The variety of what Beethoven has to say is as remarkable as the precision and force with which he says it. To study him is to discern the fallacy of the view so often heard that sentimental expression is the only kind possible to music. In Beethoven one can observe at least four well-contrasted general types of expressiveness, to say nothing of the infinite gradations between them. There is, in the first place, and as perhaps the dominant quality in all his work, the virile energy, the massive and cyclopean power, as of a giant or a god, so well illustrated in the symphonic subjects of Figure XX. What vigor, what inexhaustible force, what a morning freshness and joy there is in such a theme as that of the “Eroica” Symphony! How inexorable is its rhythm, how broad, solid, and simple its harmonic foundation! What controlled excitement, what restrained ferocity, there is in that persistent four-tone motif of the Fifth Symphony—“Fate knocking at the door”! What swift, concise assertiveness, as in the fiat of an emperor, in the opening of the Eighth Symphony, though it was called by Beethoven “my little one”! Elemental strength is the most constant, pervasive quality of expression in Beethoven’s work.
Yet, like every comprehensively great man he had the feminine tenderness and sentiment without which primal power is primitive, and will mere willfulness. His ruggedness hid the most delicate sensibility. At his most heroic moments he is always melting into moods of wistfulness, yearning, and soft emotion. To go for illustration no further than the symphonies, it is sufficient to mention, in the “Eroica,” the hesitant fervor of the second subject of the first movement; the deep and noble pathos of the subject of the Funeral March; the clear and rich emotion of the Trio (in the third movement), with its wonderful final strains, of which Sir George Grove said: “If ever horns talked like flesh and blood, they do it here;” in the Fifth Symphony, the poignant appeal of the second subject of the first movement, and the ceaselessly questing, gently insistent mood of the Andante; and in the Seventh, the resigned, yet still aspiring state of feeling voiced by the melody in A-major in the Allegretto. But it is impossible to do more than shadow forth dimly, in words, the emotions that glow with such deep color in this music. Moreover, to enumerate them is as unnecessary as it is thankless. Every one who knows music at all, knows how incomparable is Beethoven in the expression of all shades of tender, romantic, and impassioned human feeling.
A third sort of expression characteristic of Beethoven is that of the whimsical, the perverse, the irrepressibly gay. Before him, the classical symphony had had room for the brisk jollity of the Haydn finale and for the forthright animation of the Mozart minuet; but nothing like the Beethoven scherzo had existed. In Italian the word scherzo means a joke; and when he substituted the rollicking scherzo for the more formal and stately minuet Beethoven introduced into music the element of banter, mischief, and whimsy. Even among his several scherzos, there is such a diversity of mood that they introduce into music far more than one new kind of expression; their fancy is protean, inexhaustible. The scherzo of the “Eroica” is a mixture of mystery, gaiety, and headlong elan; in that of the Fifth Symphony, a sort of groping as in darkness alternates with incisive, grandiose, military boldness; in the middle Allegro of the Pastoral Symphony, taking the place of the scherzo, there is rustic merry-making, the awkward, good-natured gambols of peasants; in the Presto of the Seventh, there is upwelling geniality, the broad smile of amiable indolence; and in the Minuet of the Eighth, the old minuet stateliness gives place to a mixture of animal spirits and intellectual subtlety. Nor are the scherzos proper the only embodiment of the antics of this musical Pan; such Finales as those of the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies are but transfigured, ennobled scherzos, with the largeness of the heroic spirit added to the fancy, whim, and tireless merriment of the insatiable humorist. Beethoven is the extreme exponent of the spirit of comedy in music.
A fourth mood distinguishable in Beethoven is the mood of mystery. He loves to suggest the illimitable and the transcendent, to dissolve himself in vagueness; to pique curiosity and stimulate imagination by long stretches of pianissimo, of amorphous, ambiguous harmony, of strange inarticulate melody that baffles the attention—long, wide hushes, audible silences. In these moods he seems to retire, after his onslaughts of expression, into the deep subterranean reservoirs of the unexpressed. The Introduction to the Fourth Symphony is an example; one hears in it, as it were, the groping of vast unorganized impulses that await a birth. The extended pianissimo passage that leads into the Reprise, in the same movement, makes a similar impression, the modulation to the home-key of B-flat, after the long groping in B-major, seeming like the opening of a window in a darkened room. The wide stretches of rippling violin figures, piano, in the “Scene by the Brook” of the Pastoral Symphony illustrate another use of this device of monotony. They affect the mind, as Beethoven meant they should, like a placid sun-bathed landscape at noon, flat, silent, motionless. But perhaps the most striking instance of all is that wonderful page in the Fifth Symphony that prepares for the Finale. The sustained C’s of the strings, the suppressed, barely audible tapping of the drums in the rhythm of the central motif of the work, the fragmentary, aimless, and yet cumulative phrases of the violins, instil a sense of some vast catastrophe impending; and then, after the deliberate, gradual crescendo, pressing upon every nerve, the great joyous theme of the Finale crashes in, to sweep all before it.
Marvelous indeed is this varied and ever forcible expression of feeling in the great works of Beethoven’s maturity; but even more marvelous is the steady power by which he organizes these feelings into forms of perfect beauty, the unfaltering control by which he keeps the intensely characteristic from degenerating into caricature, the impassioned from becoming hysterical. He never forgets that, as an artist, he is the master, not the slave, of his inspiration, however seizing it may be. Though he infuses into music an eloquence new to it, he remembers that it is still music, and that it must be beautiful as music. Titanic were the labors he imposed upon himself to give his compositions balance, symmetry, logical coherence, integral unity emerging from an infinite variety of parts. His sketch-books, several of which, edited by Nottebohm, have been published by Breitkopf and Härtel, are the standing evidence of what endless effort it cost him to be an artist. In them we behold him at work, day by day, eliminating the irrelevant, reinforcing the significant, exploring the sources of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and structural variety, and returning upon his task to gather up all the threads into one complete, close-woven fabric. The result was a type of music seldom equalled, before or since, for that ordered richness, that complex simplicity, which is beauty.
An example or two will make this clearer than much description. The first subject of the Fifth Symphony, one of the most famous of Beethoven’s themes, is entirely made up of ingenious combinations of the “Fate Knocking at the Door” motif, as follows:
FIGURE XXI.