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.
Dear Finny,
"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,..."
I always thought that, too, but my sons' piano teacher informs me that several of them are actually pretty tough, especially No. 8 in F Major (I used to play it, myself).
Bach does something for me, as well. My younger son really loves JS, too (although for him, he likes pretty much everything written from 1750 or before - I guess I do, too.).
sitetest
Have we had this conversation before? If you want silly, "Amedeus" is silly.
Ever read Mozart's letters? He was silly and fun loving! there's a lot more to that film then him though. the whole thing is perfectly edited. Like a great piece of music!
Telemann is deathly boring! But Bach and Mozart combine science and art like no other composers.
No, my knowledge of classical music is very limited. Just the most famous pieces that we've all heard.
And the Flight oc the Bumblee isn't any longer then a few minutes.
But it seems like hours! ;-)
Maybe an overdose of The Green Hornet is what did it. Rimsky Korsakov's original orchestral version written in 1900 or so, is a fun piece of musical anthropomorphism.
It really is a good CD. I heard a movement of it on Classical 103.5, the top-rated classical radio station in the country (based out of DC). It was their CD pick of the week back in April.
Ah, thanks. Better than what I've been listening.
Yes, I played the 8th one, also, a favorite. Perhaps my most favorite that I could play well was the second one, haunting and beautiful.
No I haven't but Thayer is about 150 years old so there may be a few things discovered lately that he didn't know.
Not all of Telemann is boring much of his work is glorious.
After Bach and Vivaldi he is my favorite baroque composer.
The Big Three of the Baroque are always stated as Bach, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti. Strangely enough, Vivaldi was virtually forgotten prior to the 20th century. Surprising given how cheerful and colorful his tuneful music is. All Hail the Red Priest!
Could you please add me to the list? Thanks!
Scarlatti does nothing for me. I have a few cds of his music and have tried to get into it to no avail.
Handel is fantastic but most of his work is of opera size so you must devote an hour or so to hear it. Nothing tops the Messiah though.
Before Beethoven, most composers were nothing more then hired hands at the King's court, treated as servants and such. Beethoven was the first composer to establish some degree of independence from all of that. It is in large degree due to Beethoven that musicians today are treated like royalty (instead of the other way around).
I'm not sure where the author was going with this article. While his music is more dissonant, it is as perfect as that of Mozart or Bach. I wouldn't change a note.
Mozart sort of set the stage for the freelance musician when he left the Archbishop of Salzburg and went to Vienna. HE had virtually no patronage for those last 10 years. But the conception of Artist as Hero came part and parcel with the time and would have happened with some composer. Beethoven was the perfect match of Artist, Time and Sensibility.
Please add me to the list.
True, and not just in music. Some people are quick to find villains who killed off schools or styles or philosophies. Sometimes there are such villains and ways of art or life are cut off before they reach their full flowering. But not in this case.
Such things don't last forever. One can't expect that composers would be writing in Mozart's or Haydn's style two centuries later. Eventually their way of writing would have gotten repetitive, predictable, and boring.
That's the way art has worked in the West. It reaches an impasse, and then some new innovation renews it. Maybe this is unfair to non-Western art, but it does appear, roughly speaking, that artists in other parts of the world reached perfection in a style, repeated themselves, and began to decline, without having achieved a true breakthrough to new forms and styles. I'm not sure that this self-renewal in the arts still works now, but it was impressive in its day.
For a long time, Beethoven and romanticism were dominent in concert halls. People who were discontented with that style found their way back to Mozart's classicism or to the Bach and the Baroque -- sometimes played on the original instruments. There's a lot to love in that music. It's more modest and less pretentious than what came afterwards.
But it's not a question of parties or ideological combat. Mozart and Bach were refreshing after years of romantic domination. But if we were living two centuries ago and only heard the classical style, we would probably be completely bowled over by Beethoven's innovation. Beethoven showed what the potential of modern instruments and orchestras could produce, and that was a major revelation.
I remember Leonard Bernstein doing the whole Beethoven symphonic series on PBS in the late 1980's. It was called Bernstein/Beethoven (of course, Lennie deserved to be listed first). Anyway, Maximillain Schell was the cohost, and he would ask Bernstein about the symphony being presented or Beethoven's music in general.
On point they discussed was that despite not being particularly good at writing melodies, being a so-so orchestrator and having numerous short-comings, Beethoven managed to write some truly grand works. Why? Bernstein argued that Beethoven's music had perferct form (which if I remember correctly) simply meant that each note sounded like it HAD to be the one that followed.
I love the music of a lot of composers born over the past 200 years, but I'm still a sucker for Baroque. Another discussion I'd like to see would be one comparing Bach and Handel, since I tend to think GFH was better.
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