Listening to Beethoven

What bugs me in Viennese classicism is the occasional treatment of different voices as if they are equal, the trading of musical material between the low and high voices of the string choir with no variation, reflecting the contrapuntal norms of a past era rather than the realities of orchestral performance. Listening to the scherzo of the 9th today when tutti join fortissimo in the galloping rhythm I heard it as if the lazy articulations of the bass were indeed intended by the composer to resonate slightly behind the higher voices, that the strings, written in rhythmic unison, cannot at that tempo sound rhythmically unified. I thought this represents a breakthrough of using the instruments for what they are capable of rather than as the modern replacements of the human voices sounding in churches, and this is here an irony because the passage is in rhythmic unison but that is not what the listener hears: the upper voices sharply articulate the downbeat, but the lower voices are a powerful grumbling like an earthquake whose rhythmic ambiguity undermines the tyranny of the downbeat.
This is a case of what I find brilliant in Beethoven and it is usually misunderstood: that he used the conventions of his time to contrive gestures of shocking violence and intensity. I don’t believe the opening of the Eroica or the 5th or other such famous moments are truly so unprecedented in the music of his time. I’m thinking of the sforzandi in the finale of the 4th, which come in the midst of an unremarkable flurry of superficial activity. On the page the music does not appear so different from Haydn or Mozart and yet it grated on the eighteenth century ear. In that gesture from the 4th I hear more than in any other (except perhaps the first harmony of the finale of the 9th) Beethoven in his apartment mercilessly pounding, punishing the piano he can hardly hear, less to summon the sound than to vent his despair. It’s not that I think Beethoven’s gestures weren’t shocking in his time, they clearly were, but they generally had some precedent and were always the building blocks within a classical framework, sharp articulations of masculine violence to be balanced with female grace.
I noticed the strong hissing of the “f” in “Freude,” which was particularly pronounced in the recording I was listening to, as the choir sang all consonants well before the beat, which I found distasteful at first but am now uncertain about. I remember a voice teacher I knew taught that consonants should be before the beat in German and English and on the beat in French and Italian.
I thought today also that Beethoven did not have the words or their sounds in mind when he wrote the finale, with the single exception of the word “Freude,” which I imagine seized his mind forcefully upon reading the poem and that the lightning-bolt choral “Freude” at the end of the recitative emerges from that moment of inspiration when Beethoven first encountered this bit of Schiller. Otherwise the finale is instrumental music for singers. (Rather like how most of Brahms is piano music for whatever instrument) This is an indicator of how far the orchestra had come as musical thing-in-itself: composers now no longer imposed vocal tropes on wood and steel (I mean sheepgut), but the limitations and conventions of instrumental music now set the terms for vocal writing. This ideal would see its apotheosis in Wagner and his disciples—Wagner, brass-obsessed, innovating new uses and abuses and extensions of the brass choir, whose vocal lines never seem to stray from what’s possible for the French horn. Of course the same goes for Mahler and Strauss, but Strauss is cheating because for him the French horn can do anything.
The Turkishness in the finale of the 9th always troubled me. I do not doubt it was intended to be sonically strange, but I realized for the first time that poetically it represents if not a return to the home of youth, then the new elysial home we dream of, a sort of Garden of Eden. While Turkishness was at the center of the 18th-century Europe image of otherness (as, indeed, the Ottoman empire and various other parts of dar al-Islam were the parts of the outside world with which Europe was most intimately familiar), there was a strand of Enlightenment thought that presented Turks or other easterners as embodying the West’s spiritual ideals and the whole of the East as untouched by the failings of the West. Naturally these images occur side-by-side with portraits of Eastern greed, violence, lechery and superstition, as in die Entführung aus dem Serail, but if we laugh at Osmin, we, with the chorus, sing the praises of the benevolent and enlightened Eastern prince Pasha Selim, who comes off looking much better than the Europeans (at least the men), and whose deus ex machina pardon shows he understands Enlightenment ideals better than they. Voltaire, having taken his simple Candide on a tour of European locales, lifestyles and ideas, settles the hero in his own modest Eden in European Turkey (notably not in the Americas, Europeans’ other fantasy garden, which proved too dangerous for Candide and Cunegonde). I suppose Nathan der Wise is one of the best examples of Western virtue in the person of the crusader suffering by comparison to Eastern temperance. While it could be argued that Nathan represents the cosmopolitan middle ground between the excesses of East and West, yet Nathan, as a Jew, was definitely not European, and would not have been considered such by audiences of Lessing’s time. These fantasies are an emblem of Western decline as European civilization begins to look outward for inspiration rather than inward, as also witnessed also by the European fascination with the New World. These images are also intended as a criticism and mirror of the West rather than having any true grounding in experience or contact with the east.
Back to Beethoven. I would have a hard time arguing that the Turkish march in the finale is not “other.” Poetically, however, it draws the European listener out of his time and place to a distant land he’s never visited and can hardly imagine yet is real, a place where “all men will be brothers.” This ideal place, though located in the inscrutable East is merely the Enlightenment projection of Elysium.
I find myself listening to the 9th and wondering how it is Beethoven was able to summarize the aspirations and anxieties of an entire civilization. Inevitably I doubt the assumptions of those ponderings, asking whether these meanings are what we have bestowed on the man’s work. I consider the strangeness of the apotheosis of Western ideals in this journey through sonic mystery, angular gestures and rustic simplicity, arriving at the place where our most carefully considered dreams come true (by way of the Sublime Porte, no less). It’s a bizarre trip, and one I love to take.
Hat tip to Maynard Solomon for the last three paragraphs