Music & Painting: On the Road to Impressionism

Admittedly, I don’t remember much about 1816.

It was the year Rossini premiered an opera that was such a disaster, it first seemed destined for the pile of flops produced by many opera composers of the day in the highly competitive box-office environment that was Italian opera (despite opening to bad reviews, The Barber of Seville quickly became one of the most popular operas ever!)

It was rough year for Beethoven, now 45, becoming mired in the legal proceedings over the guardianship of his late brother’s son, a process that would involve much time as well as creative energy, not to mention over a year of constant illness referred to as “inflammatory fever.” He wrote very little between 1816 and 1818, a two-year fallow period very unusual for a composer who’d been intensely active, constantly producing mature masterpieces for the previous 15 years or so – giving rise to rumors that the Great Beethoven had written himself out.” Things were looking bleak.

It was a busy year for Franz Schubert, too. He turned 19 that year and, that fall, turned down for a decent teaching job in what is now modern Slovenia (then part of the Austrian Empire), he moved out of his family’s home to live with a friend which set him on a track for independent living (though rarely successful). The following year, he would meet a singer who would make his songs well known to a larger audience in Vienna. Things were looking good.

The year before, Napoleon, having escaped from exile on the Italian island of Elba and regained his throne as Emperor of the French, was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. From there, the victorious English sent him off to exile on a more distant island – St. Helena – located over 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa in the South Atlantic, a volcanic rock about 5 miles by 10 miles. Things were looking... well, over...

There was another volcanic rock that would’ve been in the news in 1815 if Europeans had access to the kind of news reporting we’re used to today: dateline, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). On April 10th, 1815, after several days of increasingly violent eruptions, the long-dormant volcano Mt. Tambora erupted: the whole mountain turned into “a flowing mass of liquid fire” which would later be described as “the Vesuvius of the East.”

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is often described as the most dramatic volcanic eruption in modern history, its impact felt around the world, but Tambora in 1815 released four times the energy associated with Krakatoa. It is referred to as the “largest observed eruption in human history.”

While we talk of “global warming” (or more correctly, “climate change”) today, the ash spewed by Tambora spread across the northern hemisphere and caused what is referred to as “The Year Without Summer.”

The biggest impact was in the Northeast and in Western Europe. Temperatures went below freezing in New England throughout May and there were significant snowfalls during June (Quebec had a foot of snow in June). Lakes and rivers in Pennsylvania froze over in August.

Crop failures in New England helped spur a migration to find better farmland in the American Midwest.

It was not all “wintry,” however: it could be 95° the next day, then dip to near-freezing a few hours later.

The winter of 1816-1817 was also bitterly cold with low temperatures of –27° recorded in New York City.

Similar weather-related problems were recorded across China (in addition to increased flooding) with an outbreak of cholera (the result of serious flooding) that spread from India to Moscow. In Western Europe, there was an increase in rainfall which, in addition to the cooler than usual temperatures, led to considerable crop failures from Ireland and Spain to Central Europe.

That year, between 10,000 and 15,000 people left Vermont, for example, hoping to find a more suitable climate for farming, creating population issues across New England. Many farms there were also abandoned because more people were now migrating to newly industrialized cities in search of factory jobs.

Given the scarcity of oats to feed horses in Europe, Karl Drais, a German inventor, began working on alternate modes of transportation, resulting in 1817 with the unveiling of what later became known as a “velocipede,” the forerunner of the bicycle. Originally a “running machine,” it had two wheels that were propelled by the rider “pushing along the ground as in regular walking or running” (pedals were added later).

Justus von Liebig, a chemist who grew up during this time and whose family had been greatly affected by the summer’s resulting famine in Central Germany, later did research in plant nutrition and introduced chemical fertilizers.

In July, 1816, a miserably cold and wet holiday in Switzerland resulted in three vacationing writers deciding to amuse themselves by seeing who could write the best Gothic horror story (then the rage). The result was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lord Byron’s fragmentary tale was later appropriated by fellow traveler John Polidori who wrote The Vampire in 1819, a precursor of “Dracula.”

One thing associated with this volcanic eruption – the ash-cloud – spread a dry, sulfurous fog that tinged the air red and created rather odd and sometimes brilliant light effects at sunrise and sunset.

It’s interesting to note that the English painter, J.M.W. Turner, then 40, began painting “atmospheric” nature scenes which featured brilliant lighting effects like his “Eruption of Vesuvius” in 1817. These swirls of light and dark (often heightened by brilliant reds and yellows) would become a feature of his mature style.

Turner: Eruption of Vesuvius (1817)

The first time I saw a painting by Turner – it was cover art for a British recording – I assumed it was by some modern 20th Century painter. So it rather surprised me when I saw he was born in 1775, when Mozart was 19 and Beethoven, not yet 5.

It’s difficult, sometimes, for people to compare musical styles to artistic styles: while we think of Classical Music giving way in 1800 for Romantic Music as I was taught, I’m now seeing textbooks that say Romantic Music begins anywhere from 1820 to 1825.

J.M.W. Turner

This makes more sense, if you consider who – other than Beethoven – was composing then and what their music sounded like. We think of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony starting the new era with a bang but really, it had little impact on most other composers who continued to write in a more Classical style familiar to lovers of Haydn (moreso than Mozart who was, by and large, overlooked except for a handful of pieces).

But I’ll get into that in a later post.

The thing is, very often stylistic developments in music are not concurrent with stylistic developments in art or literature. There are “romantic” paintings from the late-18th Century just as there are “classical” paintings still being painted well into the 19th.

But then this overlap is familiar to music lovers who sometimes are confused that Schoenberg and Stravinsky, at the forefront of the New Music Bandwagon in the early 1900s, were competing, in a sense, with composers like Richard Strauss or Puccini or Rachmaninoff or Sibelius who were writing melodic, emotional music – compared to the abstractions and atonal works of what is still considered “contemporary music” almost a century later.

And the emergence of a style like Turner’s didn’t mean he was embraced by other painters or became a leader with a huge following of admirers and imitators. In this way, he might be comparable to Beethoven (accepting the fact Turner never earned the kind of posthumous reputation Beethoven would).

One of the hallmarks of the Romantic style was a love of nature and landscape paintings – often with humanity reduced to almost nothing or completely absent, and often featuring the ruins of the past to point out the contrast between man’s achievements versus nature’s longevity. Others painted beautiful scenes full of farms, cows, fields and ponds.

John Constable: Wivenhoe Park (1816)

We hear this in music that challenged the symphonic, architectural concepts of Classical Music with the wildness and unexpectedness of Nature – a work like Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz with its “Gothic” setting in a dark wood full of black magic – but also just the forest environment reflected in the sounds of hunting horns or choruses of peasants and hunters that proved so new and refreshing. It was premiered in 1821 and became a big hit – the foreboding “Wolf’s Glen Scene” had an impact on its audience comparable to special effects in modern-day horror movies.

Francis Danby: Romantic Woodland (1824)

This is a different kind of woodland world – less a refuge than a psychological confrontation with our fears of the unknown – different from what we experienced in the nature setting inspiring Beethoven’s 6th Symphony in 1806, his “Pastoral” Symphony with its “pleasant impressions upon arriving in the countryside,” bird-calls and merrymakings of the peasants followed by a thunderstorm and a song of thanksgiving after the storm. Here, it seems more ominous, two small children lost in a dark wood, perhaps reminding us of our worst fears and childhood nightmares.

Turner was described by fellow painter John Constable (whose famous “Haywain,” speaking of famous landscapes, was painted in 1821), sitting next to him at a Royal Academy dinner, as being “uncouth but [he] has a wonderful range of mind.” Another great painter of the day, Eugene Delacroix, described him as "silent, even taciturn, morose at times, close in money matters, shrewd, tasteless, and slovenly in dress."

When I asked my students if that last description of Turner reminded them of anyone we’d talked about, one said, “Beethoven!”

Whether Turner's painting of Vesuvius was inspired by delayed news of the eruption of Mt. Tambora or not, I can’t say. He had already been fascinated by light even before 1816: his famous “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” with its barely visible elephant dwarfed by storm clouds and either a blizzard or an avalanche was painted in 1812, the year of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia (remember, like Hannibal, Napoleon had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in the 1790s: there’s a likely allegorical reference to Hannibal’s fate and the long-for demise of Napoleon’s grip on Europe and the constant warfare with England).

