by Jan Meyerowitz [Mr. Meyerowitz, composer and lecturer, was last represented in these pages with How Seriously Can We Take Rossini's Serious Operas?, November 1968. ]
THIS QUESTION is not necessarily irreverent if it is asked in the sense of Goethe's request that we must earn the right to call our inheritance our possession-by making it alive and by rebuilding it in our mind.
It is not primarily this noble purpose, however, that suggests our present inquiry. Beethoven's glory has not been immune against the trend toward tearing down the traditional image of great men. This anti-personality movement stems partly from the conviction that many of the great figures of the past-whether political or intellectual-have not exactly proven to be a blessing to mankind. The most articulate Anti-Great-Man Crusade was led by Bert Brecht, who opposed them in principle because "they exude too much sweat" and because "they are too miserable to just sit there quietly in the company of a woman." In the gallery of "Immortals" Beethoven has been placed in the special category of "Heroes," of "Supermen," and therefore could not escape being challenged today. When Beethoven was alive, many musicians and music lovers, especially women, felt a spontaneous recognition of the composer's magnitude (his elder colleague Ignaz Pleyel went as far as to kiss Beethoven's hands). For a brief period and for the wrong reasons, Beethoven enjoyed a short span of popularity in 1813 after the Napoleonic wars; but the living artist tends to get in the way of his work, especially if he is a very major figure. Beethoven was furthermore a difficult, fierce man-according to Prince Metternich, he was "downright impossible "; Cherubini labeled him a "rude boor." It is actually astounding that Beethoven got along as well as he did; the remarkable tolerance of some members of the aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the uncouth extravagances of talented men has not been lauded as much as it deserves.
After Beethoven's death, sketches of the Missa Sole/mils brought only pennies and provoked no bidding at the public auction of the master's belongings, but Beethoven's reputation soon grew to taboo proportions. The famous critic, Ludwig Rellstab, declared that Beethoven was a major figure of world history.
Thanks to men like Rossini ( "Not I, he is the greatest composer of our age "), Moscheles, Mendelssohn, the rabidly adoring Berlioz, and Liszt (who spoke of Beethoven's "gigantic brain "), the cult spread internationally. Beethoven's rank among musicians became as secure as that of Jupiter among the gods.
We read the official expression of this consensus in the famous History of Music by Emil Naumann: "Beethoven is the most Excellent among the Un-excellables." The German Nobel laureate, Paul Heyse, apotheosized Beethoven with these words: Thanks for the golden treasure, your Legacy! My spirit is all vertigo, all tremor before you, O venerable Superman who is too high even for our love.... The opinion of the French was expressed as early as 1828 in Beethoven's obituary in the Journal des Débuts: "Beethoven unites in his inspiration all the existing musical powers." The famous heretic Abbé Lamennais wrote in his most widely read Philosophical Sketches that "out of Beethoven's symphonies we can hear the voice of creation itself." Negative criticism was limited to some (supposedly) minor works or some very special aspects of Beethoven's art.
Eduard Hanslick earned his undeserved reputation as a crank as much by his few reservations about Beethoven's works as by his anti-Wagnerian stand (he disliked Christ on the Mount of Olives; he criticized--ununderstandably-the two finale of Fidelio; and he argued--convincingly--that the title "Eroica" was not appropriate for the Third Symphony). A real danger to Beethoven's supremacy could have been the monotheistic fanaticism of the admirers and disciples of Wagner, had not Wagner himself given Beethoven the highest place in his personal Parnassus, and proved his sincerity by exploring Beethoven's most difficult works: Wagner must be credited with teaching the world that the Ninth Symphony is not a fearsome eccentricity but an attractive, edifying repertory piece. The first effective challenge to the master's monarchic position was made outside Germany: the rather sad credit for this first major irreverence goes to Debussy, who called Beethoven "le vieux sourd" (the deaf old man). This remark had nationalistic as well as "aesthetic" overtones and did not go unheeded.
