Hi.
Welcome to the Listener’s Guide.
I’m Steve, and if I asked you to name a famous composer, I can guess with reasonable
certainty that one of the first people you’d name is Beethoven.
If I asked you to tell me what you know about him, I bet you could say that he was deaf
and that he wrote a bunch of great symphonies.
But what if I asked you why he was famous?
Surely being deaf wasn’t enough?
The answer turns out to be really complicated and differs depending on who you ask.
But I will try to give a few of the most common explanations.
One of the more pragmatic suggestions is that Beethoven was at the right place at the right
time.
Beethoven had a promising musical career as a young boy.
As a young adult, he became a composition student of Joseph Haydn, one of the most prominent
composers of the late eighteenth century.
Haydn was especially known for his symphonies and string quartets, and it is no coincidence
that those genres became the ones Beethoven staked his reputation on, both out of admiration
and of spite.
And Haydn’s name was certainly a foot in the door in Vienna, where Beethoven ended
up pursuing a career.
Now, early nineteenth-century Vienna was undergoing some major cultural changes, especially in
music.
Aristocrats, the traditional patrons of composers and orchestras, had to make some budget cuts,
and as a result fewer of them could afford the staff to put on symphonies.
At the same time, the middle class was growing, and they wanted to see symphonies, but ones
made for them, not for the aristocrats.
Beethoven had few competitors in that field.
I’d love to talk about the ones he did have, because I do think they’re underrepresented,
but I don’t have time, so for now I’ll say: look up the works of Eberl, Krommer,
Wranitzky, and Gyrowetz because they’re pretty great!
So Beethoven was both highly skilled and fortunate in his opportunities, and he also played up
the growing bourgeois aesthetic in his works.
About ten years into his public composing career, his works took on a noticeably more
restless and emotional tone.
He even dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon, who he viewed as a champion of the people
and of democracy.
That is, until Napoleon crowned himself emperor, at which point Beethoven scratched his name
out of the dedication so hard that he ripped a giant hole in the manuscript.
This symphony is one of the first of his “heroic period” in which his compositions show a
long-scale arc of struggle into triumph, a style most typified by his famous fifth symphony.
This dramatic arc also correlates with his own personal struggles as he lost his hearing,
which led to personal isolation as well as musical isolation.
But his deafness is really difficult to deal with for me personally.
On the one hand, it is certainly a high achievement to be able to compose music while hearing
less and less of it as the years progress.
But I also find that many people still act like his musical skill was almost supernatural,
rather than the result of decades of refining his craft.
This is a man who had been training throughout his youth to be a top-tier musician, who studied
with one of the leaders in his field as a young adult, and who then continued composing
and performing for almost twenty years before his deafness was too great for him to do anything
except write.
If anyone knew the craft by then, it was Beethoven.
But there was a different narrative in the nineteenth century.
After Beethoven’s death, someone discovered an unmailed letter to his family among his
possessions.
It said that he wanted to commit suicide, and that the only thing keeping him going
was his music.
This letter fed into the narrative of overcoming insurmountable obstacles, and into the idea
of a downtrodden artist-hero producing sublime, all-consuming art.
Basically, Beethoven was everybody’s nineteenth-century emo fave.
And Beethoven’s symphonies did have a huge impact on the genre throughout the European
continent.
For God’s sake, the man put a chorus into what was traditionally an instrumental work!
That kind of revolutionary thinking, combined with the general lack of other composers working
in the genre, meant that any composer who wanted to try his hand at symphonic writing
would have to deal with Beethoven’s very long shadow.
And then the historians got involved.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of the “great man” view of history, in which
historians would try to string together a nice, clear, linear progression from one leader
to the next.
In Viennese music, that meant Haydn gave way to Mozart, Mozart to Beethoven, and Beethoven
to… well, that part actually became a huge debate.
Who would take up Beethoven’s mantle?
Wagner? Liszt? Brahms? Schumann?
The argument would further cement Beethoven in the center of nineteenth-century German
and Austrian musical culture.
In this view of history, Beethoven took on this image of the sullen artist-hero who sulked
around and was gruff with those around him, and yet managed to create great music.
Which, if you ask me, is a crock of sh**.
To sustain that image, you have to ignore a bunch of the music that he actually wrote.
Wellington’s Victory is a great example.
It’s a military symphony that’s kind of hokey and a little bit too on-the-nose for
the event it’s trying to commemorate.
I mean, you should definitely listen to it, but if you’re familiar with Beethoven and
you listen to it for the first time, you’ll be a little bit surprised.
It’s no “Ode to Joy.”
I actually kind of love it...
Anyway, to make a long story short, Beethoven was and is famous because he meant a lot of
different, but important, things to a lot of different, but important, people.
I won’t deny that he is also important now, and I genuinely love a lot of his music.
That said, I hope this helps people to recognize how necessary it is to pull composers off
of their pedestals and re-contextualize them, because for me at least, this gives me a deeper
understanding of their works and a much greater appreciation of who they actually were.
Hi.
Thank you so much for watching this video!
If you liked it, please do remember to "like" and subscribe or like us on facebook, send
me your comments, your tweets, your questions, anything!
I'm on most social media platforms.
And if you really like this channel and can't get enough of it, I would really appreciate
your support on Patreon.
We are more than halfway to our first goal which we will celebrate with a livestream,
so if you're interested in supporting us, links in the description.
There are all sorts of cool perks!
Check it out!
And with that, I'll see you next time on The Listener's Guide.