Beethoven's music is about heroism -- the composer's, the performer's and the audience's.
The second and third kinds of heroism will be found tomorrow afternoon at Meyerhoff Hall when the Baltimore Symphony performs its annual pension fund concert. Under the baton of guest conductor Alan Gilbert, the 97 musicians of the Baltimore Symphony will re-create the 1808 concert in Vienna that introduced -- among other works -- the composer's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Choral Fantasy and the Mass in C. This is a huge effort: more than four hours of demanding music.
But to listen to so many unique works, each of which probes ever more deeply into what it means to be human, also requires a heroic commitment from the listener. There should be no sissies in tomorrow's audience.
Yet there is no other composer we are willing to listen to so much. That his contemporaries were prepared to digest so much Beethoven at once suggests his privileged position in his lifetime; that we are willing to repeat the experience almost two centuries later declares how privileged his position remains.
This year, the Baltimore Symphony is calling the current season a "Beethoven festival." But that's business as usual. Every orchestra celebrates Beethoven every season. He remains the dominant composer in the symphonic repertory.
Ever since 1804, when he destroyed the dedication to Napoleon of the "Eroica" Symphony, Beethoven has been regarded as the hero of Western music. With the "Eroica," Beethoven is said to have loosened the restraints of 18th-century conventions, singlehandedly giving music a transcendent voice that expressed Western civilization's most cherished values.
About this estimation of his heroic status, no one was more certain than the composer himself. His image -- that of the tempest-tossed figure, the deaf musician shaking his fist at fate -- was one he helped to create.
"We mortals with immortal spirits are born only to suffering and joy, and one could almost say that the most distinguished among us obtain joy through suffering," Beethoven wrote to one of the many countesses who adored him and his music.
It is not the facts of Beethoven's life that led to his reputation. There have always been (and always will be) plenty of embattled artists. But no composer before (and few after) had ever called attention to himself in his own music as Beethoven does.
Not only is the music much more difficult than any that preceded it, but the composer also left his fin-
gerprints on almost every piece he wrote. This is as true of the first piano sonatas, with their heretofore unimaginably huge time scales and muscularity, as it is of the last ones, with their aspirations to leave the Earth behind.
No one had ever written such varied works. Mozart's piano concertos, for example, are wonderful, but except for the two in minor keys, it is sometimes easy to mistake one for another. But no listener can confuse Beethoven's poetic and intimate Fourth Concerto with his heroically militant Fifth Concerto.
In the 1920s, when Robert Haven Schauffler decided to call his biography of Beethoven "The Man Who Freed Music," he meant that his music expressed the freedom of the individual. Individual freedom -- its blandishments and its consequences -- is fundamental to the Greco-Judeo-Christian origins of Western civilization. And the great revolutions in America and France that took place in Beethoven's youth signified that the importance of such freedom (and the quest for it) had acquired renewed force. It is to this force that Beethoven's music gives unforgettable expression.
Musical jolts
Fundamental to the Romantic age that Beethoven's music helped usher in was an all-embracing and ennobling concept of the self. Even if the individual could not triumph over his circumstances or his own limitations, his struggle was deemed heroic and a proper subject for poetry -- or for music.
It is easy to understand why Beethoven's music is so compelling. His music is filled with heart-stopping pauses, crashes, register shifts and startling harmonies. The listener is so affected by sudden jolts and hair-pin turns that he feels as if he is swept along with the current of the music, forced to share what it (and its creator) feels. This creates an immediacy that the music of Mozart, for example, never achieves.
Mozart's music is described as a form of perfection, which means it's apprehended from a distance. There is no such distance in Beethoven's music. It is visceral, often disturbing and even invasive -- and it compels interaction with the listener. If Mozart's music offers listeners a view of heaven, Beethoven's makes them feel as if they're in a flight-simulator. The experience demands the right stuff.
Look no further than the famous opening of the Fifth Symphony.
Other classical-era works open with similar rhetorical flourishes -- Mozart's Symphony No. 38 ("Prague") or Haydn's Symphony No. 104 ("London"), for example. But while those assertive openings allow the listener to orient himself within the contexts of tonality and meter, Beethoven's does not offer anything. The listener is in an ambiguous situation: he has been imperiously commanded -- but to do what? Something important has commenced, but the listener will not fully understand what it is until the drama completes itself four movements and more than 30 minutes later.
Beethoven may have been the first composer who was valued for the originality and difficulty of his music -- music that demanded to be understood before it could be judged.
But the music of successors such as Berlioz and Wagner -- who tried to take Beethoven's revolution even further by creating what they called the "music of the future" -- is so personal and idiosyncratic that it becomes too difficult to listen to sympathetically. And the 20th-century successors of Berlioz and Wagner retreated even further into obscurity.
