Beethoven's Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas

beethoven’s symphonies

beethoven’s symphonies

Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas

martin geck

Translated by Stewart Spencer

The University of Chicago Press   •   Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45388-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45391-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453910.001.0001

German Edition: Martin Geck, Die Sinfonien Beethovens. Neun Wege zum Ideenkunstwerk, Hildesheim 2015 © Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2015, Germany

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Geck, Martin, author. | Spencer, Stewart, translator. | Translation of Geck, Martin. Sinfonien Beethovens.

Title: Beethoven’s symphonies : nine approaches to art and ideas / Martin Geck ; translated by Stewart Spencer.

Other titles: Sinfonien Beethovens. English

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041562 | ISBN 9780226453880 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226453910 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827. Symphonies. | Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Criticism and interpretation. | Symphony—19th century.

Classification: LCC ML410.B42 G4413 2017 | DDC 784.2/184092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041562

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Beethoven: Symphonist par Excellence

Napoleon Bonaparte

Orchestral Weight

Delusions of Virility

Structure

Jean Paul’s Cloven Hoof

Nine Symphonies

Prolegomenon

On Idle Speculations

From Portentous Prologues to Ebullient Finales

On Elemental Beginnings

On Archetypal Images

On Memorable Fugato Passages

On Striking Dissonances

On False Entries

On the Escapades of the Timpani

On Highly Expressive Foreshortenings

On Beethoven’s Fondness for the Eroica

On Crossing a Threshold

The Symphonies

Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica)

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral)

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Histrion véridique, je le fus de moi-même! de celui que nul n’atteint en soi, excepté à des moments de foudre et alors on l’expie de sa durée, comme déjà. (I was the real actor playing myself! playing a truth that no one reaches in himself, except in moments of lightning and then one expiates them for their duration, as I have.)

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam¹

To keep the whole in view . . .

Beethoven: Symphonist par Excellence

Flashes of lightning are a ubiquitous feature of Beethoven’s symphonies, throwing light on something that the composer merely suspected he was carrying around within him but which then found forceful and eruptive expression in his music. The years between 1800 and 1824 are not viewed as a separate or special period by historians, and yet they frame an exceptional age in music, for they encapsulate a world of ideas that Beethoven succeeded in conjuring up in his symphonies not only for himself but for others, too.

Perhaps he himself was already thinking on a historical scale when in his late twenties he introduced his First Symphony to the world in April 1800, marking the start of a new century and prompting Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl to strike a rhapsodic note in his 1838 narrative Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener (The music festival; or, The Beethovenians), which describes a particularly memorable passage in the opening movement of the Eroica (bars 248–83) as thirty-six bars of pure nineteenth century. The piano score alone made it impossible for students even to suspect the power of this passage. [ . . . ] But what is instrumental music!² Beethoven’s First Symphony marks the beginning of a new period in the history of the symphony and arguably also in the history of classical music in general. It will be worth our while, therefore, to examine the background to this radical upheaval within the world of music.

Within this context, two currents are of particular interest for our understanding of Beethoven’s art. Historians traditionally see them as a succession of two distinct periods, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And yet—here as elsewhere—these periods overlap rather than moving from one to the other. Among the ideas associated with the Enlightenment is the belief that the individual discovered not only his or her dignity but also a sense of responsibility for what we would nowadays call the bigger picture. Until then there had been the widespread, essentially Christian belief that God is great, and man is small, and that the only great men were rulers and their agents, all of whom were acting at God’s behest. It was in this spirit that Bach wrote his Cantata BWV Anh. I 13, Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden (Welcome, you ruling gods on Earth), for the Saxon royal family. Of course, mankind has always valued genuine human greatness, generally intellectual or artistic, but until the eighteenth century this was always seen as secondary. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment did it acquire its primary significance, bringing with it a new motto: Every rational person can advance society, and a person of genius can unhinge the world.

The Romantics contrasted this conviction with their own empirical observation that genius constantly comes up against its own limitations whenever its flights of fancy clash with contemptible everyday reality. Beethoven goes to the very heart of this contradiction: the victories that his symphonies celebrate are hard won or else they are invoked by means of resources available only to music—especially his own.

