop), itself based on the root word versetzen (to “transpose”), in the sense not only of goods exchanged for money (as in a pawnshop) but also in the sense of letters—movable type—that have been transposed, hence the five different possible permutations on the last three letters of “Baron.”

Beethoven could never resist a good pun. He enjoyed playing on the similar sounds of words like gelehrt (learned) and geleert (emptied), Verleger (publisher) and verlegen (embarrassed), Not (need) and Note (musical note). These, too, are verbal manifestations of what Beethoven liked to do with musical themes: turn them inside out and upside down to make the same basic material function in very different ways. Musical puns abound in his music. The loud opening phrase of the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, for example, functions as its quiet final cadence: what we remember as the opening of the movement also turns out to be its close. Beethoven was not the first to do this kind of thing: Joseph Haydn had led the way a generation before. But Beethoven took this tendency to a new extreme, so much so that he managed to baffle even many of his contemporaries who wanted to understand his music.

The ability to look at a single object from multiple perspectives is delightfully evident in his two different settings of “L’amante impaziente” (“The Impatient Lover”), op. 82, nos. 3 and 4, for solo voice and piano. The text is an aria from a much earlier opera libretto by the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio, sung by a female character who fears she has been abandoned:

On the surface, this is a standard lament, the kind of thing found in countless operas. Yet words can convey different meanings according to how we say—or sing—them. Our understanding of such expressions as “Yeah, sure,” or “What a surprise!” depends very much on the tone of voice. In this particular case, freed from the contingencies of an operatic plot, Beethoven chose to create two entirely different songs using exactly the same text. The first, marked “Arietta buffa” (“Comic arietta”), is fast and bouncy. Set in the bright major mode and with a busy, scurrying accompaniment throughout, it conveys a tone of exasperation, and the singer’s repeated “così” (“like this”) at the end, makes the overall effect comic indeed. One has the feeling that the beloved will be in deep trouble when he finally does show up. The second setting, marked “Arietta assai seriosa” (“Very serious arietta”), by contrast, draws on every cliché in the repertory of musical laments: minor mode, slow tempo, grinding dissonances, and a hesitant melodic line with plenty of drooping intervals that mimic a lover’s sighs. It is all done to such an extreme, in fact, that we can hear the song either as a lament or as a parody of a lament, overdone to the point of farce. The key word here is “seriosa,” which in Italian can mean either “extremely serious” or “overly serious,” which is to say, serious to the point of absurdity.

The same word helps explain the unexpectedly sunny ending to the otherwise gloomy String Quartet in F Minor, op. 95, which Beethoven called “Quartetto serioso.” After three deeply serious movements Beethoven launches into an equally gloomy finale in a moderate tempo that seems headed inevitably toward a dark conclusion. But just before the end, the music interrupts itself, accelerates to a fast tempo, shifts to the major mode, and introduces an entirely new and jaunty tune that seems diametrically opposed to everything we have heard up to this point. The entire piece is over less than a minute later. This brief ending seems to mock everything that had come before.

In his life as in his music, Beethoven frequently moved without warning between serious and comic, high and low, sublime and slapstick. Even in his performances as a pianist, he could distance himself from his art and draw attention to the craft of manipulating emotions as well as notes. His pupil Carl Czerny recalled how Beethoven could move a roomful of listeners to tears through his improvisations at the keyboard and then afterward mock them for those very tears:

His improvisation was most brilliant and striking: in whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break out into loud sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty and originality of his ideas and his spirited style of rendering them. After ending an improvisation of this kind he would burst into loud laughter, and banter his hearers on the emotion he had caused in them. “You are fools!” he would say. Sometimes he would feel himself insulted by these indications of sympathy. “Who can live among such spoiled children?” he would cry.

It would be easy to dismiss this as an entertaining yet possibly apocryphal anecdote if it did not resonate with so many moments in music that Beethoven committed to paper, including but by no means limited to the mood-disrupting coda to the finale of the “Serioso” String Quartet. As one French critic so colorfully put it after hearing an unidentified symphony by Beethoven in 1811: “Having penetrated the listener’s spirit with a sweet melancholy, he shreds it at once with a mass of barbarous chords. It strikes me as if we were seeing doves and crocodiles penned up together.” Or as the pianist Jeremy Denk has noted more recently: “He’s a trickster, an unreliable narrator, willing to whip out the rug out from under you, scheming behind your back how to mislead you next.” Beethoven could be at once wholly engaged and wholly detached.

