A US colleague told me about some of the pieces they’ve got planned
next season – Schumann and Beethoven symphonies, Tchaikovsky concertos... Really, I
sometimes think artistic planning consists of taking three spinning wheels
marked ‘overtures’, ‘concertos’ and ‘symphonies’, and spinning the names of the
same two-dozen works in each genre. But it’s got me thinking about a piece I wrote
some years ago.
Beethoven’s Ninth was first performed 7 May 1824. In the 188
years since, it has acquired the status of a classic, which means, on one hand,
that it’s been accorded the honour it deserves. On the other, that it inherits
the perennial handicap of a masterpiece: it seems to be set in stone.
Somehow when we hear a work over and over again, we get to
thinking that such a work was always going to turn out the way it did; that it
sprang, like Homer’s Athena, ‘fully armed from the head of Zeus’. Such a belief
diminishes our appreciation of creation, dulls our responses, and may even
blind us to real insights.
Classical music buffs got excited in April 2003 when it was
reported that a Beethoven’s Ninth was going under the hammer at Sotheby’s. The
465 pages bound in three volumes may have been the manuscript used at the
premiere in 1824, the basis of the first printed edition in 1826. Beethoven’s
valued assistant Wenzel Schlemmer had died in 1825, and a number of other hands were
evident in the manuscript. ‘Du verfluchter Kerl’ (‘you damned fool’) Beethoven
wrote above the music at one point, ‘forgetting,’ as New York Times critic James R. Oestereich has pointed out, ‘universal
brotherhood [the theme of the last movement’s Ode to Joy] for an instant.’
There are changes to expression marks and various rethinkings, necessitating in
some cases the sewing in of whole new pages. There is even the odd coffee
stain, which goes to show that the creation of a masterpiece is a form of
industry; the result of labour, second thoughts, crossings out, the work of a
supervening genius, but also of a team of helpers who have to overcome the
hassles of everyday life to make a work of art which speaks beyond the ages.
We think of Beethoven as the supreme musical architect. But
in fact, Beethoven sat on the cusp of the period when composers turned from
improvisers into architects. Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper once likened
Beethoven’s manner of composition to finding one’s way along a wall which is
receding into fog in the distance and only becoming clearer as one gropes
along; and he contrasted this with the working method of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), who described musical conception as a house becoming
clear in all its details at once. Beethoven’s way of composing seemed to offer
fewer guarantees of success; it is remarkable that he was able to make of his
pieces such integrated wholes. The fact that they are owed a lot to his galvanising genius.
So Beethoven would basically begin at the beginning - not as
common as you’d think. He’d map out the first movement, writing a sort of
synopsis of key moments (not particularly worrying about the joins), while
noting ideas for the movements ahead (and maybe other works). He would then
work on subsequent movements, filling in details behind him as ideas matured,
as understanding grew, while nudging a piece forward. With the Ninth, the very
first idea actually to be conceived (some time after the winter of 1815) was
for a fugue on a theme we now recognise as the main theme of the scherzo second
movement, the most popular movement at the work’s first performance. But not
long after that, Beethoven came up with something similar to the prophetic opening
to the symphony we now know. In the synopsis of the opening to the symphony
sketched by Beethoven in the winter of 1815/16, one sees the same doubtful
suggestion of A minor, and then the decisive landing on D minor; nebulousness
leading to decisiveness, a compositional expression of Beethoven’s customary
manner of working.
It was some time later that Beethoven got around to thinking
about the fourth movement. The famous choral finale may not have been
inevitable. One of Beethoven’s ideas around this time is rather like the last
movement of the String Quartet in A minor, Op.132 – but in D minor, the key of
the Ninth Symphony. Maybe a string-dominated Allegro appassionato was slated for this work. What a different
ending we would then have experienced, if this fast music [I’ve
roughly orchestrated it in a sub-Beethoven-type way] had followed upon the radiantly slow third
movement...
Audience reactions in the past 188
years may have been a few decibels lower on the applause-meter.
But Beethoven
also wrote under the 'instrumental' sketch of thsi passage the words ‘Before the Freude’, ‘Freude’ being the
first word of Schiller’s poem. Could he have been thinking, if not of a
completely instrumental last movement, of a different instrumental introduction
to the choral finale, before lighting on the brilliant idea of a choral finale
preceded by the now well-known 'horror fanfare' and ‘critical review’ of all the preceding movements?
Beethoven had been meaning to set Schiller’s ode To Joy to music for many years. There is
mention in a letter to Mrs Schiller dated 1793, over 30 years before the
premiere of the Ninth, that a young composer from the Rhineland, that is
Beethoven, was intending to set the poem. And in the sketchbooks dating from
1798 there is an early setting of the line ‘muss ein lieber Vater wohnen...’
(‘there must dwell a loving father...’), which Beethoven, back then, set to a
melody in C major.
Beethoven had of course written another Choral Fantasia, with an Ode-like
melody, not yet the perfect tune he honed for the Ninth, and based on a text in
praise of music. But why did it take him more than 30 years to finally set the
Schiller?
Political sensitivity? It is well known that Schiller had
substituted ‘Freude’ (joy) for ‘Freiheit’ (freedom) to evade the censors. But
there’s some justification for thinking that ‘Überm Sternenzelt muss ein lieber
Vater wohnen’ was the line that held most significance for Beethoven. ‘Be
enfolded, all ye millions, in this kiss of the whole world! Brothers, above the
canopy of stars must dwell a loving Father’.
This occurs as the first chorus in
Schiller’s version of the poem but Beethoven saves it for later. What he then puts
after the first and second verses is Schiller’s fourth chorus: ‘Joyously, as His
dazzling suns traverse the heavens, so, brothers, run your course, exultant, as
a hero claims victory.’ Beethoven thus edits and rearranges Schiller’s poem in
order to create a sequence that takes us effectively from earthly celebration,
to the hero who advances to the stars, to the benevolent maker (of us all?) who
must be beyond. Is this the real Beethoven, looking towards the open sky, like
the prisoners in his opera Fidelio,
newly freed from their dungeon cells?
And how would we describe the music for this passage? It is
a part of a mysterious adagio that the youthful Beethoven could not have
achieved. In his final setting of these words Beethoven makes use of sounds
that he discovered while working on certain sections of the Missa solemnis, new sounds intended
to depict something beyond the heavens, and inspire a sense of primal awe. It
seems that Beethoven’s final view of the ode To Joy had to wait until after the writing of the more
heavens-gazing sections of the great Mass in D. The significance of Beethoven
having to wait so long before setting Schiller’s poem relates, I think, to his
need to find an elevated view of the text, a more universal view.
But also more personal. Beethoven once said that music was a
higher revelation than religion or philosophy, but what is revealed by looking
behind the scenes at the Ninth? It's more than just an academic exercise. I draw on what
I’ve read of Beethoven’s abused childhood, think of the words ‘lieber Vater’,
and find great poignancy in Beethoven’s extension of a universal hope for
benevolent fathering in the slow section that precedes the tumult and applause-inducing excitement of the loud, prestissimo and oh-so familiar ending of Beethoven’s Ninth.
- first published by Symphony Services International. Reproduced by kind permission
If you are interested in reading other articles of mine on classical music, please see:
Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012
