Beethoven's Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas 9780226453910

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b e e t h o v e n’s s ymphonies

b e e t h o v e n’s s ymphonies Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas

martin geck Translated by Stewart Spencer The University of C hicago Press

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C hicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45388-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45391-0 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226453910.001.0001 German Edition: Martin Geck, Die Sinfonien Beethovens. Neun Wege zum Ideenkunstwerk, Hildesheim 2015 © Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2015, Germany The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Geck, Martin, author. | Spencer, Stewart, translator. | Translation of Geck, Martin. Sinfonien Beethovens. Title: Beethoven’s symphonies : nine approaches to art and ideas / Martin Geck ; translated by Stewart Spencer. Other titles: Sinfonien Beethovens. English Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016041562 | isbn 9780226453880 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226453910 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827. Symphonies. | Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Criticism and interpretation. | Symphony—19th century. Classification: lcc ml410.b42 g4413 2017 | ddc 784.2/184092—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041562 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Beethoven: Symphonist par Excellence

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Napoleon Bonaparte Orchestral Weight Delusions of Virility Structure Jean Paul’s “Cloven Hoof ” Nine Symphonies Prolegomenon

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On Idle Speculations From Portentous Prologues to Ebullient Finales On Elemental Beginnings On Archetypal Images On Memorable Fugato Passages On Striking Dissonances

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On “False ” Entries On the Escapades of the Timpani On Highly Expressive Foreshortenings On Beethoven’s Fondness for the Eroica On Crossing a Threshold The Symphonies

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Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica) Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral) Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 Notes • 155 Bibliography • 173 Index • 187

59 68 77 89 95 104 114 125 134

Histrion véridique, je le fus de moi-même! de celui que nul n’atteint en soi, excepté à des moments de foudre et alors on l’expie de sa durée, comme déjà. (I was the real actor playing myself! playing a truth that no one reaches in himself, except in moments of lightning and then one expiates them for their duration, as I have.) Stéphane Mallarmé Villiers de l’Isle-Adam1

To keep the whole in view . . .

Beethoven: Symphonist par Excellence Flashes of lightning are a ubiquitous feature of Beethoven’s symphonies, throwing light on something that the composer merely suspected he was carrying around within him but which then found forceful and eruptive expression in his music. The years between 1800 and 1824 are not viewed as a separate or special period by historians, and yet they frame an exceptional age in music, for they encapsulate a world of ideas that Beethoven succeeded in conjuring up in his symphonies not only for himself but for others, too. Perhaps he himself was already thinking on a historical scale when in his late twenties he introduced his First Symphony to the world in April 1800, marking the start of a new century and prompting Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl to strike a rhapsodic note in his 1838 narrative Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener (The music festival; or, The Beethovenians), which describes a particularly memorable passage in the opening movement of the Eroica (bars 248–83) as “thirty-six bars of pure nineteenth century.” The piano

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score alone made it impossible for students “even to suspect the power of this passage. [ . . . ] But what is instrumental music!”2 Beethoven’s First Symphony marks the beginning of a new period in the history of the symphony and arguably also in the history of classical music in general. It will be worth our while, therefore, to examine the background to this radical upheaval within the world of music. Within this context, two currents are of particular interest for our understanding of Beethoven’s art. Historians traditionally see them as a succession of two distinct periods, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And yet— here as elsewhere— these periods overlap rather than moving from one to the other. Among the ideas associated with the Enlightenment is the belief that the individual discovered not only his or her dignity but also a sense of responsibility for what we would nowadays call “the bigger picture.” Until then there had been the widespread, essentially Christian belief that “God is great, and man is small,” and that the only great men were rulers and their agents, all of whom were acting at God’s behest. It was in this spirit that Bach wrote his Cantata BWV Anh. I 13, Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden (Welcome, you ruling gods on Earth), for the Saxon royal family. Of course, mankind has always valued genuine human greatness, generally intellectual or artistic, but until the eighteenth century this was always seen as secondary. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment did it acquire its primary significance, bringing with it a new motto: “Every rational person can advance society, and a person of genius can unhinge the world.” The Romantics contrasted this conviction with their own empirical observation that genius constantly comes up against its own limitations whenever its flights of fancy clash with contemptible

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everyday reality. Beethoven goes to the very heart of this contradiction: the victories that his symphonies celebrate are hard won or else they are invoked by means of resources available only to music— especially his own.

Napoleon Bonaparte: The Prometheus of His Age and a Lodestar for Beethoven as Symphonist In Beethoven’s eyes, his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of genius, and there is no doubt that the composer identified with his hero throughout his entire life or at least judged himself by Napoleonic standards— and this remains the case even if Napoleon’s decision to have himself crowned emperor in 1804 left Beethoven feeling bewildered and disappointed. His admiration for the Corsican ruler rested not least on the fact that Napoleon had achieved his position of preeminence in Europe not through hereditary privilege but on the strength of his strategic genius, in the process championing fundamental social changes of an altogether revolutionary kind. It makes sense to examine Beethoven’s attitude to the Enlightenment through the filter of his admiration for Napoleon, for this particular perspective is by no means as onesided as it may otherwise seem at first sight. It is an approach that brings us particularly close to Beethoven as a symphonist, for here we are dealing less with the Napoleon whom Beethoven acclaimed in 1820 as the “protector of right and of the laws”3 than with what the French call gloire, a term that encompasses both fame and merit. Like many of his contemporaries, Beethoven felt the greatest admiration for a man who had achieved the most tremendous

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everyday reality. Beethoven goes to the very heart of this contradiction: the victories that his symphonies celebrate are hard won or else they are invoked by means of resources available only to music— especially his own.

Napoleon Bonaparte: The Prometheus of His Age and a Lodestar for Beethoven as Symphonist In Beethoven’s eyes, his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of genius, and there is no doubt that the composer identified with his hero throughout his entire life or at least judged himself by Napoleonic standards— and this remains the case even if Napoleon’s decision to have himself crowned emperor in 1804 left Beethoven feeling bewildered and disappointed. His admiration for the Corsican ruler rested not least on the fact that Napoleon had achieved his position of preeminence in Europe not through hereditary privilege but on the strength of his strategic genius, in the process championing fundamental social changes of an altogether revolutionary kind. It makes sense to examine Beethoven’s attitude to the Enlightenment through the filter of his admiration for Napoleon, for this particular perspective is by no means as onesided as it may otherwise seem at first sight. It is an approach that brings us particularly close to Beethoven as a symphonist, for here we are dealing less with the Napoleon whom Beethoven acclaimed in 1820 as the “protector of right and of the laws”3 than with what the French call gloire, a term that encompasses both fame and merit. Like many of his contemporaries, Beethoven felt the greatest admiration for a man who had achieved the most tremendous

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feats through his genius alone, feats that served as a model for the great mass of the people and that also enabled the individual to find lasting glory.4 This recalls classical heroes such as Alexander the Great, with whom Beethoven is known to have identified, and it also means that Beethoven felt constantly stimulated to acquire a similar degree of fame by performing exceptional feats in the realm of music. (Quite how far Beethoven was capable of taking his identification with the figures of classical antiquity emerges from his attempts to gain custody of his nephew Karl, for in a court submission in 1818 he pointed out that Philip of Macedonia had taken charge of the education of his son, Alexander the Great, a right that Beethoven now claimed for himself in the case of his nephew.) For Beethoven— especially as a symphonist— the concept of gloire is paramount because it radiates a far greater physicality than any ethical concept, making it an apt way of giving musical expression to such a notion and allowing Beethoven to pick up various traditions of vocal and instrumental music designed to glorify the state, starting with the official music of the French Revolution, and at the same time creating something new. On January 26, 1793, Beethoven’s friend Bartholomäus Fischenich of Bonn wrote to Charlotte Schiller— the wife of the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller— to spell out the twenty-two-yearold composer’s artistic plans: “He proposes also to compose Schiller’s ‘Freude,’ and indeed strophe by strophe. I expect something perfect for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and the sublime.”5 At this date Beethoven had just left for Vienna armed with a scholarship from Maximilian Franz, the elector of Cologne, whose court was in Bonn. Indeed, Franz may well have been all the keener to accord Beethoven an extended leave of absence since

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French Revolutionary troops had marched into the Rhineland in October 1792, leading to a state of uncertainty: a regular season of plays and concerts could no longer be expected, with the result that the young court musician was eminently expendable in Bonn. On January 21, 1793, the French king, Louis XVI, had been guillotined in Paris, marking the start of the Reign of Terror and prompting even an ardent champion of the French Revolution such as Schiller to ask himself what had become of its ideals of liberté, égalité et fraternité. Published in 1799, his poem “The Song of the Bell” includes a line clearly intended as a warning against the “might of flame ”: “Woe, if it casts off its chains, / And, without resistance, growing, / Through the crowded streets and lanes / Spreads the blaze, all fiercely glowing!”6 How did Beethoven react to all this? That he was interested in Schiller’s ode as early as 1793 and was determined to turn it into something “great” is unsurprising while at the same time being far from self-evident. Schiller had been born in 1759, eleven years before Beethoven, and was then at the height of his fame as a literary revolutionary. His early play Die Räuber (The Brigands) had been published anonymously in 1781 in an attempt to circumvent the censor and soon became the subject of an impassioned debate because of its rebellious thrust, with the result that it was repeatedly banned. His Ode to Joy was tossed off in a moment of exuberance in 1785 only for him to dismiss it fifteen years later as a “bad poem,”7 but for Beethoven in 1793, this was no obstacle to his seeing in it a reflection of his own ideals of freedom and fraternity at this time. We do not know whether Beethoven was a genuine supporter of the French Revolution, but we may assume that he at least sympathized with its aims from afar. The motto of his composition teacher

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in Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, was “I love the great men of this earth but I hate bad princes more than bandits.”8 Beethoven himself added an entry to the album of Theodora Vocke of Nuremberg in this same crucial year, 1793: “Love freedom above all else; never deny the truth (not even on the throne).”9 Even as early as 1812, the preliminary sketches for what was to become the Ninth Symphony contain the entry “Detached fragments, like princes[,] are beggars”,10 a radical reinterpretation of the line “beggars become the brothers of princes” from the first version of Schiller’s ode.11 This hardly suggests that Beethoven had abandoned the ideals of the French Revolution by this date. We find him writing to his friend Nicolaus Simrock in Bonn in August 1794, “It is said that a revolution was about to break out— But I believe that so long as an Austrian can get his brown ale and his little sausages, he is not likely to revolt,”12 and it seems possible to read into these lines at least a secret sympathy for the Jacobin movement. Given the prevailing censorship affecting all correspondence during this period, he could scarcely have expressed himself any more clearly than this. Be that as it may, a new chapter in Beethoven’s political life opens with Napoleon’s appointment as commander in chief of the French armies and his coup d’état of November 9, 1799, when he became first consul and France ’s absolute ruler for the next ten years. Beethoven was not alone in regarding the Corsican commander as the proverbial phoenix rising up from the ashes of the French Revolution, for he was repeatedly portrayed as such in both literature and the visual arts. Even Goethe admired him in this role— unlike Schiller, Goethe had never been a fan of the French Revolution, but he now hailed Napoleon as the Prometheus whom

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he had celebrated in the poem of the same name that he had written in 1774 during his Sturm und Drang phase. No less a commentator than Nietzsche was to write in his Twilight of the Idols that Goethe “had no greater experience than that ens realissimum called Napoleon.”13 Elsewhere Nietzsche argued that “the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon.”14 There is no doubt that the profession of faith that Beethoven addressed to Archduke Rudolph in 1819 sums up the whole spirit of the Age of Napoleon: “In the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.”15 And even though Beethoven did not have loyal conversationalists such as Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Friedrich von Müller, and Johann Peter Eckermann to record his every word, he did have his Conversation Books, which include the following entry about Napoleon noted down in January 1820, only a few months after his letter to Archduke Rudolph: although the Corsican ruler had fallen victim to his own hubris, he had had “an appreciation of art and science and had hated the dark. He should have held the Germans in higher regard and protected their rights. [ . . . ] But he everywhere overthrew the feudal system and was the protector of right and of the laws.”16 In light of these remarks, it should come as no surprise to learn that Beethoven seems to have attempted to make contact with Napoleon as early as the spring of 1798. According to a later tradition, he frequented the Viennese quarters of the French general Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte at a time when Bernadotte was attempting to implement the demands of the victorious French as enshrined in the Treaty of Campo Formio, terms that included the opening of

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a French theater in the Austrian capital. Bernadotte is said to have seized the opportunity to suggest that Beethoven might consider writing a Napoleon Symphony and to have used the violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer as an intermediary in order to familiarize Beethoven with the newer French revolutionary music of composers such as Gossec, Catel, and Cherubini. Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that Beethoven’s first two symphonies— which were written between 1799 and 1802— contain unmistakable echoes of French revolutionary music. The first subject of the opening movement of the First, for example, recalls the theme of an overture that Kreutzer, who since 1795 had been professor of violin at the newly founded Paris Conservatoire, wrote for the marathon concert designed to fire the people of Paris with revolutionary enthusiasm during the War of the First Coalition. The suggestion that Beethoven was merely paying lip service to a local fashion loses much of its force when we recall that between his First and Second Symphonies he wrote his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, to a scenario by the choreographer Salvatore Viganò. First performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on March 28, 1801, when it ran for over twenty performances, Beethoven’s “heroic- allegorical ballet” was based in turn on a mythological poem, Il Prometeo, written in 1797 by the Italian poet Vincenzo Monti, the opening canto of which was inspired by Napoleon’s military and political achievements. There cannot be any doubt about the parallels between Prometheus and Napoleon: Monti specifically made such a connection in his dedication to the Corsican leader. Beethoven’s music also contains clear echoes of the official anthem of the French Consulate, “Veillons au salut de l’empire,”

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prompting Peter Schleuning to write that “the ballet must be seen as a homage to Napoleon as the contemporary who was to complete the mythical education of humankind and perhaps also as a mythologically phrased appeal to the French Consul to liberate all the other European nations that were still languishing under feudal rule, a hope that all progressive thinkers entertained at this time.”17 In his Third Symphony Beethoven picks up the theme of Prometheus/Napoleon that he had explored in his ballet and applies it to the medium of the symphony: the final movement’s main theme is identical to the theme of the final movement of the ballet. Even more striking is the fact that Beethoven begins his Third Symphony with a kind of pre- echo of Prometheus’s apotheosis in the final section of the ballet, with the result that the symphony as a whole builds inexorably from its first to its final movement. This is not a meaningless parallel, for it is linked to the initial subject, as is clear from the fact that Beethoven originally intended to call his Third Symphony “Napoleon” or else to dedicate it to Napoleon. The title page of a copy of the work that was prepared in August 1804 reveals that Beethoven scratched out the line “intitolata Bonaparte ” and added the words “Written for Bonaparte” in pencil. According to the later reminiscences of his pupil Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven is said to have reacted to the news that Napoleon had had himself crowned emperor in Paris on December 2, 1804, by tearing up the title page of the original score— now lost— and exclaiming: “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man. Now he will also trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition.”18 This is certainly plausible, although it is entirely possible that the whole affair was far more prosaic than this. After all, Beetho-

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ven had sold the score of his Eroica Symphony to his patron, Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, for 700 florins and dedicated it to him for a further eighty gold ducats, and so any public reference to Napoleon was probably ruled out from the outset lest Lobkowitz, as a highranking member of the Austrian aristocracy, were to be offended by such associations. But even if Beethoven took Napoleon’s coronation as an excuse to distance himself from the emperor, that would still not mean that this was the end of the matter for him. Beethoven cannot have failed to notice that his music was held in particularly high regard in Paris at this time quite apart from the fact that by 1804 he had already announced plans to move to Paris and to take with him his opera Leonore— later renamed Fidelio. And in 1809, not long after Goethe had met Napoleon, Beethoven asked a French visitor, Louis-Philippe-Joseph Girod de Vienney, baron de Trémont, whether the emperor would receive him in the event of his visiting Paris. This was also the time when he was seriously toying with the idea of accepting a post as kapellmeister at the Kassel court of Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme Bonaparte. Shortly afterward he wondered whether to dedicate his Mass in C Major to Napoleon. His later works, too, reflect an enthusiasm almost certainly bound up with the prevailing cult of Napoleon. It is an enthusiasm that finds expression not only in the composer’s first three symphonies but also in the Fifth and Seventh, to say nothing of his concert overtures and several passages in Fidelio. Clearly any disappointment that Beethoven may have felt at Napoleon’s plans to conquer Europe did nothing to alter his fundamental desire to face the great Corsican as an equal, a desire that he shared with Goethe. It was entirely typical of Beethoven, therefore, that following Napoleon’s victory at Jena and Auerstedt, he is said to have told the violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, “It’s a pity that I

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do not understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music. I would conquer him!”19 Put at its simplest, the Beethoven of his “heroic” period saw in Napoleon the statesman who would do well to make him his official artist. Not unlike his close contemporary, Friedrich Hölderlin, Beethoven was taking up the idealized picture of classical antiquity in which statesmen were artists and philosophers or at least were inspired by such artists and philosophers to pursue loftier goals. Beethoven approached these loftier goals not least through the mythical figure of Prometheus, who brought light and fire to dull humanity, which scarcely deserved that name at all. Of course, only great individuals could provide such “Enlightenment.” In this sense Beethoven did not regard Napoleon as a figure of light in his day-to-day dealings as a politician but, rather, as a brilliant contemporary encouraging his fellow men and women to achieve Promethean feats by providing guidance for both his own people and for all the peoples of the earth. Beethoven was keen to emulate his great brother in the realm of art. Nor was he alone in seeing himself in this sense as a Napoleon of music, for if others had not viewed him in a similar light, one of his visitors would scarcely have asked him, “Is that not called action with you: composition?”20 In the eyes of his unidentified visitor, Beethoven was achieving in music the ideals that the age demanded, namely, “freedom” and “progress.”

Orchestral Weight: The Basis of Beethoven’s New Symphonic Art Pathos and heroism were characteristic features of European life in the years between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Vienna

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do not understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music. I would conquer him!”19 Put at its simplest, the Beethoven of his “heroic” period saw in Napoleon the statesman who would do well to make him his official artist. Not unlike his close contemporary, Friedrich Hölderlin, Beethoven was taking up the idealized picture of classical antiquity in which statesmen were artists and philosophers or at least were inspired by such artists and philosophers to pursue loftier goals. Beethoven approached these loftier goals not least through the mythical figure of Prometheus, who brought light and fire to dull humanity, which scarcely deserved that name at all. Of course, only great individuals could provide such “Enlightenment.” In this sense Beethoven did not regard Napoleon as a figure of light in his day-to-day dealings as a politician but, rather, as a brilliant contemporary encouraging his fellow men and women to achieve Promethean feats by providing guidance for both his own people and for all the peoples of the earth. Beethoven was keen to emulate his great brother in the realm of art. Nor was he alone in seeing himself in this sense as a Napoleon of music, for if others had not viewed him in a similar light, one of his visitors would scarcely have asked him, “Is that not called action with you: composition?”20 In the eyes of his unidentified visitor, Beethoven was achieving in music the ideals that the age demanded, namely, “freedom” and “progress.”

Orchestral Weight: The Basis of Beethoven’s New Symphonic Art Pathos and heroism were characteristic features of European life in the years between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Vienna

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Congress of 1814– 15. These are also qualities that are exuded in Beethoven’s symphonies not least because these works have assimilated and reprocessed elements of French revolutionary music. More importantly, however, Beethoven was keen to depict greatness, creativity, and territorial conquest in general. These aspects of Beethoven’s symphonies often receive short shrift in traditional analyses of his music because the writers in question continue to cultivate the idea of a composer who was the first to make the “process of composing” paramount in his music. But such a process-oriented manner of composing may also be seen within the framework of piano music and chamber music and even within the medium of opera. In the field of the symphony and of the overture, more is at stake: namely, the gesture of power. This process is closely bound up with a new understanding of the orchestra and of orchestral sonorities in general. Before Beethoven, writers of symphonies had continued to hold the view that the composer begins by creating a musical phrase or period and then goes on to orchestrate it, but by the time of Beethoven’s Third Symphony and certainly his Fifth at the latest, this was merely one truth that was offset by another complementary truth: the orchestral apparatus generated certain musical developments from within itself. This is true of crescendos, of Klangflächen,21 of pithy repeats, and so on, none of which would make any sense or create an effect without the force of the orchestral sound. Of course, even eighteenth-century composers had used gestures associated with power in their orchestral music, but these are generally found in standardized form in symphonies in C major and D major in which a group of trumpeters and timpanists would ensure a festive atmosphere and provide a semblance of princely

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pomp. But none of this can be compared with the orchestral blows that Beethoven delivers in the truest sense of the term. One wellrespected Beethoven biographer in the middle of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Lenz, described the two orchestral chords at the start of the Eroica as “two blows from the heavy cavalry that split the orchestra like a turnip.”22 And even though the militaristic language is bound to wipe the smile from the face of the modern reader, Lenz’s metaphor indicates the way in which well-educated middle-class listeners heard Beethoven’s symphonies at that time. Indeed, abrupt tutti chords are by no means unusual within Beethoven’s orchestral writing, which in any case often strikes an aggressive note, and in the case of the brief “prologue” to the Eroica, these are no mere gestures but have what Egon Voss has termed “motivic and thematic status.”23 The same is true of individual passages in the timpani, the explosive force of which can be felt in particular in the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies as well as in the storm scene in the Pastoral Symphony— in the whole of this last-named work Beethoven uses the timpani only in this one characteristic scene because of the particular effect that the instrument produces. Similarly, we cannot ignore Beethoven’s extreme use of forte and sforzato markings. A glance at any of his scores will reveal that such markings are found even in those passages where they would seem to be self-evident and where they are intended, as it were, as multiple exclamation marks directed at the conductor and at the orchestral musicians. Particularly striking is Beethoven’s use of a sforzato in the context of a syncopation or on a weak beat within a rapid shift from forte to piano. The composer Mauricio Kagel has warned against attempts to domesticate or prettify Beethoven’s sforzato markings: “I don’t want to advance the theory that all sforzatos

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should completely disrupt the musical argument, but they need to create a more brittle and angular impression.”24 Kagel’s comment underscores the fact that there is no sense of marchlike conformism in Beethoven’s music. Rather, each of his specific accents indicates an expression of will that may in turn be interpreted as a spontaneous show of individual strength while remaining committed to a far-reaching and well-considered overall conception. If Beethoven did indeed compare himself as a composer to the military commander that was Napoleon, there were revealing parallels in the sense of a tactical incalculability that is nonetheless grounded in a coherent overall strategy. One aspect of this overall strategy is the fact that from the Second Symphony onward, each of Beethoven’s symphonies is a Finalsinfonie, that is, a work that builds inexorably toward its final movement rather than a symphony with a final movement that merely provides a lively envoi with which to round it off. This new approach is especially clear from the Eroica, the Pastoral, the Seventh, and the Ninth Symphonies and does not have to go hand in hand with massed sonorities of the kind found in the Fifth and Ninth. What matters, rather, is that we can identify or at least suspect the existence of an idea that will find its culminating expression in the symphony’s final movement. In the case of the Pastoral Symphony, this is the “Shepherd’s Song” that sums up the impressions left by a visit to the countryside in the form of “happy and grateful feelings after a storm.” In this context it is significant that one of Beethoven’s sketchbooks contains the entry “Lord, we thank thee,”25 possibly indicating Beethoven’s idea of introducing human voices into the final movement in order to underline its claims to express the sublime, an idea finally realized in the Ninth Symphony.

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The long-term planning of Beethoven’s symphonies not only indicates a dynamic, emphatically propulsive feature, it also reflects the composer’s formal treatment of his individual movements. The themes of the opening movements— especially in the case of the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies— are far from constituting a coherent melodic sequence but are fashioned in such lapidary and even rudimentary ways that they positively demand to be developed in the spirit of a processual approach to composition. More to the point, commentators who impute the dynamic and expansionist aspect of Beethoven’s symphonic writing to motivic and thematic processes alone impede our access to these works— it is a failing that has sometimes been taken to exaggerated extremes by established musicologists. Rather, the impression of processuality arises from the interplay between the motivic writing on the one hand and, on the other, the idiosyncratic dynamics, the metrical conflicts, and harmonic writing that never shies away from asperities. The impartial listener will be struck far more by these last- named features than by any complex motivic and thematic relationships: against this background it makes sense that in one of his Conversation Books, Beethoven noted that rhythm was “undeniably the most necessary element in understanding music.”26 For a composer wishing to create a sense of musical architecture and give the impression of long-term planning, the harmonic design of a movement is more important than the treatment of the melodic line, because harmonic developments have an immediate effect even where they may not be individually transparent. This is true, for example, of the transition to the second subject in the opening movement of the Second Symphony, which does not lead straight from the opening key of D major to A major via the dominant of

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the dominant, E major, but— to put it at its simplest— modulates first to G major/G minor, pursuing a course that Adolf Bernhard Marx described as “powerful and eerie,”27 thence to B-flat major and E major, and, finally, to A major. This is merely one small detail from the world of Beethoven’s symphonies, but it is just as powerfully responsible for the striking effect of the second subject’s entry as the character of the theme itself. In spite of this, we should not underestimate the significance of the melodic writing in Beethoven’s symphonies, a point well illustrated by an “explanation about melody” that Wagner offered the composer Felix Draeseke in 1859. As a member of the New German School, Draeseke was fully aware of every conceivable harmonic refinement. “Completely unexpectedly,” he explained, Wagner began one very hot August afternoon to sing the first movement of the Eroica, working himself up to an incredible pitch of enthusiasm and continuing to sing while growing increasingly hot, until he was finally beside himself, but he refused to stop until he reached the end of the opening section: “What is that?” he screamed at me, to which I replied, of course, “The Eroica.” “Well, isn’t the sheer melody enough? Do you always have to have your insane harmonies as well?”28

Draeseke continues his report of his encounter with Wagner by noting that, “having calmed down a little, the latter explained that the melody flowed along inexhaustibly in Beethoven’s symphonies and that this melody was enough to recall the entire symphony to mind.”29 At the time of this meeting, Wagner was putting the finishing touches to his score of Tristan und Isolde, in which he

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was especially proud of what he called his “art of the finest and most gradual transition.”30 It is remarkable that at a time when he was immersed in his own composition, Wagner was able to recall Beethoven’s melodic line in its entirety. In this he was helped not by Beethoven’s bold harmonies and brusque articulation— two qualities that he otherwise admired deeply— but by the inexhaustible melodic gifts of a composer who was able to hold his listeners in thrall not least by means of the continuum of his melodic line. Who were these listeners? Beethoven had to create his own audience, for Vienna, unlike Paris and London, evinced no obvious enthusiasm for the symphony in the years around 1800. Indeed, there was not even a symphony orchestra worthy of that name. As a result, Beethoven was obliged to form his own orchestras from the pool of musicians in Vienna for each of the concerts, or “academies,” that he organized at his own expense— assuming he was unable to draw on Prince Lobkowitz’s private orchestra, which was placed at his disposal for the rehearsals and first performances of his Third and Fourth Symphonies. Beethoven not only had to fix his own orchestras, he also had to create his own audience, for Fischenich’s comment, quoted above, to the effect that he was committed to “the great and the sublime,” does not mean that the ideal in question encountered a positive response from the outset. Indeed, such a response was unlikely not least because what was so new about Beethoven’s symphonic style was not just its greater symphonic weight but a musical language highly differentiated in terms of its detail and far more varied in terms of its semantics— what it was trying to say— than that of any of his predecessors. As a result, his critics were often reluctant to commit themselves to an unequivocal verdict, the usual line being

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that no one could deny Beethoven’s greatness in spite of which no one was in a position to describe that greatness adequately. Even so, early listeners must already have suspected a point that the German writer on music Paul Bekker was to make in 1918, when he noted that since Beethoven’s day, “the performance of a symphony was synonymous with a musical gathering of the nation,” a “gathering in which the sense of community that found expression in the music came to life and found active form.”31 At least the acclaimed first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in 1813 may be said to have validated Bekker’s posthumous assessment, for on that occasion many listeners clearly viewed the work as a reflection of the frenzied jubilation triggered by the most recent military victories of the European Coalition in its war with Napoleon.

Delusions of Virility: A Constant in Beethoven’s Symphonies? Throughout Beethoven’s symphonies there are moments that can be interpreted as gestures of power and outbursts of violence not just metaphorically but in an altogether physical way as well. This is something that listeners had rarely experienced before Beethoven but that was repeatedly found afterward. It is a constellation in the history of music that has persuaded younger American musicologists in particular to speak of a “Beethoven Paradigm” that for more than two centuries has influenced and even distorted our view of “classical music.” Of course, the works themselves cannot be recomposed— except in the spirit of experimental art— but we can at least reflect on the history of their reception, confirming our

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that no one could deny Beethoven’s greatness in spite of which no one was in a position to describe that greatness adequately. Even so, early listeners must already have suspected a point that the German writer on music Paul Bekker was to make in 1918, when he noted that since Beethoven’s day, “the performance of a symphony was synonymous with a musical gathering of the nation,” a “gathering in which the sense of community that found expression in the music came to life and found active form.”31 At least the acclaimed first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in 1813 may be said to have validated Bekker’s posthumous assessment, for on that occasion many listeners clearly viewed the work as a reflection of the frenzied jubilation triggered by the most recent military victories of the European Coalition in its war with Napoleon.

Delusions of Virility: A Constant in Beethoven’s Symphonies? Throughout Beethoven’s symphonies there are moments that can be interpreted as gestures of power and outbursts of violence not just metaphorically but in an altogether physical way as well. This is something that listeners had rarely experienced before Beethoven but that was repeatedly found afterward. It is a constellation in the history of music that has persuaded younger American musicologists in particular to speak of a “Beethoven Paradigm” that for more than two centuries has influenced and even distorted our view of “classical music.” Of course, the works themselves cannot be recomposed— except in the spirit of experimental art— but we can at least reflect on the history of their reception, confirming our

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suspicion that that history has repeatedly been influenced by “masculine ” ideas, a circumstance most clearly evident in the way in which commentators have spoken and written about these works. Are delusions of virility a characteristic of Beethoven’s symphonies as such? Strictly speaking, there is no “as such,” because each work merges with its own reception to such an extent that it is almost impossible to separate the two. Even so, comparisons are still possible— not only between Beethoven and his contemporaries but also between Beethoven’s individual works. Against this background there is no denying that Beethoven’s symphonic music admits of far more gestures of power than Schubert’s, for example, and that Schubert was able to achieve the mellow calm of his great C-major Symphony only after he had failed to achieve the heroic Beethovenian ideal in his unfinished symphony in B minor, a failure that he himself saw in an entirely positive light.32 As for Beethoven himself, it is all too easy to overlook the fact that the “titanic” elements in his works— in the widest sense of that term— constitute only one aspect of a far wider range of expression. A comparison between the space occupied by his “heroic” passages and that taken up with others of a different character would almost certainly produce some surprising results. Commentators such as Susan McClary are guilty of oversimplifying matters when they claim that Beethoven’s works contain only a handful of “feminine zones” and that the Adagio in the Ninth Symphony is an “important exception” to this rule.33 And when she writes that the entry of the recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is “one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining

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release,”34 this may be an authentic description of her own response to this passage, but it can scarcely prove that this is a typically “masculine zone ”: Beethoven’s highly differentiated music cannot be tied down to gender- specific features. Not that this prevents us from sharing Walter Benjamin’s view that any impartial observer surveying the “cultural treasures” of the world will find that they “have an origin that he cannot contemplate without horror.”35 We may take this argument a stage further and propose that wherever music betrays its origins in myth— and this applies not least to the “titanic” moments in Beethoven’s symphonies— then there is no escaping from the horror that is an integral part of myth. At the same time the subject of these symphonies discovers more and more new ways of resisting this horror and asserting its own sense of confidence and faith, a point well illustrated not only by the Adagio from the Ninth but by many episodes in the symphony’s opening movement. At the risk of exaggeration, we could say that wherever we find gestures of power in Beethoven’s symphonies, we do not need to think of Hans von Bülow, who once dedicated one of his performances of the Eroica to the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and who asserted that the maxims of the French Revolution— liberty, equality, and fraternity— should be replaced by “infantry, cavalry, and artillery.”36 We may also be reminded of Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and of the role that is played there by Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Although the writer, who sympathizes with the underdogs in the southern states, can see the revolutionary motto of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” only as a sad example of blighted hopes, she none the less succeeds in inventing a tomboyish character, Mick Kelly, who, while completely ignorant of the symphony’s historical context and of its musical and

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theoretical background, responds to it as the great revelation of her life when, wandering alone through the streets of her hometown, she happens to hear a performance of it on a radio: “This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the day-time and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her— the real plain her.”37 McCullers described the novel’s leitmotif as “man’s revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as possible.”38 In her own way Mick rebels against her feelings of loneliness and lack of proper communication: even without knowing Beethoven’s name, she senses the composer’s habitual loneliness but is also able to feel his ability to deal with those feelings by means of the creative process. In the opening movement of the Eroica, all the instruments are “bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart.” The second movement is “not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before.” The final movement, by contrast, is “glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way.”39 In this way McCullers’s autobiographically colored novel represents a special kind of “Beethoven Paradigm,” for here we are dealing with powerful emotions that cannot be located in any gender-specific environment but that affect every listener willing to be touched by this music.

Structure: An Important but Overused Key to Understanding Beethoven’s Symphonies It would be wrong to brand Beethoven a revolutionary composer à la Gossec simply because his symphonies are so highly charged

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theoretical background, responds to it as the great revelation of her life when, wandering alone through the streets of her hometown, she happens to hear a performance of it on a radio: “This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the day-time and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her— the real plain her.”37 McCullers described the novel’s leitmotif as “man’s revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as possible.”38 In her own way Mick rebels against her feelings of loneliness and lack of proper communication: even without knowing Beethoven’s name, she senses the composer’s habitual loneliness but is also able to feel his ability to deal with those feelings by means of the creative process. In the opening movement of the Eroica, all the instruments are “bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart.” The second movement is “not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before.” The final movement, by contrast, is “glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way.”39 In this way McCullers’s autobiographically colored novel represents a special kind of “Beethoven Paradigm,” for here we are dealing with powerful emotions that cannot be located in any gender-specific environment but that affect every listener willing to be touched by this music.

