# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 1/Beethoven, 1770-1920

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BEETHOVEN, 1770-1920
By Daniel Gregory Mason
BORN a hundred and fifty years ago, Beethoven was never more alive than he is today. His life, now become unconscious, is immeasurably more widely diffused than when he was in the flesh. Wherever music is loved, he is at work. Samuel Butler, pointing out this centrifugal character of mental life, its beginning in a nucleus of personality like that which was born at Bonn on the Rhine, December 16, 1770, and slowly diffusing to the four corners of the earth as impersonal influence, drew vividly as a corollary his paradox that the best part of our life is unconscious. In Beethoven's case it was undeniably so: in his conscious life he was lonely, ill, deaf, misunderstood, harassed by a hundred limitations physical and mental; in his artistic life only did his great spirit soar free. And yet—"so night is grandeur to our dust"—his artistic life itself, in which is his immortality, was the slow achievement of his mortal struggles, perfected painfully day by day through the conquest of imperfections, shining with a light which, however serenely luminous it may seem, was generated in the frictions of endless efforts of his indomitable will. This is what gives him his peculiar place in our imaginations: to every perceiving heart he becomes a symbol of our tragic humanity, which has to traverse pain to find happiness, and to which beauty is revealed only after far journeyings.
What was it in Beethoven that enabled him thus to find, amid all his struggles, confusions, and defeats, this path to true immortal life, this path which eluded so many more facile minds of his own and later days? What is it that keeps his music fresh long after that of his contemporary, Spohr, more famous than he in their day, has exhibited its pitiful weakness, long after most of that of the elegant Mendelssohn, of a later generation, seems in its jejune amiability hopelessly outmoded? Some will answer such questions by quoting Emerson's fine sentence: "The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is to speak and write sincerely." No doubt Beethoven's sturdy sincerity, verging often on ferocious unconventionality, had a close causal connection with the emotional power of his work; no doubt in him as in all men, man and artist, moral and æsthetic manifestation, were in a deep sense one. But sincerity by itself does not explain artistic power; the world is full both of "mute inglorious Miltons" and of competent artists who, while by no means mute, are neither particularly glorious; in short, as it has been well said: "Great music is not the expression of great emotion, but the great expression of emotion." Our question resolves itself, then, to a more manageable one, more manageable because, leaving moral considerations on one side, it formulates itself in purely æsthetic terms, namely: "How did Beethoven achieve the great expression of emotion?" To this one would like to reply, tentatively, "By concentration and elimination."
When, in Beethoven's final dropsical illness, the doctors were tapping him for water, the stricken Titan remarked grimly: "Better from my belly than from my pen." The remark illustrates his life-long contempt of the dilute, the platitudinous, the conventional, the "bromidic," and suggests the earnestness of his search for the opposite qualities, for distinctiveness, for characterization, for the quintessential distillation of his thought, all his thought, and nothing but his thought. Into the polite eighteenth century symphonic world of Haydn and Mozart he bursts as he used to burst into the drawing-rooms of aristocratic Vienna on rainy days, shaking the water from him like a mastiff. He sweeps away the formulæ, the clichés, those cadence ​figures of tonic and dominant that even Mozart tolerated, as a housewife sweeps away the cobwebs from a room long closed. He scraps all the old moulds. Every note has to stand the acid test of expressiveness. Is it expressive, does it characterize?—then let us use it, however harsh, ugly, or surprising. Is it merely pretty and unnecessary?—then away with it to the ashbin! To a pianist who improvised such pretty ineptitudes Beethoven listened impatiently a moment or two, and then cried rudely, "When are you going to begin?"
It was this concentration on expression, far more than any limitation of sense, even after deafness had developed, that made him, as compared with Mozart, for example, so indifferent to sensuous charm of tone. Though both his orchestration and his writing for the piano frequently attain the greatest felicity of tone-quality, there are muddy basses in some of his sonatas, and his orchestra can hardly be said to have the silvery lightness, the magically right equilibrium of Mozart. On the other hand he drives home his phrase with a relentlessness of emotional logic that makes Mozart seem like a care-free boy compared with an earnest man. Such a comparison has been made in detail by Sir Hubert Parry, in his "The Evolution of the Art of Music," between the treatment by the two masters of somewhat similar phrases, showing Mozart's charm, Beethoven's grim concentration. So intent was he on following out this emotional logic of his thought that questions of timbre seemed to him secondary. He was "comparatively careless," Ries tells us of him as a piano teacher, "as to the right notes being played, but angry at once at any failure in expression or nuance, or in apprehension of the character of the piece; saying that the first might be an accident, but that the other showed want of knowledge, or feeling, or attention." He was irritated by the limitations of voices and instruments, sometimes intolerant of them. The vocal parts in his Ninth Symphony are cruelly high; and to a 'cellist who objected that a certain passage did not "lie well," he replied, "It must lie well." He was quite free of that morbid preoccupation with timbre of so many composers of today, who write to exploit the instruments rather than to make the instruments express their thoughts.
No, not only does Beethoven, whom the nervous agony of the process of composing often drove to shouting and stamping, lack the smiling ease of Mozart, but his music, full of mysterious shadows and strange lights, cloudy and stormy as a northern sky, has seldom a moment of the golden Italian sunshine that bathes the music of the other. It is by intensity of characterization that his work is differentiated from all that went before it, and from most that has come after. He still remains unrivalled in the expressive use of all those devices, some of which he invented outright, others adapted and improved out of recognition from more timid talents: the gradual crescendo culminating not in loud but in unexpected soft; the long-maintained breathless pianissimo; sudden violent contrasts and dislocations, both of key and of rhythm; suspense in all its forms, and the arousal of expectation, sometimes to be fulfilled and sometimes to be pleasingly disappointed by the substitution of something more interesting; the subtle use of foils, pauses, and silences. And all this arsenal of weapons is used never loosely but always with the nicest discrimination of the exact expressive aim to be achieved and the simplest way to achieve it. Each of Beethoven's symphonies, after the first two at any rate, which were student works, is like a plant grown out of a unique seed: every cell of it belongs to it, and to it alone; the themes, the transitions, the modulations, the orchestration, the minutest inconspicuous ornament, are of a piece. Thus each symphony has, as few works in musical literature, its atmosphere, in which it is bathed, down to the last note: the third is heroic, the fourth romantic, the fifth tragic, the sixth pastoral and rustic, the seventh corybantic or bacchanalian, the eighth whimsical, and the ninth deeply humane and religious. ​Let no one suppose that such concentration was easily attained. Had we no testimony from his contemporaries of his ravings and shoutings when composing, of his forgetfulness of meals and sleep, the evidence of those extraordinary sketch-books in which he hammered from refractory and often commonplace ideas his great themes would suffice to show us his command of that elimination of the inessential which every true artist recognizes as the price of vitality. Strange is it at first, and yet not on consideration, that one who could tolerate so little dictation from his teachers, and of whom Albrechtsberger said, "He has learnt nothing, and will never do anything in decent style," should yet willingly impose upon himself the severest life-long discipline. It was because he recognized that discipline, with the deep respect it implies for the laws of nature—a matter quite other than any made-man rules, which Beethoven delighted to break—is the indispensable means of mastery:
And so Beethoven became a master, his work lives, and his life widens into a mighty stream.