How do we conceive of music?  

Music is, for most, a commodity. This fact has disturbed musicologists, performers and dilettantes since it became as much. For those, especially, who see it as the highest art, the idea of music as a cultural product does not chime well with conceptions of greatness, genius or artistic integrity. Yet still it stands: what Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry” wields its greatest influence on popular music, on the search for the latest hit, the chart-topper, the next “big” album or star or influencer. Most popular music is disingenuous, “standardised”, whatever its marketers or artists claim: it speaks of an originality or depth of emotion which is contrived, or at any rate clichéd.

Yet none of us would want to know that our favourite music is inherently commercial or contrived. The problem is essential to our understanding of classical music, the epitome of all the Western ideas of originality and artistic truth, as well as of technical skill. But classical music, more than any other, is what we make of it. However attractive the idea of treating music on its own terms is to modern listeners — essentially talking of it solely “as music ” — the uncomfortable truth is that classical composers are more bound to their times and conditions than any others.

Beethoven is the composer from whom musicologists can never escape. His music is universally popular. In Asia his piano works are as ubiquitous as they are here and his symphonies are the emblematic examples of the Western classical tradition in full fruition. Ask anyone what they know of his work, and those first notes of the Fifth Symphony will invariably turn up: the univocal, aggressive opening which is the simplest outline of a piece, and indeed a style, defined by its complexity.

If the Romantic era is intense, poetic, full of Sturm und Drang and the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner’s term meaning “complete or total work of art”), then Beethoven is its composer of choice. His artistic portrayals reveal it most clearly: Beethoven is clad in a dark jacket, hair flowing out, holed up in his Viennese attic, heroically scrambling through a composition he’ll never hear. “Joy through suffering” was his own term, and that intensively masculine image is the one you’ll find emblazoned over CDs of his works.

Caspar David Friedrich ’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog is the artistic version: head held high, contemplating the chaos, back to the viewer. The figure’s stick holds him upon the rock, but otherwise he is remote, impervious to others, intent on the self-sufficiency of his position, and, by extension, the artist’s integrity. Romanticism is labelled as the revolt against the constrained logic of Classicism, but its irrationality is not religious: the wanderer stands unsupported, away from the set-up of conventional society, accepted standards. He is, or was supposed to be, an outsider.  

Our image of Beethoven, and therefore of his music, is the same. He was the grumpy upstart who ripped up the ornate style of his Viennese contemporaries with his impassioned, heroic innovations. Like the best myths, it has an element of important truth about it, but has built up a collective misconception of his life, and indeed times — one which has troubled studies of music ever since. In fact, much German music after Beethoven’s death was composed in the glare of his magisterial shadow: Schubert asked how anyone could think of composing after his idol’s 14th String Quartet, Brahms expressed the towering stature of his predecessor’s works over his own musical world, and Mahler was being deliberately presumptuous when he expressed the hope that his own symphonies would outlast Beethoven’s nine to which they owed so much.

Yet, to put it blandly, this Romantic image was not the full Beethoven. The man was still very much a product of his time; one who praised Napoleon as the successor to the greatest Roman consuls, before suddenly changing his mind and violently scratching out his dedication of the Eroica Symphony after the victor of Marengo declared himself Emperor of the French. He coveted coffee like any other true Viennese.

Beethoven’s life cannot be seen without its financial side: he relied on the support of many generous aristocrats for the space to compose the pieces that have lasted, and those that have not were often those that got him the most cash: Wellington’s Victory brought him substantial rewards for a work hardly heard today, just as Brahms’ Hungarian Dances  were among his most successful if less critically admired works nowadays. Yet central to our image of Beethoven is his independence, freed from conventionality. What created it was the reforms in the way music was conceived and performed across Europe; whereas Bach, Haydn and Mozart had depended on the employment of royal, municipal and ecclesiastical patrons for steady employment, Beethoven worked largely on his own: he was the first major composer to be free from those social bonds, just as music itself was becoming available outside of those courtly circles for the first time.  

“ Bourgeois subjectivity ” sounds like a term straight out of Adorno’s “Dialectic for Dummies”, but it is nevertheless vital to our understanding of Beethoven and composers of his time. It posits the idea that the increasing prosperity of the middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century allowed them to experience the artistic luxuries formerly permitted only to the nobility, that the virtue of free time impacted not only on bourgeois political thought but promoted a burgeoning cultural awareness as well. They therefore gained that subjectivity which, as history would have it, was then passed down to the rest of society by the middle of the next century.  

It’s still a patronising view of music’s impact, and those like Adorno who lamented the mass culture of popular music risk being locked in the forbidding seminaries of the musical academy, without a thought for music being treated on its own terms. But the fact of music’s change from elitist predilection — bound by the Church and state — to a wider, educated section of society changed our perceptions of music more than the music itself.

In a wonderful recent essay for TheArticle on this theme, Jonathan Gaisman wrote here that the best classical music “is itself: and that is enough”. Aesthetically, this can be true if we want it to be. But music, or at least our proper understanding of it, cannot be left on its own, just as discussing everything but the score hinders our view of its central power as music. The power of the metaphor — which defines too much of our contemporary descriptions of musical experience — is a precious but dangerous one. Our descriptions of music have to be aware of their own subjectivity. If we declare them universal, we defy not only the intrinsic nature of musical taste and opinion, but set up the whole apparatus of cultural norms which have beset classical music and its reception to this day.  

Again, we go back to Beethoven. The advent of bourgeois subjectivity went hand in hand with the creation of a musical history — strange as it seems, the idea of the “great composers” was not fully established until the time of Wagner, when Bach’s centrality to the Western canon was acknowledged and figures like Handel, Mozart and Schumann assumed their place within this grand teleology of musical progression. In some ways, the twentieth century was the buffer to this train of progress: neoclassicism vied with serialism, while numerous other composers harked straight back to the refuges of plainsong or early music. Classical music, it seems to many, ran out of ideas in 1911 . Beethoven was the standard-bearer for the vestiges of an idealistic Romanticism.  

So our conceptions of music became historical. Bach begat Mozart who begat Beethoven who begat Schubert — so the canon goes on. Certain works, great as they are, become forbidding to many because of their status, just as do the great novels held up as the paragons of Western writing. The musicologist Joseph Kerman summed it up neatly in his seminal work on the subject: “The creation of a canon was a result of this state as well as of a historical need. The idea of ‘great works’, just as with the historical idea of the ‘great men’ shaping the course of world events, was applied in some way to music, with Beethoven as its epitomisation.”

This is not a piece of academic obscurantism or mere statue-toppling: all the major composers are still acknowledged as the masters that posterity has assured us they are. Yet the truth so much writing on music refuses to acknowledge is that central aesthetic link between context and content, as well our ingrained sensibilities, tastes, needs — things which music fulfills in a different way to literature or visual art. Too often we say that the mystery of music is its essence and power, and present it as an organism separate from its ecosystem. A full experience of music, one that conceives of its artistic manufacturer just as much as its presentational power — is one that is no more correct or undisputed, but perhaps more true.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.