A Popular History of the Art of Music

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[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXVII.

BEETHOVEN AND HIS WORKS.

The labors of Haydn and Mozart in the rich field of instrumental music
were followed immediately by those of Ludwig van Beethoven, who was
born at the little town of Bonn, on the Rhine, about twenty miles
above Cologne, in 1770. He died at Vienna, 1827. The years between
these dates were filled with labor and inspiration, beyond those of
any other master. Beethoven's place in music is at the head. Whether
he or Bach ought to be reckoned the very greatest of all the great
geniuses who have appeared in music, is a question which might be
discussed eternally without ever being settled. Considered merely as
an artist capable of transforming musical material in an endless
variety of ways, he would perhaps be placed somewhat lower than Bach;
but considered as a tone poet gifted with the faculty of making
hearers feel as he felt, and see as he saw (with the inner eyes of
tonal sense), no master ought to be placed above him. This is the
general opinion now, of all the world. Taine, the French critic, in
his work on art, names four great souls belonging to the highest order
of genius--Dante, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo and Beethoven. The
company is a good one, and Beethoven rightfully belongs in it. His
early life was wholly different from that of the gifted Mozart. He was
the son of a dissipated tenor singer, and his mother was rather an
incapable person. When the boy was about eleven years old he began to
play the viola in the orchestra. He was already a good pianist, and it
was said of him that he was able to play nearly the whole of the "Well
Tempered Clavier" by heart, and at the age of eleven and a half he was
left in charge during Neefe's absence, as deputy organist. His
improvisations had already attracted attention, and when he was a
little past twelve he was made assistant musical conductor
(cembalist), having to prepare the operas, adapt them to the orchestra
and the players of the theater, and sometimes to train the whole
company for several months together, while Neefe, the director, was
away. All this without salary. In this practical school of adversity
the boy grew up, arranging continually, training the orchestra,
adapting music and composing--for he began this very soon; in fact, we
have certain sonatinas of his, composed while he was but ten years
old.

He was direct in his speech, almost to rudeness, not, like Mozart,
attractive in his personal appearance, and rather awkward in society,
where he was continually breaking things, upsetting the water, the
ink, or whatever liquid was in his way. Nevertheless, there must have
been something attractive about this young man of independent manners,
for very early in life, and all the way through it, he made friends
with the aristocracy. Count Waldstein, a few years his senior, to whom
he afterward dedicated the so-called "Waldstein" sonata, Opus 53, in
C, early became interested in him, hired a piano for him and sent it
to his room, that he might have opportunity to practice. There was a
family of Von Breunings in Bonn, consisting of the mother, three boys
and a daughter, where the young Beethoven often stayed for several
days together. This was one of the most refined families in town, and
it was here that the unfortunate young Beethoven got his first
glimpses of a true home life, and his first realization of the
refining influence of woman's society. He learned English in order
that he might be able to read Shakespeare in the original. He also
learned a little Italian and French. In short, the boy appears at good
advantage from every point of view, except from that of mere
appearance. This life of labor and responsibility was broken in upon
when he was about seventeen (in 1787). He was sent to Vienna, and
there is a tradition that he played there before Mozart, who is
reported to have prophesied favorably concerning him. There is very
little left us concerning his first visit to the great Austrian
capital, then, as ever since, the home of music. He was soon back
again in Bonn, and there for yet another year and a half he went on
with his work. His mother dying, he had no longer any responsibility
to retain him there, so when he was about twenty-one he set out again
for Vienna, where all the remainder of his life was spent. At Vienna
he immediately began to give concerts, in which his piano playing was
the main feature, and his improvising upon themes presented by the
audience. This art always remained one of his great distinctions--the
surest proof of genius, the possession of musical fantasy, in which
every thought immediately suggests something else. He devoted himself
to serious study of counterpoint and composition under the instruction
of Haydn at first, but later with Albrechtsberger. His two great
elements of power at this period were his playing and his improvising.
Czerny says: "His improvisation was most brilliant and striking; in
whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such
an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry,
while many would break out into loud sobs; for there was something
wonderful about his expression, in addition to the beauty and
originality of his ideas, and his spirited manner of rendering them."

