By Guilherme de Alencar Pinto: Everything was planned for this to be Beethoven's year. Through a pandemic, the 250 years since poor Ludwig's birthday have been the main celebration of the detuned “For Elisa” of the supergas trucks that cross the empty streets. However, there is nothing to prevent us from taking advantage of that quarter of a millennium (which is coming to an end of the year) to summarize the contribution of one of the composers who contributed most to defining our link with art.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is perhaps the most influential composer in the history of music. From the 20th century, popular music had a massiveness that was not achievable in its time, but in it the carrier of influences is the interpretation, not the composition, and, in addition, the great segmentation of that sector prevents a figure, which is possible in the 19th century Eurocentric culture. Only Wagner (1813-1883) can make a dent, but it should be noted that the idolatry aroused by him was always fueled by a heated controversy, while Beethoven's case is more like that of his almost almost contemporary Artigas, that is, He became an almost untouchable figure and vindicated by all (in the famous controversy between Wagner and Brahms, both based their positions by evoking Beethoven).
With Beethoven there is a unique phenomenon: there is an extensive stage in his career - the moment when he operated his musical revolution in a more concentrated way - when there seems to be no other composer in the world. In 1803, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) stopped composing. From there until 1813, when Rossini (1792-1868) recorded his first operatic successes, there is no work, other than Beethoven's, that integrates the usual repertoire of concerts, recordings, that is in common memory or has exerted a significant influence. Only from that moment did the first relevant compositions of Schubert, Paganini, Weber and Meyerbeer begin to emerge, which prepared the arrival of the so-called “romantic generation” (Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner).
Of course, during Beethoven's ten long years of historical solitude, musical life continued as active as ever. Each court, each church and each municipality had its chapel master. The most prominent names, such as Spohr, Reicha, Cherubini, Hummel, Boieldieu, Méhul, Gossec, Kozeluch, Dussek, Ries, Spontini, Paer, Paisiello and Mayr fill the history books, because it would be unserious not to put anyone. But how many people who do not have the profession of musicologists had real contact with any of their productions? Those who studied the old-fashioned piano will have suffered the incredibly boring didactic pieces by Czerny, Cramer or Clementi. The one that everyone did hear about was Salieri, whose exaggerated reputation as a mediocre composer is due to fictional versions of the urban legend that, enviously, he poisoned Mozart (whose son Franz Xaver Mozart also integrates that generational legion of forgotten composers).
Those ten years in which the story takes a "close-up" (in a cinematographic sense) of Beethoven, and that leaves others as extras out of focus in the background, can be explained in two ways. The most rational thing would be to assume that the hegemonic version of the story, Beethoven-centric, unfairly erased those names or determined Beethoven-molded criteria of value in which they do not fit. The other explanation would be magical, although the romantic sensibility, with its teleological propensity, could accept it: the rest of the world expressly retreated so that the historical destiny could be fulfilled, without hindrance, through the avatar chosen by the muses: Beethoven.
The canonical account did much to romanticize Beethoven with the stereotype of the artistic genius: the man with an impulsive personality, aware of his own greatness and in eternal conflict with circumstances; disheveled and rude, because his concentration on inspiration left him no time for prosaic trifles. On top of suffering from a great unhappiness in love, he was attacked by the cruel blow of being deprived of hearing. Rather than bow to these difficulties, he responded by composing monuments of unprecedented magnitude, like sticking out his tongue at fate in a style that could sometimes be overwhelmingly furious. It was easy to feel that music as a spontaneous reflection of his exceptional personality and the events of his life, and that component of sincerity could excuse strangeness that, in other circumstances, would have been taken as errors. Even in life, this historicist idea that he was "ahead of his time" was generated with him (and he cultivated), and he remained as a crack, because indeed the future proved him right.
Beethoven became the ideal personification of the affirmation of an individualistic humanism and of the replacement of an aesthetic of the beautiful by an aesthetic of the sublime. His music no longer functions as a conventionally pleasant ornament for life, but is a strange object whose appreciation requires effort, and the reward is not simply immediate pleasure, but transcendent elevation, enlightenment of the spirit. Criteria such as originality, innovation and even that of a certain degree of discomfort, provocation to the public, come into play. He struggled with the limits (of the technically playable, of the aesthetically bearable) and contributed to establish our model of musical consumption, that is, the one that radically hierarchizes professional creators and performers and opposes them to a broad passive public that pays for the access (relegating the other formats, that of domestic music and that of functional music of the courts and churches).
