Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The conception of this symphonic ideal, and the development of technical means to implement it, is probably Beethoven’s greatest single achievement. It is par excellence a Romantic phenomenon, however ‘Classical’ one may wish to regard his purely musical procedures. It is also a feature that has offended certain critics, especially in the early part of the twentieth century, and set them against Beethoven. The composer himself was capable of producing a cynical and enormously popular travesty of his own symphonic ideal in the ‘Battle Symphony’ of 1813.1

  The Battle Symphony, Op. 91, aka ‘Wellington’s Victory’ or ‘The Battle of Vittoria’, was admittedly an aberration, although it was to bring Beethoven much needed money, exactly as he calculated. Pace the late scholars Kerman and Tyson, both of whom were lifelong academics on generous faculty salaries, it is not cynicism for an artist to scratch a living as best he may. Beethoven’s Battle Symphony never infringed his symphonic ideal, because as ‘characteristic’ (i.e., programme) music involving cannonades and fanfares it was less a symphony than what today would be a film score, something along the lines of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated 1812 overture. It told a story, dramatically and noisily, complete with national anthems. ‘Battle’ music had been a popular genre since at least the sixteenth century, and this whole period of wars and constantly clashing armies greatly revived it. The Bohemian composer Franz Kocžwara’s Battle of Prague (1788) was written originally for piano trio, but in its piano solo version it went through dozens of editions pirated all over Europe and proving especially popular in England, where no salon or drawing room was without a copy. Beethoven’s bid to cash in on this evergreen genre twenty-five years later was surely forgivable. Nor is it without interest. The hectic fugue with which it ends is not just accomplished writing but has pointers towards the Ninth Symphony. As Beethoven retorted to an adverse critic of the piece, ‘I can shit better than you can write.’

  Beethoven’s ‘symphonic ideal’ is as good a name as any for the style of music he suddenly achieved with the ‘Eroica’. It needs to be called something, if only to mark the gulf it instantly opened up between that work and every other symphony that had gone before it. It was not just a gulf of musical form, however; it suddenly introduced a dimension that even early audiences recognized as an almost moral quality. The music seemed to suggest to its listeners a narrative of high ethical struggle that ended in triumph. It was like an opera—indeed, a rescue opera—but one without singers or book.

  It was small wonder that early listeners found the sheer originality of the new style bewildering. Some gave up on the spot, like the man at the symphony’s first semi-public performance who shouted from the gallery in exasperation. Others no doubt struggled too but realized they were hearing a new and difficult kind of music with an energy that seemed to carry everything before it. And there was no doubt left in anyone’s mind that this symphony’s inner life was intensely personal. The hero of the piece might have been Napoleon, as apparently advertised; or it might have been the composer; or even some mystical fusion of them both; but the four movements recognizably carried the ennobling message of the triumphant progress of a soul. This brand-new phenomenon of nobility in music was the symphonic ideal that Beethoven would carry through into his Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies especially. More than that, it was to lay the foundations of the symphony for the rest of the nineteenth century and even much of the twentieth as classical music’s touchstone of high seriousness. It was no coincidence that Elgar’s most characteristic musical marking was to be nobilmente. Soon orchestras were calling themselves symphony orchestras, and concert halls—especially in the United States—turned into symphony halls or even just ‘The Symphony’.

  Despite his ‘new road’, it was Beethoven’s peculiar skill to retain as much of the Classical style in his music as he needed. In 1809, when his friend and patron Archduke Rudolph fled the French, together with most of Vienna’s court, Beethoven wrote for him the Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, that became known as ‘Lebewohl’ or ‘Les Adieux’. It is a very touching piece, straightforwardly programmatic, its three movements titled Das Lebewohl (‘Farewell’), Abwesenheit (‘Absence’) and Wiedersehn [sic] (‘Reunion’). The form of the first and last movements, oddly so for a middle-period Beethoven work, is of conventional sonata form complete with double bar-lines and repeats. The intensity of the sentiment is entirely his, especially in the bereft slow movement. Yet there is also a warm light-heartedness in the last movement that avoids the least hint of the sententious. All the same, by then a characteristic and essential ingredient of the Viennese Classical style was fast disappearing. This was the ability for music to be simultaneously intimate and amused. It had been one of the defining features of Haydn’s string quartets: urbane, witty exchanges between the instruments as though they were old friends chatting in a coffee house. This sense of good-natured intimacy was one of the sadder casualties of the dawning Romantic age, as Charles Rosen lamented: ‘The civilized gaiety of the classical period, perhaps already somewhat coarsened, makes its last appearances in the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, and in some of the movements of the last quartets. After that, wit was swamped by sentiment.’2