Structure: An Important but Overused Key to Understanding Beethoven’s Symphonies It would be wrong to brand Beethoven a revolutionary composer à la Gossec simply because his symphonies are so highly charged

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emotionally, and this remains true no matter how much he may have been impressed by Gossec’s compositional verve. If Beethoven struck a revolutionary note, then he did so through the medium of music, a medium that could hardly be further removed from one- dimensionality and from blatant demonstrations of power. The monumentality of his symphonies is merely one element in a compositional design whose complexity eclipsed everything that had gone before it. It would be no exaggeration to say that musical structure— a term intended to mean far more than just the pragmatic theory of musical form— became truly meaningful only with Beethoven. In the eighteenth century, music theorists had defined form as the sum total of all those structural elements that a composer needed to know in order to be able to write a song, an aria, a cantata, a dance, a sonata, or a concerto. For contemporary theorists, “form” affected only the “mechanical” aspect of composition but said nothing about the “inner nature” or the “beauty and variety” of a piece.40 By contrast, Adorno and other commentators have argued that Beethoven knows “no reification of forms.”41 As an original genius, he does not fall back on traditional formal patterns that merely require filling out in some creative way. Rather, he understands the need to see each work as a new creation— and not just in a technical sense but in a philosophical way as well. Admittedly, there are already indications of this approach in earlier composers such as Mozart and Haydn, but Beethoven goes much further in this regard, and while functional harmony, traditional meter, first-movement sonata form, and so on are not entirely invalidated, they forfeit their a priori validity and are required to justify their existence in each new work as part of a series of problems that all demand a different

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and a novel solution. Using traditional material, Beethoven creates a new and individual form for each and every work. In keeping with its definition within the current theory of systems, the term structure is used, therefore, for the whole of a system and for the interaction of its elements. Listeners who are unable to find their bearings within a familiar formal type and forced on each occasion to confront a more or less surprising structure are at risk of noticing only the narrative elements in the music. Working to counteract this is the “rational awareness,” which according to the Romantic poet and Beethovenian E. T. A. Hoffmann guarantees the “inner coherence ” and “unity” of the writing.42 These expressions are taken from a review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1810, where Hoffmann refers in the same breath specifically to the symphony’s “structure.” Here Hoffmann sets out from the premise that the famous hammering motif that opens the symphony determines the structure of the whole of the opening movement and continues to haunt the following movements as well in various modified forms. This was something new in the symphonic music of this period, and with his “discovery” Hoffmann, too, was venturing into unknown territory in terms of musical analysis. He was succeeded by a number of other writers who produced some astonishing results in the field of motivic, thematic, and harmonic analysis, opening up an important dimension of Beethoven’s output to increasingly detailed scrutiny. Essentially, two generations of scholars need to be distinguished here. The first was at pains to help audiences used to hearing purely “narrative” forms in Beethoven’s works to appreciate its structural secrets. Among these scholars were such varied

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personalities as Walter Riezler, Rudolph Réti, and Heinrich Schenker, whose theories of the Urlinie and Ursatz were developed in the main on the strength of Beethoven’s music and whose analytical approach continues to have its proponents, chiefly in the United States. All three writers were eager to treat the composer’s works as organically coherent structures. The second, the present generation of scholars, foremost among whom is Peter Gülke, stresses that thanks to the complexity of Beethoven’s structural thinking, the compositional process is forever beset by self-contradictions that lead to solutions that open up new contradictions, and so on. The opening movement of the Eroica Symphony may serve as a case in point. Symphonies are traditionally built up on the basis of their thematic material. Although the orchestra for which Beethoven writes in his Eroica adds only a third horn to the forces that were usual at that time, it is invested with such power in terms of its ability to build to dynamic climaxes, its concentrations of sound, its depiction of Klangflächen, and so on that its “themes” threaten to be submerged. Once we have accepted this, we must then observe that “themes” cannot be submerged because they do not exist in the traditional sense of the term: all that exists in the opening movement is the idea of a first subject that keeps on rematerializing and on being reactualized within the symphonic process. Here, however, it is at the end of the development section, when in any traditional symphony everything has run its course, that a “theme ” truly deserving of that name appears for the first time in the form of the E- minor episode that we hear after the previous waves of sound have died away. This theme is not the “result” of earlier motivic developments but appears to be entirely new. And yet, when we take a closer look at the score, it transpires that it is, after all, subliminally related to the older material.

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It is clear from this that in Beethoven’s music “structure” can be intelligently investigated only if we do not begin by positing what we are in fact trying to prove, namely, that the work as a whole is an “organic” structure. If we begin by looking for the “whole” in the Hegelian sense of that term, then we can do so only by regarding it as a self-contradictory structure notable for its multiple perspectives and one whose uniqueness lies in its unfathomable complexity, a complexity that seeks to imitate the structure of all living things. The effectiveness of any structural analysis that is concerned with internal coherence is also limited by what we might call external disturbance variables: the structural elements that Beethoven uses are not devoid of expression but have a meaning that constantly fluctuates, with the result that the “text” of the musical writing can be understood only within the “context” of far-reaching allusions. In light of this insight, Hanslick’s idea that “forms animated by musical sounds” are the “only content of music” seems distinctly inadequate not least because such ideas ultimately seem no more than a tautology whose only justification is that they avoid all overhasty extramusical interpretations.43 In the case of the E- minor theme, too, structural and semantic strategies overlap, and it is by no means absurd to think of the “higher voice” referred to by Salvatore Viganò in his scenario for The Creatures of Prometheus. Scholars who stake everything on immanent structural analysis will soon find that they have reached an impasse with Beethoven. As we have already noted, such analysts interpret structure to mean the relationship between a system in its entirety and the elements that make up that system. As for the structure of Beethoven’s works, their fascination lies in a specific contradiction, for no other classical or Romantic composer exudes such a powerful resolve to introduce a sense of balance into his works in keeping with this concept of

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structure and to do so, moreover, on the very highest level, no matter what risks this may involve. It is against this background that we must understand the claim made by Carl Dahlhaus, one of the finest of all structural analysts: Analysis is the never entirely successful attempt to grasp and demonstrate that all the parts of a work are meaningfully related to the whole and that each of them is limited to the function that it fulfils. The triumph of analysis consists in proving that a work, at least a successful work, cannot be other than it is. Where a composer sees possibilities— whether realized or suppressed— the analyst seeks necessity and speaks only reluctantly of chance or superfluity.44

Beethoven’s music in particular offers countless incentives to ask how “necessary” are certain compositional strategies and to present answers accordingly. And there is no doubt that the listener shares the pleasure of all those astute analysts who think that they have made sense of a particular passage— the more complicated, the better. At the same time, the mere aim of examining compositional details— however characteristic these may be— in the hope of getting to the bottom of Beethoven’s structural thinking in general is not only arrogant but very much the expression of an institutionalized delusion. Musicologists may feel satisfied if they can provide even a basic description of Beethoven’s compositional idiosyncrasies using the terminological resources of music theory— after all, it is these idiosyncrasies that are decisive in creating an artistic impression. But this does not explain them, least of all in terms of the imaginary

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whole. And who would care to speculate on what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote the striking horn passage in bar 96 of the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony? What sort of mental contortions are we required to perform even to surmise the extent to which this passage is “necessary” in terms of the work as a whole? True, we can interpret the horn writing here as a variant of the triads that occur at a comparable point elsewhere in the piece, but this says nothing about its striking symbolism. And the same is true of the remarkable emphasis that is placed on the fifth in the Trio of the Seventh Symphony. The analyst will see the charm of this passage in the fact that Beethoven reinterprets the third, A, of the Scherzo in F major as the fifth of the Trio in D major. But what does it mean when this fifth is not only retained in the Trio like a drone but when it is quite literally trumpeted aloud at an exposed fortissimo at the end of the Trio? In neither case— and they are typical of hundreds like them— are we dealing with deliberate deviations from the norm that are instantly meaningful as jokes, for this kind of device is used to enliven practically every original work, and it no more affects its substance than a witty rhetorical aside affects the substance of a speech. These examples from Beethoven’s symphonies are all symbols that neither leap out at the listener in an extreme way nor make sense from the outset. Rather, they are instances of Beethoven’s particular style of composition whereby the “parts” resist the intended “whole,” a type of resistance that cannot be easily accommodated within an imaginary whole but that asserts its special right to exist. The cursory listener may barely register such passages at all, but for him or her Beethoven has crasser examples to offer. In the course of his symphonies, the note C-sharp twice occurs in a strikingly

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prominent position. As the tenth note of the Eroica theme it completely destroys its E-flat major identity; and as a “note of horror” in the Eighth it seems to be sticking out its tongue at the listener, a point to which we shall return in due course. Passages such as these demand to be interpreted against a semantic background or seen as part of a nonconceptual philosophy of music. Which brings us back to Hegel. In his youth Hegel had learned to know the darker side of reason, when, in his own words, he had experienced the fall of the self into the night of “empty nothingness.” By “nothingness” he meant an intolerable state of uncertainty, and yet it was also a state that provided him with “an infinite number of ideas and images” in the sense of the “phantasmagorical ideas” that assailed him from all sides. In his Jenaer Realphilosophie of 1805/6, he explained that “night” was all around him, “here a bloody head suddenly shoots up, there another white figure manifests itself, before disappearing equally suddenly. We glimpse this night when we look into a man’s eyes— into a night that is terrible.”45 These images may have been associated in Hegel’s mind with the Reign of Terror that was a part of the French Revolution or with his fascination with Shakespearean drama. And we may also echo Slavoj Žižek and speak of traumatic seminal experiences that cannot be dealt with even with the most finely tuned dialectics and that Hegel himself, writing to Karl Joseph Windischmann— a physician much given to melancholy— argued were familiar to each and every one of us: he himself had been “forced through these straits” and found refuge in a systematic philosophy that no longer had anything in common with such “examples of hypochondria,” as he called them, precisely because it reveled in conceptual abstractions.46

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Anyone wanting to understand Beethoven against the background of Hegel must take account not only of the young Hegel’s “hypochondria” but also of the experienced thinker’s philosophical system. Unlike Hegel, Beethoven did not seek to escape from his “hypochondriasis” and find refuge in some allegedly higher stage of development in the form of a closed system. Rather, he sought to square the circle, as it were, and incorporate the “hypochondriasis,” the “ideas,” and the “images” that beset him into a system that has nothing to do with any conceptual unity but that represents a threat to its own existence. The aim of such an approach is certainly not to impute pathological features to Beethoven, as this method traditionally demands, in order to explain his creative genius on the basis of such features. We are dealing, rather, with the “hypochondriasis” of every individual, that is to say, with the experience of being “beside oneself ” that determines not only our everyday lives but also our highest flights of fancy: what is sensational is not the phenomenon as such but the skill that Beethoven evinces in incorporating it into his work as a composer. This was undoubtedly an intentional process even if it must in many cases remain an open question whether an individual compositional plan or an overall strategy has asserted its primacy on the basis of rational calculation or whether it should be seen as the result of a creative situation that precludes the possibility of distinguishing between careful planning and intuitive action. The analyst, at least, may take his cue from a passage in Wolfgang Menzel’s encyclopedia article on “Aesthetics” that Robert Schumann twice transcribed in the course of his life: “The task of formulating a new aesthetic is like trying to square the circle. There is always an infinite gap between theory and practice, between the

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rule and its example, and between laws and freedom. But perhaps this gap is more important than the whole.”47 Without ever being particularly close to the German Romantics, Menzel was none the less repeating the authentically Romantic position of a writer such as Jean Paul, a position that vigilant contemporaries thought that they could discover at every turn in Beethoven’s works.

Jean Paul’s “Cloven Hoof”: The Paradigms of a “Romantic” Beethoven In terms of the history of music, it makes little sense to brand Beethoven a “classical” composer, not least because it was only after his death that the term Viennese classicism came to be used as a way of characterizing the triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. To the extent that contemporaries thought in these categories, Beethoven was regarded during his lifetime as a Romantic above all and, more specifically, described as the “Jean Paul of music.”48 Writing in Goethe ’s favorite newspaper, the Cottasches Morgenblatt, on July 9, 1807, the poet Ernst Wagner noted the “strange and Romantic” phrases in the Eroica, claiming that they had an “unmistakable affinity with the humor” of Jean Paul. Four years later the composer and writer on music Gottfried Weber referred in the same breath to “Haydnesque humor,” “Beethovenian bizarrerie,” and “Jean Paul’s cloven hoof ” in the context of the Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies49— the “cloven hoof ” is an allusion to a satyr, which is how Jean Paul saw himself as a satirist. Among the points in common that these contemporaries saw between Beethoven and Jean Paul was an approach to creativity that privileged the fantastical and, hence, the irregular, that mixed

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rule and its example, and between laws and freedom. But perhaps this gap is more important than the whole.”47 Without ever being particularly close to the German Romantics, Menzel was none the less repeating the authentically Romantic position of a writer such as Jean Paul, a position that vigilant contemporaries thought that they could discover at every turn in Beethoven’s works.

Jean Paul’s “Cloven Hoof”: The Paradigms of a “Romantic” Beethoven In terms of the history of music, it makes little sense to brand Beethoven a “classical” composer, not least because it was only after his death that the term Viennese classicism came to be used as a way of characterizing the triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. To the extent that contemporaries thought in these categories, Beethoven was regarded during his lifetime as a Romantic above all and, more specifically, described as the “Jean Paul of music.”48 Writing in Goethe ’s favorite newspaper, the Cottasches Morgenblatt, on July 9, 1807, the poet Ernst Wagner noted the “strange and Romantic” phrases in the Eroica, claiming that they had an “unmistakable affinity with the humor” of Jean Paul. Four years later the composer and writer on music Gottfried Weber referred in the same breath to “Haydnesque humor,” “Beethovenian bizarrerie,” and “Jean Paul’s cloven hoof ” in the context of the Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies49— the “cloven hoof ” is an allusion to a satyr, which is how Jean Paul saw himself as a satirist. Among the points in common that these contemporaries saw between Beethoven and Jean Paul was an approach to creativity that privileged the fantastical and, hence, the irregular, that mixed

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high and low styles, that exploited allusions and omissions, and that was fond of using surprising shifts between extreme emotional registers. They regarded this as an expression of Romantic humor, a type of humor that sought to come to terms with a world that was full of contradictions and, hence, altogether “absurd,” to use a term placed in Beethoven’s own mouth in one of the so- called Bettina letters.50 No matter whether contemporary comparisons between Beethoven and Jean Paul were intended to be flattering or critical, they invariably presupposed a clash between the composer’s music and the neoclassical aesthetic of the age according to which art was supposed to show us how to lead our lives: well ordered, meaningful, and directed at something higher. After 1800, moreover, it was a point of dogma that “the content of a work of art should communicate itself in a formally lucid way, free from any attempt to convey an allegorical meaning.” Artistic expression was no longer a means to an end but a “revelation” of genius.51 Although it would be wrong to argue that Beethoven’s symphonies are entirely devoid of these idealistic features, it makes sense to see elements of Jean Paul’s style in Beethoven’s music. Observers who take exception to Jean Paul’s droll humor may start by comparing Beethoven to two Romantic painters, Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, for they too rebelled against the neoclassical view of art, detecting a “gap” in terms of a loss of meaning. Both wanted to “provide images with a new and subjectively motivated allegorical pictorial language.”52 Although the aesthetic conditions of music do not allow us to speak of an “allegorical pictorial language ” in a specifically painterly sense, Beethoven’s remark that his Pastoral Symphony was “more the expression of feelings than

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painting” reveals that he by no means frowned on the painterly element as long as it was imbued with subjective feeling. Whether we choose to speak of painting, allegory, metaphor, or humor, Beethoven’s music is always about the same thing: liberation from the classical ideal that placed the form of a work on a higher plane than its content. Abandoning this ideal meant opening up the way to specific ideas that may be congruent with the work’s structure but that also break open that structure in a way that tells listeners that they are dealing with unique messages that go beyond the conventional framework. Many contemporaries were aware that these messages existed, a point well illustrated by Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, the Braunschweig music philosopher, man of letters, and friend of Schumann whose comments on the Eroica we have already quoted. Even during the rehearsals for the work, its sheer novelty had already induced a state of frenzy in the players. At a particularly stirring passage in the opening movement (cues H and I = bars 248– 83, shortly before the entry of the E-minor subject), the lower strings led by the double bass player Hitzig “produce a tremendous B on their A-string, while the second violins defy them with their ninth, causing the entire auditorium to hurl a thunderous hurrah into this gaping hole in a century’s reckoning. [ . . . ] This was Pindar, the dithyrambically tempestuous Pindar of the nineteenth century.”53 Falling prey to the archaic frenzy that typified all the later rehearsals, Hitzig injured himself on his instrument, so violent was his playing, finally going mad at the enthusiasm inspired in him by Apollo and Bacchus. The music festival had to be abandoned. Griepenkerl was not just a writer of short stories but also a musician capable of reading a full score, which is why he was able to describe

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in detail the passages that triggered concrete ideas in him and in that way avoid the suspicion that he was merely indulging in wildly rhapsodic ramblings. Adopting the manner of a literary grotesque, Griepenkerl demonstrates that although the musicians may understand “structure,” the Eroica cannot be mastered in this way. Instead, the strident dissonances that precede the first movement’s E-minor subject produce in them a state of existential agitation. Of course, we can approach this whole episode, with its accumulated dissonances and their resolution in the direction of a redemptive E minor, by analyzing it in terms of compositional technique and by attempting to demonstrate that Beethoven, his eccentricity notwithstanding, has shown great skill in embedding it within the movement as a whole. And as we did earlier, we can draw attention to the fact that the E minor is on the one hand worlds apart from the opening key of E-flat major while on the other hand sharing the third, G, with it. But as listeners to the Eroica we do not know what is happening to us. The procedure extends into the depths of human experience while at the same time transcending that experience and ultimately proving to be something over which we have no control. The metaphorical language used by Griepenkerl makes no attempt to replace the technical explanation of the “rules” of a piece of music, which is how music had traditionally been described. In short, it does not set out to replace a rational description with speculations on what the artist was wanting to express. Griepenkerl’s metaphors represent a feeble attempt to deal with the “shock” that listeners felt on hearing this music. Picking up an idea first proposed by Sandro Briosi in Il senso della metafora, Umberto Eco has used the term shock percettivo— a “perceptional shock”— to

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explain the rhetorical figure of the metaphor that authors employ in their attempt to deal with drastic experiences about which they can express themselves in no other way.54 Griepenkerl’s reading of the Eroica will be welcomed by many readers in that the shocks triggered by the work are not interpreted in the sense of program music but are celebrated, rather, as so many outbursts on the part of an individual reacting to the spirit of the age. This certainly satisfies the claim to universality that Beethoven’s symphonies make for themselves, albeit not just because of this, for there are sufficient reasons not only in painting but in these symphonies, too, to speak of an “allegorical pictorial language.” Just as Delacroix gave his famous painting from 1830 the title Liberty Leading the People, so— as we have already observed— Beethoven originally wanted to call his Third Symphony “Bonaparte.” Even though the printed edition refers to it only as his “Sinfonia Eroica” and adds that it was “Composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo” (Written to celebrate the memory of a great man), there is no doubt that when working on the piece, Beethoven had the image of a hero in his mind’s eye, no matter how concrete or abstract that image may have been. Equally clear is the fact that the symphony’s “grand narrative” invites the interested listener to engage with this image of a hero. And the same is true of the composer’s other symphonies, all of which invite us in varying degrees to ask about specific messages. In each case our point of departure may be certain musical topoi that stand out more or less clearly from the overall framework and that include the hammering motif at the start of the Fifth and the furious frenzy whipped up by Beethoven in the final movement of the Seventh. It is not a question of searching for hidden programs with-

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out any further ado, for where they are intended to exist— above and beyond in the Pastoral— Beethoven consciously kept them to himself because he believed that he owed it to his art to ensure that he was understood through his music alone and not accused of musical tone painting. He did not want his listeners to respond to his music first and foremost as program music and to judge it, therefore, according to its recognition value. Everything was to be his own personal expression and at the same time an expression of great ideas. Although Beethoven said little about these great ideas, he clearly had no objection to listeners casting around for specific interpretations, as Adolf Bernhard Marx did in 1824 in his essay “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievements in This Field.”55 The fact that in a series of articles published in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Marx examined the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies from an avowedly programmatic standpoint is of particular interest in that Beethoven himself, writing to Adolph Martin Schlesinger on July 19, 1825, and acknowledging receipt of copies of the journal in question, referred to the “products of the gifted Herr Marx” and went on: “I hope that he will continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of Art. And surely that ought gradually to throw discredit upon the mere counting of syllables.”56 Although it is not entirely certain that Beethoven was referring to this particular series of articles, this does not alter the fact that the composer admired Marx for drawing programmatic conclusions from the description of compositional givens. In his 1824 essay, Marx specifically mentions E. T. A. Hoffmann and his “Thoughts about the Great Value of Music,” in which Hoff-

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mann describes music as “the mysterious Sanskrit of nature, translated into sound that fills the human breast with infinite yearning.”57 This is a definition that can be applied with particular aptness to Beethoven’s symphonies: the listener should “read” them in the way that our ancestors “read” the signs in the stars. These do not offer a verbal explanation of the ebb and flow of the tides, and yet anyone familiar with their movements knew what he or she could take as a point of reference. Beethoven was a modern creator of new worlds in the spirit of Hoffmann’s metaphorical language. In turn, he, too, left signs in the artistic firmament. At the same time, it is not easy to put these signs into words, for all that they are effective in themselves. Listeners who have learned to interpret the semantics of musical expression using a key that has existed over the centuries, if not the millennia, will sense that these signs have meaning even if Beethoven has made it more difficult for them than was the case with earlier generations, who for the most part were able to take their cue from the semantic framework of the ritual performed to the accompaniment of music or from the words that were sung to that music. By contrast, anyone listening to symphonic music is thrown back on him- or herself when it becomes necessary to decipher “the mysterious Sanskrit of nature.” That the rhythm of a hammering motif such as that found at the start of the Fifth Symphony signaled “terror” was clear to listeners of vocal music from similar occurrences that included a text: in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, for example, this rhythmic motif accompanies the Angel’s injunction not to be afraid. In the case of Beethoven’s wordless instrumental music, the listener may or may not be reminded of particular associations— this is entirely in the spirit of the Enlightenment and, more especially, the ethos of “absolute”

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music. On the other hand, Beethoven’s music means something just as almost all music means something, its meanings being anthropologically and historically predetermined. That a series of violently agitated blows like those in the hammering motif under discussion may be associated with the idea of danger is an experience that may initially have had nothing to do with music but has often been used by composers of art music such as Monteverdi in the stile concitato that he himself helped to create. Beethoven’s music contains these anthropological constants and historically informed characteristics, and it would be wrong to ignore them just as it would be wrong to overestimate their importance, for on the one hand Beethoven’s music would be unintelligible without this background, while on the other it gains in meaning, significance, and ethical import precisely because as a free artist Beethoven uses the existing language of music as he sees fit. The listener faces him as the counterpart of this free artist and is required in turn to provide meaning, significance, and ethical import in his or her own way, in other words, not to take his or her cue from any of the possible “programs” that Beethoven himself has consciously eschewed. All that happens in this music must be constantly renegotiated between the composer and his listener. This also applies to the “structure ” of the music, which only seems to be fixed by the notes on the printed page. Here the term parallax comes in handy, a term used in the natural sciences to describe the apparent change in the position of an object that results from the observer’s change of position. Philosophers, on the other hand, have pointed out that the observed difference is not merely subjective, because the fixed object, too, changes when seen from a new perspective.58 Anyone who adopts a flexible approach to the

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analysis of musical structures will observe that any phenomenon can also reveal different facets objectively when viewed from a different angle. In this sense the reception of a work is also affected by the interaction between its structure and its contents: different views of that structure can reveal new contents, while rethinking its content can lead to deeper insights into its structure, a dynamic that guarantees the vitality and actuality of every work of music.

Nine Symphonies: Nine Approaches to the Artwork of Ideas If the music of the eighteenth century provided scope for “great ideas,” then this was principally through the texts that were set, a point true of operas and oratorios as well as church cantatas and secular works written to honor their dedicatees. Instrumental works scored for larger forces were generally intended to serve a social function or were associated with pomp and circumstance, while piano music and chamber works were designed mainly to be played at home and served their purpose if they afforded their performers a certain degree of pleasure. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did contemporaries think of the large-scale symphony as a vehicle for ideas. Writing in the second edition of his General Theory of the Fine Arts in 1794, Johann Georg Sulzer defined the symphony as “admirably suited to the expression of all that is great, solemn, and sublime.” In particular, the symphonic Allegro was “what a Pindaric ode is in poetry: it elevates and stirs the listener’s soul, just as the ode does, and demands the same spirit, the same sublime imagination, and the same knowledge of art in order for it to succeed.”59

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analysis of musical structures will observe that any phenomenon can also reveal different facets objectively when viewed from a different angle. In this sense the reception of a work is also affected by the interaction between its structure and its contents: different views of that structure can reveal new contents, while rethinking its content can lead to deeper insights into its structure, a dynamic that guarantees the vitality and actuality of every work of music.

Nine Symphonies: Nine Approaches to the Artwork of Ideas If the music of the eighteenth century provided scope for “great ideas,” then this was principally through the texts that were set, a point true of operas and oratorios as well as church cantatas and secular works written to honor their dedicatees. Instrumental works scored for larger forces were generally intended to serve a social function or were associated with pomp and circumstance, while piano music and chamber works were designed mainly to be played at home and served their purpose if they afforded their performers a certain degree of pleasure. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did contemporaries think of the large-scale symphony as a vehicle for ideas. Writing in the second edition of his General Theory of the Fine Arts in 1794, Johann Georg Sulzer defined the symphony as “admirably suited to the expression of all that is great, solemn, and sublime.” In particular, the symphonic Allegro was “what a Pindaric ode is in poetry: it elevates and stirs the listener’s soul, just as the ode does, and demands the same spirit, the same sublime imagination, and the same knowledge of art in order for it to succeed.”59

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These extravagant claims make sense against the background of the belief that as a genre the symphony was a suitable way of creating a new religion of art, a development that seemed necessary especially in the eyes of those educated circles who felt that the old faith in the Church was now obsolete. Although “religion” continued to be indispensable as an ultimate form of insurance for both humankind and for art, it needed to be rethought. In turn, this demanded a “new mythology” of the kind proposed by Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin in their Oldest System Program of German Idealism of 1797. That this “new mythology” was above all an aesthetic program is abundantly demonstrated by the writings of early Romantic philosophers and poets, who in this context championed the artistic resources of the symphony above all else. The medium of the symphony had a number of important advantages when compared with other possible vehicles for the new religion of art. On the one hand, the lofty style that was appropriate to it was an expression of the sublime, and on the other, it was directed at mass audiences who could be defined as the “folk” or “the general public.” And, third, it was a wordless art well suited to appealing to enlightened men and women who, hostile to religious dogma, believed in art, avoiding concrete meanings but allowing audiences to revel in their own world of emotion. All of this reflects the views of the influential theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who in his series of addresses On Religion (1799) had spoken of “intuition and feeling” as the “essence of religion” and stressed its “sensibility and taste for the infinite.”60 At more or less the same time Ludwig Tieck was working on an essay, “Symphonies,” in which he stressed the twin aspects of the genre: on the one hand, symphonies were autonomous creations,

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while on the other, “individually vivid images so often hover in the music that one might say that this art holds our eyes and ears in simultaneous thrall.”61 It has to be admitted that most of the theories about the symphony as a medium for the new religion of art were written in Protestant north Germany, but this does not mean that Beethoven, who was born in Bonn in 1770 and who moved to Vienna in 1792, was not imbued with their spirit or at least that he gradually discovered that the symphony could be used as a vehicle for a work that traded in ideas. As such, it would reflect his own artistic ideas and his devotion “to the great and the sublime.” In this regard, too, he had models, who include the Mozart of the Jupiter Symphony. But it was left to Beethoven to invest these models with a new quality. Beethoven’s symphonies are a reflection of their composer’s claim to recreate the world using the resources of art. Even so, he was not some god who created his world once and for all— otherwise there would be only one Beethoven symphony and not nine. No, Beethoven repeatedly approached the problem of recreating the world from different angles, adopting a different solution on each occasion. Even as late as 1819, when he was on the point of entering the world of his final period, he was still propagating the idea of progress: “In the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.”62 This makes it sound easy. Beethoven’s great predecessors Bach and Mozart certainly did not regard themselves as backward, yet they never made such grandiose claims. It required a composer to come along who, slightly behind the times, as seems to befit the musician, felt that he belonged to the Age of the Genius and, consorting with Prometheus as the bringer of light, was keen to fight

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battles in the world of music that would do credit to Napoleon fighting on the battlefields of Europe. In short, Beethoven was neither a god of creation who was satisfied with a single wise plan to set the world in motion nor the inventor of the big bang from which everything else would then proceed as a matter of course over the next four thousand million years. No, Beethoven was simply a genius who was forever in search of something new, a search on which his listeners should not only join him but in the course of which they, too, should learn to tremble with him.

In the world of art [ . . . ] freedom and progress are the main objectives.

Prolegomenon The world of Beethoven’s symphonies is too rich and varied to be properly explored and examined in a series of brief introductions. The following section represents a consciously incomplete attempt to address some of the phenomena that audiences should bear in mind when listening to the individual works.

On Idle Speculations C major, D major, E- flat major: these are the tonics of the first three symphonies. But why is the next symphony in B-flat major, rather than the expected F major? And why is there no G major, but, instead, two symphonies in F major and one each in C minor and D minor in addition to C major and D major? For those listeners who seek a comprehensive theory of everything, the Eighth should be a whole tone higher. Speculative minds would be beside themselves with joy if Beethoven had written it in G major, but he refused to oblige, and it is in vain that we seek order for the sake of order. A better response would be a remark that Nietzsche ’s

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Zarathustra hurls at the populace, “Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.”63

From Portentous Prologues to Ebullient Finales Earlier composers such as Haydn and Mozart had already written ebullient finales designed to send their audiences back home in a mood of carefree high spirits and at the same time to encourage them to call back at some later date. But Beethoven declines to make things as simple as that. Here we have to earn the sense of satisfaction afforded by the final movement having followed the composer through thick and thin from the portentous prologue of the opening movement to the ebullience of the fourth and final movement. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel sought to apply music’s organizational principles to what he termed the “philosophical novel.”64 He himself wrote one such novel under the title Lucinde, and its imaginary “soul” is required to demonstrate a fair amount of philosophical effort before it is allowed to join in “the light-footed dance of life” in the course of the final chapter.65 Schlegel could not have known Beethoven’s symphonies at the time he was working on Lucinde, and yet his comments in his Athenäums-Fragmente are bound to strike the modern reader as altogether clairvoyant: It sometimes seems strange and risible when musicians talk about the ideas in their compositions; and it may often be the

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Zarathustra hurls at the populace, “Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.”63

From Portentous Prologues to Ebullient Finales Earlier composers such as Haydn and Mozart had already written ebullient finales designed to send their audiences back home in a mood of carefree high spirits and at the same time to encourage them to call back at some later date. But Beethoven declines to make things as simple as that. Here we have to earn the sense of satisfaction afforded by the final movement having followed the composer through thick and thin from the portentous prologue of the opening movement to the ebullience of the fourth and final movement. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel sought to apply music’s organizational principles to what he termed the “philosophical novel.”64 He himself wrote one such novel under the title Lucinde, and its imaginary “soul” is required to demonstrate a fair amount of philosophical effort before it is allowed to join in “the light-footed dance of life” in the course of the final chapter.65 Schlegel could not have known Beethoven’s symphonies at the time he was working on Lucinde, and yet his comments in his Athenäums-Fragmente are bound to strike the modern reader as altogether clairvoyant: It sometimes seems strange and risible when musicians talk about the ideas in their compositions; and it may often be the

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case that one sees they have more ideas in their music than they do have about it. [ . . . ] But does not pure instrumental music have to create a text for itself? And is the theme that it contains not so developed, confirmed, varied, and stated in exactly the same way as the object of meditation in a series of philosophical ideas?66

It was very much as a symphonist that Beethoven confirmed Schlegel’s idea that a composer develops his theme not only in his music but also— and dialectically— in ways that go beyond the individual work. In a number of the composer’s symphonies the overriding principle of a journey from the problem to its solution is plain for all to see and hear. The clearest exception to this rule is the Pastoral, for here the world of nature is a constant presence, flooding the symphony from beginning to end. But the Third, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies similarly conform to this model only in part: the final movement of the Eroica is so semantically puzzling that it can be described as “ebullient” only with considerable reservations, while the Eighth may have an uninhibitedly wild finale, but it lacks a prologue that could be described as portentous. And whereas the Ninth Symphony has such a prologue in the form of its opening movement, its choral finale is riven by internal contradictions, on the one hand revealing a series of impressive attempts to break free from the straitjacket of the “classical instrumental symphony,” and on the other hand vacillating between “free” and almost compulsively “strict” episodes, so that in the end only the idea articulated in the text that all men are brothers embodies the element of relief and liberation. Or, to put it another way, the Ninth is Beethoven’s “Unfinished” Symphony. He has, as it were, reached his limits as

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the composer of a “proper” four-movement symphony and can bring the work to an end only with a vocal finale for which he first has to pluck up courage through words (“Not these sounds, friends . . .”). Conversely, the idea of proceeding from a problem to its solution can be effortlessly applied to the other five symphonies— not mechanically, but in the sense of a play of ideas in which listeners may engage themselves and that offer no mathematically neat solutions. Here I am proposing a number of suggestions that are designed to direct the listener’s attention to what will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapters. In his First, Second, and Fourth Symphonies, Beethoven approaches the theme in what might be termed an immanently musical manner. Here we do not need to spend any length of time asking ourselves the meaning of the journey that extends from the more or less portentous slow introduction to the entirely carefree finale— we can regard it as uncomplicatedly clear and at the same time we may recall that it is a journey plainly prefigured in the older symphonic tradition. As Peter Gülke has observed, Beethoven lays claim to a conceptual process that moves from the individual detail to the whole and that transcends the specifically musical.67 Even in these three symphonies, Beethoven already goes beyond what we occasionally find in Haydn and Mozart, and this is even more true of the Fifth, which manifestly constitutes a sequence of philosophical ideas in the spirit of Friedrich Schlegel: not only internally but also in terms of the symphony’s poetic drama, its opening motto— the famous hammering motif— forms the start of a compositional process that begins in darkness and, after several intermediary stages, ends in the brightest light. But it is the final movement of the Seventh Sym-

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phony that proves to be the most “ebullient,” and here, too, we can easily imagine a sequence of ideas that goes beyond the purely musical from the introductory Poco sostenuto to the altogether uninhibited Allegro con brio that brings the symphony to an end.

