[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. Don't get alarmed friends.
We're just trying to elevate our taste in music for a moment. That's all. It won't last long.
By next week we'll be back in the womb again. But meanwhile, listen to this.
[Music]
There you go. That was the end of the last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonada. Whatever your taste in music,
you'll know what I mean when I say that had Beethoven not existed, we would have to invent him.
There are some people without whom history as we know it just wouldn't feel right. Beethoven's one of them.
Shakespeare's another, Einstein another, and many more? Who? John Macanroe. You cannot be
serious. Anyway, today's show is one I've been looking forward to for a while. I have with me in the
studio Professor Stephen Hinton, musicologist in the music department here at Stanford. He's
familiar to many in our audience. Thanks to a show I did with him a while back on the composer Kurt
Vile, which remains one of our most popular shows ever among listeners. Today we have on tap a two-part
conversation about Beethoven, who was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, western composer ever.
Indeed, if you look at Google's rankings of the 100 greatest classical composers, Beethoven is in the
number one position ahead of Mozart and Bach. De Gustibus. It's a taste I happen to share by the way,
though ranking geniuses of the caliber of Beethoven Bach and Mozart seems a little
feckless to me. Guess who's number four on the list? No wrong. Wrong again. It's Richard Wagner,
followed by Heisen, who was followed by Brahms, Brahms or the melancholy of impotence as Nietzsche
once wrote. Then there's Chewbart, Chikovsky, Handel, and Stravinsky. How about that? Stravinsky makes
the top ten? As for the composer of my favorite piece of music of all time, after comfortably
numb that is, Will Samuel Barber comes in at number 93. That, I can't agree with. Anyone who
composed is that "dagile for strings should by all rights be in the top 20, if I may express an
unentitled opinion for a change." I have no intention of putting my guest Stephen Hinton on the
spot by asking whether he agrees with Google's number one ranking yet, I will be talking with him
today about what makes Beethoven one of the very greatest composers in the Western tradition.
One of the very greatest. That's good enough for me and for Stephen Hinton too, I'm sure.
Stephen, welcome back to entitled opinions. It's a pleasure to have you with us again.
Thank you very much Robert. It's great to be back. I know you had an earlier guest talking about Beethoven.
I'm really looking forward to devoting our two-part show to the composer.
Yeah, that earlier guest, I think you're alluding to is Paul Robinson.
That's right, our friend and colleague, Paul Robinson. He started off the the false series for us.
You're right, we have a two-part conversation in two hours. Today we're airing the first hour.
The second hour will be posted immediately on our web page and on our iTunes podcast and will be
broadcast at a future date on KZSU. But leaving aside the ranking game for a moment, Stephen,
I think it's fair to say that there are very good reasons why Beethoven's star shines so brightly
in the firmament of classical music. He was, of course, an extraordinary composer in ways we'll
be analyzing today. But there's more to Beethoven than just his music. His iconic status in the
modern world is also enhanced by what we know about his personality, his temperament, and his biography.
He's in many ways the Western archetype of the artistic genius, as we understand the concept of
genius today. In fact, I'm tempted to say that the name of Beethoven refers as much to a myth as it does
to a person and composer. Would you like to start off our show maybe by saying a few words about
that myth? Certainly, when you mentioned the Google rankings, I began to wonder whether the
composer we're discussing today is the one that was actually voted number one.
There may be consternation about university rankings, for example, but at least when they are drawn up,
there's a more or less clear set of objective criteria being applied. But what are the criteria
applied to composers? Were the voters reflecting their personal musical tastes or simply confirming
Beethoven's mythological status? But I think the concept of the myth is a very appropriate in Beethoven's
case because of its, you could say, it's multivalency. Consider the various connotations. We'll talk
for example about something or some person existing only in myth. That's something fictitious or
imaginary, or a widespread belief that could be untrue and misconception. In that sense, perhaps we
have indeed invented Beethoven to allude to your opening words. There are many, many such stories surrounding
Beethoven, some of which he seems to have encouraged himself or at least not to have discouraged
such as the myth of his aristocratic birth. He didn't seem to object when people put
on rather than fan Ludwig von Beethoven. Or there was even a myth going around during his lifetime
about him. He's having been the illegitimate child of the King of Prussia and he doesn't seem to
have been too keen to suppress that one either. But the concept of myth also refers to the kind
of awe in which we can hold people. This might refer to popular stories and the popular stories
themselves may be real or fictitious. This is the legend of Beethoven and a legend that really began
quite early in his lifetime. There's some fiction and there's some awe involved.
