Forgive a slightly longer missive: Beethoven demands it.
You are going to read, and probably hear, a great deal about this complex man during 2020, this being the 250th anniversary of his birth.
I am no expert, no musicologist, just an amateur enthusiast, but Ludwig van Beethoven gets my vote as being one of the most influential people ever to walk the planet. The simple truth is that he threw away the rule book, and nothing in music, perhaps even the wider arts, was the same after him.
I remember the precise moment I first heard his music. I was taken as a young child to one of the early Charlie Brown films. Along with Linus and Snoopy the dog, Schroeder is Charlie Brown’s closest friend. But the other passion in Schroeder’s life is Beethoven. He is, you might say, nuts about him.
During the film, Schroeder plays the slow movement from the Pathétique sonata, and I went home resolved to learn the piece. (Battling the two outer movements came some years later. This became something of a pattern for me – ‘Oh, I could play that!’, only to discover that Beethoven rarely composed simple stand-alone works.)
Readers of these posts will know that Schubert is my favourite composer. And yet if I had to single out the composer who has had the greatest impact on me in so many ways, it would have to be Beethoven. In the context of classical music, I am minded to replace the word ‘music’ in John Miles’s famous lyric to read ‘Beethoven was my first love and he will be my last.’
Why so?
It may sound hokey, but in Beethoven’s music you have everything of what it means to be human. Schulz’s cartoon above is more than just funny. Beethoven’s irascibility, temper, sartorial obliviousness, hopeless love-life, manifold dwellings, and general defiance of almost everything, are well known; as is his near thirty-year struggle with deafness, surely the cruellest possible affliction for a musician.
All of these traits and frustrations are writ large in his music: never before has the personality of a composer been so glaringly exposed in his output, be it symphony, concerto, sonata, overture, choral or chamber. All his music articulates life itself.
Lest you feel tempted to charge me with spewing out sentimental nonsense, let me try and demonstrate it with a piece of music with which you may not be familiar.
Beethoven wrote sixteen string quartets, a format first used by Haydn, then developed by Mozart. Conveniently, these fall into three periods in his life, early, middle, and late; and it is the slow movement of one of the late ones, no.13, which sums up humanity more than any piece I know.
Oh no, he’s going all heavy on me now, I hear you groan. Hold on.
Nothing demonstrates the difficulty of writing about music better than this. That’s because the Cavatina, as it is called, has no tune per se that will leave you humming it later. It’s not about melody, it’s about feeling. Marked molto espressivo, you may not ‘get’ it at first. I didn’t. But after a few listens, you will want to submit to its profound and ineffable beauty, yearning for it to go on when it comes to a sudden halt. At its centre is a searing violin. The music soon engulfs you in this heart-wrenching blanket of tenderness. About half way through comes a brief ‘choke’, a change of tempo, and it is widely believed that a blotch on the original score is a teardrop from the composer.
Beethoven could only hear these notes in his head – he couldn’t try it out on a keyboard. Composed less than two years before he died, you can feel the aching sorrow of his condition, but also a sense that after all the bang, crash, wallop we tend to associate with Beethoven, this, more than anything else, (and he wrote some truly gorgeous slow movements) is the purest summation of the man, his music, his life – and, by extension, humanity itself.
If that consigns me to Pseuds’ Corner, well – show me the way. But not before you’ve clicked the image.
Manuscript Notes 