A famous painting, The Incidence at Teplitz. The man on the left, bowing to the Austrian Emperor's family, is the poet Johann von Goethe, author of Faust, possibly the most important figure ever in German literature. The figure walking away in disgust is Ludwig van Beethoven. One version of the story behind this incident has it that Beethoven said to Goethe "They should bow to men like you." The letters of Beethoven and Goethe show that both men were disenchanted with the others' reaction.
Although Beethoven greatly admired Goethe's work, the two men did not get on. Their personalities and attitudes about various issues differed greatly. One example is their view of royalty. Goethe respected the imperial family while Beethoven, apparently, did not:
Goethe wrote to his wife that Beethoven had "an absolutely uncontrolled personality"; Beethoven wrote to his publisher that Goethe delighted far too much in the court atmosphere.
There are a number of issues at play here that bear on our understanding the Ninth Symphony. So it's worth taking a minute to unpack it all before we get to the music today.
The Political Angle
First comes the political angle. He dissed the royal family in public, and it wasn't the first time, either. Yet Beethoven was able to get away with saying things like, "The Emperor should be hanged!" at a time when other people were disappearing into dungeons for saying the same thing. He really did say that, and on the record.
Compare that to Schiller. The poet who wrote the lyrics of the Ninth Symphony's Ode to Joy, for instance, was a frequent subject of state censorship. In fact, it's believed the Ode to Joy (Freude) was originally meant to be an Ode to Freedom (Freiheit). Leonard Bernstein performed it that way with those text changes in Berlin in 1989 as The Wall was tumbling.
So why wasn't Beethoven getting his thumbs screwed in a dungeon somewhere? Well, he was Beethoven. Beethoven hated the nobility and the nobility loved him back for it! The same Empress he snubbed in that painting later loaned Beethoven money without requesting an apology. Even though people were painting famous pictures of her being snubbed by him. Talk about magnanimous. I could forgive people for saying shit about me, too, but if my being snubbed made Entertainment Tonight, I'd be far less generous, wouldn't you?
The Personal Angle
Another angle on this is the personal, and it has to do with Beethoven's "madness," because Beethoven was widely seen as a crazy genius guy composer. It gave him more leeway to be inappropriate. In truth, Beethoven always makes it to the top of lists of "Famous Bipolar Celebrities of History." And as I discovered and pointed out in a previous diary, typing in the words "Ripe for the madhouse..." in Google autocompletes with the word "Beethoven."
The words "Beethoven flew into a rage over..." recur over and over again. (Really! Do a Google search.) As he had done with the Empress, Beethoven eventually pissed on just about everybody who ever tried to befriend him. Those friends he did keep were thick-skinned and loyal to a fault.
Rossini, whom Beethoven described as "frivolous," met Beethoven about the time of the Ninth Symphony's first performance.
From the book Rossini: His Life and Works by Osborne:
The disorder and apparent poverty in which Beethoven lived came as something of a shock to Rossini, the more so when contrasted with the glitter of the many receptions and dinners he attended at Metternich's bidding during his time in Vienna. The situation moved Rossini to speak of the need to find Beethoven better lodgings and greater recognition from Viennese society. He even contemplated launching a subscription, but the idea was poorly supported. To the Viennese, Beethoven was an odd bird, an outsider. Give him a house, they said, and he will sell it...
Beethoven's teacher, Haydn, wrote to him:
You will accomplish more than has ever been accomplished," wrote Haydn at the beginning of Beethoven's career, "have thoughts that no other has had. You will never sacrifice a beautiful idea to a tyrannical rule, and in that you will be right. But you will sacrifice your rules to your moods, for you seem to me to be a man of many heads and hearts. One will always find something irregular in your compositions, things of beauty, but rather dark and strange.
Things of beauty. Things dark and strange. There many works of Beethoven's that have a kind of Apollonian logic and purity to them. The Ninth Symphony, the only symphony from his Late Period, is not one of those. It is a work of beauty, with many things dark and strange, of shifting moods, but over it all, a firmly grounded, if complicated, structure.
The Aesthetic Angle
Another angle by which to view the Teplitz incident is the aesthetic one. Beethoven was offended by Goethe's deference to royalty not just because they were royal but because he was Goethe, one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Goethe and Schiller were the two most prominent literary figures of Weimar Classicism.
One of the continuing debates about Beethoven and his music is whether Beethoven was a Romantic period composer or a Classical period composer. I suppose it depends on how you define those, although judging by the company he kept, Beethoven was in sync with Weimar Classicism:
Weimar Classicism (German “Weimarer Klassik”) is a cultural and literary movement of Europe. Followers attempted to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas. The movement, from 1772 until 1805, involved Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller and Christoph Martin Wieland, and often concentrated on Goethe and Schiller during the period 1788–1805.
I think Beethoven shares more in common with Mozart and Haydn than with the later Romantics, although the Romantics LOVED Beethoven and cast him as a Romantic figure, the deaf composer, the rebel and nonconformist, the artist who suffered and laid bare his anguish, all for his art. Lost in this was Beethoven the thinker, the man who crafted his music not just as subjective expressions of his feelings, but as objective monuments to mankind, architectural feats built on enormous attention to small details. (We'll see some of those details today.)
To understand the Ninth, we need to view it not in terms of nineteenth century Romanticism, but rather Enlightenment values of the late eighteenth century, the values that gave Europe a new focus on humanism.
And America things like the Declaration of Independence.
I've been saving this in my bookmarks. Schiller, of course, was the author of the lyrics of the Ode to Joy. This is a scene, the Rutli Oath, from Schiller's oft-censored play William Tell.
Once you get past the scariness of German men shouting at what looks like a Nazi Youth rally, we can concentrate on the words and see what it reminds us of:
“No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power,
When the oppressed can find no justice, when
The burden grows unbearable — he reaches
With hopeful courage up onto the heavens
And seizes hither his eternal rights,
Which hang above, inalienable
As indestructible as stars themselves…”
That's a clear allusion to the Declaration of Independence, but put in the context of a story of Austrians who rise up against a tyrant. The political implications of this are clear. William Tell suffered on and off again censorship for two hundred years, particularly by the Nazis.
And we are back to politics. "Natural rights," or as Schiller put it, "Eternal Rights," or as the Declaration of Independence put it, "endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights:" This is a concept native to the freethinkers of the Enlightenment. It was a different way of looking at what men deserved simply by right of having been born human.
That's humanism. And when we get to the finale of the Ninth, when we put it all together, it's going to be central to understanding it.
Onward! To the actual music!
Because of the thematic nature of the Ninth, we can't just jump into the second movement without reviewing again what happened in the first movement, which we covered in the Part 1 diary. The first movement was brutally violent, volcanic in its intensity, and ended in despair. The second movement begins in a similarly dark and serious mood, but quickly turns into dance, a mischievous romp. The mood is much lighter.
And the second movement is thematically linked back to the first movement from the first six notes. I'm going to get geeky here, and treat you as adults. As you may recall, the first movement began with a mysterious, perhaps ominous, descending six note motif: A-E, E-A, A-E. This is the building block of the symphony, the "God Particle" that binds it together.
In the documentary Following the Ninth which we excerpted last time, conductor George Mathew, talking about the opening motif, said:
George Mathew: The whole thing [Beethoven's Ninth Symphony] is a kind of creation story, or an evolution story. I mean, the first thing... is not a thing! It's a nothing! What on earth is that? And then, when it starts to move, the spirit of God hovering over the waters, what you get is [music here]... and then you get this cataclysmic event. It's pure violence. That is primordial. That is the big bang. This piece gets into your bloodstream and changes who you are. The entire movement of everything, from subatomic particles to galactic clusters. It's all here.
That's one more way of looking at the first movement. I tend to look at the first movement as an expression of sheer cruelty, of the harshness of existence. If we can remember for a moment the famous first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, that was an expression man overcoming adversity -- there was a certain courage and determination and fortitude to it. The first movement of the Ninth, though, does not end that way. It goes through a number of changes before it finally ends in shrieking despair. Go back and listen to the end of the first movement, if you want to check out what I'm saying and form your own judgment, which you are well-entitled to do, because I'm certainly no final authority on any of this.
However, if you look at the first movement as George Mathew does, as a creation story, subatomic particles building to galaxies, then the beginning cosmic particle, the one that everything else erupts from is this AE-EA-AE motif, this little "nothing." Nothing because by itself it doesn't really give you a home key to get started and tell you where you are, primitive because it is just a repetition of the most primal physical relationship of two notes possible in music, the perfect fifth. And this motif, in different forms, recurs throughout all four movements, particularly at key moments, in different forms.
The second movement will begin with a new form of the AE-EA-AE motif. In the last diary, made a short "Spoiler" clip to track some ways the motif is used, so let me repost that now.
The third excerpt on the clip, at about 0:28, is the very beginning of the second movement. It should sound familiar. It's AE-EA-AE again, although with some tweaks. Now it's more like AA-EE-AA, three downward leaps of an octave. Thus we have continuity between this movement and the previous one. This new octave-leaping version of the motif will be used frequently in the second movement.
The second movement doesn't just link backwards to the first movement. It also links subtly forward to the final movement, the Ode to Joy main theme. I'll be honest and admit I didn't notice this until Archer pointed it out in a previous post.
In his late period music, like the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven had developed a huge interest in fugues. There are fugues in three of the four movements, and this one in particular flips in and out of a fugue state.
One last point before we start playing the music. The second movement is a scherzo, but it's also in (sort of) Sonata-Allegro form. Which means... I get to haul out my purty blue graphic explaining Sonata-Allegro again. Beethoven usually used simple symmetrical forms like ABA-CDC-ABA for his scherzos. I suspect this is the only time he used Sonata-Allegro for a scherzo. In this case, it's a weird hybrid, with a middle section in a different rhythm.
I decided this week to go with the Thielemann performance of the Ninth. There's a Karajan version of the second movement on Youtube, but it's been abridged, so we're dumping Karajan. This version is complete and has excellent audio and very good conducting.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor, Opus 125, Second movement Scherzo Molto Vivace. Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic.
Introduction (0:00 to 0:07)
Ah! The introduction we talked about, shuffling the the three downward steps of the first movement (EA-AE-EA), and turning it into three octave leaps downward: DD-AA-DD. This movement will be full of these octave leaps. They are the structural glue of the movement.
And just as in the first movement, with two notes, you don't have a key yet, do you? Could be D major, could be D minor... Aha! There is a third note there to clarify the key, but it's sooooo sneaky! The drums are tuned to F, so we have D minor!
Yes, drums can be tuned to particular notes, although we may not be used to hearing them used for harmony. Very sneaky.
Exposition -- First Theme (0:07 to 0:53)
And here we go with the main fugal theme of the movement, with a repeating DUM-dada, DUM-dada rhythm.
At this point I regret not having a better visual clip with a wide view of the orchestra, because if we did, you could watch how the different instrument groups join in, one after the other, building up to a deeply layered texture. At 0:34, after building to a crescendo, the layers flatten, and it resolves down to a basic D minor melody, a darkly rocking dance.
At 0:46 to 0:53, the tension lets up briefly as we prepare for a key change. Pay attention to those violins. They are playing fast octave leaps.
Exposition -- Second Theme (0:54 to 1:08)
The horn section leads us out of the darker world of D minor and takes us to the brighter world of C major. The violins are still playing octaves in the background. It's all perky as all hell; makes you want to rock your head. The music here has a kind of a kind of strength and confidence we didn't get from the fierce first movement. That's important not because we want to show that it's different -- there's an intentional emotional progress taking place here from movement to movement in this symphony. The Ninth Symphony more than any other Beethoven symphony is an organically whole structure.
Exposition -- Codetta (1:08 to 1:27)
After a warm and gentle flourish in the violins, the DUM-dada, DUM-dada returns, ushing us to a... uh... somewhat incomplete ending! At 1:23, get the first of many strange and jarring incomplete endings to come that seem to promise more... but give you instead an air pocket, leaving you in suspense.
Exposition Repeat (1:27 to 2:43)
Here the suspense is resolved by the return to D minor and the opening fugue. There's no need to explain most of this because it's just repeating everything we heard from (0:07 to 1:27). And just as before, it ends... incomplete.
Development (2:43 to 3:52)
The same incomplete ending as before. The same air pocket. But now (2:46), there's another incomplete ending, changing key again. And another air pocket. Another incomplete ending (2:49) And more key changes, coming faster now. At 3:01, with a long held note, the music stabilizes at a new plateau in a new key, but again, we are held in suspense. What next?