But I think there's another more emphatic sense of the myth that can apply here. The Germans have
the word "grundungs" moutasse, a kind of founding myth, a traditional story that functions as an
explanation or justification for the history of society. Now this "grundungs" moutasse is founding myth in
Beethoven's case isn't about the founding of Western society going back to its very beginnings,
but there's a sense in which Beethoven is seen as a critical figure in the Enlightenment.
So the founding figure of modernity. Some people might complain, "Well, what about Mozart?
Wasn't he involved in that?" Well, of course he was and he was an extremely important predecessor
of Beethoven. But there's still this sense in which Beethoven is quite different from Mozart and
his other, his teacher, Haydn, in that Mozart was still very much bound up with the world of
absolutist rule and religion. Beethoven in this mythological understanding is seen as the book
title called Beethoven or the man who freed music. And so there's this sense in which Beethoven's
music embodies the very principles of Western Enlightenment. In that sense he's a real icon of Western
culture. And maybe leading on from that one could say that because the Enlightenment culture has been
defined in terms of having overcome a culture of myth, a culture of rule by the absolutist
monarchs and rule by religion, it was a culture of demytheologization. So you get this
situation where Beethoven is seen as the mythology of demytheologization. And I think that that is
something that particularly in recent criticism has been taken up the extent to which Beethoven
really does embody Enlightenment ideals. The term that you use there, I think,
quoting the title of a book about the liberation, Beethoven as the liberator of the man who
is free to music. So this notion of freedom and liberation is associated with the Enlightenment. We take
enlightenment ideals to be that which will liberate the future from its bondage to the past,
to tradition. I suppose to older forms of authority, including religion, and of course,
absolute monarchy. Do I take it when you say that this is part of the mythological
charisma of Beethoven that there might be a grain of truth but also a great deal of fiction in the
notion of Beethoven being one of the liberators? I think that's right. There's no doubt that Beethoven,
in terms of his position as a composer, ended up in a very different place from Mozart and Haydn.
Mozart and Haydn in their employment were much more reliant on the court, for example.
Now Beethoven began his life in the court but he increasingly liberated himself as a composer
from dependence on aristocrats, on monarchs.
That's so pen-ing. But it's difficult with Beethoven because there's part of him that can be seen as
having resisted that dependence but he wasn't on the less very dependent on his aristocratic patrons
and he had a number of friends who were aristocrats who supported him very much. I think the
in a way the more critical aspect of this is that Beethoven can be seen as somebody who throughout his
career, realized what we might call a paradigm of autonomy. So this isn't just the autonomy of the
artist who does exactly as he pleases and whose creations are functions of his own imagination and
invention rather than serving some kind of what some people might see as extra musical function.
But there's also the sense in which this music is autonomous as how best to put this. Each work
creates its own world, is unique in a way and is something that demands to be understood on its
own terms rather than merely as the representative of a particular genre or tendency. Is that what we mean by
absolute music in reference to Beethoven that his music had this inner autonomy where its
ultimate point of reference was itself and not its role in providing background music for an opera
theme or church music in the service of the church? I think that is right and I think that this is part
myth in the sense of fiction and part truth again here. Nowadays people talk about
the Beethoven paradigm and I think the Beethoven paradigm is an essentialisation of certain
facets of Beethoven's music and they include this his position as a composer. He was dependent on
others but he's seen as independent and the idea that his music is absolute in a way that it means
that it's not reliant on any kind of service to a particular social function or
subservient to the text but the musical notes themselves are the essence of what the music is about and they
are self-sufficient in that way. This is a contested thing because I think some people feel that
well Beethoven's music is actually much more his career is much more nuanced and complicated in that.
People nowadays criticise the Beethoven paradigm because they feel not only does it get in the way
of having a comprehensive understanding of what Beethoven's music was about at the time but it also
gets in the way of our understanding other composers so that the Beethoven paradigm gets supplied
to composers such as Trikosky whose music is then found wanting in seriously deficient.
