BEETHOVEN (CONTINUED)
History and analytic thought alike reveal the fact that the highest
pinnacles of art can be scaled only at those happy moments when
favoring conditions of two distinct kinds happen to coincide. The
artist who is to attain supreme greatness must in the first place have
at his command a type of artistic technique that has already been
developed to the verge of maturity, but that still awaits its complete
efflorescence. As Sir Hubert Parry well says: “Inspiration without
methods and means at its disposal will no more enable a man to write
a symphony than to build a ship or a cathedral.” These means must be
already highly developed, yet not to the point of exhaustion. If the
technique is primitive, no ardor of artistic enthusiasm can reach
through it a full utterance; if all its potencies have been actualized,
no inspiration can reanimate it.
In the second place, the artist so happy as to inherit a technique ripe
but not over-ripe, must also, if he is to attain supreme greatness,
be in unison with the thought and feeling of his age, echo from the
common mind of his fellows a deep, broad, and universal eloquence,
as though all mankind spoke through him as mouthpiece. He must live
in the midst of some great general awakening of the human spirit, to
which he lends voice. Merely personal art can be interesting, graceful,
charming, moving, noble, but it cannot have the profundity, the
breadth, the elevation, which we recognize in the highest art, such as
Greek sculpture, Elizabethan drama, or the symphonic music we are now
studying. “A great man,” says Emerson, “finds himself in the river of
the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of
his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way,
and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. Every
master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his
sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought
in. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and
he enters into their labors.”[44]
When Beethoven resolved on his “new path,” his ambition was favored by
the two necessary conditions. That he had at his command an inherited
technique, just brought to the verge of maturity, we have already seen.
And he had furthermore, behind and below him, as a rich nourishing soil
for his genius, a great, new, common enthusiasm of humanity.
The eighteenth century had been a time of formalism in art and
literature, of rigid conventionality in social life, of paternalism in
politics, and of dogmatic ecclesiastical authority in religion. At its
end, however, all those dim, half-conscious efforts of humanity towards
freer and fuller life which we have indicated under the general term of
idealism, were beginning to reach definiteness and self-consciousness.
Men were beginning to assert deliberately and openly what they had
long been feeling intuitively but insecurely. They were boldly erasing
from their standards the mediæval formula: “Poverty, celibacy, and
obedience,” to write in its place the modern one: “Life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” They were revolting from the tyrannies of
Church and State, to proclaim the sacredness of the individual soul.
It was Beethoven’s high privilege to be the artistic spokesman of
this new, enfranchised humanity. Haydn, as we know, had reflected for
the first time in music the universal interest in all kinds of human
emotion, sacred and profane, that marked the dawn of the new era. But
in his music the emotion remains naïve, impulsive, childlike; it has
not taken on the earnestness, the sense of responsibility, of manhood.
It is still in the spontaneous stage, has not become deliberate,
resolute, purposeful. But with Beethoven childishness is put away,
and the new spirit steps boldly out into the world, aware of its
obligations as well as of its privileges, clear-eyed, sad, and serious,
to live the full yet difficult life of freedom.
The closeness of Beethoven’s relation to the idealistic spirit of his
time is shown equally by two distinct yet supplementary aspects of his
work. As it was characteristic of the idealism which fed him to set
supreme store by human emotion in all its intensity and diversity, so
it is characteristic of his music to voice emotion with a fullness,
poignancy, definiteness, and variety that sharply contrast it with
the more formal decorative music of his forerunners. And as it was
equally characteristic of idealism to recognize the responsibilities
of freedom, to restrain and control all particular emotions in the
interest of a balanced spiritual life, so it was equally characteristic
of Beethoven to hold all his marvelous emotional expressiveness
constantly in subordination to the integral effect of his composition
as a whole, to value plastic beauty even more highly than eloquent
appeal to feeling. In other words, Beethoven the musician is equally
remarkable for two qualities, eloquence of expression and beauty of
form, which in his best works are always held in an exact and firmly
controlled balance. And if we would fully understand his supremacy, we
must perceive not only his achievements in both directions, but the
high artistic power with which he correlates them. Just as the courage
to insist on the rights of the individual, and the wisdom to recognize
and support the rights of others, are the two essentials of true
idealism, so eloquence and beauty are the equal requisites of genuine
art.
So closely interwoven, so mutually reactive, are these twin merits
of expression and form in the great works of Beethoven’s prime--in
the pianoforte sonatas from the Waldstein to Opus 90, in the String
Quartets, Opus 59 and 74, in the fourth and fifth piano concertos and
the unique concerto for violin, in the Overture to “Coriolanus,” the
incidental music to “Egmont,” and the opera, “Fidelio,” in the Mass
in C, and above all in the six great symphonies from the “Eroica” to
the Eighth--that it seems like wanton violence and falsification to
separate them, even for the purposes of study. Synthesis, at any rate,
should go hand in hand with analysis; we should constantly remember
that the various qualities our critical reagents discern in this music,
exist in it not, as in our analysis, single and detached, but fused and
interpenetrative in one artistic whole. The chemist may find carbon,
and hydrogen, and oxygen in the rose, but a rose is something more,
something ineffably more, than a compound of these chemical elements.
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[Illustration: FIGURE XX.]
If, bearing constantly in mind the artificiality of analysis,
we nevertheless attempt an enumeration of separate qualities in
Beethoven’s mature work, we are first of all arrested by the vigor,
definiteness, and variety of his expression. In his symphonies from
the Eroica on, for example, there is a far more direct and poignant
utterance of a wide range of feeling, than we can find anywhere in
Haydn or Mozart, or in the early Beethoven. The first “subjects” of
the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, shown in Figure XX,
illustrate strikingly, brief as they are, this diversity and force of
the works of the middle period. Who that had once heard them could ever
forget them? And who could ever confuse one with another? How they
pierce through the veil of the past, with their vibrant accent of the
living, breathing man!
Beethoven’s subjects, attaining so wonderful a degree of
individualization, mark the culminating point of a long process of
crystallization of definite forms out of the tonal matrix of earlier
music. Ever since the Florentine reformers essayed to infuse into
academic art the human expressiveness of idealized popular songs and
dances, the latent potentialities of vocal phrases to express earnest
emotion, and of vigorous rhythms to express the more active and
animated feelings, had been becoming more and more fully utilized.
We saw how the popular songs were embodied and transfigured in the
sarabandes and other slow, serious movements of the eighteenth century
suites, and how the rhythms of the popular dances were wrought into
their idealized gavottes, bourrées, minuets, and gigues.[45] We saw
how Haydn, in his naïve yet skillful way, seized upon and refined the
primitive but emotionally vital folk-music of his race.[46] We saw
how Mozart contributed still further, by his wonderful genius for
organization, to the progress in delicacy, variety, and breadth, of
the same type of art. And now we see, in Beethoven, the issue of this
long growth: we see him bring to their apotheosis the eloquence of the
song and the animation of the dance; we see him, by full utilization
of the harmonic and rhythmic potentialities of structure, by vigorous
exclusion of the irrelevant and the superfluous, by full concentration
of all his faculties of heart and mind on the one idea in hand,
attaining a definiteness, a variety, and a compelling eloquence of
expression, that may fairly be said to mark an epoch. Before Beethoven
music was already an art; with him it becomes also a language.
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:
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXI.]
How wonderful here is the stern and relentless logic of that
insistently repeated rhythm, the utter naturalness of the melody which
builds itself out of the various repetitions of the theme in different
voices, and the rugged strength of the harmonic scheme of the entire
passage! Had we not documentary evidence, we should find it hard to
believe that this was not a sudden and complete thought, struck out by
Beethoven at a blow in some moment of high musical excitement. Yet his
sketch-book reveals that it grew by a very gradual process of amendment
and refining from the monotonous, uninteresting, almost fatuous bit of
patchwork shown in Figure XXII. Another, slightly more advanced, state
of the same idea is shown in Figure XXIII. In both these passages the
rhythm is almost the only element that even dimly suggests the august
gravity of the final version; for the rest, these first attempts are
depressingly futile.
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXII.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXIII.]
The well-known and universally admired subject of the Andante of the
Fifth Symphony is another illustration of Beethoven’s artistic power.
That was a rare skill indeed which could educe, even after long labor,
this beautifully modulated and sustained theme (Figure XXIV), so subtle
and varied in contour, from the trite embryo noted in Figure XXV.
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXIV.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXV.]
