Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Agnus Dei

  The strangest and most haunting Agnus Dei written to its time begins in an atmosphere of stark tragedy in B minor, which Beethoven called a “black key.” There are only a few words in this final segment of the Mass Ordinary: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Dona nobis pacem, Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Give us peace. The text comes from the words of John the Baptist when he first saw Jesus: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” That image connects Christ, who sacrificed himself for the salvation of humanity, to the sacrificial lamb of Passover. Like any composer of an ambitious mass, Beethoven will have to repeat these words a good deal in order to fill out a substantial final movement. His approach will be to reinterpret the words en route. He breaks the text into the usual three segments, the first and second focused on miserere nobis, the third on dona nobis pacem. But in the end his Agnus Dei is a personal statement, rising from tradition but stretching beyond it.

  Many Agnus Dei sections in masses begin with a gentle, pastoral evocation of Jesus as Lamb of God. Beethoven begins with a moaning, foreboding texture of bassoons, horns, and low strings as accompaniment to the prayer by the bass soloist and men’s voices from the choir. The operative idea from the beginning is not Christ as savior but the words miserere nobis, have mercy on us, which the music portrays in swelling, funereal tones like a cry of suffering humanity.

  The funeral tread stops, the music harkens. Agnus Dei, the choir chants, pianissimo. In piercing tones breaking out in the chorus in falling thirds we hear Dona! Dona nobis pacem! Give! Give us peace! Gentle music in D major and 6/8 begins, the string figures fluttering like the wings of the holy dove. We have awakened from a dolorous trance to a pastoral scene and a flowing and beautiful fugato whose theme sets the single word pacem:

  At the head of this section, Beethoven placed in the score, Bitte um innern and äußern Frieden, “Prayer for inner and outer peace.” The fugato is a pastoral idyll, the sounding image of peace, its meter and flowing lines recalling the violin solo that represents Christ in the Benedictus. The prayer swells, then the orchestra stops and leaves the chorus singing a cappella, with great simplicity and intimacy, dona nobis pacem. Beethoven has used this device of dropping out the instruments here and there throughout the mass, but this is the most poignant instance. He wants us to feel peace in our hearts and minds. Accompanied by figures dancing up in long ascents and down in descents, the choir sighs, pacem, pacem, in floating, archaic harmonies.

  The yearning for peace intensifies; the pastoral and prayerful tone gives way to a demand: “Give us peace! Peace! Peace!” The music appears to be building toward a conclusion, a coda. But that is interrupted by something wrenchingly alien: throbbing drums, flurries of strings like gusts of wind presaging a storm. Suddenly out of nowhere there are bugle calls. The soloists take up a cry marked “anxiously”: “Lamb of God! Have mercy on us!” The drums and bugles return, fortissimo, under which the soprano’s cry for mercy can hardly be heard. In this moment Beethoven explodes the form, in the same way he did with the storm in the Pastoral Symphony.50 Armies have disrupted the rite, destroyed the peace. It is war.

  Even this shocking, high-Beethoven intrusion, though, had a precedent. As so often, that precedent was Haydn. In his Mass in Time of War, written in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Haydn’s Agnus Dei is interrupted by trumpets and drums in the same place in the service, and in the same way: mounting drum taps and bugle calls, as if an army were surrounding the cathedral. In Haydn the choir’s call for peace finally becomes militant, as does Beethoven’s. But Haydn does not shatter the music as violently as Beethoven, does not break the form so completely, does not make the cries for mercy so anguished.

  In Beethoven’s Agnus Dei, the sounds of war recede, the music recovers. In a chain of falling thirds the chorus again intones, Dona! Dona! Dona nobis pacem!51 But the pastoral mood, the idyllic vision of peace, is vanished for good. Dona becomes a surging fugato that leads to a return of the beautiful, sighing lines on pacem, which as before turn into a shouted demand. Yet again that is interrupted by an alien force. War overwhelms the music.