Napoleon Bonaparte: The Prometheus of His Age and a Lodestar for Beethoven as Symphonist

In Beethoven’s eyes, his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of genius, and there is no doubt that the composer identified with his hero throughout his entire life or at least judged himself by Napoleonic standards—and this remains the case even if Napoleon’s decision to have himself crowned emperor in 1804 left Beethoven feeling bewildered and disappointed. His admiration for the Corsican ruler rested not least on the fact that Napoleon had achieved his position of preeminence in Europe not through hereditary privilege but on the strength of his strategic genius, in the process championing fundamental social changes of an altogether revolutionary kind. It makes sense to examine Beethoven’s attitude to the Enlightenment through the filter of his admiration for Napoleon, for this particular perspective is by no means as one-sided as it may otherwise seem at first sight. It is an approach that brings us particularly close to Beethoven as a symphonist, for here we are dealing less with the Napoleon whom Beethoven acclaimed in 1820 as the protector of right and of the laws³ than with what the French call gloire, a term that encompasses both fame and merit. Like many of his contemporaries, Beethoven felt the greatest admiration for a man who had achieved the most tremendous feats through his genius alone, feats that served as a model for the great mass of the people and that also enabled the individual to find lasting glory.⁴ This recalls classical heroes such as Alexander the Great, with whom Beethoven is known to have identified, and it also means that Beethoven felt constantly stimulated to acquire a similar degree of fame by performing exceptional feats in the realm of music. (Quite how far Beethoven was capable of taking his identification with the figures of classical antiquity emerges from his attempts to gain custody of his nephew Karl, for in a court submission in 1818 he pointed out that Philip of Macedonia had taken charge of the education of his son, Alexander the Great, a right that Beethoven now claimed for himself in the case of his nephew.)

For Beethoven—especially as a symphonist—the concept of gloire is paramount because it radiates a far greater physicality than any ethical concept, making it an apt way of giving musical expression to such a notion and allowing Beethoven to pick up various traditions of vocal and instrumental music designed to glorify the state, starting with the official music of the French Revolution, and at the same time creating something new.

On January 26, 1793, Beethoven’s friend Bartholomäus Fischenich of Bonn wrote to Charlotte Schiller—the wife of the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller—to spell out the twenty-two-year-old composer’s artistic plans: He proposes also to compose Schiller’s ‘Freude,’ and indeed strophe by strophe. I expect something perfect for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and the sublime.⁵ At this date Beethoven had just left for Vienna armed with a scholarship from Maximilian Franz, the elector of Cologne, whose court was in Bonn. Indeed, Franz may well have been all the keener to accord Beethoven an extended leave of absence since French Revolutionary troops had marched into the Rhineland in October 1792, leading to a state of uncertainty: a regular season of plays and concerts could no longer be expected, with the result that the young court musician was eminently expendable in Bonn.

On January 21, 1793, the French king, Louis XVI, had been guillotined in Paris, marking the start of the Reign of Terror and prompting even an ardent champion of the French Revolution such as Schiller to ask himself what had become of its ideals of liberté, égalité et fraternité. Published in 1799, his poem The Song of the Bell includes a line clearly intended as a warning against the might of flame: Woe, if it casts off its chains, / And, without resistance, growing, / Through the crowded streets and lanes / Spreads the blaze, all fiercely glowing!⁶

How did Beethoven react to all this? That he was interested in Schiller’s ode as early as 1793 and was determined to turn it into something great is unsurprising while at the same time being far from self-evident. Schiller had been born in 1759, eleven years before Beethoven, and was then at the height of his fame as a literary revolutionary. His early play Die Räuber (The Brigands) had been published anonymously in 1781 in an attempt to circumvent the censor and soon became the subject of an impassioned debate because of its rebellious thrust, with the result that it was repeatedly banned. His Ode to Joy was tossed off in a moment of exuberance in 1785 only for him to dismiss it fifteen years later as a bad poem,⁷ but for Beethoven in 1793, this was no obstacle to his seeing in it a reflection of his own ideals of freedom and fraternity at this time.

