Beethoven is the central figure in the Baltimore Symphony's programming this season, which begins tonight with the composer's Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") and concludes in June with his Symphony No. 9. By the time the season ends, concertgoers will have heard a total of 19 works by Beethoven.

This is not a Beethoven "year" -- no anniversary is being celebrated. The occasion of Beethoven's prominence this season is the absence of a music director to attract audiences and to give them the feeling that the orchestra's repertory has a theme.

That real theme is simply that classical music audiences respond to Beethoven's music as they do to that of no other composer. Beethoven has become not only the supreme image of a composer in the Western (or, more properly, Westernized) world, but the very symbol, even more than such competitors as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Einstein or Homer, of creative genius itself.

Beethoven may not be any greater than Haydn or Mozart, his immediate predecessors in the classical era. And he is less the musical revolutionary than is popularly supposed. But what makes him different is that he calls attention to himself as a creator in ways that Haydn or Mozart could not have countenanced.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, "with Beethoven, music first began to find the speech of pathos, of the impassioned will, of the dramatic vicissitudes in the soul of man." In other words, Beethoven's works represent a psychological record of a single man's struggle with destiny. That sense of individuality makes works by Beethoven as distinct from each other as those by Mozart and Haydn rarely are.

But this individuality makes the music all the more universal. If Beethoven's music speaks to the predicament of a particular hero -- the composer himself -- it also speaks to the hero within all of us. To use one of our age's most abused buzzwords, Beethoven and his music empower us. That is why we cannot seem to do without him.

Here are thumbnail sketches of most of the works the symphony will perform this season.

Symphonies

The Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") is Beethoven's "big bang" -- the single work that created the ever-expanding universe of the Beethoven mythos. As its Italian subtitle tells us, it is a heroic symphony. It begins without the spacious introductions beloved by Haydn and Mozart and used by Beethoven in his first two symphonies.

Two abrupt chords launch the first movement. That movement, with its roller-coaster emotional twists and turns, has a psychological trajectory that altered the course of Western music, becoming a template for all the symphonic music that followed. The second-movement funeral march ratchets up the expressive intensity. If the lighter scherzo and more conventional final movement fail to live up to the challenge of the the first two movements, it scarcely matters.

It is characteristic of Beethoven that he rarely repeats himself. If his Symphony No. 4 seems a return to symphonic form as it was practiced by Haydn, Symphony No. 5 is another explosion that takes the listener beyond the boundaries established by the "Eroica." If the listener experiences a letdown in the last two movements of the latter, the Fifth Symphony is a successfully unified four-movement work that grows more triumphant from movement to movement. In his Symphony No. 45 ("Farewell"), Haydn achieved a similar sense of continuous musical narrative, but what is unprecedented in Beethoven is the weight, directness and seriousness with which the discourse unfolds.

The Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") is less emotionally turbulent than either its predecessor, the Fifth, or its successor, the Seventh, and hence somewhat less valued, if no less popular. But its depiction of a green world, operating on timeless cycles dictated by nature, makes it the most relaxing of the composer's great symphonic works.

The Seventh is just the opposite. It's an invitation to the dance -- a driven, Dionysian revel that leads to a final movement, a nonstop roiling boil that concludes the work in pagan delirium. The joy in the Seventh is civilized by the ideals of the Enlightenment and articulated by the human voice in the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth's unprecedented use of singers for the last movement precipitated a controversy that has never been settled. But this symphony is another of those Beethovian watersheds, dividing symphonic composers such as Mahler and Shostakovich, who followed Beethoven's lead unhesitatingly, from those like Brahms or Bruckner, who, while unalterably influenced by the Ninth, could not bring themselves to dispense so completely with symphonic conventions.

Concertos

Beethoven was the greatest pianist of his time, and his piano concertos never permit listeners to forget that they were written for a great virtuoso. The Second, which is actually the first, is the most backward-looking. (Beethoven himself was apologetic about it.) But the First, while still Mozartean in design, charges forward with an aggressive energy that violates 18th-century notions of polite decorum.

The Third Concerto is another homage to Mozart (his Concerto No. 24), but it has a heroic confidence that makes it both less and more than the earlier composer's poignant concerto in the same key of C minor.

In the Fourth and Fifth Concertos, we enter an entirely new world. The Fourth is the progenitor of the poetic, personal concertos -- whether by Schumann, Liszt or Chopin -- that were to follow. The Fifth (the "Emperor") is the prototype for Brahms' and Bartok's more purely symphonic pieces, in which the piano functions as the most important part (rather than as the center) of the symphonic texture.

Although he was a pianist, Beethoven had enough of a working knowledge of the violin to write the greatest of all violin concertos. The construction of the Concerto in D is fabulous -- the five quiet taps on the timpani at the opening of the first movement are heard in alternative versions throughout the piece and help organize the entire work. What is most remarkable about this piece, however, is that the composer gives the violin possibilities for profound introspection in a work with orchestra that the instrument had never received from any composer before and has not received since.

Choral works

The Choral Fantasy is a maverick -- Beethoven at his most bizarre. It begins with a dazzling solo cadenza for piano that is unexpectedly joined by chorus and orchestra in what is patently a bubbling-with-joy trial run for the final movement of the Ninth Symphony.

The Mass in C is also a trial run of sorts -- for the much greater and ambitious Missa Solemnis ("Solemn Mass"). The latter gives a more private and spiritual expression to the kind of joy celebrated in the public and secular context of the Symphony No. 9.

Beethoven's major work for the theater -- his opera "Fidelio" -- will not be one of the works presented this season. But listeners will get a sample of his dramatic music from performances of the "Egmont" Overture, the composer's overture to Goethe's drama about man's battle with tyranny. The overture is a remarkable work that seems to end on a mournful note, only to blaze up unexpectedly into a heroic coda. Also to be performed will be "Ah! perfido," the composer's much-beloved concert aria for dramatic soprano and orchestra.

BSO schedule

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performances of Beethoven works this season:

"Ah, perfido": Oct. 8-10, 11

Choral Fantasy: Sept. 25-27, Oct. 11

"Egmont" Overture: Sept. 17-19

Mass in C major: Sept. 25-27, Oct. 11

Missa Solemnis: Feb. 18-19

Piano Concerto No. 1: Jan. 15-17

Piano Concerto No. 2: Feb. 25-27

Piano Concerto No. 3: Jan. 21-22, 25

Piano Concerto No. 4: Oct. 8-10, 11

Piano Concerto No. 5: Feb. 12-13

Symphony No. 3: Sept. 17-19

Symphony No. 4: March 12-14

Symphony No. 5: Sept. 25-27, Oct. 11

Symphony No. 6: Oct. 8-9, 11

Symphony No. 7: March 25-27, 30

Symphony No. 9: June 11-13

Violin Concerto: Jan 7-9

All performances take place in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. For tickets, priced $14-$55, or for more information, call 410-783-8000.

Pub Date: 9/17/98