The idea of absolute music it actually started curiously enough as a pejorative concept that was
coined by a of all people, Richard Wagner, whom you mentioned earlier, who when he was conceiving of his
music drum as wanted to see a kind of total work of art that was comprised of spectacle,
verbal content and music and plot and plot and drama and so he thought of absolute music that
as music that was divorced from all these things and for him it wasn't Beethoven, he had his uses for Beethoven's
work. It wasn't Beethoven who epitomised absolute music but Rossini whose music he thought in a
pejorative sense was actually rather divorced from the drama and had its own existence as
music providing a vehicle for virtuosic showpieces of the performers. Wagner himself later when he had a
conversion to the philosophy of Chopin how actually embraced the idea of music embodying the absolute
not-surface representation but an embodiment of the will itself and so Wagner is a tricky customer
but he introduces this concept of absolute music as a pejorative at a time when in many people's
minds and this goes all the way back to the romantic reception of Beethoven's music by ETA
Hoffmann where Beethoven's music has seen as a glimpse, a pre-sentiment of the absolute
so there's a kind of dual sense of absolute there it is the self-sufficiency of purely
instrumental music that's one aspect of the Beethoven paradigm but also the elevation of instrumental
music to something that is utterly different from earlier epochs and where in the minds of the
romantic's music becomes the the top of the artistic hip rate it is the most romantic of the
arts as Hoffmann said I'm a romantic in that regard too because I totally subscribe unironically to
the notion of absolute music or music which is self-sufficient unto itself it has its own autonomy
does not need to be the expression of something extra musical yes and this notion of autonomy is very
interesting also I'm trying to remember the first line of Kant's famous essay What is Enlightenment
where I think he says something to the effect that enlightenment is man's freedom or
is released from the bondage of his self-imposed tutelage yes that finally now man the collective
thing is becoming autonomous is going to become self-founding and is no longer going to be
you know the child in relation to the warden of authority and reason now has become
a law into itself and what you are saying about Beethoven's the myth of Beethoven and is
well there's this there's the same kind of self-founding self-securing
autonomy that's right and we should probably hear some more music so we know we can perhaps talk
about this very issue in relation to the music Beethoven himself was captivated by the myth of
Prometheus which I know at the time was something that Shelley was interested in Prometheus and bound
Mary Shelley with Frankenstein Beethoven actually wrote about Bele on Prometheus and this
this this idea of Prometheus this myth of Prometheus becomes one that is frequently associated
with Beethoven who creates these self-sufficient pieces and it's almost as if the music is
generating itself in each autonomous work and so the the music becomes a symbol of human freedom
and of human autonomy just to remind our listeners about Prometheus he's a very ambiguous figure
in from mythology the kind of mythology where you say there's no actual objective truth
contents but he is the one of the gods who gave fire to humankind and as punishment for for this
gift of the gods to humans without getting permission from the bosses is tied to a rock and has
vultures eating at his at his liver and so there is something heroic about Prometheus and
he's a rebel he's a one of the primordial mythological rebels against the hierarchical authority
structure so maybe we can hear something that will bring into focus in musical terms this
Promethean aspect of Beethoven compositions and also they what would then be this kind of heroic
drive in some of his works yes yeah what would you like to start with well why don't we start with
something that is extremely well known I think that this really is part of the Beethoven
canon in the very narrow sense perhaps it's worth mentioning at this juncture that
the Beethoven myth is built around an essentialisation of what's known as his middle period
very early on his shortly after his death his career was divided up into three periods the first one
being where he was still very much dependent on the models of contemporary composers his immediate
predecessors in particular Mozart whom he revered and Haydn whom he also revered but because he
was his teacher as well he had a somewhat strained relationship with the middle period is the one that is
seen in terms of Beethoven striking out on a new path co-insiding with a change in his biographical
circumstances it's not myth in the sense of pure fiction that Beethoven was death he gradually
he became increasingly a deaf throughout his career and we don't know the extent to which he really
was actually totally deaf at the end there may have been an element of hyperchondria about this
or just a receding from the world and this is a point of great contention but this middle period
coincides with his having written a document called the Heiliganstadt Testimony at the very beginning
of the 19th century where he talks about his having to overcome this incredible affliction so
there's a kind of heroic stance already in his biography and his realization at this time of his
deafness coincides with his with a real shift in his music to towards something that is quintessential
of this Beethoven paradigm of musical expression one can see for for shadowings of this in the
earlier music so it's not a sudden break and he's even in the middle period he's still very much
composing using the formal models of his teacher Haydn that the classical models but there's a there's
a qualitative change and I think we hear this at the beginning of the 5th symphony in a very
striking way and not just in the 5th symphony it's already there in the 3rd symphony which really
marks the beginning of this period I think the 3rd symphony is the one that again there's a
somewhat myth like quality to the stories about this the the 5th the 3rd symphony was one that he
apparently intended to dedicate to Napoleon and then there's a story about how when Napoleon
seemed to be getting too big for his boots and wanted to declare himself emperor Beethoven
ripped the title page off the score it's a wonderful moment you can see that there's Beethoven
friend of the French Revolution embracing the ideals of the French Revolution and seeing this
tyrant and saying well you know the whole thing is going to the dogs here and really standing up