  For this section Beethoven first sketched ideas for marches. Then he settled on something more ambiguous: a driving, militant fugue in gaunt colors, the fugue theme a mangling of the pastoral pacem theme:

  Years before, he wrote over an idea in the Eroica sketches “a strange voice.” Here is a truly foreign voice, cold, harsh, and bustling, like a bitter parody of his own heroic style (and this may be the point). In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror.

  Now we understand what Beethoven meant by “prayer for inner and outer peace.” The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos.

  For a second time the music recovers. The intonations of Dona nobis pacem have gone from pastorally peaceful to demanding to fearful. Now prayers for peace break out again, and the flowing 6/8 returns—but it is not a real recapitulation, and still not with pastoral peace. In fact the texture is strangely broken up. The fortissimo demands of pacem! pacem! seem to fall apart. The music drifts.

  Then in the distance, a war drum. The choir prays again: pacem, pacem. Again the drum interrupts, farther away, its alien B-flat almost out of hearing.52 Staccato lines skitter up and down. The chorus makes a longer cry for peace, forte but not fortissimo. In this last choral phrase of the mass, the sopranos in their cadence again descend only to F-sharp, not all the way to a decisive finish on D. The orchestra gives a scant four bars of climactic music, ending on a staccato D-major chord. There the Missa solemnis finds its precipitous finish, in an atmosphere of fragmentation and irresolution.

  What has happened? Generations will debate it, often trying to make the end into a pious and affirmative conclusion. But if Beethoven has put away many of his habits of development and musical logic in this work, he has not abandoned cause and effect, proportion, underlying logic, even when he intends to violate them. The war interludes break out around the rite, interrupt the service, shatter the peace, tear apart the form. The peace, the form, never recover their equilibrium.

  In musical terms, with the sounds of war, Beethoven injects an alien and unprepared but overwhelming dramatic force into the music, in the same way that his thunderstorm once broke up a peasant dance in the Pastoral. This is a logic of image and narrative, not music. By the laws of music that Beethoven bent and adapted but never lost sight of, a new idea has to be integrated, the disruption it created has to be resolved. In the Pastoral Symphony the resolution is a peaceful, thankful finale. In the Eighth Symphony finale, the disruption of the intrusive C-sharps is resolved in a farcical outbreak of modulations at the penultimate moment.

  In Beethoven’s Agnus Dei, there is no integration and no resolution of the violence and disruption. The rumbling of drums at the end pictures war receding, at the same time reminds us of our terror. At one point Beethoven sketched a triumphant ending, labeled the receding-drum idea peace. Then he decided that, no, to finish this gigantic work of faith he wanted a curt, ambiguous, unresolved ending.

  A work of faith it is. But in the end the Missa solemnis is Beethoven’s personal faith as an individual reaching toward God, not an assertion of the credos and dogmas of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church. He subsumes doctrine in some degree, as he must in order to write a mass at all, but he goes beyond doctrine into a unique mingling of faith, spirituality, and humanism. He created a mass that subsumed the doctrines and the physical rite of the church, the very gestures of the priests and the preluding of the organist, but he turns them into something b
oth personal and universal.53 Ultimately the Missa solemnis is a statement of faith and also of doubt, beyond the walls of any church. From the heart, may it go to the heart—person to person, without priests. The Missa solemnis is Beethoven’s cathedral in sound.

  At the end there is no triumph of faith, no triumph of peace, no triumph at all. God has not answered humanity’s prayers, its demands, its terrified pleas for peace. The drums have receded, but they are still out there, and they can come back. Beethoven’s most ambitious work, his cathedral, the one he intended to be his greatest, ends with an unanswered prayer. What, then, is the answer? Whether he planned two successive works as a question and answer, or whether it happened because Beethoven was who he was and believed as he did, his answer was the Ninth Symphony.

