Beethoven in the history of music
[Beethoven occupies a very particular place in the history of music. Universally recognized as one of the greatest composers of all time — for many, the greatest of all — two elements strike the observer when looking at Beethoven’s oeuvre: the level of quality he achieved in every musical genre in which he engaged, and the great and enduring popularity of his music.
There are factors that explain his dominant position in the history of music. Many of his musical ideas have their origin in the work of all the composers who preceded him. If this appears evident in some of the early works, which still retain certain eighteenth‑century characteristics, these connections — less apparent but no less important — are also present in the works of his more advanced manner: one need only think of the weight that Bachian counterpoint had in them, and, by Beethoven’s own admission, the influence of religious music up to Palestrina.
Another aspect that must be emphasized is that his influence upon his successors was such that we may confidently affirm that none of the major composers of the following hundred years escaped it entirely. Many of these influences — extensively analysed by musicologists — are, so to speak, evident, leaping to the ear at first hearing. Others are more difficult to identify. In certain cases it amounted, so to speak, to a lifelong dependence: one need only consider the position of Brahms (whose First Symphony was nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth”) and of Bruckner, who regarded Beethoven’s symphonies as the highest and unattainable model of pure instrumental music.
Echoes of the Ninth Symphony resound in many compositions of Mendelssohn [the cosmic breath of the “Choral Symphony” left its imprint on his Second Symphony, the Lobgesang] and of Mahler, for whom the symphony “had to be a world.” The spirit of the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony, with its measured tread, resounds in Schubert’s Symphony in C major and in Mendelssohn’s Italian. Nor were Berlioz, and later Richard Strauss and Dvořák, immune from Beethovenian influence — of the latter B. Cooper has said that his music would be unthinkable had the Pastoral Symphony not existed.
Beethoven’s music also exerted great influence on musical thought and on the development of musical forms. Wagner made the introduction of the voice in the Choral Finale of the Ninth a propagandistic banner in favour of the Artwork of the Future: pure instrumental music had reached the end of its course; the art of the future could only be founded on the union of music and word in the musical drama. Some scholars have emphasized how the genesis of the symphonic poems of Liszt and Richard Strauss, as well as of certain works by Berlioz — for example Harold in Italy — is to be sought in the poetic and Romantic quality of works such as the Pastoral Symphony and in the descriptive character of certain overtures (such as Leonore No. 3, Coriolan, and Egmont).]
There are also, in piano music, evident traces of Beethoven’s influence: one need only think of some of Schubert’s late sonatas. Not to mention the often‑misunderstood importance that Beethoven’s lieder production had, after 1815, on the development of the Romantic lied: the first song cycle in history is by Beethoven, the Six Lieder An die ferne Geliebte Op. 98, a formula that would be adopted in the Liederkreis from Schubert and Schumann onward, and eventually by Brahms and Wolf. Schumann even quoted a theme from An die ferne Geliebte in his Fantasia Op. 17.
The aphoristic character of Beethoven’s very last piano works — the Diabelli Variations Op. 120 and the Bagatelles [Op. 126] — was a model from which Webern, in his extremely concentrated works, could not escape.
The reasons why Beethoven’s oeuvre achieved such wide diffusion are various. As B. Cooper has pointed out, the composers with whom Beethoven’s music has the least relation are his contemporaries. His work rises like an imposing massif in an age — the first twenty years of the nineteenth century — in which the composition of imperishable works of art was minimal. One can count on the fingers of one hand the few masterpieces written in those twenty years which, apart from Beethoven’s, are still regularly in the repertory today.
Let us not forget that Schubert’s great output begins precisely in the second half of the second decade of the century. A second element explains the enormous diffusion of Beethoven’s music. During the last years of his life and after his death, the musical public was changing; with the rise of the bourgeoisie, a new category of listeners replaced the eighteenth‑century aristocratic circles for whom Beethoven himself had composed. As Kerman and Tyson have noted, this new public was drawn to Beethoven’s music with a particular intensity. The symphonies, concertos, overtures, and the most famous of his piano sonatas became pillars of nineteenth‑century musical culture.