for the for the rights of of humanity the details of that story are quite complicated there's a concern
that he had about whether he was going to get paid for this and if he dedicated it to Napoleon
then his usual page for might not have given many money he was also thinking apparently about
going to France and continuing his career over there which might have actually motivated the reason
for the dedication in a note to his publisher he even said that he wanted to call it the
Bonaparte symphony after he had apparently torn up the the title page in any event there's
there's a kind of complication about the biographical aspect of this no question however
that the music does have a strong sense of the heroic and what I mean by that is it isn't
just to do with what Paul Robinson in the earlier broadcast was referring to the as the
agrandios tone of the music but it's the way in which and this is qualitatively different
not absolutely different but significantly different from the music of his predecessors Beethoven
is writing music on a much much bigger scale to start with from before the length of his
symphony movements alone equal the length of whole symphonies from earlier times the aurora
occurs in that regard is is a complete shift in in in terms of artistic intentions and aspirations
but it's not just that the individual movements are themselves qualitatively or rather quantitatively
different from the predecessors but the whole symphony is conceived as a totality not as a set of
discrete movements that relate to a particular key in that sense you can talk about a symphony
in G minor but the fifth in particular is a terrific example of this at the micro level you feel that
there's this sense of the music evolving gradually bit by bit but not only that and we can come back
to this there's a progression from the first movement to the second movement to the third
movement to the fourth movement all the movement movements seem to be linked in various ways and
the heroic quality is is enshrined in the way that the music starts off in a rather tragic vein
there's also the myth about how the opening notes of the fifth symphony were described by Beethoven
as fate knocking on the door now this may or may not be true he had this rather how can we put it
unreliable imanogenesis chindler who passed a lot of this stuff on and some of it was self-serving be
that is as it may there is this kind of sense of some foreboding and tragedy in that opening movement
but eventually that is overcome in the final movement with this great sense of triumph and victory
and so there's a if you like a dynamic to the entire symphony which suggests some kind of
overarching narrative and I think this is quintessentially the new quality that Beethoven's work
that distinguishes Beethoven's work vis-a-vis the the music of his predecessors each
work has its own kind of narrative trajectory the movements abound up together well perhaps a
couple of things just by way of introduction of the music itself here there's been some controversy about
what the theme of Beethoven's fifth is what I mean by that is we have the famous fate knocking on
the door notes but is that is that really the theme of the of the piece well music theorists would say
that's a motive but there is some larger scale unit here which is really like much more like
Mozart's music in that it there's a kind of syntactical unit known as a period which is divided
into two and we can hear very clearly how this initial motive is introduced but then embedded
in a larger scale musical period and now how that period is itself then embedded in a form that is
to all intents and purposes the what's called the sonata form of the classical period
Mozart's so Beethoven here is composing with these very small units but the units themselves
multiply to create these larger units and I think this also creates this sense of what's referred to as
a musical process or processuality and this is this is where people who are inclined to a philosophical
interpretation of Beethoven reflecting that the spirit of his age see a parallel between
Hegel's philosophy of becoming and Beethoven's music is embodying this becoming starting
with these small units and then getting bigger and bigger and then ultimately creating this whole
narrative arch so I think that this is this is different the the overall sense of emphasis
and in places almost violence that the music has is quite different from the classical balance and
and grace of the preceding music and just one other thing we're going to hear a substantial
chunk of music here because of the scale of this movement we have an exposition that is
the initial theme that I've talked about that musical period we then have a very different
contrasting second theme do i d d d d d d d d d d d but even there you can hear Beethoven using the
motive ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba to accompany his second theme
there's then a development section as you would expect after the repeated exposition of development
section where he's tossing around the music developing the ideas and occasionally you will just have
two notes which seem somehow to be related to the very opening so there's this kind of sense in
which even a couple of notes seem to be thematically significant because of the way that he
weaves together this motive develop and of his ideas and then we have a recapitulation which is
ostensibly the same as the exposition except that there's a harmonic resolution so that the the
whole finishes in the tonic key and then we fit we hear this a couple of quite different things
happening in this recapitulation one is that that the end of the first half of the first period we
hear this very plaintive oboe is this injection of lyrical subjectivity we've had all this
motiveic kind of curt motiveic work going on and then suddenly there's something that reminds us of
more lyrical vocal work and then just before the second theme because we're not modulating to a new
key but staying in the home key the French horns can no longer play that piece because they are the
natural horns of the period and so we actually have the bassoon playing that which is a rather odd
effect I think that should probably suffice why don't we hear the the whole of the first movement of the
fifth symphony this is a recording conducted by the great conductor Carlos Kleiber yeah probably the
most mythic piece of Beethoven's entire oboe's I would say so we know about the fate the
anecdote about fate knocking on the door we also know that the allies in the in the second world
war saw the opening motive short short short long as the Morse code equivalent of the word V
which is the acronym for victory yeah here we go
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