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.
Kindly find yourself copies of the 40th Symphony, the 20th Piano Concerto (or any of the range 20-25), the Requiem the d minor string quartet. And then tell me how unstimulating they are. :-)
The 40th symphony is pretty good, and is the only one of Mozart's symphonies that I could ever stand to listen to.
Dear Borges,
I actually prefer above all the second movement of the Moonlight Sonata. I used to love to play it when I was young. You're right - the third movement is the toughy. Ouch! I remember when I first heard it played, I couldn't even imagine how fingers could run that fast.
sitetest
The 41st is magisterial. Seriously, Mozart's music was harmonically daring. It was considered abstruse and difficult to follow by his contemporaries. He could do things Beethoven couldn't do. A much better melodist for instance. The slow movements of the major piano concertos are inspired from start to finish. Say the 21th Piano Concerto's Andante (Elvira Madigan music).
The Requiem never did much for me. I am unfamiliar with the Clarinet quartets. The clarinet is not one of my favorite instruments though (granted I prefer it to the awful flute).
Dear Republicanprofessor,
"I'll even do the ping list, if no one else volunteers."
Tag, you're it.
You can make mine the first name on the list. ;-)
sitetest
Mozart was a great melodist. Melody alone is not enough - for me. I want a piece to have body, range, organization, passioin, emotion, and send chills down my spine.
Do try them - they are beautiful.
I think the opinion of a musical amateur would be more appropriate. The guy seems not to understand Beethoven in particular nor musical history in general. Schoenberg and Weber and Webern etc. owe much more to Bach than to Beethoven; of course their work mostly stems from Brahams anyway.
On the other hand,before taking the author seriously, I would like to hear some of his music.
"A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic." ~ Jean Sibelius
Throw me on if you do it.
In other words, you assume that Beethoven's music represented, for him, a "struggle for holiness."
Perhaps - but it is unclear whether he died a Catholic or a Goethean pantheist.
The 20th Piano Concerto is so freakin' beautiful. So is LV's 6th Symphony. I'm not sure I can pick a favorite between the two composers.
Ditto to that!
I consider myself a musical dunce but I know what I like.
Beethoven sucks!Does not!
Does too!
Not!
Does so!
Nuh-uh!
Uh-huh!
No way!
Way!
Dude!
Duuude!
Seriously, Mozart's music was harmonically daring.He was at his most daring in the introduction of the "Dissonant" quartet. It anticipates the 20th century.
Hehe. I guess my synapses just work different than yours.
The Hammerkalvier Sonata is one incredible piece of piano music! Music like that makes me marvel at what kind of mind could create something of that order.
Look for Piano Sonata no. 29 in Bb, Opus 106, 'The Hammerklavier.'
Not quite. Mozart heard Bach's work at Leipzig (or Dresden or somewhere) during the 1760s and commented that here was someone he could learn from. The music was living then.
Likewise Beethoven's early study with Neefe was based on Bach's work. The WTC to a large extent.
Please add me to the ping list.
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