Martin Geck - Beethoven’s Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas

Flashes of lightning are a ubiquitous feature of Beethovens symphonies, throwing light on something that the composer merely suspected he was carrying around within him but which then found forceful and eruptive expression in his music. The years between 1800 and 1824 are not viewed as a separate or special period by historians, and yet they frame an exceptional age in music, for they encapsulate a world of ideas that Beethoven succeeded in conjuring up in his symphonies not only for himself but for others, too.

Perhaps he himself was already thinking on a historical scale when in his late twenties he introduced his First Symphony to the world in April 1800, marking the start of a new century and prompting Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl to strike a rhapsodic note in his 1838 narrative Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener (The music festival; or, The Beethovenians), which describes a particularly memorable passage in the opening movement of the Eroica (bars 24883) as thirty-six bars of pure nineteenth century. The piano Beethovens First Symphony marks the beginning of a new period in the history of the symphony and arguably also in the history of classical music in general. It will be worth our while, therefore, to examine the background to this radical upheaval within the world of music.

Within this context, two currents are of particular interest for our understanding of Beethovens art. Historians traditionally see them as a succession of two distinct periods, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And yethere as elsewherethese periods overlap rather than moving from one to the other. Among the ideas associated with the Enlightenment is the belief that the individual discovered not only his or her dignity but also a sense of responsibility for what we would nowadays call the bigger picture. Until then there had been the widespread, essentially Christian belief that God is great, and man is small, and that the only great men were rulers and their agents, all of whom were acting at Gods behest. It was in this spirit that Bach wrote his Cantata BWV Anh. I 13, Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Gtter der Erden (Welcome, you ruling gods on Earth), for the Saxon royal family. Of course, mankind has always valued genuine human greatness, generally intellectual or artistic, but until the eighteenth century this was always seen as secondary. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment did it acquire its primary significance, bringing with it a new motto: Every rational person can advance society, and a person of genius can unhinge the world.

The Romantics contrasted this conviction with their own empirical observation that genius constantly comes up against its own limitations whenever its flights of fancy clash with contemptible everyday reality. Beethoven goes to the very heart of this contradiction: the victories that his symphonies celebrate are hard won or else they are invoked by means of resources available only to musicespecially his own.