In My Changer, 12/16/02

Today is Ludwig van Beethoven's birthday, and I'm trying to cancel my Earthlink service (I have a cable modem now, thank you very much) and I'm listening to the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth—Symphony, that is, not piano sonata or string quartet or piano trio or violin sonata, all of which are really good too—while I'm on hold. (I'm also realizing why people who routinely type while on the phone are extremely susceptible to repetitive stress injuries.) As far as I can tell over the phone, it's an okay performance, solidly in the tradition, nothing too extreme but played well enough and with a nice pulse.

I own three recordings of Beethoven's Ninth. I've heard it on the radio, seen it performed on TV, heard it live once. I've heard the theme song to that Brooke Shields TV show that turned the "Ode to Joy" theme into an emotionally-stunted, there-and-back-in-ten-easy-seconds guitar riff. I've heard the Samsung ads, played in movie theaters, that use a later part of that fourth movement, the double fugue on "Freude schöne Gotterfunken" and "Seid umschlungen, Millionen" if I remember correctly, and gotten goosebumps. I've heard that second movement in a Blimpie's ad on TV and moaned. I've heard one of Sir Georg Solti's renditions of the instrumental bridge (yes, that's essentially what it is) in the "Ode to Joy" during "Immortal Beloved" and felt my head spin and wondered if I was going to faint from something beyond bliss right in the Avalon. I could continue this list, but you get the point.

Beethoven's music surrounds us even when we don't hear it as such, but I almost always do hear it, because Beethoven's music has been a solace and spur and inspiration for me for so long now that I literally cannot imagine my life without him at my artistic center. I love Bach's music, but I could lose it, if some horrible bargainer made me choose; I can't imagine losing Beethoven and surviving. And I thought this would be a good occasion to write a bit about Beethoven's music as I see it and as it means something to me.

When I think above Beethoven meaning something to me, my mind always skips over the early and middle opuses and lands on the late piano sonatas and string quartets, the Ninth, and the Missa Solemnis. But this is a lot to skip over. Right now, I'm listening to the Eighth Symphony, a solidly middle-period work, and being reminded of how its abrupt accelerations and compressed musical narrative, not to mention the lack of a true slow movement, seem somehow inimical to its great cheer—it can be threatening music in some performances, and it threatens a little even when the conductor seems completely unaware of that dimension.

My current conductor, the late Alfred Tennstedt (EMI), seems to see this symphony as Beethoven's return to classical proportions and manner after the expanses of the Seventh, albeit while using a musical language that could not turn back. I had my one major car accident to a recording of the Seventh, period instrumenteur John Eliot Gardiner (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv), who later on that CD makes the Eighth into a whiplashing frenzy, so tightly controlled that you have to listen and listen close and join in the exuberance, even if Tennstedt is better to live with.

Do you see the problem? I haven't touched on anything much and I'm at damn near 600 words. I could write for a thousand words without thinking too much about a good number of Beethoven's works, because I've already done the thinking—but I'm not sure it would really interest any of you. And in truth, I can't imagine Beethoven being too pleased with this kind of intricate discussion of performances of his works. For one prosaic thing, he was deaf For another thing, he is the author of the quote (remembered approximately without reference close at hand) "I do not compose for your puny violin," said when a musician raised questions about the technical difficulties of one of the late quartets. He was composing absolute music, divorced from the vagaries of real-world performance, trying to say what he could say in a language that miraculously had not been denied him. So I'm going to say something unmusicological about what one Beethoven work means to me.

The last piano sonata, no. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, has two movements. The first begins with a thundering dissonance that is answered by a plaintive, nervous trill. Soon both dissolve into painful chords above a martial bass that eventually urges the launch into the sonata form. The first theme recapitulates some of the opening dissonances in its intervals; the second, after a deceleration more dramatic than any in the repertoire, desperate and pleading and answered by that most inevitable-sounding of forms, a fugato on the first theme in the development. Ever since I heard this music and understood it, I have thought the first movement represented life: its slings and arrows and occasional consolations, real and true while present and then subsumed in the torrent of sorrow that leads headlong to...

Some unexpected major chords that introduce the second movement. It begins with a luminous theme full of warm thirds and expands outward via variation, concentrated and rich and powerful and eventually transporting. This is where you go when you cannot live life. This is the essence of the material that binds us together. This is the expression of a private joy distilled and brought to light, perfectly and astonishingly coherent and miraculously potent. There is, as Thomas Mann discussed in The Magic Mountain, no third movement, because there could not be.

I want to write this. This is, in some basic way, what I feel life is. The sorrow of what happens is overwhelming; the beauty of what life is lies farther from our mental reach and yet is truer and even more powerful. It crushes me and exalts me at the same time. I want to write it. I think I always knew about it and Beethoven's Op. 111, with the special help of pianists Stephen Kovacevich (EMI) and Richard Goode (Nonesuch), uncovered it in me. I think I will always try to write it, even if I fail miserably every single time I try even to imagine the words for it. And that is just what I have done thus far. But I will continue to dedicate my meager talent to the attempt.

And it feels better to celebrate this on Beethoven's birthday than it would to discuss all them recordings. And I'm sure I'll do that eventually anyway. So: Happy birthday, Ludwig. If everyone is right and we do go somewhere after we die, I hope you went to the second movement of Op. 111. It's what you, after a life of pain from which you nevertheless tried to extract beauty, best deserve.

In My Changer Home

The Rest of Our Culture Home

Spam-O-Matic Home