The evolution of Beethoven’s almost perfect ideas from their strangely
featureless and uninteresting germs can perhaps be shown best of all,
however, by the citation of several consecutive stages in the history
of some single notable conception. The indescribably lovely second
subject of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony is shown in
its final form at (e) of Figure XXVI; (a), (b), (c), and (d) of the
same figure being a few of the many sketches through which Beethoven
approached it. The points of especial beauty in the matured theme
appear sporadically in the earlier sketches. Of these the chief are:
the insistent beat of the rhythm; the impressive cadence in the fourth
measure and the beat of silence following it in the fifth; the rise to
the poignant G in the seventh measure, and the lapse by rapid motion
down to B-flat again; the sudden assumption of the minor mode in
measure 9, and the modulation to the distant key of D-flat it suggests;
and the uneven yet satisfying balance of the three complete phrases,
together with the sense of being poised in air given by the sudden
cessation of the rhythmic pulse at a point so distant from the key.
The rhythm appears in the very first sketch, marked (a); the cadence
and beat of silence appear in (b), as does also the rise to G in the
melody, except that the G is flatted, slightly sentimentalizing the
effect. The modulation to the key of D-flat appears in (c) and (d),
but in each case its effectiveness is much weakened by the quickly
succeeding further modulation. The sense of poise referred to is
entirely lacking in these two variants, because a fourth phrase is
added to the three essential ones. In the final form all the effects
are made with certainty and economy.
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVI-a. A FEW OF THE MANY STAGES
IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND SUBJECT OF THE ‘EROICA’ SYMPHONY.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVI-b.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVI-c.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVI-d.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVI-e. Form adopted]
Beethoven’s method of drafting and re-drafting his subjects enabled
him to bring them at last to a formal perfection undreamed of by less
painstaking composers. His best themes combine almost the highest
possible degree of variety and unity, and therefore attain almost the
highest possible degree of beauty. We saw, in connection with the
Quintet of Mozart (Figure XVIII), how high synthetic powers of mind
enable a composer to combine different motifs in one theme in such a
way as to attain great variety of parts with final unity of impression.
Beethoven exhibits constantly, in his best work, an even higher degree
of this synthetic power than Mozart was master of. He knew how to build
the most diverse materials into a compact, indissoluble organism. His
briefest themes often discover this power as strikingly as his long
and elaborate movements. The first theme of the Sonata in A-major for
Violoncello and Piano, which appears in Figure XXVII, is an example
of the way the faculty shows itself within narrow limits. Here are
six measures, each containing a different scheme of time values; yet
the theme as a whole is as compelling in its unity and certainty of
intention as it is engaging in its variety.
The exploitation of the primary themes in the course of a long
movement, however, the constant evocation from them of new meanings and
interests, is of course the last and finest evidence of Beethoven’s
genius in composition. It was in this logical drawing forth of the
implications of his thought that he was unapproachable. He uses
to admiration all those devices of development we have already
enumerated--inversion, augmentation, diminution, shifted rhythm, and
the rest--yet never descends to the mechanical, as his great successor,
Brahms, who is perhaps the only modern composer who compares with him
in this faculty of logical development of an idea, sometimes does.
Beethoven always seems to be merely making explicit what was implied
in the theme itself.
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-a.
SOME OF THE DEVELOPMENTS OF THE FIRST SUBJECT IN THE ‘EROICA’ SYMPHONY.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-b.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-c.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-d.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-e.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-f.]
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[Illustration: FIGURE XXVIII-g.]
In Figure XXVIII are put down a few of the more important modifications
of the first subject of the Eroica Symphony, as an illustration of
the inexhaustibility of fancy displayed by Beethoven in this sort of
development. (a) is the theme in its initial form. Note how, with that
mysterious C-sharp in the bass, in the fifth measure, the outline is
momentarily blurred, and the insistence on the tones of the triad
relaxed, until with measure 7 the key is re-entered and the sentence
soon brought to a firm conclusion. No one but Beethoven could ever
have conceived that C-sharp. In (b), which follows, in the score,
immediately on (a), the second half of the motif is made the subject
of a development by repetition, at a higher and higher pitch. In
(c), which occurs after the second subject, and near the end of the
first section of the entire movement, the same portion of the motif
is further exploited. For the first four measures it is thrown back
and forth in imitation. In the fifth, sixth and seventh measures it
is given to the bass, in _diminution_ (note how piquantly) and in the
eighth measure it is both diminished and inverted, yet without giving
the slightest impression of artificiality. The subject appears at (d),
which is a part of the working-out portion of the movement, in the
minor key, and rapidly modulating to distant keys, as is appropriate
in that part of the composition the aim of which is to contrast with
the definiteness, orderliness, and precision of the Exposition. At (e)
the subject, still in minor, is heard in the bass, while the treble has
as a counterpoint to it a tripping rhythm derived from another part
of the original material. At (f), becoming emphatic, magniloquent,
the theme is sounded _forte_, and in unison by the whole orchestra,
and extended by a natural magnification to an eight-measure phrase.
