Beethoven - 2020’s Redeeming Theme
When I quietly ushered in the new year in January 2020 it was with a degree of anxiety and trepidation regarding certain political and social concerns on either side of the Atlantic. These apprehensions were tempered only by the prospect of a year spent celebrating, listening to, reading about, and the performing the music of Beethoven. Little did I realise that a few months later in March I would be giving my last recital for four months, as full lockdown came into effect just days later. Eight months have passed since and in London we are currently tentatively emerging from our second lockdown.
The impact on the Arts during this uncertain period is felt and seen by all in our field. Performances, many celebrating Beethoven’s year, have been cancelled or postponed, venues closed indefinitely, and future recovery plans remain unclear. Seasoned performers have had to turn to other forms of income, friends of mine have worked as delivery personnel, shelf-stackers, and even fishermen. Many smaller organisations have folded. My own performance venture, ‘Multiphonic Arts’, has been fortunate to receive funds, but we find ourselves in limbo, not knowing when we will be allowed back into our beloved ruined chapel.
For myself, as for many, the purgatory in which we have found ourselves would have been unimaginable without music. The lack of live performance has caused me to repeatedly turn to my recording collection, purchasing new CD’s, and at times desperately seeking those rare and precious moments when one can just sit, listen, marvel, and escape – an impossible feat when ‘locked-down’ in a small flat with a toddler!
My two lockdowns have been characterised by two composers. During the first our little London flat reverberated with the Symphonies of Mahler, doors flung wide, neighbours (fortunately) sympathetic, as entire universes were heard on a scale never since matched. The second has heard an even greater obsession with Beethoven after returning to performing his Sonata Op. 111 in a rare public performance in France in August (a performance which was nervous, tired, and one I would rather forget!). When asked to write a few words around the theme of resilience, either of these great composers would have suited the theme, but in honour of his 250th anniversary year, and current obsessions, Beethoven it is.
Beethoven was more than familiar with struggle and hardship, whether emotional, physical, or financial. His chronic deafness is well-known, the intimations of which began as early as 1797, before the realisation that the condition was not a passing ailment but permanent and progressive. Any musician or music-lover will empathise with the distress, devastation, and desperation caused, not by a sudden loss, but by a gradual deterioration of the very faculty required to perform music. Beethoven’s genius was such that deafness did not blight his creative ambition but other problems followed. His finances depended, in part, on him presenting himself to the rich and connected. This chore he frequently despised and was rendered far more problematic when grappling with the humiliation and practicalities of hearing loss. Writing to his friend Wegeler in 1801, Beethoven declares: ‘I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For two years now I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people, I am deaf.’
Beethoven reached crisis point in 1802 and penned his famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ whilst staying in the secluded village of Heiligenstadt outside of Vienna. It was intended as a semi-legal document and is a private declaration and Will to his brothers, describing his ongoing suffering to the point of thoughts of suicide. It is a carefully worded text, the original showing signs of earlier drafts and corrections, and one of the most moving by any artist. Beethoven refers to the embarrassment he endured ‘when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing’, he declares: ‘such experiences brought me close to despair; a little more of that and I would have been at the point of ending my life. The only thing that held me back was my art.’ Beethoven resolved to carry on, his resilience due to an unerring belief in his musical destiny, for which he strived and sacrificed for the good of his fellow human, proclaiming that his heart ‘is filled with love for humanity and a desire to do good.’ An overwhelming gratitude stirs in me when considering the music Beethoven would go on to create and the hole that would be present if he hadn’t possessed the strength of will to continue.
