A Life in Music

Chicago Literary Club

“A Life in Music”

by Robert Strong

with musical accompaniment by the Pacifica Quartet

Presented April 21, 2008

My subject this evening is Ludwig van Beethoven, and I will be very ably assisted by the Pacifica Quartet, which will play music from Beethoven’s string quartets to illustrate my remarks.

It is my great pleasure to introduce the members of the Pacifica Quartet to you this evening. First violinist Simin Ganatra is from California; second violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson is a native of Iceland; violist Masumi Rostad is from New York City; and cellist Brandon Vamos grew up in downstate Illinois. They are members of the faculty of University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign and are also visiting performing artists at the University of Chicago and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet has received some of the music world’s highest honors and is critically acclaimed as one of the top-ranked American string quartets. The Pacifica performs over 70 concerts annually in North America, Europe, and Asia and recently performed Beethoven’s complete string quartets in Chicago and New York City. Among its many achievements, the Pacifica was the first to play—in a single concert performance—all five of the supremely difficult string quartets by the American composer, Elliott Carter.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born December 16, 1770 and died March 26, 1827 in his 57^th year. He was short and powerfully built, with broad shoulders and strong hands. He had dark eyes, shaggy black hair, a determined set to his jaw, and strikingly expressive eyes. He was shy with women, who considered him good company but not physically attractive. He invariably developed romantic attachments to women who were not available. He had many friends, who variously described him as lively, tactless, witty, generous, stubborn, moody, proud, and touchy. “His closest friends suffered his…sudden rages—most often followed by expressions of boundless penitence.”[1] Curiously, he never learned to dance in time to music.

As Beethoven’s musical introduction, the Pacifica Quartet will play the third movement from an early string quartet, Opus 18, no. 6, composed in 1800. (Pacifica plays 3^rd movement of Opus 18, no. 6)

My narrative will focus on Beethoven’s creative life with only brief reference to his personal life. In the words of biographer Lewis Lockwood, we are unable to say “[what] circumstances in Beethoven’s outer life may have generated a particular composition at a particular time.”[2] Despite an increasingly chaotic personal life, he was highly organized and disciplined in his creative life, and it can be argued that his urgent need to create was the dominant force, sustaining him when personal crises arose.

In 1792 Beethoven left his home city of Bonn at age 21 and traveled to Vienna with an invitation to study with Joseph Haydn, the most famous composer in Europe. He had endured a lonely, difficult childhood. His drunken father’s improvidence made him the family bread-winner in his early teens as a court musician, and he had suffered the death of his beloved mother. But his musical talent had been recognized at a young age and won him excellent teachers, who not only instructed him in the musical tradition of Haydn and Mozart but also gave him an unusually solid grounding in the then-unfashionable music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Beethoven’s talent also drew the kindly support of Bonn’s aristocracy, and he carried with him to Vienna letters of introduction from the well-connected Count Ferdinand Waldstein.

Beethoven was a virtuoso pianist, and once in music-mad Vienna, he found immediate success in the palaces and salons of the wealthy elite for whom patronage of a rising young musician was proof of high social status. Many of the wealthy were amateur musicians—one prince maintained his own orchestra—and musical gatherings were a popular social ritual. Beethoven was not as successful with his teachers. While they thought highly of his ability, they considered him “stubborn and so bent on having his own way” as to refuse instruction.[3] His studies with Haydn were broken off after fourteen months, and subsequent arrangements with other noted teachers were even shorter. For his part, Beethoven was resentful of each man in turn for opposing his ideas.

The differences with his teachers were not simply the result of Beethoven’s rebellious nature. He was philosophically opposed to their principle that music should please but not challenge its listeners. Convention held that composers should strive for music of refinement and restraint. Passions could be expressed, but never, as Mozart wrote to his father, “to the point of disgust….” “[M]usic,” Mozart continued, “must never offend the ear…but must always be pleasing…in other words, always remain music.”[4] Beethoven could compose music that pleased, but he wanted the freedom to compose music of a different character, music that was less restrained and more challenging.

Beethoven understood that before he could successfully follow his own creative instincts, he must first proclaim his mastery of conventional forms. He arranged a musical ‘coming out party,’ a public concert in April 1800 designed to please the Viennese audience and to confirm his growing reputation as the young composer rising to succeed Mozart and Haydn. The program included his First Symphony, his Piano Concerto in B-flat, and his Septet—relatively conservative compositions that nonetheless reflected his own unmistakable style. The concert was an enormous success. “Beethoven the composer won praise for his ‘taste,’…as did Beethoven the pianist for his ‘masterly’ performance at the keyboard.”[5]

Here, in the style of Beethoven’s more cautious early work, is the first movement of Quartet Opus 18, no. 6, composed in 1800. In it you will note the statement-and-response of a refined conversation among the instruments—a balanced musical structure of “this” answered by “that.” There are brief flashes of assertiveness, as in any conversation among close friends, but the overall effect is pleasing, with no passions, as Mozart wrote, expressed “to the point of disgust.” (Pacifica plays 1^st movement of Opus 18, no. 6)