On Elemental Beginnings Is there anything like it in the history of the pre-Beethovenian symphony? A symphony that begins not with a proper theme but with an exterritorial motto such as we find twice at the start of the Fifth Symphony? It is as if both composer and listeners have had a déjà vu experience when faced by an impressive image, an imposing architectural structure, or a weathered tombstone, an experience that has to be processed in the course of the subsequent musical argument. Someone has to be the first to think up such a formal design and to risk such a daring beginning! The Pastoral Symphony, too, which is coeval with the Fifth, begins with an exterritorial motto, the sound of which may similarly be interpreted as a déjà vu experience. On this occasion, however, the musical argument unfolds along far more relaxed lines: it is enough to recall the scent of the country air, just as the narrator in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu eats a madeleine biscuit dipped in lime blossom tea and is reminded of an archetypal scene that opens up the gateway to his childhood.

On Archetypal Images Remarkable déjà vu experiences are to be found not only in a number of elemental openings but also in entire movements: in the Eroica’s Adagio assai, the Pastoral’s Andante molto mosso, and

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phony that proves to be the most “ebullient,” and here, too, we can easily imagine a sequence of ideas that goes beyond the purely musical from the introductory Poco sostenuto to the altogether uninhibited Allegro con brio that brings the symphony to an end.

On Elemental Beginnings Is there anything like it in the history of the pre-Beethovenian symphony? A symphony that begins not with a proper theme but with an exterritorial motto such as we find twice at the start of the Fifth Symphony? It is as if both composer and listeners have had a déjà vu experience when faced by an impressive image, an imposing architectural structure, or a weathered tombstone, an experience that has to be processed in the course of the subsequent musical argument. Someone has to be the first to think up such a formal design and to risk such a daring beginning! The Pastoral Symphony, too, which is coeval with the Fifth, begins with an exterritorial motto, the sound of which may similarly be interpreted as a déjà vu experience. On this occasion, however, the musical argument unfolds along far more relaxed lines: it is enough to recall the scent of the country air, just as the narrator in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu eats a madeleine biscuit dipped in lime blossom tea and is reminded of an archetypal scene that opens up the gateway to his childhood.

On Archetypal Images Remarkable déjà vu experiences are to be found not only in a number of elemental openings but also in entire movements: in the Eroica’s Adagio assai, the Pastoral’s Andante molto mosso, and

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phony that proves to be the most “ebullient,” and here, too, we can easily imagine a sequence of ideas that goes beyond the purely musical from the introductory Poco sostenuto to the altogether uninhibited Allegro con brio that brings the symphony to an end.

On Elemental Beginnings Is there anything like it in the history of the pre-Beethovenian symphony? A symphony that begins not with a proper theme but with an exterritorial motto such as we find twice at the start of the Fifth Symphony? It is as if both composer and listeners have had a déjà vu experience when faced by an impressive image, an imposing architectural structure, or a weathered tombstone, an experience that has to be processed in the course of the subsequent musical argument. Someone has to be the first to think up such a formal design and to risk such a daring beginning! The Pastoral Symphony, too, which is coeval with the Fifth, begins with an exterritorial motto, the sound of which may similarly be interpreted as a déjà vu experience. On this occasion, however, the musical argument unfolds along far more relaxed lines: it is enough to recall the scent of the country air, just as the narrator in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu eats a madeleine biscuit dipped in lime blossom tea and is reminded of an archetypal scene that opens up the gateway to his childhood.

On Archetypal Images Remarkable déjà vu experiences are to be found not only in a number of elemental openings but also in entire movements: in the Eroica’s Adagio assai, the Pastoral’s Andante molto mosso, and

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the Seventh Symphony’s Allegretto, Beethoven draws in the most general terms on the genre of the funeral march, on the topos of a scene by a brook, and on a cheerfully animated pilgrims’ song, but his music is able to go beyond this and present us with situations whose ear for detail suggests a hint of uniqueness. Listeners are not so much invited to resonate with traditional moods as they are confronted with clearly outlined manifestations that they feel they have already seen with their inner eye, so concrete is the image. And yet they have no idea how or where this may have taken place. Beethoven’s music is able to conjure up images that are sketched out in our subconscious but that can be raised to a conscious level only through the medium of music. We can describe this as scenic composition or as a kind of composition that recalls the visual arts. And we may be reminded in this context of a comment by Bertolt Brecht, who noted with regard to the opening recitative of Bach’s St. John Passion (“Jesus went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron”) that “The locality of the brook is described exactly.”68 Brecht did not mean this literally but was trying to say that the plasticity of Bach’s recitative turns the narrative situation into an experience of startling immediacy. Much the same could be said of the aforementioned movements from Beethoven’s Third, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies: the composer goes beyond the depiction of a vague feeling and elaborates a specific message as if he wanted to inform his listeners that this is his funeral march, his scene by the brook with its plashing waves and birdsong, his pilgrimage. Beethoven’s superior ability to use music to express specific sensory experiences sets him apart from many of his successors, a point that could be demonstrated by means of a subtle analysis

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of his scores. But here we may limit ourselves to a comparison between Beethoven and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, where the sunrise invoked by the composer is illustrated by means of music whose triumphalist gestures are so generalized that it is impossible to identify any local color. Instead, they remind the listener of the brilliantly bombastic ornamentalism that was so popular in the late nineteenth century. By contrast, Beethoven prefers a concrete musical language that did not simply fall into his lap but that he had to work hard to master. This is true not only of Beethoven’s elemental beginnings and of his characteristic movements but also of an infinite number of compositional details that are intended not only to delight the listener but also to stand out within the framework of the symphony as a whole. Beethoven allows us to share in his thought processes as a composer even on points of detail, and these thoughts are clearly ambivalent. To the extent that they float around in his brain, they do not necessarily have to be musical in character, and it is only after an often lengthy process of clarification reflected in his many surviving sketches that they finally find musical expression. But this expression can appear truly striking only if there is something elemental to it, something that does not necessarily clash with its environment but that at the same time defies it. From this point of view, an “elemental” chord that clearly stands out from its surroundings does not need to be simple, but it must demonstrate a degree of striking memorability that makes it seem to stand out. Whereas the music of later generations of composers may in certain cases be compared to impressionist paintings in which the contours are deliberately blurred in order to conjure up a more generalized atmosphere, Beethoven banks on significant individual moments

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without, however, neglecting the whole. These moments are meaningful in their own right, allowing them to summon up archetypal images on a microcosmic level. These do not have to be a part of some detailed sequence of associations: one such archetypal image is associated with the aforementioned C-sharp in the cellos, a note that blatantly indicates the limits imposed on the opening impulse of the Eroica Symphony, representing the idea of an obstacle over and above its immanent musical function. Beethoven was neither the first nor the last composer to interpret music in this sense as a metaphor for universal human ideas, but there has been none to compare with him in terms of the consciousness and intensity of his approach. Within the medium of the musical drama, his most obvious successor was Wagner: the sword motif in the Ring— to take but a single example— conveys an element of propulsive momentum that goes beyond the music and the events onstage and expresses an archetypal gesture that is felt with undeniable immediacy.

On Memorable Fugato Passages According to Beethoven’s early biographer Wilhelm von Lenz, the composer was convinced that “a new and truly poetic element” needed to be introduced into “the traditional form of the fugue.”69 Beethoven does justice to this maxim in his symphonies, and he does so, moreover, in the most varied ways. Compare, for example, the teasing and yet relaxed fugato in the Trio of the Fifth Symphony with the meditative fugato in the Allegretto of the Seventh. Another kind of fugato may be found in those numerous fugued passages that invoke the symbolism of a struggle and as such are entirely novel, at least in symphonic writing. This is certainly true of the

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without, however, neglecting the whole. These moments are meaningful in their own right, allowing them to summon up archetypal images on a microcosmic level. These do not have to be a part of some detailed sequence of associations: one such archetypal image is associated with the aforementioned C-sharp in the cellos, a note that blatantly indicates the limits imposed on the opening impulse of the Eroica Symphony, representing the idea of an obstacle over and above its immanent musical function. Beethoven was neither the first nor the last composer to interpret music in this sense as a metaphor for universal human ideas, but there has been none to compare with him in terms of the consciousness and intensity of his approach. Within the medium of the musical drama, his most obvious successor was Wagner: the sword motif in the Ring— to take but a single example— conveys an element of propulsive momentum that goes beyond the music and the events onstage and expresses an archetypal gesture that is felt with undeniable immediacy.

On Memorable Fugato Passages According to Beethoven’s early biographer Wilhelm von Lenz, the composer was convinced that “a new and truly poetic element” needed to be introduced into “the traditional form of the fugue.”69 Beethoven does justice to this maxim in his symphonies, and he does so, moreover, in the most varied ways. Compare, for example, the teasing and yet relaxed fugato in the Trio of the Fifth Symphony with the meditative fugato in the Allegretto of the Seventh. Another kind of fugato may be found in those numerous fugued passages that invoke the symbolism of a struggle and as such are entirely novel, at least in symphonic writing. This is certainly true of the

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relevant passages in the opening movement of the Eroica. On the other hand, the fugato passages in the final movement of the Eighth, which are clearly designed to sound “wrong,” suggest the idea of someone gesticulating wildly and meaninglessly. Finally, there is the double fugue in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, which strikes the listener as being more concerned with appearance than with substance. Although the grandiose gesture is concealed by the noble intention of combining the maxims of “Joy, beautiful divine spark” and “Let me embrace you, O millions” in the spirit of a powerful chorus sung by the nation as a whole, this idea evidently struck Beethoven at such a late stage in the compositional process that he now had to contend with two themes that can be combined only on the level of their superficial impression at best.

On Striking Dissonances Beethoven’s symphonies contain so many striking dissonances that we can discuss only the two most impressive ones here. Take bars 276–79 in the opening movement of the Eroica, where the sense of terror is at its greatest as the F in the first violins clashes with the A-minor triad in the oboes, clarinets, bassoons, second violins, cellos, and basses. Beethoven has already included a number of dissonances before this striking passage in which, to quote Berlioz, “one can barely restrain a shudder at this spectacle of uncontrollable fury.”70 The flutes confirm the dissonance E–F in their shrill high register. This whole passage is all the more effective in that this strident dissonance is followed by a period of calm that is entrusted to the strings and which, although it begins by striking a dissonant note, culminates in the famous episode in E minor for the winds,

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relevant passages in the opening movement of the Eroica. On the other hand, the fugato passages in the final movement of the Eighth, which are clearly designed to sound “wrong,” suggest the idea of someone gesticulating wildly and meaninglessly. Finally, there is the double fugue in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, which strikes the listener as being more concerned with appearance than with substance. Although the grandiose gesture is concealed by the noble intention of combining the maxims of “Joy, beautiful divine spark” and “Let me embrace you, O millions” in the spirit of a powerful chorus sung by the nation as a whole, this idea evidently struck Beethoven at such a late stage in the compositional process that he now had to contend with two themes that can be combined only on the level of their superficial impression at best.

On Striking Dissonances Beethoven’s symphonies contain so many striking dissonances that we can discuss only the two most impressive ones here. Take bars 276–79 in the opening movement of the Eroica, where the sense of terror is at its greatest as the F in the first violins clashes with the A-minor triad in the oboes, clarinets, bassoons, second violins, cellos, and basses. Beethoven has already included a number of dissonances before this striking passage in which, to quote Berlioz, “one can barely restrain a shudder at this spectacle of uncontrollable fury.”70 The flutes confirm the dissonance E–F in their shrill high register. This whole passage is all the more effective in that this strident dissonance is followed by a period of calm that is entrusted to the strings and which, although it begins by striking a dissonant note, culminates in the famous episode in E minor for the winds,

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thereby ushering in the only self-contained theme in the whole of this opening movement. Those listeners who regard Beethoven as a master of detailed structure can appreciate him here in all of his mastery, using terror as a means of enhancing the effectiveness of the following “words of comfort from above,” which is one of the ways in which the spiritual heart of this movement may be interpreted. A dissonance in the opening movement of the Ninth has gone down in history not only because it is so exposed but because of the intervention of Berlioz, who was so critical of the simultaneous appearance of E-flat, F, G, A-flat, and C (with the G as the bass note) in bar 217 of the development section that a number of editions subsequently replaced the A-flat with a G.71 Beethoven’s strategy is clear, however, his aim being to prepare the way in the most dramatic manner possible for the following contrapuntal section, which suggests the entry of a double fugue. From this point of view, this dissonance has a similar function to the one that is found in the Eroica.

On “False” Entries The classic example of a “false” entry is the apparently premature entry of the horn at the start of the recapitulation in bar 394 of the opening movement of the Eroica. It is known to German writers on music as the “cumulus.”72 The entry is marked pianissimo and is accompanied only by a “whispering tremolando”73 in the violins that is, however, startlingly dissonant. The fact that it is followed by two bars in the full orchestra marked forte and then fortissimo merely serves to underscore the significance of the procedure: the

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thereby ushering in the only self-contained theme in the whole of this opening movement. Those listeners who regard Beethoven as a master of detailed structure can appreciate him here in all of his mastery, using terror as a means of enhancing the effectiveness of the following “words of comfort from above,” which is one of the ways in which the spiritual heart of this movement may be interpreted. A dissonance in the opening movement of the Ninth has gone down in history not only because it is so exposed but because of the intervention of Berlioz, who was so critical of the simultaneous appearance of E-flat, F, G, A-flat, and C (with the G as the bass note) in bar 217 of the development section that a number of editions subsequently replaced the A-flat with a G.71 Beethoven’s strategy is clear, however, his aim being to prepare the way in the most dramatic manner possible for the following contrapuntal section, which suggests the entry of a double fugue. From this point of view, this dissonance has a similar function to the one that is found in the Eroica.

On “False” Entries The classic example of a “false” entry is the apparently premature entry of the horn at the start of the recapitulation in bar 394 of the opening movement of the Eroica. It is known to German writers on music as the “cumulus.”72 The entry is marked pianissimo and is accompanied only by a “whispering tremolando”73 in the violins that is, however, startlingly dissonant. The fact that it is followed by two bars in the full orchestra marked forte and then fortissimo merely serves to underscore the significance of the procedure: the

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horn’s function is evidently to announce the recapitulation before it is ushered in by the cellos with a fortepiano marking. This is not a joke in the spirit of the “false ” entries that Beethoven uses in his Pastoral Symphony to characterize the peasants’ music. Beethoven’s sketches for this passage indicate its importance to him and reveal that it played a part in his planning from an early date. According to Karl Nef, this passage “is impossible from a purely musical point of view” and “can be explained only on the strength of its poetic idea.”74 But what could this idea be? The ostensibly premature entry of the horn recalls nothing so much as a warning sign. Clearly Beethoven wants to prevent the horns from stumbling into the recapitulation without first giving the matter some serious thought. In no circumstances are they to give the impression that everything of substance has already been said and they can sit back and watch the exposition pass them by all over again. And, indeed, listeners can expect not only a substantially different recapitulation but also a monumental coda that returns to the striking E-minor theme of the development section and once again demonstrates that this is the spiritual heart of the symphony. We cannot simply ignore the suggestion that this is Karl Nef’s “poetic idea,” in which case we are dealing with the plot of The Creatures of Prometheus, which, as we observed earlier, Beethoven worked on as a kind of dry run for his Eroica Symphony. And another, related thought: how did musicians find their way around this score, when rehearsals generally ended in confusion, notably with this “cumulus” passage. Not until relatively late in the nineteenth century did handwritten and printed parts include rehearsal cues or bar numbers, leaving it a mystery how conductors were able to manage without such points of orientation. And this

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is even more baffling when we recall that the orchestra was often conducted by the leader of the orchestra from his violin part, a part which at best included cues indicating the entry of the other instruments.

On the Escapades of the Timpani Even before Beethoven’s day there were, of course, solo passages for the timpani. Notable examples include the instrumental introduction to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the opening movement of which was originally a setting of the words “Ring out, O timpani, sound forth, O trumpets,” and two of Haydn’s symphonies: no. 94 in G major (“Surprise”) and no. 103 in E-flat major (“Drumroll”). In Beethoven’s symphonies such passages are not necessarily more striking, but they are undoubtedly more “eloquently” incorporated into the overall concept. This is certainly true of the final section of the funeral march in the Eroica, where, from bar 199 onward, the timpani no longer merely underscores the musical argument in the other instruments— specifically the brass— but adds emphases of its own right up to its very last note: a solitary eighth note heard pianissimo ten bars before the end of the movement, at a point where the rest of the orchestra is silent. In bar 67 of the Adagio of the Fourth Symphony, the timpani takes over a dotted rhythm from the cellos and double basses made up of a descending fourth repeated six times. It had previously played this rhythm while accompanying other instruments, but now it performs it on its own. Three bars before the end of the movement, the timpani restates this rhythm, pianissimo, in a slightly foreshortened form, while the rest of the

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is even more baffling when we recall that the orchestra was often conducted by the leader of the orchestra from his violin part, a part which at best included cues indicating the entry of the other instruments.

On the Escapades of the Timpani Even before Beethoven’s day there were, of course, solo passages for the timpani. Notable examples include the instrumental introduction to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the opening movement of which was originally a setting of the words “Ring out, O timpani, sound forth, O trumpets,” and two of Haydn’s symphonies: no. 94 in G major (“Surprise”) and no. 103 in E-flat major (“Drumroll”). In Beethoven’s symphonies such passages are not necessarily more striking, but they are undoubtedly more “eloquently” incorporated into the overall concept. This is certainly true of the final section of the funeral march in the Eroica, where, from bar 199 onward, the timpani no longer merely underscores the musical argument in the other instruments— specifically the brass— but adds emphases of its own right up to its very last note: a solitary eighth note heard pianissimo ten bars before the end of the movement, at a point where the rest of the orchestra is silent. In bar 67 of the Adagio of the Fourth Symphony, the timpani takes over a dotted rhythm from the cellos and double basses made up of a descending fourth repeated six times. It had previously played this rhythm while accompanying other instruments, but now it performs it on its own. Three bars before the end of the movement, the timpani restates this rhythm, pianissimo, in a slightly foreshortened form, while the rest of the

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orchestra listens in silence before ending the movement with two fortissimo chords. We shall return in due course to the impression of the numinous to which the timpani makes a substantial contribution in the transition to the final movement of the Fifth Symphony. The Pastoral Symphony takes this process a stage further, for here Beethoven uses the timpani— like the piccolo— only in the storm scene, where he paints a picture of the rumbling of the storm as it passes into the distance. We might even be entitled to describe this as an example of scene painting, for there has never been a more vivid and graphic orchestral invocation of a storm scene than this. How did a timpani player in Beethoven’s day manage to retune his instrument in the Eighth Symphony in the time available? There is little time to retune one of the two timpani from C to F at the end of the third movement, and machine timpani did not yet exist at this time. Perhaps the player had a third instrument at his disposal. The solo entries of the timpani in the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony were applauded by the audience at the work’s first performance in 1824. But why does Beethoven demand two timpani in F, as in his Eighth Symphony, when the movement is in D minor? In this case two sets of instruments have to be retuned within the shortest possible time in order to produce the piquant interval of a third.

On Highly Expressive Foreshortenings My concern here is not the cuts that later generations, thinking that they know better than the composer, have sought to introduce into Beethoven’s symphonies but the characteristic way in which

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orchestra listens in silence before ending the movement with two fortissimo chords. We shall return in due course to the impression of the numinous to which the timpani makes a substantial contribution in the transition to the final movement of the Fifth Symphony. The Pastoral Symphony takes this process a stage further, for here Beethoven uses the timpani— like the piccolo— only in the storm scene, where he paints a picture of the rumbling of the storm as it passes into the distance. We might even be entitled to describe this as an example of scene painting, for there has never been a more vivid and graphic orchestral invocation of a storm scene than this. How did a timpani player in Beethoven’s day manage to retune his instrument in the Eighth Symphony in the time available? There is little time to retune one of the two timpani from C to F at the end of the third movement, and machine timpani did not yet exist at this time. Perhaps the player had a third instrument at his disposal. The solo entries of the timpani in the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony were applauded by the audience at the work’s first performance in 1824. But why does Beethoven demand two timpani in F, as in his Eighth Symphony, when the movement is in D minor? In this case two sets of instruments have to be retuned within the shortest possible time in order to produce the piquant interval of a third.

On Highly Expressive Foreshortenings My concern here is not the cuts that later generations, thinking that they know better than the composer, have sought to introduce into Beethoven’s symphonies but the characteristic way in which

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Beethoven foreshortens the musical argument in order to intensify his intended message. Take the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony, where the music suddenly reverts from D major to the opening key of B- flat minor at the transition to the first variation on the main theme in bars 41–43. But this is nothing when set beside the parallel passage starting in bar 83: what we find here is a wonderful modulation in the winds from E-flat major to C-flat major, a key that seems to be briefly confirmed by a striking horn solo already mentioned in another context (p. 26). Far from lingering in C-flat major, the music shifts abruptly to B-flat major, the key in which we now hear the second variation on the main theme. But Beethoven has included a performance marking here: Lo stesso tempo (the same tempo). The regular flow of the movement is not to be disrupted but should be maintained to the very end. But in order to avoid any sense of monotony, Beethoven uses changes of key signature that, figuratively speaking, may be described as marking a return from a foreign harmonic “atmosphere” to the original harmonic “lighting.” In each case the return is achieved as if by magic, rather than by provocative violence. Taken as a whole, this is a tiny example of Beethoven’s ability to balance the individual musical parameters in such a way that the heterogeneity of the individual detail is combined with the homogeneity of the whole.

On Beethoven’s Fondness for the Eroica History has recorded a conversation that took place in the summer of 1817 between Beethoven and a Viennese music lover, the court secretary Christoph Kuffner: “K.— Tell me frankly, which is your favorite among your symphonies? B.—[in great good humor] Eh!

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Beethoven foreshortens the musical argument in order to intensify his intended message. Take the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony, where the music suddenly reverts from D major to the opening key of B- flat minor at the transition to the first variation on the main theme in bars 41–43. But this is nothing when set beside the parallel passage starting in bar 83: what we find here is a wonderful modulation in the winds from E-flat major to C-flat major, a key that seems to be briefly confirmed by a striking horn solo already mentioned in another context (p. 26). Far from lingering in C-flat major, the music shifts abruptly to B-flat major, the key in which we now hear the second variation on the main theme. But Beethoven has included a performance marking here: Lo stesso tempo (the same tempo). The regular flow of the movement is not to be disrupted but should be maintained to the very end. But in order to avoid any sense of monotony, Beethoven uses changes of key signature that, figuratively speaking, may be described as marking a return from a foreign harmonic “atmosphere” to the original harmonic “lighting.” In each case the return is achieved as if by magic, rather than by provocative violence. Taken as a whole, this is a tiny example of Beethoven’s ability to balance the individual musical parameters in such a way that the heterogeneity of the individual detail is combined with the homogeneity of the whole.

On Beethoven’s Fondness for the Eroica History has recorded a conversation that took place in the summer of 1817 between Beethoven and a Viennese music lover, the court secretary Christoph Kuffner: “K.— Tell me frankly, which is your favorite among your symphonies? B.—[in great good humor] Eh!

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Eh! The ‘Eroica.’ K.— I should have guessed the C minor. B.— No; the ‘Eroica.’”75 It is no accident that many of the examples included here are taken from the Eroica. With the possible exception of the Ninth, on which Beethoven had yet to start work at this time, none of his symphonies reveals as many different puzzles as this one. But, far from worrying the composer, this was a source of “great good humor.” He preferred it to the more streamlined Fifth, presumably because alongside its dynamic qualities, it also resembles an elaborate and fantastical maze or labyrinth. However keen Beethoven may have been to be understood through his music, he was equally determined to hold his cards close to his chest, the only exception being the Pastoral Symphony. The reader will be reminded of the sibylline inscription that Beethoven framed and kept constantly before him on his desk:76 “I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. No mortal man has raised my veil.”77 Beethoven may have come across this motto in Schiller’s essay “Moses’ Calling.” He related it, naturally enough, to the deity. Beyond this, however, he may well have identified with the words that Bettina von Armin had placed in his mouth in one of her Goethe letters from 1810, written after she had made the composer’s acquaintance in Vienna: “Thus art has always represented the deity.”78 And for Beethoven this art was ultimately his own.

On Crossing a Threshold The famous C-sharp that interrupts the opening motif of the Eroica Symphony after only nine notes confronts composer and listeners alike with what appears to be a locked door. It is impossible to

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Eh! The ‘Eroica.’ K.— I should have guessed the C minor. B.— No; the ‘Eroica.’”75 It is no accident that many of the examples included here are taken from the Eroica. With the possible exception of the Ninth, on which Beethoven had yet to start work at this time, none of his symphonies reveals as many different puzzles as this one. But, far from worrying the composer, this was a source of “great good humor.” He preferred it to the more streamlined Fifth, presumably because alongside its dynamic qualities, it also resembles an elaborate and fantastical maze or labyrinth. However keen Beethoven may have been to be understood through his music, he was equally determined to hold his cards close to his chest, the only exception being the Pastoral Symphony. The reader will be reminded of the sibylline inscription that Beethoven framed and kept constantly before him on his desk:76 “I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. No mortal man has raised my veil.”77 Beethoven may have come across this motto in Schiller’s essay “Moses’ Calling.” He related it, naturally enough, to the deity. Beyond this, however, he may well have identified with the words that Bettina von Armin had placed in his mouth in one of her Goethe letters from 1810, written after she had made the composer’s acquaintance in Vienna: “Thus art has always represented the deity.”78 And for Beethoven this art was ultimately his own.

On Crossing a Threshold The famous C-sharp that interrupts the opening motif of the Eroica Symphony after only nine notes confronts composer and listeners alike with what appears to be a locked door. It is impossible to

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continue. And the music does indeed retreat at this point before attempting to pursue its course by other means. Not until the final movement is Beethoven’s symphonic ego able to cross the decisive threshold, and only now is the way clear for relaxed music making and for the transformation of the problematic opening motif into a lively contredanse. Much the same is true of the Fifth Symphony, the famous opening motto of which resembles a somber warning: “Do you know what you are committing yourself to by entering here?” And as in the Eroica, the transition to the light is found only at the end, the one difference being that here the preparations are even more intense, the victorious C major of the closing apotheosis being preceded by an episode in which the composer seems to be groping in the dark, leaving his contemporaries astonished at its tonal and metrical uncertainty. Beethoven adopts a very different approach in his Pastoral Symphony. Although this, too, begins with a motto that reads like an inscription over a doorway, on this occasion the listener is invited to enter in keeping with the movement’s heading, “Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the countryside.” The Ninth Symphony promises no fewer than two liminal experiences for the listener. At the start of the work, we feel that order is being imposed on a diffuse primeval state without, however, the movement’s forfeiting any of its sense of monumentality. This is comparable to the “breakthrough” to the final movement of the Fifth, but it is not a breakthrough from diffuse darkness to bright light. Rather, it is one from formlessness to form— no longer as a first step that is reversed in the moments leading up to the choral finale, moments that include the “terrifying fanfare ” and the

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appeal, “O friends, not these sounds.” The renewed signal to stop makes it clear that the composer’s formal artistry is not yet over no matter how impressively it may be articulated. No, a higher threshold has to be crossed here, leading to the idea of a shared celebration to which each of us contributes as best we can. From the Eroica onward, Beethoven is repeatedly exercised by the problem of how best to surmount the threshold between the self-referential pursuit of art and a higher idea that transcends the compositional process. Only here is this productive contradiction summed up with such striking succinctness.

Starting today, I plan to strike out in a new direction.

The Symphonies Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 First performed in the Vienna Burgtheater on April 2, 1800

Neither the date of the first performance nor the rest of the evening’s program was an accident. The year, 1800, signaled the start of a new century, and it is entirely possible that Beethoven wanted to mark the occasion with a flourish. Contemporary reports certainly spoke of “novelty and a wealth of ideas.”79 No less remarkable is the fact that the rest of the program of Beethoven’s first independent concert included a Mozart symphony— almost certainly the Jupiter, which Bach’s pupil Johann Christian Kittel had hailed as a “triumph of more recent music.”80 Kittel’s encomium is directed at the final movement in particular, a movement that combines sonata form and fugal textures in a way that epitomizes a straightforward theory of musical form while proving impossible to categorize as a continuation of the traditional fugal finale or as the plausible consequence of a conception that extends beyond the individual movement. Rather, there is a superfluity of meaning that clearly consists in the belief that the final movement of a symphony should strike the audience as

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F i g u r e 1 • Beethoven at the time of the First Symphony. Copper engraving by Johann Joseph Neidl after a drawing by Gandolph Ernst Stainhauser von Treuberg dating from 1801. The image— an authorized portrait— was on sale at several of Vienna’s booksellers. Beethoven himself sent a copy to his friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler in Bonn. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn)

the culmination of all the previous movements. For Mozart, too, this belief was new and possibly even unique. The final movement was to enhance and intensify all that had gone before it, something that the carefree envoi of a Haydn symphony or any of Mozart’s earlier final movements— inspired, as they are, by operatic finales— were never able to achieve, their undeniable charm notwithstanding.

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If a finale that is weighty in this sense is not to seem unwarranted and without foundation, then it needs to be preceded by a significant opening movement. And if, when he wrote his Symphony in C Major, Beethoven was wanting to pick up where Mozart left off with the final movement of his Jupiter Symphony, then he made this apparent with his very first chord. According to a tradition stretching back several centuries, this should be C–E–G, and the listener should by rights be informed that the symphony is in C major. Instead Beethoven begins with a C7 dissonance, which is then resolved to the subdominant, F major, and it is only after a series of detours that the musical argument definitively reaches the home key with the start of the first subject. Until then a dissonance at the start of a piece had been limited almost exclusively to vocal music. Bach, for example, had begun his Cantata 54, Widerstehe doch der Sünde (Stand firm against sin), with a sustained suspension that symbolizes the resistance that all good Christians should evince in the face of sin, and from that point of view it makes sense. But Beethoven’s procedure is innovative in that it involves a harmonic puzzle extending over several stages. The composer does not invite his listeners to follow his music in the usual obvious way but challenges them to enter a completely unknown room with him. Here they are greeted not by the trumpets and timpani that are typical of a symphony in C major and that Mozart had deployed as recently as his Jupiter Symphony. Instead, woodwinds and pizzicato strings create the impression of relatively diffuse sonorities, an impression abetted by the initial absence of any solid metrical foundation. All told, we are dealing here with an initial example of the way in which Beethoven’s “absolute music” henceforth draws its strength from the listener’s unconditional will-

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ingness to accept unusual situations and to feel personally responsible for creating a sense of context and cohesion. The slow introduction to the First Symphony is not so much concerned with establishing a mood as with lending plausibility to the first subject’s dazzling entry. After all, it is simply not possible to launch the work with such an explosive subject: Beethoven first needs to harness sufficient energy to ensure that the following discharge is possible— this is a problem that he continued to wrestle with right up to the time of the Ninth. It is worth stopping at this point to examine the altogether inspired way in which he creates that moment when the pent- up energy is released. In fact the point at which this occurs— and, hence, the beginning of the first subject— is hard to pin down with ultimate clarity. On the final beat of the twelfth bar, as the unison strings swoop down like a falcon on the tonic, the critical mass that has been building up grows sufficiently dense to give rise to a chain reaction, but the process that has been described in this way renders it almost impossible to distinguish between the introduction and the first subject: our attention is directed less at “how it all started” and more at “how it has developed.” This sums up to perfection Beethoven’s aim— expressed in his letter to Archduke Rudolph— of making “progress” in the world of art “as in the world of our great creation.”81 For Carl Dahlhaus, who draws for his line of argument on the article on the symphony in Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts, the first subject carries us along with the force of a Pindaric ode, a verse form that was regarded in Sulzer’s day as the very epitome of the sublime.82 Arnold Schmitz was forcefully reminded of the main theme from Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Ouverture de la journée de Marathon of 1795–

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96, the revolutionary strains of which were intended to recall the idea of the heroic defense of the fatherland at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.83 These various associations complement one another extremely well, the idea of the timelessly sublime consorting with that of the topically revolutionary to create a work entirely typical of Beethoven and at the same time one whose “tone” remains intelligible to us today. Many of the composer’s contemporaries saw the Beethoven of the First Symphony as the natural successor of Haydn and Mozart. It is entirely understandable, therefore, that the Russian writer on music, Alexander Ulïbïshev, who wrote in French under the name of Alexandre Oulibicheff and who was well known in his own day as an admirer of Mozart and an outspoken critic of Beethoven, regarded the First as “the best thing that Beethoven ever wrote and the least of the evils that he brought into the world.”84 By contrast, the Leipzig- based music critic and Beethoven admirer Friedrich Rochlitz noted that there had initially been a tendency to see in the First Symphony “fairly confused explosions of bold exuberance.”85 This exuberance is plainly audible in the opening movement and in the Menuetto, which is in third position. Particularly striking about the first movement is not so much the novelty of the introduction, which, like the opening of an eccentric novel, whets the appetite for what is to follow, but the entire musical argument, which is notable for its use of dynamics and for a processual approach to composition that, even if they fall short of the later Beethoven’s achievements in this field, are nonetheless sufficiently striking when compared with Haydn and Mozart. Schumann, who could still regard himself as Beethoven’s contemporary, proposed a highly Romantic image:

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Soon the young Beethoven arrived, breathless, embarrassed, and distraught, his hair long and unkempt, his brow and breast as open as Hamlet’s, an eccentric who caused much bewilderment; he found the ballroom too confining and too tedious, preferring to rush outside into the dark, snorting at fashion and ceremonial, yet at the same time avoiding the flowers in his path in order not to trample them underfoot.86

This “breathlessness” that Schumann observed is admirably demonstrated by a new awareness of time on the part of the symphonist, a feature that offers listeners few opportunities to stop to catch their breath. As a result, the first subject’s six-bar antecedent phrase is not followed by a regular consequent phrase that would have lent balance to the musical structure but by a shift to the key of D major, signaling a sense of impetuous momentum. Conversely, the second subject may be built up along regular lines, but the key of G major that appears here in keeping with the rules of traditional sonata form is not reached by means of a textbook modulation via the dominant of the dominant. Because the second subject is unable to confirm the tonic, listeners feel a sense of bewilderment when it enters: the G major may conform to the rules, but listeners have the impression that they have entered through the wrong door and have been misdirected— a clearer sense of orientation would have been provided by the key of D major, but this is conspicuous by its absence. Even Mozart had occasionally adopted this device, allowing Donald Francis Tovey to speak in this context of a “practical joke.”87 Beethoven may well have been familiar with such passages and may even have studied them, but he reveals what can be made

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of such a “joke ” when the cheeky transgression of a compositional convention becomes an individual hallmark of his style whereby the route by which one key modulates to another is perceptibly shortened and the composer links together parts of the movement that his more leisurely predecessors had generally kept apart. Another of Beethoven’s hallmarks that may be identified in his First Symphony is his handling of the development section. This is not to belittle the skill that Haydn and the later Mozart lavished on their development sections, but there is no doubt that here, too, Beethoven was far more ambitious than either of his predecessors had been. For him, the time was definitely over when the development section was viewed as no more than a bridge between the exposition and the recapitulation, no matter how original and elaborate that bridge may have been. Beethoven’s development section, by contrast, is used to rework the themes that were presented in the exposition and to elaborate them in such a way that when they reappear in the recapitulation, they appear to the listener to have been transfigured. This is already a quality that we can admire in the First Symphony, where Beethoven deliberately works with material derived from the first four bars of the first subject and from the second four bars of the second subject. And the consistency of his approach can be seen from the harmonic trajectory of the first of the two passages that make up the development section. If we ignore the intermediary stages, this consists of a sequence of fifths descending from A major to E- flat major followed by a sequence that rises, mirrorlike, from E-flat major to E major. The ascent is initially stepwise, before the earlier fifths reassert themselves. The final part of the development section reflects the composer’s aim of allow-

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ing his two main motifs to roam freely after they had previously been held on a relatively tight rein on their journey through the harmonic highs and lows of the earlier part of this section. By the end little is left of them apart from a specific gesture. What we find instead in bars 162–70 is a triumphant statement of a seven-note motif in the fortissimo winds that may be interpreted not only as the goal of the development section but also as the emotionally charged victory call of the new revolutionary age. It is a motif that contains echoes of a number of revolutionary anthems,88 and it prefigures the breakthrough that Beethoven stages at the end of the development section of the opening movement of his Eroica Symphony, where it takes the form of his theme in E minor. The recapitulation that follows can now appear as something entirely fresh and new. The seriousness of purpose that Beethoven brought to his new compositional concept is clear from the coda, which ends with a fortissimo C- major triad lasting no fewer than twenty- two bars. In the slow introduction to this movement the home key had been glimpsed through a veil rather than being clearly stated, but at the end it is finally exhibited in all its glory, thematically underpinned by a segment of the first subject. This implies an approach to the work’s dramaturgy that banks on a public appeal and that achieves its full effect only when entrusted to a conductor who is in complete control of the orchestra. This was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time of the symphony’s first performance in 1800, when the work was led by the opera director Giacomo Conti, possibly from the concertmaster’s desk. This last- named possibility would certainly have made sense in the second movement, where there is a palpable air of relaxation reminiscent of the world of chamber music: the dynamic marking

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forte is rarely found, and the ending is marked pianissimo. Although the timpani is allowed a brief moment of prominence with its dotted rhythm, this passage too is marked piano, a marking that reflects the key of F major, which was traditionally associated with a low dynamic level. According to Johann Mattheson, one of Germany’s leading theorists of the first half of the eighteenth century, this key was capable of “expressing the most beautiful sentiments in the world, whether they be magnanimity, steadfastness, love, or whatever else appears at the top of the list of virtues, and expresses them, moreover, in such a natural way and with such matchless ease that no constraint is necessary.”89 Although this may remind listeners of the century of Haydn and Mozart, the following Menuetto once again reveals a typically Beethovenian feature: this is the first and last time in his entire symphonic output that Beethoven specifically uses this movement heading, which he adopts with the single aim of taking it to its furthest and most absurd extreme. The era of the menuetto as a kind of stately court dance similar to that invoked by Mozart in his Jupiter Symphony and in Haydn’s late “London” Symphony is now definitively over. What we hear is a quick dance whose motoric rhythms obscure such parameters as melody and harmony. In the Trio— whether by way of a joke or not— simple harmonies and brief melodic phrases are savored all the more consciously. In none of his later symphonies does Beethoven call into question the tradition that a symphony must include a lively movement in a dancelike ternary meter. Instead he furnishes more and more examples of the way in which he refuses as a composer to be guided by the image of a particular type of movement but redefines that movement type for himself.

