04/21/2009
Stephen Hinton on Beethoven- Part 1
Stephen Hinton is Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1994; from 1997-2004 he served as chairman of the Department of Music. After studying at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took both a double major in Music and German […]
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This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. Don't get alarmed friends.
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We're just trying to elevate our taste in music for a moment. That's all. It won't last long.
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By next week we'll be back in the womb again. But meanwhile, listen to this.
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There you go. That was the end of the last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonada. Whatever your taste in music,
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you'll know what I mean when I say that had Beethoven not existed, we would have to invent him.
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There are some people without whom history as we know it just wouldn't feel right. Beethoven's one of them.
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Shakespeare's another, Einstein another, and many more? Who? John Macanroe. You cannot be
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serious. Anyway, today's show is one I've been looking forward to for a while. I have with me in the
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studio Professor Stephen Hinton, musicologist in the music department here at Stanford. He's
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familiar to many in our audience. Thanks to a show I did with him a while back on the composer Kurt
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Vile, which remains one of our most popular shows ever among listeners. Today we have on tap a two-part
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conversation about Beethoven, who was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, western composer ever.
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Indeed, if you look at Google's rankings of the 100 greatest classical composers, Beethoven is in the
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number one position ahead of Mozart and Bach. De Gustibus. It's a taste I happen to share by the way,
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though ranking geniuses of the caliber of Beethoven Bach and Mozart seems a little
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feckless to me. Guess who's number four on the list? No wrong. Wrong again. It's Richard Wagner,
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followed by Heisen, who was followed by Brahms, Brahms or the melancholy of impotence as Nietzsche
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once wrote. Then there's Chewbart, Chikovsky, Handel, and Stravinsky. How about that? Stravinsky makes
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the top ten? As for the composer of my favorite piece of music of all time, after comfortably
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numb that is, Will Samuel Barber comes in at number 93. That, I can't agree with. Anyone who
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composed is that "dagile for strings should by all rights be in the top 20, if I may express an
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unentitled opinion for a change." I have no intention of putting my guest Stephen Hinton on the
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spot by asking whether he agrees with Google's number one ranking yet, I will be talking with him
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today about what makes Beethoven one of the very greatest composers in the Western tradition.
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One of the very greatest. That's good enough for me and for Stephen Hinton too, I'm sure.
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Stephen, welcome back to entitled opinions. It's a pleasure to have you with us again.
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Thank you very much Robert. It's great to be back. I know you had an earlier guest talking about Beethoven.
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I'm really looking forward to devoting our two-part show to the composer.
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Yeah, that earlier guest, I think you're alluding to is Paul Robinson.
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That's right, our friend and colleague, Paul Robinson. He started off the the false series for us.
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You're right, we have a two-part conversation in two hours. Today we're airing the first hour.
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The second hour will be posted immediately on our web page and on our iTunes podcast and will be
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broadcast at a future date on KZSU. But leaving aside the ranking game for a moment, Stephen,
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I think it's fair to say that there are very good reasons why Beethoven's star shines so brightly
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in the firmament of classical music. He was, of course, an extraordinary composer in ways we'll
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be analyzing today. But there's more to Beethoven than just his music. His iconic status in the
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modern world is also enhanced by what we know about his personality, his temperament, and his biography.
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He's in many ways the Western archetype of the artistic genius, as we understand the concept of
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genius today. In fact, I'm tempted to say that the name of Beethoven refers as much to a myth as it does
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to a person and composer. Would you like to start off our show maybe by saying a few words about
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that myth? Certainly, when you mentioned the Google rankings, I began to wonder whether the
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composer we're discussing today is the one that was actually voted number one.
