Beethoven 3 Essay Research Paper BeethovenEvents of

Beethoven 3 Essay, Research Paper

Beethoven

Events of the day matter less in a study of Beethoven (1770-1827) than they do in most other composers. However, certain factors need to be taken into consideration when one is looking at his composition method. He never moved from Vienna and only ever left the city for any lengthy period either to take a summer holiday – which was only a holiday in the sense that he could devote himself to composition more entirely without interruption – or to visit Baden and elsewhere for the sake of his general health or in his attempts to find a cure for his deafness. In Vienna his success as a composer centred around performances in friends houses or in the concert hall. He was not always in poverty but never became rich and died poor. Almost the whole of the remainder of his life story is the series of difficulties he had with money matters, his troubles with sponging relatives, the opposition to his work by professional musicians and the faithful admiration extended to him by amateurs.

Outside the purely personal considerations one must not overlook the drastic changes which passed over the whole of European society in Beethoven’s lifetime. Twice during the most productive part of Beethoven’s life, Vienna was occupied by Napoleon’s armies but his work went steadily forward. Nevertheless, the ideas that brought those armies into existence was sweeping across Europe. The spirit of independent thought and action was stirring and it was this that eventually gave birth to the inventive genius of the 19th century. It animated the poetic thought of Goethe and Schiller and infused itself into the music of Beethoven from the Sonata Appassionata to the ninth symphony.

This spirit might be the strongest reason for Beethoven’s slow working and his comparatively small output. Haydn and Mozart could turn out symphonies and quartets by the dozen because they accepted certain principles of order without question. Beethoven, on the other hand, considered every work a matter of strong personal conviction. When, in later life, he looked back at earlier works he was disgusted by how much he had taken for granted. Now he felt that his ideas as he first put them on paper did not represent his feelings truly and accurately. He adopted the plan of putting them down just as they came, merely catching a glimpse of his though as it passed. Then he sifted them, discovering what part really represented that thought; what was the chance of the moment or due to mere convention of style. And so, rejecting the latter and perfecting what he felt to be genuine, he gradually formed his melodies, extended them, and moulded them into complete shape.

Beethoven adopted the habit of sketching in innumerable notebooks. He always carried one with him, made of rough greyish paper, more like wrapping paper than for writing, crudely sewn, presumably by himself. A great many of these notebooks with their priceless contents have been lost, but a good number remain and are, thanks to the efforts of Gustav Nottebohm (1817-1882) in deciphering them, valuable evidence of Beethoven’s method of working. The sketches are often either nearly illegible or in a personal shorthand, and their elucidation was a work of great patience and, often, insight. Because Beethoven habitually adopted this method of sketching, it has often been assumed that he was a very laborious composer, and it tends to be forgotten that he was naturally as fluent as any of his predecessors, not excluding Mozart. He himself remarked that sketching was a “bad custom”, either because he may have felt it interfered with his natural spontaneity, or because he may sometimes have thought he was wasting time in jotting down everything and anything that occurred to him. But there was no real alternative for him – he was breaking new ground all the time and must therefore go warily.

Slowness is the first quality in Beethoven’s character making him typical of the change of attitude of musicians towards their art at the turn of the century. Had he been content to compose for the calculated satisfaction of his patrons there can be no doubt that, like Haydn, he would have produced a vast quantity of finished work, much of it consisting of masterpieces of the kind he must have felt were already too numerous in the world. Beethoven was not, it is important stress, an iconoclastic revolutionary, and a great deal of the music he did write was successful in fulfilling purposes similar to those of Haydn in many of his finest works. He saw nothing wrong in this, being fundamentally a man of the Enlightenment, and he regarded his music as a solace to the spirit as much as an exploration of it. The older he grew, however, the more instinctively exploratory he became, with the result that the sketching habit was more and more necessary to him. His sketchbooks show that all his major works were the result of long thought and mental struggle during which he gradually shaped them out by a process of writing and rewriting.

It is often said that Beethoven’s ideas were hammered out from crude beginnings, flat commonplaces being transformed into deathless utterances by dint of sweating modification, note by note. On the face of it, it would seem to be so. One has only to look at some of the early sketches for a masterpiece to be amazed at the crudity of them. The sketch, for instance, for the beautiful slo