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For Berlioz, the Menuetto was the only really new aspect of this symphony. He spoke of “admirably wrought music, clear and lively,” whereas the final movement struck him as “musically childlike. In short, this is not yet the true Beethoven. But we shall soon find him.”90 He was referring to the Second Symphony. The final movement vacillates between rondo form and sonata form and recalls nothing so much as an enjoyable Haydnesque envoi. The initial chord strikes a note of pomp and circumstance but is not followed by an effervescent first subject. Instead the composer seems to be searching for such a subject with a thoughtfulness that borders on hesitation, only for him then to plunge headlong into the Allegro molto e vivace. And yet this tempo is so overwrought that the scherzo-like mood seems almost a parody of Haydnesque lightness. In sum, Beethoven’s First Symphony reveals a composer keen to surpass his mentor, who was still very much active at this time, both in the weight that he attributes to the opening movement and in the subtlety and extravagance of its final Allegro molto e vivace.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 Probably premiered at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on April 5, 1803

Compared to its predecessor, the Second Symphony was evidently intended to be a more significant, more multilayered, and in general a more heroic work. In it we can already find signs of a tendency typical of Beethoven’s symphonic output as a whole: each work was designed to outdo its predecessor. “I represent the avant- garde of my day” could be the Second Symphony’s motto. Haydn and Mozart have been forgotten— assuming they had ever been the inspiration for the First. Because size and significance are related to

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For Berlioz, the Menuetto was the only really new aspect of this symphony. He spoke of “admirably wrought music, clear and lively,” whereas the final movement struck him as “musically childlike. In short, this is not yet the true Beethoven. But we shall soon find him.”90 He was referring to the Second Symphony. The final movement vacillates between rondo form and sonata form and recalls nothing so much as an enjoyable Haydnesque envoi. The initial chord strikes a note of pomp and circumstance but is not followed by an effervescent first subject. Instead the composer seems to be searching for such a subject with a thoughtfulness that borders on hesitation, only for him then to plunge headlong into the Allegro molto e vivace. And yet this tempo is so overwrought that the scherzo-like mood seems almost a parody of Haydnesque lightness. In sum, Beethoven’s First Symphony reveals a composer keen to surpass his mentor, who was still very much active at this time, both in the weight that he attributes to the opening movement and in the subtlety and extravagance of its final Allegro molto e vivace.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 Probably premiered at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on April 5, 1803

Compared to its predecessor, the Second Symphony was evidently intended to be a more significant, more multilayered, and in general a more heroic work. In it we can already find signs of a tendency typical of Beethoven’s symphonic output as a whole: each work was designed to outdo its predecessor. “I represent the avant- garde of my day” could be the Second Symphony’s motto. Haydn and Mozart have been forgotten— assuming they had ever been the inspiration for the First. Because size and significance are related to

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F i g u r e 2 • Letter from Beethoven to his pupil Ferdinand Ries dating from April 1802. In it Beethoven asks Ries to look through a set of handwritten orchestral parts, presumably for the Second Symphony. He also mentions a letter of recommendation to Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus that is enclosed with the present letter. In that letter he asks the count for an advance of fifty ducats for Ries, a sum that would allow the latter to equip himself for his new appointment as the count’s pianist in residence. Beethoven gently admonishes his pupil for not having turned to him sooner in his time of need. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB Br 188)

quantity, then the Second Symphony is a larger- dimensioned work. The dynamic potential of the orchestra’s sonorities is explored in greater detail with the result that there are long sections less notable for their thematic writing than for their use of Klangflächen, or “sound-sheets,” in which energy is generated anew. Beethoven reexamines the question of the slow introduction and its transition to the first subject, but this time the introduction does not seem rushed. Rather, the composer allows himself

F i g u r e 3 • First page of the piano part of an arrangement of the Second Symphony for piano trio. According to the most recent research, it is not entirely certain whether it was Beethoven himself who prepared this arrangement, which was published by the Bureau des arts et d’industrie in Vienna in 1806, even though the title page names him as the arranger. But he generally prepared his own arrangements, which not only helped to boost his income but were an appealing compositional challenge for him. In particular, the task of reducing symphonic resources to the much smaller forces of a chamber ensemble gave him an opportunity to reexamine the musical substance of a work. Today’s publishers cannot hope to make any money from such arrangements because the radio, the gramophone record, the compact disc, and widely available online resources mean that we are no longer obliged to get to know symphonies through the medium of chamber works performed in the privacy of our own homes. In the nineteenth century, when live performances might not be an option, listeners were not only reliant on such self-help but positively enthusiastic about it. After all, it was not until 1819 that music lovers in Hamburg, for example, were able to hear their first live Beethoven symphony. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, C.36/31) It is worth adding that nowhere in a pre-Beethovenian symphony do we find half notes and sixty-fourth notes as close to one another as here. This is no longer determined by conventional metrical proportions but by what might be termed the compositional ego.

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plenty of time to explore in detail the heroic panorama that gives the opening movement its distinctive profile. In turn, this offers him a chance to paint an even broader picture in the course of the rest of the movement. The slow introduction begins in a novel way with what Adolf Nowak has called “a solemn vocal melody,”91 the very appearance of which contradicts those commentators who wish to see in Beethoven a composer of “absolute music” as defined by Hanslick with his “tonally moving forms.”92 The hymnlike tone makes it unequivocally clear that we are not dealing here with any self-referential symphonic game but that great matters are afoot, matters that might be described in words if this did not fly in the face of the genre’s very essence. Here we may think of the language of those vocal and instrumental works from the time of the French Revolution that Beethoven was fond of citing, and in light of the present heroic motto we may even imagine that the symphony was written against the background of Beethoven’s thoughts about moving to Paris or at least of occupying a place in Napoleon’s world that would be worthy of a truly great artist. The foregoing comments also apply to the opening movement’s fanfare- like second subject, although to describe it as a “second subject” scarcely does justice to the fact that the whole movement is geared to its appearance, while the development section, too, singles out this metrically succinct and marchlike episode as a possible goal. Although the first subject loses its second half here and finds its very meaning questioned in consequence, it returns in all its glory in the recapitulation, this time in the tonic. In spite of this, it would be wrong to think that the opening movement as a whole was about nothing more than hymnlike, revolutionary gestures, for Beethoven’s approach is anything but

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one- dimensional or alfresco. The surviving sketch material for the Second Symphony reveals the extent to which the composer struggled in his search for every single compositional and technical detail. His journey took him not from the complex to the simple but involved a clear attempt to avoid banal or obvious solutions: in short, he wanted to appear as an original, incalculable genius. And so we find him discarding the idea of introducing the motif of the first subject into his slow introduction, as one of his sketches indicates. In other respects, too, these sketches are not concerned with honing points of detail. Rather, the movement’s definitive structure emerges from what appears only on the surface to be detailed work. And from the outset this structure is designed to call the material into question on its most basic level. Nowak is right to speak of a “critical examination” of first-movement sonata form,93 and his remarks apply not only to the movement’s basic structure but also to detailed questions that Haydn and Mozart are unlikely ever to have considered, their differentiated approach to compositional matters notwithstanding. The astute analyst who is well practiced in the study of scores will always be able to find a belated rationale for Beethoven’s decisions. But those listeners who are under no compulsion to award Beethoven’s music a seal of approval as the expression of the most perfect logic will be receptive to the contingencies of that music, in other words, those elements in each work that cannot always be explained by analysis and that we simply allow to affect us no matter whether we agree with them or question them or do both of these things at once. Those of Beethoven’s contemporaries who claimed that his Second Symphony was “bizarre”94 were not necessarily limited in their outlook but may have been keen to “understand” Bee-

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thoven in a better and more detailed manner than later generations of listeners who have voluntarily surrendered to the cult of genius. When confronted with movements that are structurally undistinguished, strict formal analysts tend to fall back on a particular trick in order to fill the space available to them, reporting on programmatic interpretations of the works in question only to dismiss those interpretations as wayward. Formally speaking, the Larghetto of the Second Symphony reveals little that might elicit comment: it is a type of sonata movement whose first subject not only assumes the form of a two-part song but can even be interpreted as an example of a song without words. A slightly more daring interpretation— albeit one that still falls well short of the sort of language adopted by concert guides— might encourage us to speak of “idyllic”95 elements that, where appropriate, do not exclude “sighs” and clouded minor-key harmonies.96 Even the remark that the second subject in A major recalls the Andante moderato sections from the slow movement of the Ninth remains within the bounds of appropriateness, for all that it is less “delicate” than these lastnamed passages. (Beethoven himself uses the term delicate in his sketches for the Ninth.)97 We do not need to go any further than this. But would it be a sacrilege to allow our imagination free rein— at least to the extent that we remain bound by the matter in hand and are clear in our own minds that the result of our exercise is nothing more nor less than an act of the imagination? At all events, it seems obvious that— unlike Haydn and Mozart, for example— Beethoven was concerned in his slow movements not only with generalities but also with a specific message: this conclusion seems inescapable when we consider the relevant movements from the Third, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and

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Ninth Symphonies, not one of which can be reconciled with the traditional idea of a “classic slow movement.” No one, of course, is obliged to sit up and take notice here, but in the case of those commentators who in the course of the work’s reception have done precisely that, we should not accuse them of seeking to gain access to Beethoven’s music by dishonest means, for it could be the case that, appearances notwithstanding, they are approaching the music not from the outside but are at pains to come closer to an understanding of Beethoven’s works “from the inside ”— the phrase is taken from Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s splendid study Mozart im Innern seiner Sprachen (literally, “Mozart inside his languages”).98 There is no doubt that Beethoven was willing to divulge only as much of this interior as his music itself reveals. But when, in response to a question as to the key to understanding his Piano Sonatas op. 31, no. 2, and op. 57, he replied “Just read Shakespeare’s Tempest,”99 then his comment, which seems to me to be entirely plausible, is not so much a pointer to a hidden program than an invitation to the questioner, Anton Schindler, to use the power of his imagination, an imagination to which the playwright accords a leading role in The Tempest, where the key words are enchanted sleep and apparition. Modern listeners may have no qualms, therefore, about engaging with Berlioz’s train of thought: for them, the Larghetto of the Second Symphony represents “a lovely image of innocent happiness, scarcely clouded by a few melancholy accents.”100 And such listeners may also respond positively to the idea proposed by the German Beethoven scholar Harry Goldschmidt that on a hidden level the Second Symphony is a symphonic version of The Magic Flute. In particular, the “rapt duets of the central episodes” in the Larghetto reflect the happiness that Tamino and Pamina find in

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love, whereas the minor-key passages are an echo of the “terrors of night and death.”101 We are not concerned with the plausibility of individual details but with a fundamental openness to the idea that great artists have always been inspired by other great artists— not just literally (although this also happens) but above all in the sense of their acceptance of “convincing” attitudes on the question of their work as artists. Beethoven wrote his Second Symphony at the time of his Heiligenstadt Testament, a document that reveals two sides to his character, one struck down by adversity, the other of a far more amiable kind. It is conceivable that in this situation he might have drawn strength from Mozart for the moments of happiness that find expression in the Larghetto. At this point it is worth recalling the Song without Words that opens the movement and that has left its mark on the rest of the musical argument. Whether we are dealing here with The Magic Flute or with some other work, Beethoven could have imagined this movement as a setting of words that would suit the emotional world of Pamina and Tamino. Among the various ways of listening to music, it is undoubtedly legitimate to think about the music and to imagine it against a broader background. Adorno, who insisted that music could only ever be itself and that it was a “social fact,” made an original comment on the Second Symphony’s Larghetto, claiming that it “belongs to the world of Jean Paul. The infinite moonlit night speaks only to the finite coach driving through it. Its confined cosiness reinforces the expression of the unconfined.”102 Adorno is alluding here to Jean Paul’s satirical novel Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise, not only flaunting his literary education but also proposing a way of explaining the contrast between the movement’s resolute opening bars and the “confined cosiness” of the following theme

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in A major starting in bar 33. Nowhere else in his output as a symphonist was Beethoven to depict such a startling antithesis. At the same time Adorno draws attention to an important aspect of Jean Paul’s aesthetics, whereby beautiful infinity repeatedly clashes with secular finiteness in his novels. Although Katzenberger’s daughter Theoda is allowed to experience the profound seriousness of love, Katzenberger himself is depicted as someone who, immune to any deeper emotions, feels only enjoyment when others feel horror. Jean Paul’s novel appeared only some years after Beethoven’s Second Symphony, with the result that we are relieved of the need to speculate on whether or not the composer was familiar with it. More interesting are Adorno’s suspected parallels between the novel and the symphony against the background of the concept of “Romantic humor,” for Beethoven’s works, too, are remarkable for the way in which the infinite encroaches on the finite. For him, the “finite” A-major theme is not merely “cozy” but also “confined.” In the case of his First Symphony, Beethoven had still described his third movement as a Menuetto even though it is scherzo-like in character. In the Second Symphony, this situation is reversed, for although the movement is headed “Scherzo,” it recalls a minuet even if the reminiscence is a remote one. No less unmistakable are the features of an idiosyncratic scherzo. The opening section— as far as the double bar line— may be a textbook example of a sixteenbar period, and yet the dynamics, with their asymmetrical interplay of piano, forte, and fortissimo, suggest an arbitrariness wholly unsuited to a dance. Beethoven is aware, of course, that such effects can soon wear thin, with the result that in his later symphonies he finds other ways of bringing out the laconic character of this innovative kind of genre.

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The arbitrary elements in Beethoven’s scherzos must always be seen within the symphony’s overall context, of course, and this is also true in the case of the Second. After the Larghetto has created a sense of great calm, the composer needs the Scherzo to generate the kinetic energy required for the final movement’s tempestuous Allegro molto. (We shall find something similar with the famous transition to the triumphant final movement of the Fifth, except that on the later occasion the device is used even more dramatically.) It might seem at first sight as if Beethoven was again wanting to compete with Haydn in terms of the high spirits and wit of one of the older composer’s finales. But the idiosyncratic head motif, with its compass of almost two octaves, generates such earthy humor and even sarcasm that it is no longer possible to doubt in Beethoven’s imprint— linguists speak in this context of an idiolect. Another aspect of this idiolect is the almost mystical solemnity that the coda exudes from bar 336 onward and that represents more than merely a chance to catch our breath before the violent agitation of the closing bars, for it also recalls the hymnlike tone found in the first and second movements, affording a glimmer of hope within a world that Beethoven was to describe as “absurd” in a letter that Bettina von Arnim fabricated to him in August 1810.103

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica) Official first performance at the Theater an der Wien on April 7, 1805

Beethoven was evidently not satisfied with the ray of hope that he had conjured up on the horizon toward the end of his Second Symphony and must have felt that he owed humanity a symphony

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The arbitrary elements in Beethoven’s scherzos must always be seen within the symphony’s overall context, of course, and this is also true in the case of the Second. After the Larghetto has created a sense of great calm, the composer needs the Scherzo to generate the kinetic energy required for the final movement’s tempestuous Allegro molto. (We shall find something similar with the famous transition to the triumphant final movement of the Fifth, except that on the later occasion the device is used even more dramatically.) It might seem at first sight as if Beethoven was again wanting to compete with Haydn in terms of the high spirits and wit of one of the older composer’s finales. But the idiosyncratic head motif, with its compass of almost two octaves, generates such earthy humor and even sarcasm that it is no longer possible to doubt in Beethoven’s imprint— linguists speak in this context of an idiolect. Another aspect of this idiolect is the almost mystical solemnity that the coda exudes from bar 336 onward and that represents more than merely a chance to catch our breath before the violent agitation of the closing bars, for it also recalls the hymnlike tone found in the first and second movements, affording a glimmer of hope within a world that Beethoven was to describe as “absurd” in a letter that Bettina von Arnim fabricated to him in August 1810.103

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica) Official first performance at the Theater an der Wien on April 7, 1805

Beethoven was evidently not satisfied with the ray of hope that he had conjured up on the horizon toward the end of his Second Symphony and must have felt that he owed humanity a symphony

F i g u r e 4 • Title page of Beethoven’s own copy of the score of his Eroica Symphony. The copyist was Benjamin Gebauer. The autograph score is no longer extant. It was Gebauer who added the title “Sinfonia grande / intitolata [illegible word] Bonaparte / del Sigr / Louis van Beethoven.” Beneath it, barely readable any longer, is Beethoven’s own pencil addition “geschrieben auf Bonaparte ” (written for Bonaparte). The words “Sinfonie 3. Op. 55” and “[1]804 im August” have been added in another, unidentified hand. The words “intitolata Bonaparte ” were later scratched out with such force by Beethoven that a hole was left in the paper. Beethoven has added various notes in the margin: “NB 1. Cues for the other instruments are to be written into the first violin part,” “NB 2. The third horn is so written that it can be played by a primario as well as a secundario,” and “NB. The 3 horns are arranged in the orchestra in such a way that the first is in the middle between the 2 others.” The bizarre appearance of the title page gives rise to all manner of reflections. In the first place, it makes clear the uncertainty felt by all Beethoven scholars in their attempt to reconstruct in detail the complex relationship between the composer, Napoleon, and the Eroica. But it also reveals that in preparing his new symphony for publication, Beethoven was by no means concerned only with such lofty matters as the role of Napoleon: instructions on the score’s notation and on performing practice were sufficiently important for him to disfigure the title page of a copy that was to serve as the engraver’s starting point. In turn, this indicates that unlike Wagner, whose scores are models of the art of calligraphy, Beethoven was heartily indifferent to what his scores may have looked like, the only exception being those occasions when he was preparing them for persons of rank. Otherwise his sole interest was in what he actually intended by what he had written— but woe betide the copyist or engraver who misinterpreted those intentions. He would then have no hesitation in showering them with abuse: a genius demands to be understood even on the basis of hieroglyphics. (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna, A 20. Mediennr. 00462476, © IMAGNO/Erich Lessing)

F i g u r e 5 • Bill from Anton Wranitzky, Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz’s kapellmeister, for expenses incurred during rehearsals at the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna in the spring of 1804. The mention of a third horn points clearly to the Eroica. According to this list, payment was made to twenty-two musicians employed for this purpose. To work out how many players were involved in total, we need to remember that the Lobkowitz orchestra also included between five and seven full-time members, so the rehearsals must have involved six or seven violinists, three or four violists, two cellists and two double bass players. By contemporary standards in Vienna, this was a meagre showing, and yet even the subsequent first performance of the Eroica in the city in 1805 can hardly have featured as many players as we know took part in performances in Paris and London. (Lobkowitzisches Rechnungsarchiv, Wiener Hauptkassa 1804, no. 254)

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sustained by hope from start to finish: the Eroica. It matters little whether he sketched this symphony at more or less the same time as the Second or whether he had been approached by the French envoy in Vienna to write a “Napoleon” Symphony as early as 1798. There are good reasons why it appears in third position in the complete cycle of his symphonies, for it strikes out in a new direction that clearly sets it apart from the First and Second Symphonies. It appears from Carl Czerny’s reminiscences that “by around 1803,” Beethoven was “so dissatisfied” with his previous work that he decided to strike out in a “new direction.” Czerny thought that he could see a partial realization of this resolve in the op. 31 piano sonatas.104 His memory was at fault inasmuch as the op. 31 sonatas date from 1801–2, and yet this should not prevent us from including two other works under this heading: the Eroica, most of which had been completed by 1803, and the Fifth, on which Beethoven began work only a short time afterward. With a composer as purposeful in thought and deed as Beethoven, it would be surprising if, in referring to his “new direction,” he had been thinking of only a handful of piano sonatas, although it was inevitably these that were of particular interest to the pianist Czerny. Rather, these ideas were to leave their mark on an entire creative period. The German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has seen their effect first and foremost in the tendency “to view musical form as a process, as an urgent, unstoppable sense of movement.”105 This interpretation is plausible, at least to the extent that it does not imply that until then Beethoven had had little thought for processual procedures but assumes that in this regard the Third Symphony represents an important step forward. And yet such a step may be understood not just in terms of compositional technique, for

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there were more far-reaching reasons for it. It is no accident that the Heiligenstadt Testament dates from the time of this “new direction” in Beethoven’s thinking. Writing under the influence of his increasing deafness, the composer notes how in his “twenty-eighth year” he had been “obliged to become a philosopher.”106 Increasingly cut off from the world and its pleasures by a harsh fate, he was able to find a sense of well-being and salvation only in his music, in which he aspired to rise above his fate and at the same time to appeal to something higher and better in his fellow human beings. Any composer wanting to conduct a philosophical debate through the medium of music will find it hard to do so without breaking down the conventions of the genre, conventions that state that a symphony must obey certain formal patterns. To that extent the increase in processual thinking observed by Dahlhaus is indeed an important sign of the “new direction” in Beethoven’s output. But more is at stake here: the more dynamic form serves to lend a more dynamic impact to the ideas, which now have to be conveyed to the listener in more effective ways than before. In the specific case of the Eroica, there are three leads that we can follow here: the title, the self-quotation, and the decision to cast the work in the form of a Finalsinfonie. We have already referred to the first of these leads. In August 1804 Beethoven wrote to his publishers Breitkopf & Härtel to explain that “the symphony is actually called Ponaparte [sic].”107 This is confirmed by the copy of the full score in the possession of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna: it contains an entry— later scratched out—“intitolata Bonaparte” (titled Bonaparte) and an additional note in Beethoven’s hand, “geschrieben auf Bonaparte ” (written for Bonaparte).108 According to a reminiscence of

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Ferdinand Ries,109 Beethoven is said to have torn up the title page of the original score— now lost— with its dedication to Napoleon by way of a reaction to the news that Napoleon had had himself crowned emperor on December 2, 1804, in the presence of the pope. Although this sounds plausible, it does not exclude the possibility that Beethoven’s gesture was also tactically motivated: he had been amply rewarded by Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz for the composition of the Eroica and may have felt that this was a suitable opportunity to rededicate the work to his new patron, Prince Lobkowitz, rather than to Napoleon.110 Such considerations are not only speculative, of course, but also of secondary importance given the undeniable fact that at the time of the symphony’s composition, Beethoven had wanted to forge a link between the work and the historical figure of Napoleon, a desire that chimes well with the idea of a “new direction.” In terms of the ideas contained in his works, Beethoven was determined not only to adopt a more concrete approach to those ideas but also to express a greater sense of Napoleonic heroism. This also helps shed light on the second of the three leads mentioned above. As we have already had occasion to observe, the main theme of the final movement of the Eroica derives from the finale of the ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, which was first performed in March 1801. The medium of the heroic ballet was regarded as an important way to cast the leading ideas of the age in an artistically attractive form. In choosing the subject of Prometheus, the choreographer Salvatore Viganò deliberately singled out one of the preeminent themes of the period: the brilliant individual, embodied by the Titan Prometheus, breaks away from the gods’ control and creates a race of free humans. Napoleon was hailed

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as a latter-day Prometheus, being depicted as such in every art form from the visual arts to poetry and ballet. For Beethoven, too, the theme had a particular topicality regardless of whether or not he was thinking of Napoleon when writing the music for his ballet. Is there a direct line from The Creatures of Prometheus to the Eroica that extends beyond the aforementioned self-quotation? Several German musicologists, including Harry Goldschmidt, Constantin Floros, and especially Peter Schleuning have examined this question in detail and have related the plot of the ballet to individual movements and episodes in the symphony, which they have then interpreted programmatically.111 Their work is bound to convince even skeptics that when he wrote his Third Symphony, Beethoven was thinking of the contemporary figure of Napoleon as well as the mythical figure of Prometheus. This brings us to the third strand in our quest for the “new direction” in which Beethoven struck out at this time. This new direction is marked by an increase in processual thinking, a processuality that is, of course, placed in the service of a specific transmusical idea. Only against this background does it make sense that for the first time in his life, Beethoven wrote a Finalsinfonie, a work that was not only a novelty in terms of the history of the medium but also designed to demonstrate the processual nature of the compositional process by means of a narrative that establishes a clear link between the beginning and the end of the work. The music itself gives us at least a vague idea of the nature of this narrative especially when we take account of the term Eroica that Beethoven finally gave to the work and the additional description of it as “composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand’ Uomo” (composed to celebrate the memory of a great man).

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Beethoven not only based the final movement of his Third Symphony on a theme from the final section of his Prometheus ballet but also chose as the main theme of his opening movement in E- flat major a motif that could be regarded as a preliminary or archetypal form of the theme from the finale. This Urform appears in the opening bars of the symphony as a five-bar motif whose tenth note seems so strikingly unusual that Wagner felt able to say to his second wife, “Do you know what note represents all modern music? It is C-sharp, the C-sharp of the first theme of the Eroica. Who else, before or after Beethoven, could have uttered this sigh within the complete calm of a theme?”112 We could also say that this C-sharp marks the start of the “new direction” in Beethoven’s thinking, a direction typical of an idiosyncratic streak in Beethoven’s compositional manner that cannot be immediately explained by reference to the movement’s structure. After all, it is only the subsequent compositional process that clarifies this point. Rather, it must first be interpreted metaphorically, for we are dealing here with the resistance with which the subject is confronted from the outset. Particularly striking are the two orchestral chords that precede the entry of a subject made up for the most part of triadic forms that are close to nature. As such, these may be interpreted as expressions of a brute force to which the symphonic self is exposed from the very beginning. The conflicts that are adumbrated in this way grow markedly more intense and violent in the course of the first movement’s development section in the wake of a series of agglomerations of sounds that create the impression of extreme brutality. Only after a consoling voice has registered its objection to such violence in the form of the E minor that enters unexpectedly as if from another world— only then,

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toward the end of the movement, can the opening theme breathe a sigh of relief and even strike a note of triumph. But we have to wait until the final movement before the theme really comes into its own in the form of the contredanse familiar from The Creatures of Prometheus. Now it can be heard in a whole series of variations, not only appearing in the guise of a czardas but on two occasions being subjected to fugal procedures before being placed on a pedestal in augmented form at the end. This marks the emotionally charged resurrection of the hero who had previously been borne to his grave in the second movement, a funeral march enlivened by motifs from French revolutionary music. Listeners need to be familiar with this context if they are to judge for themselves the seriousness with which Beethoven strives to write music about ideas in his Eroica Symphony. But they should immediately forget this knowledge, for ultimately the Eroica is neither a Prometheus nor a Bonaparte Symphony but a Beethoven symphony. In his drafts for a third diary, the Swiss writer Max Frisch noted that “I am thrown back on experiences that make me conceptually helpless and therefore narrative.”113 This reflects the artist’s desire that the individual whom he is addressing should not interpret the story he is telling as a description of events that can effortlessly be put into words but, rather, as the result of experiences that have passed through that individual and which in this way have been turned into something unique to that person. In this sense it may remain an open question to what extent audiences in Beethoven’s day were aware of the contemporary background of his music, but what is beyond doubt is that today’s audiences are thrown back on their own devices: for us, neither Prometheus nor Napoleon is of any practical use here. But we shall

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certainly be helped by the knowledge that when we listen to the Eroica, we are not dealing with a crass alternative between, on the one hand, an appreciation of the work’s structure and, on the other, an opportunity to wallow in various emotions. Rather, we should be concerned to make sense of a conceptual framework in which structural data, narrative elements, and personal expression are all closely interwoven. This point is well illustrated by the opening movement’s development section. As we have already noted, development sections initially had the function of leading the musical argument back from the exposition, which exhibited an “open” ending on the dominant, to the tonic and hence to the recapitulation and of doing so in an original way. This, at least, was its function during the early days of first-movement sonata form. The development sections of the young Mozart are correspondingly brief, whereas those of the more mature Mozart and of the later Haydn are already well developed as autonomous parts of the movement. Here fragments of the thematic material presented in the exposition are reassembled, and far-reaching harmonic processes are set in motion. Or, to put it another way, the composer generates a sense of drama in the middle section of the movement that allows the listener to feel that the subsequent entry of the recapitulation is a source of calm as agreeable as it is necessary. Beethoven follows this course in his first two symphonies, but in the spirit of his “new direction,” he then asks himself the question as to the higher meaning the development section might have on the whole of his elaborate work. The Eroica provides one possible answer: at the risk of oversimplifying the situation, we could say that its development section demonstrates the way in which a symphonic self heroically confronts the tempests

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of the world. From a purely formal point of view, the goal no longer seems to be the entry of the recapitulation but the listener’s entry into the conciliatory world conjured up by the hymnlike theme in E minor. None of this means that Beethoven was abandoning any of his claims to be a master of logical structure. Even the theme in E minor that appears to issue from another world is prefigured in a way that is both preemptive and imperceptible. Is it possible to ascribe a sense of balance to a final movement that even Beethoven’s contemporaries found problematical? For the most part it consists of character variations that ensure that when the Prometheus theme appears, it seems entirely worthy of the role that has been allotted to it. The individual variations might reflect the “festive dances” with which the ballet ends. But a number of questions remain open. Adorno claimed that the final movement simply “comes to grief ” and that “every dunce ” can see this.114 A harsh verdict! And yet tradition has it that even Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia asked to hear the work three times in succession when it was given a private runthrough on Prince Lobkowitz’s country estate in Bohemia. Clearly even an amateur composer whom Beethoven held in high esteem was puzzled by a work that can last up to an hour in performance if all of the repeats are observed. But specialists, too, are puzzled by the piece. Take the sequence of notes B- flat– A– C– B (in German nomenclature B– A– C– H) that occurs at a contrapuntally awkward passage in bars 244–46 of the first movement’s development section, where they are admittedly divided between two voices. Is this mere chance? Or is it a hidden tribute to Bach?115 Was Beethoven the resolute revolutionary wanting to position himself subliminally as Bach’s genuine heir?

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And could the same be true of the final movement, where the Prometheus theme is stated in the manner of a Bach chorale? When examined from a bird’s-eye perspective, the Eroica may be seen to contain all of the major themes that were to preoccupy German symphonists in the course of the nineteenth century: nature, the sublime, battle, violence, loneliness, grief, words of encouragement “from on high,” celebration, and triumph. Structurally, too, it reveals a variety that was rarely to be equaled. It is no accident that Schoenberg held it up as a model in his composition classes. According to his “Notes on the Four String Quartets,” he himself learned from the Eroica “how to avoid monotony and emptiness; how to create variety out of unity; how to create new forms out of basic material; how much can be achieved by slight modifications if not by developing variation out of often rather insignificant little formulations.”116 A wealth of different perspectives, an extremely high number of subtle nuances, and the ability “to keep the whole in view”117— Beethoven was impressively successful in squaring the circle with his Eroica Symphony. This does not imply perfection, for such a thing is impossible in an art as ambitious as Beethoven’s. Rather, it suggests an invitation to the listener to continue to think about the work and to extend it into a virtual space that offers an answer to questions that the work itself leaves open. One of the aphorisms of the Colombian thinker Nicolás Gómez Dávila reads, “Every artist comes to a rest a few steps short of his invisible goal.”118 And Brecht argued that “Contradictions are our hope!”119 Peter Schleuning believes that the “great man” in whose memory Beethoven ultimately wrote his Third Symphony was Prince Louis Ferdinand, who fell in battle while fighting Napoleon shortly before the work appeared in print. As we have already noted, it was

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Louis Ferdinand who asked to hear the symphony three times in succession on Prince Lobkowitz’s Bohemian estate. And yet it is possible that the “great man” remained Napoleon himself— not Napoleon as a historical figure whose coronation as emperor diminished him in Beethoven’s eyes but Napoleon as an idealized figure. In the wake of his coronation, Napoleon as a historical embodiment of hope had to be borne to his grave, which is what happens metaphorically in the Marcia funebre. But as a symbolic figure of light and as the Prometheus of his age, Napoleon could be resurrected in the symphony’s final movement. And should we also think of the composer himself? After all, he had recently completed his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he had toyed intensively with the idea of a physical mortificatio and of an ideational, spiritual vivificatio.

