On Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 1:52:05 PM UTC-7, Frank Forman wrote:
> WP: Tim Page: Beethoven: The genius who broke all the rules
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/beethoven-the-genius-who-broke-all-the-rules/2019/08/16/399b54b2-a71e-11e9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html
>
> Tim Page, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music critic for The
> Washington Post, is Professor of Journalism and Music at the University of
> Southern California and the author or editor of more than 20 books.
>
> Beethoven
> By John Clubbe
> Norton.
> 505 pp. $39.95
>
> Ludwig van Beethoven decided, in a break from tradition, that musical
> content would dictate the forms of his compositions, instead of the other
> way around. He lived in a time, writes John Clubbe, that saw "new and
> strange ideas" and a flowering of the creative spirit. (Photo: Johnny
> Eggitt/AFP/Getty Images)
>
> Don't let the title "Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary" throw you off.
> This is not one of those Marxian screeds that evaluate the work of an artist
> by perceived progressive leanings: There is nothing of Trotsky and very
> little of Adorno in this volume. Rather, John Clubbe has written a
> thoughtful cultural history that takes into account the times in which
> Beethoven lived and worked--and they were times of revolution.
>
> Clubbe calls the two decades from 1790 to 1810 "the beginning of a new stage
> in the history of mankind." "New and strange ideas, cheering to many but
> highly upsetting to others, infiltrated Europe. This creative spirit, as
> later historians have observed, produced a tremendous flowering in science,
> technology, literature, art and music, and reforms of all kind. Poets and
> musicians differentiated and refined the language of the inner life."
>
> Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770 in the western German city of Bonn.
> Clubbe calls the composer's father, Johann, a court tenor, his "first and
> worst" teacher: "His pedagogy was unremarkable, his method cruel, his
> behavior--influenced by a growing addiction to alcohol--abominable. He often
> beat his son." Beethoven's hostility toward authority may be traced in part
> to such unfair treatment. In any event, the young man was often dismissed as
> ill-mannered and intemperate, and he burned bridges with many who would
> gladly have helped him. Still, his genius prevailed--a strong pianist, an
> inspired improviser, a violinist, a conductor, Beethoven also wrote hours
> upon hours of marvelous music, bursting with energy and invention, and was
> famous before he was 30.
>
> There is a long-standing tendency to treat the early works as though they
> had somehow been composed by Beethoven before he became the titanic
> Beethoven of legend. In fact, the steady and radiantly good-humored early
> piano sonatas and string quartets are no less worthy for having been written
> in a classical mien than, say, "The Firebird" is minor Stravinsky because it
> predates the savage ferocities of "The Rite of Spring." Indeed, Glenn Gould
> found Beethoven's early music his most satisfying. "Almost all of those
> early piano works are immaculately balanced--top to bottom, register to
> register," he said in a 1980 interview. "Beethoven's senses of structure,
> fantasy, variety, thematic continuity, harmonic propulsion and contrapuntal
> discipline were absolutely--miraculously--in alignment."
>
> But Beethoven the revolutionary would soon be in ascendance. Take the
> abrupt--and, for its time, deeply shocking--opening of the Symphony No. 3
> ("Eroica"), written in 1803: There is no formal introduction whatsoever,
> only two bluntly explosive chords and then the great first theme. Even five
> years earlier, in one of his finest piano sonatas, Op. 10, No. 3, Beethoven
> followed a joyful opening movement with a long Adagio of such unprecedented
> tragic intensity that we can only imagine the effect it must have had on its
> first audience. Thereafter, Beethoven would leave the rules behind--content
> would dictate form, rather than the other way around.
>
> Clubbe knows his 19th-century history--he has edited the letters of Thomas
> and Jane Welsh Carlyle and written full-length studies of Byron and Thomas
> Hood. He traces Beethoven's love for the work of Goethe and Friedrich
> Schiller, and his profound early admiration for Napoleon (to whom the
> "Eroica" was originally dedicated). A chapter on the creation of "Fidelio,"
> Beethoven's only opera and an ode to human freedom, is especially
> comprehensive. Clubbe also makes note that Vienna, for all of its undoubted
> musical greatness--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert spent most of their
> careers there, with Brahms, Mahler and Schoenberg, among many others, to
> follow later in the century--was in most ways a hidebound, purse-proud and
> restrictive city.
>
> As W. Jackson Bate observed of Samuel Johnson in his magnificent biography,
> whatever we experience, we find Beethoven has been there before us, and is
> meeting and returning home with us. It was Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 that
> was led by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to reopen the Bayreuth Festival
> at the end of World War II. And, when the Berlin Wall fell in the glorious
> autumn of 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted an ensemble made up of residents
> of both sides of the city, long divided by the Soviet domination of Eastern
> Europe. Instead of the cry of "Freude!" ("Joy!"), Bernstein asked the chorus
> to shout "Freiheit!" ("Freedom!"). Somehow, one suspects Beethoven would
> have approved.

(2023 Y. upload):

"Just Beethoven Breaking Boundaries Again"