Posted on 06/16/2005 8:28:05 AM PDT by Pyro7480
Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan
The composer was certainly a genius, but he diverted music from elegant universality into tortured self-obsession
Dylan Evans
Tuesday June 7, 2005
Guardian
It's Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 will have filled six days of airtime with every single note the composer wrote - every symphony, every quartet, every sonata and lots more besides. This coincides with a series of three films on BBC2 in which the conductor Charles Hazlewood tells us about the composer's life, and three programmes of musical analysis on BBC4.
It's good to see classical music getting some coverage on primetime TV, but the relentless focus on Beethoven is dire. Not all fans of classical music are members of the Beethoven cult. Some of us even think he did more harm than good to classical music.
Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music, but this change was a change for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the "music of the spheres" in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.
This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven's fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven's original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.
This is not to deny Beethoven's genius, but simply to claim that he employed his genius in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea. If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences.
It's instructive to compare Beethoven's morbid self-obsession with the unselfconscious vivacity of Mozart. Like Bach's perfectly formed fugues and Vivaldi's sparkling concertos, Mozart's music epitomises the baroque and classical ideals of formal elegance and functional harmony; his compositions "unfold with every harmonic turn placed at the right moment, to leave, at the end, a sense of perfect finish and unity", as the music critic Paul Griffiths puts it. Above all, Mozart's music shares with that of Bach an exuberant commitment to the Enlightenment values of clarity, reason, optimism and wit.
With Beethoven, however, we leave behind the lofty aspirations of the Enlightenment and begin the descent into the narcissistic inwardness of Romanticism. Mozart gives you music that asks to be appreciated for its own sake, and you don't need to know anything about the composer's life to enjoy it. Beethoven's music, on the other hand, is all about himself - it is simply a vehicle for a self-indulgent display of bizarre mood swings and personal difficulties.
Hazlewood claims, in his BBC2 series, that music "grew up" with Beethoven; but it would be more accurate to say that it regressed back into a state of sullen adolescence. Even when he uses older forms, such as the fugue, Beethoven twists them into cruel and angry parodies. The result is often fiercely dissonant, with abrupt changes in style occurring from one movement to another, or even in the same movement. Hazlewood is right to describe Beethoven as a "hooligan", but this is hardly a virtue. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex's reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.
I won't be able to resist tuning in to Beethoven at times this week, but I'll need to cheer myself up with something more optimistic and life-affirming afterwards.
Dylan Evans is a senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England.
If the writer of that Guardian piece had 1/10th the brain of Beethoven, he wouldn't embarass himself publishing pap like this.
I did not realize that Republicanprofessor had already volunteered. RP, I throw my support to you and ask only that you add me to that list. :)
You expect way too much from modern journalists.
Mozart threw away better music than was ever written by the group you mention. There has never been anything better than the Requiem, #40, #41, Piano Concerto 21, the Horn Concertos. Some of the sonatas can seem to be the same until careful attention is paid. No operas are better than The Marriage, Magic Flute or Don Giovanni. In short the only composer who can be considered the equivalent of Mozart is Bach.
Mozart was a phenom the likes of which hasn't been seen since. An inability to appreciate his marvelous works is a sad thing to observe.
While I love much of Dvorak's work (compared to Mozart's incredible output there isn't that much) and some of Strauss's none of those exemplars should even be mentioned in the same breath as the divine Wolfgang.
I wonder what he would think of Strauss, I been listening to alot of his stuff lately.
Did you think the portrayal of Beethoven was silly? I thought it was right on. And Gary Oldman was brilliant. While the mystery of who was "immortal beloved" was "solved" by the writer/director Bernard Rose, he did a lot of research and maintains that his conclusion is the most likely answer.
It may have been his view of music,I had a great deal of difficulty getting through Spengler.I do remember that he believed Western culture(or was it civilization?)peaked before his time,although I don't remember that he used Beethoven to illustrate this point.But it is fairly well known that Spengler loved Beethoven,especially the late string quartets.
My opinion is that the Evans doesn't have the concentration span to appreciate the inner struggle.I love Mozart,but his bright springy music does not require the same kind of concentration that Beethoven's does.
BTW,hats off to anyone who could slog through The Decline of the West.I have both an abridged and unabridged copy,and one is as difficult as the other.
Did you direct that at me because I commented on a thread on emo? ;-)
Borges condescendingly replies:
Astonishingly misinformed.
From age seven through high school, I was taught (violin, viola, clarinet, and piano) by a wonderful music teacher whose former students include several successful and even renowned classical musicians. He was from Russia, Georgia, to be exact. He understood my utter and complete capitulation to all things J.S. Bach. Quoth Mr. Korisheli, my teacher:
"Mozart wrote lot of junk, Beethoven wrote lot of junk, but Bach didn't write any junk."
Still, Borges, all those years growing up and playing Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart on both keyboard and in orchestras, I'll tell you from my uninformed position that Mozart's stuff was generally repetive, boring, formulaic, predictable .. dare I say, vapid. There were exceptions, but not many. Beethoven, on the other hand, was never vapid, that I can think of. And quite a lot of it wasn't junk at all, but adventurous, risk-taking musical explorations that for the past 40-plus years have inspired me and filled me with wonder. Not quite up there with Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor, but very close. Mozart was a puppy playing safe in a fenced yard compared to Beethoven. Put that in your "informed" pipe and smoke it!
It is phenomenal and the ultimate Beethoven piano sonata.
Such music could not be played on the keyboard instruments of his day because of the damage done. Beethoven stimulated the development of the Piano as makers created instruments capable of playing his works.
I believe Bach's music was always used as a teaching tool but was not performed in public. At least Paul Johnson maintains that.
Aha! I've never seen A Clockwork Orange, but I've always hated Beethoven's 9th as not only dark, but a heavy-duty burst of shrieking bombast.
There's something of a humanistic spirit that inhabits Beethoven's music. It is the very opposite of the spirt of God that emanates from J.S. Bach.
No the idea that the Immortal Beloved was his sister-in-law is silly. He HATED her and berated his brother for marrying her, thought her a slut and had her in court for years. That is the LAST person who would be the IB.
Nope. I was commenting on the article, which in its superficial essence says to me that Beethoven and the romantic movement in music is very similar in outlook to emo! My son listens to emo all the time. I call it "Whiney boy music," which I am sure is superficial on my part.
I love Beethoven. I must have gotten confused about which message I was reading, cause I normally post my potshot snarks in reply to the first message.
I never got around to seeing Immortal Beloved but on your recommendation I might just do so. I do know that Jim Svejda didn't have much good to say about it. :)
Dear R.P.,
Please add me to your nascent classical music ping list.
Many thanks!
Yes!!! That's it -- exactly! You put it into the perfect words! Bach makes me soar beyond myself, feel connected to God, always has; Beethoven makes me turn inward in reflection. As for Ode to Joy -- I'm pretty sure that Bach was the original composer of Ode to Joy (Jesu Joy of Men's Desiring?), and Beethoven borrowed it and built upon it for his own symphony.
All of that "hatred" was depicted in the story. Whether you like Bernard Rose's conclusion or not, I think he made a wonderful film and portrayed Beethoven's frustration and humiliation beautifully.
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