Many French-oriented musicians aligned with Debussy. Even today we see its reflection in Stravinsky's insensitive remarks about Beethoven. I once heard the Belgian composer Jean Absil publicly declare that Beethoven was "quite rhetorical most of the time" and therefore "certainly not the ideal composer for the Latin taste." Yet these challenges were not more than a few private growls. Even a great Debussian like Alfredo Casella wrote in 1936 that he remembered Busoni playing the C minor Concerto by Mozart and that "it sounded almost as great as a composition by Beethoven." The extremist movements of the right and the left have generally annexed Beethoven as one of their prophets. In Nazi Germany, Beethoven was to the concert hall what Wagner was to the theater. The Party newspaper Völkische Beobachter stated in December 1934: "Beethoven is now for us a fortification against the danger that music would become again (as it was before 1933, in the Kurt Weill-Alban Berg era) an empty play of sounds, a sport [sic] of dissonances, an exercise in harmonic obscenity, and a chaos of form." But we may speculate that a victorious war would have changed this attitude.
Some ominous remarks by the ultra-racist Alfred Rosenberg indicate this rather clearly: one could not be too sure about the composer's origins; his foreign ancestors could not be traced too far back. The official philosopher of the Party wrote this staggering sentence: "We witness the triumph of the Germanic spiritual essence in a man who was corroded by uncanny racial forces of the lowest human level that come to the surface here and there like those grotesque barbarous gargoyles on a Gothic cathedral." The preferences of extreme rightist movements go to romantic art with inflated nationalistic attitudes. It is probable that a victorious Nazi state would have degraded Beethoven for his "outlandish" individuality and his unequivocally democratic attitude.
The movements of the left saw in Beethoven a partisan, but this was a purely political seal of approval based on superficial reasoning. The most telling and impressive fact in Beethoven's posthumous political career is that performances of his opera Fidelio are "discouraged" both in rightist and leftist authoritarian countries.
We can gather from the foregoing that our question implies two considerations: the validity of the romantic belief that Beethoven is the greatest composer of all times and-for those who will not admit that there is a Greatest Composer-the discussion of Beethoven's caliber in his own realm and time.
The idea of The Greatest Composer is often dismissed as a purely subjective whim, but by examining one's conscience and thought it is perfectly possible to distinguish between such a whim and a higher conviction. This writer will argue that Beethoven is objectively the greatest creative musician of all times.
The purpose of music is the ideal spiritual organization of time (that empty flow of empty moments into an empty infinity, so burdensome to the mind) into an event of meaningful beauty, into an artistic experience. No other creative work can do this as richly or as meaningfully as music. No other artistic endeavor (such as poetry) has the same impact on time or can give time the absolutely concrete form music can create. And there is reason to believe that no other composer has ever fulfilled this task as well as Beethoven, for he is the master not only of musical characterization, but of the purely musical creation of definite shapes of sculptural clarity. Beethoven's immense capacity for molding musical materials into clear musical imagery is easily discernible in his few program pieces. These "programs" are executed with a perfect balance between the poetic idea and the musical form: the first movement of the Sonata Les Adieux is a very sensitive and humorous union of the story (the stagecoach leaves . . . disappears . . . reappears . . . there is the excited waving of arms, possibly handkerchiefs ... and then the stagecoach disappears for good) with a cunningly conceived sonata form. But far more impressive than this fusion of action and musical design is the clarity, the evidence of the multiform invention found in all of Beethoven's music. The public has tried to over-explain the always perfectly self-explanatory musical content with apocryphal titles. We may wistfully accept the spurious names given to some Chopin etudes or some Mendelssohn pieces, but in the case of the Moonlight Sonata or the Appassionata, these surnames seem blasphemous. The "Moonlight" movement is infinitely more than a mood piece and "Appassionata" is a vague, sentimental title for the work.
Only our musical imagination can grasp the character and the meaning of this music. Even the strangest pieces strike us as completely clear in their characterizing intentions: the second and the last movement of the Eighth Symphony, the mad conclusion of the Scherzo of Sonata Opus 106, and the majestic lunacy of the toccata that introduces the finale of the same work. Beethoven, the greatest musical sculptor, has chiseled out of his musical materials hundreds of tonal images that leave no doubt about their unequivocal significance.
In this power of shaping music into characteristic imagery, Beethoven is unexcelled. Although Mozart--of a more Italian, nonexpressionistic musicality-created the most sensitive, most flexible, most intelligent and subtle inflections in the general musical language of his time (this capacity is so prodigious that it appears to many as the peak of all artistic creativity), he did not create the kind of rugged, sharp distinctiveness we admire in Beethoven.