  31

  You Millions

  FOR BEETHOVEN THE Ninth Symphony in D Minor, op. 125, had a long background. It marked a return to roots in his life, his art, and his culture. Those roots reached back to his youth in Bonn during its golden years of Aufklärung, when he first determined to set “An die Freude,” the Friedrich Schiller poem that in fiery verses embodied the spirit of the time. The intellectual atmosphere he breathed in Bonn included the philosophy of Kant, the Masonic ideal of brotherhood, the Illuminist doctrine of a cadre of the enlightened who will point humanity toward freedom and happiness. Passing through his life and awareness in the next decades were the French Revolution and its art, the funeral dirges and music for public festivals; then the wars and the burgeoning hopes of the Napoleonic years; then the destruction of those hopes and the end of the age of heroes and benevolent despots.

  Also simmering within the Ninth Symphony as it took shape was the model and the threat of Haydn, who wrote The Creation and the song that became the unofficial Austrian national anthem. Beyond Haydn lay traditions and voices and models that Beethoven had always turned to for ideas and inspiration: Handel, Mozart, Bach, and the history of the symphony, including what he himself brought to that history.

  Once, the threads of his early years had gathered into the Eroica, which secured the symphony for more than a century as the summit of musical genres. Now the accumulated threads of a lifetime converged to create the Ninth, the sister work to the Missa solemnis, the answer to the human and spiritual question that the mass left hanging: if God cannot give us peace, what can? Beethoven did not consider the mass and the Ninth his final statements, because he hoped to write still greater works if fate gave him the chance. Fate did not oblige. So if the mass and symphony were not the end, in many ways they were the summation and culmination of his life and work.

  The Ninth itself took at least a decade to condense from its first vague imaginings, during anguished and drifting years, to the conception that it became: a monumental symphony whose culmination is a finale with the unprecedented inclusion of a choir and soloists singing verses from “An die Freude.” As it took shape, the music of the symphony itself traces that same journey from vaporous beginnings through tragedy to triumph.

  When in his teens Beethoven declared to friends his intention of setting the whole of Schiller’s “To Joy,” one of his adult admirers wrote to Schiller’s wife, “I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime.” If Beethoven attempted that setting at all, any traces of it disappeared; several years later, he suppressed another setting that he had mentioned to a publisher. But he never stopped thinking about the poem—he remembered it after Napoleon betrayed the republican dream, and after Austria set out to erase the memory of that dream. Since the 1780s there had been some forty settings of “An die Freude,” including one from 1815 by the young Franz Schubert.1 They were widely sung in Masonic and Illuminati lodges. Most of these settings were, like the poem itself, in the tradition of the geselliges Lied, a social song intended to be sung by groups of friends.

  Ideas about a “Freude” setting and/or a work with chorus, perhaps as part of a symphony or some sort of freestanding piece, began to turn up in Beethoven’s sketches of the middle teens. In early 1816 he added one more sketch to his dozens of ideas for symphonies:

  From Cook, Beethoven

  This is one of his few symphony sketches that eventually took wing. It is recognizable as the opening of the eventual Ninth. More sketches turned up in the winter of 1817–18, also involving what became central ideas. One of them was a string tremolo on the open fifth A–E, the essential concept of the beginning. Loose, abortive ideas for the second-movement scherzo appeared, written beneath one of them, “Symphony at the beginning only 4 voices 2 Vln, Viol, Bass among them forte with other voices and if possible bring in all the other instruments one by one.” Sketches toward what became the slow movement may first have been intended for a different piece.2

  By around 1818 he had fixed on the idea of a symphony with voices to enter in the finale or earlier. He was also thinking about the archaic church modes, though those ended up mainly in the mass and a late quartet. He speculated about the music from a slow movement returning in the finale, also an ecclesiastical touch and a Bacchic (meaning dancing and ecstatic) movement. Around the same time he wrote in his Tagebuch, “To write a national song on the Leipzig October and perform this every year. N.B. each nation with its own march and the Te deum laudamus.”3 Here he imagined some sort of national work for an international festival. In one way and another, all these ideas ended up in the Ninth.

