Beethoven's Eroica Read online

  Whoever has won a beloved wife,

  Let him add to the jubilation!…

  And he who never achieved marriage,

  Let him slink away in tears!

  But by then he must have been long resigned to his fate. Despite an earlier succession of quite unrealistic romantic hopes, he had always been doomed to die a bachelor.

  The Heiligenstadt Testament is undoubtedly a tragic document. Yet even so, it is hard for modern readers to know why Beethoven should have experienced his deafness as quite such a profound source of shame. Maybe it was more a shrinking from the consequences: the irony of a musician losing his most precious asset; the end of his livelihood of public performing; foreseeing the magnanimous pity of bitter rivals and inferiors who would now eagerly reclaim the limelight he had to leave. Yet the tone of this ‘confession’ is similar to that of someone in a twentieth-century suicide note describing a sexuality that he felt had made him a social outcast (‘a dread of putting myself in danger that they will detect my condition’). One might have imagined that in Beethoven’s day of dubious medical recourse—the quack doctors, epidemic diseases, untreatable disabilities and early deaths—his deafness was more likely to have attracted matter-of-factness and sympathy. After all, he must have known for some time that his playing was becoming increasingly inaccurate. He would have glimpsed occasional winces in faces that once were rapt and tearful. But his life furnishes ample evidence of how bad he was at judging people’s reactions, having very little understanding of either himself or of others. It was not just his puns he misjudged: he had simply never acquired many of the basics of ordinary human relations. Beethoven was hopelessly ill equipped to deal with his own overwhelming genius, and his deafness only threw it and him into increasing proximity.

  Yet in some way the Heiligenstadt crisis must have been cathartic because his truly Promethean creativity never flagged. While working on the piano variations in that summer of 1802 he had also been playing around with ideas for a grand new symphony. Beethoven’s copious sketches for what was to become the ‘Eroica’ provide a fascinating insight into what one might call his purposeful gropings towards its final version. In Heiligenstadt he made sketches for the first three movements but seemed not to bother with the finale, presumably since he must already have decided on a set of orchestral variations and fugue on the same ‘Prometheus’ theme, and its outlines were probably clear enough in his mind not to need roughing out at this stage. Obviously its key of E flat major would determine that of the symphony as a whole. As it turned out, he never used these initial drafts. They were part of the laborious craft by which he slowly constructed all his masterpieces as one by one the ideas became clearer to him. After that autumn in Heiligenstadt he shelved the work while keeping it very much alive at the back of his mind.

  The best part of a year then went by while he worked at a steady pace on commissions, finishing the Second Symphony, the three violin sonatas, Op. 30, the three piano sonatas, Op. 31, an unsuccessful oratorio Christus am Oelberge (‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’) and much else besides. Then in the early summer of 1803, in response to his usual urge to get out of Vienna’s dust and noise into the countryside, he again rented rooms, this time in Oberdöbling, not far from Heiligenstadt. Armed with his own heroic acceptance of his fate and a new sketchbook he settled down to serious work on the symphony. In the interim he must have done a good deal of thinking and now had a much clearer idea of where the piece was going. At some point the project had jelled around a ‘programme’ he would probably have been unable to describe schematically, but which had evidently taken overall shape in his mind as partly occupying the portentous spaces defined by ‘Bonaparte’ and ‘heroism’ and partly reflecting his own renewed dedication to his exacting muse.

  * See Chapter 2.

  5

  CONSTRUCTING A SYMPHONY

  How far should one go in presuming to link biographical detail with an artwork? There has long been a tendency among certain biographers, especially modern ones, to try to ‘get inside’ Beethoven’s mind during the creative process. The spur to this has usually been the archive of sketches and other documents he carefully hoarded. Older composers such as Haydn, Mozart and above all Bach have been largely spared the more graphic of such attempts, because they left comparatively few—if any—such pointers as to how a particular work was conceived, as opposed to noting who had commissioned it. A fascination with people’s emotional states was very much a Romantic phenomenon and one perfectly exemplified by Beethoven’s contemporary, the composer-writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was to write so passionately about Beethoven and most famously about the Fifth Symphony. This is how Hoffmann began his rhapsody about ‘a work that is splendid beyond all measure’:

  How irresistibly does this wonderful composition transport the listener through ever growing climaxes into the spiritual realm of the infinite… The character of apprehensive, restless longing contained in this movement is made even plainer by the melodious subsidiary theme. The breast that is oppressed and alarmed by intimations of things monstrous, destructive, and threatening wheezes for air with wrenching gasps.1

  The oppressed breast and wrenching gasps are suggestive of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1782) and the whole consumptive world of the emerging Romantic period. Who knows if it bore even the remotest connection to Beethoven’s creative process? This particular way of writing about music was the progenitor of some of the worst purple passages in the history of Western literature, many of them perpetrated about the same symphony. Perhaps the most notorious example is that in Chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, describing a performance in the Queen’s Hall, London. Forster’s editorializing begins with the bland and unverifiable assertion, ‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’ His ensuing description tells us nothing whatever about the music and everything about the musically illiterate English middle-classes of the Bloomsbury period. We begin at the end of the slow movement:

  Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said ‘Heigho’, and the Andante came to an end… Helen said to her aunt: ‘Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing… Look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,’ breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right. Her brother raised his finger; it was the transitional passage on the drum. For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then—he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. Any fate was titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.

