Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

To Schindler:

“Do not come to me till I summon you. No concert.

“Beethoven.”

The dogmatic, domineering habit of mind here illustrated, the obverse side of Beethoven’s strong will and high self-reliance, doubtless did much to intensify the loneliness and the difficulties of his old age. Yet even here there is something noble, something that commands as much admiration as pity, about this wounded hero, this lion at bay.

The last scene of Beethoven’s troublous life opens in October, 1826, when, already aged and broken, though but fifty-six years old, he was obliged to seek, in the house of his “pseudo-brother” Johann, at Krems, fifty miles from Vienna, a refuge for Carl, who had been ordered out of Vienna by the civil authorities after his attempt at suicide. Sir George Grove gives a picture of the oddly-assorted group of actors: “The pompous money-loving land-proprietor; his wife, a common frivolous woman of questionable character; the ne’er-do-well nephew, intensely selfish and ready to make game of his uncle or to make love to his aunt; and in the midst of them all the great composer—deaf, untidy, unpresentable, setting every household rule at defiance, by turns entirely absorbed and pertinaciously boisterous, exploding in rough jokes and hoarse laughter, or bursting into sudden fury at some absolute misconception.” Beethoven, whose health was already seriously undermined, was obliged to sit in a cold room at his work, his brother being unwilling to go to the expense of a fire, and to eat unwholesome, ill-cooked food, for which however board-money was rigorously exacted. By early December there was an open rupture between the two brothers, and the composer and Carl, resolved to leave the place, yet denied the closed carriage of the niggardly Johann, risked the fifty-mile journey, in winter weather, in a hired open wagon. It was Beethoven’s death blow. Reaching home after two days’ exposure, he took to his bed, with his digestive troubles much aggravated, and an inflammation of the lungs. A little later dropsy set in, and four operations had to be undergone. As the doctors drew out the water Beethoven said grimly: “Better from my belly than from my pen.” Early in the new year he rallied, and planned fresh compositions. He amused himself with the romances of Scott, but at last threw them down, exclaiming angrily: “The man writes for money.” Soon he began to fail again. On March 24th, rapidly sinking, he just found strength to whisper to the friends at his bedside: “Plaudite, amici, commèdia finita est.” After a desperate struggle of two days, his vigorous constitution at last succumbed, and he died on the evening of March 26th, 1827.

Of the compositions of Beethoven’s last period the most conflicting opinions have been held. Musicians of the Wagner and Liszt school have seen in the Ninth Symphony the opening of a door into a new realm of art, greater, freer, more deeply expressive than any that had gone before. Critics less in sympathy with the tendencies of romanticism, however, have interpreted the last phase of Beethoven’s career as a decadence, the necessary result of flagging vitality and of his previous exhaustion of the legitimate effects of pure music. They have pointed out that his deafness made him indifferent to the actual sensuous effect of his combinations of tone; that his increasing fondness for the subtleties of polyphony was not supported by adequate early training; and that the isolation and sufferings of his life gradually undermined the sanity and marred the balance of his art. Probably there is some truth in each of these views.

It is certain that Beethoven, in his last quartets and pianoforte sonatas, and in the Ninth Symphony, showed for the first time the feasibility of those special, highly individualized expressions of feeling in music which were afterwards wrought out in great variety and profusion by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and the other composers of the Romantic school. He not only made music, as we have already seen, a language as well as an art, but he set the fashion, in his last compositions, of regarding its powers of eloquent and definite utterance as of even greater importance than its general plastic beauty. From the point of view of interest, this was an advance; and judged from this standpoint Beethoven was a pioneer in that movement towards characteristic expression which has been so important a part of the musical activity of our time.

But every advance, in art as well as in life, is made at a certain cost, and the price of this increase in complexity and preciseness of expression was a loss of artistic wholeness and poise. As a monument of pure beauty embodied in tones, the Ninth Symphony hardly holds its own beside the Eighth, so much smaller and less ambitious. One misses in it the sense of reserve power, of restraint, of firmly controlled balance of means and ends. The passionate spirit of the work jars and disrupts its body. Music is strained to its limit of power; and great as is the result, the success seems too much like a feat of genius, done in despite of natural laws. In all Beethoven’s later works there is this uncomfortable sense of strain and labor. He achieves the well-nigh impossible, but it is at the cost of serenity.

In view of the circumstances, we may think it could hardly have been otherwise. Long-continued deafness had made Beethoven insensitive to the sensuous basis of music. He considered less and less the actual sound of his fabric of tones, more and more their purely intellectual and ideal relations. The pages of the final sonatas and quartets bristle with passages as distressing to hear as they are interesting to contemplate. This tendency to harshness was reinforced by his growing addiction to contrapuntal writing. His natural style was that monophonic or harmonic style initiated by the Florentine reformers and passed on to him through Haydn and Mozart. But as he meditated, ever more profoundly, he came to see its inadequacy, and constantly felt out more and more in the direction of polyphony; he endeavored to graft the fugue and the canon upon sonata-form. His early training, however, was insufficient for such a task; his limitations in counterpoint had been correctly gauged by his teacher, Albrechtsberger; and when in his maturity he attempted to write polyphonically, he became crabbed, awkward, and discordant. His instinct was right, but his skill did not support him. In choral writing, again, to which he devoted himself with increasing enthusiasm as he grew older, he was at a disadvantage. He disregarded the natural conditions of the voice; he never really mastered vocal style; and when he introduced a chorus into his last and most gigantic symphony, he attempted more than he could satisfactorily execute. The choral part of that symphony is exceedingly difficult; and the audience is made almost as uneasy by it as the chorus.