In Our Time - Beethoven

Episode Date: December 21, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great composers, who was born into a family of musicians in Bonn. His grandfather was an eminent musician and also called Ludwig van Beethoven. His father, who was not as talented as Beethoven's grandfather, drank heavily and died when Beethoven was still young. It was his move to Vienna that allowed him to flourish, with the support at first of aristocratic patrons, when that city was the hub of European music. He is credited with developing the symphony further than any who preceded him, with elevating instrumental above choral music and with transforming music to the highest form of art. He composed his celebrated works while, from his late twenties onwards, becoming increasingly deaf.(Before the live broadcast, BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme played selections from Beethoven, with Essential Classics playing more, immediately after, on the same network.)With Laura Tunbridge Professor of Music and Henfrey Fellow, St Catherine's College, University of OxfordJohn Deathridge Emeritus King Edward Professor of Music at King's College LondonAndErica Buurman Senior Lecturer in Music, Canterbury Christchurch UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Ludwig van Beethoven, as one of the greatest composers, is often considered the greatest, a defining figure in Western classical music. He was born in Bonn in 1770 and moved to Vienna,

the hub of European music in his early 20s, and now he flourished. yet still in his 20s he noticed he was losing his hearing and had to find a way to keep going to create even greater works rather than give up. His output loomed over the rest of the 19th century as it does today. In particular, he popularised music without words, transcending language, and he changed the way that audiences valued music,

making it something that could be engaged with and thought about rather than played in the background and talked over. With me to discuss Beethoven and our Laura Tunbridge, Professor of Music and Henfrey Fellows and Catherine College University of Oxford. John Deithridge, Emeritus King Edward Professor of Music at King's College, London,

and Erica Brumman, Breumann, Senior Lecturer in Music, Canterbury Christiast University. So here we go, Bait Herbert without the music. John Dethrich. What signs were there in Bonn that Bade Hervin might become a composer? There are plenty of signs. He was there from 1770 to 1792, 22 years,

in a very active musical place. and met a very great number of interesting people, including a composer you've never heard of, and I call Christoph Gottglob Nefer, who came as a quite well-known composer, but very well-read composer, open to French ideas about social reform, enlightened absolutism.

But the most important thing about his main teacher was that he had a connection to the Bach tradition. He was taught by someone called Hila, and he knew, C. P.E. Bach, the son of J.S. Bach, and he gave Beethoven a manuscript copy of the 48 when he was only 13 years old. And Beethoven studied this for its harmony at a very early age. Now, that's something that Mozart and Haydn didn't have the privilege of doing. So there was a combination of things with Beethoven's upbringing, first of all, this training in the North German Bach tradition. And secondly, this exposure to progressive ideas coming from France, which were particularly,

particularly controversial and talked about in this area of Germany. Getting a little bit behind or a little bit before that, John, his grandfather had been a musician at the court in Bonn, reasonably good I get from the notes that all of you give. His father was

not as good a musician but was also drunk and was determined that his boy should become another Mozart who was a few years ahead of him. That might be exaggerated. I think the important thing about the grandfather, he had the same name Ludwig van Beethoven. He was also quite well off. So he left the family.

He was a musician though. He was a musician. He was a musician. He was head of music in Bonn, so I'm going too fast. And his son, he didn't like his son particularly much. He used to call him Johannes de Loifer, which means Johannes, the runaway play on words in German from John the Baptist. And he was never at home, but he did teach his son. our Ludwig found Beethoven. Apparently too strictly, though,

Beethoven said later he didn't allow me to improvise. So he owes his father some of the basics, but he didn't actually get his real idea of what was to come from him. He got it from Christoph Gottlieff, a particular attitude to composition. Nevertheless, his father drove him. His father drove him, indeed. His father made him practice till midnight, a lot of nights,

and his father wanted him to be the new Mozart. So we have that pressure on him and that idea, that girl was a young boy. and then he, of course, made him cry. He was one of his great heroes, and he hoped to meet him. There's a controversy about whether you don't meet him.

