TLS 5856: Leon Plantinga: A wild joy

[Frank Forman]

The best book on Beethoven and, indeed on music, is J.W.N. Sullivan,
Beethoven: His Spiritual Development.

TLS 5856: Leon Plantinga: A wild joy

Leon Plantinga is the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music Emeritus
at Yale University. His most recent book is Beethoven's Concertos: History,
style, and performance, 1999, and he has written on Robert Schumann's music
criticism, the life and work of Muzio Clementi, and the history of
nineteenth-century music.

Jan Swafford
BEETHOVEN
Anguish and triumph
1,104pp. Faber. £30. 978 0 571 31255 9
Published: 24 June 2015

The crowd at Ludwig van Beethoven's funeral procession in Vienna in 1827 was
estimated variously at 10-20,000. In 1845, in celebration of the
seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, his native city of Bonn staged a
multi-day dedication of a Beethoven monument, a statue of heroic proportions
by Ernst Julius Hähnel, erected in the middle of the town. The occasion was
marked by torchlight processions and artillery salutes; it saw the
construction of the new Beethovenhalle where an audience half again the size
of the town's population listened to performances of his works. In
attendance were many of Europe's most admired musicians (Berlioz, Liszt,
Meyerbeer, Louis Spohr, Jenny Lind) and royal eminences such as King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the
following century, both sides in the Second World War invoked Beethoven's
music to whip up patriotic support, and many of us have indelible memories
of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Ninth Symphony (with "Freude" in the
finale changed to the more apposite "Freiheit") in joyous celebration of the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

His posthumous fame has only continued to grow. Jan Swafford's massive book,
Beethoven: Anguish and triumph, is at least the sixth full life-and-works
account of the composer to appear in the last seventeen years (others are by
Maynard Solomon, David Wyn Jones, Lewis Lockwood, William Kinderman and
Barry Cooper). And recent publications on more narrowly defined aspects of
the man - his works, his reception and influence, his politics and religion
- also abound. A large majority of these works are in English, showing how
distinctly the landscape of Beethoven studies has shifted since the
mid-nineteenth century, when a pioneering biography by the American
Alexander Wheelock Thayer (still a standard reference work in a revision by
Elliot Forbes) could not find a publisher until it was translated into
German. The main impetus for all this writing is probably the obvious one:
Beethoven's music continues to absorb and move generation after generation.
For many, that music is singularly bound up with ideas and aspirations, with
notions such as heroism, triumph, death and lament, freedom and joy.

Beethoven also makes an attractive subject in other ways. He lived in and
responded to the social and intellectual tumult surrounding the French
Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic saga - his and Bonaparte's careers
intersected in interesting ways, always to Beethoven's detriment - and he
came to uneasy terms with the suffocating Restoration that followed.
Beethoven, moreover, achieved greater international celebrity during his
lifetime than had any composer before him; he managed this even as his
chosen art teetered uncertainly between dependence on patronage and attempts
to address an emergent public.

Writers on Beethoven have also been fascinated by the rather less exalted
but colourful person himself: fiery-tempered, paranoid but given to impulses
of generosity, eccentric in the extreme, increasingly deaf, unkempt, unlucky
in love for most of his adult life. There is, too, the drama surrounding
Beethoven's ill-conceived and plainly disastrous guardianship of his nephew
Karl, a poignant late-life tale that played out as the composer unleashed
the astonishing final burst of creative energy that produced the Ninth
Symphony, the Missa solemnis, and the late string quartets.

In several ways Beethoven and his friends offered future biographers a
helping hand. In response to the composer's growing celebrity various people
who knew him (notably Franz G. Wegeler, Ferdinand Ries, Ignaz von Seyfried,
Anton Schindler and Gerhard von Breuning) wrote accounts of their
interactions, and recipients of Beethoven's letters and notes tended to save
them. Beethoven himself was a compulsive saver. The compositional sketches
he habitually made, most of them bound up in some seventy homemade
sketchbooks, went with him from dwelling to dwelling as he restlessly moved
about Vienna; some sketch leaves he had brought with him from Bonn in 1792
were still at hand on his death in 1827. Then there were the "conversation
books" of his later deaf years: packets of paper on which his interlocutors
scribbled down their sides of conversations and to which Beethoven
occasionally made his own contributions. These too he saved, therewith
providing generations of Beethoven biographers with a virtually unique
resource.

Swafford wades into his subject with evident enthusiasm, starting at the
beginning with Beethoven's boyhood in Bonn and proceeding patiently, almost
year by year (as his distinguished predecessor Thayer did) through the
course of his subject's fifty-six-year life. At appropriate points he shifts
gears to discuss the relevant music, often at some length, or halts the
action to reflect on the ambient historical situation: Beethoven's boyhood
amid a particularly emphatic version of the secular Enlightenment cultivated
in Bonn; Napoleon's triumphs in Italy and in the Rhineland with the capture
of Bonn and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; the intrigue and
excesses of the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15; the iron-fisted police state,
the "Metternich system", installed in Austria thereafter.

For the most part this attention to historical context is cogent and
informative, but at points it suffers from Swafford's penchant for
improvised melodrama. He tells us that Beethoven, working in Vienna in early
1814, absorbed in the revision of Fidelio, paid no attention to events in
Paris surrounding Napoleon's official deposition. Nonetheless we get this
fanciful vignette of Tsar Alexander I at that scene in Paris: "Finally
Alexander appeared in the uniform of an officer of the guards, heavy gold
epaulets across his shoulders, sporting an enormous hat with a cascade of
feathers, his feet thrust in stirrups of gold. He waved benevolently to the
dazed Parisians ...".

Swafford is similarly drawn to rather grand-iloquent chapter titles: "Fate's
Hammer", "Our Hearts Were Stirred", "My Angel, Myself". In another flight of
fancy, he imagines how Beethoven felt in 1798 contemplating the place of his
own work in the volatile, shifting world around him, and helps him out with
a few words: "How and in what terms could he get past the plateau where he
was now languishing? How could he lift his art to a new level .... How could
he step out of the role of entertainer and into the stream of history?" Such
spurts of novelistic creativity are surely meant as harmless ornament; but
they sometimes veer dangerously close to the boundary between history and
fiction.

But Swafford typically tells the story of Beethoven, his surroundings, and
his work in a straightforward and engaging way. There is virtually no
reference here to the dominant strains in Beethoven scholarship of the past
half-century. In one such strain, starting roughly in the 1960s, Beethoven
scholars concentrated on a close study of the sources of his music -
sketches, autograph scores, first editions approved by the composer, letters
- intent mainly on establishing a clean text, an accurate date, and the
details of "compositional process": the steps from preliminary jottings to a
finished composition. Those sketchbooks that Beethoven lugged from one flat
in Vienna to the next became a central object of study for this
"documentary" branch of Beethoven studies. (The Beethoven Sketchbooks by
Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson and Robert Winter, published in 1985, summarizes
in concise and elegant form most of what is known about them.) Nearly all
the sketchbooks bear the names of former owners - e.g. Kessler, Landsberg,
Scheide - names that Beethoven scholars (of that persuasion) speak as easily
as if they belonged to old friends. Swafford seldom broaches the subject of
Beethoven's working method or his use of sketches; he almost never refers to
any Beethoven sketchbook, and he never does so by name. Another exemplary
product of that "documentary" emphasis in Beethoven studies was the splendid
1996 edition of the composer's letters in seven volumes (Briefwechsel
Gesamtausgabe, edited by Sieghard Brandenburg and others) sponsored by the
Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. Swafford ignores this edition in favour of Emily
Anderson's convenient but not always reliable three-volume translation of
the composer's letters published in 1961.

This strand of Beethoven scholarship has, however, now been almost wholly
supplanted by something very different. The energy devoted to Beethoven
studies these days pursues not facts and descriptions, but explanations and
interpretations. A favourite theme is the puzzling ambiguity of Beethoven's
political stance - and, by implication, the political colouring of certain
of his compositions. How, for example, to square his determination in 1804
to dedicate the Eroica Symphony to Napoleon with his setting of Austrian
patriotic songs as early as 1796-7 or his celebration of Bonaparte's
downfall in Wellington's Victory and the compositions for the Congress of
Vienna in 1813-14? Where did he stand vis-à-vis the stirrings of an
incipient German or Austrian nationalism? Or in relation to the
conservative, mystical/medievalist turn in the thought of literary figures
in Vienna such as Zacharias Werner, Adam Müller, and Friedrich Schlegel?
(Two recent books that tackle such matters are Stephen Rumph's Beethoven
after Napoleon, 2004, and Nicholas Mathew's Political Beethoven, 2014.)
Still lurking in the shadows behind much of this delving into Beethoven's -
particularly the late Beethoven's - political and social alignments is the
imposing figure of Theodor Adorno; his explication of the late works as a
critique of bourgeois ideology continues to stir sympathetic vibrations in a
good many present-day writers.

Again, Swafford has near-total success in avoiding entanglements with this
sort of thing. "Adorno" appears neither in his bibliography nor in his
index; nor do the names of most subsequent writers with an Adornoesque - or
postmodern or feminist - tilt. One exception: Swafford's discussion of the
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, offers (in a footnote) an appraisal of
Daniel Chua's book The "Galitzin" Quartets of Beethoven as "an interesting
and worthwhile study, even if it is too beholden, for my taste, to
fashionable academic theory... he makes the Galitzins [i.e. the String
Quartets Op. 127, 130, and 132, dedicated to Prince Nikolai Galitzin] a
deliberate critique of the norms of Classical discourse in music, and
thereby makes Beethoven into a virtual poststructuralist". But Chua's and
Swafford's responses to the formal discontinuities and stark contrasts in
the late quartets differ less in substance than in style of discourse. In
his discussion of the Quartet Op. 127, Swafford even tells us, "Then in the
Galitzins the serious deconstruction of forms and norms begins".

A work of the early Bonn period to which Swafford attaches particular
importance is the Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, composed by the
nineteen-year-old Beethoven in 1790. Joseph II, the radically "enlightened"
monarch who in his anti-ecclesiastical zeal subordinated the clergy to the
state and closed hundreds of monastic institutions throughout the land, was
widely reviled at the time of his death. But the prevailing attitude in Bonn
was downright reverential. The politically liberal Literary Society, or
Lesegesellschaft (of which Beethoven's distinctly liberal teacher Christian
Gottlob Neefe was a member), commissioned the young composer to write this
funeral cantata in a great hurry for a ceremony to be held in March 1790. In
a pattern that was later to become familiar, Beethoven missed the deadline;
the piece was not performed and was lost from sight until the late
nineteenth century.

The text, written by one Severin Anton Averdonk, a local theology student,
is drenched in theatricality ("Dead! Dead! Dead! / Dead, it is groaned
through the desolate night, / And the echoing rocks cry it back!"). The
young Beethoven responds in kind with music of high drama. The opening
movement, Swafford writes, "reaches a depth of sorrow stunning for a
teenager", with a clear foretaste of the Beethovenian manner, particularly
the "Beethoven C-minor mood" to come. (He has good precedent for his
opinion; shown this composition on its resurfacing in the 1880s, Brahms had
exclaimed in a letter, "Even if there were no name on the title page none
other could be conjectured! - it is Beethoven through and through!")

Beethoven himself had already confirmed the prophetic potential of the
Joseph cantata. When composing Leonore, the first incarnation of Fidelio in
1804-05, he reached back to that cantata at a crucial juncture: in the final
scene the heroine Leonore, having freed her husband Florestan from the
tyrant's dungeon, rejoices with soaring words and melody quoted directly
from the earlier work: "Da stiegen die Menschen ans Licht" ("Thus mankind
rose to the light"). The persistence in Beethoven's mind of such heady
optimism about human destiny, first voiced in commemoration of the
archetypical enlightened monarch, adds support to Swafford's now rather
unfashionable belief that the strain of enlightened liberalism surrounding
the youth in Bonn remained a dominant and lifelong component of his thought.
Beethoven's long-lived attachment to the young Schiller's giddily optimistic
paean to joy and brotherhood, "An die Freude" ("Ode to Joy"), suggests
something similar. A line from the poem shows up in a second cantata from
1790, this one for the installation of Joseph's successor, Leopold II; it
too was not performed, and Beethoven apparently thought about setting it to
music a number of times before it at last found its place in the finale of
the Ninth Symphony.

