Beethoven: A Bicentennial Tribute

December 16 marks the bicentennial of a composer who stands at the summit of musical greatness. On that day in 1770 Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. This son of an obscure court musician became an artist whose influence and ability to express in music the whole range of the human spirit have rightly been compared with Shakespeare’s in literature.

Of all the great composers none has had closer study than Beethoven, and of none do we have fuller information. His upbringing was sketchy; his education, except in music, was meager—a deprivation he suffered from all his life. At the end of his twenty-first year he settled in Vienna, where he remained until his death on March 26, 1827. The intervening years were filled with inward struggle and unremitting work out of which came some of the supreme masterpieces in all music.

Life was difficult for Beethoven. His contemporaries knew his worth, and by middle age his reputation was international. But his was a fiercely independent nature, fully conscious of his genius. Socially he was awkward, inept, and sometimes rude. He was often irascible and in his business dealings at times unreliable, while in personal relationships he could be unpredictable. Yet behind his thorny exterior were noble simplicity of character and lofty idealism. He loved nature and delighted to walk in the woods and fields, jotting down themes in his sketchbooks, of which more than 5,000 pages survive. For the use and development of his genius he had a lifelong sense of responsibility to God.

The tragedy of Beethoven’s life was an inner one. It centered in his deafness and in problems with his nephew. This boy whom he lovingly tried to raise as a son proved unworthy. Nor was the uncle, so different from such an ordinary youth, capable of understanding him.

The greater trial of loss of hearing began as early as 1798 (the year before the composition of the First Symphony), when Beethoven was twenty-eight, and it progressed relentlessly to the practically total obliteration of his hearing that shadowed his later years.

What this affliction meant we see from the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” a kind of self-revelatory “will” addressed by the composer to his brothers in 1802 but not found till after his death nearly twenty-five years later. In it he explains: “Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in men than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection … O I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly mingle with you … if I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, a fear that I may be subjected to the danger of letting my condition be observed.” He went on to tell how, when a companion heard in the distance a flute he could not hear or a shepherd’s voice he was unconscious of, he was driven to the verge of suicide. “Only art …” he cried, “withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce … Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to good live therein.”

It was Aristotle who said that “musical compositions are, in their very nature, representations of states of character.” So this “testament” with its pathetic outcry is reflected throughout Beethoven’s work as in the Appassionata Sonata or the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. Yet deafness did not master Beethoven. Out of his struggle with it came not only some of the most exuberantly joyous music ever written but also works of the serenity and supernal beauty that are unique marks of his genius. Thus the greater slow movements—for example those of the third, fifth, and ninth symphonies, of the Violin Concerto, of the last string quartets, and certain of the greater piano sonatas—these contain some of the most consoling of all music. And there are places in his work, like the Arietta and Variations of the final piano sonata, where his music soars to the gates of heaven.

Beethoven had learned, according to J. W. N. Sullivan in his study of the composer’s spiritual development, to accept suffering “as one of the great structural lines of human life,” and so he came to “that unearthly state where the struggle ends and pain dissolves away.” As for his religion, he was baptized a Roman Catholic but had very little contact with the church throughout his life. On his deathbed he gladly received the sacrament. His notebooks and other writings, while not reflecting orthodox Christian doctrine, unmistakably reveal the central place his faith in God held in his life. Because he translated his Job-like experience into tone, musical literature has no more profound statement of the problem of suffering and its resolution than his. This is one reason why his great works are so universal. Geoffrey Bull, the English missionary who endured the torture of Chinese Communist brainwashing, tells in his book When Iron Gates Yield how one day in Chungking, after his captors had taken away his Bible and he was facing death, the Emperor Concerto refreshed him as he heard the whole of it coming over a radio somewhere outside his prison room. Even there, Beethoven was speaking.

With all its sublimity, Beethoven’s music is very human. He can celebrate the beauties of nature and, more than any other of the great masters, laugh with the gigantic, down-to-earth humor of his great scherzos or with the more delicate wit of some of the rondos or bagatelles., To a very high degree he exemplifies that indispensable element of great art—its incarnational relationship to our common humanity. And in his music a powerful mind is at work. For it is the combination of intellect and emotion that gives Beethoven his compelling force.

Some good music makes agreeable “background” listening. Not so with a large part of Beethoven’s work. Its logic is so inexorable, its structure so strong, that it commands the attention of the musical hearer. Those who have been hearing and playing him for a lifetime (as I have been doing for close to sixty years) know the lasting quality of Beethoven’s greater compositions, with some of which music has yet to catch up. As Igor Stravinsky, the distinguished modern Russian composer, says of the C-sharp Minor String Quartet, “everything in this masterpiece is perfect, inevitable, inalterable. It is beyond the impudence of praise.…” Indeed, Beethoven’s influence on certain leading contemporary composers is profound.

Now some may say, “This is all very well for musicians. But what has it to do with us in a troubled age when so many are in spiritual and physical need?” This, of course, is a modern form of the old question of Tertullian, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—a question that in some minds today still challenges the propriety of Christian involvement with culture. We may discern in Beethoven several answers to it.

