Beethoven - The Art of Living

Beethoven

The Art of Living

"He was a severe and difficult man, impetuous, disliking formality, frequently reproachful and ill-tempered. But his sufferings were immense. For the last 30 years of his life he was deaf. For six years he kept his disability secret, and in his anguish came close to suicide. Later, he became more reconciled to it and carried a conversation book, in which his companions wrote their questions. To achieve contact with the sounds as he composed them, he held a stick between his teeth which returned vibrations from the piano."         

                                              - An excerpt from the "Life and Times of Beethoven"

If I were to apply M.K. Gandhi’s quote “My life is my message” to Beethoven’s life then his message is as loud and clear as a trumpet in a fanfare: hard work and perseverance lead to great things. Beethoven is considered great not because he composed despite being deaf, but because his compositions were simply exceptional. Anyone who has heard his most famous Ninth symphony knows this. But, for me, the real mystery is the source of his motivation.

Beethoven’s life was riddled with every problem imaginable. Poor family, Abusive father, early death of the mother, financially struggles, heartbreak, deafness, depression, family problems, a suicidal nephew to take care of….. the list goes on. Most people would think that true music comes from misery and sorrow; the obvious motif of the Opus that is his life. It definitely had an influence on the way he composed, dramatic, grandiose sometimes philosophical. But I don’t believe that to be the whole reason for his driving force. I believe the answer is a lot more complex and subtle, qualities also present in his music.

Consider this: to write this simple article, a mere 5 paragraphs has taken me a whole night and day of thinking and formulating sentences. Beethoven’s works, hardly simple, were 60-70 pages, sometimes more than a 100 pages long. Works like the 5^th symphony, 9^th symphony, Pastoral symphony, Emperor piano concerto, moonlight sonata, the Pathetique sonata, and The Tempest sonata are no mean feats. Passion and emotion, they last for short spurts of time. They produce ideas, but they do not help with execution. It takes hours of patience and meticulous work to compose like this. Beethoven was not just an artist, he must have been a scientist, rational and practical, determined to uncover the secrets of music.

On a side note, sometimes I wonder: Suppose he wasn’t deaf, would he still have composed the same pieces in the same way? Did his deafness somehow help him compose better? He spent 30 years of his life being deaf. Most of his greatest pieces were written after he went deaf. What if he didn’t have a difficult life, and he never went deaf, what would his music be like then?  

So, to summarise the things we have so far discovered about Beethoven: he was dramatic, subtle, passionate, emotional, rational, practical, patient, meticulous, ill-tempered, and reproachful all at the same time. In other words, he was human. Let’s make a note of this so that when people talk about Artificial Intelligence being able to compose music, we can still be proud to be and live as humans, as Beethoven has so wonderfully shown us.

The Ideal Listener

The Ideal Listener

I should like to suggest some of the qualities that I believe make up the ideal listener. Let us suppose that we are at a concert; our two immediate neighbours must serve as representatives of typical listeners. One experiences music almost entirely through his emotions. He is thrilled by sound itself; the weight of a Tchaikovsky climax overwhelms him; the sensuous beauty of a Brahms slow movement affects him like a good claret; he finds Mozart charming, if a little lightweight, loves the songs of Schubert but finds his instrumental music a trifle over-long, admires and respects Beethoven sometimes to the point of idolatry but considers the late quartets to be above him. His enjoyment of music is genuine, enthusiastic, committed and personal, and not in any way to be despised.

    Beyond him sits our paragon, the perfect listener. He shares all of our immediate neighbour's enthusiasms, but his reactions are constantly enhanced by the subtleties in the music and in its performance. Let us look into his mind for a moment to see the equipment he brings with him to increase his rapport with the music. The programme tells us that we are hearing a Beethoven quartet, the first of the Op.59 set, and gives us a good deal of information about Count Rasumovsky, to whom the work was dedicated. It gives the date of composition, 1806, and the story of the quartet's publication. In its analysis of the four movements it draws particular attention to the Russian folk-tune in the finale, incorporated into the score by Beethoven in order to delight his Russian patron. (Incidentally, and with deference to our musicologists, would our enjoyment of this piece be affected in any way if the opus number was to be changed to 52, if the Count had been a Slovakian ambassador named Silicowsky, if the final tune had been a Moravian folk-song and so on? Of course not.)

     What then do I expect my ideal listener's reaction to the music to be? In general terms, to appreciate every moment in the composition that has some special significance, not in the analyst's sense, like a dead moth pinned on a board, but as part of the whole interwoven tapestry of music. These strands are so complex and multifarious that the very first bars of this quartet might be said to reach back to early Haydn and forward as far as Sibelius. The accompanying figure is pure Haydn, but the cello theme starting so unexpectedly on the fifth note of the scale has a curiously modal flavour that shows us intimations of the opening of Sibelius' 3rd symphony.

     This sense of period, this awareness of the very feel of time, will extend beyond the realm of music, so that one identifies with the intellectual climate of the age. Music is a sort of time machine, enabling us to experience vicariously the emotions and thoughts of men long dead; but it should also help us to be more in tune with the paintings, architecture, literature and poetry of the age from which it comes. Listening to Beethoven we become sensitive not just to music but to the whole flavour of his era.

Excerpt from Antony Hopkins' Introduction to 'The Larousse encyclopedia of music' edited by Geoffrey Hindley