Another historical event also influenced Turner’s style: the Industrial Revolution.

Just as the invention of the printing press had a major impact on literature and music and just as the Internet has influenced our own lives today, the Industrial Revolution which began in England in the 1760s transformed life in the 19th Century. We’re still dealing with its impact today, both in terms of its social and personal influences as well as in environmental issues.

In 1839, Turner presented his painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last birth to be broken up which is clearly more than an image of a glorious old ship. Almost a ghost ship, it represents, allegorically speaking, the Past, being hauled to its destruction by the Future, the dark steam-powered tug-boat.

And then there’s the railroad – initially intended to take coal from the mines to the factories for processing – which had become a form of public transportation in the 1820s (perhaps this too had something to do with the impact of crop failures and the necessary feed to fuel horses, the standard form of transportation at the time?).

England had its first intercity railway in 1830 between the industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester and by the 1850s, England had over 7,000 miles of railroads. The Great Western Railroad (in England) opened its first line in 1838 and J. M. W. Turner painted one of his most famous paintings, Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway in 1844:

Considering the almost unintelligible aspects of Turner’s scenes in his later paintings, as far as his contemporaries would be concerned – people used to art being “representational” rather than ambiguous and indecipherable – it’s also easy to understand how he fits in with the development of what became known in France as “Impressionism” which began to develop only a couple decades after Turner’s last paintings. Whether he was a direct influence or not, I’m not sure, but quite often new stylistic ideas – creative artists trying to find new ways of expressing themselves – evolve independently or along parallel paths.

If, to put it differently by misapplying Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion (1686), “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” we could say that for every stylistic concept an artist may have, substituting “concept” for “action,” there will always be someone trying to figure out a different way of achieving the same thing or a different thing or, more importantly for the development of new artistic ideas, of achieving the opposite.

If you look at Constable’s landscapes, for instance, and look at his exact contemporary Turner’s landscapes, you have two opposing viewpoints of what a landscape could be. One is “representational” or realistic, the other is “impressionistic” or only vaguely representational, if representational at all. The one is comparable to a photograph – we may think it very pretty – and the other requires the viewer to “interpret” what the artist himself interprets from what he sees, a suggestion of something rather than a specific something.

In a sense, this non-representational style is more interactive, engaging the viewer in the re-creative process. One is “passive” – we look at it and enjoy it; the other may be “active” – we become involved in trying to figure out “what it means.”

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The French poet Stephen Mallarmé once said that naming an object takes away its power: “to suggest is to dream.” Poets and painters – and later, musicians – broke down the boundaries of reality (or at least, standard images of reality) by suggesting an image, whether through some kind of ambiguity or other implications.

In a sense, this has been in poetry and literature for a long time – from the days of biblical parables to poetic allegories and use of symbols of the 19th Century (the image of a black crow implying impending death, for instance; of black being evil against good’s pure white).

1902 Illustration for "Moby-Dick"

As an example, take Herman Melville’s novel (published in 1851) Moby-Dick, the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of a white whale. On the surface, it is simply an exciting story about a whaling expedition gone wrong. On the interactive, interpretive level (engaging the right brain), readers might see it as something deeper. Usually, we think “the eternal struggle between good and evil,” especially considering all the Bible-thumping rhetoric included within the tale – and considering Captain Ahab’s name is that of an idol-worshipping biblical king who opposed the prophet Elijah and whose wife was the ignominious queen, Jezebel.

On the surface, it would seem Ahab’s search for revenge against the whale pits a wounded man against a destructive beast but then the usual symbols for good and evil are reversed: Ahab is always dressed in black, the whale is atypically white. So therefore we tend to re-interpret this as man against nature, nature being good and the general whaling industry (Ahab) is evil.

(Of course, I also remember reading in college how one commentator saw it as an allegory about the railroad and the destruction of the American West – wait, what…? – despite the fact the Federal land grant program to westward rail expansion didn’t actually begin until 1855, four years after Melville published his novel, but hey… Perhaps a little too much ‘right brain,’ there…)

So, given this interpretive involvement between artist and audience, consider some of these other paintings as the 19th Century progressed:

Turner: Seascape with Sea Monsters (1845)

If this painting by J. M. W. Turner, one of his last, was a beach scene called “Seascape with Sea-Monsters” painted in 1845, six years before his death, consider these two more “representational” nature paintings:

Thomas Cole: "The Picnic" (1846)

Eduard Manet: "Luncheon on the Grass" (1863)

In these two paintings, we see two different approaches to the same apparent subject: a picnic (though Manet’s was originally called “The Bather”). Cole’s focus is more on nature and the smaller human figures encompassed by it; Manet’s is more on the people in the center with nature being reduced to a setting.

It’s interesting that we hear so much about how controversial Manet’s painting was: because of the nude woman sitting with two fully clothed men? No, actually: because it “glorified” the wooded park on the edge of Paris where young men went to meet prostitutes. Art in past centuries were full of naked or scantily clad people, but if he had called this “Picking up hookers in the park on Saturday,” it might have been, if nothing else, more honest.

Edgar Degas: L’Absynthe (1873)

In this portrait, we don’t see aristocrats or rich bourgeois people but common everyday people that you might find in the tavern down the street. The title refers to a popular distilled alcoholic drink that was described as an “addictive psychoactive drug” and its addicts as “sodden and benumbed.” There could be a deeper story behind these two if he had just called it "In a tavern" – but the title implies a specific viewpoint. During this decade, Degas went from being a “historical painter” to one employing common people – milliners, laborers as well as dancers – another stylistic change-of-focus.

While landscapes – or cityscapes, for the urban life – became hazier with painters like Claude Monet (not to be confused with Eduard Manet), giving rise to the term “Impressionism,”

Claude Monet: “Impression: Sunrise” (1872)

there was an almost “immediate reaction” from painters who disliked the ambiguity of this style and sought “other ways” of stepping away from the exact replication of reality, distinguishable from the photograph:

Gustave Caillebotte: "Paris Street, Rainy Day" (1877)

Caillebotte considered himself an Impressionist even if his style is often “less impressionistic” than many paintings by his colleagues. He was also interest in early photography as a form of artistic expression.

On the other hand, Georges Seurat developed a “pointillistic” style where, rather than using brush strokes, he created colors out of combinations of dots (points) in various colors. His most famous painting is the “Sunday in the Park on the Isle Le Grande Jatte” painted in the mid-1880s. For example, the woman with the parasol (and the monkey) is wearing a hat with a purple flower. If you would closely at the hat, you see it is comprised of red, blue, purple and lavender dabs.

Seurat: "Sunday in the park..."

His style was also controversial – I suppose most people couldn’t see why bother with such a minuscule painting technique, though it’s interesting to point out, seeing it from a distance, you’re not aware of the dots as you are when you look at it closely. On the other hand, we see this technique in the colored comic strips of newspapers in the late-20th Century.

This is the foot of the man wearing a top hat and holding a cane in the lower left corner of the painting.

A few years after Georges Seurat painted this, Claude Debussy was composing this:

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His “Claire de lune” (Moonlight) may be one of his most famous pieces. It is not as musically “ambiguous” as we might expect with the term “impressionism” in painting – it is still tonal and still has harmonic motion similar to what listeners would’ve expected at the time of Brahms and those following the legacy of Beethoven (remember, his “Moonlight” Sonata was given that nickname not by the composer but by a German poet in 1836, nine years after the composer's death).

However, things began to change – evolve, we might say: a few years later, he composed this, inspired by the lazy summer afternoon day-dreams of a faun (that Greek figure, half-man, half-goat).

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Here, Debussy stretches the phrases with cadences that never seem to resolve and though it’s tonal, it doesn’t sound as distinct as a “classical” composer would have used the concept of tonality and the harmonic motion of traditional chords.

Everything here is for the imagery, washes of color that suggest a mood and the image’s essence rather than its form and structure or melodic development (though there are recognizable recurring elements and melodic contrasts with variety provided by dynamics and the expectations of frequent fragmentary repetitions – for example, 1:55 to 2:17).

In the next decade, with his short miniature “Preludes” for piano, Debussy composed on entitled “Voiles” or “Sails,” inspired by boats with their sails wafting in the breeze.

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In this piece, Debussy avoids using traditional chords in traditional ways. In fact, he’s not even using a traditional major or minor scale. Instead of the standard patterns of whole-steps and half-steps that composers have been using for centuries, he’s using one built entire of whole tones which, unlike traditional scales, has no dominant chord available (like a C Chord moving to a G Chord, the most obvious tonal relationship defining C Major).

This tonal ambiguity gives the music a sense of “suspended animation” if animated at all, a kind of static quality suggested more by different layers of sound and grounded especially by the constantly repeated single note in the lowest register, as if everything above it is moving in different layers of time as well.

When it ends, it doesn’t really seem to ‘end’ in the sense of resolving any tension. In fact, there’s hardly any real tension at all – just as we might not feel any tension, lying in the grass on a sunny day watching boats on the river, their sails wafting in the breeze (unless you think maybe that low repeated pitch is kind of ominous) – rather than resolving and ‘ending,’ it merely stops. We have closed our eyes, perhaps fallen asleep, or gotten up and wandered off to receive our next impression…

- Dick Strawser

Romantic Music and the Conflict of Duality: Part 1

This post is a work-in-progress for my Intro to Music class – there will be more text posted a little later, but I wanted to post the musical examples we’d covered as we made the transition from Classical to the Romantic era.

Beethoven was essentially a fork in the road – his music led to two different paths that both became very important to the rest of the 19th Century, to put it simply. It’s ironic that the two “warring” camps of music between 1830 and 1900 could say they found their roots in Beethoven!

Berlioz c.1830

The first major example beyond Beethoven and Schubert would be the French composer, Hector Berlioz and his epic Symphonie fantastique -- so-called because of its “fantastic” nature as in “inspired by fantasy” (though it’s a pretty fantastic piece, in the modern sense of the word, too).

Here is a performance of the complete, nearly hour-long symphony conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. It’s in five movements (the standard symphony would’ve been 4 but Beethoven, in his “Pastoral” Symphony which suggested “pleasant feelings upon arriving in the countryside” as well as “merry gathering of country folk” (celebrating the harvest) and a finale that was a celebration of thanksgiving after the storm – he inserted an additional movement before the finale that depicted the thunderstorm) and tells a story about a young artist (presumably Berlioz himself) falling in love with a beautiful woman (presumably Henrietta (or Harriet) Smithson) whom he sees through the fog of an opium-induced dream, then sees at a fancy-dress ball; then dreams of a country scene where a shepherd serenades his shepherdess who then disappears after the intervening rolls of thunder… then things get really weird when he imagines he’s now sentenced to death for killing his Belovéd and is then beheaded at the scaffold (guillotine!) before ending up in Hell where he imagines she is now the leader of the witches’ Sabbath he witnesses. Yeah…



1st Mvmt (Dreams, Passions – meet the Belovéd with her “idee fixe” or fixed idea, her main theme, first introduced at 5:40 in the violins as the First Theme after the slow introduction)
2nd Mvmt (Scene at the Ball) begins at 16:10
3rd Mvmt begins at 23:05 (w/English Horn – answered by oboe played from off-stage)
4th Mvmvt (March to the Scaffold) at 41:25 (at 47:47 – memory of Her Theme, then the axe falls!)
5th Mvmt (Witches’ Sabbath) at 48:26 – at 50:08, the jaunty theme is a perversion of The Belovéd’s Theme as the leader of the Witches’ Dance (introducing the Gregorian Chant for the “Day of Wrath,” Dies Irae, at 51:42 after the churchbell chimes)

Here is a link to PBS’s “Keeping Score” with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, an episode about Berlioz's symphony. You can read the text but if you have time, the program itself (an internal embed) would give you lots of additional information about the work itself.

Compare that to Felix Mendelssohn’s "Italian" Symphony (initially written around the same time Berlioz had completed his “Fantastique.” They actually met in Rome not long after Berlioz’s premiere and while Mendelssohn was composing his own symphonic impressions of his visit to sunny Italy.



Here, Dudamel conducts a different orchestra – but notice the difference in his conducting style, too – the way-out “over-the-top” highly dramatic music of Berlioz requires a more extroverted style to get the interpretation across to the musicians; the Mendelssohn is more “stable,” more straight-forward, not far removed from Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and requires less “showmanship” to get is essence across. Though it is “picturesque,” it is not necessarily a story being told in music – more a mood, impressions, memories, but certainly not the “blood-and-thunder” of Berlioz’s symphony.

The sound on this recording is too metallic and nasty for my taste (at least on my computer) so here’s a different conductor with Venezuela’s “Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra” with just the first movement of the symphony:

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(These are students in the program “La Systema” that takes kids from poor neighborhoods and often from potential lives of crime, hands them an instrument and gives them lessons and an opportunity to get out of their environment… like Dudamel)

These two composers are almost the opposite of each other though they were contemporaries and, actually, friends – and open-minded enough to realize what the other had achieved in his music, even if they didn’t agree with it themselves (Mendelssohn joked he felt he needed to wash his hands after just handling the score – the whole idea, not just musically, was antithetical to his world-view).

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PROGRAM MUSIC

One of the hallmarks of the Romantic Period (if not of small-R romantic music in other periods) is an interest in Nature as a source of inspiration. We had seen it in paintings much earlier but most of the music from the 18th Century (with rare exceptions) would be considered “ABSTRACT music” – music that is primarily about form and content, perhaps dramatic or maybe dealing with contrasts but not specifically “about” anything – not, in other words, telling a story. Granted, there are pieces like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” four violin concerto each one depicting the different seasons of the year complete with bird-song or rustling winds or hunting-parties or dogs barking or people slipping on the ice; and there are short harpsichord pieces by French composers that might depict an event or create an image or suggest a specific mood, but these are more the exception to the Baroque and Classical eras.

The idea of “PROGRAM music” was to suggest a scene (like a painting) or imply a story (like a literary work). Today, it might be more like a “soundtrack” for a film, music that underpins the action, perhaps, helps set the mood or place the setting.

Though a “program” piece like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (written around 1830) told a very explicit story supplied by the composer, many times a composer might give it a title and, if it’s a well-known story, the listener could supply the details that the title suggests. When Felix Mendelssohn was a young man, he visited Scotland and visited a famous cave on the Atlantic Coast of Scotland – sending home a drawing of the cave with a fragment of music underneath it, he later turned his memories and this scrap of music into a piece he called “Fingal’s Cave” or “The Hebrides.”

The Entrance to Fingal's Cave in Scotland

The music suggests the rising and falling of waves, the immensity of the cave, the growing awe of seeing the cave coming into view and so on. But in spite of the “program” behind the music, the music is still firmly structured as a “sonata form” just like the 1st movement of a Haydn or Beethoven symphony would have been – complete with contrasting themes, the proper digressions and returns from the tonal center and so on. It could be appreciated as both PROGRAM music AND ABSTRACT music!

Here’s the Hebrides Overture overlaying a video travelogue of a visit the Cave the music describes:


Even without knowing the title, it’s possible a listener could figure out what’s “behind” the music. Someone listening to the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique and knowing it only as the Symphony No. 1 in C Major would be lost because the “classical structure” of a traditional symphony is so subsumed by the programmatic element as to be unnoticeable beyond the division into movements and contrasting moods and tempos: Berlioz doesn’t care about traditional structure – he’s only interested in the emotional impact of his music and the story it is meant to convey.

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We had also listened to two works that were inspired by “riding horses” – and the supernatural. The first was Franz Schubert’s song “The Erlking” in which a father rides through a night-time storm to take his son who is ill and hallucinating, imagining he’s being pursued by the Erlking and his daughters, nasty sprites who entice and then kill children:
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Notice how Schubert arranges the three different characters: The Father (Narrator) until 1:04 when the Son answers him with the voice now in a slightly higher register (and sung more softly by the singer) returning to the Father (deeper voice & register) at 1:20 (“My son, you’re imagining this”). At 1:29, we hear a slight change in the accompaniment, the voice becomes more insinuating – this is the Erlking (“You lovely child, come play with me”). Schubert then alternates between these three voices.

