The score comprises two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two drums, first and second violins, violas, violoncellos and basses. In some of the movements three trombones, a double bassoon, a piccolo, triangle, cymbals and big drum are called for.
“These great works he did as no one ever did and probably no one ever will. But of orchestral music he wrote no more after the Ninth Symphony. Music will advance in richness, scope and difficulty; but such music as Beethoven’s great instrumental works, in which thought, emotion, melody and romance combine with extraordinary judgment and common sense and a truly wonderful industry to make a perfect whole, can hardly any more be written. The time for such an event, such a concurrence of the man and the circumstances will not again arrive. There can never be a second Beethoven, or a second Shakespeare. However much Orchestras may improve and execution increase, Beethoven’s Symphonies will always remain at the head of music as Shakespeare’s plays are at the head of the literature of the modern world—‘Age cannot wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety.’”[68]
In every way possible Beethoven discovered and brought forward the capacities of each individual instrument. Each instrument in the Orchestra was enriched under Beethoven’s touch and given a new standing, a new dignity. The viola, the violoncello, the double-bass, the horn, the trombone and the kettledrum were all brought forward and turned into solo instruments. The clarinet, too, became firmly established as a leading voice.
No composer before him had ever made the instruments converse as did Beethoven. No composer had ever made the strings so flexible, so humorous, so pathetic, so gay, so languorous. Besides, Beethoven was the first to take the violins up into the highest register—into the ethereal domain where Wagner followed.
“When an idea comes to me,” said Beethoven, “I hear it on an instrument, never on a voice.”
“Beethoven is the prophet of the new era which the Nineteenth Century ushered in for mankind. As things must be felt before they can be acted out, so they must be expressed in the indefinite emotional forms of music before they can be uttered and definitely imaged forth in words or pictorial shapes. Beethoven is the forerunner of Shelley and Whitman among the poets, of J. W. Turner and J. F. Millet among the painters. He is the great poet who holds Nature by the one hand and Man by the other. Within that low-statured, rudely outlined figure which a century ago walked hatless through the fields near Mödling or sat oblivious in some shabby restaurant at Vienna, dwelt an emotional giant—a being who—through his outer life by deafness, disease, business-worries, poverty, was shattered as it were into a thousand squalid fragments—in his great heart embraced all mankind, with piercing insight penetrated intellectually through all falsehoods to the truth and already in his art-work gave outline to the religious, the human, the democratic yearnings, the loves, the comradeship, the daring individualities, and all the heights and depths of feeling of a new dawning era of society. He was, in fact, and he gave utterance to, a new type of man. What that struggle must have been between his inner and outer conditions—of his real self with the lonely and mean surroundings in which it was embodied—we only know through his music.”[69]
Beethoven was the last great Classical composer.
With Weber we enter a new school of music—the Romantic; and Carl Maria von Weber stands at the head of this Romantic School.
The word Classical is used in two ways: one, to define old works which have held their place in general estimation for a long time; and the other to describe works, written according to strict ideas of form, usually in the Sonata and Symphonic style. The great classical masters are Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The word Romantic is used to define the works of the composers who came directly after the Classical composers and who wished to write in freer form, permitting more play for the imagination.
The great Romantics are Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin.