Classical Corner Beethoven

Classical Corner — 31 July 2011

By Lawrence Schenbeck

For years, the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young carried around an old recording of “Singin’ the Blues” made by Frankie Trumbauer and his band in 1927. When he was asked why, Young said “[They were] the only people that was tellin’ stories that I liked to hear.” For Young, the best way to describe a well-constructed piece of music was to call it a story. It wasn’t just notes, or phrases, or even feelings. It was a story.

I’d like to follow up on that notion today. We’ve already talked about rhetoric as a factor in Mozart’s style; now let’s broaden the metaphor. Beethoven and those who followed him did often conceive of music in literary terms. It was a story.

The Back Story

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is probably responsible for most of the myths and truths that circulate today about great musicians. He was a rebel, socially and musically: although he moved easily among the nobility, he chafed at their pretensions and considered himself their equal if not superior. He suffered: born into relative poverty as the talented son of an alcoholic court musician, he was rejected by most of the women he courted, and lost his hearing, which would have forced most musicians to abandon their careers forever. He was misunderstood: most of his late music was rejected as too complicated, eccentric, and abstract. Even his “heroic” middle-period works, which celebrated the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment and early Romantic era, were seldom appreciated by audiences or critics at their first performances. And yet he persevered. Beethoven’s indomitable spirit found its way into every page of his music, with the result being that when we hear one of Beethoven’s sonatas or symphonies today, we feel – still – as if he were in the room with us. Beethoven’s music has never been absent from Western concert life, and every composer who followed him “felt the tread of a giant behind us,” as Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) put it.

In the nineteenth century, people from the worlds of literature and music frequently engaged each other in philosophical and aesthetic dialogue. What is more, a lot of musicians wrote – essays, criticism, poetry – and relied on words to inspire or complete their music. Writers, for their part, often hoped to produce poems that approached the sensibility of music. Some, like E. T. A. Hoffmann, created music themselves, or at least operated as music critics. Of course it is easy to trace the music-and-literature connections of the time in Lieder (art songs) and short character pieces. Songs had a text, and character pieces often came with a descriptive title that let us in on the extra-musical part.

But how could longer forms of purely instrumental music be considered “stories”? No problem for the Romantics, apparently. In the 1830s one German music encyclopedia compared the grosse Symphonie to the “dramatically constructed novel of feeling.” In his 1859 Beethoven book, A. B. Marx called the symphony “a reflection of life [Lebensbild] unfolding in a series of psychologically natural steps.” As a teenager Robert Schumann wrote that “When I play through Schubert, it is as though I were reading a novel of Jean Paul composed into music.”

Here’s how they made the leap from literal expression (words in a novel) to symbolic narrative (notes in a symphony). Beginning with Beethoven, a handful of “plot archetypes” (i.e., expressive plans that resemble a narrative) gradually became recognized by composers and their audiences, and the symphony-as-story became a commonplace. These plots were not as specific as the descriptive schemes constructed for program music (see Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique), but they did contain portrayals of psychological-dramatic evolutions that achieved their goals by playing around with structure. One such plot was the darkness-to-light model, in which the music gave listeners the impression of a psychological progression: suffering followed by healing, struggle followed by triumph, sin followed by redemption.

A composer could play off the audience’s expectations in such works by manipulating musical form and style at every level, from motif and phrase (micro) to entire movements and, in an extended work, the order of the movements themselves (macro). This process depended on having an audience that knew the conventional forms well and expected to hear a “story.” Over time, it practically guaranteed that newer works would be made, and heard, as commentaries on older ones. All this accelerated the rate at which narrative conventions themselves became worn out and had to be supplanted, and that process fed the “anxiety of influence” of the Late Romantics – but now I really am getting ahead of myself.

So how was a plot archetype applied to a symphony? From Haydn and Mozart the Romantics inherited the conventional form of four separate movements, varying in structure, tempo, and other details. Beginning with Beethoven, narrative weight became concentrated in the first and last movements. The first could, through imaginative inflections of sonata-allegro form, present the “hero” and other “characters,” suggest the nature of the dilemma, and offer hope for its eventual resolution. The last movement, or finale, often recalled specific thematic materials from the first and might also add threads from intervening movements, which tended to be more static evocations of contrasting moods – areas of relative repose. The finale’s main function, however, was to work toward an overwhelming resolution of the dilemma presented earlier.

One of the chief devices used to that end was the so-called Durchbruch or “breakthrough” moment. In a breakthrough moment – according to theorist James Buhler – the music turns aside from its expected course. This turn amounts to more than a simple interruption, because its effect is not merely local but has large-scale consequences. Here, for example, is a simple interruption that occurs in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. You are probably already familiar with it: