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Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

–Ludwig van Beethoven

Two hundred fifty years ago today, Ludwig van Beethoven was likely born.

We don’t know if this is his actual birthdate. All we can surmise is that he was likely born on this date because he is known, by church records, to have been baptized on December 17, 1770, and it was common practice in his time for infants to be baptized the day after their birth.

I’m not done with Beethoven yet, not by a longshot! I’ll be celebrating his life and music for the rest of this month, right up until December 31. But for now, here are some things that others have written about him.

Harold Schonberg, from his book THE LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS:

The difference between Beethoven and all other musicians before him–aside from things like genius and unparalleled force–was that Beethoven looked upon himself as an artist. Where Mozart moved in the periphery of the aristocratic world, anxiously knocking but never really admitted, Beethoven, who was only fourteen years Mozart’s junior, kicked open the doors, stormed in, and made himself at home. He was an artist, a creator, and as such superior in his own mind to kings and nobles.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven”:

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Schonberg:

Beethoven had decidedly revolutionary notions about society, and Romantic notions about music. “What is in my heart must come out and so I write it down,” he told his pupil Carl Czarny. Mozart would never have said a thing like this, nor Haydn, nor Bach. The word “artist” never occurs in Mozart’s letters. He and the composers before him were skilled craftsmen who supplied a commodity, and the notion of art or writing for posterity did not enter into their thinking. But Beethoven’s letters and observations are full of words like “art”, “artist”, and “artistry”. He was of a special breed and he knew it. He also knew that he was writing for eternity. And he had what poor Mozart lacked–a powerful personality that awed all who came in contact with him. “Never have I met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity,” Goethe wrote, “such vitality and great-heartedness. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt to the world and its ways.” Little did Goethe understand Beethoven. With Beethoven, it was not a matter of adapting himself to the world and its ways. As with Wagner later on, it was a matter of the world adapting its ways to him.

Jan Swafford, from THE VINTAGE GUIDE TO CLASSICAL MUSIC:

Above the proscenium in Boston’s Symphony Hall, one name rests in a marble medallion, presiding over the music like a resident demigod: Beethoven. In many concert halls around the world that design is repeated in one form or another. The reason for this single-minded iconography is that most of these halls were built in the nineteenth century, when Beethoven was the unquestioned sovereign of composers, seeming to epitomize all music. Common opinion in this century has inherited that attitude.

Albert Einstein:

It would be possible to describe absolutely everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Victor Hugo:

[In Beethoven’s music] the dreamer will recognize his dreams, the sailor his storms, and the wolf his forests.

Hector Berlioz:

In the life of an artist thunderclaps sometimes follow each other in quick succession as in great storms, when the clouds, charged with electricity, seem to bounce lightning around and blow up a hurricane.

I had just had a double vision of Shakespeare and Weber, when immediately on another point of the horizon I saw the immense figure of Beethoven arise. The shock I received was almost comparable to that from Shakespeare. He opened up a new world in music, just as the poet had unveiled to me a new universe in poetry.

Leonard Bernstein in THE JOY OF MUSIC:

Many, many composers have been able to write heavenly tunes and respectable fugues. Some composers can orchestrate the C-major scale so that it sounds like a masterpiece, or fool with notes so that a harmonic novelty is achieved. But that is all mere dust–nothing compared to the magic ingredient sought by them all: the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be. Beethoven had this gift in a degree that leaves them all panting in the rear guard. When really did it–as in the Funeral March of the Eroica–he produced an entity that always seems to me to have been previously written in Heaven, and then merely dictated to him. Not that the dictation was easily achieved. We know what agonies he paid for listening to the divine orders. But the reward is great. There is a special space carved out in the cosmos into which this movement just fits, predetermined and perfect…Form is only an empty word, a shell, without this gift of inevitability; a composer can write a string of perfectly molded sonata-allegro movements, with every rule obeyed, and still suffer from bad form. Beethoven broke all the rules, and turned out pieces of breathtaking rightness. Rightness–that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen in that instant, in that context, then chances are you’re listening to Beethoven. Melodies, fugues, rhythms–leave them to the Tchaikovskys and Hindemiths and Ravels. Our boy has the real goods the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.