The limits of the present work do not admit of following the career of
this great master in the detail which would otherwise be desirable. It
must suffice to mention the more salient features. Contrary to the
precedent established by Mozart, Beethoven was in no hurry to appear
as a composer of ambitious pieces. After the early practical
experiences above described, and the further advantage of studies in
Vienna under the best teachers at that time living, it was not until
1795 that he appeared as composer of his first concerto for pianoforte
and orchestra, a Mozart-like work, but with an _Adagio_ of true
Beethovenish flavor. A year later he published his first three sonatas
for pianoforte, dedicated to Haydn. These three works are in styles
totally unlike each other, and there is little or no doubt that each
one of them was modeled after some existing work, which at that time
was highly esteemed in Vienna. The first in F minor, is plainly after
one by Emanuel Bach in the same key. The _Adagio_ of this is
especially interesting, not only because it shows a freedom and a pure
lyric quality totally foreign to Emanuel Bach, and beyond Mozart even,
but because it was taken out of a quartette which he had written when
he was fifteen years old. This shows that even at that early age
Beethoven had arrived at the conception of his peculiar style of slow
movements, which differed from those of Mozart in having a more
song-like quality, and a deeper and more serious expression. The
impression of a deep soul is very marked in the _Largo_ of the first
concerto, and there are few of his later works which carry it more
plainly. In all, some sixty works precede this Opus 2, which is the
modest mark affixed to these three sonatas. The third, in C, is still
different from the other two, and was fashioned apparently after some
composition of Clementi or Dussek. The _Adagio_ takes a direction
which must have been regarded as not entirely successful, for nowhere
else does the composer follow it out. Then followed a succession of
pieces of every sort, not rapidly, like Mozart's compositions, as if
they represented the overflowing of an inexhaustible spring, but
deliberately, as if the world were not ready for them too rapidly, one
after another, each in succession carrying the treatment of the
pianoforte to a finer point, and each different from its predecessor,
whether of contemporaneous publication or of a former year, until by
the end of the century he had reached the "_Sonata Pathetique_," a
work which marked a prodigious advance in expression and boldness over
anything that can be shown from any other master of the period.
Mention having been made of the slow movements in these works, in
which point they were perhaps more strikingly differentiated from
those of the composers previous--the _Largo_ of the sonata in D major,
Opus 10, may be mentioned as an example of a peculiarly broad and
dramatic, almost _speaking_ rhapsody, or reverie, for piano, which not
only calls for true feeling in the interpreter, but also for technical
qualities of touch and breadth of tone, such as must have been
distinctly in advance of the instruments of the day. Meanwhile a
variety of chamber pieces had been composed, many of them of decided
merit. This was a great period of activity with the young composer.
He had found his voice. Within two years from the "_Sonata
Pathetique_," he had composed all the sonatas up to the two numbered
Opus 27, in which the so-called "Moonlight" stands second, and between
these a variety of variations, and several important chamber pieces,
not forgetting the oratorio, "Christ on the Mount of Olives"--a work
which although not fully successful, nevertheless contained many
beautiful ideas, and one chorus which must be ranked among the best
which the repertory of oratorio can show--"Hallelujah to the Father."
The year 1800 also saw the first performance of the beautiful and
romantic third concerto for pianoforte and orchestra. The first
symphony had been performed in 1800, and by 1804 we have the great
heroic symphony, the "_Kreutzer Sonata_," and the "_Appassionata_"
with all that lie between. Never did tone poet give out great
inspirations like these so freely. Each is an advance upon the
previous, distancing all works of similar composers, and each one
surpassing his own previous efforts. This activity continued with
little or no interruption until 1812, after which there is quite a
break, Beethoven occupying himself with pot-boilers for the English
market, in the way of arrangements of songs for instrumental
accompaniment. Of these there are many, Scotch and other, besides
masses, canons for voices and the like. In 1814 we have the lovely
sonata in E minor for piano, Opus 90, and in 1818 the great sonata for
hammer klavier, Opus 106. Then in 1821 and 1822 the last of the
sonatas, which carry this form of pianoforte writing to a point which
it had never previously reached, if since; and then the "_Messe
Solennelle_," and the ninth symphony, the latter having been composed
in 1822-1823. After this came the last quartettes for strings,
compositions which have been much written about, but which time has
shown to be among the most beautiful and understandable of all that
great master produced.

[Illustration: Fig. 57.

BEETHOVEN.]

Meanwhile, as a man Beethoven had been subject to his vicissitudes,
but upon the whole, while no longer the popular composer of the day
(his seriousness prevented that) he was in comfortable circumstances,
but annoyed by the care of a nephew of irregular habits and
reprehensible character. For many years now Beethoven had been getting
deaf, and for the past ten or twelve he had been unable to hear
ordinary conversation, so that communication had to be carried on with
him by writing. Superficial observers inferred from this fact that
the inability to hear his compositions must have reacted unfavorably
upon them, and probably accounted for many passages which were unlike
his early works, and unintelligible or unlovely to the critics
aforesaid. It is true that between the early and the latest
compositions of Beethoven there is a greater difference in
intelligibility than between the early and the late compositions of
any other master. But the difference is not one of judgment on his
part, but purely one of different conception, different melodic
structure and deeper effect. The ninth symphony, which the first
players called impossible, has lived to be counted not simply the
greatest of all of Beethoven's works, but the greatest of _all_
instrumental music. It has been named as an impassable barrier beyond
which no later composer might pass and compose an instrumental
symphony. Nothing could be more unjust or mistaken. Every composition
of Beethoven is a fantasia, which in his earlier work indeed has the
form of the sonata, the accepted serious form of the day; but in the
works of the middle period, the limits of the sonata form were crossed
in many directions, and in the latest the sonata is forsaken entirely.
But this is not to say that Beethoven had gone beyond the sonata form.
Beethoven was an improviser in music, quite as surely as his wildest
successor, Schumann, and he wrote as he felt at the time. He lost
nothing in being deaf. His inner tonal sense was as acute as ever, and
had been trained as the tonal sense of few composers ever was. In
point of fact the compositions of the later period are as sweet as
those of any former period whatever. The last sonata for the
pianoforte is one of the most advanced compositions that exist for the
instrument. It is a tone poem which will outlast most other things
that Beethoven wrote for this instrument. In fact, the accuracy with
which the capacity of the instrument is gauged is one of the most
striking peculiarities of the last sonatas and other late works of
this master. Meanwhile, piano technique has advanced to a point where
these great works no longer present the insurmountable difficulties
that they did when first composed. Their general acceptance has been
delayed by the foolish notion that there was about them something
sacred and secluded from the apprehension of ordinary readers. This is
not the case. They are within reach, and repay study.

Beethoven's last days were not pleasant. He lived the life of a
bachelor, and his nephew was a source of trouble. It is thought by
many that the neglect of his nephew to order a physician in time, when
requested to do so by his uncle, was the immediate occasion of the
death of the great man. Beethoven died March 27, 1827, after a serious
illness, in which dropsical symptoms were among the most troublesome.
There was a grand funeral, in which impressive exercises were held,
and the body was deposited in consecrated ground in the cemetery at
Wahring, near Vienna.

The allusions to the compositions of this composer in the preceding
pages are very fragmentary, and, in fact, are expected merely to
direct attention to those mentioned. There are many others almost
equally worthy of attention. But upon the whole, the reputation of
Beethoven as a tone poet must rest first upon the nine symphonies;
then upon the string quartettes and other chamber music; next upon the
concertos, of which the third and fourth for pleasing beauty, and the
fifth for deep poetical meaning, have never been equaled by those of
any other composer. There remain the sonatas for pianoforte and for
piano and violin, three large volumes, containing a multitude of
exquisite strains, which the world would be poor indeed to lose.

[Illustration: Fig. 58.

BEETHOVEN AS HE APPEARED ON THE STREETS OF VIENNA.

(From a sketch by Lyser, to the accuracy of which Breuning testifies,
excepting that the hat should be straight on the head, and not
inclined to one side.)]

In personal appearance Beethoven was rugged rather than pleasing. He
was rather short, five feet five inches, but very wide across the
shoulders, and strong. His ruddy face had high cheek bones, and was
crowned by very thick hair, which originally was brown, but in later
life perfectly white. His eyes were black and rather small, but very
bright and piercing. His natural expression was grave, almost severe,
but his smile was extremely winning, and he was jovial in humor. He
was very fond of the country, walking in the fields, where under a
tree he would lie for a half day together, humming the melodies which
occurred to him, and making notes in the bits of blank paper which he
always carried. These pocket note books have been preserved, and we
find in them themes in crude form which he used for some important
movement or other, often several years later. Among the works produced
while this habit was strongest were the sixth and seventh symphonies,
than which no works in music are more charming.

