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.
One look at that sheet music will demonstrate its incredible complexity.
No.
Audience: "Hey Beethoven yer a narcissistic hooligan"
Beethoven: "what???"
Tht one got me!!!!!
If you are a Beethoven lover buy yourself a copy since it can take years to read being filled with footnotes and musical examples. But it is the definitive biography of Beethoven. An amazing work about an amazing man.
My favorite classical (?) piece is the theme from "The Magnificent Seven." Call me a heathen.
OK, Beethoven's 9th and the Moonlight Sonata come close. And don't forget "Flight of the Bumblebee" and "The William Tell Overture." (Just kidding).
I will be away for some time this summer, so I will let sitetest and/or borges know so that they can activate the ping list when necessary. It's always good when a couple of people have the list.
The Maynard Solomon bio gets all the publicity. Have you read that one?
A long time ago I read that a truly cultured individual was one who could hear The William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
I suppose I will never achieve true culturedness.
Bach remains my favorite. Our elementary and high school orchestra (same teacher & players throughout) was small but intense, most us beginning at tender years with the Suzuki method and growing up together. Thus our teacher had us playing mostly Baroque music, lots of Bach, Telleman, Vivaldi, etc. We were pretty accomplished in this regard, and toured the state a few times.
As for keyboard, this may not sound like much to you, as it's probably child's play (it was in Bach's time!), but I learned six of the 15 two-part inventions, and someday hope to learn all of them. Bach does something to me, always has. The music is so perfectly mathematical yet so extraordinarily spiritual, indicating to me a connection between math and God.
Me either. But if they're looking for a way to torture prisoners at Gitmo, they should try one of those. I can't take more than a few minutes of either.
I think those "cultured" individuals must have been born before 1950 or after 1970 (or whenever they wouldn't have seen the Lone Ranger on TV). That sure counts me out.
Now, me, I'd settle for a cultured individual being one who knows how to put titles in italics (you pass). (Using HTML makes this titles in italics even tougher....I don't think the test can count with HTML.) All people on this thread seem to know what they are talking about. Except perhaps the bozo who wrote the article that started it all.
An astonishing letter. Thanks for sharing that - it's said that when he finished the direction of his 9th Symphony they had to gently turn him so that he could see the audience applauding. Frankly I'm surprised he didn't kill himself as the deafness progressed.
Mathematical Signatures in Nature: A Sign of Design?
Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Section
LvB's complete piano works, CD, printable sheet music: Sheet Music Link
Enjoy!
Hey Snoop Dog bes numba one!
(jest kidding)
Have you ever heard the William Tell Overture in its entirety? I mean with the Dawn, Dusk and Storm and Morning sequences not just the march at Noon that comes at the end. It's a wonderful piece of tone painting. And the Flight oc the Bumblee isn't any longer then a few minutes.
Dear Republicanprofessor,
"...so I will let sitetest and/or borges know so that they can activate the ping list when necessary."
I guess I deserve that, as I'm an instigator. ;-)
I'm willing to help out.
sitetest
My favorite scene is when Beethoven tries out the Italian girl's piano and has to put his head on the case in order to hear himself playing "Moonlight Sonata." And you know what happens next. I could watch that scene over and over.
I like how they have Solti and a 100 piece orchestra blasting away on the soundtrack when the actual orchestra on screen is of much smaller forces. The original theaterical cut of amadeus remains one of the best films ever made about music.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.