Perhaps nowhere is this sense of multiple perspectives more clearly on display than in the String Quartet in B-flat Major, op. 130, a work with two utterly different finales. The original version, from December 1825, ends with a massive fugue that dwarfs all preceding movements in both scale and tone. The Viennese publisher Domenico Artaria recognized the difficulties this extremely long and demanding finale would pose for performers as well as listeners, and for this reason requested (and offered to pay for) a different finale. Beethoven complied, producing a much shorter and lighter movement with driving dance rhythms. Artaria then published the original finale as a separate work of its own, the Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”), op. 133. It would be cynical to think that Beethoven had created the new finale for money alone: at this late point in his life, he had his choice of commissions. Artaria’s offer was unusual in that it gave him an opportunity to end the same work in two different ways. The fact that both finales have their advocates today speaks to the ability of each to close things out convincingly, each in its own way. Nor was the idea of an alternative finale unique to op. 130. According to Czerny, Beethoven at one point even contemplated writing a purely instrumental finale to the Ninth Symphony.

Had he lived longer, Beethoven might very well have carried out this plan. That he would even contemplate the idea speaks volumes about his inclination to adopt contrasting perspectives in any number of situations. This tendency extended at times toward people as well. His correspondence reveals a constant series of turbulent relationships that break and then heal and then sometimes break again. He was quick to change his mind about the loyalty of those around him. The case of Stephan von Breuning is typical. One of Beethoven’s closest friends from his Bonn days, Breuning shared a flat with the composer in Vienna for a time in 1804, and in a letter to their mutual Bonn friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler, he described the strain of daily contact, aggravated by the composer’s growing deafness. Something must have happened a few weeks later, for in early November Beethoven sent a miniature portrait of himself to Breuning with the wish that

what happened between us be concealed forever behind this painting. I know I have wounded your heart. My own emotion, which you certainly must have observed, had punished me enough for it. It was not malice within me that was directed toward you; had that been the case I would never be worthy of your friendship. It was passion in you and in me—but distrust of you began to stir within me. Individuals came between us, ones who will never be worthy of you or me.…Forgive me if I hurt you; I myself suffered no less when I did not see you for so long beside me. Only then did I realize so vividly how dear you are to my heart and always will be.

We can see a similar pattern in other correspondence with Wegeler himself, Eleonore von Breuning, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, Countess Marie Erdödy, and even Prince Lichnowsky, his most important patron during his early years in Vienna. Beethoven’s personal relationships were as mutable as his musical ideas.

He could compartmentalize his creative energies to an astonishing degree. He often worked on several compositions at more or less the same time, rather like those chess masters who take on multiple opponents simultaneously and play each board in sequence. This approach also testifies to his ability to “tune” and “retune” himself in the sense proposed by Friedrich Schlegel: he could enter and leave contrasting musical worlds with apparent ease, no matter how extreme the differences among the various works before him. He reported to Wegeler in 1801 that he often had three or four different compositions in progress at any given moment, and he told a visitor in 1816 that “I don’t write anything in one fell swoop without interruption. I always work on many things at the same time. I pick up now this and now that.” The sketches for the wholly different Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, composed over the same span of time, certainly confirm this.

Finally, we have Beethoven’s own word on the need for composers to be able to step outside themselves when creating new works. He was in a foul mood when he wrote to the publisher Breitkopf and Härtel in February 1812, for Archduke Rudolph, his most important patron in the last two decades of his life, had recently declined his right as coadjutor to become Archbishop of Olmütz, thereby dashing Beethoven’s expectations of a stable and highly desirable post at what would have been his patron’s new court. He was in such despair at this news that he had to acknowledge his momentary inability to do something that artists in particular must be able to do easily: convey a mood different from that which they actually feel.

For now I can write only what is absolutely necessary. You say that good humor sparkles in my last letter; artists have to be able to throw themselves often into anything and everything, and so this [good humor], too, might have been feigned, for I am precisely not in good humor at the moment.

This is not to say that Beethoven did not genuinely feel the emotions we hear in his music. That these emotions were routinely imagined makes them no less real for purposes of composing. But composing, for him, was above all a matter of arousing an emotional response in listeners, not of expressing his inner self. He belonged to the last generation of composers who treated instrumental music as a rhetorical art. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and composers had long considered it their responsibility (aided by performers) to “persuade” listeners emotionally, to transport them into particular emotional states. The idea that listeners might somehow bear the burden of understanding, that it might be up to them to grasp what a composer was trying to “say,” speaks of a mode of listening that would not gain a foothold until later in the nineteenth century. Beethoven’s music did in fact become increasingly enigmatic over the course of his life, especially in his last decade, but one of the reasons so many of his contemporaries puzzled over what he had written was that they were simply not accustomed to the notion of listening as an activity that required any special effort on their part.

We routinely accept that responsibility today, and there is nothing wrong with looking to the person of the composer to make sense of what that individual has created. But if our image of that individual lacks depth, our experience of the music suffers. In the case of Beethoven, The Scowl is real enough, but it makes him one-dimensional. It is a caricature, and like any caricature, it exaggerates distinctive features of the individual it portrays. Beethoven scowled but he also laughed, and to judge from contemporary reports, he did so often and quite heartily. Scowling or laughing, he was able to distance himself from his own transitory emotions and create fictional worlds that we as listeners can inhabit at our pleasure.