It is very easy to question the seriousness of an avant-garde who does incomprehensible things, but Beethoven blocked those criticisms by demonstrating an indisputable virtuosity of writing also in known fields, and, in addition, he managed to mobilize the popular enthusiasm of his time and ours: apart from "For Elisa", everyone knows her "Ode to Joy", the "Moonlight Sonata", the cha cha cha chaaaan that begins the Fifth Symphony, or even the music from the television show Chespirito (which comes from The ruins of Athens, 1811). Along with those pieces integrated into global folklore, there are about forty more that are well known by concertgoers, and there is nothing that bears his signature that does not arouse curiosity, is not available in printed editions of scores or is not obtained in recordings.
Beethoven made a great impact for having done what he did and for being the way he was, but there was also, among his younger contemporaries and in subsequent generations, eager for a figure like him to exist. The feeling is that he came to occupy a place that was there, waiting to be occupied. To satisfy that collective desire, the stories of his life and work are often biased. Much emphasis was placed on his support for the French revolution and his admiration for Napoleon; the liberal democratic soul vibrates with the anecdote that when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor (1804), Beethoven, who had just completed a Bonaparte Symphony, was outraged and removed his name from the title (the work would be published as Heroic Symphony). The original title was crossed out so untimely that it pierced the paper. This precious record of Beethoven's fury (the leaky copy) persists in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, and supports the composer's idea as a determined revolutionary, republican and anti-authoritarian. The rest of the story, although it is no secret, did not make so much legend: over the years, Beethoven tended to become more conservative, and his personal and professional closeness to members of the aristocracy, in addition to a global change of sensibility , made it less conducive to the idea of revolutionary sociopolitical changes.
Life
Because he was born in the city of Bonn (December 16, 1770), Beethoven is often vindicated by Germany as a German composer. Bonn was the seat of the Archbishopric of Cologne, a Catholic theocratic electorate.
His father was a musician and dreamed of him being a child prodigy, as Mozart had been. Alcoholic, he constantly beat the son to give his all in the studies. Ludwig never reached the outstanding level that Mozart had had as a child, but when he was 7, he gave his first concert as a pianist, and at 11 they wrote the first newspaper article about his talent. When he was 12, the first publications of his compositions appeared, and at 13 he was appointed organist of the Bonn court (the only regular job he had in his life).
In 1792 he moved to Vienna on a scholarship from the Bonn government to study with Haydn. Mozart had died the previous year, and everyone saw Beethoven as the new Mozart. What a heavy backpack to carry, added to the pressure suffered since childhood. It is truly admirable that Beethoven was able to contemplate with humility and lucidity his differences with his idol and model: composing was much more difficult for him and the historical-aesthetic moment was changing. Even after immediately becoming one of the most important musical personalities in Vienna, instead of being inflated, he continued to seek help (after classes with Haydn, he studied with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Salieri). Although he already had compositions published, only at the age of 24 did he deign to consider that his canonical work began, stamping his collection of trios as "opus 1". He dared with his First Symphony at 29, an age when Mozart had already written about fifty symphonies.
Thus he established his modality, that of writing relatively few works but with a high impact, while causing a furor as a pianist, even more virtuous than Mozart, although with a harsher sound. Everything seemed to be going smoothly when, in 1801, he noticed a noticeable hearing loss. The following year, the doctors correctly concluded that the process was irreversible and that, over the years, he would become totally deaf. It is then that Beethoven draws up his Heiligenstadt will, addressed to his brothers, but which he then speaks to God and humanity. There he manifests the purpose of committing suicide, but then he thinks about the need to continue creating. The language has a lot of the cheesiness that characterized Beethoven, both in verbal and musical expression, when he tried to overturn high feelings and thoughts. The document was never sent and, like his other famous writing, the letter to the anonymous "beloved immortal" (1812), was found among his belongings after his death, as if he intended that these proclamations contribute to romantically direct the image that posterity would have of him.
Beethoven sublimated his frustrations in monumental works, which begin in a dramatic and distressed way, but which, after a long process of struggle and effort, come to victory. In his time, not everyone understood that complex, intense, strange and excessive music, but for many, especially young people, it was the very embodiment of a new sensibility. In his historical critique (1810) of the Fifth Symphony, E T A Hoffmann considers that "Beethoven's music [...] ignites that infinite longing that is the essence of Romanticism".
In Vienna Beethoven dispensed with permanent employment, which was unusual, except in the world of opera. He preferred to preserve his independence and launch himself into the market by fulfilling specific orders and selling pieces to sheet music publishers. It was not an easy path (Mozart had tried to undertake it and died poor, leaving his family helpless), but, in practice, he was able to survive. There was a particularly daunting time, in 1808, when he considered capitulating and accepted Jerome Bonaparte's offer to take over as the official composer of the kingdom of Westphalia. This greatly disturbed the Viennese aristocracy, and a group of high-ranking nobles agreed to grant him a life pension on the sole condition that he continue to live in Vienna. That pioneering example of grant patronage is highly significant. Until a few decades before, a musician, no matter how good he was, was seen by the aristocrat as a server in charge of adding entertainment, pleasure and beauty to his life, and one more element in his ostentation of magnificence. Now, however, the balance of power had changed, since sponsoring the arts was not merely a luxury, but a necessity. There was an awareness that the marketing schemes of industrial capitalism were not yet capable of sustaining the highly specialized artistic activity that European civilization had developed, so that the patronage of the aristocracy was essential, and exercising that function contributed to legitimizing the nobility. In fact, after more than two centuries, the names of the princes Kinsky, Lobkowitz and Lichnowsky or the archduke Rodolfo survive for their association with Beethoven much more than for their political achievements.