Swafford, himself a respected composer, devotes a good deal of space to
description and discussion of the music itself. But at every turn he faces
the question of how much detail and technical talk the general reader will
tolerate. He adopts the happy expedient of including in the text only a
compact description and assessment of a piece - one presupposing little
understanding of harmony or formal analysis - with a much more extensive and
detailed discussion in the voluminous footnotes at the back of the book.
This works for the general reader because Swafford has a knack for succinct
characterization, for giving the reader a vivid impression of a piece in a
few non-technical words; it also has value for the musically more
sophisticated reader.

A good example of this strategy is Swafford's discussion of the Piano Sonata
Op. 53, the Waldstein, of 1803-04. This begins with some thoughts about the
role played by Beethoven's new Érard piano, a recent gift from the Parisian
maker, in the very new textures and pedal effects of this remarkable
composition (this piano had an actual damper pedal unlike the Viennese
instruments Beethoven was used to, where the dampers were controlled with a
knee lever). Now for the famously original start of the piece: "The
Waldstein Sonata leaps into life in medias res, with a sense of restless
energy that will hardly flag throughout. Above the pounding rhythms are only
scraps of motifs; at first the music is like an accompaniment in search of a
theme". And further, "the movement surges and drives, but most of it is
actually piano to pianissimo. The governing idea is power under restraint,
generating a fund of energy that never dissipates and never climaxes". A
long footnote gives us the details: the novel harmonic pattern, the
intricate motivic structure, the deft managing of rhythmic momentum. Yet
when Swafford writes at great length about a single composition, this
segregation of detail from summary description can break down. The Eroica,
for example, gets a thirty-seven-page chapter all to itself (the only other
composition accorded this distinction is the Ninth Symphony); in the main
text we get a variation-by-variation account of its finale that is next to
impossible to follow without a score - unless, of course, the reader has the
piece fully memorized.

Swafford perseveres to address the late music with energy and patience. He
writes admiringly and in some detail - in this case aided by the use of
musical examples - of each of the five movements of the immense and
intricate Missa solemnis. Beethoven poured enormous effort into this work
(leaving behind some 600 pages of sketches and drafts), which he finished
about three years too late for the ceremony for which it was intended, the
elevation of his faithful pupil and patron the Archduke Rudolph to
Archbishop of Olmütz. Its difficulty and the outsized forces needed for its
performance have ensured that it would seldom be heard in any venue at any
time.

Swafford posits secular reasons for Beethoven's embarking on this formidable
project: hope of being named Rudolph's kapellmeister and the mastery of yet
another, and indeed the most venerable, of musical genres. He has
interesting things to say about the particularities of musical style here,
quite distinct from Beethoven's usual writing of the time. The words, he
says, make a decisive difference: intent on getting the declamation of the
irregular, ever-changing text just right, Beethoven largely suppressed the
normal rhythmic component in the elaborate motivic interrelationships
typical of his late music. This is a good point. But at places in this
thoughtful discussion Swafford's penchant for the hyper-dramatic
unfortunately intrudes: "Gloria! Et resurrexit! Et incarnatus est. As
Beethoven pounded his hands and feet and bellowed as he worked, composing
with his whole body ... ". There are a couple of reports, to be sure, of
Beethoven engaging in histrionic behaviour at work. But not in this case;
here such embellishment is only a distraction.