This is developed at some length in the score. (g) is the beginning of
the Coda. In one of Beethoven’s breathless _pianissimos_, the subject
is given by the second violins on their G-strings, the first violins
meanwhile embroidering in an elastic staccato the most indescribably
merry, light-hearted little counter-melody. From the freshness of this,
one might fancy that the work was just opening rather than drawing to
its close. Truly, Beethoven’s imagination is like some friendly genie
of the Arabian Nights, filling our cup of enjoyment as fast as it is
drained.
The mental power that in the preliminary parts of composition reveals
itself merely as a remarkable ingenuity, inventiveness, and elasticity
of mind, appears, when contemplated in its larger action, almost
superhuman in its breadth of grasp. In the conception and execution
of a great symphonic work, as an integral whole of many and diverse
parts, Beethoven is unapproachable. All the successive movements in a
long work, all the themes and transitions, all the rhythmic changes,
all the modulations, temporary or prolonged, are foreseen and adjusted
with perfect control. There is no feature of any moment that has not
its relation to the whole. Often the reason of some apparent whim will
not appear for pages; but at last it will appear, and when it does it
will be seen to fulfil a purpose never lost sight of. As a turret or
window at the extreme end of a building may balance a similar feature
at the other end, so Beethoven’s treatment of a given theme, early in a
movement, may be determined and illuminated by what he finally does to
it in the Coda. So integral is his work, so firmly held in the grip of
his inexorable artistic logic.
Beauty, in the great compositions of his prime, is therefore as
omnipresent as expression; and their supreme greatness is in fact
due to the perfect balance, in them, of these two equally important
elements of musical effect. Before passing on to the consideration of
his later years, it will be well to make still clearer the fact of this
balance of qualities by a brief reference to the highly interesting and
significant attitude of Beethoven towards program music.
Program music differs from pure music in being aimed rather at the
literal imitation or delineation of objects and events in the natural
world than at the presentation, through orderly and consequently
beautiful tone-combinations, of the general emotions that they
arouse. Schütz, a very early German composer, depicting by a long
downward scale an angel descending from heaven; Beethoven, introducing
the notes of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in his Pastoral
Symphony; Schubert, writing in the accompaniment of his song, “The
Trout,” a leaping figure suggestive of the motions of the fish in the
water; Raff, sounding the rhythm of a galloping horse all through
the ride-movement of his Lenore Symphony: Wagner, imitating in the
“Waldweben” the murmurings of the forest; all these composers are
writing program music. Of course there is no reason that program music
should not be at the same time pure music, provided that the desire
to imitate nature accurately does not lead the composer to slight the
requirements of plastic beauty in the ordering and combination of his
material. A portrait may be good decoration, if composition, massing,
light and shade, coloring, and so on, are not sacrificed to a pitiless
realism. Just so, program music can be made beautiful, if the needs of
abstract tonal beauty are duly considered.
But as a usual thing they are not. The program composer generally
makes a fetish of his “idea,” pursues it with the enthusiasm of the
literalist, and quite neglects the formal symmetry, the stylistic
congruity and harmony, of his web of tones. The result is that program
music is as a rule more interesting than moving; that in attempting
to make pure sounds do what words, or even colors and shapes, can do
better, it sacrifices the legitimate and characteristic effect of
tones--the suggestion of a general state of feeling, potent by reason
of its very vagueness, and transfigured by the abstract beauty of its
medium.
Now Beethoven was obliged in his early maturity to face and solve
this problem of program music for himself. His intense individualism,
his susceptibility to strong feeling, his natural interest in the
characteristic, the dramatic, the definite, and the opportunity he
found, in music as he received it from his forerunners, for a more
detailed expressiveness than had yet been attempted, all inclined him
to take the attitude of the program composer. The poetic conception
of a work was so clear and distinct in his mind that he could easily
assign it a descriptive title. He called his third symphony “The
Eroica,” his sixth the “Pastoral,” and said that the motif of the
fifth indicated “Fate Knocking at the Door.” He called one of his
piano sonatas “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour;” of another, that
in G-major, Opus 14, he said, “It is a dialogue between husband and
wife, or lover and mistress; between the entreating and the resisting
principle;” he tacitly admitted that the sonatas in F-minor, Opus 57,
and in D-minor, Opus 29, were illustrative of Shakespeare’s Tempest.
