Celebrating Beethoven: the capacity of a human

In Vienna, a seemingly inconspicuous white building lines the street opposite the main university. If you go in, a long, hammering staircase leads up many floors to a small museum. There are never many visitors, the rooms are compact and most of the walls merely decorated with portraits or busts of the same face, staring straight back at you. 

This dreary lodging was where Ludwig van Beethoven lived for a part of his long life in Vienna. It is around the time he lived here that the devastating Heiligenstadt Testament was written, which pleaded with his brothers when the composer began to notice his fall into bitter deafness. It is where he composed Fidelio, and his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, works which express a life unimaginable from those sparse quarters. 

All that can be imagined from here is the idea of Beethoven flinging himself up the stairs to work, or raging around the house, caught up in one of the tempestuous moods which are reflected so passionately in his music. One can only be left to imagine the man himself, flaunting his genius over such bare floorboards, or unleashing his chords upon the nearest piano. More than 200 years since its conception, the notion that the opening bars of the Fifth or the unhinged scales of the same piece, or the cries of the Chorus in his only opera, were first conceived and documented here, still creates a hush around the rooms. There are papers and facsimiles, but none have the characterful power of the bust of Beethoven which stands towering above the rest; his face staring straight into anyone who stands close, his hair thrown back, his eyes eternally animated. 

For the most endearing quality of Beethoven is his eternal supplies of energy. The popular image held of him as the bustling, rambunctious, misanthropic creator of the dark, gargantuan chords which open the Ninth Symphony, is not as misleading as the image of Bach as simply a stolid small-town organist, but it still needs urgent correction. Beethoven was, more than the only other two who could compete with him, the most euphoric. His music made the extremes of emotion more stark than any composer had done before him, and his symphonies wreck every sinew and tear apart every convention on the score and in performance, to throw the listener into every swathe of feeling. Think of the serene opening of the Seventh Symphony, before the shattering slow movement, then followed by the last two movements – which are the musical equivalent of being dragged up a mountain and then thrust off the summit into a landslide. Playing his music is constantly exhausting; string players need not take out gym memberships when they are faced with their scores; long passages of winding melodies contrast with his masterful control of rhythm, with the emphasis of each bar shifting all over the place, and melodies turned upside down in some colossal kaleidoscope. 

Attempts to understand Beethoven often look to his musical influences and the tumult of the times in which he lived. The latter may give more of an indication of his unique brilliance; the revolutionary age in which he grew up was then contrasted with the cruelness of the aftermath. The division of Europe under the tyrannical rule of Napoleon, who Beethoven had once so adored, made him a witness to an upheaval desperately illustrated in his music. The famous tale of his dedication of the Eroica Symphony where he tore through the paper in removing Napoleon’s name after the latter declared himself Emperor in 1804 is but one of his political outbursts, yet he was entwined to the idea of liberty and freedom to death: his last completed symphony and Eroica make this clear enough. For the time he lived in was still haunted by the eye of the censor and the whim of the secret policeman, a world similar to the same turn of the century depicted by Puccini’s Tosca a hundred years later. 

And yet he saw past it. And that is the other supreme part of Beethoven: his defiance in face of repression, in the face of deafness, in the face of his father’s abuse, in the face of all the social ostracisation he felt as a result of his “malady”. Indeed, many of his friends told of him as not only the greatest composer, but the greatest human to have ever lived. When, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, he pleads with his brothers to forgive him for seeming “malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic”, he goes on to beg a “Divine One” to see within him the trenchant “inmost souls” wherein lies “the love of mankind and the desire to do good”. His musical endeavours, ultimately done to “become accepted among worthy artists and men”, seem impossible, but it is against all this that he composes his greatest works in his middle and later stages of life.

All attempts to set down his musical legacy make the fatal mistake of idealising Beethoven as a moveable figure, and his works as merely figments of the grand passage of the classical tradition. If most composers after Bach owe much of their tradition to the Leipzig Kapellmeister, then Beethoven’s influence is not so concrete. Credited with unleashing the force of Romanticism onto a world-weary musical scene, this does not speak so much of the later string quartets or the demonic idiosyncrasies of the Grosse Fuge, which still today doesn’t find a regular slot among Classical FM listeners (yes, I know, I know). Trying to position him among the other greats of Romanticism does a disservice; had Beethoven lived another decade, I’m quite sure he would have spared Schoenberg et al quite a lot of time devising a new atonality a century later. 

Listening to Beethoven, not just in his symphonies, is like being hoist by the throat and flung around the room to measure the effect. His musical philosophy at times seemed to be more based around the mind of a spirits competitor than that of the Viennese tradition he was taught. And it is this culmination, of the swaggeringly brilliant mind, the bemusing inspiration, and the enchanting result, which binds his music to so much of the Western imagination even now. Just picture the scene before you: of Beethoven, now almost completely deaf, gesticulating wildly in front of his beleaguered orchestra at the end of the premiere of the Ninth, still conducting, although the piece finished many bars ago. One of the performers turns him round to acknowledge the raptures from the audience. If there is a personification of art, it’s standing there, its eyes flying avidly forward.

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