After those two towering monuments of 1823-4, the Missa solemnis and the
Ninth Symphony, each with soloists, chorus and large orchestra, Beethoven,
though ill and obsessed with difficulties in controlling his ward Karl,
managed to settle back into the intimate, magical world of the late string
quartets. Swafford calms down too. He writes here with the veneration to
which these works are accustomed, but also freely shares his puzzlement and
doubts. The Quartet in Bb, Op. 130, is for him, as it has been for many, an
enigma, a study in "irony, disjunction, paradox". He questions whether the
radical fragmentation of the first movement ever achieves anything like
resolution. He confesses in a footnote that he feels embarrassed to write
about the original finale, the gargantuan, violent, relentless Grosse Fuge.
He does so, well and at some length; but in the end this famously enigmatic
piece remains so for him as well. At the end of his life, after much
cajoling from those around him, Beethoven replaced this movement with the
one that is now routinely played. If the Grosse Fuge was too manic and
overwhelming for Swafford, its replacement, he suggests, is too slight.

The marvellous Quartet in C# minor, Op. 131, gets its full due here: a
leisurely discussion of its seven movements (really five with two prefaces),
with space for both detail and reflection on the meaning of it all. As to
detail, Swafford points to the use of keys calculated for their
effectiveness with string instruments. The C# minor of the first and last
movements is an extremely rare key for Beethoven (the only other well-known
example of it is in the "Moonlight" Sonata). This key has only two pitches
played on open strings, A and D. The play of light and shade in the use of
open and stopped strings, Swafford shows, is part of Beethoven's plan for
the sound of this quartet. This begins at the beginning: the crux of the
first violin's initial fugal entry is an accented open A; the second violin
answers with a corresponding accented D. That the long-deaf Beethoven should
still be sensitive to such niceties of sound is astonishing; perhaps he
simply remembered from the dim past what these sounds were like - as when in
his last years he gave piano lessons, drawing his conclusions about the
student's playing from watching her hands move on the keyboard.

Swafford moves through this music with patience and admiration, from the
lament of the opening fugato through the gently contrasting variations of
the middle movement to the return of the home key under a renewed veil of
tragedy in a fierce march-like finale. As usual, he is quick to ferret out
the subtle motivic relationships that bind this work of many parts into an
intelligible whole. This, he seems to tell us, is its ultimate virtue: "The
triumph in the C-sharp Minor Quartet is not in heroic gestures or in the
kind of wild joy that ended Fidelio and the Eroica ... the triumph of the
C-sharp Minor Quartet, its answer to suffering, is the supreme poise and
integration of the whole work". With this quartet, Swafford tells us,
Beethoven effectively ended his career: "What followed were after-effects
and asterisks". But this is too easy a dismissal of the real final string
quartet, Op. 135 in F, finished in the autumn of 1826, about which Swafford
has already written a couple of pages. This music, retrospective, perhaps
nostalgic, reminiscent of Beethoven's early writing, perhaps even recalling
Haydn's, is hardly negligible.

What now remains for Swafford is to tell us about the composer's harrowing
final months - all now coloured by his nephew Karl's attempt to commit
suicide - and the poignant final scenes at his deathbed. As we might expect,
he warms to the task just as he has for the composer's other moments of high
crisis, the onset of deafness and thoughts of suicide revealed in the
"Heiligenstadt Testament" of 1802, the abandonment of hope for love in the
"Immortal Beloved" episode a decade later. Beethoven's final days were
filled with drama - Swafford has no need to add any of his own. Towards the
end his friends gathered about him, as did a number of musicians, J. N.
Hummel, the young Ferdinand Hiller, and Anselm Hüttenbrenner among them
(whether Schubert was there is a matter of dispute). At one point, several
of those present testified, Beethoven suddenly exclaimed, "Plaudite, amici,
comoedia finita est", thus providing Swafford with one more colourful
chapter title.

This book breaks little new ground as biography: Jan Swafford's story of
Beethoven's life, as he shows in the footnotes, comes from secondary
sources. What is special here is the parsing and appraisal of the music -
mostly traditional in method, but personal in detail, always sensitive and
sympathetic - and how well he knits this musical explication together with
his account of that remarkable life.

[Christopher Webber]

On 03/07/2015 15:43, Frank Forman wrote:
> The best book on Beethoven and, indeed on music, is J.W.N. Sullivan,
> Beethoven: His Spiritual Development.

Only if we respond to pseudo-scientific, romantic tosh.