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 First performed in the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna in March 1807

Perhaps we may be permitted to speculate a little: if Beethoven set aside his sketches for his Fifth Symphony, on which he had been working since 1803–4, and turned instead to his Fourth Symphony, he may have thought that he first needed to reveal himself as a composer in all his puzzling mysteriousness and complexity before writing a monumental work in which the difficult subject is completely subsumed by the bigger picture. This attitude is reflected in the fact that the Fourth, with its “avant-garde features,”120 once again addresses the question of how to begin a new work. With the slow introductions to his first two symphonies, Beethoven had already made it unmistakably clear that he was no longer satisfied with an attention- seeking upbeat

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Louis Ferdinand who asked to hear the symphony three times in succession on Prince Lobkowitz’s Bohemian estate. And yet it is possible that the “great man” remained Napoleon himself— not Napoleon as a historical figure whose coronation as emperor diminished him in Beethoven’s eyes but Napoleon as an idealized figure. In the wake of his coronation, Napoleon as a historical embodiment of hope had to be borne to his grave, which is what happens metaphorically in the Marcia funebre. But as a symbolic figure of light and as the Prometheus of his age, Napoleon could be resurrected in the symphony’s final movement. And should we also think of the composer himself? After all, he had recently completed his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he had toyed intensively with the idea of a physical mortificatio and of an ideational, spiritual vivificatio.

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 First performed in the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna in March 1807

Perhaps we may be permitted to speculate a little: if Beethoven set aside his sketches for his Fifth Symphony, on which he had been working since 1803–4, and turned instead to his Fourth Symphony, he may have thought that he first needed to reveal himself as a composer in all his puzzling mysteriousness and complexity before writing a monumental work in which the difficult subject is completely subsumed by the bigger picture. This attitude is reflected in the fact that the Fourth, with its “avant-garde features,”120 once again addresses the question of how to begin a new work. With the slow introductions to his first two symphonies, Beethoven had already made it unmistakably clear that he was no longer satisfied with an attention- seeking upbeat

F i g u r e 6 • Sketch including early ideas for the final movement of the Fourth Symphony. This is the only surviving sketch for this work. The ideas have been noted down in the top third of a sheet of music manuscript paper that, otherwise left blank, dates from May or June 1804, a time when Beethoven was mainly occupied with Fidelio. This folio is part of a set of three folios that are concerned in the main with Fidelio. The other sketches are for the duet for Marzelline and Jaquino, but there are also excerpts from the vocal parts from Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Cherubini’s Les deux journeés, a work known in the German-speaking world as Der Wasserträger. These last-named pieces were evidently regarded by Beethoven as good examples of the successful treatment of a vocal line. It is no longer possible to say with any certainty whether Beethoven was already seriously occupied with his Fourth Symphony in the middle of 1804 not least because it was not until two years later that he completed his work on the score. But from an early age he had been used to working on several projects at once, his creative imagination clearly requiring an extensive field for experimentation, where his ideas could float freely like elementary particles before coming together to form a critical mass in often unpredictable ways. The staves of music that relate to the Fourth Symphony illustrate the difficulties that await anyone venturing into the field of source studies, for such scholars will not infrequently stumble upon initial ideas that are hard to attribute to a particular work, while the notes themselves are not always easy to decipher. This example is in fact relatively straightforward, for even the nonspecialist can recognize in the top line the coquettishly ornamental figure in the violins from bars 70–85. It cannot be proved or disproved that this figure was under discussion from the outset— within the movement as a whole, after all, it hardly plays a major role. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB BSK 17/65 a, fol. 2v)

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F i g u r e 7 • Title page of the first printed edition of the full score of the Fourth Symphony, published by Nicolaus Simrock in Bonn and Cologne in 1823. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, C 60/1)

of the kind that was typical of major-key symphonies intended to be performed at court and that it required an extraordinary effort to embark on the creative act of starting a symphony in any credible way. But in the Fourth Symphony a further factor is at work, for here the composer no longer takes the listener by the hand so

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that they can unlock the door to the work together. Instead, the listener is in the same position as the composer: both of them are left groping in the dark in the Adagio introduction. It is impossible, after all, to claim that the thirty-eight-bar introduction leads logically to the main part of the movement, which is headed Allegro vivace. Rather, this introduction is characterized by an inner restlessness that finds expression above all in the eccentric harmonic writing, which not only explores a number of the byways that are traditionally used to generate tension but even appears to lose its way. The first eighteen bars are notable for a diffuse B-flat minor that seems reluctant to move from the spot, but Beethoven then reinterprets the note G-flat— the minor sixth degree of the key of B-flat minor— as F-sharp, namely, the fifth degree of B minor. In terms of harmonic theory, even B minor is worlds removed from B-flat minor, but the expert listener will be even more astonished to realize that Beethoven makes no attempt to head for the main key of B-flat major but ends up in A major immediately before the entry of the main Allegro. At this point the “miracle of Creation” finally occurs, when Beethoven succeeds within seven bars in finding a transition to the B-flat major of the main part of the movement by rewriting the note A as the third of F major and interpreting this as the dominant of B-flat major. Even a musicologist who tends to understatement has described the entry of the Allegro vivace as one of those moments in Beethoven’s works “that takes our breath away.”121 I myself have used an emotionally charged image and spoken of an act of creation to describe this process while at the same time using technical terms that in the circumstances may seem small minded. But no other approach is possible with Beethoven, for here we are always dealing

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both with the bigger picture and with an art that requires the most detailed elaboration. It is exactly the same in the world of nature. There is the long view adopted by the philosopher and there is the close-up preferred by the scientist. Between the two are the music lovers— people who are not entirely at home in either of these two opposing worlds but who can still appreciate what they can hear, even if they are unable to follow every technical description. Beethoven’s contemporaries did not understand everything either. In 1807, two years after its Viennese premiere, the twentythree-year-old Carl Maria von Weber subjected the Fourth Symphony to a particularly mocking attack in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. Writing about the introduction, which Schubert once copied out, he complained that First, we have a slow tempo, full of brief, disjointed ideas, none of them having any connexion with each other, three or four notes every quarter of an hour! That’s exciting! Then a hollow drum-roll and mysterious viola passages, all decked out with the right amount of silences and general pauses; eventually, when the listener has given up all hope of surviving the tension as far as the Allegro, there comes a furious tempo in which the chief aim is to prevent any principal idea from appearing, and the listener has to try to find one on his own.

Weber’s ironic conclusion was that “Above all, one must shun rules, for they only cramp genius.”122 Although Weber places his criticism in the mouth of a grotesque character plagued by nightmares and incapable of detailed technical analysis, he was objecting to a kind of music that sought to replace

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the clarity of the older generation of composers with an attitude marked by eccentricity and egocentricity. Right up to the present day, music has witnessed so many aboutturns and undergone so many unexpected developments that concertgoers are no longer nonplussed by an opening passage such as that of Beethoven’s Fourth. But is it too much to hope that we could hear not just the introduction but the whole of the symphony with fresh ears? Only then would we really appreciate the extent of Beethoven’s whimsy. His Fourth Symphony may not have the long line of the Eroica or the rhetorical power of the Fifth, but if we are prepared to listen closely, it creates a more self-referential impression than we are used to with Beethoven as a symphonist. It features a whole series of idiosyncrasies that cannot be subsumed within an overall concept, whether that concept be interpreted structurally or narratively. Take the note G-flat, which, foreign to the scale of B-flat major, is found not only in the slow introduction but also at other key points in the symphony’s other movements. Among other idiosyncrasies is the solo treatment of the timpani in the Adagio, a movement that generally draws attention to itself by dint of its infinitely long-breathed form. No less striking is the preferential treatment accorded to the bassoon, whose ostensibly premature entry in the final movement has caused many a performer to break into a cold sweat, not least on account of the tempo marking at this point. Hermann Kretzschmar’s venerable concert guide refers to the symphony’s characteristic chiaroscuro, to the hesitant design of a number of its melodies, to its tendency to linger over certain harmonies, and to its use of hidden dissonances.123 Listeners may be reminded of these factors just as they may recall a comment by

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one of today’s leading conductors, Michael Gielen, who refers to the “shock” and “power of negation” at the start of the Adagio’s recapitulation. It is, he writes, like “a descent into the Underworld,” but one that gives way to a “sense of gentle gliding, as if the soul, after experiencing death, finds itself in a no-man’s-land and wonders whether we shall go to Heaven or be reincarnated.”124 In short, every sensitive listener will find that the Fourth is far more than a gallop toward the affirmative Fifth but is Beethoven at his purest— a Beethoven whose fire does not burn with a single flame but in lots of smaller flames. To offer an affectionate demonstration of this would weigh down the foregoing account with far too many analytical details and is a task that I must delegate to more comprehensive individual accounts.

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 First performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808

The Fifth Symphony was intended to mark the end of the questing and questioning tentativeness of the earlier symphonies. The will-o’-the-wisps were to be extinguished, all problems solved, the sleights of hand consigned to the past, and all excessively complicated thematic and motivic writing avoided until further notice. The narrative, too, should be simple: unknown forces pitted against a feeble self, and at the end an all-consuming victory. It has recently been suggested that Beethoven’s claim, as transmitted by Anton Schindler, that “Thus Fate knocks at the door”125 is authentic but that it relates first and foremost to the way in which the composer wanted these bars to be performed. According to this view, Beethoven felt that the hammering motif at the start of

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one of today’s leading conductors, Michael Gielen, who refers to the “shock” and “power of negation” at the start of the Adagio’s recapitulation. It is, he writes, like “a descent into the Underworld,” but one that gives way to a “sense of gentle gliding, as if the soul, after experiencing death, finds itself in a no-man’s-land and wonders whether we shall go to Heaven or be reincarnated.”124 In short, every sensitive listener will find that the Fourth is far more than a gallop toward the affirmative Fifth but is Beethoven at his purest— a Beethoven whose fire does not burn with a single flame but in lots of smaller flames. To offer an affectionate demonstration of this would weigh down the foregoing account with far too many analytical details and is a task that I must delegate to more comprehensive individual accounts.

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 First performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808

The Fifth Symphony was intended to mark the end of the questing and questioning tentativeness of the earlier symphonies. The will-o’-the-wisps were to be extinguished, all problems solved, the sleights of hand consigned to the past, and all excessively complicated thematic and motivic writing avoided until further notice. The narrative, too, should be simple: unknown forces pitted against a feeble self, and at the end an all-consuming victory. It has recently been suggested that Beethoven’s claim, as transmitted by Anton Schindler, that “Thus Fate knocks at the door”125 is authentic but that it relates first and foremost to the way in which the composer wanted these bars to be performed. According to this view, Beethoven felt that the hammering motif at the start of

F i g u r e 8 • First page of the first printed edition of the violin part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in April 1809. That it is an uncorrected copy is clear from the fact that the opening motto is only four bars long here, not five as it became in the wake of the first performance. Note the cues that were used by the orchestra’s concertmaster when conducting the work from his part. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, C 67/44)

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F i g u r e 9 • Sketch of the head motif of the Fifth Symphony, together with a transcription. The symphony’s striking opening was still not fixed at this stage of the compositional process.

the symphony and in all of its later appearances should be taken noticeably more slowly and in that way set apart from the rest of the musical argument. This would suggest in turn that Beethoven was keen to ensure that the déjà vu experience of hammering that the listener is intended to feel should be transmitted by the idea of a motivic and thematic process that developed of its own accord. The oboe solo, which, like the pounding motif, is separated off from the surrounding argument by fermatas in the interface between the opening movement’s development section and its recapitulation, makes sense only if it, too, is seen as an exterritorial symbol that the listener is meant to interpret as such: the plaintive tone of the solitary oboe suggests a human sigh and in that regard recalls our own self. When seen in this way, the oboe solo mirrors the pounding motif by representing an admittedly weak reaction to the forces unleashed by that motif. For all its brevity, it clearly objects to the inevitability with which Fate presumes to assert itself here. Ultimately it is of only secondary importance how we interpret the comment “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” After all, the peremptory gesture of a pounding motif has a lengthy tradition

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in music. As we have already observed, it is found in one of the recitatives in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the words “Warum wollt ihr erschrecken?” (Why are ye so sore afeared?), and it also occurs in the piano accompaniment of Schubert’s song Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), where it expresses the terror that the young woman feels in the face of Death. In short, Bach’s and Beethoven’s contemporaries were familiar with the topos, and it is no accident that even during Beethoven’s lifetime Adolf Bernhard Marx could speak of the “struggle between a powerful being and an almost supernatural destiny.”126 A similar sentiment is expressed by the hero of Goethe’s tragedy Egmont, for which Beethoven was to write a set of incidental music only a short time afterward: “As if goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time bear onward the light car of our destiny; and nothing remains for us but, with calm self-possession, firmly to grasp the reins.”127 As a result of its uncompromising motivic and thematic unity, the opening movement allows only a single moment of stasis and calm— the exception is the aforementioned passage for the solo oboe. The following Andante con moto, by contrast, begins with a series of self-contained and songlike structures, and yet here, too, the mood of contemplation is very quickly energized. First the clarinets and bassoons, then the brass, state a ceremonial, almost military- sounding fanfare that looks forward to the victorious strains of the final movement. And the Andante does not lack a sense of underlying menace in the form of echoes of the pounding motif from the opening movement. That our journey still has some distance to run is clear from the opening of the Scherzo, which, like that of the Fourth Symphony, starts with the music groping its way forward: unison cellos and basses enter pianissimo with a “question” that is taken up by the

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full choir of instruments. This question is very soon answered with a self-confident fanfare motif whose rhythm may differ from that of the initial hammering motif but that reveals the same feeling of urgency. The Trio is cast in the form of a fugato, prompting Schumann to regard it as an expression of Beethoven’s sense of humor:128 the great and the sublime appear great and sublime only when placed alongside the petty and the playful. But such playfulness is not sufficient for Beethoven to prepare the way for the brilliance of his finale. Instead, he needs the famous, improvisatory- seeming transition from the Scherzo to the final movement, a passage that according to a witticism on the part of Louis Spohr is the only truly inspired moment in this symphony. Only in this way can Beethoven justify the final movement’s definitive éclat triomphal— the term is taken from the French operas of this period that dealt with the Terror and, to quote the German writer on music Karl H. Wörner, represents the “heroic passion, the impulsive intensity, the breathless crescendo, and the element of triumphalism that are new qualities in the music of the ‘revolutionary age.’”129 At this point Beethoven cuts the Gordian knot in a way that even for him is unique. The individual subject cannot assert himself in the face of fate but can only subscribe to the great movements of his age and join the jubilant throng. In this case the throng consists of the men and women of the French Revolution, who are seen here in an idealized light. Their battle cry of “la liberté,” which can be effortlessly set to the sequence of notes C–B–C–D in bars 298–300, could have been taken from the Hymne dithyrambique by ClaudeJoseph Rouget de Lisle, who also wrote the words and music for the Marseillaise.130 Elsewhere, too, there are echoes of the French Revolution. For the victorious final movement, for example, Bee-

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thoven calls on the services of a piccolo, contrabassoon, and three trombones, instruments specifically associated with military music and used here to underscore the note of victory. It scarcely needs to be added that the C minor of the opening movement brightens to C major, a shift of striking metaphorical potency. Readers may be tempted to question whether the road from the succinct motivic and thematic writing of the opening movement to the coup de théâtre of the final Allegro and, hence, from battle to victory and from individual oppression to a sense of collective liberation obeys the rules of compositional and philosophical stringency or, indeed, whether such a course is at all possible. And yet audiences in Beethoven’s day were as fascinated by this sudden sense of liberation— fairy-tale-like in its intensity— as today’s listeners. According to Beethoven’s Russian biographer Alexander Ulïbïshev, an old grenadier who attended a performance of the work in Paris shortly after the composer’s death is said to have exclaimed, “C’est l’Empereur, vive l’Empereur,” paying tribute to Napoleon with his spontaneous acclamation.131 Other commentators have interpreted the heroic element in the Fifth Symphony in their own idiosyncratic ways. Wagner, for example, reports on a concert that he conducted in Dresden in 1848— a year of revolution in Europe: “King and court were depressed, and the entire audience felt a dark sense of foreboding at the imminent danger and upheavals. [ . . . ] It was then that the violinist Karol Lipiński whispered to me: ‘Just wait— it will all pass at the first bow- stroke of the C- minor Symphony!’ And he was right: the symphony began, what cheering, what enthusiasm!”132 Here the symphony’s stirring opening was enough to lift the mood of depression that had settled on the audience. The reason for this was not just Beethoven’s particular skill but the mythical ele-

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ment in music as such: its mere sound implies that we may feel safe as we are carried along on the river of sound and that all will turn out for the best. And yet this in itself cannot explain the universal enthusiasm for this symphony that overwhelms audiences to this day. Here two factors come together: first, a compositional style of almost unique succinctness, and second, a message that affects us on the very deepest level of human experience. The first and last movements are particularly fine examples of the absolute succinctness of Beethoven’s approach. The opening Allegro con brio— the shortest opening movement of any of Beethoven’s symphonies— impresses us by dint of the concentration of its thematic and motivic material and its initial pounding motif. There are few, if any, subsidiary ideas, and at no point does the musical argument attempt to explore any byways. Significantly, the “second subject” is hardly crucial here. Instead, the movement is dominated from first to last by propulsive motoric rhythms that eschew the dotted notes, triplets and sixteenth notes, and even the syncopations that are so typical of Beethoven as a symphonist precisely because of their ability to generate a sense of resistance. The movement is intended to be heard as a continuous crescendo that, with the exception of the solitary oboe solo at the start of the recapitulation, allows nothing to impede its progress. In striking contrast to the Eroica, there is no resistance to be overcome. The powerful river of sound seems unstoppable. Accordingly, the recapitulation is not only a largely literal repeat of the exposition but above all a tauter expression of what has already been formulated, bringing the musical argument to a climax as it heads for the coda. The final movement reveals another kind of succinctness, for here there is no motivic or thematic unity but only the paratactic juxtaposition of one victorious gesture after another. The move-

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ment ends with an apotheosis of the theme first stated in its opening bars: it culminates in a pure C-major sound surface expressive of the highest and most universal enthusiasm. The fact that the movement may be analyzed as a sonata movement is largely lost from sight here. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that a number of writers on Beethoven have spoken of “commonplaces drawn from the world of military music” and of “a dubious folksiness.”133 Even an admirer of Beethoven like Wagner expressed his sense of bemusement: according to an entry in his second wife’s diary dated July 14, 1880, “At breakfast R. talks about the C Minor Symphony, says he has been thinking a lot about it, and it seems to him as if Beethoven had suddenly felt the desire to set aside the musician in himself and appear in the guise of a popular speaker; here he spoke in broad outlines, painted al fresco as it were, left out all musical detail, which in the finale to the Eroica, for example, is present in such richness.”134 The reference to Beethoven as a popular orator derives from one of the two major forms of discourse of the composer’s day, namely, the political element, under which heading we may include terms such as the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Bonapartism, and second, an aspect best subsumed by the phrase “art as a religion.” Although the Fifth Symphony is by no means the only example of this last-named category, it is a particularly striking example of it inasmuch as its outer movements express a core element of every religion that we have already mentioned in the context of the Eroica: mortificatio and vivificatio, the idea of having to die and of returning to life. Almost every culture is familiar with the notion that periodically we have to cleanse ourselves from our imperfections in order to be reborn. In this context Luther’s Small

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Catechism speaks of the old Adam who must be drowned every day in order for a new man to come forth and arise. One of the rituals that is associated with the idea of Freemasonry and that enjoyed a widespread following in Beethoven’s day was the belief that the candidate must visit a “dark chamber” before being found worthy of sharing the light. In an ethnological context we may be reminded of the shaman who must pass through the proverbial tunnel to reach the desired state of enlightenment. That even Beethoven’s own contemporaries saw this connection is clear from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth. Writing in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the Romantic poet, who was also a composer genuinely knowledgeable about music, speaks of “the realm of the infinite” and of “the mighty and the immeasurable ” and explains how Beethoven “sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain.” The dissonant C in the timpani in the mysterious yet tense transition from the Scherzo to the final Allegro reminds Hoffmann of “a strange and dreadful voice” that instils a sense of “ghostly fear,” while the entry of the final movement is like “a brilliant shaft of blinding sunlight suddenly penetrating the darkness of night.” It is hard to think of a more forceful expression of the topos of death and resurrection that is found throughout the worlds of mythology and theology. And precisely because Hoffmann goes beyond flowery metaphors and uses numerous musical examples to clarify the work’s inner structure and the “close relationship of the individual themes to each other,” he can also appraise the musical procedures that create the “unity that is able to sustain one feeling in the listener’s heart.”135 Works of art that find global acceptance may perhaps be distinguished by a succinctness that extends to both form and content

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and as a result implies the idea that no alternative is possible. This is certainly true of Beethoven’s Fifth: its dynamics are not only structurally based, they are also integral to the work’s “message,” a message that, crudely but by no means inaccurately, may be summed up in the phrase “Through darkness to light.” It cannot be stressed sufficiently often that such a motto might be applied to countless works of art but to only one of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral) First performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808

“To keep the whole in view”:136 this comment by Beethoven is of particular significance in the context of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies not least because he was working on both symphonies at the same time and because he introduced them to Viennese audiences at the same concert in 1808. But it is clear from various fundamental compositional decisions that the parallelism goes even further. Both opening movements are dominated by an exterritorial motto clearly marked off by fermatas from other motivic and thematic events, and the final movements of both symphonies are cast in the form of a hymn that emerges as if by compulsion from a transition that links the two movements. As if this were not enough, there is some evidence to suggest that the two works are intended to form a single whole in terms of the ideas that they convey: taken together, they express the meaning of human existence. We are dealing here with the human condition and with the existential entities of fate and nature. Both sets of ideas are explicitly presented in the exterritorial mottos at the start of each symphony: in the Fifth in the form of

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and as a result implies the idea that no alternative is possible. This is certainly true of Beethoven’s Fifth: its dynamics are not only structurally based, they are also integral to the work’s “message,” a message that, crudely but by no means inaccurately, may be summed up in the phrase “Through darkness to light.” It cannot be stressed sufficiently often that such a motto might be applied to countless works of art but to only one of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastoral) First performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808

“To keep the whole in view”:136 this comment by Beethoven is of particular significance in the context of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies not least because he was working on both symphonies at the same time and because he introduced them to Viennese audiences at the same concert in 1808. But it is clear from various fundamental compositional decisions that the parallelism goes even further. Both opening movements are dominated by an exterritorial motto clearly marked off by fermatas from other motivic and thematic events, and the final movements of both symphonies are cast in the form of a hymn that emerges as if by compulsion from a transition that links the two movements. As if this were not enough, there is some evidence to suggest that the two works are intended to form a single whole in terms of the ideas that they convey: taken together, they express the meaning of human existence. We are dealing here with the human condition and with the existential entities of fate and nature. Both sets of ideas are explicitly presented in the exterritorial mottos at the start of each symphony: in the Fifth in the form of

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F i g u r e 1 0 • Folio from the autograph score of the Pastoral Symphony, op. 68, with the “Scene by the brook.” In his note, Beethoven instructs the copyist, Joseph Klumpar, to enter the words “Nightingale,” “Quail,” and “Cuckoo” at the relevant points in the wind parts. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, BH 64, fol. 67v)

the pounding motif, in the Sixth in the guise of the nature motif that is set apart by fermatas from the rest of the musical argument. There are several reasons why we are entitled to speak of a nature motif here. According to a long- standing musical tradition, the key of F major represents the pastoral world, an ideal picture of nature at peace with itself. This tradition begins with the thirteenthcentury canon Sumer is icumen in and includes the Sinfonia from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Simon’s aria “The shepherd gathers now his flock” from Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons, and the “Scène aux champs” from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. A nineteenth-

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F i g u r e 1 1 • Folio from the autograph score of the Pastoral Symphony, “Scene by the brook.” Beethoven initially struck out this passage but then added the note “stet,” indicating that it was to be reinstated. Even Beethoven’s preferred copyists had difficulty with some of his instructions not least because they were also expected to point out minor mistakes in the score. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, BH 64, fol. 69r)

century Swiss scientist even claimed that it was possible to hear the note F and, above it, the triad C–E–G in waterfalls and other Swiss lakes and rivers. He even referred explicitly to the opening motto of the Pastoral Symphony, in which the drone-like fifth, F–C, follows a C-major triad.137 Although we may be inclined to dismiss this claim as a curiosity, there is no denying the existence of the drone-like fifth as such. Nor can we ignore the fact that the melody of the motto obeys the laws of the pentatonic scale— itself inspired by nature and familiar to us from Papageno’s birdcalls in The Magic Flute. Arguably even

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more important is the fact that this melody is almost identical to the Serbian folksong “Sirvonja” that was traditionally sung by children and that was published in 1880 in a collection of Slavonic folk tunes but that is believed to be substantially older. Regardless of whether melodies like “Sirvonja” were in circulation in his own day, what is clear is that in writing his Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven had in mind a very specific idea of nature that, like the Serbian folksong, can be pinned down to a particular location. And this remains true even though Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries recalled in later life that his mentor “frequently had a certain subject in mind, even though he often laughed at and inveighed against descriptive music, particularly the frivolous sort. Occasionally Haydn’s Creation and The Seasons came under fire in this respect.”138 In other words, Beethoven had no wish to write music for people who, as Karl Kraus once pertinently observed, cannot imagine a broken leg without first having a leg described to them. But at the same time he wanted to present nature so clearly that none of his listeners would be able to doubt what they were hearing. Had his Third and Fifth Symphonies not been sufficiently clear in this regard? Doing the splits was not easy for him— not because he doubted in his project but because he was afraid of being misunderstood. It is clear from various notes in his sketchbooks that he was initially inclined to dispense with programmatic movement headings and leave his listeners to “work out the situation” for themselves.139 It is obvious, nonetheless, that a poetic idea can indeed be identified, an idea reflected in the movement headings that flesh out the term Sinfonia caracteristica, which, according to his sketches, Beethoven

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planned to call the work. At the same time, he included the phrase “More the expression of feelings than painting” on the playbill for the first performance, by which he meant that the “painting” that was undoubtedly intended served to depict “feelings.” And so the opening movement was headed “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside,” while the final movement was titled “Joyful, grateful feelings after the storm.” Of course, Beethoven would not be Beethoven if he had not wanted to “paint” the source of these emotions and feelings as accurately as possible. Not only is the motto of the opening movement inspired by folk music traditions but also the third movement, headed “Merry gathering of country people,” recalls genuine peasant music, including the “musical joke” in bar 91, where the oboe’s “premature” entry appears to put the bassoon off its stride. (All the more striking is the assurance with which the two instruments find themselves back on track when the phrase is repeated.) Finally, the “Shepherds’ song” in the last movement is inspired by the folk traditions of alphorn music while also recalling the opening motto, which in turns echoes the sounds of the natural world. There are also many “painterly” liberties and subtleties. In the second movement (“Scene by the brook”), for example, the listener is struck not only by the calls of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet), all of which are indicated as such in the score, but also— according to a note in Beethoven’s sketches— by the murmuring of the brook, two solo cellos contributing to the impression of a specific carpet of sound. (It may be added parenthetically that, normal practice notwithstanding, the violins as well as the solo cellos are instructed to play con sordino at this point.) Headed “Storm,” the fourth movement, too, allots a

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particular function to the lower strings: repeated rapid ascents in the cellos and basses begin on the same note, but in order to create a particularly forward-looking, noise-like impression, the bass line is notated in sixteenth notes, that of the cellos in sixteenth-note quintuplets, resulting in irrational displacements. Something altogether astonishing happens at the end of the “Scene by the brook.” Here the music seems to indicate that a curtain is rising and that the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo are about to appear onstage— not, of course, in the flesh but as parts of a mechanical instrument. This, at least, is how both Debussy and Adorno independently interpreted this scene.140 But the episode can be interpreted in a different way: at the end of the performance, the voices of nature are set free and now have the stage to themselves, while we listeners lend an ear to their singing with the awestruck reverence of children who forget everything else that is going on around them. The following movements similarly contain passages in which the woodwinds sing their own praises like the voices of nature—“as nature ’s free and reckless child,” to quote Schiller’s epic poem The Song of the Bell, which was first published in 1800.141 The way in which Beethoven fashions time is unique. In the Pastoral Symphony he leaves it, as it were, to nature to decide where and how it will unfold. “Form” is completely subsumed by the “content,” and this “content” is dictated not by the subject composing the work but by nature itself. Peter Gülke remarks very aptly in this context that it is impossible to separate “syntax” from “substance ” or “the act of saying” from “what has been said.”142 An early reviewer of the symphony evidently had nothing better to do than complain about all the “repeats” and propose cuts of his own. Nature does not repeat itself, however, but finds expression

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in ever new versions. A typical example of this is the first movement’s development section— to the extent that we opt for a technical term that is hardly appropriate here. There is no thematic or motivic writing here, for what we hear instead is the same rhythmic figure that, derived from the opening motto, is repeated thirty-two times, albeit differently harmonized and differently orchestrated. Something completely different happens in the development section of the opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, where the “symphonic self ” can barely manage a sigh at the end of a series of mounting shocks. This “symphonic self ” does not appear in the Pastoral Symphony in either an active or a passive role but is an engaged observer of events in which nature itself sets the tone. All of this must be understood metaphorically, of course, for the degree of compositional calculation that Beethoven applies to the work is every bit as great in the case of the Pastoral as it was in that of the Fifth. The large-scale symphonic form within which nature is to pour forth demands to be filled. What the listener hears as its natural breath has to be produced by art, just as the gesture of naturalness is plausible only when presented against a carefully prepared background. Beethoven’s ability to create a language that, however “close to nature,” does not need to eschew either nuances or extended arcs of tension deserves the greatest admiration, and the same is true of the way in which he maintains a balance between the expected and the unexpected, between order and self-abandon, and between expansion and contraction. This is the result of Beethoven’s sovereign handling of form: the multifunctionality of the individual building blocks and the elasticity of the structure prevent the narrative from turning into something too unequivocal, too one- dimensional, and even too

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monotonous. In the case of some of Richard Strauss’s descriptions of nature, one is tempted to cite Goethe’s Torquato Tasso: we “feel the purpose, and are thence constrain’d.”143 And this remains the case no matter how dazzling or discreet the effect may be. But with Beethoven such a comment would be inapposite in view of the autonomous features of the score. There is a moment when nature is perceived in an internalized way, a moment almost impossible to analyze but one that goes beyond mere description. Michael Gielen has spoken in this context of “soulscapes.”144 Another striking example of such a “soulscape ” is the section headed “Feeling new strength” in the third movement of the op. 132 string quartet, a movement titled “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity.” On the one hand the listener feels that he or she can sense this “new strength” pulsating through every cell of a living organism, while on the other the writing— in spite of the vitality that it exudes— is completely spiritualized. Often enough Beethoven’s formal artistry seems to be fired by ideas for which he positively burns, and in the case of the Pastoral this content is not just “nature” as a subject worth painting or even “nature ” as a way of relaxing or recuperating but “nature ” as a source of happiness in an avowedly religious sense. In 1815 Beethoven jotted down the following note: “Almighty / in the forest / I feel blest / happy in / the forest every / tree speaks / through you / O God[!] What / majesty / in such / a forest region / in the heights / there is peace— / peace to / serve him—.”145 According to his own testimony, Beethoven wrote these meditative lines on a sheet of music manuscript paper on the Kahlenberg, a well-known vantage point outside the city gates of Vienna. And we know from comparable jottings that his concern was to record

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important experiences in a lasting linguistic form, perhaps also as a repository of ideas for subsequent compositions. The belief that nature was a religion was entirely typical of Beethoven, although the diary-like character of this particular jotting invites us to recall the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who had popularized the notion of nature as a religion at the time of the Enlightenment in Europe. We may assume that Beethoven, whom his contemporaries occasionally compared with Rousseau,146 was familiar with the Rousseauism of his age. Certainly, it is impossible not to be reminded of the Pastoral Symphony when we read a passage such as the following one about the profound appreciation of nature on the part of a writer who passionately enjoyed walking: “In describing his ecstasies at the Lake of Bienne, Jean- Jacques lets the sensible world become a far-off accompaniment, with the light sound of the to and fro movement of the waves. The mind’s activity is reduced to the point where it simply allows the self to experience its own presence. There is a close correspondence between the attenuation of thought and the tranquil murmur of the waters.”147 In this context Rousseau himself describes the conditions needed to put him in the right frame of mind for contemplation: “There must be neither a total calm nor too much movement, but a steady and moderate motion, with no jolts or breaks.”148 Each spring, Rousseau would walk two miles a day, hoping to hear the nightingales at Bercy. The result was a feeling of peace that he hoped he would experience at the end of his life. Here we find a “religious topology” related to the concepts of “consolation,” “hope,” and “peace.”149 At this point Rousseau felt a sense of “nostalgia” that at the same time revealed his awareness that there was no longer any going back: “In Emile

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he says that ‘much art is necessary if social man is to be kept from becoming altogether artificial.’”150 Friedrich Hölderlin was a self-confessed follower of Rousseau, and in his hymn “The Rhine,” which he wrote only a few years before Beethoven’s Pastoral, he harks back directly to his model: “Then often to him it seems best / Almost wholly forgotten to be / Where the beam does not sear, / In the forest’s shade / By Lake Bienne amid foliage newly green, / And blithely poor in tones, / Like beginners, to learn from nightingales.”151 Today’s listeners will find it difficult to accept the effusiveness of Beethoven’s religious experience of nature and will be unable to appreciate the catastrophic consequences that a real storm could cause in his day. As a result, they will not be able to judge for themselves the authenticity of the hymnlike tone adopted in the final movement— the “Shepherds’ song”— in conveying “joyful, grateful feelings after the storm.” But the happiness of the moment that Beethoven is able to convey remains as affecting as ever even though elements of clarification and transcendence that are naturally appropriate to a final movement slightly weaken the impression of absolute calm. But the qualities of the Pastoral are best illustrated by a comparison with the descriptions of nature in late nineteenth-century symphonies, where we find nothing to set beside the urgent calm of Beethoven’s religiously intensified experience of nature. It is no accident that Adorno speaks of the “poverty of the sunrise” at the start of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony: “No sunrise, even in mountains, is pompous, triumphal, imperial; each one is faint and timorous, like a hope that all may yet be well, and it is this very unobtrusiveness of the mightiest light that is moving and overpowering.”152

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Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 First performed in University Hall in the City of Vienna on December 8, 1813

It is easy to understand why, before completing his First Symphony, Brahms complained half seriously, half ironically to his friend, the conductor Hermann Levi: “I will never compose a symphony! You have no idea how it feels to one of us when he continually hears behind him such a giant [i.e., Beethoven].”153 And we can understand why Brahms, like his mentor, Robert Schumann, wrote only four symphonies. Composers who were unwilling to emulate Bruckner and Mahler, for example, and to strike the same note in each and every one of their symphonies as the musical expression of a permanent psychological state were bound to be tempted to limit their output before they started to repeat themselves and merely confirmed their listeners’ expectations. The point that I am trying to make here may be illustrated by a comparison between the second movements of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh, for the gestural language in each of them is vaguely similar. The musical content of Beethoven’s Allegretto has for good reason been associated with the “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (Saint Mary, pray for us), a litany traditionally sung during processions and pilgrimages.154 The Andante moderato from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony similarly suggests a mood of sacred solemnity with its use of the Phrygian mode and the measured tread of its main motif. But there is also an important difference. Whereas Brahms’s contemporaries heard in his Andante moderato an emotional language that, typical of Brahms, invited them to identify with it, few of Beethoven’s contemporaries would ever have thought of describing his Allegretto as a typically Beethovenian movement.