At 3:06, we delve (and I like that word choice, delve, because it implies digging downwards) into a new, very long fugue based on the previous material, led by the bassoons. The strings are just barely there, allowing the woodwinds to dominate this one. And the drums too! Again, contributing their little F note to the MELODY, as they did in the intro.
At 3:46, we start to emerge upwards again. Through a crescendo, we emerge again back in D minor for the (first) recapitulation.
Recapitulation (3:52 to )
Recapitulation -- First Theme Again (3:52)
Back in D minor, at the peak of the crescendo, the main theme returns. The violins announce its imminent return with repeating octave leaps. And there it is, at 3:59, but it's a rougher beast this time than the first time around, with the drums pounding away.
Recapitulation -- Second Theme Again (4:31)
The second theme returns, in D major now, led by the horns as before, with the strings making octave leaps in the background. But at 4:38, it takes a sudden turn into D minor territory. This theme we heard before as strong and confident becomes more unsure.
Recapitulation -- Codetta (4:47)
The codetta again, same flourish with the violins, but this time in a minor key (D minor).
At 5:03, we have the beginning of that "incomplete ending" + air pocket music, but there's less mystery here. We're coming soon to a full stop, as the violins pick up the pace with a mad flurry of octave leaps, and we rush to an ending... OF SORTS.
Because if this were a real Sonata-Allegro movement, we would finish things here and call it the coda. This is a weird hybrid-form movement.
THE TRIO! (5:24 to 8:33)
Oh yes! And what hell is a trio? you ask. That's what you call the inner section of the usual symmetrical minuet or waltz or scherzo, which is usually of the form ABA, where B is the trio section. Or ABAcdcABA where cdc is the trio section.
In this movement, Beethoven has given us a whole Sonata-Allegro movement for the A section. And he's going to repeat it again at the end. With the trio in the middle!
And notice something else Beethoven has done right here, as he segues into the trio. You may not have noticed, but he very subtly switched us from a 3-beat to 2-beat, from a waltz type rhythm to a march type rhythm. Without you noticing how he did it!
And he put us back in the brighter key of D major, which the woodwinds launch into with a very, very simple theme, one which is repeated over and over again and which, by itself, would be rather boring with so much repetition. But the fun here is in the detail, all the elaboration piled atop it in the accompaniment, and the way it is passed back and forth between the different parts of the orchestra. All of it based on the same minimalist theme.
Simple enough, but it becomes ANGELIC by 7:49, as it approaches the end. The strings separate, the deeper violas down low, carrying the main theme as the violins in their high register cradle and rock it. We're going to get a lot more of this kind of gentleness in the third movement. This presages that.
At 8:10, the music slows down (this may be the conductor's decision), increasing the sense of the angelic, of a baby being rocked to sleep.
Out of this comfort, at 8:34, a sense of darkness slips in. And very quickly we find ourselves in:
Introduction (and exposition, development, recapitulation) AGAIN (8:34 to end)
Octave leap! Octave leap! (drum roll) Octave Leap! We're back at the very beginning. And we repeat it all as we did before, so there's no need to break it down again.
The difference is in the ending, and it's a real ending, this time. At 12:20, we get our "incomplete ending" + air pocket again. At 12:39, we get the flurry of octave leaps again.
At 12:44, the very simple trio theme returns... but it's a Beethoven head fake! You might think the trio is going to return... And just as you wonder that, at 12:53, Beethoven interrupts and says, NO! It's over now, dammit!, ending with another and very final flurry of octave leaps. Ending the movement as it began.
---------- End of second movement ----------
I noticed the terrible dearth of paintings of Beethoven smiling, so I decided to make one with Photoshop. Unfortunately, I think he looks even scarier smiling than when he is glowering. "I vant to trink your bhuLOOOD!" Would you spend a night in Castle Beethoven? (The original image can be found here.)
I suppose this is all way too geeky for some people. But writing these diaries is a balancing act, trying to find just the right balance of technical explanations and coddling to keep people reading it and entertained and not giving up. But this is Beethoven and it's Beethoven's Ninth Symphony -- so this is a real geekfest. Beethoven's music -- and this symphony in particular -- manages to be a passionate outpouring and an architectural masterpiece as well, a great gothic cathedral of music.
NEXT WEEK: The third movement. We'll get to see just how angelic and gentle Beethoven could be.