The purchase value of the life annuity soon declined, due to the high inflation that followed the Napoleonic wars. The economic predicament was one of the reasons for the bitterness that patterned his later years. Other reasons were deafness (then total), affective loneliness and the feeling that, from around 1815, many of the public and of the intelligentsia began to prefer younger and easier composers, such as Rossini and Weber.
Musical contributions
From a very young age, Beethoven stood out for the originality of his thematic material and instrumental writing. It was noted for rhythmic energy, an aspect in which its sole precedent, Vivaldi (1678-1741), at that time was totally forgotten. To this Beethoven added an impetuous aggressiveness that is, perhaps, his most recognizable trait.
It is very common for historians and critics to divide their work into three periods, but then they are in trouble to characterize those periods in a way that is consistent with reality. We can increase precision and reduce inconsistency by dividing each of these periods in two and replacing the general descriptions with the mere indication of the prominent presence of certain features. The first part of the first period (let's call it 1A) would be the works of childhood and adolescence. The 1B would come from his Trios, opus 1 (1795); understands his stage as "the new Mozart" or "the new Haydn" and extends to works of a notorious originality that are no longer "the new" nobody. From that time, his most remembered work must be the Sonata almost a fantasy, opus 27, nº 2, known as “Claro de luna”, a prototype of a romantic conception of a piano piece destined to function not so much as a speech, but as a sound installation that generates a suggestive climate: the flow of the triplets in the right hand, the deep and scattered notes of the very low bass, the grim melody, the chiaroscuro given by the sudden alternation between major and minor, and the eventual intervention of that zigzagging figure that rises and falls, all bathed in resonance (the pedal constantly pressed).
Stage 2A would be the so-called "heroic phase" of its production, after the diagnosis of deafness and Heiligenstadt's will. It is his most influential moment, that of the historical solitude mentioned at the beginning of this note. To make the Heroic Symphony (1804), among other things, Beethoven had to solve structural problems to sustain such a long piece (about 50 minutes). The dimension of the work was not a mere question of megalomania: it was an essential condition to emphasize the anthropomorphic aspect that classical music had been developing, that is, music that emulated psychological or narrative processes. Here the peaks of emotion are built with resources that imitate effort: an attempt goes wrong, then we look for another way, we catch our breath, we double and finally we reach the climax. Without that sensation of elapsed time, of accumulated substance, the climax of an unprecedented tension could not be justified: the orchestra in full swing hammering for five consecutive times a dissonant chord (seventh major) that sounds like a horn and ends, before loosen, in an even more dissonant chord. The duration of the movement allows for something else: to generate a "story" for the main theme. This theme has all the attributes of a military touch, but it is presented in a way that contradicts that vocation: with a smooth dynamic in the cello and with a descending and dissonant ending. In the course of the piece that theme will gradually fulfill its destiny: the brilliant sound of horns and trumpets, the strong dynamics and a consonant and ascending, erect ending. In terms of the screenplay, it can be said that this theme has a developmental arc, it undergoes an irreversible process, it ends differently from how it started after having gone through a series of adventures, some painful and others pleasant. This deepening of the dramatic narrative of music contributed to increasing the status and attractiveness of instrumental music, which now competed with the novel, the theater and, later, with cinema, sharing the transformative or "philosophical" potential of these artistic forms and transcending the mere function of modulating the momentary mood of the listener.
The duration of the first movement of Heroica was obtained with the Mozartian procedure of employing a profusion of thematic ideas. But Beethoven's ideal, following Goethe, had more to do with conquering an organicity, which was what he sought with the Fifth Symphony (1808). The initial four note motif appears everywhere, not just in the first move. The scherzo engages with the finale after an extensive preparation, in which the music grows from the skeletal sound of pizzicati to the solar explosion of the tutti with the entire orchestra making a bombastic theme. It is such a strong effect that, for the re-exposure, Beethoven had to repeat it, reiterating a part of the previous movement, which arises implanted in the Finale as if it were a flashback. In this way, the movements of the work became inseparable, since they are embedded in each other, and the whole piece sounds like a unified journey that goes from the rabid nonconformity of the beginning to the victorious glory of the end.