When the father arrives home, he looks down and realizes his son – is dead.

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The next example was Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from “The Ring of the Nibelung” – the current Met production in which 24 planks form a “machine” that can change shape, form steps, walls, platform and – as here – even horses riding through the air.
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(the basic “Ride” is the first 2:30 or so but the “Ride” continues, once they’ve landed, till about 5:20).
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In addition to the production – how the director realizes the idea of the Valkyries flying through the air on their horses (impossible to depict on stage in Wagner’s initial production in 1876) – feel the constant pounding of hooves and the rushing of wind suggested in the music itself. In one sense, you don’t need the visual element because your imagination can supply it from hearing the music.

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There were two paths that essentially ran parallel (or crossed back-and-forth) throughout the bulk of the 19th Century. Though both have “Romantic” elements, one is more right-brained “romantic” (Dionysian) than the other, which could be described as more left-brained “classical” (Apollonian).

The right-brained path (more subjective) would lead from Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (the “Pastoral”) and his later music like the 9th Symphony to the Romantic Music of Berlioz, of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

This left-brained branch (more objective, more “abstract”) became the music of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann and Schumann’s protégé, Johannes Brahms. Though technically “Romantic” composers of the 19th Century, their stylistic attitudes are essentially different (sometimes almost the opposite) of those following the Right-Brained Path – they are more “classical” in their style but could at times be very “romantic” in mood: Schumann’s miniature piano pieces that tell stories, for instance, are certainly Romantic in spirit, but overall he might be a more objective composer.

The line is very fine and easily crossed: like a traditional DIALECTICAL synthesis, Robert Schumann could be part-Romantic and part-Classical (compared to Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt) but one who might score slightly higher on the one side or the other depending on the piece of music or the particular moment.

Certainly his “multiple personality” issues – one of his characters in his writings about music he called Master Raro (after an old philosopher) who would examine things according to certain left-brain, logical patterns, while two others he called Florestan who would see things from a certain right-brain, passionate and emotional viewpoint, or Eusebius who, also right-brained, was more contemplative and introspective. At times, any of these would dominate over the others, or at times they’d be in conflict with each other, both in his reaching a conclusion in his writings as well as in the music he composed.

Schumann’s inner struggles – both in terms of his music and his life (whether we view it as “insanity” or not) reminds me of the comment by Native Americans who tell us, inside each of us there are two wolves: one, the white wolf, represents good; the black wolf represents evil – and they are constantly fighting for control of your spirit. The student asks “which one wins?” The teacher says “the one you feed.”

- Dick Strawser

Beethoven and his 9th Symphony

Beethoven (foreground) in 1812

It’s possible to teach a complete course on Beethoven by himself; even to teach a course on his nine symphonies alone. Recently, music critic and fellow blogger Matthew Guerrieri wrote an excellent book on the influence of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony called The First Four Notes, 363 pages about what might have influenced him to write it in the first place and the impact it’s had on future imaginations.

If his 5th Symphony weren’t enough, it was Beethoven’s 9th – like the composer himself, a megalith in the world of classical music – that placed him squarely in the pantheon with the likes of Shakespeare and (at least in Europe) the German poet Goethe. It regularly appears on lists of favorite works of classical music in those Top 40 lists beloved of a box-office-oriented pop culture – and usually as No. 1.

Considering it’s over an hour long, this seems a bit odd, and though its great “Ode to Joy” theme in its last movement may be easily accessible to the average listener, one would hope there’s more to its popularity than just a hummable tune.

Even though by now, it’s outdated technology, do you know why the CD holds around 70 minutes of music?

The story goes that when Philips and SONY were developing this technology in the 1970s, they were looking for that could hold all of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in a single-disc format. That may or may not be entirely true – even Snopes calls it “undetermined” – but it’s a story that, true or not, might be one more example of the importance of Beethoven’s art in the general world around us or another example of the mythology that’s grown up around him.

So, what about this 9th Symphony?

First of all, by any standard, it’s a huge piece and not just because of its 70-minute playing time. The last movement alone is unprecedented. In Mozart and Haydn’s day, only a generation earlier, the finale was a kind of “happy ending” afterthought to the importance of the first movement with its tonal drama told in Sonata Form (whether the music sounded “dramatic” in our sense of the word or not). But Beethoven had been changing that in the course of his career, not just in the symphonies. The last movement of the 3rd Symphony (the “Eroica”) is a large-scale set of variations and the weighty equal to its first movement. The finale of the 5th Symphony is the dramatic resolution of the tension of its opening movement with its famous “fate knocks at the door” motive: for the first time, there was unresolved tension at the end of the 1st movement that, eventually, needed to be resolved.

Beethoven, painted in 1823

This led to the standard “conflict-resolution” symphonies of the Romantic Era, later in the 19th Century, where the “conflict with fate” (just one such potential conflict) is triumphantly overcome in the finale – we hear this same “program” [*] in the 1st Symphony of Johannes Brahms, completed in 1876, as well as the 4th Symphony of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky written a year later (and since it was such a success, he used it again in his 5th Symphony), plus Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony (completed in 1902) and Dmitri Shostakovich (inspired by his experience with Stalin’s disapproval and the possibility of being arrested for his bourgeois artistic attitudes which we might call “crimes against the proletariat”) written during the height of Stalin’s purges in 1937 (the question, depending on how you view the tempo of the last movement, is whether the finale is triumphant or numbly following orders – it’s a long story but… of course… more on that later).

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[*] “program” in this sense means an underlying story whether directly described in the music or implied in its emotional appeal. “Music that tells a story” is often called simply “program music.” In this case, it’s not an actual story but one that is inferred by critics and most listeners.
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The very opening of the symphony is almost “anti-classical.” If the whole purpose of classical logic was to allow the listener to place himself on the “you-are-here” map in the sense of the clarity of its form and the sense of its tonal scheme (which is, basically, an aspect of defining that form), the vague sonority and ambiguous harmonic motion of the opening is more like an invitation to enter a dream-like state with a treasure map to find out where you are. We know it is D Minor but beyond that, what might lie ahead?

The closest thing in music before this (the symphony was written in the early-1820s) was the opening of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, which at the time was regarded as one of the greatest works ever written (Beethoven studied with Haydn in the early-1790s and had attended The Creation’s premiere in 1798). Its opening, called “The Representation of Chaos” might not be chaos as we imagine it today – helter-skelter energy without any purpose or direction (as in “chaotic”) – but more the vague ambiguity of obscuring mists that only later is resolved – ta-daaah! – to a brilliant C Major Chord as out of this void, God created Light (about 2:20 into this clip). Curiously, as harmonically ambiguous as Haydn’s chaos may sound, it is still in Sonata Form! That’s Classical Logic for you.

Though Beethoven’s sense of “chaos” is less murky and not the lengthy harmonic labyrinth Haydn sets up, it is still a striking opening. It begins (at 0:06) with the interval of an open 5th – neither major nor minor – which expands into a rhythmic falling-motive (notice how it gets fuller in texture and how the statement of the motive begins to pick up speed and volume) that turns out to be a dominant chord leading up to the first appearance of the tonic at 0:32. This falling-motive now expands into the full range of the orchestra by itself (no harmony for five measures) which then continues to unfold in short fragments: a new idea at 0:48 which then leads directly to what sounds like a restatement of the opening vague hollow-sounding 5th but now on the tonic of D (minor) at 1:02. Are we still in the Introduction or is this really the first theme? Doesn’t sound very tuneful, does it? Then, this open 5th resolves again but not to tonic D Minor but to a new key – B-flat Major at 1:26. Unexpected – and it keeps on going, spinning along (notice the reminder of the first “theme” churning away at 1:43) until it seems to reach a kind of melodic resolution (if not harmonic) at 2:00 before we hear another “theme” (or thematic fragment that also continues to spin) until 4:25 when we suddenly (unexpectedly?) return to the opening empty interval, the same pitches we heard at the very beginning.

