Beethoven, Ludwig van

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BEETHOVEN, LUDWIG VAN

early life
symphonies
intellectual and social life
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BEETHOVEN, LUDWIG VAN (1770–1827), German-Austrian composer.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born into a family of musicians serving at the electoral and archiepiscopal court at Bonn. His grandfather, of the same name, was kapellmeister, or director of music, at the court when Beethoven was a small child, and his father was a singer there. The boy Beethoven was trained to be a court musician as well; he played viola in the orchestra and organ in the chapel; for opera performances he accompanied rehearsals and coached singers. In 1787 he traveled to Vienna, presumably to study with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), but was called back almost immediately by the illness of his mother; owing to her death soon thereafter and his father's alcoholism he became responsible at the age of seventeen for the care of two younger brothers. The young Beethoven's budding career as a composer, though apparently little supported by the Bonn court, got off to a fairly promising start: by the age of twenty-one he had produced two cantatas, three piano sonatas, three piano quartets (piano and strings), an early version of what became the Second Piano Concerto, and many shorter compositions.

early life

In November 1792, as the armies of Napoleon were threatening the town and court, Beethoven left Bonn again for Vienna, there to remain for the rest of his life. His previous position in Bonn served him well there too, for the court establishment at Bonn was closely related by blood lines and marriage with the court of the Holy Roman Empire at Vienna, and his early supporters in the imperial city, such as the Lichnowskys and the Lobkowitz and von Fries families, were among the most exalted of the nobility. But Beethoven, like Mozart before him, never officially entered the employ of any person or institution there. In Vienna he made an early reputation as a pianist, gave piano and composition lessons, conducted and performed his music at private and public concerts, and sold his compositions to publishers in Vienna and Germany, later in England and Paris as well. He often composed on commission, an arrangement whereby the granter of the commission typically received the dedication of the composition together with exclusive rights to its performance for a fixed period of time, after which Beethoven was free to publish it.

Especially during his earlier years as a composer in Vienna, Beethoven specialized in music for his own instrument, the piano, an instrument only recently ascended to a position of dominance in European music, one which continued to undergo technical change throughout his life. The sonata for solo piano, previously associated largely with amateur performance, became in Beethoven's hands a vehicle for far-reaching innovation in musical expression: in harmonic language, form, sonority, texture, and in referential and associative richness. His thirty-two sonatas (plus juvenilia), distributed rather evenly across all but his final half-dozen years, are the single genre that provides a reasonably full glimpse of the majestic course of Beethoven's musical thought, from the youthful pathos and exaggerated Haydnesque wit of op. 2 and 10 (1795–1797) to the contemplation, violence, and exaltation of opp. 109, 110, and 111 (1820–1822).

The five concertos for piano, intended for public concerts, fall in the earlier part of Beethoven's career; following in the steps of Mozart, he wrote these concertos (with the exception of the last concerto, the "Emperor" of 1809) for his own performances. Thus they show all the brilliance requisite for virtuoso performance. But in addition they share in the expressive strength and imagination of Beethoven's maturing style. A marvelous example is the Fourth Concerto, op. 58, which combines military themes with ones of near-pastoral serenity, while the middle movement plays out a dialogue of fierce opposition ending in something like reconciliation and tranquility.

In Beethoven's day the kind of music that enjoyed the greatest social prestige was still opera. Though he considered possible opera libretti for composition nearly all his life, Beethoven composed only one, Fidelio, an adaptation of a French "rescue opera" libretto in which the heroic Leonore saves her husband Florestan from death at the hands of a villainous tyrant. The premiere of the opera, in November 1805, unfortunately coincided with Napoleon's invasion of Vienna, and closed after only three performances. Revised versions created with new librettists were mounted in 1806 and 1814, this last being the version seen in modern performances. In these subsequent incarnations the opera shifts emphasis dramatically from the saving of a single person to the liberation of all humankind from the bonds of tyranny, Florestan's fellow prisoners having been implicitly transformed into the suffering masses at large. Many have seen this change as indicative of Beethoven's own political sympathies, of liberal and humanitarian impulses that again come strongly to the fore in the Ninth Symphony (1824).

symphonies

The genre most indelibly associated with Beethoven's name is the symphony. From the First (1800) to the Ninth a quarter of a century later, his symphonies are a study in diversity. The Third Symphony, the "Eroica" (1804), decisively broke with the traditions Beethoven inherited. Its intended dedication to Napoleon, later changed to "the memory of a hero"; its monumental funeral march implicitly commemorating that hero; the unprecedented scope and expressive extremes of individual movements all seemed to mark this as a symphony that transcended its genre to become the larger-than-life embodiment of an idea. The Sixth Symphony, the "Pastoral" (1808), again laden with extramusical reference, but of a nearly opposite significance, makes elaborate use of accepted musical signifiers of the pastoral, of a celebration of nature, of the imagined virtue and simplicity of country life. And in the Ninth Symphony (1824), Beethoven famously rejected the basic presuppositions of the genre by adding text (Schiller's "Ode to Joy") and voices that sounded a ringing proclamation of human goodness and the triumph of universal brotherhood.

Beethoven contributed to all the standard musical genres of his time: there are two masses, including the monumental Missa solemnis (1823), concert arias, songs for voice and piano, programmatic overtures, music for wind ensemble, and character pieces and variations for piano. His music has long formed the centerpiece of the instrumental chamber music repertoire, with ten sonatas for piano and violin, five for piano cello, and six piano trios (piano, violin, and cello). But most central of all have been the sixteen string quartets (plus the separate Grosse fuge), composed from around 1800 until his death. Of these the final five, commonly known as the "late" quartets, were finished within the space of about a year and a half at the end of his life. Their expressive world ranges from near-crude good humor to a kind of serene, timeless otherworldly musing that Beethoven's contemporaries were at a loss to fathom, but which has since come to be be seen as the apex of his art.