  After what appears to be a long hiatus came a few bars of ideas including, from 1822, a sketch toward variations on Handel’s well-known Funeral March from Saul. The snippet of the Handel march Beethoven jotted down is a precursor of the coda of the Ninth’s first movement:4

  From Levy, Beethoven

  That year he sketched a simple, almost chantlike setting of “An die Freude” with this note: “Sinfonie allemand after which the chorus enters or also without variations. End of the Sinfonie with Turkish music and vocal chorus.”5 So by that point he was thinking about a symphony to end with a choral setting of “An die Freude” involving music in the pseudo-Turkish style familiar in military music.

  All these loose ideas, of the kind that characterize most of his jottings in the sketchbooks, precipitated into intensive work in the spring of 1823. By then two things had happened. In November 1822, the Philharmonic Society in London accepted his proposal to write a symphony for it, offering 50 pounds; and he finished the Diabelli Variations and had nothing else pressing to do. The London commission was yet another impetus to go to England and see whether he could duplicate Haydn’s triumphs. Around April 1823, new sketches and drafts for the symphony followed on the completion of the Diabellis.6 Some eleven months later, the Ninth was done.

  When he got down to the job, he already had what amounted to a final conception of the opening. But he had a problem that needed to be addressed before he went further. He was determined to make this an end-directed symphony, that end being a choral finale involving voices and “An die Freude.” As he said, Always keep the whole in view. If the finale and its theme were to be a goal, the music needed to foreshadow it from the beginning. So before he got too far into the first movement, he had to find his finale theme. In that respect the symphony was going to be composed back to front, as the Eroica and the Kreutzer Sonata had been: the leading ideas of the beginning being developed from the main theme of the finale.

  Quickly he found his opening phrase for the poem:

  For the moment, though, that was all he found. The rest of the theme, which would encompass each of his chosen verses of the Schiller (selected from the much longer complete poem), would not come. But in fact the inception of the theme was all he needed, for the moment, to make his foreshadowings. The first phrase could stand for the whole of the Freude theme, just as the first notes of the Eroica theme often stood for the whole. He could finish the rest of the finale theme later.

  At the same time, that first phrase, setting the first four lines of the Schiller, determined the style and direction of the
Freude theme. It is above all simple, an ascent from the third degree of the scale to the fifth and back down to the first degree, all in quarter and half notes. Here Beethoven’s longstanding concern with simplicity and directness found its ultimate distillation in a little ditty that was going to be the foundation of a monumental work. That ascent from the third degree to the fifth and scalewise back down to the first would be the essence of the foreshadowings in the symphony. So strong was that presence that it took him considerable pains, when he finally got to it, to finish the tune in the same plainspoken spirit while giving it at least a little seasoning.

  Beyond that, what did he have in mind as he shaped the Freude theme from its seminal first phrase? He already understood that the finale and its theme were going be the goal, the destination. Which is to say, the symphony was going to be a journey toward joy, starting in despair. It was a familiar narrative for Beethoven; he had done something like it in the Fifth Symphony. And he knew what he was aiming for in the Freude theme itself: a tune in the simple, popular, rhythmically and harmonically straightforward style of a geselliges Lied, especially the kind the Freemasons used to sing (before they were banned in Austria).

  In all this he was doing what he usually did, taking models and expanding them in his own directions, sometimes expanding them exponentially. One model was his own Choral Fantasy for piano, voices, and orchestra. Beethoven himself described the finale of the Ninth as in the vein of the Choral Fantasy. The leading themes for both pieces have the kind of straightforward, declamatory style of other of his songs on echt-Aufklärung texts going all the way back to Who Is a Free Man? from his youth (which his Bonn friend Wegeler turned into a Masonic song).