Deafness aside, two other significant events had long-reaching consequences for Beethoven. Firstly, the loss of his mother in 1787 at the age of just sixteen, leaving him and his two brothers to an absent father. Such an event would have a lasting effect on anyone and is quite possibly the root of Beethoven’s difficulty in forming lasting relationships with women – not for lack of desire – a struggle only exacerbated by the increasing isolation of progressive deafness. Secondly, much later in life, following the death of the composer’s brother Caspar in 1815, Beethoven undertook a legal challenge for the guardianship of his nephew Karl, then just nine years old. Beethoven had been named sole guardian in Caspar’s Will but a codicil written on the same day cancelled this appointment in favour of the boy’s Mother, with whom relations were far from cordial. It took Beethoven five years to settle the dispute, amidst considerable costs and emotional expense, and some have questioned why he obsessed over the matter to such an extent. He would struggle until his death to maintain care of Karl’s health and educational needs.
It has always struck me as miraculous that, despite the turmoil, ill health (he often complained of intestinal upsets), financial worries, and the custody battle Beethoven experienced throughout his final decade, the music he created at this time is overall some of the most profoundly ecstatic, joyful, and generous of spirit of his entire output. These include the final Piano Sonatas, Diabelli Variations, Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, and the late String Quartets. He plunged himself into his work and found freedom from his isolation and ill-health in his art. He worked obsessively on new compositions, producing music which at times challenges works from decades later for sheer progressiveness.
Beethoven famously wrote on the score of his Missa Solemnis: ‘From the heart – may it go again – to the heart!’, a statement which perfectly sums up the great warmth, passion, and humanity one senses in his mass setting. His love for, and connection to, his fellow human is heard throughout his musical output, and especially in his later works which for me capture everything it means to be a human being: suffering, ecstasy, anger, reconciliation, love, and much more, all of which are reflected in great art. Beethoven’s choice of passages from Schiller’s Ode to Joy in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony have never seemed more relevant and is a call for the peoples of the world to unite: ‘All people become brothers! … Be embraced, Millions! This kiss to all the world!’.
Whilst further exploring the notion of Beethoven’s love for humanity I have come to consider the significance of his fondness of compound time signatures in his late period. Compound time is the ‘secular’ choice, the time signatures of dances and folk songs, of the people, a connection enriched further by his interest at this time in the music of the Renaissance – hence the astonishing use of modality in the Missa Solemnis and the extraordinary ‘Lydian’ slow movement of the String Quartet Op. 132. Beethoven’s choice of compound time in the most profoundly sacred and intimate moment of the Benedictus of the Missa Solemnis speaks volumes of his extremely personal consideration of divinity, devoid of the exterior pomp and show of religious ceremony, but reliant on private human experience. Also consider the two Ariosos and fugues of the Piano Sonata in Ab Op. 110, the Arietta of the Sonata in C minor Op. 111, the great slow movement of the Hammerclavier Sonata in Bb Op. 106, the second movement of the String Quartet Op. 127, the third movement of the Ninth Symphony – the list goes on – all of which provide the hearts of these astounding works.
One senses in Beethoven the same love of humanity that many musicians feel. For many of us we chose to become musicians because we love sharing music with those around us, instilling in others the awe it inspires, and celebrating the ability of music and the arts to bring people together, especially in times of hardship, regardless of cultural or societal differences. Beethoven’s generosity has been widely echoed in recent months amongst the many musicians who have seen the lives they knew upended and indefinitely halted, but who have continued to record, livestream, share performances online, and occasionally in person from front rooms with windows open with audiences around the world, and often for free. Such feats of munificence should at very least convince us to believe that classical music performance will always endure. Beethoven wrote in 1825 that ‘Art demands of us that we don’t stand still’, and never has this statement seemed more relevant as musicians, innovative by nature, find increasingly inventive ways of sharing their artform.
It is impossible to fully express the gratitude I feel towards Beethoven for creating the music he did, it has been a source of solace my entire life from the moment as a young baby my parents played me his Sixth Symphony as a lullaby, to my discovery of the late String Quartets in recent years. It is music of life, about life, and profoundly human in which Beethoven lays himself bare for us all to witness, and reflect in, his struggles, anger, revelations, ecstasies, and above all his love for his fellow human being.