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There may be consternation about university rankings, for example, but at least when they are drawn up,
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there's a more or less clear set of objective criteria being applied. But what are the criteria
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applied to composers? Were the voters reflecting their personal musical tastes or simply confirming
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Beethoven's mythological status? But I think the concept of the myth is a very appropriate in Beethoven's
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case because of its, you could say, it's multivalency. Consider the various connotations. We'll talk
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for example about something or some person existing only in myth. That's something fictitious or
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imaginary, or a widespread belief that could be untrue and misconception. In that sense, perhaps we
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have indeed invented Beethoven to allude to your opening words. There are many, many such stories surrounding
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Beethoven, some of which he seems to have encouraged himself or at least not to have discouraged
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such as the myth of his aristocratic birth. He didn't seem to object when people put
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on rather than fan Ludwig von Beethoven. Or there was even a myth going around during his lifetime
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about him. He's having been the illegitimate child of the King of Prussia and he doesn't seem to
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have been too keen to suppress that one either. But the concept of myth also refers to the kind
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of awe in which we can hold people. This might refer to popular stories and the popular stories
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themselves may be real or fictitious. This is the legend of Beethoven and a legend that really began
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quite early in his lifetime. There's some fiction and there's some awe involved.
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But I think there's another more emphatic sense of the myth that can apply here. The Germans have
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the word "grundungs" moutasse, a kind of founding myth, a traditional story that functions as an
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explanation or justification for the history of society. Now this "grundungs" moutasse is founding myth in
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Beethoven's case isn't about the founding of Western society going back to its very beginnings,
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but there's a sense in which Beethoven is seen as a critical figure in the Enlightenment.
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So the founding figure of modernity. Some people might complain, "Well, what about Mozart?
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Wasn't he involved in that?" Well, of course he was and he was an extremely important predecessor
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of Beethoven. But there's still this sense in which Beethoven is quite different from Mozart and
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his other, his teacher, Haydn, in that Mozart was still very much bound up with the world of
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absolutist rule and religion. Beethoven in this mythological understanding is seen as the book
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title called Beethoven or the man who freed music. And so there's this sense in which Beethoven's
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music embodies the very principles of Western Enlightenment. In that sense he's a real icon of Western
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culture. And maybe leading on from that one could say that because the Enlightenment culture has been
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defined in terms of having overcome a culture of myth, a culture of rule by the absolutist
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monarchs and rule by religion, it was a culture of demytheologization. So you get this
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situation where Beethoven is seen as the mythology of demytheologization. And I think that that is
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something that particularly in recent criticism has been taken up the extent to which Beethoven
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really does embody Enlightenment ideals. The term that you use there, I think,
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quoting the title of a book about the liberation, Beethoven as the liberator of the man who
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is free to music. So this notion of freedom and liberation is associated with the Enlightenment. We take
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enlightenment ideals to be that which will liberate the future from its bondage to the past,
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to tradition. I suppose to older forms of authority, including religion, and of course,
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absolute monarchy. Do I take it when you say that this is part of the mythological
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charisma of Beethoven that there might be a grain of truth but also a great deal of fiction in the
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notion of Beethoven being one of the liberators? I think that's right. There's no doubt that Beethoven,
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in terms of his position as a composer, ended up in a very different place from Mozart and Haydn.
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Mozart and Haydn in their employment were much more reliant on the court, for example.
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Now Beethoven began his life in the court but he increasingly liberated himself as a composer
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from dependence on aristocrats, on monarchs.
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That's so pen-ing. But it's difficult with Beethoven because there's part of him that can be seen as
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having resisted that dependence but he wasn't on the less very dependent on his aristocratic patrons
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and he had a number of friends who were aristocrats who supported him very much. I think the
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in a way the more critical aspect of this is that Beethoven can be seen as somebody who throughout his
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career, realized what we might call a paradigm of autonomy. So this isn't just the autonomy of the
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artist who does exactly as he pleases and whose creations are functions of his own imagination and
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invention rather than serving some kind of what some people might see as extra musical function.
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But there's also the sense in which this music is autonomous as how best to put this. Each work
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creates its own world, is unique in a way and is something that demands to be understood on its
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own terms rather than merely as the representative of a particular genre or tendency. Is that what we mean by
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absolute music in reference to Beethoven that his music had this inner autonomy where its
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ultimate point of reference was itself and not its role in providing background music for an opera
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theme or church music in the service of the church? I think that is right and I think that this is part
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myth in the sense of fiction and part truth again here. Nowadays people talk about
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the Beethoven paradigm and I think the Beethoven paradigm is an essentialisation of certain
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facets of Beethoven's music and they include this his position as a composer. He was dependent on
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others but he's seen as independent and the idea that his music is absolute in a way that it means
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that it's not reliant on any kind of service to a particular social function or
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subservient to the text but the musical notes themselves are the essence of what the music is about and they
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are self-sufficient in that way. This is a contested thing because I think some people feel that
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well Beethoven's music is actually much more his career is much more nuanced and complicated in that.