Other works, not specifically named by him, wore very naturally titles
given by others: as the “Pastoral Sonata,” the “Moonlight Sonata,”
and the “Sonata Appassionata.” At the same period that he was writing
these instrumental works with programmistic aspect, he wrote also
his incidental music descriptive of Goethe’s “Egmont,” his overture
on the subject of “Coriolanus,” and his single opera, “Fidelio.” Of
interpretation he said:
“Though the poet carries on his monologue, or dialogue, in a
progressively marked rhythm, yet the declaimer, for the more accurate
elucidation of the sense, must make cæsuras and pauses in places where
the poet could not venture on any interpunctuation. To this extent,
then, is this style of declaiming applicable to music, and it is only
to be modified according to the number of persons cooperating in the
performance of a musical composition.”
Yet in spite of all these indications of the direction in which music
was moving with Beethoven, his instinct for beauty kept him from
allowing mere delineation to become his ideal. As Sir Hubert Parry
well says, the Pastoral Symphony is like a manifesto on that point. Of
all Beethoven’s works, it ventures farthest into the domain of program
music. It contains actual imitations of sounds and sights in nature,
as the rippling of the brook (strings); the muttering of thunder
(contrabasses in their low register); flashes of lightning (violins);
the bassoon of an old peasant sitting on a barrel, and able to play but
three tones; and the song of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe),
and cuckoo (clarinet.) All the movements bear descriptive titles, as
follows: “The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country;
Scene by the brook; Merry gathering of peasants; Thunderstorm;
Shepherd’s song--Rejoicings and thankfulness after the storm.” It is
obvious that here Beethoven was pushing the descriptive power of music
to its limits. Yet it is important to note that even here neither
his instinctive sense of the proper uses of the musical art nor his
reasoned conviction as to the nature of musical expression forsook
him. Throughout the growlings of the thunder, the music pursues its
way coherently and accordingly to its own laws. The rhythmic scheme
and the harmonic sequence are maintained, and the general structure is
not for a moment forgotten. After the imitation of the bird-notes, in
the second movement, the musical sentence is rounded out to completion
by the lovely concluding phrase, imitated by various instruments.
(See Fig. XXIX).
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XXIX. THE BIRD-NOTES IN THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY.]
It is only necessary to play the bird-notes alone, omitting the
supplementary phrase, to see how much of the effect is a matter of
pure music. And that Beethoven realized this himself, that he was
clearly aware that music affects us more by setting up vague but potent
emotions in us by means of a beautiful embodiment of expressive sounds
than by merely copying what is in the actual world, is evidenced
by the motto he inscribes at the head of his score: “Mehr Ausdruck
der Empfindung als Malerei”--“More the expression of feeling than
painting.” Even more succinct, if that is possible, is a note in one
of his sketch books: “Pastoral Symphony: no picture, but something
in which the emotions are expressed which are aroused in men by the
pleasure of the country.”
This attitude of Beethoven’s towards program music, both in practice
and in theory, is but a crucial and striking example of his general
attitude towards music, an attitude produced both by the tendencies of
the historic moment and by his native genius. Had he had less capacity
or taste for expression of the most definite and vivid emotions,
he would not have been able to carry music beyond the formalism of
Haydn and Mozart, and to make it voice the self-conscious idealism,
the romantic intensity, the various, many-sided, and profound
spiritual life, of modern men. Had he not, on the other hand, clung
pertinaciously to the plastic beauty which, after all, is the most
indispensable quality of musical art, had he allowed his interest
in the characteristic to betray him into literalism, he would have
deprived music of that period of full maturity which he represents,
and ushered in too soon the inevitable decadence, in which art is no
longer whole and balanced, but seeks special effects and particular
expressions, becomes meteoric, dazzling, and fragmentary. That period
was bound to come, as the parabola must make its descending as well as
its ascending curve, or the plant have its autumn as well as its spring
and summer. But before the appealing, but pathetically incomplete work
of the romanticists came to give a sort of Indian summer brightness to
the musical year, it was meet that it should have its full harvest of
ripe, sound, and wholesome beauty. And this it had, in the incomparably
sane and noble works of the mature Beethoven.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] “Representative Men,” Riverside ed., p. 182.
[45] See Chap. III., p. 118.
[46] See Chap. V., p. 199.