Alex Ross - Beethoven’s Bad Influence

7/23/2019 Alex Ross - Beethoven’s Bad Influence

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alex-ross-beethovens-bad-influence 1/17

Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter

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

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/141020_r25610-901-1200.jpg



http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alex-ross

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/onward-and-upward-with-the-arts



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/onward-and-upward-with-the-arts



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:



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



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,



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



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



“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



H

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,



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



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



C

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



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



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.



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



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



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. ♦

RELATED STORIES




MusicalEvents

A Century of Benjamin Britten

BY ALEX ROSS

ACriticatLarge

Decoding Wagner’s “Ring”

BY ALEX ROSS


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/secret-passage-2

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/a-critic-at-large

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/secret-passage-2


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/coronation

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/musical-events

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/coronation

Alex Ross - Beethoven’s Bad Influence

Documents

Transcript of Alex Ross - Beethoven’s Bad Influence