Here is what might well be the most famous piece of classical music ever written. Try and listen to it anew, if you can: not just to the thundering opening that is almost a cliche now, but to the varying moods of the slow movement, and the scintillating way the scherzo builds into the soaring chords that dispel the clouds and return us from the land of C-minor to that of C-major. There’s a reason that the Fifth Symphony is one of classical music’s foundational stones. If Beethoven had written nothing else in his life but this symphony, his place would be ensured.

Thankfully, he wrote so much more than this.

Happy Birthday, Ludwig van Beethoven! Your music endures, and thus, so do you.

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 On the eve of what is likely Beethoven’s two-hundred fiftieth birthday, one might ask, “Why do we still listen to him? Why is this music still potent? Why is it still relevant?”

More tomorrow and for the rest of the month, but…this is why. All it takes is being willing to listen, and to go where the music takes you, and Beethoven does all the rest.

Thanks to Sheila O’Malley, who shared this with me over on her blog.

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 There’s something about the work that results from a genius deciding to just…go on autopilot for a bit. Beethoven found himself in 1813 being requested by a friend to write a piece of music for an automated music device, basically a wind-up machine with wind instruments and such, not unlike a player piano but a bit more complicated. The gizmo was called a panharmonicon, and I wouldn’t mind hearing what one of these sounds like. Apparently Beethoven wrote a piece too large for the actual machine, so he expanded it further for full orchestra with a lot of extra percussion and brass, and then he performed it at a concert benefitting surviving soldiers of the Battle of Hanau. The work is a musical depiction of Wellington’s defeat of Joseph Bonaparte, and as such it is simply called Wellington’s Victory.

The music starts with snare drums, playing softly and getting louder, as if to suggest the marching infantry. Then…well, it’s not really a piece on describes or analyzes. It’s a series of popular martial tunes, some of which are still familiar to this day. There is also a sequence of actual “battle” music, complete with muskets. The whole thing is just…well, it’s a fun listen. It really is. It is also impossible to take seriously. There is no sense at all that Beethoven put any serious effort into this piece whatsoever. He needed a piece that could be played by a machine, so he wrote a mechanistic potboiler. And yet…well, it’s Beethoven. When a towering genius does something that for them is no real effort whatsoever, they still have a habit of turning out something of interest.

And Beethoven himself knew this, because when the thing was criticized, he made a rather pointed retort: “What I shit is better than anything you could think up.” Ahhh, Beethoven. Ever the social charmer, even when he was right.

Here’s Wellington’s Victory. The thing that staggers my mind about this piece is that it was programmed on the exact same program as his genuine masterpiece, his Symphony No. 7. One of the enduring masterworks of not just music, but of all Western art…and a trifle commemorating a battle no one much remembers. It’s the kind of thing that makes you remember that Abraham Lincoln’s little speech at Gettysburg wasn’t actually the headlining event that day; that was a two-hour droning oration that Lincoln followed with ten sentences that endured into history.

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 Ahhh, the numbering of the works of the classical masters! If you’re old enough, you may well remember owning an LP of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (From the New World), but it would have been labeled as his Symphony No. 5, before scholars renumbered it. Likewise, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major was actually the second piano concerto he wrote, after the one that would later be published as the Second Concerto. (There had also been an unpublished student work, but we don’t need to consider that one here.) Beethoven chose to publish this concerto first, so the numbering reflects not the compositional order but the publishing order.

Classical music can be confusing.

So let’s listen to both concertos, No. 1 in C Major, and No. 2 in B-flat Major.

Both of these works reflect the youthful classicism of Beethoven’s early period. In each of these concertos you hear the strong influences of Mozart (who was already gone) and Haydn (who was not). But in each you do catch glimpses of the more expansive Beethoven to come, the Beethoven who would take classical forms and stretch them to unprecedented lengths. More important than that, though, is that in each work you hear Beethoven’s humor and musical wit, which are characteristics not always called to mind when considering this composer. Of particular note for me in a Beethoven concerto is the third movement, the rondo, when Beethoven always seems to have a great deal of fun with the rhythms, almost making the listener wonder, at first, where the bar line and the beat even are. There’s a feeling of syncopation even where there’s no technical syncopation happening at all.