  There was even precedent within the secular Viennese classical tradition for including fugue in a symphony, as Beethoven did in the ‘Eroica’. He was perfectly familiar with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony and was doubtless as astonished as anyone by the perfection of its coda, when the movement’s four motifs or tunes are unexpectedly combined with each other while still making exhilarating music. Yet it was impossible not to feel that Mozart’s display of sheer contrapuntal technique also included the faintest suspicion of ‘showing off’. This element was completely foreign to the hard-won self-expression that preoccupied Beethoven and which is so apparent in the way he used fugue and other contrapuntal effects in the ‘Eroica’. As with his sonata form, Beethoven’s fugues were nothing if not personal. By the time he came to write the ‘Eroica’ he had mastered a counterpoint that could be successfully married to his symphonic ideal. Thereafter, the occasional fugues he incorporated into his music took on more and more of his personal voice until in the last movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata as well as in the Grosse Fuge (the original last movement of the String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 130) Beethoven was producing fugal writing that could have been composed by no one else either before or since, so unique and powerful was the style. In such ways Beethoven made personal the various musical forms he had inherited. Even when he seemed to have abandoned them altogether they were usually present in spirit, bringing order to seemingly wilful disorder.

  Archduke Rudolph of Habsburg, Cardinal and Archbishop of Olmütz, by Johann Baptist von Lampi, probably in 1805. Rudolph was Beethoven’s pupil in late 1803 and became a friend and one of the composer’s long-term patrons. Beethoven dedicated the Fourth Piano Concerto to him.

  CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

  9

  AFTER ‘EROICA’

  The French invasion of Austria in 1805 set in motion a social upheaval that in turn brought radical changes to Vienna’s musical life. Many of the nobility fled the city, and the old eighteenth-century tradition of aristocratic patronage for composers rapidly began to dry up. It continued for Beethoven, but only because his isolation in deafness and his growing celebrity as Europe’s foremost composer made it a matter of honour for his friends and remaining patrons to ensure his material well-being. Even so, at the end of his life his income derived more from publishers than from loyal supporters. Composers of a later generation such as Schubert, twenty-seven years his junior, found virtually no private patrons and were almost wholly dependent on commissions.

  However, the collapse of noble patronage in the wake of the French occupation of Vienna did stimulate the founding in 1814 of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, a society that sponsored true public concerts. This organization represented a definitive shift away from salon concerts and performances in t
he little theatres attached to private palaces. It was a trend that reflected Vienna’s lively new social mix that in addition to the remnants of the aristocracy comprised a burgeoning middle-class audience plus the financial backing of wealthy bankers, mostly Jewish. In essence it was the shape that public music-making would take for almost the next century and a half, until in the aftermath of the Second World War European governments began using public taxes rather than private benefactors to sponsor their nations’ music-making. In some cases (the Soviet Union, for example) this was Beethoven’s youthful vision realized, of composers being paid by the state. On the other hand he would hardly have consented to the quid pro quo of being obliged to write only music that was approved by a regime.

  Well before he died in 1827 Beethoven’s music was out of fashion in Vienna—if, indeed, anything so avant garde had ever been truly fashionable. New styles had superseded it. Rossini took the city by storm in 1817 with the Barber of Seville and other tuneful, accessible operas. Weber’s Der Freischütz followed in 1821 as the smash hit it had already been in Berlin a few months earlier. Then came a new generation of virtuoso instrumentalists. In 1828 Paganini’s apparently superhuman command of the violin led impressionable people seriously to believe that he had made a pact with the devil. The showman in him astutely pandered to this by cultivating a Mephistophelian image, his skeletal frame clothed entirely in black. The following year Chopin came to Vienna with a dazzling piano technique, cutting such a romantic figure that ladies swooned and, when brought round, spoke of the unbearable longings his music aroused in them. Meanwhile Vienna’s long love affair with dancing was being refined into the waltzes, quadrilles and polkas that the Strauss family and others would soon establish as the city’s musical trademark.

  By 1830 it was hard to believe that Beethoven had barely been dead three years: the transcendental seriousness of much of his late music seemed to belong to another era—many thought to another planet. Yet over the years the Viennese public’s attitude towards him had turned to affection. It increasingly mattered less that most would have listened to his later works such as the last piano sonatas and string quartets with bafflement. As the city’s internationally renowned eccentric he had finally become a Viennese. Late in life he had even been imprisoned overnight as a drunken vagrant whose roaring protests that he was Beethoven were met with ribaldry by the policemen who failed to recognize him. (It is impossible not to recall the incident of the adolescent Beethoven furiously trying to rescue his reeling father Johann from arrest in Bonn.) By the time of his death Beethoven was eminent as well as unfashionable, both comic and tragic in true Viennese style. He was deemed fit to lie beside Haydn and Mozart—if only they could discover where Mozart lay, which to this day nobody ever has. Haydn had been buried some thirty miles from Vienna in the Esterházy-built Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, coincidentally the very church where in 1807 Beethoven had conducted the premiere of his Mass in C: an under-rehearsed and chaotic fiasco of a performance.

