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“IF music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it…” The opening lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night might have entered the thoughts of the uniquely privileged Viennese audience that witnessed Ludwig van Beethoven premiering his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in the Austrian capital on Dec 22, 1808.
For good measure, the artistic showcase also featured the first performances of his Piano Concerto No 4 and Choral Fantasy. A 20th-century equivalent would have entailed The Beatles, say, unveiling ‘Sgt Pepper’ and ‘Abbey Road’ simultaneously in a live performance. Incidentally, the latter album’s Because is based on reversing the chords of the Moonlight Sonata. It wasn’t the only time turned up in the pop pantheon.
By 1808, Beethoven was already viewed as the most fascinating composer of his age. He was born in Bonn, probably precisely 250 years ago today. He first visited Vienna as a teenage prodigy, and may have been tutored by Mozart. He was obliged to return to Bonn to attend to his dying mother, but went back to Vienna at Haydn’s invitation five years later and remained there for the rest of his life.
I cannot claim to be an aficionado of Western classical music — the temporal investment it requires has always been a hard slog. Yet there are compositions that insinuate themselves into the subconscious, from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to Strauss’s Blue Danube, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Ravel’s Bolero and Chopin’s etudes.
Beethoven holds his own 250 years after he was born.
I would make a particular exception, though, for Beethoven. It dates back, perhaps, to a presentation on the weekly Disney show featured on PTV in the early 1970s, where a dramatised biography of Beethoven showed the opening chords of the Fifth Symphony being inspired by a debtor banging on the door of the composer’s rented accommodation. Those dramatic notes are more often described as the knocking of Fate.
The show was possibly more accurate in its depiction of a deaf Beethoven being swung around by a soloist after inaugurating his Ninth Symphony to witness the rapturous response. The Ninth came almost a decade after the Eighth, which had been unveiled before an audience of international leaders at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
That particular segment, now the official anthem of the European Union, has stood the test of time in more ways than one. Beethoven’s death centenary in 1927 was widely commemorated across Europe, from Britain to the Soviet Union. As a German, though, he was also appropriated by the Nazi regime, which continued to honour him despite determining that he was ‘mixed race’. Based on Beethoven’s looks, the suspicion of African ancestry has persisted, albeit without any firm foundation.
His politics have also served as the basis of much conjecture. Beethoven famously rescinded the dedication of his Third Symphony, Eroica, to Napoleon after the latter emerged as a potential tyrant. And there is a tale, possibly apocryphal, about how he, while out for a walk in a park with Goethe, encountered a royal party and strolled right through it, even as Goethe stepped aside to bow and scrape.
For all his antipathy towards authority, Beethoven relied for much of his life on the sponsorship of European nobles, and many of his compositions were dedicated to princes, counts and barons. But he regularly fell out with patrons, and occasionally detested royals. Yet his Symphony No 8 was unveiled before the crowned heads of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
He never compromised his art, though, confessing at the turn of the century that his devotion to music had prevented him from suicide. His personal life was a shambles, littered with unrequited love or romances doomed by the social rules of the era. Yet, despite a handful of detractors, few who heard his compositions could fail to be moved by them.
And the legend only grew after his demise in 1827, just three years after he had inaugurated his magnificent Symphony No 9, whose glorious final movement, a setting for Schiller’s Ode to Joy, has been appropriated for political purposes throughout the past two centuries, and serves today as the European Union’s official hymn.
Not surprisingly, the German Nazi regime picked Beethoven as an avatar (despite concluding that he was mixed race). However, a century earlier Friedrich Engels had waxed eloquent about the Fifth Symphony, and some six decades later Vladimir Lenin declared he could listen to the Appassionata sonata every day. “What astonishing, superhuman music,” he is quoted by Maxim Gorky as saying. “It always makes me proud … to think that people can work such miracles.”
But perhaps the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim summed up Beethoven best a few years ago by pointing out that “he freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure”, and that much of his work could be paraphrased “by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living”.
Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2020