In the first performance I am featuring here, of the Piano Concerto No. 1, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, is joined by pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, who is a wonderful artist I’ve just discovered this year. She plays with technical control that is amazing to behold, and she’s also one of those pianists who does put on a bit of a show as she plays. (Her hair would be quite the distraction if she were playing from the score as opposed to memory.) But note also how attentive she is when she goes tacit and the orchestra picks up the main thrust of the music. Buniatishvili performs truly as a partner with the orchestra and with Maestro Mehta, and it’s a fantastic performance.

In the second performance, the Piano Concerto No. 2 is played by soloist Martha Argerich and conductor Daniel Barenboim, leading the West-East Divan Orchestra. Some years ago I listened to the entire cycle of the Beethoven symphonies that Barenboim and this orchestra performed at the BBC Proms, and this combination of musicians has, to my ear, a particularly special touch with Beethoven. Argerich is, of course, an absolutely brilliant musician of Argentine and Swiss descent, and she brings here the weight of experience and years of musical training and insight to her performance of the Second Concerto. Which was really the first…but we won’t go into that again.

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 For most casual listeners, the words “Beethoven” and “sonata” almost always indicate one of the sonatas for solo piano, and with good reason; the piano sonatas comprise some of the greatest writing for piano in music history, and they are important listening for anyone. And if you happened to be a piano student of any skill, likewise your piano teacher eventually had you work on one of Beethoven’s sonatas.

However, Beethoven didn’t just write sonatas for piano alone. He also wrote sonatas for solo violin and piano, and for solo cello and piano.

Before turning to a specific sonata, it’s interesting to look at the term itself. Sonata is an Italian term, which differentiates an intrumental work to be played rather than a vocal work to be sung (a cantata). Over time, especially in the Classical era when forms began to settle in to certain sets of expectations, a sonata became somewhat standardized as a large-scale work of three movements, which in turn were usually in a standardized sequence: an allegro which used a form in which a single melody (or maybe two) were stated, then developed, before being played again one final time before ending; a middle movement which was usually in a slower tempo; and a fast finale, often much faster than the first movement, and often in a Rondo form. The structure of the first movement–intro, theme, development, recapitulation, coda–became so entrenched that it in itself became known as sonata, or sonata-allegro, form. So important did sonata-allegro form become that it became the almost universal form in first movements of symphonies.

Of course, the history of the symphony is as complicated as that of the sonata, and as Classicism gave way to Romanticism and then to Modernism, adherences to standard forms came and went and came again. Even Beethoven was not always locked into the expected forms: he would start a three-movement piano sonata with a slow movement (the “Moonlight”), or he would write two- or four-movement sonatas. It is best, when thinking about musical forms and definitions of musical terms, that one remember the wise words of Captain Hector Barbossa of Pirates of the Caribbean fame: “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

And when you’re a towering genius like Beethoven, who is literally shaping the course of music history for centuries to come, well then…the guidelines are there to be ignored at will. 

After all that, let’s turn to Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 5 in D Major, which follows all the usual rules and adheres to the usual structure. Beethoven wrote this sonata at the same time as the one preceding it, the Sonata No. 4, in 1815 when his deafness was reaching its endpoint. He was entering what historians have called his “third period”, which is when his most introspective and profound music seems to have resulted.

This sonata is apparently less frequently performed than the Sonata No. 3 (which as of this writing I have not heard), which I find interesting. The Fifth Sonata begins with a simple declarative statement by the piano, which sounds twice, seeming to hesitate after each sounding, before taking off into the initial allegro. The movement then propels through its formal demands before drawing to a close before the listener really expects. The second movement puts the cello’s lyrical strengths on display, before a final movement that is fugal in nature. When the entire work ends, it is with a feeling of reflective abstraction as Beethoven, only left with his inner ear at this point, is transcribing sounds he can only imagine.

As much as I love the violin as a solo instrument, the cello is not to be slighted in its uses. The technical demands of the instrument are entirely different from those of the violin (which Beethoven had already mastered). Playing the cello has its own physical demands, and the instrument’s voice resides in a much lower register, which means that it has to be treated differently than the violin if it is to be heard in full partnership with its accompanying instrument. Beethoven clearly understood the cello as well as he did the violin, judging by the results in this sonata.

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