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People nowadays criticise the Beethoven paradigm because they feel not only does it get in the way
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of having a comprehensive understanding of what Beethoven's music was about at the time but it also
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gets in the way of our understanding other composers so that the Beethoven paradigm gets supplied
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to composers such as Trikosky whose music is then found wanting in seriously deficient.
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The idea of absolute music it actually started curiously enough as a pejorative concept that was
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coined by a of all people, Richard Wagner, whom you mentioned earlier, who when he was conceiving of his
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music drum as wanted to see a kind of total work of art that was comprised of spectacle,
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verbal content and music and plot and plot and drama and so he thought of absolute music that
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as music that was divorced from all these things and for him it wasn't Beethoven, he had his uses for Beethoven's
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work. It wasn't Beethoven who epitomised absolute music but Rossini whose music he thought in a
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pejorative sense was actually rather divorced from the drama and had its own existence as
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music providing a vehicle for virtuosic showpieces of the performers. Wagner himself later when he had a
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conversion to the philosophy of Chopin how actually embraced the idea of music embodying the absolute
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not-surface representation but an embodiment of the will itself and so Wagner is a tricky customer
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but he introduces this concept of absolute music as a pejorative at a time when in many people's
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minds and this goes all the way back to the romantic reception of Beethoven's music by ETA
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Hoffmann where Beethoven's music has seen as a glimpse, a pre-sentiment of the absolute
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so there's a kind of dual sense of absolute there it is the self-sufficiency of purely
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instrumental music that's one aspect of the Beethoven paradigm but also the elevation of instrumental
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music to something that is utterly different from earlier epochs and where in the minds of the
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romantic's music becomes the the top of the artistic hip rate it is the most romantic of the
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arts as Hoffmann said I'm a romantic in that regard too because I totally subscribe unironically to
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the notion of absolute music or music which is self-sufficient unto itself it has its own autonomy
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does not need to be the expression of something extra musical yes and this notion of autonomy is very
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interesting also I'm trying to remember the first line of Kant's famous essay What is Enlightenment
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where I think he says something to the effect that enlightenment is man's freedom or
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is released from the bondage of his self-imposed tutelage yes that finally now man the collective
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thing is becoming autonomous is going to become self-founding and is no longer going to be
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you know the child in relation to the warden of authority and reason now has become
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a law into itself and what you are saying about Beethoven's the myth of Beethoven and is
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well there's this there's the same kind of self-founding self-securing
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autonomy that's right and we should probably hear some more music so we know we can perhaps talk
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about this very issue in relation to the music Beethoven himself was captivated by the myth of
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Prometheus which I know at the time was something that Shelley was interested in Prometheus and bound
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Mary Shelley with Frankenstein Beethoven actually wrote about Bele on Prometheus and this
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this this idea of Prometheus this myth of Prometheus becomes one that is frequently associated
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with Beethoven who creates these self-sufficient pieces and it's almost as if the music is
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generating itself in each autonomous work and so the the music becomes a symbol of human freedom
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and of human autonomy just to remind our listeners about Prometheus he's a very ambiguous figure
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in from mythology the kind of mythology where you say there's no actual objective truth
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contents but he is the one of the gods who gave fire to humankind and as punishment for for this
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gift of the gods to humans without getting permission from the bosses is tied to a rock and has
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vultures eating at his at his liver and so there is something heroic about Prometheus and
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he's a rebel he's a one of the primordial mythological rebels against the hierarchical authority
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structure so maybe we can hear something that will bring into focus in musical terms this
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Promethean aspect of Beethoven compositions and also they what would then be this kind of heroic
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drive in some of his works yes yeah what would you like to start with well why don't we start with
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something that is extremely well known I think that this really is part of the Beethoven
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canon in the very narrow sense perhaps it's worth mentioning at this juncture that
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the Beethoven myth is built around an essentialisation of what's known as his middle period
