You say you want a revolution
Don’t let the title Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary throw you off. This is not one of those Marxian screeds that evaluate the work of an artist by perceived progressive leanings: There is nothing of Trotsky and very little of Adorno in this volume. Rather, John Clubbe has written a thoughtful cultural history that takes into account the times in which Beethoven lived and worked — and they were times of revolution.
Clubbe calls the two decades from 1790 to 1810 “the beginning of a new stage in the history of mankind.”
“New and strange ideas, cheering to many but highly upsetting to others, infiltrated Europe. This creative spirit, as later historians have observed, produced a tremendous flowering in science, technology, literature, art and music, and reforms of all kind. Poets and musicians differentiated and refined the language of the inner life.”
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770 in Bonn. Clubbe calls the composer’s father, Johann, a court tenor, his “first and worst” teacher: “His pedagogy was unremarkable, his method cruel, his behaviour — influenced by a growing addiction to alcohol — abominable. He often beat his son.” Beethoven’s hostility toward authority may be traced in part to such treatment. In any event, the young man was often dismissed as ill- mannered and intemperate, and he burned bridges with many who would gladly have helped him. Still, his genius prevailed — a strong pianist, an inspired improviser, a violinist, a conductor, Beethoven also wrote hours of marvellous music, bursting with energy and invention, and was famous before he was 30.
There is a long- standing tendency to treat the early works as though they had somehow been composed by Beethoven before he became the titanic Beethoven of legend. In fact, the steady and radiantly good- humoured early piano sonatas and string quartets are no less worthy for having been written in a classical mien.
Indeed, Glenn Gould found Beethoven’s early music his most satisfying. “Almost all of those early piano works are immaculately balanced — top to bottom, register to register,” he said in a 1980 interview. “Beethoven’s senses of structure, fantasy, variety, thematic continuity, harmonic propulsion and contrapuntal discipline were absolutely — miraculously — in alignment.”
But Beethoven the revolutionary would soon be in ascendance. Take the abrupt — and, for its time, deeply shocking — opening of the Symphony No. 3 ( Eroica), written in 1803: There is no formal introduction whatsoever, only two bluntly explosive chords and then the great first theme. Even five years earlier, in one of his finest piano sonatas, Op. 10, No. 3, Beethoven followed a joyful opening movement with a long Adagio of such unprecedented tragic intensity that we can only imagine the effect it must have had on its first audience. Thereafter, Beethoven would leave the rules behind — content would dictate form, rather than the other way around.
Clubbe knows his 19th- century history. He traces Beethoven’s love for the work of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, and his early admiration for Napoleon ( to whom the Eroica was originally dedicated). A chapter on Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera and an ode to human freedom, is especially comprehensive. Clubbe also makes note that Vienna, for all of its musical greatness — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert spent most of their careers there, with Brahms, Mahler and Schoenberg, among many others, to follow — was in most ways a hidebound, purse-proud and restrictive city.
As W. Jackson Bate observed of Samuel Johnson, whatever we experience, we find Beethoven has been there before us, and is meeting and returning home with us. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was led by conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to reopen the Bayreuth Festival at the end of the Second World War. When the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein conducted an ensemble made up of residents of both sides of the city. Instead of the cry of “Freude!” (“Joy!”), Bernstein asked the chorus to shout “Freiheit!” (“Freedom!”). One suspects Beethoven would have approved.