I’ve been revisiting Beethoven.
If you love the music we call classical – concert music composed in the Western World from the mid-sixteen-hundreds onward – you’re always revisiting Beethoven. He, Bach, Handel, and Mozart are inevitable. (I’m tempted to add Schubert, Verdi, Wagner and Tchaikovsky – OK, what the hell, add them.) Other giants you might, with difficulty, steer clear of, even risk chiding. Vivaldi, Haydn, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky have – believe it or not – knowledgeable detractors. I, for example, loathe Liszt, who should be shot from the can(n)on not enshrined in it. Of the titans, I’d argue, the most titanic is Beethoven, not just because he left more tunes ringing in posterity’s ears, but because he revolutionized every form he touched. Only once – when he was off his rocker – did he produce schlock (see Opus 91). The symphony, piano sonata, and string quartet, he transformed utterly from his first to his last.
His restlessness makes him the most exhausting of musical companions. The others on my list you can sometimes relax into, their beauty embracing, consoling. But behind even the serenest of Beethoven’s utterances, you feel his impatience pacing. Sick, ugly, embittered, enraged, alone, he was never at his ease; his best – which he knew to be better than anyone’s – was never good enough. This intolerable tension – of dissatisfaction – is essential to his genius.
This revisit was occasioned by a perfect rendering of Fidelio by the Metropolitan Opera (be still, my heart) and Jan Swafford’s crackling biography of the man, through my earphones. Swafford is my favorite musical biographer. Music is the devil to write about. “No ideas but in things,” decreed poet William Carlos Williams – but in music there are no things – no shapes, colors, natural forms – so the writer’s left with inert technical terms (sonata, counterpoint, andante, etc.) and vague mushy adjectives (sweet, fierce, sunny, etc.). I’ll keep jawing about music because I love it, need it, but not without grumping like Rumpelstiltskin at my inadequacy.
Swafford writes for the knowledgeable amateur. He describes the music, he doesn’t quote it (musical quotations amidst prose distract impossibly). Himself a composer, he feels the creative project, the musical mysteries being wrestled. I’ve read his books on Ives and Brahms and much of his Vintage Guide to Classical Music. I smile anticipating his Mozart.
Technology aids the music writer immeasurably. After Swafford describes a Beethoven piece – his Egmont Overture, say – I can toggle my smartphone onto a recording, one of several – and compare the actuality with his description. The auditory appetite stimulated by the writer’s prose is instantly sated by the sounds it was straining to evoke. If you like music, try it, it’s a thrill and a half. Bless Steve Jobs.
A Beethoven immersion invariably kicks me in the pants. Any great art goads me to try harder – not to compete, heaven knows, but to strive – and quit dillydallying and moping; Beethoven most sternly. His life sucked, pardon my French. He never got the girl, he was ugly, had to cope with stupid patrons, was going deaf, his intestines were revolting (in both senses). Irascible by nature, he messed up all his relations. Yet he soldiered on, more than soldiered, triumphed, finding his way again and again to hallelujahs which exalt us still.
We live in an evil hour, which will get worse. Individually and collectively we’ve plenty to bemoan. My laundry-list of grievances is long and tear-splotched. Beethoven grabs it from me, crumples it, and flicks it into the trash. “How stupid can you be?” he growls. “Freude’s the word. Freude, freude, freude.” (Freude means joy.)