For all his originality, Beethoven is a classical composer who generally heeds the laws of sonata form even as he bends them. His works, unlike those of Mozart or Haydn, may emphasize music as a transitory process rather than as a finished product. But once listeners have completed the journey, they realize that they have arrived in a familiar place. Despite the apparent spontaneity of his musical narrative, the composer's sense of an ending was never in doubt.
'It must be!'
If not in his early or middle works, then in his later ones, Beethoven's heroism transcends the human condition by encouraging patience -- acceptance of what is.
The rapturous fervor of the finale of the Ninth Symphony, as well as the finales of the late piano sonatas and string quartets, puts us in mind of what "The Revelation of John" and the visionary poetry of William Blake call the "New Jerusalem."
But Beethoven's late music seems to tell us that paradise is not yet, and patience and acceptance are also forms of heroic action. That may be the meaning of the composer's mysterious inscription in words and notes ("Must it be? It must be!") over the last movement of the last work he ever completed, the opus 135 String Quartet.
Beethoven arrived at a moment in history when the demands of society and the desire of individual freedom seemed reconcilable, a time when scientific discoveries had not yet knocked man from the center of the universe.
To understand just how difficult such notions now seem, consider these lines from the "Ode to Joy," written in 1785, by Friedrich Schiller, one of the greatest poets of Beethoven's youth:
Be embraced, ye Millions!
This kiss to the whole world!
Brothers -- beyond the canopy
of the stars
Surely a loving Father dwells.
Joy, beauteous, godly spark,
Daughter of Elysium!
Joy, beauteous, godly spark!
Today most people react to these lines -- with their emphasis upon the freedom of the individual, the brotherhood of man and the existence of universal parameters established by divine love -- with a certain embarrassment.
Yet Beethoven -- at least for the duration of the finale of his Symphony No. 9, in which the lines above are the final words sung by the chorus -- makes us feel that Schiller's notions are palpably true, that his ideals are achievable.
Beethoven allows us to escape into the possibility of a heroic self, even though that comforting notion had begun to be dismissed as a philosophical absurdity by the time of the Ninth Symphony's first performance in 1824.
His music fearlessly explores the unknown, the absurd and the grotesque, and always brings us home safely.
Listening to it is one of the few hedges we possess against the universe.
Recommended recordings
Beethoven's music has been recorded often and well. The following list of recommended recordings emphasizes complete sets and affordability.
Piano Concertos -- For many aficionados, the most probing performances of these five concertos continue to be those Artur Schnabel recorded in the 1930s with Malcolm Sargent conducting the London Symphony and London Philharmonic (Pearl PEA 9063). Other distinguished sets, inexpensively priced, are those by Schnabel's great student, Leon Fleisher, with George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra (Sony Classical SB3K 48397) and Vladimir Ashkenazy, with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony (London 425582).
Violin Concerto in D -- My favorites include Fritz Kreisler's 1926 performance with Leo Blech conducting the Berlin State Opera Orchestra (Pearl PEA 9996); two versions by Jascha Heifetz, the first with Arturo Toscanin and the NBC Symphony (RCA Gold Seal 60261) and the second with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony (RCA Red Seal RCD1-5042); and David Oistrakh's performance with Sixten Ehrling conducting the Stockholm Festival Orchestra (Testament SBT 1032).
String Quartets -- Great performances of these 16 masterpieces abound, but none is greater or less expensive than the version by the Quartetto Italiano (Philips 454062).
Piano Sonatas -- The set by Schnabel (EMI Classics CDH 63765) remains indispensable, but just as revelatory are Annie Fischer's performances (available singly on Hungaroton Classics). A splendid, inexpensive set is the one by Vladimir Ashkenazy (London 425590).
Masses -- The Mass in C and the towering Missa Solemnis are available together in a budget-priced set (EMI CZ5762693), beautifully performed by Carlo Maria Giulini and several distinguished soloists.
Fidelio -- Beethoven's only opera is excitingly performed by conductor Lorin Maazel, with a cast that includes Birgit Nilsson and James McCracken, and inexpensively priced on London 448104).
Violin Sonatas -- The performances of violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin have never been surpassed (Philips 412570).
Cello Sonatas -- The versions by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter are the most monumental and most thrilling ever recorded (Philips 442565).
Piano Trios -- Almost 30 years after they were recorded, the versions of pianist Eugene Istomin, violinist Isaac Stern and cellist Leonard Rose (Sony Classical SM2K 64510 and SM2K 64513) remain the pick of the field.
Symphonies -- The best (and the cheapest) of conductor Herbert von Karajan's several sets with the Berlin Philharmonic was his 1963 recording on Deutsche Grammophon (DG 429036).
Pub Date: 10/10/98