A Composer of Instrumental Music
Beethoven was distinctly a composer of instrumental music, although he wrote the opera Fidelio, also the Ninth Symphony in which he made great innovations in symphonic form and introduced the Choral.
Up to this time, composers in the Classic School had paid more attention to the voice and to the soloists in the concertos than to the orchestra. Thus we see men like Mozart leaving a space toward the end of the movement in a concerto for the soloist to make up his own closing salute to his audience before the orchestra ended the piece. These cadenzas became acrobatic feats in which the players wrote the most difficult “show-off” music. Beethoven, with his love for the orchestra and his feeling that the soloist and the orchestra should make one complete unit, wrote the cadenza himself and thereby made the composition one beautiful whole rather than a sandwich of the composer, soloist and composer again.
Fancy all this from a man who, when he multiplied 14 × 26 had to add fourteen twenty-sixes in a column! We saw this column of figures written on a manuscript of Beethoven’s in an interesting collection, and the story goes that Beethoven tried to verify a bill that was brought to him in the midst of a morning of hard work at his composing.
Besides his symphonies, concertos and sonatas in which are light moods, dark moods, gay and sad moods, spiritual heights and depths, filling hearers with all beauty of emotion,—he wrote gay little witty things, like the German Dances, The Fury over the Loss of a Penny (which is really funny), four overtures, many English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Italian folk-song settings. He also wrote one oratorio called The Mount of Olives, two masses, one of which is the magnificent Missa Solemnis, one concerto for the violin that is the masterpiece of its kind, and the one grand opera Fidelio.
Thus we have told you about the bridge to the “Romantic Movement” which will follow in the next chapter.
Beethoven could have said with Robert Browning’s “Abt Vogler”
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws....
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,