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F i g u r e 1 2 • Page from the Petter Sketchbook that contains sketches for various works, starting with op. 92. In particular it is important for the genesis of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. This page is in fact more interesting for Beethoven’s handwritten entries, such as the one in the top right- hand corner: “Such passages should produce another effect than the miserable enharmonic evasions which every school Miserabili can write, they ought to disclose the change to every hearer.” At the bottom of the same page another entry reads, “Cotton in my ears at the pianoforte frees my hearing from the unpleasant buzzing” (trans. Thayer, Life of Beethoven). Beethoven had always liked to commune with himself through the medium of his sketchbooks. Here he would address not only questions of musical aesthetics but also everyday concerns. To take an example, the shift from C- sharp major to D- flat major was not just a question of compositional technique for Beethoven, for it also touched on the issue of the characteristics associated with the different keys, questions that listeners should consciously engage with. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB Mh 59, fol. 1r)

The magic of this movement consists of the fact that the composer enters a world that seems to contain things that are secrets even to him. The spatial element is underscored by a recollection by the then thirteen-year-old Siegfried Wagner, who recalls Liszt

F i g u r e 1 3 • Autograph sketch that was once part of the Petter Sketchbook but that was removed from it at an early date, presumably to be sold or presented as a gift. This particular bifolio dates from 1811–12 and contains sketches for the Seventh Symphony, among other works. On the second line down the reader will be able to identify the characteristic rhythmic pattern of the head motif of the second movement. This theme is first found in a sketch dating from 1806 and is taken up again here. Experts have of course succeeded in identifying these and other sketches, whereas nonexperts will be fascinated by other matters, such as the physical appearance of the notation. Is it simply chaos or a modern work of art reminiscent of a painting by Cy Twombly? Or perhaps it is both of these things at once. Whatever the answer, sketches such as these lead lives of their own and cannot be dismissed as unfinished vis- à- vis more “finished” versions. One of the leading experts on Beethoven’s sketches, Douglas Johnson, was so puzzled by them that after years of research he proposed the provocative thesis that Beethoven’s sketches are neither able nor obliged to explain what does not emerge from the works themselves and that we are not doing justice to the sketches if we simply regard them as precursors of the finished work. We may interpret sketches such as the one reproduced here as rampant growths without a beginning or an end. They exist against the background of the composer’s life and works and belong to a “whole ” that cannot be codified in the form of definitive texts. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, BH 120, fol. 1r)

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visiting the family at the Palazzo Vendramin- Calergi in Venice only weeks before his father’s death and playing the Allegretto on the piano. His father had entered the room and, unobserved by Liszt and the group of listeners, had “danced to the music in the most skillful and graceful way.”155 We are dealing here with a moment of transcendence, when conventions are bypassed in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. The gesture of the symphonic is thrown open in the direction of a deeper empirical space. It is no accident that at a performance on November 29, 1814, the Allegretto had to be repeated at the insistence of the audience even though the movement, however straightforward and well balanced it may seem, does not even represent a specific vocal scene. The element of songlike simplicity is absorbed by the weight of the symphonic element, a weight that is articulated in the consonance of meter, harmony, and dynamics. The fact that a new world will open up with the Allegretto is already clear from the initial six-four wind chord that begins forte and dies away pianissimo, like a curtain that descends only to be raised again, creating the necessary distance between the tempestuous agitation of the opening movement and the scene evoked in the second movement, a scene that, although animated, is none the less contemplative in tone. Its vaguely archaic garb ensures that the composer can retire behind his symphonic self and communicate a process that affects his listeners both in its gestural immediacy and, at the same time, in a specifically refracted form. We are reminded of a painting by Jan Vermeer such as The Love Letter, in which the observer’s gaze glides past various iconographically significant objects before coming to rest on a central image in the background. Here, too, we are dealing not only with a superficial realism but,

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more importantly, with an imaginary impression of distance and even rapt otherworldliness created by colors, light, and shade. In much the same way, early listeners may have been fascinated by the association with a processional dance or even a pilgrimage presented in spatial terms and combined with spiritual ideas, for what we have here is an example of art as a religion, a concept first associated with the Nazarenes who came together in Vienna in the early years of the nineteenth century as the Brotherhood of Saint Luke. What is unique about the Allegretto is the transition to its middle section. On the one hand, the entry of the Trio— marked dolce— seems so natural that nothing else is conceivable here, while on the other hand we as listeners do not know what is happening to us. The belief in a “miracle from on high” extends far into the depths of human experience, at the same time enhancing that experience and rendering it inaccessible. In an entry in one of Beethoven’s Conversation Books for the summer of 1823, when he specifically discussed the “intentions” of the Allegretto of his Seventh Symphony, Anton Schindler expressed the wish that “All of this must be indicated when these works are published in their entirety, for no one will look for this in them.”156 It is possible that in adding this entry to Beethoven’s Conversation Books, Schindler was merely trying to make himself look important in the eyes of posterity. Nor do we know what reply Beethoven may have provided, although it is possible that he preferred to keep his own counsel and to say nothing. None the less, it is no surprise that Schindler’s questions related to the Seventh Symphony in particular. Like the Third and certainly more so than the Fifth and Sixth, the Seventh recalls a stage play that does not deal in any concentrated way with a single theme— destiny and nature— but

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presents a vast panorama that triggers all manner of ideas in the listener’s imagination. In the course of a reception history that has now lasted more than two centuries, the Seventh has been subjected to more “programs” than any other of Beethoven’s symphonies.157 We do not need to draw a veil over these programs, as some of Beethoven’s more serious exegetes prefer to do, nor do we need to dismiss them as naive and unworthy of a deeper understanding of Beethoven. However imperfectly, this approach attests to the attempt to understand Beethoven’s intentions. Even so, it is clear that in this case, too, Beethoven wanted to be understood through his music alone. In itself, this music already offers us much that is excitingly new. This begins with the symphony’s initial effect, which was admired by Berlioz, no less: “The entire orchestra strikes a strong, staccato chord; in the silence that follows, an oboe is exposed— its entrance was drowned out earlier by the orchestral attack— and it now develops the melody in sustained notes.”158 Berlioz’s terminology is technical, but the same idea may also be expressed metaphorically: the oboe is like a frightened bird that takes flight from the sheer weight of the orchestra. The listener will be reminded of the Fifth Symphony, in which the solo oboe was not allowed to emit its first “human” sigh until the interface between the development section and the recapitulation— in other words, only after the orchestra had been allowed to let off steam to its heart’s content. Now both elements are brought together within the narrowest possible confines: in the one lies the other. This idea could hardly be more strikingly illustrated than by this oboe note breaking free from the orchestral chord. This is an idea that could provide us with a clue with which to

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interpret the symphony as a whole. Unlike the Third, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, the Seventh “negates” the often-proposed idea that Beethoven’s symphonies in general owe their sense of cohesion to the composer’s intensive work on the same basic motivic and thematic material, the traces of which may be followed right up to the glorious finale. In the case of the Seventh Symphony, this theory does not get us very far. If there is a unifying principle, then it is not to be found on the level of the motivic writing but on that of rhythm and meter. Romain Rolland invoked “l’Orgie du Rythme” when discussing Beethoven’s redefinition of the symphony;159 and Michael Gielen has seen himself confronted by a “rhythmic insistency without equal.”160 The result is a degree of “drive” that encouraged Wagner to speak of the “apotheosis of dance itself,”161 a comment that makes sense if we define “dance” as Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) and allow that the symphony’s four movements are all very different in character. Inasmuch as the suggestive rhythmic and metrical fury of this movement stifles the question as to whether it evinces any more farreaching motivic and thematic cohesion, Beethoven is able to pursue a different principle here, namely, the aforementioned idea that “in the one lies the other.” In other words, we are not dealing here with the “developing variation” that Schoenberg thought was prefigured by Beethoven’s music but with changes and transformations within the musical textures. The introductory chord in the full orchestra mutates into the oboe solo, and the opening movement’s succinctly rhythmic first subject is transformed from a skipping figure in the flute to a jubilant orchestral tutti. Peter Gülke has described the “upbeat that shoots up like a rocket” as “the musical embodiment of the spark that inflames the masses and transforms the idea into

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one of material violence, a dominant gesture with which the full orchestra seizes possession of the theme.”162 In the recapitulation the situation is reversed: here it is the orchestral tutti that gives the impression that it has now finally seized control; only then does the first subject enter as a reminiscence of its original lightness. Although it would not be wrong to speak of an “exposition,” a “development section,” and a “recapitulation,” to do so would cause us greater difficulties than in the composer’s other symphonies, for a narrative element is so dominant here that the usual categories of music theory no longer apply. This is already true of the extended introduction to the opening movement, which cannot really be interpreted as a lead-in to the main movement but is an independent prologue to the following dithyramb, which is how we may interpret this Vivace by reference to Johann Georg Sulzer’s definition of the symphony in his General Theory of the Fine Arts. In much the same spirit, Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas on the “drunken fury” of the ode, which he compared to a “river that sweeps along in its eddying current everything that moves,”163 were still sufficiently topical to play a role in Beethoven’s aesthetic outlook. And the same is true of Herder’s description of the orgiastic elements in the cult of Dionysus or Bacchus. It is worth noting here that at the time that he was working on his Seventh Symphony, Beethoven was also toying with the idea of writing an opera on the subject of Bacchus, a theme that will resurface in the context of his work on his Ninth Symphony. It is not just the rhythmic frenzy of the writing that legitimizes Beethoven’s decision to juxtapose episodes within a narrative framework while never losing sight of the overall context, for the instrumentation also plays its part here. Only with the help of his

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chosen orchestral forces is he able to create the mounting sense of drama, with all of its lengthenings and foreshortenings, its highs and lows, its build up and release of tension, and its moments when the musical argument is driven forward and others when it is held back. And yet the style that Beethoven adopts in the opening movement could never be described as lapidary, its dynamics notwithstanding. An expert such as Berlioz rightly draws attention to the subtleties in the score and in particular praises the resolution of a dissonance in bar 160 that had been “criticized by the guardians of the school doctrine” but that he himself holds up as an especially felicitous harmonic effect.164 Nowadays such nuances are no longer criticized but tend, rather, to be ignored, and yet they confirm— at least involuntarily— the impression of impassioned extraversion. The Scherzo in F major similarly leaves an extravert impression, the rushing presto quarter notes certainly seeming like a return to the “bustling world” after the pause for reflection in the previous Allegretto. (The phrase “bustling world” is taken from Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem “Abschied” [Farewell], which the poet wrote in October 1810 and which includes the line “Da draußen, stets betrogen, saust die geschäft’ge Welt” [Out there, for aye betrayed, the bustling world roars past].)165 But this “bustling world” then disappears at a stroke, making way for a Trio in D major, which Michael Gielen has described as the “inner high point of the symphony.”166 Of the unison of the main motif, only the third, A, remains, which is reinterpreted as the fifth of the new key of D major and, stressed with peculiar force, turned into the basis for a “jubilant hymn.”167 The novel nature of this tonal complex becomes clear when Beethoven returns from the Trio to the main part of the Scherzo, the F major of which restores us to the “bustling world.” As listeners

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we have difficulty finding our way back to the new key, for all that it is the old key. Original though the “harmonic effect” that Tchaikovsky admired may be,168 more important is its function in the symphony as a whole, where it serves to create an impression of transcendence. Admittedly, it does not hurt to know that a serious contemporary of Beethoven, Maximilian Stadler, pointed out that the theme of the Trio is borrowed from a song traditionally sung by pilgrims in Lower Austria,169 but even if we are unaware of this detail, we shall surely interpret the Trio as testimony to Beethoven’s ethical outlook and as a metaphor for his ability to transform our dismay at the world’s “absurdity” into a feeling of reverence. And it is one of Beethoven’s— no doubt well-considered— secrets that he conceals this core message in a Trio, which is effectively a subsidiary clause within the structure as a whole. But we need to hear this message before the “self-hypnotic” raging of the final movement can begin.170 If Schumann suggested that with this final movement Beethoven was wanting to usher us into a ballroom,171 then this may indicate less of a deeper understanding of the work on Schumann’s part than the tameness of the performances that he would have heard under the Gewandhaus’s worthy music director, Christian August Pohlenz, in Leipzig. Be that as it may, most commentators on Beethoven agree that there is something provocatively monomaniacal about this final movement. Its initial theme confronts the listener with a sense of wild frenzy that is quickly brought under control by the march rhythms that are derived from it and that reveal an altogether military tautness and rigor. It may be worth noting that these march rhythms recall an epi-

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sode from François-Joseph Gossec’s Le triomphe de la République,172 because the concerts that were held in Vienna during the winter of 1813– 14 and that included the acclaimed first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony took place against the background of the recent military victories that tolled the end of the Napoleonic era. And yet it would be wrong to overemphasize these associations because the movement contains moments when the subject is completely overwhelmed by the impulsive forces that, regardless of the situation in the composer’s own day, cannot be overlooked in his music. In a conversation with Engelbert Humperdinck on April 7, 1881, Wagner expressed the view that although it is possible to love this final movement, listeners had no choice but to admit that “in a certain sense it is no longer music, but only He could do it!”173 Whether we regard the final movement as magnificent, disturbing, or both of these at once, there is no doubt that it affords impressive proof of Beethoven’s inspired ability as a symphonist to get to the heart of a fundamental idea. Here his aim is to ensure that primeval forces appear to glorious effect. Thanks to his lapidary style, Beethoven needs only around seven and a half minutes to achieve this aim, whereas later composers took as long as half an hour to present the ideas that they wanted to express in their final movements. Frenzied though the final movement may seem, it was certainly not composed in a state of drunken ecstasy. Rather, the countless surviving sketches attest to the extreme intellectual effort that went into the process of turning chaos into order and disorientation into purposefulness, while at the same time introducing episodes that retard the flow of the musical argument and that serve to summon up new strength. In much the same way the arbitrarily placed

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accents act as a stimulant and prevent any sense of monotony and of a trancelike state. Without flinching from extreme gestures, Beethoven remains true to his reputation as the master of a lapidary style who refuses to forgo his sense of self-reflection. At the same time he is determined to go beyond a work that is merely appellative in character: in the final movements of his last two symphonies, Beethoven will readdress the question of “the individual and the mass” before finally— in his late string quartets— reflecting on his own frailty in a moment of impressive self-examination.

Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 First performed in the Great Redoutensaal in Vienna on February 27, 1814

As a symphonist, Beethoven had, by his own admission, always kept the bigger picture in mind, with the result that he was evidently unable to present the drunkenly victorious messages of his Seventh Symphony without conceiving and creating a counterpart in the form of his Eighth, a work that he wrote, as it were, at the very heart of the Seventh. Just as a satyr play followed a tragedy in classical antiquity, so the exuberantly tempestuous Seventh is followed in Beethoven’s output by a symphony striking for its succinct and concentrated form and for the fact that, according to Beethoven’s once influential biographer Adolf Bernhard Marx, it is “the most jovial of all Beethoven’s symphonies.”174 This view was widely held not only by nineteenth- century concert guides but was shared by composers such as Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, and even Wagner dated the Eighth to a period in Beethoven’s life when he was said to have “paid tribute almost exclusively to the spirit of the most sublime joviality.”175

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accents act as a stimulant and prevent any sense of monotony and of a trancelike state. Without flinching from extreme gestures, Beethoven remains true to his reputation as the master of a lapidary style who refuses to forgo his sense of self-reflection. At the same time he is determined to go beyond a work that is merely appellative in character: in the final movements of his last two symphonies, Beethoven will readdress the question of “the individual and the mass” before finally— in his late string quartets— reflecting on his own frailty in a moment of impressive self-examination.

Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 First performed in the Great Redoutensaal in Vienna on February 27, 1814

As a symphonist, Beethoven had, by his own admission, always kept the bigger picture in mind, with the result that he was evidently unable to present the drunkenly victorious messages of his Seventh Symphony without conceiving and creating a counterpart in the form of his Eighth, a work that he wrote, as it were, at the very heart of the Seventh. Just as a satyr play followed a tragedy in classical antiquity, so the exuberantly tempestuous Seventh is followed in Beethoven’s output by a symphony striking for its succinct and concentrated form and for the fact that, according to Beethoven’s once influential biographer Adolf Bernhard Marx, it is “the most jovial of all Beethoven’s symphonies.”174 This view was widely held not only by nineteenth- century concert guides but was shared by composers such as Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, and even Wagner dated the Eighth to a period in Beethoven’s life when he was said to have “paid tribute almost exclusively to the spirit of the most sublime joviality.”175

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F i g u r e 1 4 • Page from the Petter Sketchbook that documents the complicated genesis of the Eighth Symphony. Here we find Beethoven working on a passage that will later be found at the start of the Eighth Symphony, and yet there are indications that at this date the new piece was being planned as a keyboard concerto. Admittedly, the outlines of the head motif may be made out at the top of the page, but following the fermata in line 13, a passage begins that can be identified in the context of the previous pages as a cadenza for the piano. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB Mh 59, fol. 37v)

By the twentieth century, the dominant view— first voiced with some vigor in the nineteenth century by Robert Schumann— was that the Eighth Symphony expressed a sense of “humor,” a term that is, of course, open to many interpretations. Carl Dahlhaus, for example, noted a “humorous distance ” from the symphonic tradition,176 while Michael Gielen has argued that the humor is “the angry humor of Rumpelstiltskin. There is an anger here and a repressed violence that keeps on breaking out.”177 For his part,

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F i g u r e 1 5 • Page from the Petter Sketchbook (nine pages after the page shown in fig. 14). Beethoven is still in two minds about his next project: he is now thinking of a “Concerto in G,” an “Adagio in E-flat,” and a “Concerto in G or E minor” as well as a “Polonaise for piano solo.” Right at the bottom of the page is an entry that reads “Joy divine spark daughter / work up overture.” This is already a reference to the Ninth Symphony even though the sketches for this “overture ” that are found only a few pages later bear no relation to the work that was composed a decade later. Only from fol. 45r onward does Beethoven decide definitively in favor of his later Eighth Symphony. (BeethovenHaus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB Mh 59, fol. 42r)

Adorno perceived in the symphony an “idyll burst asunder by its own latent driving forces.”178 Beethoven’s sarcasm— and it is difficult to interpret many features of the Eighth Symphony in any other way— represents a form of self-reckoning and a protest at his own symphonic ideal that results in a basic contradiction. On the one hand, the Eighth is “authentic” Beethoven right down to the very last detail, revealing

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all the relevant hallmarks, including motivic and thematic writing notable for its advanced planning, defiant counterpoint, furious cross-rhythms, sudden shifts from piano to forte, and idyllic and even hymnlike episodes. Even the note that Wilhelm von Lenz described as a “note of terror”— the C-sharp in bars 17–18 of the final movement that rudely interrupts a pianississimo— may be interpreted as an example of Beethoven’s quintessential humor— Louis Spohr likened its appearance to someone sticking out his tongue at him in the middle of a conversation.179 And yet this C-sharp is not a unique affront but one that is deliberately built into the movement as a whole. In the second(?) recapitulation, for example, which is laid out along remarkably “false” lines, it features as the dominant of F-sharp minor, which for its part literally bursts into the surrounding textures in F major. The German musicologist Constantin Floros has noted, not without good reason, that in general the final movement of the Eighth Symphony is “arguably the most brilliant example of the art of the imprévu from the time before Berlioz.”180 And yet the symphony is about far more than any impression of the unforeseen or unpredictable, for it reveals such striking elements of disintegration that the listener is bound to think of an altogether self- destructive impulse— self- destructive not in the sense of the integrity of the composer’s own personality but in his handling of the enthusiastic superstructure of his own creativity. In the final movement of the Seventh Symphony, this superstructure had already shifted from the ethical to the orgiastic, and it is now completely demolished. Beethoven may have taken pleasure in his own feeling of sarcasm, and I can well imagine him calling out to his listeners, “I’ve given you my all, both compositionally and

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philosophically. Were you able to make anything of it? Have you changed the world? You have the parts of the puzzle. Now put them together— if you can!” But Beethoven’s own contemporaries were unable to do so, and so he proceeded to write this inability into his music, most graphically in the second movement of his Eighth Symphony, an Allegretto scherzando. For a long time writers on the composer believed that its theme was derived from the Maelzel Canon WoO 162 that Beethoven wrote over supper on the eve of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s departure from Vienna in the spring of 1812, setting it to the words “Ta ta ta ta ta . . . lieber Maelzel, leben Sie wohl, sehr wohl! Banner der Zeit, großer Metronom” (Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, dearest Maelzel, now fare you well, most well! Captor of time, mighty metronome). But it is now thought that no such dinner took place, at least not in the form described by Schindler and not at the time that he states since Maelzel’s metronome had not yet been presented to the public under his name. Indeed, the canon, as such, is not even by Beethoven.181 And yet this circumstance should not discourage us from assuming that there is a kernel of historical truth to the story that may even help to make better sense of it. In writing his Allegretto scherzando, Beethoven was not thinking of a metronome or was not thinking exclusively of one but of one of the many mechanical instruments that Maelzel famously invented and exhibited in his gallery in Vienna. What Beethoven reproduces is, of course, anything but a mechanical instrument that runs with predictable regularity, as one might assume from the first few bars. Rather, it is a mechanism that plays tricks: the “melody” and the “accompaniment” are neither internally homogeneous nor do they go together. There are points

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that overlap while other passages are drawn out or distorted and others again are delayed. Toward the end, the whole apparatus seems to fall part before it briefly resumes its eerie bustle— it is almost as if someone has kicked the mechanism in order to get it going again. Even today a number of interpreters are reminded here of the triumphant ending of an Italian opera aria in the modern style. Schumann imagined the composer “throwing down his pen” at this point.182 Admittedly, this recalls the “mischievousness” that is generally attributed to Beethoven, but it goes further than this, especially if we start out from the Allegretto scherzando and examine the other movements in terms of their relationship to the work’s “form.” Even the opening movement is an absurdity if we examine it more closely. Take the head theme, for example, which, unlike the themes in Beethoven’s other symphonies, appears from the outset as a compact twelve-bar period in the “classical” tradition, raising the question of the way in which Beethoven was able to develop ideas and resolve contradictions in the face of this self-contained structure. In fact, moments of harmlessness clash with others expressive of intense passion almost without any connection between them: here we have the delightful first subject, there wild agglomerations of sound, which are already found in the exposition and even more forcefully in the development section. In spite of its hidden “wit,” this development section is dominated superficially by a mechanical approach to composition, the one-bar head of the theme migrating through the orchestra in what seems to be an uninvolved way while the simple sequencing and stretta technique results in the sort of mechanical sequences that German musicologists describe dismissively as Schusterflecken,

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literally, “cobbler’s patches.” “Much ado about nothing!,” one is tempted to say at the risk of oversimplification. But the result of all this “ado” is a hymnlike turn of phrase that is headed fortississimo and that is typical, rather, of Beethoven’s final movements. The listener is unsure how seriously to take this. All that is certain is that it has difficulty asserting itself in the face of the basses, which simultaneously take up the main theme as if keen not to miss the start of the recapitulation. In short, all manner of emotions are touched on in the rapid interplay between different levels of experience: the charming, the muted, the impassioned, the wild, and the festively solemn. In third position Beethoven would normally include a scherzo, but in this case the movement is headed Tempo di Menuetto, a heading that creates a sense of distance, as if to say that in this medium, too, he has reached the end of the road: although it may be possible to fall back on older forms, this should not be taken to mean that in 1812 it is possible to invoke an innocent world of dance. As a result, the movement does not seem delightfully old fashioned but bears clear signs of a sense of disorientation. At the very beginning trumpets and timpani— in the final movement, these latter are tuned, unusually, an octave apart— enter prematurely. The first violin enters in bar 26 only after some hesitation but still manages to pick up the musical argument. In bar 37 the timpani, instead of entering in unison with the horns and trumpets, enters two beats late, adding to the uncertainty. The listener is reminded of the peasants’ music in the Pastoral Symphony, but music which on that occasion may have been meant to sound humorous and to evoke a genre scene now gives the impression of raising basic doubts about the meaning of the work in its entirety.

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The final movement in particular creates the impression of a disturbed state of mind. Indeed, even the critic of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, writing on March 4, 1818, spoke of “chaotic confusion” and of ideas that replaced each other at insane speed.183 Even the rhythm of the main theme may be interpreted as a distorted version of the main theme from the Seventh, while the rest of the movement similarly contains a whole series of grotesque fits and starts. The development section seems effortful and, in the context of a final movement, oddly overwrought, at times even lacking in logical coherence. And it remains inconsequential, for there is no sense of the liberation that we would normally find in a final movement. Instead, the final fifty-three bars over the ostinato tonic F seem provocatively outrageous even by Beethoven’s standards. With few exceptions, the Eighth Symphony lacks the warmth that we otherwise find in Beethoven’s symphonies, especially in his slow movements. Instead, the composer takes the opportunity to present us with an entire catalog of examples of his habitual surliness. And this, too, he seems to be saying, is a part of his character and creativity. If we compare the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies movement by movement, then the suggestion that the Eighth is a satyr play receives further confirmation. Whereas the opening movement of the Seventh is unusually discursive, its counterpart in the Eighth is— by Beethoven’s lights— exceptionally concentrated. The inspired Allegretto of the Seventh corresponds to the mechanical Allegretto scherzando of the Eighth; and the scurrying quarter notes of the Presto of the Seventh are in stark contrast to the quarter- and eighth-note figures in the Tempo di Menuetto of the Eighth, where the impression that they create is not only one of pensive tranquility but also of deliberate awkwardness. Ultimately

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there can be no doubt that the hectic gesture of the theme of the Eighth’s final movement draws a bead on the final frenzy of the Seventh, just as the two final movements in general are contrasted with one another, one of them a constantly swelling river of euphoria, the other revealing signs of chaos and aimlessness at every turn. If, to quote Adolf Bernhard Marx, Beethoven’s Eighth is the “most jovial of all Beethoven’s symphonies,” then it is only in the sense, outlined above, of a satyr play in which the composer reveals his cards, as if he were saying, “As a composer able to demonstrate my craftsmanship, I am now at the height of my powers, but as the herald of humanitarian ideals, I cannot go on.” This reminds us of Jean Paul, with whom Beethoven had been compared from the time of the Eroica onward. Jean Paul, too, subverted humanitarian ideals in his novels, regaling his readers instead with all manner of aberrations and false leads that not infrequently end in dashes and question marks. And yet— his habitual contempt for the world notwithstanding— Jean Paul still seeks to bind his numerous readers to him with words that are ultimately consolatory. This is not what Beethoven does in his Eighth Symphony, where he no longer attempts to square up to a world that is simultaneously impressive and repulsive, fantastical and confused, a world teeming with contradictions that cannot be resolved by reason or by art. In no previous work do we find the composer reflecting on his own possibilities in the way that he does in the Eighth. In terms of the “joviality” of the symphony, Friedrich Schlegel would speak of “a truly transcendental buffoonery.”184 In opera buffa, too, the characters constantly caricature their own actions. And, as Schlegel goes on to assert, the smile of irony is ultimately marked by “the most solemn seriousness,” because it reflects an objective whole.185

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Like the practitioners of opera buffa, Beethoven sticks out his tongue not only at himself but also at his audience. For him, his Eighth Symphony served as depressing proof that a symphony will still be accepted in the concert hall even when its mechanisms are presented in such a distorted way that no one can fail to notice them. This is the voice of a disillusioned idealist. Or to express the same idea in the language of sarcasm, the Eighth Symphony is a record of what the hard of hearing can still make out in terms of the high-sounding tone of an “idealistic” symphony. And yet the composer’s disappointment also contains within it the stimulus for the symphony’s successor. If he was unable to achieve his goal with a purely instrumental work, then perhaps he could do so with what his contemporaries called a “grand symphony with choruses.” In the best Romantic tradition— and again we are reminded of Jean Paul— the Eighth reveals Beethoven as an ironist who destroys his ideal but who refuses to let it go. If we want to hear it not from an objective distance but with a partial sense of identification, then we should imagine the composer as a shaman not afraid of strangeness in convincing others of the significance of his mission. And this mission would consist of the graphic warning that the genre of the idealistic symphony could be salvaged only if something earth-shatteringly new were to happen.

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 First performed at the Kärntnerthor-Theater in Vienna on May 7, 1824

Writers on Beethoven who want to avoid all “extramusical” speculations will be hard pressed to stick to this principle in the case of the composer’s first eight symphonies, but they will fail comprehensively when they turn to the Ninth. The problem is not that the

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Like the practitioners of opera buffa, Beethoven sticks out his tongue not only at himself but also at his audience. For him, his Eighth Symphony served as depressing proof that a symphony will still be accepted in the concert hall even when its mechanisms are presented in such a distorted way that no one can fail to notice them. This is the voice of a disillusioned idealist. Or to express the same idea in the language of sarcasm, the Eighth Symphony is a record of what the hard of hearing can still make out in terms of the high-sounding tone of an “idealistic” symphony. And yet the composer’s disappointment also contains within it the stimulus for the symphony’s successor. If he was unable to achieve his goal with a purely instrumental work, then perhaps he could do so with what his contemporaries called a “grand symphony with choruses.” In the best Romantic tradition— and again we are reminded of Jean Paul— the Eighth reveals Beethoven as an ironist who destroys his ideal but who refuses to let it go. If we want to hear it not from an objective distance but with a partial sense of identification, then we should imagine the composer as a shaman not afraid of strangeness in convincing others of the significance of his mission. And this mission would consist of the graphic warning that the genre of the idealistic symphony could be salvaged only if something earth-shatteringly new were to happen.

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 First performed at the Kärntnerthor-Theater in Vienna on May 7, 1824

Writers on Beethoven who want to avoid all “extramusical” speculations will be hard pressed to stick to this principle in the case of the composer’s first eight symphonies, but they will fail comprehensively when they turn to the Ninth. The problem is not that the

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F i g u r e 1 6 • Excerpt from Landsberg 8, with sketches for the final movement of the Ninth Symphony. Between them is an entry that reads “my fr [friends?] let this be celebrated.” Here we find Beethoven struggling to find the right transition to the final movement. At an early stage of the compositional process he was inclined to present the opening bars of the first three movements not only in musical succession but also to have each of them accompanied by a comment from the singer, who in the final version is left with only a single comment: “O friends, not these sounds! But let us intone more agreeable ones, and ones more filled with joy!” (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Department of Music with Mendelssohn Archives, Mus. ms. autogr. Beethoven Landsberg 8, fol. 71. Photo © bpk/Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

composer himself turned for help to words in the form of Schiller’s Ode to Joy but, rather, the way in which he did so. It is not a question of Beethoven adding voices to the orchestra in order to clarify his ideas. Nor is it sufficient to equate these ideas with the content of Schiller’s Ode— in other words, with ideas on humanitarian ideals and brotherly love.