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very early on his shortly after his death his career was divided up into three periods the first one
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being where he was still very much dependent on the models of contemporary composers his immediate
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predecessors in particular Mozart whom he revered and Haydn whom he also revered but because he
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was his teacher as well he had a somewhat strained relationship with the middle period is the one that is
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seen in terms of Beethoven striking out on a new path co-insiding with a change in his biographical
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circumstances it's not myth in the sense of pure fiction that Beethoven was death he gradually
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he became increasingly a deaf throughout his career and we don't know the extent to which he really
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was actually totally deaf at the end there may have been an element of hyperchondria about this
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or just a receding from the world and this is a point of great contention but this middle period
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coincides with his having written a document called the Heiliganstadt Testimony at the very beginning
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of the 19th century where he talks about his having to overcome this incredible affliction so
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there's a kind of heroic stance already in his biography and his realization at this time of his
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deafness coincides with his with a real shift in his music to towards something that is quintessential
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of this Beethoven paradigm of musical expression one can see for for shadowings of this in the
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earlier music so it's not a sudden break and he's even in the middle period he's still very much
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composing using the formal models of his teacher Haydn that the classical models but there's a there's
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a qualitative change and I think we hear this at the beginning of the 5th symphony in a very
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striking way and not just in the 5th symphony it's already there in the 3rd symphony which really
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marks the beginning of this period I think the 3rd symphony is the one that again there's a
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somewhat myth like quality to the stories about this the the 5th the 3rd symphony was one that he
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apparently intended to dedicate to Napoleon and then there's a story about how when Napoleon
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seemed to be getting too big for his boots and wanted to declare himself emperor Beethoven
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ripped the title page off the score it's a wonderful moment you can see that there's Beethoven
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friend of the French Revolution embracing the ideals of the French Revolution and seeing this
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tyrant and saying well you know the whole thing is going to the dogs here and really standing up
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for the for the rights of of humanity the details of that story are quite complicated there's a concern
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that he had about whether he was going to get paid for this and if he dedicated it to Napoleon
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then his usual page for might not have given many money he was also thinking apparently about
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going to France and continuing his career over there which might have actually motivated the reason
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for the dedication in a note to his publisher he even said that he wanted to call it the
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Bonaparte symphony after he had apparently torn up the the title page in any event there's
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there's a kind of complication about the biographical aspect of this no question however
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that the music does have a strong sense of the heroic and what I mean by that is it isn't
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just to do with what Paul Robinson in the earlier broadcast was referring to the as the
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agrandios tone of the music but it's the way in which and this is qualitatively different
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not absolutely different but significantly different from the music of his predecessors Beethoven
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is writing music on a much much bigger scale to start with from before the length of his
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symphony movements alone equal the length of whole symphonies from earlier times the aurora
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occurs in that regard is is a complete shift in in in terms of artistic intentions and aspirations
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but it's not just that the individual movements are themselves qualitatively or rather quantitatively
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different from the predecessors but the whole symphony is conceived as a totality not as a set of
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discrete movements that relate to a particular key in that sense you can talk about a symphony
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in G minor but the fifth in particular is a terrific example of this at the micro level you feel that
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there's this sense of the music evolving gradually bit by bit but not only that and we can come back
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to this there's a progression from the first movement to the second movement to the third
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movement to the fourth movement all the movement movements seem to be linked in various ways and
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the heroic quality is is enshrined in the way that the music starts off in a rather tragic vein
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there's also the myth about how the opening notes of the fifth symphony were described by Beethoven
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as fate knocking on the door now this may or may not be true he had this rather how can we put it
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unreliable imanogenesis chindler who passed a lot of this stuff on and some of it was self-serving be