The 1st Movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor:
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This is what you could call an ”open-ended” theme – as opposed to a self-contained tune that ends with a clearly marked cadence. But it’s not so much a melody as a collection of fragments that can be taken apart and expanded. And harmonically, while it’s very active, we’ve spent most of our time in the unexpected key of B-flat Major (if you were listening to a symphony in 1790, you would say “it should be in F Major, that’s the rule” – or that was the standard operating procedure). Suddenly we’re back setting up D Minor all over again.

“Ah,” the astute listener from the 1820s would say, “we’re repeating the exposition.” But instead of doing what he did the first time around, at 4:40, Beethoven quietly switches gears. The careful listener would probably catch this and go, “ah hah! Maybe we’re into the Development Section already instead?”

And from there on, it’s definitely harmonically more active like you’d expect a Development section to be. Only… uhm, haven’t we been doing something like that already?

As we continue through the on-going Development, the tension, after dropping back a bit, continues to mount around 8:00 till it sounds like it should reach a cadence at 8:08 – but, no, he keeps pulling you along with an unexpected chord – though it’s really a D Major Chord (going to G Minor?) which (after a dissonant chord at 8:27) finally resolves to the expected “main theme” (without the introductory open 5th) at 8:30 but it doesn’t sound like it did at the opening. In fact, it sounds like it’s still – despite all the expected pitch “D” you hear in it – developing! Then, at 9:09 there’s a sudden change of mood – “oh wait,” you think, “isn’t that one of the secondary theme fragments?” It is and it’s in D Major, like it’s supposed to be in a Recapitulation. But by 9:30 we’re on the move (harmonically) again – in fact, while all of this material sounds familiar, we’re never quite sure where we are harmonically. He brings in sudden – and brief – changes of mood and stretches out some of these chords (and vague tonal areas) and with it stretching the tension until we reach 11:33 where we hear the “main theme” in D Minor as it ought to be.

But no sooner started than he’s off again – “where are we,” the listener used to nicely balanced, predictable classical form would be thinking. Well, at 12:41, that sounds like something from the Main Theme, in the horn? Right? And it does resolve to a D Minor chord at 12:55 but not for long – again, he’s off… and where to now? It takes us till 13:55 – another minute – to arrive at a D Minor cadence that feels like tonic. But wait… this isn’t the Recapitulation, is it? It sounds like it’s wrapping up – is this going to be the end? It’s not the “theme” but sounds like part of it. The tension continues to build (dynamics as much as the push-and-pull of the harmonic expectations) until – at 14:37 – there it is, the Main Theme. But wait… is that the end? At 14:50 – yes, that’s the end of the movement!

So what happened to the Development and the Recapitulation?

This is one of the Big Changes leading into the Romantic Period. Say good-bye to the nice “you-are-here” kind of logic from Haydn’s symphony. The Style Pendulum has swung (again) from Simplicity to Complexity – the components are all there but the boundaries are vague and in fact can be so “smeared” (a Haydn-loving listener would say “messy, indeed”) as to be unintelligible even to the astute listener.

We are now all on an adventure – and the structural form has become a map we have to figure out in order to find our way. The principles still exist – statement / digression / restatement – but sometimes they may over-lap so that we’re not sure, even before we’ve figured out the “exposition” part of it, what’s exposition and what’s development. And later, what’s development and what’s recapitulation.

There’s not much “contrast” between themes – if we can even think of them as the kind of melodies people were expecting just a couple decades ago – and part of what we might overlook is how all of this, some 15 minutes of music, grows out of that opening thirty seconds that just keeps spinning along almost as if it doesn’t really seem to know where it’s going. However, once you examine it, you would realize it knows exactly where it’s going but the form just isn’t the same as it used to be.

To paraphrase an advertising campaign about the progress being made in generations of technology (I think it was used originally for cars): “This ain’t your Grandfather’s Symphony!”

Beethoven worked on this first movement for a long time. We’re not sure exactly how long, but at some point in 1817, he wrote down some ideas in a sketchbook that would later become these thematic molecules. What eventually became the longer “theme” at the opening was originally for a Symphony in B-flat Major though it later became a Symphony in D Minor – which, ironically, spends a lot of time in B-flat Major, not the old-fashioned expected key of F Major. So even before he technically began working on his 9th Symphony, he was jotting down ideas probably five years earlier.

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The S.O.P for the inner movements was a slow movement in second place and a fast movement in third (originally a minuet but later a lively dance-like, often rustic movement called a scherzo which in Italian means “joke”).

Usually, people say Beethoven reversed the order for the 2nd and 3rd Movements because the finale was so grand, it needed the contrast of coming out of the slow movement, not the scherzo.

But that’s not true. You see, Beethoven had already planned on a 2nd Movement scherzo and a 3rd Movement Adagio before he’d even figured out what he would do for his finale! The reason, then, was because the 1st movement was so weighty and not that fast, that a contrast with a long slow movement which might also be very intense (as it turned out to be) was not that much contrast. So to give his audience a break, he planned on going right from this first movement to the scherzo. Even so, it’s not much of a joke: it’s actually very dramatic.

Does the opening motive remind you of something? The opening theme of the 1st Movement, once it got started, was based on falling 5th. This time, it’s falling octaves. But on only two notes: the same pitches we hear in that open intervals that sounds so unstable and vague at the very beginning of the symphony.

And those first seven seconds generate the scherzo’s main theme – which, far from being a joke, is actually a fugue!

Usually, fugues in the Age of Mozart and Haydn were very academic sounding and associated with showing off the composer’s intelligence, being able to handle this old-fashioned skill from the Baroque Era of 50 to 100 years before. But maybe that’s the joke, here: Beethoven shows he can write a fugue – kind of – but it’s kind of a hurly-burly scurrying fugue and ready to take off in any direction it pleases with sudden changes of mood and sudden interruptions, especially from the timpani (or kettledrums) around 5:03.

The “Scherzo” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9:
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There’s also a very contrasting section that begins at 6:56 – the energy-level changes, the lines are more step-wise and, well, more linear. Then it’s back to the opening again at 9:40.

This contrasting or “B section,” as we’d call it, is – especially after that puzzling first movement – almost mind-numbingly simple: lots of repetition, almost obsessively repetitive (but so is the fugue) and by comparison almost static with its long sustained tones behind the bubbling foreground.

Then we repeat the “A Section” at 9:40 and continue (leaving out the ordinarily repeated segments) until 13:14 when it sounds like we’re going to repeat the “B Section” also but it’s only a brief reminiscence until the octaves pound us to that final D.

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I’m not going to spend much time with the slow movement which is unfortunate, because it’s an incredibly beautiful Adagio and despite the greatness of the other three, always one of my favorites in all of Beethoven’s output.

In this case, where the themes before were “modular” – based on thematic molecules or cells – the themes in this movement are long, linear, song-like and constantly varied. The opening theme (starting at 0:24) is almost prayer-like with its dialogue between strings and winds, and its contrasting theme (starting at 2:19) is built with a constant rising then falling of its components. He then builds on these two ideas, alternating and varying them, to create a long, almost seamless respite from all the ambiguity of the first movement and the dynamic rhythmic drive of the second movement.

The 3rd Movement, Adagio, of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor:
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But then Beethoven hit a brick wall: what to do after all this? He’s now got three movements, each about 15 minutes long which would still make this longer than a typical Haydn Symphony and about as long as his entire 3rd Symphony written twenty years earlier. Did he need another movement at all? Wasn’t that long enough?

One of the things we know from the sketchbooks was that Beethoven had tried several ideas for an orchestral finale and none of them seemed to please him.

Now, he had always wanted to set Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” ever since he was a young man. The poem had been written in 1785 (when Beethoven was 14) and became the equivalent of a popular hit in the world of German poetry. While it’s essentially a Classical Era poem, the inspiration was initially that sense of excitement generated by what led to the French Revolution a few years later, that fermenting agitation for more freedom. In fact, the initial sketches, so the story goes, indicate the idea of “Joy” was more “Freedom” but Schiller knew that would get him into trouble with the secret police, so he changed it.