Early in his career the critical response to Beethoven's music was often negative or grudging: his works were often seen as obscure, bizarre, eccentric, and excessively long (at the first public performance of the "Eroica," it is reported, someone shouted "I'll give another Kreutzer if the thing will but stop!"). But in about 1805 a rather different strain of Beethoven criticism began to make an appearance, especially in Germany. Newly serious and technically competent reviews attempted to penetrate the obscurities and difficulties to find aesthetic justification for them. This new criticism reached a high point in the expansive reviews of E. T. A. Hoffmann in the years 1810 to 1813. And as Beethoven's late works, especially the late quartets, diverged ever more from contemporary practice, they inspired in his listeners a curious blend of puzzlement and awe. They seemed to illustrate the paradox of the genuine masterpiece: art that is in important ways unique, quite unlike other works of its kind, and at the same time exemplary, comprising a lasting standard of achievement and a model for others to follow.

By mid-career Beethoven had become the most famous musician in the world. His compositions routinely commanded high prices from both aristocratic patrons and publishers in several countries; as he produced them his symphonies quickly became standard fare at concerts all over Europe. Artists and intellectuals gathered in impressive numbers to visit him on his deathbed, and at the funeral of this reclusive man the crowd in attendance was estimated at ten to twenty thousand.

Until the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, his achievement cast its shadow over European music. Musicians felt he held proprietary rights over vast areas of composition—the symphony, the sonata, the string quartet, the piano concerto—and to compose in these genres meant meeting Beethoven on his own territory. Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, and at the end of the century, Gustav Mahler, all felt his example as both an imperative of sorts and an inhibiting factor, a standard that seemed at once to demand and discourage emulation.

intellectual and social life

By comparison with the exaltation of his aspiration and achievement, the course of Beethoven's life in Vienna seems prosaic. The central personal drama in this life was his advancing deafness. As early as in the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, the

composer declared himself on the verge of suicide over his affliction, but overcame his despair with a Promethean resolve to carry on in fulfillment of the artist's responsibility to society. Succeeding generations have seen in this pattern of dire crisis and its resolution through the exercise of indomitable will a psychological paradigm for the expressive arc of Beethoven's compositions, particularly in the larger symphonic movements. For some years the composer made efforts to conceal his condition, fearful that its being known would injure his status as a musician. But beginning about 1816 necessity led him to use an ear trumpet, and two years later he resorted to "conversation books," in which his interlocutors entered their side of any exchange. Beethoven tended to save his documents compulsively; the survival of many conversation books has provided extraordinary material for biographers.

Strongly attracted to women from his adolescence, Beethoven, despite great apparent effort, was never able to attain a satisfactory relationship with any one of them. In Vienna he typically pursued women of a higher social standing than himself, some of them already attached, and some piano students of his who tended to be a good deal younger as well. In 1812 he wrote in several installments (but apparently never sent) a rhetorical cri du coeur to an unnamed "immortal beloved" expressing both his love for her and his resignation to their inevitable separation. This document has unleashed a torrent of speculation as to the identity of the addressee; by far the most likely candidate, recently identified by Maynard Solomon, is one Antonie Brentano, a native of Vienna married to Franz Brentano, a wealthy Frankfurt merchant. There have been various explanations for the melancholy story of Beethoven's relations with women. But there were two constant factors, probably related, in virtually all his encounters: a pursuit of the unattainable and an avoidance of commitment.

Beethoven's contemporaries saw him as a participant in that multifaceted, perplexing artistic and intellectual movement of his time, Romanticism. E. T. A. Hoffmann, surely a central figure in that movement, declared of Beethoven, "He is a completely Romantic composer." Subsequent generations have sought to distance the composer from such associations. Viennese scholars of the early twentieth century, alarmed at the radical modernism of Arnold Schoenberg and his group, extolled an earlier "classical" period consisting nearly exclusively of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. And modernists of various stripes ever since, eager to dissociate Beethoven from a despised Romanticism, have cemented his position in such a classical school. Charles Rosen's The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, first published in 1971 and since become a staple in every university music department in the English-speaking world, has carried on the tradition. Beginning in the late 1990s there has been some reassessment of this position by James Webster, who has questioned the validity of a "classical period" in music altogether, and Maynard Solomon, who has made a renewed exploration of Beethoven's ties with Romanticism.

Various schools of interpretation in the twentieth century have found Beethoven an inviting subject. Editha and Richard Sterba's Beethoven and his Nephew (English translation 1954) advanced a neo-Freudian and largely disapproving view of the composer's personality, particularly of his troubled relationship with his nephew Karl whose guardianship he assumed, after bitter legal wrangling with Karl's mother, in 1818. Among others who have applied concepts of psychoanalysis to the study of Beethoven's life, the most influential has been Maynard Solomon in his Beethoven (1977). Feminist scholarship has generally been critical of Beethoven, seeing the forcefulness of his music as a celebration of male hegemony. An analysis of Beethoven's career by the sociologist Tia DeNora (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, 1995) sees the composer's towering reputation as a social construction, the result of a conscious effort of Beethoven's highly placed supporters to advance him as the embodiment of a new cult of "serious" music. A 2004 book by Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon, construes the late works as a reflection of the conservative political and social ideals of the Metternich period. A perceptive and balanced account of the composer's life and work is Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (2003).