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that is as it may there is this kind of sense of some foreboding and tragedy in that opening movement
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but eventually that is overcome in the final movement with this great sense of triumph and victory
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and so there's a if you like a dynamic to the entire symphony which suggests some kind of
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overarching narrative and I think this is quintessentially the new quality that Beethoven's work
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that distinguishes Beethoven's work vis-a-vis the the music of his predecessors each
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work has its own kind of narrative trajectory the movements abound up together well perhaps a
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couple of things just by way of introduction of the music itself here there's been some controversy about
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what the theme of Beethoven's fifth is what I mean by that is we have the famous fate knocking on
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the door notes but is that is that really the theme of the of the piece well music theorists would say
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that's a motive but there is some larger scale unit here which is really like much more like
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| 00:29:25.760 |
Mozart's music in that it there's a kind of syntactical unit known as a period which is divided
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| 00:29:33.840 |
into two and we can hear very clearly how this initial motive is introduced but then embedded
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in a larger scale musical period and now how that period is itself then embedded in a form that is
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| 00:29:49.600 |
to all intents and purposes the what's called the sonata form of the classical period
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| 00:29:56.880 |
Mozart's so Beethoven here is composing with these very small units but the units themselves
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| 00:30:03.520 |
multiply to create these larger units and I think this also creates this sense of what's referred to as
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| 00:30:11.600 |
a musical process or processuality and this is this is where people who are inclined to a philosophical
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| 00:30:19.520 |
interpretation of Beethoven reflecting that the spirit of his age see a parallel between
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| 00:30:27.280 |
Hegel's philosophy of becoming and Beethoven's music is embodying this becoming starting
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| 00:30:35.120 |
with these small units and then getting bigger and bigger and then ultimately creating this whole
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| 00:30:40.960 |
narrative arch so I think that this is this is different the the overall sense of emphasis
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| 00:30:51.920 |
and in places almost violence that the music has is quite different from the classical balance and
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| 00:31:02.080 |
and grace of the preceding music and just one other thing we're going to hear a substantial
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| 00:31:09.680 |
chunk of music here because of the scale of this movement we have an exposition that is
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| 00:31:17.280 |
the initial theme that I've talked about that musical period we then have a very different
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| 00:31:24.720 |
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
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| 00:31:33.680 |
motive ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba to accompany his second theme
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| 00:31:37.760 |
there's then a development section as you would expect after the repeated exposition of development
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| 00:31:45.520 |
section where he's tossing around the music developing the ideas and occasionally you will just have
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| 00:31:54.480 |
two notes which seem somehow to be related to the very opening so there's this kind of sense in
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| 00:32:04.240 |
which even a couple of notes seem to be thematically significant because of the way that he
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| 00:32:10.080 |
weaves together this motive develop and of his ideas and then we have a recapitulation which is
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| 00:32:18.080 |
ostensibly the same as the exposition except that there's a harmonic resolution so that the the
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| 00:32:25.280 |
whole finishes in the tonic key and then we fit we hear this a couple of quite different things
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| 00:32:33.280 |
happening in this recapitulation one is that that the end of the first half of the first period we
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| 00:32:43.680 |
hear this very plaintive oboe is this injection of lyrical subjectivity we've had all this
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| 00:32:49.760 |
motiveic kind of curt motiveic work going on and then suddenly there's something that reminds us of
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| 00:32:58.160 |
more lyrical vocal work and then just before the second theme because we're not modulating to a new
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| 00:33:06.880 |
key but staying in the home key the French horns can no longer play that piece because they are the
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| 00:33:14.240 |
natural horns of the period and so we actually have the bassoon playing that which is a rather odd
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| 00:33:21.840 |
effect I think that should probably suffice why don't we hear the the whole of the first movement of the
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| 00:33:29.200 |
fifth symphony this is a recording conducted by the great conductor Carlos Kleiber yeah probably the
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| 00:33:37.040 |
most mythic piece of Beethoven's entire oboe's I would say so we know about the fate the
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| 00:33:45.360 |
anecdote about fate knocking on the door we also know that the allies in the in the second world
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| 00:33:51.120 |
war saw the opening motive short short short long as the Morse code equivalent of the word V
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| 00:34:01.360 |
which is the acronym for victory yeah here we go
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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