The third contender for the highest place in music is J. S. Bach, Beethoven's equal in at least one respect: the shaping of themes. We have only to examine the forty-eight subjects of the fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier: each one has in its few notes a strikingly distinct musical physiognomy. But the developmental characteristic of Bach's time is fundamentally different. Although Bach's music has touches of great dramatic intensity and even traits of sharp theatricality, the growth of the pieces from the theme is like the growth of a plant: the texture sprouts from a small seedling of great generating power, it shoots up, sprawls, and expands until the inner impact fades and the possibility of further variation and development runs out (or-to be just a little blasphemous-until Anna Magdalena calls for supper). Except for the obvious beginnings and some emphatic endings, there are only very general, if not vague, structural characteristics with which a musical passage must be endowed. But even with very little training we can place any short quotation from a Beethoven movement in the exact spot where it belongs in the piece, where it fulfills a very definite function in the whole structure. You can recognize whether it is a first or a second theme, an episode, a transition or a re-transition, a coda, a beginning, a climax, the end of a development, etc. Each passage, each motif is so clearly devised for its very special, exclusive function that we can place it in its correct spot in a composition we do not even know! We can compare Bach's music to flora, Beethoven's music to fauna. The growth of Bach's music (except in simple songs and arias) is, like that of a vine, only partly controllable: its parts actually flee from the root and branch out, of their own volition; in terms of their life-giving source they arc-in a deeper sense--lost. Or, to change the analogy, its development is comparable to the White Queen's addition: "One and one and one ..."-not the attaining of a final, ideal, rounded, preconceived form (although this, to be sure, might not be the native task of music). Beethoven's compositions have the properties of a flesh-and-blood organism, all parts of which are differentiated as to their form, function, dignity, and place and are related to the "inner heart" (not to the immovable root they leave behind them). You can cut a piece from a Bach work and "put it into a vase." It will be a pleasant, living branch and still carry the image of the entire organism. If you cut a piece from a Beethoven movement, it is as if you have cut an ear, a leg, or the nose from an animal: it is mutilation, horror-and who does not understand this has never understood anything about Beethoven. (And who thinks that this paragraph is a derogation of Bach has not read it thoughtfully but emotionally.) Bach's music is spun, woven; Beethoven's music is constructed. This difference is, of course, one of historical evolution: the baroque masters did not conceive the art of integrating contrasting elements into one musical form, an ideal which the "classics" achieved. The quite impossible question raises itself: what would Bach have done in Beethoven's time? We are not ready for such a rash speculation.
Mozart's and Haydn's sonatas and symphonies are as beautifully organized as Beethoven's, but they are infinitely less pronounced as dramas-that is why they seem to be more "beautiful," more "purely musical," so completely without rhetoric. The difference between the earlier masters and the latter is especially noticeable in the middle sections of their sonata movements: Mozart and Haydn-with vigorous drive and infinite imagination-will usually expand and expound the meaning, the characteristic content, the qualities of their themes (this can be studied, for instance, in the development of the first movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony where all the intervals, rhythms, phrasings, inflections of one of the themes are demonstrated in emphatic fragmentation). In a Beethoven development more is done: the themes grow beyond their original stature--they will create a plot, a struggle; they will show higher aspirations; great and terrible things will happen to them. The most striking study of Beethoven's power of development can be made by following the course and destiny of one theme throughout a movement. No score-reading, no special knowledge is needed for this adventurous endeavor. The composer's capacity to say the strongest, the weirdest, even the most complicated things in such simple terms that even the "man in the gallery" can comprehend, is one of the reasons Beethoven occupies his supreme position.
In the Eroica the principal theme of the first movement consists of eight tones that spell out a chord broken into a melodic figuration. There is no fixed ending; in its flow the theme seems to create the following ideas, the other dramatis personae. The shape of the theme changes from commanding firmness to searching unrest, then to an angular figure.
The ending of the first section is stunning: the theme undergoes a shrinking process; the solid outline becomes a twisted discordant design-then it shrivels to an uncanny crawl in half steps. There are innumerable transformations of the theme in the further course of the movement, especially in the suspenseful anticipation of its return as "recapitulation" which does not come as a formal repeat but as a rebirth after a tremendous, spasmodic pregnancy.
Another example, chosen at random, is the second theme of the finale of Sonata Opus 27, No. 2, which is usually played as an agitated but lovely melody.