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F i g u r e 1 7 • The new catalogue of Beethoven’s works includes the composer’s plans for a Tenth Symphony, of which there is a good deal of preparatory material. This illustration reproduces one page of a bifolio, the top half of which contains sketches for the Yorck March WoO 18. The middle and lower part of the page are filled with jottings for the Tenth Symphony that are written with a finer nib. Alongside thematic fragments it is also possible to decipher the explanatory words “wind band alone” and “without 2 parts.” (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Bodmer Collection, HCB Bsk 20/68, fol. 1r)

To impute to Beethoven the thinker the simple formula “three plus one ”— three traditional symphonic movements and a finale that provides the symphony with its vocal and instrumental copestone— immediately raises the question as to what that copestone surmounts. Why did Beethoven not start by writing a choral symphony based on Schiller’s Ode? Why does such an exercise have to be preceded by three weighty symphonic movements? What function do they perform within the four-movement work? What

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message does Beethoven the symphonist want to convey— not just through the medium of the final movement but through the symphony as a whole? From first to last the symphony clearly follows a line of argument that may not be immediately apparent but that can be traced by means of the clues that the composer left behind for us. In order to preempt my findings, what I am trying to say is that I believe that the Ninth Symphony’s four movements are conceived along historical and philosophical lines that lead logically to the final movement. We may start by taking a closer look at this final movement, which begins with a motto described by Wagner as a “terrifying fanfare.”186 This is then followed by an orchestral recitative and by the opening bars of the first three movements, each of them accompanied by a commentary in the form of further passages of orchestral recitative. In the final version of the symphony these commentaries are wordless, but in the Landsberg 8 sketchbook, they are texted.187 The sketches state clearly, “Recitative— thinking of words.”188 Beethoven himself indicated which words he meant by writing between the lines of his sketches. Following the “terrifying fanfare,” for example, we find “Today is a solemn day . . . let it be celebrated with song and dance.” There follows the opening of the first movement, with these words added by way of a commentary: “O no— not this— something else pleasing is what I demand.” In much the same way the initial idea for the Scherzo, too, is discarded: “nor this either— it is but sport— but only a little merrier— something more beautiful and better.” Beethoven’s reminiscence of the Adagio likewise fails to meet with his approval: “nor this— it is too delicate— we must look for something animated [?]. [ . . . ] I shall see to it that I myself sing something first, then you

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should just join in.” The opening bars of the melody set to the words “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” are accompanied by the following commentary in the sketches: “Ha! That’s it! I’ve found it— Joy!” In the definitive version the orchestral recitatives are untexted and are followed by the melody associated with joy. It, too, is initially untexted and entrusted to the cellos and basses before being presented by the full orchestra in the spirit of a set of cantus firmus variations. What follows is bound to surprise the listener: the “terrifying fanfare ” is repeated, whereupon the baritone soloist interjects, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!” (O friends, not these sounds! But let us intone more agreeable ones, and ones more filled with joy). Only now do we hear what we might have expected to hear in the wake of the instrumental statement of the melody associated with joy— only now do we hear its vocal version, sung first by the soloists, then by the chorus, too. Analysts who are committed to the doctrine of musical immanence and who refuse to look beyond the actual notes may examine the matter in whatever way they like, but neither the repeat of the “terrifying fanfare” nor the baritone’s recitative is musically plausible, leading Ralph Vaughan Williams to argue, no doubt ironically, that Beethoven had simply forgotten to delete the first, wordless part of the final movement before sending it off to his publisher.189 The doubling does, however, make sense if we impute the following message to the composer: “What I feel impelled to say cannot be expressed through symphonic music alone; for that I need a more far-reaching vehicle of communication— namely, a chorus embedded in the orchestral sonorities and able to transcend the

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boundaries between musicians and listeners, turning all of the parties involved, together with everyone else who feels that the music appeals to them directly, into ‘friends’ and ‘brothers.’” Against this background the “terrifying fanfare” would acquire a specific function, and we would no longer need to interpret it as an echo of the political horrors of the age, including the Restoration and the political persecution that Beethoven ostensibly wanted to counter with his hymn to the ethical ideal of brotherly love. Instead, we could imagine it as a determined intervention on the part of an imaginary listener dissatisfied with the symphony’s first three movements and now signaling by means of violent, but not “terrifying,” gestures that he wants something more “animated,” not to say “more stirring.” This imaginary listener— and this is effectively the punch line— would then be Beethoven himself in his capacity as a composer who has come to realize that not even the finest symphonic music can prevail in the face of the banal reality to which he is exposed. Mankind gets nowhere by listening to a “traditional” symphony, even one composed to the very highest standards and even with a first movement notable for its somber sublimity, a Scherzo remarkable for its bacchantic wildness, and an Adagio distinguished by its otherworldly soulfulness. Not even the most brilliant final movement would be of any use here. Rather, the solution to the problem of composing a suitable final movement must involve the composer in bravely transcending the limits of the purely aesthetic and, together with his listeners, joyfully and confidently joining in a round that unites all men as brothers in a world created by God the Father. Reduced to its most formulaic, the message is this: in spite of his best intentions, it is of no help to Beethoven the symphonist that he confirms his collective elemental

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forces in the opening movement, his own natural vital powers in the second movement, or his own inner strength in the third movement. He still needs help from outside. Here— to particularly striking effect— the message of the Eighth Symphony is taken a stage further. On that occasion Beethoven had deconstructed his own idealistic music, whereas he now performs yet another volte-face. In the first three movements of the Ninth, he surpasses himself in terms of idealistic rhetoric only to reject this idealism in his final movement in a way that is brusque but at the same time very different: as the intervention of the “terrifying fanfare ” reminds us, even the most masterly symphonic rhetoric is ultimately still rhetoric. In the final analysis, salvation can come only from above, and benediction has to be entreated. There remains the question of why Beethoven did not set Schiller’s Ode from the outset. The answer is that, as always, he kept the bigger picture in mind and did not want to call into question his previous symphonic writing in the way that he had to a certain extent done in his Eighth Symphony. Instead, he was keen to turn it into something new, an aim he sought to achieve not in any mechanical way by simply appending the “new” to the “old.” No, Beethoven dares to do something else by following a sequence of ideas that allows the “new” to grow organically out of the “old.” We do not have to impute a program to all four movements of the Ninth Symphony— which the young Wagner believed contained “the secret to all secrets”190— in order to draw conclusions about the composer’s corresponding intention from the character of each of those movements, for it is both possible and, indeed, necessary for Beethoven’s programmatic and compositional aims during the individual stages of the work’s genesis to remain an open question.

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The existence of the sketches notwithstanding, we can focus on the end result alone. Even early commentators were reminded of the primal force of the godly and the sublime when they heard the opening Allegro maestoso. An evolving world emerges from chaos as something irrevocable and all determining. Listeners may be reminded of the permanence of being and of the eternal path of the stars. This sense of order is reflected on a compositional level in the astonishingly logical structure of the movement in regular four-bar groups that are in remarkable contrast to the movement’s dramatic language. We may even note strophic structures here. According to Carl Dahlhaus, it is very much “the simplicity that it can tolerate when performed bombastically without lapsing into empty rhetoric” that guarantees the movement’s characteristic monumentality.191 The numinous opening has been described by Jens Brockmeier and Hans Werner Henze as a “primeval landscape ” and as a part of our “prehistory,”192 while the beginning of the symphony reminded a member of Schumann’s Davidsbündler circle of “the story of mankind— first the chaos, then the call of God ‘there shall be light.’”193 What happens next is less the expression of a carefully planned compositional process, as we find in many of the opening movements of Beethoven’s middle-period works, than the depiction of a seething primeval state. We do not have to reduce the multilayered opening movement to these particular impressions and associations to regard it as the starting point of ideas that are plausibly continued in the second movement, a Molto vivace— Presto that is scherzo-like in character. The image of a cosmos guided by immutable laws is replaced by that of a Dionysian celebration that begins by striking a grotesquely

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overwrought note accompanied by vulgar capers reminiscent of the goat that was regarded as a manifestation of Dionysus and illustrated here by octave leaps in the timpani that were spontaneously applauded at the symphony’s first performance in Vienna. Only with the entry of the Trio does the movement assume more “human” characteristics. We are justified in speaking of Dionysian or Bacchic features not only by the work’s reception but also by the traces that Beethoven himself left behind: in preparing to start work on his Ninth Symphony, he jotted down phrases such as “Greek myth” and “Bacchic celebration,” while he also— as we have already observed— toyed with the idea of writing an opera about Bacchus. Few musical sketches have survived for this opera, but one of them, headed “Fugue,” is a preliminary version of what later became the theme of the Ninth Symphony’s Scherzo, while the sketches for the opera include the sentence, “Dissonances perhaps not resolved in the entire opera or in a very different way from usual, since our own more refined music is inconceivable in these dissolute times.”194 These “dissolute times” refer not to Beethoven’s own day but to an imaginary Dionysian and Bacchic age that appears to be reflected in the second movement of the Ninth Symphony: an early age of humankind inhabited by Rousseau’s “noble savages” and featuring wildly bucolic scenes such as those that might have been found in Beethoven’s Bacchic opera if he had ever written it. The third movement is headed “Adagio molto e cantabile,” and here Beethoven presents us with a later age: instead of music inspired by the “dissolute times” of early human history, we are given an idea of what Beethoven described in his sketches as “our own more refined music,” music apostrophized in his sketches for his Ninth Symphony as “more beautiful,” “better,” and “more del-

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icate.” In spite of the heroic gesture of this music, which calls for resolute action and draws in its final section on brass and timpani, the third movement turns out in the end to be “too delicate ” to survive the present day: “something animated” is needed. And this is now imported into the symphony in the form of Schiller’s Ode— once again before a historical and philosophical background. A new age— if such a high-flown term may be used here— is conceivable only through an “inventive return” to nature.195 This idea takes its cue from Rousseau, whom the young Schiller revered and whose epistolary novel La nouvelle Héloïse Beethoven may well have known.196 The term inventive implies that it is not a question of turning back the clock in order to return to a primeval state of human evolution, a state that Rousseau himself says he has no idea what it might look like. Rather, the road that leads to a state of “nature ” populated by a noble humanity first has to be discovered by means of education and culture. Beethoven himself intends to contribute to this development with his last completed symphony. Time and again it is clear from the final movement of the Ninth Symphony that natural sounds and a more refined musical language repeatedly come together in the sense of an “inventive return” to nature. On the one hand we have the “rough” melody associated with joy and initially heard in a deliberately unaccompanied version, and on the other this melody is ennobled within a double fugue that is admittedly not especially elaborate. Other contrasts abound: whereas one critic of the first performance was able to write in the context of the tenor solo, “Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,” that “the genuinely Turkish element in this music lies in the arbitrary way in which a composer can abandon all of the rules of art that are accepted by civilized norms,”197 Beethoven

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has no hesitation in including an extended orchestral fugato that is really aimed at the expert and whose function we can only speculate about in a movement conceived as a chorus that embraces the whole of humanity. The present proposal that we interpret the sequence of movements by analogy with a historical and philosophical train of thought is, of course, bound up with all manner of uncertainties, and yet it is by no means implausible. On the one hand, there are the aforementioned oral and written statements from the time of the symphony’s genesis as well as cue-like entries in the composer’s sketchbooks that, like the elements of a mosaic, can be assembled to create a hypothetical picture and give us an idea of what Beethoven intended in terms of the work’s philosophy. At the same time, there can be no doubt that in a more general way Beethoven was practically unique as a composer who took an interest in philosophical lines of thought and whose works may— also— be interpreted as works of philosophy. To that extent, it is not inappropriate to cite the philosopher Friedrich Schelling here, a writer who was working on his incomplete The Ages of the World while Beethoven was composing his Ninth Symphony: “Perhaps the man will still come who will sing the greatest heroic epic, embracing in spirit all that was, that is, and that will be, as lauded by the seers of prehistory.”198 It even makes sense in this context to quote five lines from Hölderlin’s hymn “As on a holiday”: Yet, fellow poets, us it behoves to stand Bareheaded beneath God’s thunder-storms, To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with our own two hands And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift, To offer it to the people.199

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It is entirely legitimate to draw parallels between Beethoven’s Ninth and contemporary poetry and philosophy because no other work of music that dates from the time of Beethoven can claim so comprehensively to grasp the world in its entirety and to seek to explore both remote cosmic worlds and the depths of the human psyche. Against this conceptual background, the Ninth has been described from the very outset as a work that is sublime in character.200 But unless we are dealing with sheer size or with the mathematical sublime as defined by Kant, the sublime is a vague concept that is hard to pin down. And in the specific case of a highly differentiated art like Beethoven’s, terms such as monumental or lapidary do not on their own get us very far. Motivically and thematically, the opening movement of the Ninth is more fragmented than that of the Fifth or even the Third. Contradictory ideas flow into one another and displace each other in rapid succession. According to Michael Gielen, even in the exposition, “everything is smashed to pieces and fitted together again and also turned into a puzzle.”201 Adorno compares the development section to the actions of Shakespeare ’s Hamlet, “who, after infinitely protracted, preparatory ‘developments’, finally, at the last moment, helplessly compelled by the situation, achieves in an unplanned, gestural way what could not be accomplished as a ‘development’. The formal schema of the Gordian knot.”202 Speculating on whether these arbitrary features, with their palpable lack of logic, are conscious or unconscious on Beethoven’s part will get us nowhere. Indeed, it is doubtful that such distinctions can do justice at all to Beethoven’s creative process. And yet they are an integral part of his late style, a style that has definitively moved away from a more streamlined compositional model— assuming that such a thing ever existed even with the “heroic” Beethoven.

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The numerous unison passages ensure a note of increased concentration, and it is entirely typical that the opening movement ends with one of these passages. But here it is remarkably abrupt. Now reduced to its head motif, the main theme seems to grow resigned as it dies away rather than crowing in triumph. A movement that had been designed to seem boundless is, as it were, suddenly switched off, with the result that the American musicologist Leo Treitler does not see an “end” after the final bar, but a “stop.”203 Beethoven has reached his limits. Written into the score is not only monumentality but also the composer’s own feeling that he is currently out of his depth. In the second movement Beethoven even seems to have laid aside his pen and to have abandoned himself to a ghostly and orgiastic frenzy before disseminating a feeling of natural human warmth in the Trio and creating an extreme sense of contrast. In the third movement, too, “Beethoven turns his own discourse into a puzzle.”204 But in spite of all his boldness in terms of his harmonic writing and the idiosyncrasies of his instrumentation, he continues to write with such delicacy that even an analyst with as strict a sense of form as Heinrich Schenker can be inspired by the transition from the strings to the winds in bar 6 to imagine “human arms reaching out in desire for an object that is so close to being attained.”205 Was the composer keen to present his listeners with a passage of the greatest conceivable beauty so that the following “terrifying fanfare ” would strike their ears with all the greater stridency? Perhaps it was this impression of abruptness in the transition between the Adagio and the “terrifying fanfare,” which is attenuated by no break between the movements, that left members of an audience “admirably well educated in terms of Beethoven’s

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symphonies” feeling “repulsed,” as we read in a review of a performance in 1826.206 Ten years later Mendelssohn conducted another performance in Berlin, prompting his sister Fanny to write of “this gigantic Ninth Symphony, which is so grand, and in parts so abominable, as only the work of the greatest of men could be.” And she struggled to make sense of a final movement, which was “meant to be dithyrambic, but falling into the opposite extreme— the height of burlesque.”207 In 1846, following a performance that Wagner conducted in Dresden, the local art expert and music lover Carl Gustav Carus noted that, his respect for “the mighty genius of a composer like Beethoven” notwithstanding, the symphony’s final movement was “merely strange and profoundly disjointed” and, as such, symptomatic of the “disquiet, dissatisfaction, and torment of the artist,” with the result that “at many points sheer madness” seemed to “break through.”208 Although Wagner himself hailed the Ninth as the precursor of his own music dramas, he qualified his enthusiasm in a letter to Liszt in June 1855: “In the Ninth Symphony (as a work of art), it is the last movement with its chorus which is without doubt the weakest section, it is important only from the point of view of the history of art since it reveals to us, in its very naïve way, the embarrassment felt by a real tone- poet who (after Hell and Purgatory) does not know how finally to represent Paradise.”209 We do not have to interpret these remarks by Fanny Hensel, Carl Gustav Carus, and Wagner— and many other names could be added to this list— as criticism in the philistine sense of the term. What we are dealing with, rather, is an attempt on the part of Beethoven’s admirers to come to terms with a work that they have difficulty approaching but who none the less want to find a

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suitable intellectual and emotional response to something that they find strange and unsettling. Have today’s listeners who effortlessly enjoy the Ninth— often within the framework of a New Year’s Eve concert— really advanced any farther down the road to understanding or are they merely being less sensitive? It could be argued that there are two Ninth Symphonies, one of them heroic, the other carnivalesque. Indeed, this may be an indication of the greatness of the work that both of these aspects are to be found in it as in a picture puzzle. Lest the reader take fright at the term carnivalesque, which is borrowed from the writings of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin,210 it may be worth introducing an intermediary category here, namely, that of the Dionysian. Nietzsche was thinking of this when, in the context of the Dionysian element in art, he wrote about the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music: Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of māyā had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. [ . . . ] In these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity.211

A less emotionally overwrought reading might pay less attention to a phrase such as “universal harmony” and give greater heed

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to the idea of “singing,” “dancing,” “enchantment,” and “intoxication.” The result is an exceptional state in which traditional aesthetic rules no longer apply. This brings us to the element of the carnivalesque:212 the carnival sees itself as a type of theater consisting entirely of actors, its culture privileging the victory of the extraordinary over the ordinary, of the physical over the spiritual, and of contingency over logic. Slapstick humor and deeper meaning are closely intertwined. Slavoj Žižek relates this kind of dialectic not only to the final movement of the Ninth Symphony but also to its monumental opening: Was there ever a more succinct declaration of the resolute stance, the stubborn stance of the uncompromising will to enact one ’s decision? However, is it not that, if one just barely shifts the perspective, the same gesture cannot but appear as a ridiculous gesturing, a hysterical waving with hands that betrays the fact that we are effectively dealing with an imposture?213

Although we may find it refreshing that a present-day philosopher can express himself so freely, we should not ignore the fact that— as we have already noted— even the opening movement contains clearly audible musical gestures expressive of failure and submission: Beethoven’s approach to composition is far more dialectical than a Hegelian like Žižek is prepared to admit. Perhaps it would be better to appeal to Victor Hugo, who in his Préface de Cromwell— written only three years after the first performance of the Ninth Symphony— championed the genre of the grotesquely sublime.214 The literary scholar Wolfgang Kayser sees

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in this the beginnings of a double aesthetic in modern literature: on the one hand, the experience and depiction of a destroyed harmony and, on the other, an indication of the way in which we have grown remote from the original certainty of our belief that we would be saved.215 Although we may shy away from imputing such modernity to Beethoven, we are none the less happy to note that in the string quartets that he wrote after his Ninth Symphony, he reflects movingly on the possibility of such alienation. Perhaps we would do best to stick to the ambivalences that characterize the Ninth: on the one hand it burns with the fire of idealism, while on the other hand there is an inflated desire to overcome and conquer. As we have already observed, this inflated element struck nineteenth-century listeners as grotesque, although this has more to do with a desperate effort of will than with ridiculousness. In terms of Beethoven as a compositional subject, it smacks of disrespect to speak of carnivalesque features, but for the modern listener this may be a productive approach, for such listeners would no longer be obliged to listen to the final movement in a Nietzschean spirit of “intoxication.” Rather they may experience the work on a metalevel by “dancing” and “singing” with Nietzsche. This postmodern approach is by no means the last word on the subject, but at least it allows listeners to “go along with” the work without being forced to accept a message that even Schiller later found problematical. And the fanatical analyst would be relieved of the task of discovering an immanent musical meaning in the work when he would prefer simply to join the procession. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the most significant works of recent cultural history: as in a prism it refracts rays of light

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that are as characteristic as they are different. There is Beethoven’s individual style, with all of his— often nondefinable— vacillations between his wholehearted embrace of the world and his rejection of it, between forbearance and rigorousness, between a popular anthem and a double fugue. At the same time we can sense the spirit of his age, a spirit that in turn is inwardly divided between the hope that a religion of art may yet be able to provide the assurance that the old Christian faith was increasingly unable to guarantee and doubts as to whether this is really anything more than a simple hypothesis. And finally there is the demand that the artist must now be self-reliant and get by without any blessing from on high. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a classic example of a work that contains within it the sort of contradiction that was to characterize every Finalsinfonie of the nineteenth century and beyond— the list could be extended at least as far as Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” a work that threatens to choke on the sheer number of its hymnlike moments. The conductor Michael Gielen has put forward a suggestion in the context of Beethoven’s Ninth that is designed to divest the final movement of its “mendaciously festive character.” In his own performances of it he has occasionally prefaced the “terrifying fanfare”— which arguably no longer sounds as frightening today as it did in Beethoven’s time— with Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw as an indication of the impasse to which humanity has been brought by the “idealism that was present in Schiller’s poem and undoubtedly also in Beethoven’s breast.”216 For Ernst Bloch, the “true finale ” of the Ninth Symphony was its Adagio, which “does not boom towards a prearranged final point” but is one of the “slow miracles of music” that “aim beyond time, therefore also beyond passing away.” It resembles “a

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F i g u r e 1 8 • Beethoven at the time of the Ninth Symphony. Chalk drawing by Johann Stephan Decker, a painter known for his portraits of eminent individuals. It dates from 1824. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Picture Archives PORT_00000761)

hearkening of the subject in a place” that cannot be reached by any triumphalist gesture, no matter how powerful that gesture may be.217 And yet perhaps the choral finale can still give the strongest “preappearance of what has come good,” namely, “a humanly possible Elysium for which there is as yet no concretion.”218 This is a wise insight. The final movements of the Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies had all set out to demonstrate that

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the age of salvation had dawned, but if even they had failed to achieve this aim, then a choral finale, no matter how monumental, could hardly be expected to do so. And yet such a final movement might represent our claims to happiness, claims that Beethoven had sought to uphold all his life through the medium of his art.

Notes

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Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 2:36; trans. Barbara Johnson as “Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,” in Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 60. 2. Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener, 2nd ed. (Braunschweig: Verlag von Eduard Leibrock, 1841), 110–11. Griepenkerl called his work a “Novelle” even though it is over 300 pages long. 3. Karl-Heinz Köhler and Grita Herre, eds., Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1972), 1:210 (after January 22, 1820). 4. Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 5. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, rev. Hermann Deiters and Hugo Riemann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1917), 1:303; Eng. translation from Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, rev. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 1:121. 6. Friedrich Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1838), 1:367; translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

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15. 16. 17.

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as “The Song of the Bell,” in The Poems of Schiller (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, [1873]), 211. Karl Goedeke, ed., Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner: Von 1784 bis zum Tode Schillers, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Veit, 1878), 4:196 (letter from Schiller to Gottfried Körner, October 21, 1800). Irmgard Leux, Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748–1798) (Leipzig: Kistner & Siegel, 1925), 198. Helga Lühning and Sieghard Brandenburg, eds., Beethoven: Zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1989), 11. Peter Cahn, “Beethovens Entwürfe zu einer d-Moll-Symphonie von 1812,” Musiktheorie 20 (2005): 123–29, esp. 128; Eng. translation from Thayer, Life of Beethoven, 1:519. In the reworked, final version of the Ninth, Beethoven preferred Schiller’s “All men become brothers.” Sieghard Brandenburg, ed., Ludwig van Beethoven: Briefwechsel. Gesamtausgabe (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1996), 1:26; Eng. translation from Emily Anderson, The Letters of Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1986), 1:18 (letter from Beethoven to Nicolaus Simrock, August 2, 1794). Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 6:151; trans. R. J. Hollingdale as Twilight of the Idols (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 103. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 5:185; trans. Walter Kaufmann as “Beyond Good and Evil” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 368. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 4:298; Letters of Beethoven, 2:822 (letter from Beethoven to Archduke Rudolph, July 29, 1819). Köhler and Herre, Beethovens Konversationshefte, 1:210 (after January 22, 1820). Peter Schleuning, “Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus op. 43,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albert Riethmüller et al. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 1:314–25, esp. 318–19. Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, Biographische Notizen über

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 – 1 6

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

•

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Ludwig van Beethoven (Koblenz: K. Bädeker, 1838), 78; trans. Frederick Noonan as Beethoven Remembered: The Biographical Notes of Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries (Arlington, VA: Great Ocean, 1987), 68. Friedrich Kerst, ed., Die Erinnerungen an Beethoven (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1913), 1:109; trans. Maynard Solomon in Beethoven (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977), 138. Martin Geck, “‘Heißt das nicht Handeln bey Ihnen: Componiren?’ Napoleon als Leitstern Beethovens,” in Napoleon: Trikolore und Kaiseradler über Rhein und Weser, ed. Veit Veltzke (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 547–52, esp. 552. Thomas Peattie proposes “sound-sheet” as a translation of the word Klangfläche; see Thomas Peattie, Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 97. Alternative translations include “sound-plane” and “sound surface”; see Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 307–8, and Thomas Bauman, “Mahler in a New Key: Genre and the ‘Resurrection’ Finale,” Journal of Musicology 23 (2006): 478. See Martin Geck and Peter Schleuning, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”: Beethovens “Eroica.” Revolution, Reaktion, Rezeption (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989), 279. Egon Voss, “Die Beethovensche Symphonie: Skizze einer allgemeinen Charakteristik,” in Die 9 Symphonien Beethovens, ed. Renate Ulm (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), 29–53, esp. 35. Paul Fiebig, ed., Über Beethoven: Von Musikern, Dichtern und Liebhabern. Eine Anthologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 297–98. See David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38–39. Quoted without a source reference by Dieter Rexroth, Beethovens Symphonien: Ein musikalischer Werkführer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 49. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1859), 1:228–29. Erich Roeder, Felix Draeseke: Der Lebens- und Leidensweg deines deutschen

158

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

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Meisters (Dresden: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, [1932]), 106. An extreme example of what Wagner meant by this is a song by one of his acolytes, Peter Cornelius, “Ein Ton” (One note), that was published in 1854 as the third of his op. 3 set of six songs titled Trauer und Trost (Grief and consolation). Here the vocal line consists of a single note, B, repeated from start to finish, while the piano accompaniment explores every conceivable harmonic byway. Ibid.; for an alternative translation, see Lewis Lockwood, “‘Eroica’ Perspectives: Strategy and Design in the First Movement,” in Beethoven Studies 3, ed. Alan Tyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 85–106, esp. 89. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel et al. (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1967–2000; Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1999–), 11:329 (letter from Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, October 29, 1859). Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), 15. Only after completing his Symphony in B minor did Schubert speak of still having to “blaze a trail to the great symphony.” See Martin Geck, Von Beethoven bis Mahler: Leben und Werk der großen Komponisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000), 108, 113. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 128. Quoted by Frédéric Döhl, “Die neunte Sinfonie,” in Beethoven-Handbuch: Orchesterwerke und Konzerte, ed. Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: LaaberVerlag, 2013), 279–318, esp. 308. McClary’s comment was made in the January 1987 issue of the Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter, eliciting such a negative reaction that she reformulated it in Feminine Endings as “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music” (128). Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 1/2:696; trans.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 0 – 2 8

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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159

Harry Zohn as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 248. Marie von Bülow, ed., Hans von Bülow: Briefe und Schriften (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1908), 7:379–80, quoted by Geck and Schleuning, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”, 231. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 107. Oliver Evans, Carson McCullers: Her Life and Work (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 148. McCullers, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 107. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme; Rudolstadt: Schirach, 1782; repr., Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), 12. Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 230; trans. Edmund Jephcott as Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 159. Stefan Kunze, ed., Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 102, 111; trans. Martyn Clarke as “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” in David Charlton, ed., E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238, 250. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1989), 34; trans. Gustav Cohen as “The essence of music is sound and motion” in The Beautiful in Music (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 48. Geoffrey Payzant offers “The content of music is tonally moving forms” in On the Musically Beautiful (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1986), 29. The original reads “Der Inhalt der Musik sind tönend bewegte Formen.” Carl Dahlhaus, “Plädoyer für eine romantische Kategorie: Der Begriff des Kunstwerks in der neuesten Musik,” in Schönberg und andere: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Neuen Musik (Mainz: Schott, 1978), 277. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Johann Heinrich Trede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), 187, quoted by Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and

160

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

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the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso Books, 2013), 353 (translation emended). Johannes Hoffmeister, ed., Briefe von und an Hegel (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952–54), 1:314 (letter from Hegel to Karl Joseph Windischmann, May 27, 1810), quoted by Raphael Wild, Gott erkennen: “Methode” und “Begriff” in G. W. F. Hegels “Wissenschaft der Logik” und “Philosophie der Religion” (London: Turnshare, 2005), 284. Quoted in Martin Geck, Robert Schumann: Mensch und Musiker der Romantik (Munich: Siedler, 2010), 259; trans. Stewart Spencer as Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 225. See Elisabeth Eleonore Bauer, “Beethoven— unser musikalischer Jean Paul: Anmerkungen zu einer Analyse,” in Beethoven: Analecta varia, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte 56 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1987), 87–105. See Geck, Von Beethoven bis Mahler, 30. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 3:227; Life of Beethoven, 1:498 (letter purporting to have been written by Beethoven to Bettina von Arnim, August 11, 1810). See Nils Büttner, “Wie der Kontrapunkt ins Bild kam,” in Philosophie des Kontrapunkts, ed. Ulrich Tadday, Musik-Konzepte Sonderband (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2010), 201–22, esp. 215. Ibid., 218. Griepenkerl, Das Musikfest, 152–53, quoted in Schleuning and Geck, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”, 244. Umberto Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), 152. See Umberto Eco, Die Grenzen der Interpretation, trans. Günter Memmert (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), 202, where Memmert uses the term Wahrnehmungsschock. This whole section was omitted from the American edition, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Adolf Bernhard Marx, “Etwas über die Symphonie und Beethovens Leistungen in diesem Fache,” Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1

n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 5 – 4 5

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

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(May 12, 1824): 165–68, 173–76, and 181–84, repr. in Kunze, Beethoven, 630–43, and trans. Wayne M. Senner in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1:59–77. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 6:112; Letters of Beethoven, 3:1222 (letter from Beethoven to Adolph Martin Schlesinger, July 19, 1825). E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Allroggen et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2006), 2/1:49, trans. Martyn Clarke as “Thoughts about the Great Value of Music,” in Charlton, Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 94. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 4th ed., rev. Friedrich von Blankenburg (Leipzig: M. G. Weidmanns Erben, 1794), 4:478–79. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 22–23. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1967), 255–56. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 4:298; Letters of Beethoven 2:822 (letter of July 29, 1819). Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 4:19; trans. R. J. Hollingdale as Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 46. Friedrich Schlegel, Literarische Notizen 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1980), 69. Friedrich Schlegel, Dichtungen, ed. Hans Eichner, vol. 5 of Kritische Ausgabe der Werke (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1962), 82. Friedrich Schlegel, Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Ernst Behler et al., vol. 2 of Kritische Ausgabe der Werke (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1967), 254. Peter Gülke, “Introduktion als Widerspruch im System: Zur Dialektik von Thema und Prozessualität,” in “. . . immer das Ganze vor Augen”: Studien zu Beethoven (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 69, 71.

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68. Hans Bunger, Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht: Hanns Eisler im Gespräch (Munich: Rogner und Bernhard, 1970), 27. 69. Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1860), 5:219. 70. Hector Berlioz, A travers chants, ed. Léon Guichard (Paris: Gründ, 1971), 41; translated by Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay as The Art of Music and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 13. 71. Berlioz, A travers chants, 73; Art of Music, 32. 72. Karl Nef, Die neun Sinfonien Beethovens (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1928), 67. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 4:29; Life of Beethoven, 2:674. 76. See Anton Schindler, Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven (Münster: Aschendorff’sche Buchhandlung, 1871), 2:161; trans. Constance S. Joly as Beethoven As I Knew Him, ed. Donald W. MacArdle (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996), 365. 77. Quoted from Michael Ladenburger, ed., Beethoven und sein Bonner Freundeskreis (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1998), 61 (reproduced in facsimile); Eng. translation from Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, 365. 78. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 3:221; this passage is not included in Life of Beethoven. 79. Kunze, Beethoven, 22; translation from Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions, 1:163. 80. Johann Christian Kittel, Der angehende praktische Organist; oder, Anweisung zum zweckmäßigen Gebrauch der Orgel bei Gottesverehrungen in Beispielen (Erfurt: Beyer & Marlin, 1808), 3:15. 81. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 4:298; Letters of Beethoven, 2:822 (letter from Beethoven to Archduke Rudolph, July 29, 1819). 82. Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit (Laaber: LaaberVerlag, 1987), 106. The article on the symphony in Sulzer’s lexicon is by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz: Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 4:478.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 3 – 7 4

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163

83. Arnold Schmitz, Das romantische Beethovenbild (Berlin: Dümmler, 1927), 165–66. 84. Wilhelm Seidel, Ludwig van Beethoven: 1. Symphonie C-Dur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1979), 33. 85. Ibid., 31. 86. Robert Schumann, “Kürzeres und Rhapsodisches für das Pianoforte,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 2 (1835): 153–54; reproduced by Martin Kreisig, ed., Robert Schumann: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), 1:107. 87. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1:23. 88. See Geck and Schleuning, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”, 58. 89. Johann Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg: Benjamin Schillers Wittwe, 1713), 241. 90. Berlioz, A travers chants, 38; Art of Music, 12. 91. Adolf Nowak, “2. Symphonie D-Dur op. 36,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albert Riethmüller et al. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 1:289–300, esp. 291. 92. Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 34; On the Musically Beautiful, 29. 93. Nowak, “2. Symphonie,” 297. 94. Friedrich Rochlitz, writing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in October 1828, quoted in Seidel, Beethoven: 1. Symphonie, 31. 95. Armin Raab, “II. Symphonie in D-Dur,” in Die 9 Symphonien Beethovens, ed. Renate Ulm (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013), 79–99, esp. 84. 96. Nowak, “2. Symphonie,” 294. 97. Landsberg 82, quoted by Robert Pascall, “Beethoven’s Vision of Joy in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony,” Beethoven Forum 14 (2007), 103–28, esp. 118–19. 98. First published by Fischer in Frankfurt am Main in 1982 and frequently reprinted. 99. See Schindler, Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven, 2:221; Beethoven As I Knew Him, 406. 100. Berlioz, A travers chants, 39; Art of Music, 12.

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101. Harry Goldschmidt, Beethoven: Werkeinführungen (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., 1975), 25–26. 102. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, 236; Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 163. 103. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 4:227; Life of Beethoven, 1:498 (letter purporting to be written by Beethoven to Bettina von Arnim, August 11, 1810). 104. Carl Czerny, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, ed. Walter Kolneder (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1968), 43. O. G. Sonneck’s edition of Czerny’s reminiscences is based on a discredited version of this text; see Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York: Dover, 1967), 23–31, esp. 31. 105. Carl Dahlhaus, “Beethovens ‘Neuer Weg,’” in Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung 1974, ed. Dagmar Droysen (Berlin: Merseburger Verlag, 1974), 46–62, esp. 54. 106. H. C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: Sein Leben und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1970), 256; trans. Richard Wadleigh and Eugene Hartzell as Beethoven: A Documentary Study (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 145. 107. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 1:219; Letters of Beethoven, 1:117 (letter from Beethoven to Breitkopf & Härtel, August 26, 1804) (emended). 108. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 1:220. 109. Wegeler and Ries, Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven, 78; Beethoven Remembered, 68. 110. Geck and Schleuning, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”, 142–44. 111. See Peter Schleuning, “3. Symphonie Es-Dur, Eroica op. 55,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albert Riethmüller et al. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 1:386–400. 112. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack (Munich: R. Piper, 1976–77), 1:401; trans. Geoffrey Skelton as Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (London: Collins, 1978–80), 1:378 (entry of June 17, 1872). 113. Max Frisch, Entwürfe zu einem dritten Tagebuch, ed. Peter von Matt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 176.

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165

114. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, 156–57; Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 105–6. 115. Peter Schleuning, “Schönberg und die Eroica: Ein Vorschlag zu einer anderen Art der Rezeptionsforschung,” in Beethoven und die Zweite Wiener Schule, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1992), 25–50, esp. 42. 116. Arnold Schoenberg, Stil und Gedanke: Aufsätze zur Musik, ed. Ivan Vojtĕch (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1976), 411; this passage does not appear in Leo Black’s English translation, Style and Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). The English original is quoted by Ursula von Rauchhaupt, ed., Schoenberg, Berg, Webern: The String Quartets. A Documentary Study (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, 1971), 39. 117. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 3:20; Letters of Beethoven, 1:454 (undated letter from Beethoven to Georg Friedrich Treitschke, [March 1814]). 118. Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Es genügt, dass die Schönheit unseren Überdruss streift . . . Aphorismen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), 29. 119. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 16:610. 120. Peter Gülke, “Natur darstellen— Natur sein: die Pastorale,” in “. . . immer das Ganze vor Augen”, 195. 121. Rudolf Bockholdt, “Proportionen der Tempi und Metamorphose des Tempos im ersten Satz von Beethovens Vierter Symphonie,” in Münchener Beethoven-Studien, ed. Johannes Fischer (Munich: Katzbichler, 1992), 46– 52, esp. 49. 122. Quoted by Peter Gülke, “Introduktion als Widerspruch im System,” in “. . . immer das Ganze vor Augen”, 77; Eng. translation from John Warrack, ed., Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15. Writers are uncertain whether Weber was referring to the Fourth here, but if he had a specific symphony in mind, it can only have been the Fourth. 123. Quoted in Nef, Die neun Sinfonien Beethovens, 108. 124. Michael Gielen and Paul Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch: Die neun Sinfonien (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 58–59.

