5 Paths to Ludwig van Beethoven
Paul Griffiths’ new novel Mr Beethoven imagines a voyage Beethoven takes to Boston having lived beyond March 1827, when the real composer died. The counter-factual history is played upon in the book with great irony and lightness of touch, but one thing that is completely sincere is the love of Beethoven’s music.
Here, Griffiths recommends five personal highlights from, and ways into, the Beethoven canon.
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From “Für Elise” to the Ode to Joy, from the Fifth Symphony to the “Moonlight Sonata,” there are a thousand entry points to the composer whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year – if celebrated with far fewer concerts than had been planned. Here are a few personal choices of monuments and moments:
Beethoven resolving
Almost any large composition of Beethoven’s will tell you the same story, of opposites – vigour and calm, thunder and tranquility, adventure and intimacy – being fully expressed and then reconciled. It was how music worked at the time – how, from Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven had learned music worked. At that same time, revolution – political revolution in France, industrial revolution in England – had spun divisions into the air, between aristocrat and bourgeois, owner and worker. The task was to model resolution. The biggest of Beethoven’s works by far – his single opera, Fidelio – does that on several levels. A cross-dressing woman enters a prison to rescue her unjustly incarcerated husband. A tyrant is overthrown. A choir is given full, free voice. And all this is concluded by the arrival of a minor character, who enters the action just fifteen minutes before the end to sing the most beautiful melody in the entire piece. A recording made at La Scala in 2014, with Peter Mattei in this role and Daniel Barenboim conducting, is available on YouTube.
Beethoven aspiring, inspiring
He was, of course, afflicted with deafness, steadily increasing from when he was around thirty to the end of his life, a long quarter-century later. It was, as he said himself, a terrible fate for a musician. It did, though, enable him to become the great artist of the “Even so…”. This meant creating aspirations not just for himself but for all humanity, that the world might become a better place. In so doing, he made himself a focus of inspiration. You can hear his determination on progress, improvement, solidarity, responsibility all through his output, and most definitely in a piece for choir and orchestra with solo soprano, Opferlied. Never mind the words; the message is in the music. Among the few recordings of this rarely performed item is one conducted by Kent Nagano.
Beethoven laughing
Audiences at classical concerts, if memory serves, were rarely found laughing, or even smiling. That was a shame – certainly when Beethoven was on the menu. Humour he inherited from his teacher Haydn, the humour of dialogue as the same phrase pops up in different parts of the orchestra, the humour of a sudden exclamation or retreat. But there’s also the humour of the nineteenth century laughing at, liberated from, the decorousness of its predecessor – the ripple of affectionate amusement. And nobody minds when music laughs at its own jokes. Try Simon Rattle’s recording of the Second Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Start with the last movement if you need convincing. Or the one before that.
Beethoven praying
Beethoven does this too, with hands poised at a piano keyboard or – in the “Sacred Song of Thanksgiving” that forms the immense slow movement of his late A minor quartet – at string instruments and their bows. The Danish String Quartet’s recording for ECM is forthcoming, but YouTube has them playing this music in Copenhagen two years ago. Fervent serenity.
Beethoven discovering
In having fun with a jejune tune proposed by a publisher, Beethoven surveyed his era and looked way beyond it. András Schiff recorded two performances of the Diabelli Variations for ECM, on a twentieth-century piano and on one from Beethoven’s time and place. Between the here-and-now and the there-and-then rises eternity.
Paul Anthony Griffiths OBE (born 1947) is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. His latest novel Mr Beethoven is published by Henningham Family Press and is the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month for May.
