Beethoven, Schubert, and Consolation

I'm too busy to post. I have a deadline looming for the first draft of my book and a lot of research still to do for it, and I have a copyediting job to start and finish over the next month, and then I start teaching at community college again, as well as doing what I swore I'd never do, viz., homeschooling. All that is for another post. I simply wanted to drop in to share this lapidary paragraph by Jeremy Denk in his review of a new Beethoven biography by Jan Swafford.

Denk writes:

I found myself aching to replace the “Triumph” in Swafford’s subtitle with “Consolation” [the book is titled Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph]. Of course we love Beethoven’s movements of triumph: the C major fanfares that conclude the Fifth Symphony, the lust for life in the dances of the Seventh Symphony, the “Ode to Joy.” They are a crucial part of his persona, but not the center. . .  The pianist Leon Fleisher observed that Schubert’s consolations always come too late; his beautiful moments have the sense of happening in the past. Generally, Romantic consolations tend to be poisoned by nostalgia and regret. By the modern era, consolation is mostly off the table. But Beethoven’s consolations seem to be in the now. They are always on time — maybe not for him, but for us.

What a brilliant exegesis of Romantic music -- the ethos of consolation come too late, leaving the musical protagonist in the sorrow of his regret. The idea of Schubert (who worked very much under the long shadow of Beethoven) composing beautiful moments which seem to have already gone by is breathtakingly apt. One hears, for example, the straining, yearning nostalgia in the opening theme of the Sonata in B flat, D 960, played here by Fleisher himself. In many of Schubert's pieces, there's a tentative quality in the opening notes, the sense that the theme has begun already, somewhere to the left of the first measure, which I think is related to this notion of consolation that has happened in the past, a gentler version of Dante's famous aphorism: "There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery."



(Incidentally, former Vox Nova contributor Mark DeFrancisis, a classical-music connoisseur, sent me a recording of Mitsuko Uchida playing the same piece, and I listened to it while driving, and had to pull over because I was crying too much to see the road.)

Read Jeremy Denk's entire marvelous book review here. He is one of those rare musicians who writes as well as he plays.

To Everything

This made the hair on my arms stand on end when I heard it.

Is Beethoven the Voice of God?

I'm being facetious, of course.  But it did cross my mind yesterday, after I woke up in the dark of early morning, and, in a bit of a panic, asked God the Father to send me a hug (I'm not usually that sentimental, but waking up in the dark really kicks the ass of my soul).  Later, I turned on the radio, to hear Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 -- again: the last time I asked God for some sort of a sign, the same thing happened, and the same music played (and I was annoyed).  So, I thought, is this it?  Is this you talking to me, God?  I would have maybe preferred the humanity of the Symphony no. 6, the Pastoral, which contains whole worlds of delight and terror and the wistfulness of nostalgia.  But the Seventh is awesome in the truest sense of the world, and this was God the Father I'd been talking to, after all.

Then, today, I was helping my son clean up the dozens of empty wooden thread spools we'd been building with (I've become obsessed with this slim series of English craft-and-early-learning books from the 1960s, Learning with Mother, which features all sorts of things you can do with wooden thread spools), and put on the radio again.  And this time, I felt as if I were not only being hugged by God the Father, but also kissed by God the Son, for it was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, op. 80.

I can't explain why I love this piece with the intense passion that I do, but to me, it is the most perfect piece of music ever.  I love the simple, anthemic theme, so redolent of human hope, which Beethoven cycles through the sections of the orchestra, treating it with grace, wit, and -- if a composer can be said to feel this way about his own tunes -- heartfelt love, before handing it over to the full orchestra, where it erupts into a swelling lyrical outburst that foreshadows his other great anthem, the "Ode to Joy."  The theme starts at 1:20, below.

And then, out of nowhere, what has been, to this point, a piano concerto becomes something else entirely, when the voices suddenly appear as if wafted down from above, singing self-referentially about the consolations of music (about 2:51 here).

I remember hearing the Choral Fantasy fortuitously on the radio one day when I was a lonely new mother, and how I shouted with joy at my newborn, "That's Beethoven!" as if he could understand. Later, when he was two, he was playing the harmonica one day, and I told him he sounded like Bob Dylan.  "Beethoven," he loftily corrected me.

Today I did something similar, feeling like a real music geek.  I could feel my face light up as I turned the volume higher and explained to my now-four-year-old that the music had been composed by Mr. Beethoven, and then pointed out, one by one, the different instrumental entrances.  I know he's going to be really embarrassed by me one day; I was embarrassed by myself.  And then, without meaning to and without any warning, when the piece was over I burst into tears.  "What's wrong, Mommy?" he said, alarmed.  "Nothing," I replied. "Just that the music is so beautiful."  "It's not beautiful," he said, trying to comfort me.

I read once long ago, in a book of essays about English literature by an early twentieth-century Indian scholar whose name, like the title, I can no longer remember, that the aim of literature is "the total eradication of sorrows and miseries."  God must have intended music to be a similar balm.

(The picture above illustrates a famous incident in the life of Beethoven.  He and Goethe were walking together one day in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens in Vienna when they met the Archduke and Archduchess.  Goethe made as if to move aside to let the imperial party pass, but Beethoven linked arms with him and made him walk on.  They marched right into the midst of the royal entourage, which humbly parted to make way for the two great artists, the true nobility of the modern age.)

Music and Memory, Part 8: "Cradlesongs of my sorrows"

These are the words Brahms used in private to describe his Three Intermezzi, op. 117, written in 1892.  The first, in E-flat major, is the best known.  In the score, Brahms prefaced the piece with two lines of poetry, an excerpt from a Scottish poem translated into German by Johann Gottfried von Herder: 

Schlaf sanft, mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!
Mich dauert's sehr, dich weinen sehn.

(Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well!
It grieves me so to see you weep.)

E-flat major is a key that had come to be associated earlier in the nineteenth century with the heroic, chiefly through Beethoven's use of it as the key of his Symphony no. 3 ("Eroica") and Piano Concerto no. 5 ("Emperor").  But as the vehicle for the voice of Brahms's gently-rocking melody, it becomes the key of bittersweet resignation, and even of profound heartbreak mediated only by memory.

There are many beautiful recordings available, but I like this one in particular, since it's the one I grew up with.  Glenn Gould playing late Brahms might seem counterintuitive, but this is a stunning, restrained, and deeply moving performance.

"If Classical music is the data of a human census, Romantic music is the anecdotes, the telling of how things were . . ."

Great post on music, suffering, and consolation by George Grella at The Big City.

In the last song of his Neue Liebesliederwalzer, the moving Goethe setting "Zum Schluss," Brahms said it all:

Now, you Muses, enough!
In vain you strive to show
how misery and happiness
change places in the loving breast.
You cannot heal the wounds
that Love has caused,
but solace comes, dear ones,
only from you.