For one thing, the life and work of this man stand as a signal example of God’s sovereignty. All men’s talents and gifts—for preaching or teaching the Word, for business or government, for science or art, for all the manifold aspects of human life—come from God. In his sovereignty he graciously gives gifts as he wills—the more ordinary talents to many and supreme genius to a very few like a Beethoven and a Bach, a Michelangelo and a Rembrandt, a Dante and a Shakespeare, a Pascal and a Newton. God makes no mistakes in exercising his common grace for our edification and enjoyment. He is the God of truth, and when, as with Beethoven and others like him, the genius he gives is used with utmost integrity, we do God no honor if we look down upon its products or take no interest in them. Great and noble art is not a frill, a spiritual irrelevancy. Properly used it is a God-given means of refreshment and enrichment. It is as much a manifestation of God’s wisdom and greatness as the majesty of the mountains, the vastness of the seas, or the glory of the heavens.

Consider next the providential aspect of Beethoven’s life. “God,” as Emile Cailliet says, “is the great Doer of the unexpected.” As unexpected as lightning yet guided infallibly by the all-wise God is the entrance of genius into the stream of history. So with Beethoven. It was providential for music that this man appeared when he did. He was, as H. E. Krehbiel, one of the leading American critics, wrote, “a gigantic reservoir into which a hundred proud streams poured their waters; he is a mighty lake out of which a thousand streams have flowed through all the territories which the musical art has peopled, and from which torrents are still pouring to irrigate lands that are still terrae incognitae.”

It was also providential that deafness overtook Beethoven. The history of music has no more moving scene than the one in Vienna at the first performance of the Ninth Symphony in 1824. Beethoven stood in the center of the orchestra, ostensibly conducting. The members of the orchestra and choir had been told to watch him but not to follow his beating time. An ovation came after the scherzo. Yet the composer just stood there, quietly turning the leaves of his score. A singer plucked his sleeve and pointed to the wildly applauding crowd. No wonder there were few dry eyes in the audience.

Why did this have to happen to such a great artist? Why was he brought to such a pass that in his later years his only communication with others was through their writing in his conversation books? The answer is that, apart from the strange providence of his deafness, he might never have composed music like the Ninth Symphony, the last piano sonata and last quartets, and the Missa Solemnis. Also the great works of his “middle” period reflect his tragic problem. As Alexander Wheelock Thayer, the author of the standard biography, put it, “who can say that the world has not been a gainer by a misfortune which stirred the profoundest depths of his being and compelled the concentration of all his powers into one direction?”

Hearing is essential to performing and conducting music but not to composing it. Beethoven, who had great gifts as a virtuoso and conductor, might have gone on to a brilliant public career at the cost of some real loss of productivity. But the tragedy of deafness turned his genius inward with glorious results for music. “At its greatest,” wrote Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, “music, more than any other of the arts, has gone beyond the phenomenal to the noumenal universe.… It is a paradox—the less the musical imagination is obsessed literally by the promptings of the outer ear, the clearer becomes the significance contained within the notes. Beethoven deaf got as close to the Thing-in-Itself, to the revelatory point where notation ends and spiritual exploration begins, as mortal agency so far has been able to arrive.”

But Beethoven would never have done what Cardus is speaking of had it not been for his unswerving dedication to his work. He never made his difficult temperament an excuse for not working. In a time when integrity is in short supply, even more than Milton in his blindness Beethoven stands as a supreme example of artistic integrity. His sketchbooks show how very hard he worked at revising and developing his themes and shaping the logic of his compositions. In 1815 he wrote in one of his notebooks: “If possible develop ear instruments, then travel! This you owe to yourself, to men, and to Him, the Almighty: only in this way may you develop once more all that has remained latent within you.” And in 1818, about the time he began work on the Missa Solemnis, which he considered his greatest composition, he exclaimed, “Once again sacrifice all the trivialities of social life to your art! O God over all!” Such integrity in the use of genius to the glory of its great Giver deserves renewed recognition in this bicentennial year.

Why is Beethoven still, two hundred years after his birth, the most played of all the master composers? Those who know his music do not need to be told why. Those who are acquainted with little more of it than the three imperious eighth notes and the half note that open the Fifth Symphony may find the reason by listening to Beethoven.

Here, then, is a challenge for the reader who is uninterested in classical music. Take time from some of the television trivialities at which most people today look, and hear some Beethoven records or tapes—one of the symphonies, the Emperor Concerto, the Violin Concerto, or other of the well-known works. Better yet, hear Beethoven “live” at a concert. Or again, turn off the “background music” on your stereo and give your whole attention to Beethoven. As Donald Francis Tovey, the great British musicologist, said, “his music is edifying … a supremely masterly and hopeful criticism of life.” And as you listen, and keep on listening, thank God for this man whose music speaks so eloquently of struggle with affliction, of the joy and humor of life, of sorrow and consolation, and serenity that surmounts suffering.

Frank E. Gaebelein is headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and former co-editor of Christianity today. His avocation is music (he is a pianist). He is currently engaged in preaching, lecturing, and writing.

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