We do not know whether Beethoven was a genuine supporter of the French Revolution, but we may assume that he at least sympathized with its aims from afar. The motto of his composition teacher in Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, was I love the great men of this earth but I hate bad princes more than bandits.⁸ Beethoven himself added an entry to the album of Theodora Vocke of Nuremberg in this same crucial year, 1793: Love freedom above all else; never deny the truth (not even on the throne).⁹

Even as early as 1812, the preliminary sketches for what was to become the Ninth Symphony contain the entry Detached fragments, like princes[,] are beggars,¹⁰ a radical reinterpretation of the line beggars become the brothers of princes from the first version of Schiller’s ode.¹¹ This hardly suggests that Beethoven had abandoned the ideals of the French Revolution by this date.

We find him writing to his friend Nicolaus Simrock in Bonn in August 1794, "It is said that a revolution was about to break out—But I believe that so long as an Austrian can get his brown ale and his little sausages, he is not likely to revolt,"¹² and it seems possible to read into these lines at least a secret sympathy for the Jacobin movement. Given the prevailing censorship affecting all correspondence during this period, he could scarcely have expressed himself any more clearly than this.

Be that as it may, a new chapter in Beethoven’s political life opens with Napoleon’s appointment as commander in chief of the French armies and his coup d’état of November 9, 1799, when he became first consul and France’s absolute ruler for the next ten years. Beethoven was not alone in regarding the Corsican commander as the proverbial phoenix rising up from the ashes of the French Revolution, for he was repeatedly portrayed as such in both literature and the visual arts. Even Goethe admired him in this role—unlike Schiller, Goethe had never been a fan of the French Revolution, but he now hailed Napoleon as the Prometheus whom he had celebrated in the poem of the same name that he had written in 1774 during his Sturm und Drang phase. No less a commentator than Nietzsche was to write in his Twilight of the Idols that Goethe "had no greater experience than that ens realissimum called Napoleon."¹³ Elsewhere Nietzsche argued that "the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon."¹⁴

There is no doubt that the profession of faith that Beethoven addressed to Archduke Rudolph in 1819 sums up the whole spirit of the Age of Napoleon: "In the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives."¹⁵ And even though Beethoven did not have loyal conversationalists such as Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Friedrich von Müller, and Johann Peter Eckermann to record his every word, he did have his Conversation Books, which include the following entry about Napoleon noted down in January 1820, only a few months after his letter to Archduke Rudolph: although the Corsican ruler had fallen victim to his own hubris, he had had "an appreciation of art and science and had hated the dark. He should have held the Germans in higher regard and protected their rights. [ . . . ] But he everywhere overthrew the feudal system and was the protector of right and of the laws."¹⁶

In light of these remarks, it should come as no surprise to learn that Beethoven seems to have attempted to make contact with Napoleon as early as the spring of 1798. According to a later tradition, he frequented the Viennese quarters of the French general Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte at a time when Bernadotte was attempting to implement the demands of the victorious French as enshrined in the Treaty of Campo Formio, terms that included the opening of a French theater in the Austrian capital. Bernadotte is said to have seized the opportunity to suggest that Beethoven might consider writing a Napoleon Symphony and to have used the violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer as an intermediary in order to familiarize Beethoven with the newer French revolutionary music of composers such as Gossec, Catel, and Cherubini.

Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that Beethoven’s first two symphonies—which were written between 1799 and 1802—contain unmistakable echoes of French revolutionary music. The first subject of the opening movement of the First, for example, recalls the theme of an overture that Kreutzer, who since 1795 had been professor of violin at the newly founded Paris Conservatoire, wrote for the marathon concert designed to fire the people of Paris with revolutionary enthusiasm during the War of the First Coalition.

The suggestion that Beethoven was merely paying lip service to a local fashion loses much of its force when we recall that between his First and Second Symphonies he wrote his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, to a scenario by the choreographer Salvatore Viganò. First performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on March 28, 1801, when it ran for over twenty performances, Beethoven’s heroic-allegorical ballet was based in turn on a mythological poem, Il Prometeo, written in 1797 by the Italian poet Vincenzo Monti, the opening canto of which was inspired by Napoleon’s military and political achievements. There cannot be any doubt about the parallels between Prometheus