Now, throughout his life, Beethoven was an admirer of the sense of Freedom for the Common Man that the French Revolution promised and which fell flat on its face when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and turned the whole idea of a French Republic into just another tyrannical government. It’s interesting to remind ourselves of this since Beethoven lived in Imperial Vienna, was a friend of the Imperial family (and a teacher of the Emperor’s little brother) and associated with many of the city’s finest (and richest) aristocrats. Whatever his political sense, he knew his livelihood depended on aristocratic support and so, whether consciously being dialectical or not – the “thesis/antithesis = synthesis” formula – Beethoven still managed to proclaim his universal love for the Brotherhood of Man which might have sounded suspicious in 1820s Vienna when the Masonic Brotherhood had been driven underground and anything about “freedom” smacked of revolution against the state or, given the constant state of warfare during Napoleon’s reign till he was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, pro-French or pro-Republican sympathies. (Incidentally, these same sympathies would erupt later in a series of revolutions across Europe in 1848-1849, but… more on that, later.)

So, going against all expectations, Beethoven decided to take Schiller’s poem and set it to music with chorus and four vocal soloists in addition to what was then already a large orchestra. And, considering the length of the poem, eventually adding an additional 20 minutes or so to the symphony’s full length – unheard of, at the time, and still uncommon for another sixty years (with a few exceptions).

You can read Schiller’s poem here.
http://www.raptusassociation.org/ode1785.html
Whatever it may sound like to a German in the early-1800s, it sounds quite often silly in English to modern listeners today. I know of no performance that ever tried to sing Beethoven’s 9th in English.

So, after these first three movements and especially the long calm slow movement, Beethoven wakes everybody up with a most surprising chord that’s almost like a thunderbolt to get his listener’s attention. This is a true “dissonance” – both something needs to be resolved and an “ugly sound.” It clatters through what could be a frenzied and chaotic counterpart to the first movement’s opening (the very opposite of its ambiguity) before breaking out in something else unexpected: the cellos and basses play this long declamatory passage beginning at 0:13. Now, this is technically an operatic convention – it’s called a “recitative,” something non-melodic in which a singer would declaim a text in a passage that would resemble the speech-pattern, accompanied by occasional punctuation-like chords. But we have no idea what the implied text might be – yet.

The Finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor:
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At 0:24, the opening blast returns until it’s interrupted and pushed aside by the bass “recitative” at 0:33. Then, at 0:42 we hear something familiar – wait, that’s the opening of the First Movement! But at 0:55, it’s also pushed aside by the basses. After this seems to shrug itself off, at 1:13 we hear the opening of the Second Movement which then is also set aside by the “recitative” before, at 1:33, it’s the Third Movement’s turn. Ah, this time, it’s a gentler reaction from the “recitative” before it becomes more aggressive as it had been earlier (1:55).

Now, at 2:04, we have a new idea hinted at which, if you’ve never heard it before, might sound like a ray of hope. In fact, the “recitative” seems to think very highly of this new idea and cadences authoritatively in the key of D Major at 2:26. Whew! Now we know where we’re supposed to be.

Then he starts what will become the Main Theme of this last movement. It sounds like a hymn and in fact it is so simple and direct it could easily be sung by a congregation with little musical background. After the complexities of the earlier movements, this is beginning to sound very simple – and so therefore, reassuring.

This is, by the way, an example of a "self-contained" or "closed" theme, complete it itself and one that is less easy to spin off into ever-evolving continuity. Instead, he accomplishes length by repeating and varying it.

Between 2:29 and 5:32, Beethoven creates several variations on this hymn-like tune which repeat the melody as you’ve already heard it (initially, all by itself without harmony) and gradually adding other layers and textures, including, at 4:52, a variation with a martial flare. Then at 5:33, he begins to expand the theme by closing it off with a little “coda” or extension (coda in Italian means “tail,” literally). He starts moving further afield and it’s almost like he’s thinking out loud – where to next? Here? No… maybe…

Then at 6:09, back comes the opening furor – but when you’d expect this instrumental “recitative” to start up again, it’s actually being sung by a singer – a bass (and that’s pronounced, in music, “base”) with the words “O friends, not these tones… Let’s find more pleasing, joyful sounds.” And with shouts of “Joy!” answered by the chorus, now, the last movement officially begins: the introduction over, here is the Main Theme, now sung to the words “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” or “Joy, beautiful spark of the Gods.”

This is the theme known universally as “The Ode to Joy.”

At 7:48, he begins another series of variations on the theme, bringing in the other solo voices. Around 8:30, another variation but now that we’re familiar with the tune, he can be a little less literal in repeating it: we hear more it’s shape and essence rather than a literal restatement of the theme itself.

By 9:33, we’ve now moved away from all this D Major tonality and something new starts: by 9:47, we’ve now started a march-like treatment of the theme complete with bass drum and cymbals (a cliché that would’ve been called “Turkish Music” in a city that only about 140 years earlier when the Turkish Empire (the Moslem’s Ottoman Empire) brought its border within view of Vienna’s walls). It then continues with the solo tenor and the men’s voices of the choir.

The very sound of this would’ve had Viennese listeners tapping their toes and nodding their heads in rhythm. Considering the drama of the 1st Movement, we are now in a “populist” vein – something that today would seem to be contradictory. But in Beethoven’s day, “High Art” and “Popular Art” could exist side by side.

At 11:10, we’re off, developing ideas from the theme by way of the march and the tonal scheme gets very active. It’s almost as if, the way things are tossed back and forth between the winds and the strings that we’re fighting the battle after we’ve already celebrated the victory! Then at 12:30, we hear all this octave intervals sweeping back and forth like the theme from the First Movement or the opening of the Scherzo but in a very remote key from the one we’d normally expect for a symphony in D.

With a great rush, then, after two suggestions of starting the Ode to Joy Theme almost, at 12:56 Beethoven sweeps us solidly back into D Major with the return of the Main Theme, now, almost shouted by the full chorus: a Triumphal March!

After all this, we’ve gone about 14 minutes basically on one theme. But at 13:47 it abruptly stops. What next, you ask?

A new theme!

Sung to the words “Be embraced, oh ye millions,” again a melodic idea (not much of a tune, by comparison to the Ode to Joy Theme) by itself as if proclaimed by angels accompanied by – ta da! – trombones! Notice how the statements alternate between the stentorian declamation and the gentler full choir, harmonized continuation.

Now, if this is going to be our “second theme,” how hellaciously long do you think this “sonata form” movement is going to be if we’re only at the 2nd Theme after 15 minutes???

Then, after some spiritual questing – “look for God beyond the stars!” – at 17:19, something unexpected happens, resolving this quest for God. Beethoven combines the Ode to Joy Theme with an almost joyful skipping rhythm against this new “B Theme,” the song of Universal Brotherhood. And then turns it into – a fugue! Though not a technically strict one, but definitely fugal! And despite the academic, intellectual reactions to the very idea of a fugue, this is the most joyful moment in a whole movement all about joy.

In fact, it’s so joyful, at 18:37 begins a passage where the sopranos hang on to a high A – and that’s pretty high for a choir-ful of sopranos – for the next thirteen measures (try holding your breath that long, much less singing a high note that’s hard to control!).

But this suddenly breaks off in a contrasting section at 18:54 – “do you bow down, ye millions?” Then at 19:40, back in D Major after a brief digression, we resume variations on the Main “Ode to Joy” Theme – but less strictly, only suggesting the theme and its text. To a well-experienced listener of Classical Symphonies, this would sound like the start of the “wrapping up,” the beginning of the “Coda” and the final reinforcement of the key and its themes.

However, there are stops and starts along the way. The tension isn’t quite ready to be completely resolved, yet.

At 21:04, yet one more digression. We swing off suddenly to another key (ordinarily it wouldn’t be expected but several times he’s already landed in B Major so by now, maybe it’s not so unexpected) where the four soloists have what is called a “cadenza.” Like the “recitative” was an operatic convention, this is a convention from the concerto – a work for solo instrument and orchestra – where the orchestra would stop playing and the soloist has a long extended solo passage usually of a virtuosic (“technically showy”) nature that might sound like it’s being improvised (“made up on the spot”) – which actually is what soloists were expected to do in Mozart and Beethoven’s day. So, this time, Beethoven gives his solo quartet of singers a chance to show off before it ends, leading us back to D Major by 21:54 and from there, it’s a joyous celebration all the way to the end, complete with bass drum and cymbal again.

