So Beethoven is 200! He will be soon, at any rate. He was born December 16, 1770 and survived until March 26, 1827, which means that in seven years we will have another Beethoven milepost, the sesquicentennial of his death. (The occasion of the centennial in 1927 was the beginning of Beethoven recordings.) With so much number magic on hand, the old curmudgeon is likely to have a lot of his music played between now and 1977. And yet the continuing road to fame--which must be renewed for every generation of listeners-will not be easy. Beethoven is in transition (if we may speak relatively, as though he were moving away from us) ; what will the younger generations make of this rough, exalted, obstinate early Romantic? It is easy to say that Beethoven is eternal, his music imperishable. It's been said for a long time. But in these days of larger crisis, is music itself as we know it in any sense imperishable? More likely, we feel, it hangs by a musical thread. We are merely repeating the comfortable language of the nineteenth century and the eighteenth before it when we speak of "eternal" art. The ages of Reason and Science were confident that the world's (i.e. man's) problems were at last near solution and what man had wrought well nobody was likely to tear down unless for a very good reason. Tear down Beethoven? Things then moved onward and upward, each day's new miracles routinely surpassing those of the day before, just as expected. Of course Beethoven would live forever, in an ever more enlightened future.
After all, Beethoven was the man who freed music, as one writer, Robert Haven Schauffler, put it for his generation. Freed it from what? Well, from tyranny. Tyranny, first ( they always said) in the old aristocratic world, where musicians had been mere servants in livery. And yet Haydn (in gorgeous livery) lived to a mellow old age and world fame as a servant of that same appreciative aristocracy, which was knowledgeable in music as few groups have been since.
Some of its members voluntarily contributed to Beethoven's upkeep. Beethoven's own freedom, too, was scarcely better than wretched, to put it mildly. Things are not as simple as they used to seem in the century of utter confidence.
Nor did Beethoven free music from the supposed rigid restraints of the older Mozart-Haydn music, a thought that was dinned into me in my musical youth and is still taught today in Music Appreciation classes. On the contrary, he was formed and disciplined by that very admirable school of composition and now is considered a part of it-the Viennese Classic school.
Moreover, in the face of freedom the key to Beethoven's greatness lay in sheer musical self-discipline, a regard for shape and form and musical logic that knew no bounds in terms of man-hours of self-imposed work.
He was, to be sure, the first big popular Romantic composer and he did free music from one set of expressive conventions simply by indicating another and more currently relevant set in his music, more forceful in sound, more outward and literal in emotion, more democratic in that it was a language newly easy for the masses to understand. But this was an updating, not a kind of freedom! Mozart and Haydn were unaware of the "restraints" from which, said the nineteenth century, Beethoven had freed music. Freedom, as we ought to know by now, is only a higher state of self discipline.
Beethoven's music has a different importance for us. His sound structure expresses above all the sense of his own times--and not so very differently from our own "multi media" expressions today.
It was the dynamic new age of industry and machinery, the time of revolutionary democracy, the downfall of kings and the rising of the people. William Blake's "dark satanic mills" sprawled hideously on the landscape, the beginnings of modern industrial expansion. For the first time in 700 years Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London turned dark, smudged with soot. Coal, steam, dirt and sweat began their rule in the midst of the glorious bloody wars of Napoleon, old-style wars, yet fought on a frightening new scale of enormity, the first global conflict. After centuries, European man was exploding like a supernova and the excitement was felt in every aspect of life.
Beethoven "free" of all this? Of course not. The opposite.
The railroads were only a few short years ahead. Already in Beethoven we sense their kind of power; it was, so to speak, in the air and we may hear it loudly in his driving orchestral momentum. Not literally, of course. Even more importantly, though, for being such an accurate expression of the ground-feeling of that time, the sense of enormous things to come. And how like Napoleon's Arche de Triomphe in Paris is the great arch of the Eroica Symphony, enormous beyond precedent yet so ineffably classical in structure! We can forgive those who followed Beethoven for their wishful misinterpretations of him-they were speaking for themselves and he was their embodiment. Bigger and better! That was the cry. Expand, expand! Down with restraints and formalities, on to the wild blue yonder. Freedom from everything! But if other composers, taking up Beethoven's new and exciting musical language, used much less discipline and inner shaping than he himself did, it was not Beethoven's doing. His was the freedom of discipline--exactly the same sort that brought the industrial age forward so astoundingly in the next hundred years. Without the heady concept of freedom, it would not have happened.
Today, of course, we still expand, and we talk Progress with every breath. But how differently. We are afraid to believe ourselves, beyond the day after tomorrow. That dazzling explosion of future glory that the nineteenth century anticipated with such confidence is no longer in our future. We're expecting a more dire explosion and we feel helpless before it. The promised land is no longer achieved and then regularly achieved again, except maybe, on the moon.
In art, in music, we are bifurcated, the two halves expressing us equally.
One part blasts away at the old institutions, as they must be blasted at if we are ever to pull out and away: pop art, electronic music, aleatoric (chance) sound configurations, the Moog and the RCA Synthesizer. What is music? Who knows any more; but we'll find out for ourselves even if we must invent our own new music.
The other half of us finds blessings in musical hindsight--and why not? If people in the past did an enviably good job, should we ignore them? And so we revive old music (95 per cent of it not from the Romantic nineteenth century) and restore such obsolete mechanisms as the Baroque oboe, ancestor of the "modern" oboe. Perverse, but logical. A rediscovery of former real and solid human values, in our time of need. It's worth learning to play the Baroque oboe, if only to experience the feeling of how it was, back in that golden age of confidence.
It's all in the human family, and that family is in a bad way right now.
So Beethoven, writing in the bouyant first enthusiasms of an age now rushing to ruin (relatively, at least--it'll last awhile yet) is no longer an easy composer to understand and may well become much more difficult. Not only in his way of thinking, so unlike ours, but because his very language is increasingly unfamiliar among the young, who go easily for Bartok, Mahler, Stravinsky, Rock, or the massive Baroque of Vivaldi and Telemann.
In Beethoven's day, Bach was at his lowest ebb. Will Beethoven, perhaps, have to ebb too, before we rediscover his ebullient message of hope? Maybe another 50 years will help. How about his 250th for Rediscovery Day. That would be December 16, 2020, a good deal less than a lifetime away.
Less than Beethoven's own. About then, I expect, we'll really be needing Beethoven, perhaps to herald the dawn of planetary expansion. Good luck! is all I can say. He'll need it and so will we.
(adapted from: Audio magazine, Mar. 1970)
Also see:
Remasters of Living Stereo (Aug. 1993)
How to read an orchestral score (Dec. 1972)
Getting Hooked on Chamber Music (Apr. 1970)
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