Richard Morrison
Beethoven’s remarkable life and music demands to be celebrated
Why Beethoven needs to be celebrated, not ignored
Poor old Ludwig. His 250th anniversary year has hardly begun, yet already people are complaining about there being ‘too much Beethoven’. How much is too much? Well, just a single note if you’re the US musicologist William Gibbons.
He has caused a small Twitterstorm by declaring that programming even more Beethoven than normal is ‘grotesque’ at a time when ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ are ‘essential goals’ for the classical music world. It means, he says, ‘elbowing out of the way’ women and minority-ethnic composers to pay yet more homage to ‘the mythical dead white European hypermasculine genius hero that personifies the canon’.
Well, it’s certainly true that Beethoven is played a lot already. But that’s largely because he is so damn good, so provocative, so eternally challenging, in so many different formats. That’s why I don’t think I will feel the same way at the end of 2020 as I did after the Mozart anniversaries in 1991 and 2006 – which was basically sick to death of the man being celebrated, because so much charming but vacuous notespinning had been dredged up and marketed as divine inspiration when it clearly wasn’t. With Beethoven, apart from the Wellington Symphony and a few misguided choral cantatas, there are no dull or substandard works.
But this doesn’t answer Professor Gibbons’s central objection, which is that saturating the concert halls with Beethoven in his anniversary year merely reinforces the notion that the classical music world is fixated on a tiny number of mostly dead white men, to the exclusion of all other music. To this argument the first riposte must be that it’s not. Not any more. The trend towards commissioning and reviving music by women and minority-ethnic composers may not be accelerating as fast as the assiduously woke Gibbons desires, but accelerating it is. It’s young white male composers I feel sorry for now. They are on the wrong side of history.
But I disagree with Gibbons on a deeper level, too. By endorsing the currently fashionable antipathy in academic circles to ‘the canon of great composers’ he is himself perpetuating a myth: that these dead white males somehow led privileged lives, gilded by money and adulation, and that consequently we should be downgrading their achievements and instead honouring composers who, because of their gender, skin colour or social status, had few opportunities in their lifetimes to demonstrate their talents.
I sympathise with that impulse, but not if it means denigrating famous composers who also had to battle through terrible setbacks to make their voices heard. And there is no more astonishing example of that than Beethoven. For most of his adult life he endured a crippling disability that would have ended most music careers, as well as chronic headaches and stomach pains that were probably due to his sordid living conditions. Physically ugly and pathologically volatile, he was never likely to find a soulmate, so he must also have been acutely lonely. He certainly contemplated suicide, but characteristically decided it that would be a capitulation to ‘fate’, his lifelong foe.
Nor did he compromise, whether in writing music that would challenge convention and baffle even the cognoscenti, or in dealing with the outside world. Unlike his teacher Haydn, he rebelled against the aristocratic patronage that had been regarded as essential for composers. ‘What you are, you are by birth,’ he wrote acidly to one aristocrat who had tried to help him. ‘What I am, I am by myself. There have been thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven.’ With this refusal to kowtow to toffs, he not only redefined the image of the creative genius – from private servant to public hero – but also stayed true to the ideals of social equality and freedom that he proclaimed so gloriously in the Ninth Symphony.
Presumably it’s this lifelong struggle to assert himself in the face of devastatingly hostile circumstances that makes Beethoven ‘hypermasculine’ in Gibbons’s eyes. To me, however, it seems more like hyper-inspiring – particularly, I would have thought, to the struggling young composers of today, of all genders and ethnicities, who feel they aren’t getting the recognition they deserve. I agree with Gibbons that Beethoven Year shouldn’t be a lame hurrah for the status quo. But it doesn’t have to be. It should be the reverse: a reminder that the gifted and determined can succeed against all odds in changing the world, without sacrificing their integrity or ideals.
Beethoven’s struggle to assert himself in the face of hostile circumstances is hyper-inspiring