But just when you think it’s over, a sudden “mis-resolution,” a change at 22:54 – nooooo! Not another prolonging passage – which slows down, but never loses its sense of majesty (perhaps that sense of slow-motion just before you break through the finish line) until, having done so at 23:09, it’s now a final jubilant shout, perhaps a victory lap!

And those are, very definitely, final chords!!

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People often say that Mozart may write music that is sublime or divine, but by comparison Beethoven is more human and, often, more universal as he certainly is in his setting of texts about the Universal Brotherhood of Man.

Small wonder that the “Ode to Joy” theme itself has gone on to become a popular hymn tune and eventually the (Inter)National Anthem of the European Union.

Beethoven’s 9th has become a universal favorite – it’s a New Year’s Tradition in Japan, surprisingly enough, where community orchestras and choruses will perform it every year. It’s a major undertaking and always an event when it appears on an orchestra’s concert program. In many radio polls, whether in this country or Europe, Beethoven’s 9th (even if it’s only because of this last movement’s theme) is usually No. 1 on the list of favorite works.

How was it received at its premiere in 1825?

Beethoven was by now stone deaf but he wanted to conduct it. The official conductor allowed him to stand on stage and conduct while telling the orchestra not to watch him. He sat to the side of the stage, beating time for the orchestra he could not hear.

This was the first time Beethoven had appeared in public as a “performer” in some 12 years and the hall was packed – word had gotten out that this was going to be an amazing work. Two of the singers were among the best known in Vienna.

When it was over, Beethoven was still conducting. The alto singer came forward, took him by the arm and turned him around to see the audience. They had erupted in applause between movements and sometimes after certain sections of the piece (it was considered okay, then) but Beethoven only saw this at the end. He received five standing ovations and even if he couldn’t hear the applause, he could see the audiences jubilant response. He was given a hero’s welcome.

Earlier symphonies – his major works – had often been well-received but there were often those, especially among the critics, who thought he was mad or if he weren’t deaf, he wouldn’t have written it that way (as in “so badly”). Even a colleague, the composer Carl Maria von Weber (himself a leading contemporary composer of the day) thought, after his 7th Symphony in 1813, that Beethoven was “ripe for the mad-house.”

His one opera, Fidelio, had been a disaster – not once, but twice. His great Violin Concerto, today regarded as perhaps the greatest violin concerto ever written, was so dismally received, it was never performed in his lifetime and in fact never entered the repertoire until 1844, 17 years after Beethoven’s death, when it was played by a brilliant young violinist named Joseph Joachim who was 12 at the time.

But this time everyone seemed to be in universal agreement: this was Beethoven’s greatest work.

The dissenting voices – and some of them are significant – aren’t about the musical values, but the technical ones. True, it’s not a great symphony because it’s hardly typical. And, also true, sometimes it’s quite badly written for some of the instruments: I know several bass players who hate playing this piece because it’s so difficult for them to play, making unrealistic demands on what the instrument can do; several players on the contrabassoon say Beethoven had no idea what the instrument could or could not do – he just doubled the string basses which are already having trouble!

The choral writing is also not very good at times – and as exciting as it might sound, that 13-bar High A in the sopranos is most unkind, especially so far into the piece when they’re already going to be tired. When the solo soprano has to sing a note one step higher than that, she’s singing it on a weird vowel that is almost impossible to control on that pitch – even if she does it well, it still sounds uncomfortable.

But as Beethoven, deaf or not, once said to a violinist complaining about how difficult his part was in his latest string quartet, “What do I care about you and your damned fiddle!?”

Beethoven was Beethoven – even as a young man, he was always who he was and never what other people wanted him or wished him to be.

Perhaps that has something to do with why his music still, 186 years after his death, continues to inspire us today, just as it has every generation since then.

Before, society didn’t pay much attention to composers: they were craftsmen, employed by the church or by an aristocrat and they did their job, turning out music as expected or required.

Beethoven presents us with the first time a composer became a hero – and with it, an almost mythological reverence that has been difficult to ignore.

For a man who had to deal with deafness at the height of his career, who complained about constant stomach trouble, who had a miserably unhappy personal life with his friends and family, with all the difficulties reality kept pushing in his way, it is amazing to compare the music we know with the man we sometimes overlook.

Sometimes, his music is what it is despite his reality – especially his deafness – but it’s quite possible his music and the interior world he created for it was also because of it.

- Dick Strawser

A Brief Introduction to Beethoven and a couple of his Symphonies

Coming face to face with Beethoven can be a daunting experience.

First of all, since he seems to be regarded as the Greatest of the Great Composers by so many lovers of classical music, you may find him either so thoroughly intimidating or you might think he must be over-rated. Again, different people will always react differently – and how we feel about him today doesn’t mean he was always regarded this way, or that he won’t be regarded differently in the future.

Many people might consider the greatest composers in the classical music world to include Bach and Mozart, though there was a time when Bach was almost completely forgotten and largely unknown to a wider audience until some seventy years after his death. And don’t forget Mozart couldn’t find a decent job during his lifetime and also wasn’t that well known not long after his death except for a few pieces and even that to a relatively small group of enthusiasts.

It was in 1877, not long after conducting the first performance of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 (which he called “Beethoven’s 10th), the conductor Hans von Bülow came up with “The Three Bs – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms!” which was essentially a marketing phrase rather than an honest historical assessment. However, somebody else had already come up with a 3-B tribute for Beethoven’s “logical successor,” the French composer, Hector Berlioz – and that was back in 1854. But by 1877, most people (especially Germans) would no longer consider Berlioz the equal of Beethoven.

But Beethoven’s star, once ascended, never really faltered though he became more god-like and titanic and less of a mere mortal. In fact, one of the problems with classical music is that we forget these composers ever were human: they’ve become marble busts and their lives either bearing little impact on how we consider their music or becoming so mythologized, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction (or at least glorification).

We tend to overlook that Beethoven had a rough childhood, hated his father, his mother dying when he was not yet 20, and spending more time quarreling with his brothers throughout his life than having any kind of familial relationships with them; that he never had any kind of loving relationship with a woman throughout his life, as well – at least a fulfilling, two-sided relationship (he was often in love but often with women who, whether married or part of the wealthy society who looked down on Beethoven’s kind as mere tradesmen, unattainable); he was frequently ill – and not just his deafness – which would have stifled any man’s creativity; and had a personality that often alienated him from the society of the people he needed for his artistic support.

There was another major distinction between Beethoven as a composer and composers of previous generations: Mozart and Haydn, for all their brilliance and originality, were still basically servants employed by the upper class aristocracy. Beethoven was the first great composer who didn’t have what we might call a “steady gig.” He was never an aristocrat’s court composer or resident pianist, nor did he ever hold a job as a music director for a church or the equivalent of a “university professor” (which in itself was something new). He made his living primarily as a teacher of piano lessons to private students – mostly the young ladies of middle-class families who were expected to play the piano and sing as the family’s entertainment center in the days before television and sound systems (later, they would be expected to be good cooks but in those days, you hired people to do your cooking; you made your own music unless you were rich enough to hire some musicians, too). For a while, he was also a concert pianist, playing primarily what we would call “solo recitals” but also appearing occasionally with orchestras and chamber ensembles (unlike other concert artists of the next generation, he never toured all over Europe).

In fact, the whole idea of the “public concert” was something that was fairly new. It had only been during the days of Mozart’s childhood that such a thing started happening in London – originated by one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons who settled there – so that musicians (both performers and composers) could make a living by performing for ordinary people who would actually pay money to hear their music. Before, the general public never got a chance to hear the performances that were held in aristocratic homes or the castles of the crowned heads of Europe (including all those little German city-states).

J. S. Bach had given some public concerts as the director of Leipzig’s “Collegium Musicum” where, without a public concert hall to hold them in, people went to Zimmerman’s Coffee House to listen to programs featuring concertos and sonatas and suites of dances.

