A life in music, and far beyond

“THROUGH music he could create impregnable, unified structures; describe endless forms of transcendence over hostile energies; inscribe narratives of return, refinding, and rebeginning; forge a channel between himself and a forbearing deity; invoke the healing powers of music.” So Maynard Solomon (inventing a few words along the way) characterizes Beethoven’s creative quest in the prologue to his magisterial collection of 12 essays exploring new facets of Beethoven’s late style.

No one in Beethoven’s lifetime (it goes without saying) would have referred to the works from roughly 1815 until his death in 1827 as “late”; Beethoven’s style evolved continuously throughout his career, and who knew where it would take him? Wilhelm von Lenz, in “Beethoven et ses trois styles” of 1852, first put the concept of early, middle and late Beethoven squarely into play. Indeed, the very notion of a “late style” -- subsequently applied indiscriminately by scholars to artists from Leonardo to Willem de Kooning -- seems indissolubly linked with Beethoven. The reasons for the linkage -- including those adduced by Lenz -- are not hard to find. Traditionally, Beethoven scholars have promulgated the notion of a six-year gap (1812-18) between the latter works of the so-called Heroic Decade (especially Symphonies No. 7 and 8) and the clarion call to the late style in the B-flat Piano Sonata, Op. 106 (the “Hammerklavier.”) Over this period, Beethoven maintained a diary whose irregular entries suggest his struggles. Moreover, the late works, especially the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, seem to inhabit new and ineffable realms of human consciousness. And finally, could anything other than divine intervention have synchronized the dawn of the late style with the onset of Beethoven’s clinical deafness? From 1818 he was forced to rely on his friends writing down commentary in so-called conversation books, not to mention the need to compose aided only by an interior ear. Hence the image, burned in the romantic imagination, of the lonely existential traveler whose struggles outstrip the comprehension of mere mortals.

Much of Solomon’s extraordinary career, including his landmark biography of 1977 and a 1988 collection of essays, has been devoted to humanizing Beethoven. Unlike the vast majority of artist biographers, he has always been deeply invested in the relationship between life and art -- a preoccupation all the more striking in his case because he makes no claims to being a trained musician. Paradoxically, the result is not a more fallible, less deified Beethoven but an even more impressive and moving figure whose courage and resolve redeem a raft of human frailties. Not surprisingly, Solomon is far less interested in the external markers of Beethoven’s late style than in his intellectual and spiritual journey. In the course of this journey, the line between the Heroic Decade and the late style is both blurred and clarified.

In “Late Beethoven,” Solomon has undertaken a study no one before him either dared or bothered to do. His preparation included a close inspection of Beethoven’s Tagebuch (the aforementioned diary), letters, annotations in books in Beethoven’s library and thousands of pages of his conversation books. This led him down a trail full of discoveries: Beethoven’s deep affinity for Freemasonry; a reevaluation of the much maligned theme of the “Diabelli” Variations, a monumental set of variations for piano, as the ideal subject rather than a rescued banality; a survey, in the essay titled “Some Romantic Images,” of Beethoven’s portrayals of talking trees, breezes, starry skies, the romantic solitary, the distant beloved. Solomon connects Beethoven’s evolution to the seminal Romantic thinkers of his time -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, the poet Novalis, Johann Gottfried Herder, Blake and Wordsworth -- and along the way uncovers links to artists and writers from Aristotle to Auden.

Solomon quotes Beethoven’s doleful remark that “before my departure for the Elysian fields I must leave behind me what the eternal spirit has infused into my soul and bids me complete.” The same could be said of Solomon, whose work on Beethoven has been matched by a penetrating biography of Mozart and will soon be followed by a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Schubert.

Esteban Buch’s “Beethoven’s Ninth” is, as its title proclaims, considerably more focused than Solomon’s essays. In actuality it is not a book about the Ninth Symphony at all -- the first three movements play only cameo roles -- but a fascinating if sometimes convoluted piece of reception history, of which German scholarship has been so fond. Its rationale derives from the celebratory 1989 performances of the Ninth under Leonard Bernstein, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This media-saturated event quickly became notorious for Bernstein’s substitution, under real or imagined pressure, of the word Freiheit (“freedom”) for Schiller’s Freude (“joy”) -- a delicious example of political co-option. Simply put, Buch traces the search for a “European anthem,” a musical and textual symbol of Europe’s noblest collective ideals, revving up with “God Save the King” and “La Marseillaise” in the 18th century and marching systematically through Beethoven’s career (including his entanglements with French revolutionary and postrevolutionary ideals) to Modernist appropriations of the Ninth.

Not until his Conclusion does the author finally confess his full ambition: “[T]he ideological implications of Beethoven’s work go far beyond the question of Europe. The career of the Ode to Joy is a tale that ... can be read as a fable on the moral value of Western art. All who have invoked the Ninth Symphony have begun by experiencing its beauty and ended with the need for its morality; because they revered the Beautiful and because they believed that they knew the Good, they have made that Beautiful the symbol of the Good.”

Buch chronicles in loving detail the hypocrisies of all those involved in the 1989 performances of the Ninth and their sequels. Bernstein’s disingenuous play for the historical place in Schiller’s Ode of “freedom” over “joy” was taken up in 1990 by British socialist Lyndon Harrison, who pleaded for the adoption of Beethoven’s setting as the official hymn of the EU (in its original form or a more accessible one is not clear). It is unlikely, of course, that either Schiller or Beethoven had in mind the fall of communism, the victory of consumer-driven capitalism or the triumph of NATO.

Within these limitations, however, Buch’s forays into the intimate relationship between music and politics are fresh and revealing at almost every turn. Anyone who reads his account of the infamous 1845 Bonn unveiling of a Beethoven statue -- “There is practically no merchant who does not want to turn a profit from the name Beethoven. We have Beethoven cigars, Beethoven trousers with stripes like bars of music and with pauses, quarter-note rests, and other musical signs” -- will quickly understand that modern concepts of merchandising have deep roots.

As the Argentinian author of a French doctoral thesis, Buch has kept his work blessedly free of the incestuous footnoting practiced by the scholarly Beethoven community. (As a result, he occasionally misses things; the chapter on “Beethoven as Fuhrer” would have benefited from a reading of David B. Dennis’ “Beethoven in German Politics: 1870-1989.”) Richard Miller’s translation of Buch’s prolix prose is a tour de force of the kind normally reserved for the works of a Dostoevsky or a Mann.

The brand of personal heroism traced by Buch and, especially, Solomon -- based on sacrifice and the spiritual journey -- is an awkward fit with contemporary cultural values. There’s very little irony or compromise in the heroic path trod by Beethoven. Among cinematic heroes (or antiheroes) of the last decade, there are far more examples of the Gordon (“Greed is good!”) Gekko sort or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator than of the triumph of creativity over adversity, for which Beethoven is so justly famous; even the heroic Harry Potter seems to be primarily the beneficiary of special effects.

Perhaps the purity of Beethoven’s struggle in the face of deafness and his own pronounced shortcomings transcends any kind of historical limitation. Solomon makes as compelling a case as can be imagined for the intricate and indirect bond between life and music. He forces us to hear the late music with destabilized new ears. Given that Beethoven is a composer more often and more widely performed than any other in the classical pantheon, this is a feat with few equals.