Last year, I enjoyed
reading and learned a great deal from Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. In the beginning of this new year
of 2016, I have been completely enthralled by another new book on the
symphonist from Bonn. Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven
Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2015) was,
for me, a real page-turner, shedding many new lights onto these iconic
masterpieces that are such a part of our consciousness.
I was astounded to learn
that because of the direction Beethoven scholarship and research took in the 20th
century, only about twenty percent of the composer’s sketchbooks have been
transcribed and published. In this information-packed book, the author went
back to the source material including, significantly, the Eroica Sketchbook and, even more interestingly, many of Beethoven’s
brief concept sketches marked Sinfonia
or Sinfonie, tantalizing ideas for
symphonies that “never got beyond this incipient stage.”
For each of the symphony,
the author gives an outline and analysis of each movement. What made this book
such a compelling read was the author’s insights into the genesis of each of
the nine symphonies, as well as some of the historical and biographical
background.
Throughout the book,
Lockwood made connections between incidents –
personal and historical - in Beethoven’s life and the genesis of the
symphonies. He argued against scholars such as Carl Dahlhaus, who dismissed the
“intertwining of a great artist’s life and work” by “regarding the events of
Beethoven’s life as essentially irrelevant to his works.”
In the introductory
chapter, the author recounted a conversation between violinist Karl Holz and
Beethoven. Holz intimated that one finds in the composer’s instrumental works a
representation (Darstellung)
analogous to the state of Beethoven’s soul. Because only Holz’s statement had
been written down, we do not know what the composer’s response was, but we
could deduce from Holz’s subsequent statements that Beethoven was not in
disagreement.
Just as in the string
quartets and piano sonatas, we can trace in the symphonies the evolution and
development of his thinking as a composer, Lockwood argues that the symphonies
“were not merely conceived as individual projects but were the products of an
artistic vision that persisted throughout Beethoven’s lifetime.” This argument
is borne out by the fact that ideas for many of the later symphonies were
conceived of many years before the actual composition of the works. For
instance, although it has been generally accepted that Beethoven sketched ideas
for a D minor symphony in 1811 to 1812. But a much earlier entry in 1804 in the
Eroica Sketchbook reveals an entry
marked “Sinfonia in D Moll,” months after he completed his early drafts for the
Eroica symphony and the Waldstein Sonata, and shortly after he
wrote down his initial ideas for the Fifth Symphony. These early seeds, according to Lockwood, “looks at
first like a passing thought but…holds the seeds of later growth.”
Knowledgeable music
lovers would know of Beethoven’s early, middle and late period compositions.
Lockwood classified Beethoven’s nine symphonies into five compositional phases.
The first phase ends with the writing of the First Symphony, when Beethoven was
“establishing his credentials, having delayed the writing of a symphony until
he had an opportunity for a public concert.” The second phase (1801 to 1806)
covers the Second and Third, as well as first ideas for the Fifth and (less so)
the Sixth, and includes composition of his sole opera, Leonore, its two great overtures (Nos. 2 and 3), and the Fourth
Symphony. The third phase comprises the closely intertwined Fifth and Sixth
Symphonies. The fourth phase covers the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. After
that came a hiatus from writing symphonies (although there were ideas for them)
until his work on the Ninth Symphony - 1822 to 1824 - the fifth period.
There were also
interesting discussions on the subject of the dedication of the Eroica Symphony. On the published title
page, the dedication was “composed to celebrate the remembrance of a great
man.” The author speculated whether the composer was thinking of Napoleon, as
he was before his coronation. Another plausible candidate that might have
captured the composer’s imagination would have been Prince Louis Ferdinand of
Prussia, killed in battle in 1806. Lockwood believed that instead of a single
individual, Beethoven was referring to “an ideal, mythic figure, whose heroism
is represented by the power and weight of this symphony and whose death is
commemorated by its Funeral March as second movement.”
Beethoven’s sketchbooks
contain not only musical ideas for compositions, but “concept sketches and
movement-plans,” using musical notations as well as words. Lockwood pointed out
that these movement plans reveal that the composer “could establish what its
primary lineaments might be, and even if the movement-sequence changed later,
at least one basic movement-idea often remained intact, one that could serve as
the invariant against which he could set the other movements.” Therefore, it
seems that Beethoven composed with a basic musical idea, a “basic thematic
shape that has a definite form in pitch content and rhythm.” From this primary
idea, the anchor or the invariant factor of the work, he could then “build
successive elaborations and contrasts as he worked out the larger shape of a
movement or a piece.” In the Eroica,
for instance, the anchor or invariant would be the E-flat major theme that
formed the symphony’s finale, but was earlier used in his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus as well as
the Op. 35 piano variations, the so-called Eroica
Variations.
Regarding the Pastoral Symphony, there was a
discussion of the programmatic nature (or not) of the work. From the statement
of Donald Francis Tovey that “not a bar of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony would have
been different if its ‘programme’ had never been thought of,” to the claim in
the 19th century that Beethoven was “father of nineteenth-century
program music,” Lockwood pointed out that one view needs not really invalidate
the other. The author quoted from an article by Richard Will that Beethoven’s
Sixth Symphony, “inhabits two generic worlds, that of the symphony and that of
the programmatic symphony as it was practiced, not by Berlioz and Liszt, but by
Beethoven’s contemporaries and predecessors.” On the one hand, Lockwood argued,
Beethoven was using “time-honored pictorial devices known to the programmatic
genres… in such a way that listeners could indeed delight in recognizing and
enjoying his imitations of natural sounds within the fabric of the
composition.” One needs go no further than to think of the famous birdcalls at
the end of the second movement, where Beethoven actually named the three
individual birds. That said, the composer was, at the same time, writing a
symphonic work “whose high level of expressive and formal cogency would match
that of his recent path-breaking symphonies.”
The author gave his
readers much food for thought about the (relatively) less played symphonies –
the first and second, the fourth and eighth. Lockwood told us, for instance that,
“without the innovations of the Second Symphony the Eroica might not have been possible.” About the slow movement of
the Fourth Symphony, Lockwood wrote that it “fully anticipates the world of the
Romantics four decades later.” Regarding the Scherzo of the same work, a full
five-part form with all sections written out (rather than merely repeated), the
writer believes that this movement “now stands up handsomely to the other large
movements in its weight and length, rather than serving as a point of
relaxation before the finale.” I was fascinated to learn that sketches for the
Eighth Symphony show that Beethoven initially conceived of the musical ideas
not for a symphony at all, but for a piano concerto. Regarding the Eighth
Symphony, Lockwood reminded us that Beethoven’s “re-animation of the classical
manner in the Eighth should be seen not as a regression, but as a further
widening of his command of a wide range of stylistic direction.” The author
went on to argue that many aspects of this work foreshadow the composer’s late
style.
A discussion of all the
fascinating revelations this book contains would not be possible in this brief
piece, but I would like to end with the author’s view, as part of the section
that addresses the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, that Beethoven “is too
little appreciated as a melodic composer because of the powerful developmental
character of so much of his music.” Lockwood quoted Beethoven’s own words in a
letter from 1825, that “melody must always be given priority above all else.”
To me, the idea of melody for
Beethoven might be akin to Wagner’s idea of melos,
or song. Not an 8-bar melody in the sense of a Rossini aria, but something
larger, something that is capable of expanding over an entire large-scale
structure, such as a movement of a Beethoven symphony. Wagner reportedly
believed that “the melodic flow in the Beethoven symphonies streams forth inexhaustibly,
and that by means of these melodies one can clearly recall to memory the whole
symphony.”
Can we, with all the
disturbing news of wars and violence that come our way from every corner of the
globe, still believe in Schiller’s sentiment that: “All men shall become
brothers” (Alle Menschen werden Brüder)?
Lockwood ended this mastery volume by sharing with his readers an excerpt from
Kant that Beethoven wrote down for himself, “the moral law within us and the
starry skies above us.” Indeed Beethoven’s “belief that personal recognition of
both the earthly and the transcendental enables the realization of the human
potential.” The symphonies of Beethoven, even today, bring us to a higher plane
of consciousness, a higher plane of existence, and they are perfect examples
that great music can still mean something
to us in this “fragmented and pessimistic age.”
Patrick May
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