With last week’s blog we’ve reached the year 1810. Beethoven is 40 years old and at the height of his artistry. He has achieved great fame and by now is acknowledged as the greatest composer alive. He loves nature and his God and is hopeful for marriage. However, he is very deaf, frustrated in love, suffering from various health issues, has an irascible and difficult personality, etc. As we have seen through the course of these weeks his music reflects these conflicts, anguish and despair alongside a beautiful optimism. I have asked a longtime friend, Elizabeth Morrison, writer and cellist, to share her insights on the element of joy in Beethoven’s music.. In a few weeks Foley Schuler will comment on the other side of Beethoven – pain, disappointment, anguish. Elizabeth’s thoughts follow here along with included musical examples.
Beethoven’s Joy by Elizabeth Morrison
Do you know the novel Howard’s End, by E.M. Forster? An elegant dissection of love and class in early-20th-century England, it’s one of my favorite books. Early on there is a scene set in a London concert hall, where a family group, the Schlegels, are taking in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Forster uses each character’s reaction to the music to suggest something about them: Aunt Juley, “wanting to tap surreptitiously when the tunes come,” Margaret, who can “see only the music,” her younger brother Tibby, “profoundly versed in counterpoint, holding the full score open on his knee,” and their German cousin Fraulein Mosebach, who “remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutch’”–really German.
The one I always recall, though, is Margaret’s sister Helen, the young woman at the center of Forster’s story. She alone “can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood.” When the third movement begins, Helen feels that “a goblin was walking quietly over the universe. Goblins were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. Helen could not contradict them, for she had felt the same, and seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.”
As the third movement gives way to the fourth, it seems to Helen that “Beethoven appears in person. He gives the goblins a little push, and they begin to walk in a major key, and then–he blows with his mouth, and they are scattered! …Amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he leads his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven, when he says other things.”
You can hear all this for yourself in a 1990 recording by the Chicago Symphony. When the third movement begins, at 28.11, there are the goblins. They are followed by an interlude that Helen calls “elephants dancing” (actually it’s just the cellos and basses); and then the goblins again. The enormous breath that blows them away is unmistakable too, at 33.18. This is certainly joy, fully realized in a symphonic masterpiece.
But exhilarating as it is, triumphal joy is only one of the many sorts of joy to be found in Beethoven’s music. In his piano sonatas, for example, there are more intimate expressions. There, too, joy is highlighted by contrast, but it need not be to “panic and emptiness.” In one of his most beautiful sonatas, Opus 53, the “Waldstein,” joy emerges from high seriousness and profound inner concentration.
I hope you’ll listen to all of this wonderful recording by Daniel Barenboim, but please start paying special attention at the start of the second movement, marked Adagio molto (very slow), at 11:30. After an exciting and forward-leaning first movement, Beethoven takes us into a sound world that is as much meditation as music. The notes are distinct and vital, like words spoken quietly by someone we love, or perhaps whispered to ourselves. Throughout the four short minutes of the movement, the bass line stays very low, reaching down to a low F, very deep on the piano. Our thoughts are drawn into the depth with them. All is hushed and dark. Then, at 15:50, Beethoven places a high G, four octaves above the F, repeats it, and lets it hang in the air until, as the third movement opens, we look up and see the stars.
The theme here, very simple and pure, gives us four of these high Gs, then four high Fs; they make me think of the stars appearing, one after another, in the night sky. From the inner focus of the Adagio, joy comes as we feel their unbroken perfection over all. Oh, and there’s joy too in watching Barenboim’s left hand cross over his right to play the high notes. From the depth to the heights–literally!
I promise I am not trying to turn you into Helen Schlegel, who can’t listen to music without a picture in her mind. You may be more like Tibby, immersed in the details of how it is done; you might prefer me to describe joy as being structured in major keys, brighter tempos, or the sound of the trumpet. And there’s nothing wrong if, like Aunt Juley, you just want to tap. But I am a bit of a Helen myself, and a picture helps me put my thoughts about music into words. So I’m happy to find words by Beethoven himself in my final example, the unavoidable one in any discussion of Beethoven’s joy, the Ninth Symphony.
This enormous work, his last symphony, is almost synonymous with joy. In the fourth and final movement he brings in four vocal soloists and a chorus, the first time a major composer brought voices into a symphony, to sing the words of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the famous “Ode to Joy.” But the first words we hear, from the baritone soloist, are not by Schiller. Beethoven wrote them himself, as an introduction to the poem. In this famous recording, made by an international group of musicians led by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin in 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Wall, we hear them at 1:06:09. Yes, that’s one hour and six minutes in; there has been a lot of music before we get there! The words Beethoven wrote are,
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!
Freude! Freude!
(Oh friends, not these notes!
Let us strike up more pleasing, more joyful ones!
Joy! Joy!).
It takes the baritone, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, a full minute to sing words we could speak in a few seconds. Just as he begins, a row of little girls of the chorus, who have been waiting quietly behind the timpani player for over an hour, get to their feet. It is a matchless moment, in history and in music. And yes, Rootering substitutes Freiheit, freedom, for Freude. Even so, it’s all about joy.
But what does Beethoven mean, “Not these notes?” It is an extraordinary statement, after the three incredible movements that have preceded it. Amazingly, he seems to be telling us to leave it all behind. He wants more joyful sounds–and here they are. Nothing I can say could possibly add to the experience of listening to the Ode to Joy. Just do it, and feel it all for yourself.
So here we have three distinct facets of Beethoven’s joy: triumphant in the Fifth Symphony, contemplative in the Waldstein Sonata, transcendent in the Ninth. And they are just the beginning. Beethoven, our romantic hero, who constantly finds beauty in anguish and superhuman striving, who suffered greatly in his own life, has left us joy that is simply inexhaustible. Here are a few more pieces for you; and with all the music Bob has presented in his blog, I’m sure you can find many more.
Piano Sonata Opus 78, “à Thérèse”, in a performance with the score. Joy in tenderness.
Symphony Number 6, the “Pastoral”, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Joy in nature.
Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Opus 11, Camerata Pacifica. Joy in playful humor. The last movement, based on a song, “Before I go to work, I must have something to eat,” begins at 14.56. Be sure to watch to the end for a rare instance of classical musicians joking around.
Howard’s End was made into a Merchant-Ivory movie in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, and Helen Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel. It is available on Netflix. Unfortunately, the scene where the Schlegels hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a shambles. For whatever reason, the producer chose not to hire an orchestra, substituted a pianist and a lecturer, and disrespected the goblins. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a good movie anyway.
Piano Sonata Opus 78, “à Thérèse”, in a performance with the score. Joy in tenderness.
Symphony Number 6, the “Pastoral”, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Joy in nature.
Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Opus 11, Camerata Pacifica. Joy in playful humor. The last movement, based on a song, “Before I go to work, I must have something to eat,” begins at 14.56. Be sure to watch to the end for a rare instance of classical musicians joking around.
Howard’s End was made into a Merchant-Ivory movie in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, and Helen Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel. It is available on Netflix. Unfortunately, the scene where the Schlegels hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a shambles. For whatever reason, the producer chose not to hire an orchestra, substituted a pianist and a lecturer, and disrespected the goblins. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a good movie anyway.
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