  Goblins, elephants, demigods, angels. As an accomplished composer himself Hoffmann could surely never have perpetrated this menagerie; but as a Romantic writer raised on the novels of Jean Paul his language was undoubtedly that of the emotions music could evoke and a certain extravagance was always likely. One drawback of this way of writing about music is that it becomes nearly inevitable that such writers confuse their own reactions with the composer�
�s intentions.

  There is a case to be made for calling Beethoven the first genius in the modern sense. Previously, an exceptional artist such as Mozart simply had genius as a gift from God. It inhabited rather than personified him. But with the writings of Hoffmann the idea of the genius took hold: an exceptional artist who by his own efforts rather than supernatural ones transfigured himself into a victorious Olympian, a metamorphosis that requisitioned every aspect of his life and being.

  To some extent we still retain this notion. Johann Rochlitz, a tenor singer who knew Beethoven well, once described him as ‘a very able man reared on a desert island and suddenly brought fresh into the world’.2 And there he is: the Caliban archetype of the modern-style genius untainted by a debased civilization, uncaring of social conventions and even of the law, taking dictation from his inner daemon. A holy man, a sadhu, his body covered in filth and ashes but his mind dwelling among the stars. A certain strand of Beethoven biographies has always helped this image along with imaginative word-portraits of the composer striding tousled about the Austrian landscape, howling snatches of music, stamping his feet to inner rhythms and occasionally stopping to scribble illegible notes on a tattered sheaf of manuscript paper or to shake his fist at the elements as a sort of symphonic King Lear. For all one knows it might have been exactly like that: it remains a harmless fancy. Yet trying to guess the thought processes of creative artists is inevitably presumptuous, no matter what they said about themselves. The same applies to assigning a ‘meaning’ to a piece of music even if, as with the ‘Eroica’, the composer assigned it the title ‘Bonaparte’ from the first and labelled its slow movement ‘Funeral March’. Quite enough for speculation; yet nothing like enough for psychoanalytical certainty.

  Then there is the problem of the Past, where things were thought and done differently. Was Mozart’s late G minor Symphony ‘autobiographical’? It is not even clear what this might mean other than in vague terms of the work’s ‘mood’—and even that is open to radically opposed interpretations. Today we hear it as redolent of passion and tragedy, whereas Schumann, the arch-romantic and one of the nineteenth century’s astutest composer-critics, perceived only a ‘Grecian lightness and grace’.

  This portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Mähler, painted around 1804, shows the composer not long after he had finished the ‘Eroica’. His dapper clothes reflect his appearance as Vienna’s foremost ‘Lion of the keyboard’ even though by now his deafness has put that career in terminal decline. Beethoven kept the painting for the rest of his life, perhaps as a nostalgic reminder of his former public glory.

  CREDIT: THE ART ARCHIVE / HISTORISCHES MUSEUM (MUSEEN DER STADT WIEN) VIENNA / COLLECTION DAGLI ORTI

  All the same, given what we already know about Beethoven’s associations of his Third Symphony with Bonaparte, Prometheus and heroism in general, certain liberties will inevitably have to be taken. Not only did the ‘Eroica’ break all previous symphonic moulds in its sheer size and complexity, it was also the nineteenth century’s first major avant-garde work: one that severely challenged both performers and its audiences. It might be useful to note some of the methods Beethoven used without ascribing too many motives, other than technical, to him.

  I ALLEGRO CON BRIO

  A resemblance to the theme that opens the ‘Eroica’ has long been spotted in the tune with which the twelve-year-old Mozart began the overture to his little opera Bastien et Bastienne (1768): the notes, rhythm and key are identical to Beethoven’s. Scholars have pondered whether Beethoven could have known Mozart’s boyhood work, the consensus being that it is possible but unlikely. In any case the notes in question simply make up a chord of E flat major, and firmly establishing the key at the outset was a conventional way of beginning a piece of music. A large part of Beethoven’s genius lay in his ability to take the notes of a striking phrase—even just a common chord—and somehow construct an entire movement from them. It was this trick of making distinctive fragments yield up their hidden possibilities that gave rise to the concept of the Leitmotiv, which later gained particular currency through Wagner’s use of it. As always, Beethoven was ahead of his time.