[Illustration: [autograph] Louis Van Beethoven]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HAYDN, MOZART AND BEETHOVEN COMPARED.

The three masters, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, in relation to the
symphony stand upon a plane of substantial equality, whether we
estimate their merits according to the absolute worth of the
compositions they produced in this form, or in the value of the
additions which each in turn made to the ideal of his predecessor.
Naturally, as the latest of the three, though so far contemporaneous
with them as to form part of a single moment in the progress of art,
the symphonies of Beethoven are greater in certain respects, and, as
also was to have been expected from his general depth of mind and
seriousness of purpose, they are perhaps somewhat more severe--or
elevated--in style and sentiment. Nevertheless, the ideal of the three
writers was but slightly different. All alike sought to weave tones
into a succession of agreeable and beautiful combinations, related as
representing a continued flight of spirit--a reverie of the beautiful.
Haydn has the honor of having created the form. His fortunate
innovation upon the traditions of his predecessors, by adding the
second and contrasting theme, and his happy faculty of working out the
middle part of the first movement thematically in a style of free
fantasy based upon the various devices of counterpoint and canonic
imitation, not only suggested to the later composers a way in which
an endless variety of pleasing tone pictures might be created--but
established, and demonstrated by the clearness with which he did it,
and the ever fresh variety and charm of his works, that this was _the
way_ in which symphonic material must be put together. For further
particulars relating to the sonata form, as such, the student is
referred to my "Primer of Musical Forms" (Arthur P. Schmidt, Boston,
1891).

The form thus established by Haydn, Mozart accepted, and followed in
all his symphonies, with few and unimportant variations. His additions
to the general ideal of orchestral effect were in the direction of a
sweeter _cantilena_, a vocal and song-like quality, which pervades
every movement, and which in the slow movement rises to a height of
refined and exquisite song never surpassed by any composer. Beethoven
is often more impassioned; at times more forcible. But it is never
possible to say of the pure spirit of Mozart, that this refined and
gentle soul might not have broken mountains and shaken the hills if he
had chosen to do so. His refinement is like that of a seraph, as we
see it illustrated in the feminine-looking faces of the Greek Apollos,
and the St. Michaels and archangels of Guido Reni and Raphael. It is
free from passion and toil; but no man dares set a limit to the
strength therein concealed. In the slow movements of the pianoforte
sonatas of Mozart we do not find this quality so plainly manifested.
The instrument was still too imperfect, and did not invite it.
Moreover, the greater portion of these compositions bear the
appearance of having been written for the use of amateurs. But in the
string quartette and the symphonies it is different. Here the spirit
of Mozart has free course, and he goes from one beauty to another,
with the sure instinct of a master before whom all tonal kingdoms are
wide open. This can be seen even in the pianoforte arrangements of the
greater symphonies. The melodies, apparently so simple and diatonic,
are susceptible of being sung with heartfelt fervor under the fingers
of the violinist, or by the voice of the great singer, and when so
sung they become transfigured with beauty--luminous from within, like
lovely angel faces, glowing with radiance from the higher realms of
bliss. Without this idea of singing, and more than this, of a pure
spirit singing, the Mozart adagios are open to the charge often made
against them in these later days by the unthinking, who find in them
only the external peculiarities of simplicity and diatonic quality,
with the unsensationalism which technical reserve implies.

[Illustration: Fig. 59.

REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE PAGE OF BEETHOVEN'S SONATA, OPUS 26,
CONTAINING THE CELEBRATED FUNERAL MARCH.]

