I was about ten years old when I began paying attention to classical music. My parents (especially my mother) played classical music on the record player quite often. One night I began actually listening to the record playing in another room. It was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, I fell in love with it, and began listening to all the records we had.
From Tchaikovsky to Beethoven, Bach and Mozart (I didn’t particularly like them), Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Smetana, Debussy. And eventually others.
But Beethoven was one of my favorites. I loved the 5th and 6th symphonies–we didn’t have any of the others at the time–and the piano sonatas we had: the Moonlight, the Pathetique, and number 24. That’s all the Beethoven we had them, but when I could I began buying books and music, and am still expanding my collection.
It must have been a year or two later, at the house of my aunt and uncle that I first encountered Beethoven’s Ninth symphony. I put it on, and almost immediately realized that this was something much different from what I’d heard before.
And two nights ago I came upon a documentary about the Ninth told from a variety of viewpoints.
From a Chinese composer working on a piece inspired by the Ninth, from Gregory Prokofiev (grandson of composer Sergei Prokofiev) also working on such a piece, from a musician born deaf (how one gets to be a musician when born deaf I have no idea), from two deaf people attending a performance in Barcelona, rehearsal of an orchestra at a music festival in Salzburg Austria, rehearsal of an orchestra in an obscure town in Japan which was where German POWs performed it and introduced it to the Japanese. Now it’s performed annually (maybe not this year) with a chorus of 10,000. Also an orchestra in Kinshasa, capital of the Republic of the Congo.
An awful lot of people are moved at least as deeply by it as I am.
Most probably know (but not necessarily) that Beethoven was stone deaf when he wrote the piece. He was nearing the end of his life and career, and many composers (and creative artists of all sorts) are no longer as good at the end of their careers as at the beginning. Beethoven went against that stereotype. He also wrote his Missa Solemnis and his late string quartets, which many believe to be among his greatest works.
The deaf pianist pointed out that at least Beethoven had had normal hearing at the beginning of his life, had become an extremely fine pianist, and had experience with composition. But he began to lose his hearing about age 28. It’s not hard to imagine the difficulty of deafness for a musician, and especially for a composer. But Beethoven didn’t begin writing his really great works until he was past thirty, having decided to continue composing despite his deafness.
Because of it he became increasingly isolated. He still had friends, but it was harder and harder for him to communicate with them. And he had very little money. About 1810 or 11 he had considered going to work for a nobleman (as Joseph Haydn had done), but was dissuaded by three noblemen who lived in Vienna and promised to subsidize him.
Alas, that never happened. One of the noblemen unexpectedly died, and Beethoven’s period was also that of Napoleon, –and the Napoleonic wars, an unstable time. He never got the subsidies he needed.
He also spent about six years writing almost nothing. During that time he became guardian of one of his nephews, which may have been a way of giving back for the gift of his tremendous talent. The period doesn’t seem to have otherwise have been very rewarding: he and his nephew didn’t get along well. Beethoven seems to have been a very difficult person.
He also yearned to be married, but probably could never have found a wife willing to live with him, even if he could have supported a wife. One biographer says he did find someone willing, but was too afraid to take the plunge and marry her. We know that his father abused him, trying to make him into another Mozart. Maybe this had something to do with his unwillingness to take that chance.
He began thinking about the symphony in 1818, but didn’t actually write it until 1823. It took time to arrange for a performance–it was canceled and rescheduled several times. But when performed, in 1824, Beethoven conducted, and it seems to have been an immediate hit. Beethoven’s friends had to turn him around, though, or he wouldn’t have known the whole audience was applauding.
This wasn’t his last work, though. He wrote his last five string quartets after that before becoming sick and dying in 1827. Many think these to have been some of his greatest works.
I listened to his Fifth Symphony recently, and found again that it doesn’t wear as well as some of his other works. It’s dramatic enough, but seems kind of disconnected to me. I don’t really care for his first four symphonies, either. I love the first movement of his Seventh, but the rest of it I’m less thrilled with. The Eighth is nice enough, but short. That leaves the Sixth, the Pastoral, which is my favorite, except for the Ninth. I like to listen to it every spring, but didn’t get around to it this year.
Beethoven is kind of an anomalous figure. Not as prolific as Haydn, Bach, or Mozart, but more emotionally accessible than they. He wasn’t a Romantic composer, though. He was still influenced by the Classical and Baroque periods, so he stands somewhere between. He tried almost every genre of classical music: a ballet, an opera, an oratorio. It wasn’t that he couldn’t write for voice, as witness the Ode to Joy that ends the Ninth symphony, as well as his opera and his Choral Fantasy. I think he also wrote songs, though one hardly hears about them.
But he was much more comfortable with piano, cello, and violin sonatas, as well as string quartets, though he never managed to write as many of them as either Mozart or Haydn, both prolific to a truly amazing level. Beethoven struggled with his compositions, and arguably wrote more profound music than the other two because of that.
His life was more dramatic because of that too. Few would have blamed him for not continuing composing because of deafness, but he did continue, and suffered from poverty and isolation because of that.
He might have been able to make more money if he’d been willing to write to order, but he never was. In his later career he was promised a large sum by a wealthy Englishman who wanted him to write a symphony in his earlier style. He denounced the man, and declared he would never write anything but what he was inspired to write.
Everyone was influenced by him, but also intimidated. Brahms took a long time, and made a couple of practice attempts with two Serenades before producing any symphonies. The practice seems to have been worth it, though, as most agree that his symphonies can stand comparison with Beethoven. Not that there were no symphonies worth hearing between Brahms and Beethoven, but there were very few. And few if any with the kind of immense talent that could produce such a symphony as the Ninth.
As it was, at least according to some, Beethoven spent his last years writing profound music almost without exception. Something few others could ever do. And he was able to write an ode to joy even though his life wasn’t (at least not obviously) very joyful. He wished for company in the high reaches of the spirit, and it seems unlikely he ever found it.
But he left the evidence of his search to inspire others two hundred years later.
allenstarbuck 