In reality it is a fearsome motif: a melody blocked from its flight and expansion by an inexorable top note that holds a lid of stone over the imprisoned soul of the melody. Twice during the piece the captive energy succeeds in breaking that obstacle: the first time (in the development), it sinks, exhausted, into dark regions; the second time, near the end, it does take flight after the breakthrough, only to find another obstacle, another lid of stone above the one it crushed. There it is shattered and never heard again. (One may think I am indulging in a kind of pseudo-poetry, but I have actually described only purely technical features, only purely musical images.) More difficult to grasp is Beethoven's energetic, Herculean concept of the theme-and-variations form. While, in general, these compositions are more like a picture gallery than like an organic work of art, the master can give the sequence of variations such coherence that the work becomes a majestic drama, a new and unique musical form. The most overwhelming example is the second movement of the last piano sonata. The most opposed regions of thought alternate in perfect order and serenity; the words of the German poet August von Platen are realized: "You move the heaviest masses with a turn of the hand." "The most violent battle that resolves itself into beautiful concord. It is the discordant concord of creation, the perfect image of the world that rolls on carrying the turbulent multitude of innumerable creatures, but maintains itself and endures through perpetual destruction." Thus Schopenhauer describes Beethoven's symphonies. Beethoven never fails in matching the exigencies of his task with his inspiration; the whole gamut of musical form and expression is at his absolute command. It is therefore an untenable notion (held by Stravinsky, for one) that Beethoven "is not a melodist." Beethoven creates melodies, even cantabiles-in their dramatically right and proper context-and most of them are supremely beautiful. The cantabile is only one form of expression in the many musical forms that go into the building of a great work. Beethoven chooses sovereignly and freely among them to create these "perfect images of the world." How do the later composers fare when compared to Beethoven? What about that "Tenth Symphony by Beethoven," the First by Brahms? That "successor" may deserve all the praise in the world except this designation.
The romantic style is concerned with moods, with the author's own person, with "ideas," and, in spite of its often painful egocentric intensity, it is un-dramatic, un-dialectic in its essence. Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, that masterpiece of evocation with its brilliant sonata-like arrangement, can be grasped by us after a few pages, if not after a few measures: in a deeper sense, the piece is then already over, and the mood, the idea, the locale, the landscape, the humidity are already evoked. But one could evoke the mood, the idea, the locale, the landscape in the mind ... and skip the piece.
Even the hardworking, intense Brahms cannot recreate "that most violent battle, that perfect image of the world "; the drama, the events in this later music are subjective and small-private dolors, whims, ironies, changes of atmosphere, of light.
Some Beethovenian features, though, have remained alive in later masters. Berlioz has a fine, almost thievish ear for Beethoven's colors and phrases and they enrich his programmatic Symphonie fantastique with authentic accents. Contemporaries praised Meyerbeer for his successful emulation of Beethoven (others, like Schumann, were scandalized by this idea). Meyerbeer understood better than anybody else in his time the art of integrating contrasts into a large dramatic frame; he may have made a "technique" out of this, but, thanks to his abilities, he created the operatic style of the nineteenth century; through him some powerful remnants of Beethoven's achievements live on in Donizetti, Verdi.
Wagner. In the last-named we encounter this secondhand influence and also a direct inheritance: Wagner's "infinite melody" draws its vitality from the impressive art of thematic transformation. It closely follows poetic and psychological intentions rather than genuinely musical designs, but there is enough of the classic master's spirit to overcome the dangers of that extramusical method. The dissolution of the horn call in Tristan, the mutation of the Rheingold motif into the motif of the Gibichungen in Götterdämmerung--these wondrous inspirations and skills are of the school of Beethoven.
It has not been pleasant to speak roughly about other beloved composers; but this is the unavoidable result of a view from the heights where Beethoven dwells. He made more out of music than it may have been destined to be. It was the immense spiritual and intellectual struggle that went into his work that earned Beethoven the title of "Hero." Many readers will continue to think that the idea of a man who represents the peak of music history is a Spenglerian fiction; they will prefer the more humane relativistic concept that will consider each period capable of its own perfection and its own greatness. This is no place for philosophical acrobacy to reconcile the two concepts (which is possible). My task was to demonstrate that we do by no means overestimate Beethoven. In any case, the notion of his being the Supreme Composer may have been ... a good working hypothesis.
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( High Fidelity magazine)
Also see:
Beethoven on Records—Part I: Fidelio and the Songs
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR -- Solti in Chicago