In Beethoven’s time, then, while he also played in the homes of the wealthy, he also gave public concerts. In addition to playing specific pieces – which could involve a number of performers playing in a variety of combinations – pianists often would improvise. This was something Beethoven, as a composer as well as a performer, excelled at and often there were competitions at some of these programs – imagine a kind of reality-TV approach to dueling pianists – and of course rivalries within the musical community. It was one way that Beethoven began to become well known in the late-1790s after he’d arrived in Vienna to study with Franz Josef Haydn.

Beethoven, unlike Mozart, was not a “fast” composer, capable of writing a symphony in a few days, if need be. Nor was he the craftsman like Haydn who needed to turn out a certain amount of music in a short amount of time. He was often pains-taking, spending months working out his themes and then figuring out some of the possibilities of what he could do with them.

This makes sense when you figure Mozart, during his 35-year life-span, wrote more than the 41 published symphonies we know (several of the early ones are quite short and rather meager in comparison to the later ones), or that Haydn, over a period of 36 years, composed at least 104 symphonies – but during Beethoven’s symphony-writing career, between 1800 and 1825, he completed only 9. Well, “only”… Granted, those nine symphonies are all considered masterpieces where Mozart or Haydn would likely be remembered for maybe a dozen or so symphonies - actually, for Mozart, perhaps a half-dozen - in the standard repertoire today, but their idea of what a symphony is changed over the course of their own lifetimes: it began as a functional, orchestral multi-movement piece for an evening's entertainment that was more craft than potential masterpiece, possibly written for an occasion and, quite likely, not intended for future performances. Later, the symphony became more of a “significant effort” and even if they weren’t intended to be future masterpieces, they had more of a sense of posterity about them.

We don’t know why Mozart wrote his last three symphonies – he had no performance lined up for them and there seemed to be no commission to bring them about and this was a time when few artists set about writing something that didn't have a reason to be written (unlike later when a composer might think "hmm, perhaps I'll write a symphony") – but they are each a masterpiece and, considering they were all three written between June and August of 1788 (along with several other works), each different from the other. Haydn wrote his last twelve symphonies for concert series in London, primarily to sell tickets, so there was a sense of writing for “popular” appeal, here, that the others may have lacked, another problem to consider when trying to figure out how to write a symphony.

Beethoven wrote his symphonies all for public consumption – not for aristocratic music-lovers though some of them were first heard in private concerts in aristocratic homes – and while there was an eye toward popular appeal, there was also a sense of universality about them that Haydn or Mozart would probably have never considered at the time they were writing symphonies.

Would Beethoven’s symphonies have been different if he had lived 10-20 years earlier? Most likely. Would Haydn have written symphonies differently if he had continued writing symphonies had he lived longer? One of the favorite “what-if” games for classical music lovers is what Mozart would have sounded like if he had lived as long as Beethoven – that means, he would’ve died in 1813, around the time Beethoven was finishing his 7th and 8th Symphonies. Or as long as Haydn: then, Mozart would’ve died in 1833, outliving Beethoven by 6 years… Well, that’s all conjecture of course, but musicians are always developing: since they didn’t live in a vacuum, it’s quite likely they would have been greatly influenced by events of their time as well as artistic trends and attitudes in the musical world around them, adapting and “perfecting” their own creative styles in response to some new stimulus.

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It’s not always wise to put too much stock in what a composer was doing at the time he was composing something, because art exists independently of the artist. Still, it’s interesting to realize what was going on in a composer’s life when he was working on a particular piece. For instance, I recently heard a string quartet by Franz Schubert. If nobody told me anything about it and I had no idea when it was written, it would have been a very enjoyable piece of music just as it was. But knowing he was 16 when he wrote (and wondering what I was doing when I was 16…) and also that he’d recently decided to quit school because he’d gotten less than acceptable grades in Latin and had failed Math – his scholarship, which he thought he might lose, was reduced with the admonition to do better in his class work, that “singing and music are but a subsidiary matter… good morals and diligence in study are of prime importance and an indispensable duty for all those who wish to enjoy the advantages” of this scholarship. So clearly this delightful piece came at a time when he felt strongly enough about becoming a composer that he probably put a little more thought and effort into it, perhaps, consciously or not. Incidentally, it was not written for “public consumption.” Like much chamber music of the time, it was intended to be performed and listened to “at home.” Schubert’s father, a school-teacher, was the cellist and his two older brothers played the violin; Schubert himself played the viola. There’s a big difference in the scope of this string quartet and those he would write at the end of his short life.

So, let’s think about Beethoven having just had considerable success in Vienna as a pianist and as a composer with his first set of string quartets, his first symphony, a ballet that was at the moment quite popular, and some piano sonatas he had been performing around town.

Then, on the verge of his mature career – he is now 32 – he is aware the problems he’d been having off and on with his hearing were becoming more serious, in fact could even mean he was going deaf.

It’s one thing to go deaf in your old age or to contend with life having been deaf from an early age, but the sudden possibility that, so close to professional success as he was, he had to face it now must have been devastating – certainly as a performer but also as a composer. While he did not go “totally deaf” until the mid-1810s, in 1802 it was serious enough the letter he wrote to tell his brothers about it – known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – reads as much like a last will and testament as it might indicate thoughts of suicide.

He wrote this in October while staying in what was then a rural suburb of Vienna called Heiligenstadt (it’s now been absorbed into the city limits), despairing of hearing the birds singing, the shepherd playing his pipes, of not being able to hear people talk to him, of wondering how to explain to people “I am deaf.”

At the same time, he was working on the last movement of his 2nd Symphony. How would you expect it to sound, given the circumstances going on in his life at the time?

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Not exactly what you’d expect, is it? No gnashing of high drama, no sense of tragedy or loss – certainly nothing suicidal. If anything, the opening theme sounds a bit like a yelp – one critic described as a hiccup followed by a growling stomach – and it’s fairly high-powered and lively all the way to the end.

Now, Beethoven felt his symphony didn’t need a big tragic ending – downer or not. There was nothing in what he had planned previously to indicate that turn of emotional events. Even though he swore he would overcome this handicap – and seize Fate by the throat – he knew this symphony did not need a fist-shaking “curse-you,-Fate” ending, either. The fact that it’s as boisterous as it is might lead modern listeners (perhaps over-analyzing it) to think it “over-compensating.” Regardless, Beethoven was able to compartmentalize reality and art and deal with such striking and presumably life-changing contrasts.

While the 3rd Symphony, the famous “Eroica,” which was presumably inspired by Napoleon directly or by the image of a “great man,” a world hero, marks a decided change in the course of the symphony – it’s usually credited with being the first great masterpiece of the Romantic Era when it was completed in 1804 – it does include “a grand funeral march for a hero” in the slow movement even though there was no indication Napoleon was going to die anytime soon.

Perhaps this idea of “seizing Fate by the throat” was behind the 5th Symphony (which he actually began after the 3rd, but ending up completing what became his 4th Symphony beforehand) with its famous “Fate Knocks at the Door” motive, the intense drama of the opening movement, the disturbing nature of the interruption in the third movement (based on the rhythms of that opening “Fate” motive) that leads directly into a dance of triumph in the finale. Though he never gave it a title or mentioned there was a story behind the music, it is too easy for us to think that here, Beethoven is grappling with the whole idea of his deafness, determined to overcome it.

However, since he never mentioned anything about that, rather than making it a personal story, it becomes a universal one. It can now become – by inference – anybody’s story, anybody’s ordeal with a catastrophe that must be overcome and, in the end, is successfully overcome.

That may explain why, aside from some initial reactions about its new-fangled drama being a little over the top, this symphony – or at least its first movement – has gone on to become one of the most popular works in the classical musical repertoire, familiar to people who’ve never even set foot in a concert hall before.

Here’s the complete symphony in one of those “color-coded” analyses that will help you follow the formal design of each movement.

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I don’t at the moment have much time to write about his 9th Symphony, but here’s a performance of the last movement, the setting of the “Ode to Joy,” which I’ll get back to later tonight…

Well, actually, it became a post of its own: you can read it here and listen to clips of each movement of the symphony.

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This is one of those graphic representations that simplifies the score for those who can’t read musical notation but might be allow you to follow the textures and sonorities of the score.

More to come,

Dick Strawser