Ludwig Van Beethoven is certainly on any short list of the greatest
composers. Like all supreme artists, this is not for his prodigious
technical gifts alone, but for the depth of human experience and emotion
that his music explores and the universality of its message. Beethoven's
struggles with his own fate and deafness are embodied in music that
fearlessly continued to evolve throughout his life. His continued searching
for deeper musical, philosophical and emotional truths brings to mind
artists such as Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
Beethoven, the son of a rather dissolute court musician, was born in Bonn,
Germany in 1770. It is perhaps his early rebellion against the arbitrary
strictness of a father who wanted to exploit his son's talents that formed
Beethoven's strong and difficult personality. He was truly a child of the
revolutionary spirit that was spreading through Europe, and the first
important composer to openly declare himself an artist serving a higher
calling than the court or aristocracy.
Beethoven thus did not become the second Mozart, the darling of court
society that his father hoped for. Rather he became an independent force,
confident of his own powers, and one whose few lessons with the greats of
the previous generation, including Haydn and Mozart, didn't ultimately mean
much to him. He settled in Vienna in 1792, and his first public fame came as
a piano virtuoso of unprecedented power, with a new and explosive kind of
playing that was quite apart from the elegant fluency of Mozart and other
virtuosos of the day. His virtuosity is certainly evidenced in his piano sonatas and
particularly the five piano concertos, culminating in the Concerto No.5 in Eb (Emperor), which, like the concertos of Mozart, were originally conceived as apt
calling cards for a composer/pianist.
Beethoven's talents and brash confidence won the respect of a musical and
enlightened aristocracy who treated him with a deference that Beethoven
expected and demanded, and that would have shocked both Haydn and Mozart.
While he probably could have survived by other means, he received financial
support from a number of interested nobleman, but without sacrificing his
independence.
Beethoven's output is usually thought of as grouped in early, middle and
late periods. The First Symphony (1800) begins the new century on a seventh
chord (a mysterious dominant of the subdominant) that quickly challenges
classical propriety (although such things had already been explored by
C.P.E. Bach, perhaps the true father of the new music). The style of this
music already sacrifices the elegance of Mozart's surfaces for power and
energy, and Beethoven shows his attraction to the economic use of material
favored by Haydn. Beethoven's gruff humor probably owes more to Haydn as
well, and by the Second Symphony, the minuet has been replaced with a
weightier scherzo which is characteristic of the direction in which
Beethoven's symphonic thoughts are moving.
The Third Symphony (Eroica) is a watershed in western music history. The
violent removal of the dedication to Napoleon is well known, but the
universal heroism and grandeur of the longest symphony until the Ninth,
remained and points the way to the noblest aspirations of the form in the
19th century.
By this time Beethoven has also established his most important metiers with
a number of his thirty-two piano sonatas and the Op.18 string quartets. He
had also begun to experience the deafness (probably from syphilis) that
transformed his inner world view. This was at first met most
characteristically perhaps with the violence and challenge of the fate
motive of the Fifth Symphony. Beethoven seems to address his own destiny
and place in the universe with a biblical directness that evokes Job.
Other seminal middle period music includes such masterpieces as the
Violin Concerto,
the Piano Sonata No.21 in C (Waldstein)
and No.23 in F- (Appasionata), and the Rasumovsky
string quartets. Much of this music is characterized by an enormous
expansion of classical forms and themes that are markedly rhythmic in
character (e.g. the opening motives of the Violin Concerto and the Waldstein
Sonata). In addition, Beethoven realizes the essence of the most important
of classical forms - the sonata form - with strongly differentiated first and
second theme groups, highly dramatic development sections and codas that
sometimes rival the development in size. The importance of the sonata form
can be particularly seen in a work such as the first string quartet of Op.59,
where even the slow movement and scherzo are in sonata form.
For all the inspiration that Beethoven was to succeeding generations of
romantic composers, both in the transcendence of his music and the
independence of his character, he almost completely worked within the
heritage of the classical tradition. The sublime world of the last five of
his sixteen string quartets and the late piano sonatas is still within the
bounds of classical procedures, but now forms are telescoped and there is a
very personal use of unusual numbers and types of movements combined with an
increasing use of counterpoint. Many of the final works contain fugal
sections of a very personal nature within sonata forms. In these works
Beethoven, in his isolation brought about by years of total deafness,
reaches a profound state of resignation and understanding, humor, and
contemplation. The rhetorical trills of the earlier classical era have been
transformed into the shimmering stars in the heaven of the variations of the
Op.109 piano sonata.
Allen Krantz is a composer and classical guitarist with degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory and Stanford
University. He is on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA where he lectures on music history
and heads the guitar program. Krantz's works range from solo piano
and chamber music to a number of orchestral pieces. Recordings of his compositions and arrangements are on
the DTR label, and his guitar transcriptions are published by International Music.
Link to the CMA
Beethoven, the son of a rather dissolute court musician, was born in Bonn,
Germany in 1770. It is perhaps his early rebellion against the arbitrary
strictness of a father who wanted to exploit his son's talents that formed
Beethoven's strong and difficult personality. He was truly a child of the
revolutionary spirit that was spreading through Europe, and the first
important composer to openly declare himself an artist serving a higher
calling than the court or aristocracy.
expansion of classical forms and themes that are markedly rhythmic in
character (e.g. the opening motives of the Violin Concerto and the Waldstein
Sonata). In addition, Beethoven realizes the essence of the most important
of classical forms - the sonata form - with strongly differentiated first and
second theme groups, highly dramatic development sections and codas that
sometimes rival the development in size. The importance of the sonata form
can be particularly seen in a work such as the first string quartet of Op.59,
where even the slow movement and scherzo are in sonata form.
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