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125. See Schindler, Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven, 1:158; Beethoven As I Knew Him, 147; see also Egon Voss, “‘So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte’: Überlegungen zu Anton Schindlers Äußerungen über den Beginn von Beethovens 5. Symphonie,” Bonner Beethoven-Studien 11 (2014): 185–91. 126. Adolf Bernhard Marx, “Etwas über die Symphonie und Beethovens Leistungen in diesem Fach,” Berliner Allgemeine Musikzeitung 1 (1824): 165–68, 173–76, and 181–84, quoted in Kunze, Beethoven, 630–43, esp. 635. 127. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dramatic Works of Goethe, trans. Anna Swanwick (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 346. 128. Robert Schumann, “Das Komische in der Musik,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 1 (1834): 10; reproduced in Kreisig, Robert Schumann, 1:112–14, esp. 113; trans. Paul Rosenfeld as “On the Comic Spirit in Music,” in Robert Schumann: On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947), 57–59. 129. Karl H. Wörner, Das Zeitalter der thematischen Prozesse in der Geschichte der Musik (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1969), 18. 130. See Peter Gülke, Zur Neuausgabe der Sinfonie Nr. 5 von Ludwig van Beethoven. Werk und Edition (Leipzig: Peters, 1978), 53. 131. Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, 2:77. 132. Hans von Wolzogen, Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., [1888]), 35–36. The performance took place on March 8, 1848. Lipiński was the leader of the Dresden Hofkapelle from 1839 to 1861. 133. Gülke, Zur Neuausgabe der Sinfonie Nr. 5, 67. 134. Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 2:568; Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2:510 (entry of July 14, 1880). 135. Kunze, Beethoven, 101, 109, and 111; trans. Martyn Clarke as “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” in Charlton, Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 237–38, 247– 48, and 250. 136. Brandenburg, Beethoven: Briefwechsel, 3:20; Letters of Beethoven, 1:454 (undated letter from Beethoven to Georg Friedrich Treitschke, [March 1814]).

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137. Albert Heim, “Töne der Wasserfälle,” Verhandlungen der Schweizerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft 56 (1873), 209–14. 138. Wegeler and Ries, Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven, 77– 78; Beethoven Remembered, 67–68. 139. Rudolf Bockholdt, Beethoven: VI. Symphonie F-Dur op. 68 (Munich: Fink, 1981), 78. 140. See Roland Schmenner, Die Pastorale: Beethoven, das Gewitter und der Blitzableiter (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 171. 141. Schiller, Poems, 211. 142. Peter Gülke, “Natur darstellen— Natur sein: die Pastorale,” in “. . . immer das Ganze vor Augen”, 199. 143. Goethe, Dramatic Works, 246. The original reads “So fühlt man Absicht und man ist verstimmt.” The line is used proverbially to indicate annoyance when another person’s underlying motives become apparent. 144. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 76. 145. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 3:506; this passage is not included in Life of Beethoven. 146. See, e.g., Carl Czerny in the context of his remark about Beethoven’s “new direction”: Albert Leitzmann, ed., Ludwig van Beethoven: Berichte der Zeitgenossen (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1921) 1:33; Eng. translation from Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries, 31. 147. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 307; trans. Arthur Goldhammer as Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 259. 148. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 308; Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 260. 149. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 424; Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 360. 150. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle, 345; Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, 294. 151. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press, 2004), 509.

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152. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus einem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 142–43; trans. E. F. N. Jephcott as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), 111. 153. Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908), 1/1:165; Eng. translation from David Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15. 154. Wolfgang Osthoff, “Zum Vorstellungsgehalt des Allegretto in Beethovens 7. Symphonie,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 34 (1977): 159–79. 155. Siegfried Wagner, Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachf., 1923), 20. According to Cosima Wagner, the movement in question may have been the Allegretto scherzando from the Eighth, but this does not affect my argument, because in both cases it is the dance-like element that matters; see Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 2:1089; Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2:988 (entry of January 10, 1883). 156. Köhler and Herre, Beethovens Konversationshefte, 3:350. 157. For an overview, see Albrecht Riethmüller, “7. Symphonie op. 92,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albert Riethmüller et al. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 2:60. 158. Berlioz, A travers chants, 61–62; Art of Music, 26. 159. Romain Rolland, Vie de Beethoven (Paris: Hachette, n.d.), 42; trans. B. Constance Hull as Beethoven (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1919), 30. 160. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 84. 161. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th ed. (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel’s Musikalienhandlung, 1907), 3:94–95; trans. William Ashton Ellis as Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1895), 1:124 (emended) (The Artwork of the Future). 162. Peter Gülke, “Zur Bestimmung des Sinfonischen,” in “. . . immer das Ganze vor Augen”, 47. 163. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Fragmente einer Abhandlung über die Ode,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1899), 32:61–79, esp. 63–64.

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164. Berlioz, A travers chants, 63; Art of Music, 26. 165. Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke, ed. Jost Perfahl (Munich: Winkler, 1981), 1:67. 166. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 89. 167. Ibid., 88. 168. Peter I. Tschaikowski, Erinnerungen und Musikkritiken, ed. Richard Petzoldt and Lothar Fahlbusch (Wiesbaden: VMA-Verlag, 1974), 134. Tchaikovsky’s review first appeared in the Russian Register on November 27/December 9, 1874. An English translation by Luis Sundkvist is available online at http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/The_Second _Symphony_Concert._Mme_Patti’s_Benefit_(1874). 169. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 3:302; Life of Beethoven, 1:527. 170. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 91. 171. Robert Schumann, “‘Aus dem Leben eines Künstlers’: Phantastische Symphonie in 5 Abtheilungen von Hector Berlioz,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (1835): 1–2, 33–35, 37–38, 41–51; reproduced as “Sinfonie von H. Berlioz” in Kreisig, Robert Schumann, 1:69–90, esp. 79. 172. Arnold Schmitz, Das romantische Beethovenbild, 169–70. 173. Quoted by Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners in sechs Büchern (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911), 6:447. 174. Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, 2:209. 175. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 9:100; Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 5:100 (emended) (Beethoven). 176. Carl Dahlhaus, “Bemerkungen zu Beethovens 8. Symphonie,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 110 (1970): 205–9, esp. 209. 177. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 98. 178. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, 236; Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 164. 179. Schmidt, Beethoven: Werke und Leben, 215–16. 180. Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1977), 2:307. 181. See Martin Geck, Ludwig van Beethoven (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2014), 109– 10; trans. Anthea Bell as Beethoven (London: Haus, 2003), 87–88.

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182. Robert Schumann, “Das Komische in der Musik,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 1 (1834), 10; reproduced in Kreisig, Robert Schumann, 1:112–14, esp. 114; trans. Paul Rosenfeld as “On the Comic Spirit in Music,” in Wolff, Robert Schumann, 57–59, esp. 59. 183. Kunze, Beethoven, 316. 184. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Imaginationen des Bösen: Für eine ästhetische Kategorie (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2004), 70. This quotation and the following one are taken from Fragment 42 of Schlegel’s “Critical Fragments,” first published in the Lyceum der schönen Künste in 1797. 185. Ibid., 71. 186. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 9:241; Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 5:239 (“The Rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony”). 187. Thayer, Beethovens Leben, 5:27–28; Life of Beethoven, 2:891–94 (emended); see also Sieghard Brandenburg, “Die Skizzen zur Neunten Symphonie,” in Zu Beethoven 2: Aufsätze und Dokumente, ed. Harry Goldschmidt (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1984), 88–129. 188. Ludwig Nohl, Beethoven’s Leben (Leipzig: Ernst Julius Günther, 1867–77), 3:398; 2nd ed. rev. Paul Sakolowski (Berlin: Schlesische Verlagsanstalt, 1909–13), 3/1:200. This passage does not appear in John J. Lalor’s much abridged translation, Life of Beethoven (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1881). 189. Quoted by Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87. Vaughan Williams’s comments first appeared in Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 43–44. 190. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich: List, 1976), 43; trans. Andrew Gray as My Life, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 36. 191. Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit, 110. 192. Jens Brockmeier and Hans Werner Henze, “Nur insofern etwas in sich selbst einen Widerspruch hat, bewegt es sich, hat Trieb und Tätigkeit,” in Die Zeichen: Neue Aspekte der musikalischen Ästhetik II, ed. Hans Werner Henze (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 333–65, esp. 343.

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171

193. Robert Schumann, “Fastnachtrede von Florestan,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 2 (1835), 117; reproduced in Kreisig, Robert Schumann, 1:39–42, esp. 41; trans. Paul Rosenfeld as “Mardi Gras Speech by Florestan,” in Wolff, Robert Schumann, 99–101, esp. 100. 194. Quoted by Dieter Rexroth, ed., Ludwig van Beethoven: Sinfonie Nr. 9 d-Moll (Mainz: Schott, 1979), 324. 195. Jürgen Link, Hölderlin— Rousseau: Inventive Rückkehr (Opladen: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1999). 196. Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, Beethoven und seine “Unsterbliche Geliebte” Josephine Brunswick (Zurich: Atlantis, 1983), 157. 197. Friedrich August Kanne, “Academie des Hrn. Ludwig van Beethoven,” Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat 8 (1824), 149–51, 157–60, and 173–74; reproduced in Kunze, Beethoven, 474–85, esp. 481. 198. Friedrich Schelling, Werke: Nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Anordnung, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1927), 4:582. 199. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 465–67. 200. See Andreas Eichhorn, Beethovens Neunte Symphonie: Die Geschichte ihrer Aufführung und Rezeption (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1993). 201. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 117. 202. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, 103; Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 65. 203. Leo Treitler, “History, Criticism, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19–48, esp. 25. 204. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 118. 205. Heinrich Schenker, Beethovens Neunte Sinfonie: Eine Darstellung des musikalischen Inhalts (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1912), 201; trans. Joseph Rothgeb as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: A Portrayal of the Musical Content, with Running Commentary on Performance and Literature as Well (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 190 (emended). 206. Kunze, Beethoven, 487–88. The anonymous review originally appeared in the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 3 (1826): 214–17.

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207. Sebastian Hensel, ed., Die Familie Mendelssohn 1729–1847: Nach Briefen und Tagebüchern (Berlin: Behr, 1882), 2:9; trans. Carl Klingemann and an American collaborator as The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847) from Letters and Journals (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 2:8. 208. Carl Gustav Carus, “Vom Ende Beethoven’s: Nach seiner neunten Symphonie. Palmsonntag 1846,” in Mnemosyne: Blätter aus Gedenk- und Tagebüchern (Pforzheim: Flammer & Hoffmann, 1848), 113–19, esp. 116–17. 209. Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, 7:204; Eng. translation from Richard Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 343 (letter from Wagner to Liszt, June 7, 1855). 210. See, e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). 211. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 1:29–30; trans. Walter Kaufmann as “The Birth of Tragedy,” in Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 37. 212. See Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, 100–5, and Jayme Stayer, “Bringing Bakhtin to Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony and the Limits of Formalism,” Beethoven Journal 10, no. 2 (1995): 53–59. 213. Slavoj Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption; or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), 231–69, esp. 232. 214. Carsten Celle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 291–92. 215. Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1957); trans. Ulrich Weisstein as The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). 216. Gielen and Fiebig, Beethoven im Gespräch, 114. 217. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1096–97. 218. Ibid., 834.

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Oulibicheff, Alexandre. Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus; Paris: Jules Gavelot, 1857. Pascall, Robert. “Beethoven’s Vision of Joy in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony.” Beethoven Forum 14 (2007): 103–28. Peattie, Thomas. Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Raab, Armin. “II. Symphonie in D-Dur.” In Die 9 Symphonien Beethovens, edited by Renate Ulm, 77–99. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013. Rauchhaupt, Ursula von, ed. Schoenberg, Berg, Webern: The String Quartets. A Documentary Study. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, 1971. Rexroth, Dieter. Beethovens Symphonien: Ein musikalischer Werkführer. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005. ———, ed. Ludwig van Beethoven: Sinfonie Nr. 9 d-Moll. Mainz: Schott, 1979. Reynolds, Christopher Alan. Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Riethmüller, Albrecht. “7. Symphonie op. 92.” In Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, edited by Albrecht Riethmüller et al., 2:45–62. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1996. Robbins Landon, H. C. Beethoven: Sein Leben und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1970. Translated by Richard Wadleigh and Eugene Hartzell as Beethoven: A Documentary Study. London: Thames & Hudson, 1970. Roeder, Erich. Felix Draeseke: Der Lebens- und Leidensweg eines deutschen Meisters. Dresden: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, [1932]. Rolland, Romain. Vie de Beethoven. Paris: Hachette, n.d. Translated by B. Constance Hull as Beethoven. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1919. Sachs, Harvey. The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824. New York: Random House, 2010. Schelling, Friedrich. Werke: Nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Anordnung. Edited by Manfred Schröter. 12 vols. Munich: Beck, 1927–46. Schenker, Heinrich. Beethovens Neunte Sinfonie: Eine Darstellung des musi-

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Index

Pages numbers in italic refer to figures. Adorno, Theodor W. on Beethoven’s use of structure, 22 on Eighth Symphony, 126–27 on Jean Paul and Beethoven similarities, 75–76 on Ninth Symphony, 145 on Sixth Symphony, 109 on Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, 113 on Third Symphony, 87 Alexander the Great, 4 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 23, 103, 132 Arnim, Bettina von, 56 art as religion, 39–41, 102–3, 111–13, 118 Bacchus, 32, 121, 144 Bach, Johann Sebastian

Cantata 54, Widerstehe doch der Sünde, 61 Cantata BWV Anh. I 13, Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden, 2 Christmas Oratorio, 36–37, 53, 98, 105 St. John Passion opening recitative, 47 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 148 Beethoven, Karl, 4 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 60, 152. See also symphonies of Beethoven; specific symphonies aesthetic aim, 62–63 Bacchus opera ideas of, 121 Bettina letters, 31, 56 Conversation Books, 7, 15, 118 Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, 8–9, 25, 52, 82–83, 84, 85, 87

188 Beethoven, Ludwig van (continued ) custody fight for nephew, 4 descriptive music viewed by, 107 dialectical approach to composition, 149 early plans to set Schiller’s “An die Freude,” 4 engagement with Napoleon, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 71, 124 Enlightenment vs. Romantic currents in works of, 2, 3 fantastical creative approach, 30–31 Hegel’s influence on, 28–29 Heiligenstadt Testament, 75, 81, 89 hypochondriasis and, 28–29 indifference to look of scores, 78 Jean Paul’s aesthetics compared to, 30–38, 75–76, 133, 134 Leonore (later Fidelio), 10, 90 letter to Ries, 69 Mass in C Major, 10 orchestras organized by, 17, 79 Piano Sonata op. 31, no. 2, 74 Piano Sonata op. 57, 74 piano sonatas, op. 31, 80 plans for Tenth Symphony, 136 plans to move to Paris, 10, 71 sarcasm of, 127–28 String Quartet, op. 132, third movement, 111 string quartets, late, 125, 150 as successor to Haydn and Mozart, 63 sympathy with aims of French Revolution, 5–6 Bekker, Paul, 18

•

index Benjamin, Walter, 20 Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 35–36 Berlioz, Hector “correction” to Symphony no. 9, first movement, 51 on Eighth Symphony, 125 on First Symphony, 68 on Second Symphony, 74 on Seventh Symphony, 119 Symphonie fantastique, 105 Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste, 7–8 Bismarck, Otto von, 20 Bloch, Ernst, on Ninth Symphony, 151–52 Bonaparte, Jérôme, 10 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 3–11 Beethoven’s admiration for, 3–4, 14, 71 Beethoven’s attempt to contact, 7–8 coup d’état of, 6–7 cult of, 10 “Eroica” Symphony and, 9–10, 78, 81–82, 89 Fifth Symphony and, 100 Goethe ’s views on, 6–7, 10 Prometheus and, 82–83 self-crowning of, 9 wars of, 18, 63, 124 Brahms, Johannes on Beethoven’s symphonies, 114 symphonies of, 114 Symphony no. 4, second movement, 114 Brecht, Bertolt, 88 on Bach’s St. John Passion opening recitative, 47 Breitkopf & Härtel, 81, 96

index Briosi, Sandro, Il senso della metafora, 33 Brockmeier, Jens, 141 Browne-Camus, Johann Georg von, 69 Bruckner, Anton, symphonies of, 114 Bülow, Hans von, 20 Campo Formio, Treaty of, 7–8 Carus, Carl Gustav, 147 Catel, Charles-Simon, 8 Cherubini, Luigi, 8 Les deux journeés, 90 Conti, Giacomo, 66 Cornelius, Peter, “Ein Ton,” 158n28 Cottasches Morgenblatt, 30 Czerny, Carl, 80 Dahlhaus, Carl on analysis, 26 on Beethoven’s processual thinking, 80, 81 on Eighth Symphony, 126 on First Symphony, 62 on Ninth Symphony, 141 Debussy, Claude, on Sixth Symphony, 109 Decker, Johann Stephan, drawing by, 152 Delacroix, Eugène, Liberty Leading the People, 34 Dionysian element, 121, 141–42, 148 divine right, pre-Enlightenment belief in, 2 Draeseke, Felix, 16–17 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 7 Eco, Umberto, on perceptional shock, 33–34

•

189

Eichendorff, Joseph von, “Abschied,” 122 Enlightenment ideas, individual and, 2, 11 Fischenich, Bartholomäus, 4, 17 Floros, Constantin, 83, 128 F major, key associations of, 105–7 form, contrasted with structure, 22, 81, 109–11 forte markings of Beethoven, 13, 51–52 Freemasonry, 103 French occupation of Rhineland (October 1792), 4–5 French Revolution, 5–6, 20, 28, 99–100 French revolutionary music, 8–9, 12, 66, 71, 85, 99 Friedrich, Caspar David, 31 Frisch, Max, 85 Gebauer, Benjamin, 78 Gielen, Michael on Eighth Symphony, 126 on Fourth Symphony, 95 on Ninth Symphony, 145, 151 on Seventh Symphony, 120, 122 “soulscapes” concept, 111 Girod de Vienney, Louis-PhilippeJoseph, baron de Trémont, 10 gloire, idea of, 3–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Egmont, 98 Napoleon viewed by, 6–7, 10 Torquato Tasso, 111 Goldschmidt, Harry, 74–75, 83

190

•

Gómez Dávila, Nicolás, 88 Gossec, François-Joseph, 8, 22 Le triomphe de la République, 124 Griepenkerl, Wolfgang Robert, Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener, 1–2, 32–33, 34 Gülke, Peter, 24, 45, 109, 120–21 Hanslick, Eduard, 25, 71 Haydn, Franz Joseph, oratorios of The Creation, 107 The Seasons, 105, 107 Haydn, Franz Joseph, symphonies of Beethoven as successor, 63 development sections, 86 finales of, 43, 60 form and structure in, 22 “London” Symphony, 67 trumpets and timpani in, 12–13, 53 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25, 28–29 Jenaer Realphilosophie, 28 Oldest System Program of German Idealism (with Schelling and Hölderlin), 39 Henze, Hans Werner, 141 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 121 heroism as characteristic feature of European life, 11–12 Hitzig (double bass player), 32 Hoffmann, E. T. A. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony reviewed by, 23, 103 “Thoughts about the Great Value of Music,” 35–36

index Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11 “As on a holiday,” 144 Oldest System Program of German Idealism (with Hegel and Schelling), 39 “The Rhine,” 113 Hugo, Victor, Préface de Cromwell, 149 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 124 hypochondriasis, 28–29 Jacobin movement, 6 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 30–38, 75–76, 133, 134 Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise, 75–76 Johnson, Douglas, 116 Kagel, Mauricio, 13–14 Kant, Immanuel, 145 Kayser, Wolfgang, 149–50 Kittel, Johann Christian, 59 Klangflächen, 12, 24, 69, 157n21 Klumpar, Joseph, 105 Kraus, Karl, 107 Kretzschmar, Hermann, 94–95 Kreutzer, Rodolphe Ouverture de la journée de Marathon, 62–63 overture by, 8 Krumpholz, Wenzel, 10–11 Kuffner, Christoph, 55–56 Lenz, Wilhelm von, 13, 49, 128 Levi, Hermann, 114 Lipiński, Karol, 100 Liszt, Franz, 115, 117, 147

index Lobkowitz, Joseph Franz von, 10, 17, 79, 82, 87, 89 Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, 87, 88–89 Louis XVI, King of France, 5 Luther, Martin, Small Catechism, 102–3 Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk, 129 Mahler, Gustav symphonies of, 114 Symphony no. 8, 151 Marseillaise (French anthem), 99 Marx, Adolf Bernhard Beethoven analyses by, 35, 98 on Eighth Symphony, 125, 133 “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievements in This Field,” 35–36 on Second Symphony, 16 Mattheson, Johann, 67 Maximilian Franz, elector of Cologne, 4–5 McClary, Susan, 19–20 McCullers, Carson, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 20–21 Mendelssohn, Fanny, 147 Mendelssohn, Felix, 147 Menzel, Wolfgang, article on “Aesthetics,” 29–30 metronome, 129 Monteverdi, Claudio, stile concitato of, 37 Monti, Vincenzo, Il Prometeo, 8 Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 93–94 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, The Magic Flute, 74–75, 90, 106

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191

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, symphonies of Beethoven as successor, 63 development sections, 86 finales of, 43, 60 form and structure in, 22 Jupiter, 40, 59–61, 67 trumpets and timpani in, 12–13 unorthodox modulation in, 64 Müller, Friedrich von, 7 Nazarenes, 118 Neefe, Christian Gottlob, 6 Nef, Karl, 52 Neidl, Johann Joseph, engraving by, 60 New German School, 16–17 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Also Sprach Zarathustra, 42–43 The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 148, 150 Twilight of the Idols, 7 Nowak, Adolf, 71, 72 opera buffa, 133–34 Ortheil, Hanns-Josef, Mozart im Innern seiner Sprachen, 74 Oulibicheff, Alexandre. See Ulïbïshev, Alexander pathos as characteristic feature of European life, 11–12 Peattie, Thomas, 157n21 Philip of Macedonia, 4 Pindar and Pindaric odes, 32, 38, 62 Pohlenz, Christian August, 123

192 power gestures in Beethoven’s symphonies, 11–18 program music, nineteenth-century, 113 Prometheus (mythic figure) Beethoven and, 8–9, 11, 40–41, 82–83 Napoleon compared to, 8 Proust, Marcel, À la recherche du temps perdu, 46 Réti, Rudolph, 24 Revolution of 1848, 100 Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 7 Ries, Ferdinand, 9, 69, 82, 107 Riezler, Walter, 24 Rochlitz, Friedrich, 63 Rolland, Romain, 120 Romantic ideas genius and, 2–3, 31, 40–41, 78 humor and, 30–31, 133 Jean Paul and, 30–38, 75–76 in painting, 31–32 Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph, Hymne dithyrambique, 99 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 142 Confessions, 112 Emile, 112–13 La nouvelle Héloïse, 143 Rudolph, Archduke, 7 Runge, Philipp Otto, 31 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph The Ages of the World, 144 Oldest System Program of German Idealism (with Hegel and Hölderlin), 39

•

index Schenker, Heinrich analytical technique, 24 on Ninth Symphony, 146 Schiller, Charlotte, 4 Schiller, Friedrich “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), 4, 5, 135, 140, 143, 156n11 “Moses’ Calling,” 56 Die Räuber, 5 “The Song of the Bell,” 5, 109 Schindler, Anton, 74, 95, 118, 129 Schlegel, Friedrich, 45 Athenäums-Fragmente, 43–44 on Eighth Symphony, 133 Lucinde, 43 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion, 39 Schlesinger, Adolph Martin, 35 Schleuning, Peter, 9, 83, 88–89 Schmitz, Arnold, 62–63 Schoenberg, Arnold “developing variation” idea, 120 “Notes on the Four String Quartets,” 88 A Survivor from Warsaw, 151 Schubert, Franz, 93 Symphony in B minor, “Unfinished,” 19, 158n32 Symphony in C Major, “Great,” 19 Der Tod und das Mädchen, 98 Schumann, Robert, 29–30 on Beethoven, 63–64 on Eighth Symphony, 126, 130 on Seventh Symphony, 133 symphonies of, 114 Schusterflecken, 130–31 sforzato markings of Beethoven, 13–14

index Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 145 Hegel’s fascination with, 28 The Tempest, 74 Simrock, Nicolaus, 6 “Sirvonja” (Serbian folksong), 107 Spohr, Louis, 99, 128 Stadler, Maximilian, 123 Stainhauser von Treuberg, Gandolph Ernst, drawing by, 60 Strauss, Richard Alpine Symphony, 48, 113 descriptive music of, 111 structure in Beethoven’s symphonies, 21–30 “external disturbance variables” and, 25 form contrasted with, 22, 81, 109–11 parallax view, 37–38 processual thinking and, 83–84, 109–11 ruptures in, 32–34 sublime, concept of, 14, 39, 62–63, 145, 149 Sulzer, Johann Georg, General Theory of the Fine Arts, 38, 62, 121 Sumer is icumen in, 105 symphonies, eighteenth-century. See also Haydn; Mozart final movements in, 60 social function of, 38 trumpets and timpani in, 12–13 symphonies as a medium of religion, 39–40, 102–3, 111–13, 118 symphonies of Beethoven. See also specific symphonies below allegorical pictorial language, 34–38

•

193 analyses of, 23–27 archetypal images and memorability, 46–49 contemporary audiences and reception, 17–19, 85–86 crescendos in, 12 crossing thresholds in, 56–58 delusions of virility in, 18–21 dramaturgy of, 14–15 elemental beginnings of, 46, 48–49 expressive foreshortenings, 54–55 exterritorial mottos, 46, 97, 104–5 “false ” entries in, 51–53 finales, 43–46 as Finalsinfonien, 14 forte and sforzato markings, 13–14, 51–52 French revolutionary music’s influence on, 8, 12, 66, 85, 99 fugato passages, 49–50, 99 gesture of power in, 11–18 harmonic writing, 15–16 as individual approaches to artwork of ideas, 38–41 melodic writing, 16–17 programs kept to himself, 35, 56, 107–9 repeats in, 12 resistance to categorization, 42–43 slow movement concerns, 73–76 striking dissonances in, 50–51 structure as key in understanding, 21–30, 81, 83–84, 109–11 timpani writing, 12–13, 53–54, 67, 94, 131 trumpet writing, 12

194 Symphony no. 1 in C Major, 59–68 first movement, 61–66; coda, 66; development, 65–66; entry of first subject, 62; exuberance of, 63; French revolutionary music’s influence on, 8, 66; introduction, 61–62; modulation to second subject, 64–65; opening chordal dissonance, 61–62; recapitulation, 65, 66 second movement: dynamics in, 66– 67; timpani writing, 67 third movement, 67–68; Berlioz’s views on, 68; exuberance of, 63; Menuetto designation, 67, 76 fourth movement, 68 eighteenth-century form of, 45 premiere, 1–2, 59, 66 Symphony no. 2 in D Major, 68–77 first movement, 69–73; development, 71, 72–73; first subject, 69, 71; introduction, 69; second subject, 71; sketches for, 72; transition to second subject, 15–16 second movement, 73–76 third movement, character of, 76–77 fourth movement, character of, 77 dimensions of, 69 eighteenth-century form of, 45 intent of, 68–69 Mozart’s Magic Flute and, 74–75 piano trio arrangement, 70 Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major (Eroica), 77–89 first movement: B-A-C-H appearance in, 87–88; C-sharp in theme, 27–28,

•

index 49, 56–57, 84; development, 66, 86–87; development section, 84; E-F dissonance in, 50–51; “false” horn entry, 51–53; first chords as gesture of power, 13; first theme, 15, 84–85; fugato in, 49–50; Griepenkerl on, 1–2; recapitulation, 84; structure of, 24–25 second movement: as archetypical funeral march, 46–47, 89; individuality of, 73–74; timpani writing, 53 fourth movement: character of, 44, 152–53; Creatures of Prometheus as basis for, 9, 82–83, 84, 85, 87; problematic aspects, 87 as allegory, 34, 118 Beethoven’s fondness for, 55–56 difficulty of, 52–53 as Finalsinfonie, 14, 44, 57, 81, 83–84 gestures of power in, 12 Napoleon’s connection to, 9–10, 78, 81–82, 89 new direction of, 80–85 puzzling aspects of, 87–88 rehearsal bill for, 79 role in McCullers’ Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 20–21 self-quotation in, 81, 82–83 title of, 81–82 title page and dedication, 9–10, 78, 82 Ernst Wagner’s comparison to Jean Paul’s writings, 30 Symphony no. 4 in B-flat Major, 89–95 first movement: Allegro vivace entry, 92–93; introduction, 91–92, 93

index second movement: recapitulation, 95; timpani writing, 53–54, 94 fourth movement: bassoon entry, 94; sketch, 90 “avant-garde features” in, 89, 91–92 eighteenth-century form of, 45 as Finalsinfonie, 14 idiosyncracies in, 94–95 title page, 91 Symphony no. 5 in C minor, 95–104 first movement, 95–98; development, 110; first theme, 15; initial motif, 34, 36–37, 45, 46, 57, 95, 97, 97–98, 105; oboe solo, 97, 98, 101, 119; succinctness of, 100–101 second movement, 98 third movement, 98–99; fugato in, 49, 99 fourth movement, 99–100; character of, 152–53; French revolutionary music’s influence on, 99–100, 102; scoring, 100; succinctness of, 101–2; timpani writing, 54; transition to, 99 as Finalsinfonie, 14, 57, 100, 103–4 gestures of power in, 12 Hoffmann’s review of, 23, 103 intent of, 95 new direction of, 80 political oration and religious elements, 102–3 printed violin part, 96 as sequence of philosophical ideas, 45, 103–4 simultaneous composition with Sixth Symphony, 104–5

•

195

Symphony no. 6 in F Major (Pastoral ), 104–13 first movement: development, 110; initial motif, 46, 57, 105, 108; key of, 105–6; pentatonic melody, 106–7 second movement: autograph score, 105, 106; depictive music in, 108, 109; individuality of, 73–74; time fashioning in, 109–10; topos of, 46–47 third movement: “false” entries, 52, 108, 131; peasant music influences, 108 fourth movement: depictive music in, 108–9; timpani writing, 13, 54 fifth movement: alphorn influences, 108; character of, 152–53; as culminating expression, 14; hymnlike tone, 113; sketches with text, 14; transition to, 104 Beethoven’s description of, 31–32 as Finalsinfonie, 14–15 nature as constant presence in, 44, 108–9, 111–13 as program music, 56, 57, 107–9, 113 simultaneous composition with Fifth Symphony, 104–5 Ernst Wagner’s comparison to Jean Paul’s writings, 30 Symphony no. 7 in A Major, 114–25 first movement, 121–22; discursiveness, 132; introduction, 121; oboe solo, 119; opening of, 119 second movement: character of, 114–15, 117–18, 132; fugato in, 49; individuality of, 73–74; opening of,

196 Symphony no. 7 in A Major (continued ) second movement (continued ) 117–18; similarities with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, 114; topos of, 47; transition to middle section, 118 third movement: character of, 122–23, 132; emphasis on fifth in, 27 fourth movement: character of, 123–25, 152–53; frenzy of, 34, 45–46, 123–25, 128–29, 133 dramatic structure, 118–19 Eighth Symphony compared with, 132 as Finalsinfonie, 14 Napoleonic Wars and, 18, 124 premiere of, 18 programs proposed for, 119 rhythm and meter as unifying principle, 120 sketches, 115–16 timpani writing, 13 Symphony no. 8 in F Major, 125–34 first movement, 130–31 second movement: ending of, 130; individuality of, 73–74; mechanical nature of, 129–30 third movement: disorienting nature of, 131; timpani writing, 54, 131 fourth movement: character of, 44, 132–33; C-sharp in, 28, 128; fugato in, 50 as Finalsinfonie, 14 joviality of, 125–27, 133 sarcasm and, 127–28, 133–34 Seventh Symphony compared with, 132

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index sketches, 115, 126–27 timpani writing, 13 Symphony no. 9 in D minor, 134–53 first movement: character of, 141; dissonance in, 51; first theme, 15, 57; fragmented nature of, 145–46; recapitulation, 19–20, 158n34 second movement: character of, 141–42, 146; individuality of, 73–74; timpani writing, 54 third movement: character of, 19, 20, 142–43, 146; expressive foreshortening in, 55; horn passage, 27 fourth movement, 134–40, 143–50; character of, 44–45; crossing a threshold in, 57–58; double fugue in, 50, 144; intention, 139–40; “Ode to Joy” in, 135, 140, 143, 156n11; reception of, 147–48; sketches, 135, 137–38; structure, 138–41; transition to, 146–47 carnivalesque character, 148–49 cultural significance, 150–51 dramatic structure, 137–39 as Finalsinfonie, 14, 146, 151 historical-philosophical interpretation, 144–48 as “inventive return” to nature, 143– 44; Turkish element, 143 preliminary sketches, 6 sublime and, 145 timpani writing, 13 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, on Eighth Symphony, 125

index Tieck, Ludwig, “Symphonies,” 39–40 Tovey, Donald Francis, 64 Treitler, Leo, 146 Twombly, Cy, 116 Ulïbïshev, Alexander (Alexandre Oulibicheff ), 63, 100 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 138 “Veillons au salut de l’empire ” (French Consulate anthem), 8–9 Vermeer, Jan, The Love Letter, 117 Viganò, Salvatore, scenario for Creatures of Prometheus, 8, 25, 52, 82–83 virility, delusions of, 18–21 Vocke, Theodora, 6 Voss, Egon, 13 Wagner, Cosima, 168n155 Wagner, Ernst, 30

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197

Wagner, Richard on Beethoven’s melodic gift, 16–17 on Eighth Symphony, 125 on Fifth Symphony, 100, 102 on Ninth Symphony, 137, 147 on Seventh Symphony, 124, 129 sword motif in Ring cycle, 49 on Third Symphony, 84 Tristan und Isolde, 16–17 Wagner, Siegfried, 115, 117 Weber, Carl Maria von, on Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4, 93–94, 165n122 Weber, Gottfried, 30 Wegeler, Franz Gerhard, 60 Windischmann, Karl Joseph, 28 Wörner, Karl H., 99 Wranitzky, Anton, 79 Žižek, Slavoj, 28, 149