  There was a huge turnout for Beethoven’s cortège, the Viennese being fonder than most of a good funeral. Schools were closed, and many thousands of people lined the streets to watch his coffin carried to Währing church. After the high solemnity of the funeral service itself came the procession to the cemetery accompanied by the mournful sounds of a brass band in an arrangement of the slow movement of the A flat Piano Sonata, Op. 26, that Beethoven himself had marked Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe. It was notably not the Funeral March of the ‘Eroica’ they chose to play, but he was a hero nevertheless. At the cemetery they heard the actor Heinrich Anschütz deliver the playwright Franz Grillparzer’s short oration outside the gates. Many in the crowds, sharing a sense of black humour, would have been amused had they known the extreme contrast between the solemn pageantry in its honour and the poor corpse the coffin hid. The boy from Bonn had made a dreadful death. His drink-abused liver had packed up and he had swollen grotesquely with dropsy. The liquid was tapped several times to give him some relief, the incisions for which (no anaesthetics or antiseptics in those days) had become infected and the wounds slowly poisoned him. Parts of Beethoven’s body had begun to putrefy very noticeably even before death, and afterwards came the mutilations of doctors cutting out his aural organs to find the cause of his deafness and others eviscerating him to shake their heads over his liver. On top of that the cadaver was almost completely bald, so much of his hair having been cut off and sold to souvenir hunters.

  Beethoven lying dead: Joseph Danhauser’s lithograph from his own drawing made on March 28, 1827, two days after the composer’s death and before souvenir hunters had bribed their way into the room to steal locks of his hair, leaving the corpse nearly bald.

  CREDIT: THE ART ARCHIVE / BEETHOVEN HOUSE, VIENNA / COLLECTION DAGLI ORTI

  Also unknown to the crowds, it would be Beethoven’s posthumous fate to be dug up twice before being moved to Vienna’s enormous Zentralfriedhof where today he lies beneath a copy of his original obelisk surrounded by other famous composers or else (as in Mozart’s case) their memorials: the nearest thing to a musicians’ Valhalla as can be found. In Thomas Hardy’s epic verse drama about the Napoleonic era The Dynasts, Napoleon muses after Waterloo:

  ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves

  To light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour.’1

  Beethoven might equally well have said the same on his deathbed. Such is the passing of heroes.

  The extraordinary art this hacked and rotting body had so lately produced and which has so deeply influenced people’s minds for nearly two centuries still offers plentiful evidence of things not seen. Much of it has an unmistakably visionary quality, but a vision of what none can say. The cultural tyranny that Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies in particular have imposed for the best part of two centuries is unfortunate if it has deterred a wider listening public from revelling in the exquisite balance and lyrical qualities of so many of his earlier works (for example, the Op. 18 string quartets or the ‘Pastoral’ Piano Sonata, Op. 28), as well as the sublime inscrutabilities of the last five string quartets, the last three piano sonatas, the Diabelli Variations for piano and, of course, the Grosse Fuge. Intended as the last movement of the Op. 130 string quartet, this work was deemed too knotty and unplayable at the time, and Beethoven instead substituted a more conventional finale. The Grosse Fuge went on to baffle the entire nineteenth century. It was seen as one of the Master’s aberrations it was best to draw a veil over (like the Battle Symphony), and it was really only in the twentieth century that people began to come to terms with it. It was Stravinsky who famously described it as ‘this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary for ever’.

  Beethoven’s immense funeral procession as recorded by Franz Stöber in a watercolour. The event was attended by an estimated 20,000 people, including Vienna’s great and good. The bier was accompanied by the cream of the city’s artists, including Hummel and Schubert (who would himself die the following year).

  CREDIT: BEETHOVEN HAUS, BONN / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

  Each generation is newly uncertain that it has fully got to grips with Beethoven, and it might anyway now be impossible. Greatness has long since encased him like glass over a mantel clock, and, as Oscar Wilde once remarked to his friend Whistler, to be great is to be misunderstood. Much more recently the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross has wondered whether Beethoven can now ever escape the fate of ‘monumental meaninglessness’.2

  Even so, there were critics in his lifetime who claimed to understand his music. This is what the poet, artist and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote in 1810 as a preliminary to reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:

  Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen qu
ickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world! Beethoven’s music wields the lever of fear, awe, horror, and pain, and it awakens that eternal longing that is the essence of the romantic. Thus he is a purely romantic composer, and if he has had less success with vocal music, is this because vocal music excludes the character of indefinite longing and represents the emotions, which come from the realm of the infinite, only by the definite affects of words?3

  Beethoven thought very highly of Hoffmann’s attribution of such transcendent emotionality to his music—as well he might, seeing himself enshrined in the same continuity of musical greats as Bach, Haydn and Mozart. More than that, though, Hoffman had described a heroic art that could exercise immense power over everyone who heard it. This it duly did, and with practical consequences.

  By mid-nineteenth century Beethoven’s symphonies had become many orchestras’ staple diet, the calorie-laden centrepieces of concerts in which new music from living composers often functioned more as cuisine minceur. It was Beethoven who did most to shape the future category of ‘classical’ music. Alex Ross has put this well.