Nor is it true that Beethoven is incapable of this elevated soaring in
the higher realms of the merely beautiful in song. There is generally
an undercurrent of deeper pathos in all his sustained slow movements,
but in the earlier symphonies, especially in the second, there is a
long slow movement of heavenly depth and quality. Indeed, without
pausing to individualize we may say once for all that the slow
movements of Beethoven are nearly as sweet and as forgetful, as
rapturous, as those of Mozart. Even when he takes the lower key of the
minor, with its implication of suffering and pain, there is still a
sweetness, which once heard can never be forgotten. Think of the
lovely _allegretto_ of the seventh symphony, with its persistent
motive of a quarter and two-eighths. Even in an arrangement for the
pianoforte this is still impressive; upon the organ yet more so; but
how much more so when given by the orchestra, with the lovely changing
colors of Beethoven's instrumentation! The progress from Haydn's slow
movement to that of Beethoven is in the direction of depth,
self-forgetfulness, and elevated reverie, having in it a quality
distinctly church-like, devotional, worshipful and reposeful in the
heavenly sense. The finest example of this is in the slow movement of
the ninth symphony of Beethoven, where the composer has one of those
lofty moods, which even in his younger times Mrs. Von Breuning used to
call his "_raptus_"--rapture of song.

In a technical point of view the handling of the themes becomes more
masterly in Beethoven than even in Mozart--mainly perhaps because the
symphonies of Beethoven represent a more mature point in his mental
and artistic career than do those of Mozart. The third symphony of
Beethoven was written in 1803, the composer being thirty-three years
old; the fourth waited until he was thirty-five or six. Mozart died at
the age of thirty-five, and whatever we have from his lofty pen came
to the young Mozart, not yet having reached middle life. Observe also
the rapidity with which these great works followed one another from
the pen of Beethoven, when once he had found his voice. The fifth
symphony was written in 1808. In the same year he wrote also the
sixth; four years later, in 1812, the next two symphonies, the seventh
and eight. Then a long pause, filled up with other works, and at
length when the composer was fifty-three years of age, in 1823, the
mighty ninth. If Mozart's life had been spared to enter into the more
comfortable and dignified openings which his death prevented, what
might we not have had from him!

In one sense there is a distinct difference between the symphonies of
Mozart and those of Beethoven. The passionate ideal, the picture of a
deep soul, tossed yet triumphant, is nearer to the latter. Whatever
Mozart may have experienced in the way of "contradiction of sinners"
(as St. Paul calls it), he never allows the fact to find entrance into
his music, and especially into his symphonies. Whether he felt that
these moments did not belong to a high ideal of orchestral pieces, or
whether he was glad to find in the tone world forgetfulness of sorrows
and troubles, we do not know. But Beethoven came nearer to the great
time of the romantic. The inherent interest of whatever belongs to the
human soul was an idea of his time, and unconsciously to himself,
perhaps, it entered into and colored his work. The ninth symphony
belongs to the period when Hegel was delivering his lectures upon the
deepest questions of philosophy, and laying it down as a fundamental
principle that it is the place of art to represent everything
whatever, which sinks or swells in the human spirit; not alone all the
noble and the lovely, but also the ignoble, the vicious, the unworthy,
and particularly the tragic--to the end that the soul may learn to
know itself, and awaken to a deeper and better self-consciousness.
Beethoven felt the mental movement of his day. While his acquaintance
with other prominent literary men of his time made little headway,
owing in part to his deafness, and in part to his very strong
self-consciousness, he read and thought, and felt himself akin with
the whole human race. He was a socialist and a republican by instinct.
"Man stands upon that which he really is," was a form of
self-assertiveness, which, if not actually enunciated by him, at least
represents his attitude toward the conventionalities and
superficialities of the courts, the social orders, and the general
movement of mind into which he entered. Moreover this was the time
when the romantic poets of Germany had already set the world thinking
their new ideas. Close by the great composer, in the same city in
fact, worked a young man, worshiping almost the very ground upon which
Beethoven walked, but for the most part unknown to him--Franz
Schubert, who in the symphony was classic to the very highest degree,
and a tone poet gifted lyrically not less than Mozart himself, a
composer whose ideas have equal refinement and grace with those of
Mozart, together with a certain charm peculiarly their own, and an
instinct for musical coloration, which has never found its superior.
This obscure young man, whose lofty genius was recognized only after
his soul had taken its flight from earth, was the founder of the
modern romantic school of music--the musical commentator upon the
productions of all the best of German poets; a composer of such
inexhaustible fertility and melodic inspiration that Schumann said of
him, that if he had lived he would have set to music the whole German
literature. Thus by the combined efforts of all these composers, of
Schubert no less than of the three great masters of whom we are more
particularly speaking, the symphony came to its full expression.

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