The relative tranquility fostered by the life pension (1808) started stage 2B, the "romantic phase". The works become shorter and also more lyrical, nostalgic, less incisive. It is the time when Beethoven is going to look more like the next generation, the romantic generation. At that time, there are two especially important inventions. One is the song cycle; the song, or Lied, was a genre close to the popular, intimate, brief. Enlarging it, as Beethoven had done with symphonic movements, would have mischaracterized it. In A la beloved distante (1816), the composer hooked six different songs with a common theme of longing for love, separation and nostalgia. The final song recalled the first one. With the cycle, it was possible to preserve the simplicity of each constituent piece, generating, globally, a work of greater scope. Variants of that resource would be used by various composers, and, in short, the "conceptual" LP, which would gain prominence in the rock era, derived from the idea of the song cycle. The other invention, which is manifested in A la amada distante or in the sonata opus 101 (also from 1816), is the act of memory: the return of a certain musical idea as if it were a reminiscence brought up by some association of ideas, that sometimes appears fleetingly and suggests a new way forward. This emulation of memory deepened the anthropomorphic (or psychomorphic) character of music.
Its 3A period is characterized by the lack of characteristic or, better said, by the co-presence of extreme features and very different from each other. Here his most monumental works arise (the Missa solemnis, the Novena, the Diabelli Variations, the Sonata Hammerklavier) along with the brief trifles: the most massive makes its way alongside the most exclusive and almost impenetrable.
The Novena (1824), about an hour long, seemed to break the limits not only of duration, but also of the genre itself, since in the final movement a choir and four solo singers intervened. That transgression would be, from then on, an important point of discussion. For the most avant-garde trend of the mid-nineteenth century (Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner), Beethoven would be demonstrating that the notion of musical genre had lost its meaning, and from now on one should compose only according to the intrinsic needs of each idea. , without fitting into established models.
In the Ninth, Beethoven sought to reconcile enormous duration (even more than Heroic) with the demand for organic integration. The beginning was very slow, like a static situation that was gradually gaining more movement. That, on the one hand, imposed a disposition to a long speech. On the other hand, such a beginning seemed to presuppose an expectant, silent, reverent audience that Beethoven's work had helped to form. Without that almost religious attitude on the part of the public, that beginning would be meaningless and would lose effect. The climax was no longer in development, but in re-exposure: the main theme, when he returned after development, erupted like a cataclysm. It is as if a dam had been broken: the entire orchestra playing loudly, the timpani holding a thunderous curl and the theme making itself heard, but half drowned in an uncontrolled sound mass, which would only gradually settle down to give us a breathable atmosphere and limpid. The second move was the prototype of the evil scherzo. He is playful, yes, as a scherzo is by definition, but he plays with his own serious face, with a certain diabolical air, half mocking, half disturbing. And the choral ending, which contains the famous “Ode to joy”, to sustain itself in its 25-minute length, resorted to the tactic, also highly influential, of containing, in the same continuous movement, all the different stages that used to constitute a whole symphony and some more: a calamitous beginning, a recitative, the presentation of the basic idea (twice, once instrumental and once sung), a playful moment (like a scherzo), another very slow and sentimental (like a slow movement) , and the live and cathartic final revelry.
If the Novena grew "outward", there were other works, such as the Diabelli Variations (1823), which seemed to grow "inward". From a theme almost offensively bobote, Beethoven begins, variation after variation, a journey full of unexpected occurrences until, suddenly, we realize that we are in contact with the subtlest, most delicate, deepest, and most complex feelings. But of course, getting there requires time, patience, trust, complicity, concentration.
The final stage, which would be 3B, is that of relative abstraction. Here Beethoven composed, almost exclusively, string quartets (1825-1826). It is a disconcerting moment in his work, since it departs from psychological empathy and seems to return to the preclassical concept of generating an interesting sound object. Of course, that interest is no longer determined by beauty and conventional forms, but by a metaphysical "something", not very easy to locate. They are mysterious works, whimsical constructions of elusive sense, fascinating objects of contemplation and analysis, but they never became popular because it is not comfortable to listen to something that is so difficult to understand where to hold on. It is nice to associate the somewhat abstract character of those final works with the detachment of someone who guesses being close to death, but that seems to presuppose a certain premonitory power in the composer, since the liver disease that killed him at the age of 56 manifested itself only a few months before the end and, from then on, precisely, he was no longer able to compose.
With its demand for concentration, patience, effort, and openness to a mobilizing dramatic charge, Beethoven's music may seem half-misplaced in the era of trap and reggaeton, but, luckily, it is still available in thousands of recordings and, when it returns to exist such a thing, concerts. Without it it is impossible to understand crucial aspects of the history of music. Listening to her is also a very vivid and gratifying way to get in touch with the sensitivity that prevailed two centuries ago. Those who manage to connect with it will have the privilege of facing some of the greatest creative, intellectual and sensitive feats of the world of music.
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