  How he actually began the ‘Eroica’ immediately confirms how little this symphony was to be beholden to anything that had gone before. The single chord with which he had opened the Op. 35 piano variations has now become two brusque chords for full orchestra that stand like twin great pillars forming the work’s portal. This might seem to derive from a similar device Haydn sometimes used in his later works as a ‘call to attention’, but in Beethoven’s hands his grand portal immediately opens onto an E flat tonal landscape that the cellos promptly subvert with a rogue C sharp. It is a completely unexpected move and immediately leaves the hearer slightly off balance:

  It is a powerful device (and one that was to be exploited later by Liszt).* The exposition of this first movement continues the unsettled effect by introducing tunes that feel more unfinished than complete in themselves. By the time of the repeat at the double bar-lines (the two great introductory chords are not repeated) it becomes clear on how grand a scale the music is going to be. All these motifs and snatches of tune have to be allowed to expand, link up and make satisfying sense, and from the moment the movement is begun for the second time it is clear this will be a symphony like no other before it. In fact the first movement of the ‘Eroica’, including repeats, plays longer than many an entire little eighteenth-century symphony.

  This is music that needs to be heard rather than analysed, for no matter how familiar it becomes, it miraculously retains a freshness as though one were always hearing it for the first time. This maybe has something to do with its sheer energy. It is an act of self-assertion that at times almost gives the impression that the composer is reaching out of the score to grasp the hearer’s lapels. And if this seems too fanciful, the sense of an utterly distinctive musical personality with something new and urgent to say is often overwhelming, not only in the orchestral climaxes but equally in the careful details that defy the listener to ignore them.

  There is a famous instance of this at the moment of the recapitulation. After the development section has taken us on an often startling but weirdly logical tour of the landscape in which we have looked at the exposition’s fragments from a variety of different angles until they seem to construct an imposing skyline, we are about to return to the home key of E flat major and it is time for the main theme to be restated. It is a normal enough moment in the Classical form so familiar to eighteenth-century listeners, but Beethoven once again wittily destabilizes conventional expectations. The orchestration is reduced to the first and second violins holding a soft tremolo chord in the dominant against which a single horn states the opening theme in the tonic. In other words, even as the violins are playing the notes that most prepare the ear for a return to the symphony’s ‘home’ key of E flat major, the horn appears to jump the gun by being already there:

  To the ears of many of Beethoven’s listeners what sounded like an awful mistake is actually a moment of pure magic. It was this harmonic clash that led poor Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s young student and unpaid secretary, to make a gaffe at the rehearsal for the symphony’s first semi-public performance by Prince Lobkowitz’s private orchestra:

  [Here] Beethoven has a wicked trick for the horn. A few bars before the complete theme is restated Beethoven has the horn play it while the violins are still playing the chord of the second. For someone who is unfamiliar with the score this always gives the impression that the horn player has miscounted and come in too early. However, during the first rehearsal of this symphony, which went appallingly, the horn player came in correctly. I was standing next to Beethoven and, thinking it was wrong, I said, ‘That damned horn player! Can’t he count properly? It sounds horrible!’ I think I nearly got my ears boxed. Beethoven did not forgive me for a long time.3

  Ries was scarcely to be blamed, for Beethoven was throwing away the rule book of harmony and creating his own. It migh
t be hard to believe today, but in the nineteenth century editors and conductors often took it upon themselves to ‘correct’ this passage in both print and performance.

  The coda at the end of this monumental first movement also breaks both usage and rules. Audiences were used to the Classical composers’ little codettas at the end of a movement (such as the four bars that end the slow movement of Haydn’s B flat major String Quartet, Op. 55 No. 3, or the ten bars that round off the last movement of Mozart’s B flat major Piano Sonata, K. 333/315c). They would also have adapted to the more recent and imposing endings of certain symphonies. The 83 bars that end Haydn’s ‘London’ Symphony in D major (No. 104) of 1795 contain 8 extraordinary bars (293–300) whose widening leaps for the strings vividly show how very indebted Beethoven was to his old teacher. Not only does he write some almost identical string passages in this first movement of the ‘Eroica’, but he has learned the possibilities a coda could be made to offer. Listeners would have been stunned by Beethoven’s 140 bars of magnificent originality that end this first movement. Far from acting as a decorous and allusive full stop, his coda is practically a movement on its own, beginning with another of his coups that were to be notorious before they became famous. This was to restate the main theme in three abrupt downward steps in the successive keys of E flat, D flat and C without any modulations in between to soften the harshness. And once again, heard against the background of what has gone before and heretical as it is in terms of contemporary musical orthodoxy, the device simply sounds right.