By 1802, ten years after his arrival in Vienna, Beethoven had become the acknowledged successor to Mozart and Haydn. At age 31 he was a financial success, receiving annuities from his aristocratic supporters and income from his compositions. In 1802 his growing deafness led to a personal crisis, but creatively he was supremely confident and knew that some of his compositions had already gone far beyond his predecessors. His “Pathétique” and “Tempest” piano sonatas and the magnificent “Kreutzer” violin sonata unleashed a power that astonished his private audiences. This was not music of charm and restraint but music composed in a style that a contemporary described as “like a living wind that agitates the depths of the sea,” sweeping the listeners up “in the storms…of musical emotion, not just hearing but feeling music as a bodily experience.”[6]

The Pacifica Quartet will play an example of Beethoven’s early departure from conventionally ‘pleasing’ music, the section Beethoven titled “La Malinconia” from the fourth movement of his Quartet Opus 18, no. 6. This was the first time a personal emotion—“melancholy”—had been used as a title in a string quartet, a bold innovation in what was then considered the highest and most refined of musical genres. The music was also provocative in its intensity and the dramatic contrast of soft and loud passages.[7] (Pacifica plays La Malinconia only from 4^th movement of Opus 18, no. 6)

Beethoven’s first public announcement of a new creative direction was his Third Symphony, titled “Eroica,” in 1804. The music was a giant creative leap. The “Eroica” opens with two fortissimo full orchestra chords—“the cannon shots of a new symphonic language,” in the words of biographer Edmund Morris.[8] The music immediately modulates in and out of remote harmonies to a long series of pulses, then on to a fortissimo finale-like climax—all in the first 45 seconds! There had never been a symphony like this one. It was more dramatic; more emotional; more intense; with more contrast between loud and soft and sudden harmonic shifts; more instruments, especially brass; and more music! The “Eroica” was almost twice as long as most Haydn and Mozart symphonies.

Our ears are so accustomed to Beethoven’s music that it is hard for us to grasp the impact of his new style on concert-goers in 1804. To give you some sense of this, the Pacifica will play the first movement of Quartet Opus 95, composed in 1810 near the end of Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” period. First, let us recall the more conventional style in the opening measures of Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 18, no. 6. (Pacifica plays to 1^stnote of measure 13, 1^st movement of Opus 18, no. 6) Now imagine you have only heard music in that Haydnesque style and hear the explosive first movement of Quartet Opus 95. (Pacifica plays 1^st movement of Opus 95)

With the “Eroica” and the compositions that followed in the next eight years, Beethoven revolutionized instrumental music and greatly enlarged its expressive capacities.[9] This was the central phase of his career, the years when he completed many of his best-know and still most-loved compositions—his Third through Eighth Symphonies; his Third, Fourth, and Fifth Piano Concertos; the Violin Concerto; the Triple Concerto; and some of his best-known sonatas, trios, and quartets. In their scale and power, and especially in Beethoven’s dramatic use of contrast, these works opened the door to the long era of Romantic music that followed Beethoven’s death. Contrast was now the central element of Beethoven’s musical design—the sudden changes in volume, harmony, mood, and character that strike the listener so directly.

Another distinctive element of Beethoven’s musical design often passes by the listener without notice—his use of small musical ideas, called motifs, to build extended passages of music. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony presents a famous example of this technique. It begins with a four-note motif, which Beethoven repeats for emphasis. (Cellist plays first five measures of Fifth Symphony) This motif dominates the first and third movements of the Fifth Symphony and reappears in the last movement as well. Development of musical motifs is a basic compositional technique used by many composers in which a passage of music is restated in modified form or mixed with new musical ideas. Beethoven selected very small motifs, sometimes just a few notes, which gave him great flexibility to make sudden changes in the texture of his music. What makes Beethoven’s music unusual is the intensity with which he re-worked and developed these small musical bits, but the process unfolds so organically that the listener perceives the music as extended passages and whole movements.

Typical examples of Beethoven’s use of small musical motifs can be found in the fourth movement of his Quartet Opus 59, no. 2. The movement opens with a melody in the first violin. (First violinist plays measure 1 to middle of measure 5, 4^th movement of Opus 59, no. 2) Within this brief melody are two motifs that Beethoven uses prominently to build and add variety to the entire movement. Here’s the first motif. (First violinist plays C-D-E in measures 1 & 2) Just three notes, which for purposes of discussion I will call “Da-da-DUM.” Here’s the second motif. (First violinist plays D-G-A-G in measures 2 & 3) I will call this “ta-TA-ta-TA.” Here they are again back together in the first half of the opening melody—Da-Da-DUM,” “ta-TA-ta-TA.” (First violinist plays measure 1 to first note of measure 3, 4^th movement of Opus 59, no. 2)