The reasons for this extraordinary diffusion may appear mysterious unless one recalls that already in the last years of his life Beethoven’s fame was linked to something more and different than purely musical values and phenomena. Today we have no doubt in defining Beethoven as a classical musician; indeed, he represents for us the culminating point of the Classical era, given that most of the forms he used in his greatest works — and which he carried, so to speak, to their extreme limits (the symphony, the concerto with solo instrument, the piano sonata, the string quartet) — were those brought to perfection by Haydn and Mozart. (But let us not forget that, as B. Cooper wrote, the discussions as to whether he belongs more to Classicism or to Romanticism were interminable. And in the Répertoire international de la littérature musicale he was placed in the “Classical” section, while Schubert — who died only a year later — was placed in the “Romantic” one.)
What also provoked the enormous diffusion of his works was the birth of the Beethoven myth, in which the story of his life became inextricably intertwined with the qualities of his music, producing the image of the prototype of the revolutionary and Romantic artist — which he was not! — an image that fascinated the Romantic age. The myth was created by music lovers, amateurs, and writers on musical matters who applied to Beethoven their own Romantic mental categories. But nineteenth‑century musicians, who were often writers and popularizers, also contributed to the creation of the myth.
For Hoffmann, the Romantic musician is a sort of magician, a privileged being. The image of Beethoven the man blended well with this vision: the solitary artist, almost deaf, who confronts adversity with pride, and who on the artistic plane fights for the progress of art, breaking the bonds imposed by many classical rules; the composer who, as he himself said, wrote more for posterity than “for the gallery,” in other words the prototype of the Romantic artist. As B. Cooper has written, “His irregularities and his contravention of classical formal ideas made Beethoven the inspirer of the Romantics, the man who freed music from the shackles of the conventional formal rules of the eighteenth century. He was seen, and can still be seen, as the man who effected for music a fundamental revolution, as the French Revolution did for politics.” Therefore, Cooper concluded, “although he was in a certain sense a true man of his age, who expanded and infused with a new Zeitgeist the genres and forms he had inherited, he is at the same time a man for all ages. His music still influences the evolution of music today and embodies the entire range of human emotions with such intensity that it will forever find an immediate response in listeners.”
E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his writings, made popular the idea of the Romantic musician as magician and demonic figure. The vision of the artist as hero had already surfaced in German Romantic literature before 1800. The Beethovenian heroic element was identified in the strength of his character, in his independence and liberal spirit, in his deafness, in his suffering and inability to find the love of a woman, in his sincere devotion to art. The Heiligenstadt Testament, the letters to the Immortal Beloved, and the fanciful memoirs of Bettina Brentano contributed to nourishing the myth.
The Beethoven myth drew history and historicism into its wake; from Beethoven the creator it was a short step to Beethoven, life of a conqueror, then to the heroic life of Beethoven, and finally to Beethoven, the man who freed music — all titles of widely circulated books in the early twentieth century. In 1870, the centenary of his birth, the house in which Beethoven had been born was transformed into a kind of national shrine on the banks of the Rhine (to which were added an imposing archive of manuscripts and a cultural institute). If the establishment of the Beethovenhaus may be considered an expression of the claim of Beethoven’s native land against his adopted one, Vienna responded in 1900 with the most grandiose of monuments erected to its hero: the famous room with Klimt’s frieze, inspired by Beethovenian scenes, and Klinger’s statue. At the inauguration ceremony Mahler conducted a brass band and a choral mass of Viennese workers in an open‑air performance of the Ode to Joy.
In nineteenth‑century literature the two principal monuments to the Beethoven myth were constructed: Thayer’s biography and Nottebohm’s study of Beethoven’s sketches. These contributed to increasing the myth, making visible the labour and devotion that Beethoven invested in every creative act. No other composer stimulated such a production of technical analyses and critical studies as Beethoven, beginning in the mid‑nineteenth century.
The culmination of Beethovenian hagiography came at the beginning of the twentieth century with Jean‑Christophe (1904–1912), the extraordinarily long and popular novel based on the romanticized life of the composer, written by Romain Rolland. While entire generations of performers built their careers on Beethovenian interpretations, studies on Beethoven continue incessantly and uninterruptedly to appear even today. — Kerman and Tyson