Happy birthday, Ludwig!
This is a personal story about why I, like many others, revere Beethoven, written to acknowledge his anniversary year.
Celebrating a birthday during a global pandemic was always going to be problematic. When you're Ludwig van Beethoven, it's your 250th and musicians all over the world have been planning celebratory events for years, it could be a disaster. But the world's orchestras and other ensembles are not giving up easily on plans to honour a composer who has been called the greatest ever in the western art music canon.
As musicians and organisations have turned to digital streaming to reach audiences in locked down countries, Beethoven's music has been the choice of many, including our own Auckland Philharmonia, which brought serenity to New Zealand living rooms early in our lock-down with his Pastoral 6th. Clever musicians from the Rotterdam Philharmonic combined individual performances of Ode to Joy from their bedrooms for a YouTube audience of 2 million., and although the NZSO’s much-anticipated Missa Solemnis in April was postponed, the Orchestra’s musicians streamed all-Beethoven chamber recitals, playing together as virtual ensembles from their Wellington living rooms.
Beethoven cycles in New Zealand
Musicians frequently perform and record complete “cycles” of Beethoven’s music, offering an experience of the astonishing range of his oeuvre throughout his composing life. The NZSO jumped the gun last year on Beethoven’s birthday with a splendid two-city ‘Festival’ of his nine Symphonies in four concerts under Edo de Waart. New Zealand pianist Michael Houstoun has twice performed all thirty-two Piano Sonatas to enraptured audiences and recorded them in 2014 for release by Rattle Records as a 14-CD boxed set. Houstoun has also performed all the Piano Concertos with Orchestra Wellington and the complete Violin Sonatas with Michael Hill Competition award-winner Bella Hristova, also released by Rattle. The New Zealand String Quartet was about to tour nationally with its third complete cycle of Beethoven’s String Quartets when the COVID-19 lockdown forced postponement. APO has likewise had to postpone its cycle of the complete Symphonies scheduled for this birthday year.
Images of Beethoven, wild-haired and glowering, are instantly recognisable. The story of the composer’s life is legendary, particularly the tragic encroaching deafness that took him into a totally silent world by his early forties. Ashamed of his condition, he retreated from performing and public appearances. His apparently reclusive, cantankerous personality, related to his disability, may have vexed his Viennese landlord and neighbours but was no barrier to adulation in the music world in his own time and since.
But why is Beethoven revered not only by audiences but by musicians the world over, including those at the summit of their profession? Variously described as a 'genius', a 'god' and a 'colossus' astride the classical music world, Beethoven has earned his unassailable status in many ways.
At the technical level his music is remarkable for its sheer compositional skill. He picked up the genial language of Haydn, himself a master of invention, and the elegant beauty and structural skill of Mozart and transcended both. This month I’ve been playing his Piano Sonata Opus 26 in A flat. Every bar of this music contains evidence of a huge musical intelligence and an enormous subtlety in the use of composing tools. Small chromatic shifts to take the musical argument forward, his choice of key and subversion of that key in the service of expression, his negotiation around little musical corners – all of these are a source of wonderment when performing his music.
And the architecture of the forms in which he combines these bars is extraordinarily innovative. Opus 26 begins not in ‘sonata form’ but with a wonderful set of variations. He constantly pushed the envelope of the established forms of his day, acknowledging no constraints in his ingenious constructions.
Secondly, he far exceeded his contemporaries in the variety of his expression. In one piano sonata, one set of variations, one symphony or concerto, we experience the gamut of emotions; heart-breaking tenderness, passionate rage, gentle witticisms and fleet-footed joy are all communicated with consummate skill.
Beyond all of this are the breadth and depth of his art – the word profound often comes to mind when considering Beethoven, and this quality is found across an enormous quantity of music. Beethoven’s large composing output is usually divided into three periods, called “early”, “middle” (or “heroic”) and “late”. Music from the early period is closest to the classical styles - and forms - of Haydn and Mozart. In his middle period, which included six Symphonies from the 3rd, “Eroica”, to the 8th, the last two Piano Concertos and his only opera, Fidelio, his passionate and revolutionary style pointed the way towards the Romantic period of the later 19th century. In his “late” works, the influence of the Baroque contrapuntists and his iconoclastic approach to form produced awe-inspiring music that is at times harmonically and structurally mystifying and ethereal, particularly in the late String Quartets and Piano Sonatas.
Beethoven’s last works include his final Symphony, the monumental and ever-popular 9th, for which he added choral forces and soloists to the orchestra. The “Ode to Joy” from the last movement may be the most well-known melody of all classical music. The 9th is a sublime example of perhaps the final and most important reason for Beethoven’s enduring popularity - his humanity. As the voices of the choir are raised to sing, in the words of Schiller’s poem, Freude (Joy), and Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All people will become brothers) we experience both Beethoven’s spiritual depth and his big-heartedness. He was capable of turning away from his own demons to reach out to all of humanity. Unsurprisingly this music has become a universal anthem, performed on occasions such the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, broadcast by Chinese students from Tiananmen Square and sung by Chilean demonstrators against Pinochet.
Beethoven’s actual 250th birthday is not until December 2020 - he was baptised on 17 December and probably born the day before. The current pandemic’s interruptions to the many live Beethoven celebrations scheduled for this year may continue, but we should all, musicians and audiences alike, find ways to celebrate, this year and every other, the music this giant of composition has left us. Happy birthday, Ludwig!