Beethoven uses the “ta-TA-ta-TA” motif as the rhythmic pulse of the entire movement, and it is frequently played as a musical foundation in the lower instruments, for example under Simin’s opening melody. (Second violinist, violist, and cellist play measure 1 through first note of measure 5, 4^th movement of Opus 59, no. 2) The “da-da-DUM” motif appears in all the instruments at various points, weaving through the movement to provide both continuity and contrast. Not long after the movement opens, “da-da-DUM” is used by itself to accelerate the music. (Pacifica plays measures 36 to first note of 52) Further along the “da-da-DUM” motif appears in an entirely different character as it bounces humorously back and forth among the four voices. (Pacifica plays from B in measure 89 to first beat of 107) In a final example, near the end of the movement Beethoven puts “da-da-DUM” and one “ta-TA” together to create music of an ambiguous, searching character. (Pacifica plays from first violin’s pick-up in measure 327 through measure 342) You will hear these motifs and others in the complete fourth movement of Quartet Opus 59, no. 2, composed in 1806. (Pacifica plays 4^th movement of Opus 59, no. 2)

Shortly after completing his Eighth Symphony in 1812, Beethoven wrote a letter to a stranger, a girl of about ten years old, who had written him a fan letter. In his reply, he expressed the sense that he no longer saw a creative path forward. “I am not yet entitled to [a laurel wreath],” he wrote. “[A] true artist… sees unfortunately that art has no limits [and he is aware] how far he is from reaching his goal…[even though] others may perhaps admire him….” After 1812 Beethoven’s creative output suddenly declined, abruptly ending his decade of composing in the “heroic” style, and he fell into a state of apparent creative exhaustion. During the years from 1813 through 1817 he composed relatively little—two bombastic commemorative pieces that are no longer performed and only a few substantive works, including his final version of the opera Fideleo. These were also years of wrenching difficulties in his personal life—loss of financial support; bitter family battles; estrangement from former friends; chronic illness; and increasing isolation as he became completely deaf. Biographer Lewis Lockwood makes a convincing case that this period, though outwardly unproductive, was one in which Beethoven rebuilt his musical language using new sources of inspiration, principally the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

By 1818 Beethoven’s creative confidence returned, and despite increasing ill health he composed steadily until shortly before his death in March 1827. The great Hammerklavier Piano Sonata of 1818 was the first of his so-called “late period” compositions, all of which have a quality of radical experimentation, ranging from his most massive, rhetorical works like the Ninth Symphony to his most inward, compressed compositions like the late string quartets. Throughout, there is a sense, in the words of Michael Steinberg, that Beethoven “seems to ignore the physical limitations of fingers and lips and vocal chords.”[10] Elements from the style of Bach and other masters of the Baroque era are prominent in Beethoven’s compositions of this period—fugues, with their independent, overlapping lines of music; old dance forms; trills; recitative; and other antique devices. The strongly rhythmic qualities of his earlier style are less prominent and his music is more lyrical, as though it is trying to capture the eloquence of the human voice. These changes give his “late period” compositions a deeply personal character and a sense of speaking directly to the listener.

Beethoven’s new style baffled his contemporaries, even the small group that remained devoted to the struggle of understanding his music. The poet Goethe said that music being composed at this time, by which he certainly meant Beethoven’s, “just remains stuck in my ears,” and he considered it “no longer being music.”[11] Only Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was greeted with thunderous applause, which has never ceased. His other public composition, the equally massive Missa Solemnis, was not popular, and the rest of Beethoven’s compositions after 1818, mostly for piano and string quartet, were considered unfathomable and unplayable, the “products of a deaf genius buried in an inaccessible world.”[12] Elements of Beethoven’s late musical style can be heard in two movements the Pacifica will play from his Quartet Opus 131. An extended fugue opens the first movement, with a darkly lyrical and introspective character. Experimentation with form is evident in the lack of a clear break between movements and the frequently changing tempo in the second movement. Here are the first two movements of Quartet Opus 131, composed in 1826. (Pacifica plays 1^st & 2^nd movements of Opus 131)

The final composition Beethoven completed before his death in 1827 was his Quartet Opus 135. He inscribed the last movement with the following words: “The resolution reached with difficulty: Must it be? It must be!” Beethoven had used descriptive words in the past to heighten the emotional qualities he wished his music to express—but what is the meaning of this enigmatic title? Does Beethoven wish us to understand something deeply philosophical, or as contemporary anecdote suggests, is it a joking reference to a customer’s reluctance to pay Beethoven’s bill? The movement’s slow introduction groans the question: “Must it be?” After several repetitions of the question comes the bright answer—“It must be!” This is followed by music of an almost playful gaiety, undisturbed by a brief reappearance of the groans. The Quartet Opus 135 stands apart in its straightforward brevity, coming as it does immediately after Beethoven composed his most inward and transcendent string quartets. The fourth movement may be considered Beethoven’s witty statement that all’s right with the world, surprising us, as he loved to do, with an unexpected contrast to the seriousness of his other late work. Here to close our program is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s last complete composition, his Quarter Opus 135. (Pacifica plays 4^th movement of Opus 135)

Notes