We might enter and that. But how well placed was Bonn? Bonn was very well placed. It was inside one of these ecclesiastical states, alongside the Rhine, with Colonas, its centre. The other two had Tria and Mites their centres, and this was a very active part of the Holy Roman Empire.

But the important thing, as I've said, it had lines of communication to Amsterdam, important publishing centre, and to Paris. And French was actually the second language there, which is where Beethoven picked up the French language. He could never speak it that well or write it, but he certainly knew French. And Tokrille always used to say that this part of Germany,

the great historian of the French Revolution, that this part of Germany, unlike any other part of Germany, was the one most receptive to French ideas because of this problematic relationship between the aristocracy and the peasantry. So Beethoven was in the thick of it, right from the start. When you're talking about French ideas, you're talking about the end of the revolutionary ideas.

Enlightenment, stroke, revolutionary ideas. Yes, very good. Laura. And what made me, he went to Vienna when he was about 20. Why did he go and why was it so important for musicians to go there? Well, this is the next stage of his education in some ways. He went to study with Hayden. And in so doing, he managed to establish himself,

within the Viennese classical traditions. So from that point of view, this was the next step on from what he'd already taken on from his family and from the musicians he encountered in Bonn. Vienna was also going to be a very important place for him as a musical city, partly because it has his already an idea of an incipient musical tradition

of Mozart Haydn and then Beethoven would insert himself into that legacy or be inserted into it. But also, it's just a hugely musically diverse city. And I think this is something that we forget. that it's not just about the Viennese classical tradition, but also about Italian opera, French opera, dance music, entertainment, the idea that the Viennese liked to have a good time

within musical circles. And so it's an incredibly rich environment for Beethoven to enter into. What did he do when he got there? He was studying. He was beginning to teach. He was also performing. Who was he being helped with John's?

Was he studying with someone? Well, studying with Haydn. Already as soon as you got there? Yeah, they'd made the connection in Bonn and then Beethoven agreed on the understanding that he could then travel on to London, perhaps with Hayden, although that never came to fruition. So he was studying and playing and making a living? Yes, he was.

And in fact, although it was a little bit tight for him in terms of managing to dress himself adequately and find accommodation and all of that, he was actually able to support himself and found it a reasonably good living. Was he among a lot of other young men who were thinking that there was glory in Vienna? Was he one of many, or did he stand out or? Did he stand out or? by the time he got there. What was it like for him when he was 20, 22, that sort of thing? I think at first, actually, he was quite willing to play a part in society and be part of the young men, the brilliant musicians who were around in Vienna. Of course, it's also an important place for musicians

to visit and to pass through. I think the other thing that happens, perhaps, is that he's able to start to compete with other performers, to make his name as an improviser. And so that's also an important way in which he establishes his reputation, and of course, increasingly as a composer. putting himself in touch with publishers, with Artaria, and particularly in Vienna, so that he can begin to have his works appear, importantly in print. So it's not just about performance, but it's also about this idea that his music could circulate in the home as music that could be performed by a wide variety of people by amateurs and by professionals. He's also entered into a world where the music is more or less controlled by aristocrats, their courts, their houses, their groups,

so infatuated by it and I'm very knowledgeable about it and he obviously had to play ball with them. He wanted to. Can you give us somebody in every's relationship with that? Well, that had already begun to build up in Bonn and then extended in Vienna so that he could have these relationships, not really friendships, but sort of strong relationships with aristocratic patrons who were willing to support him in his various ventures, who were willing to promote him, who encouraged subscriptions to some of his music when it was printed,

and also who would eventually, and this was, very important agree some kind of annual stipend for him so that in order to keep him in Vienna as eventually they wanted to do a group of three or four aristocrats arranged this system whereby they would support him and give him some money a year so that he would stay within the city you've emphasized the multiple nature of Vienna's attachment to music Italian opera and dance music I think well did that did Beethoven go do we know did Beethoven go to any of the concerts if he listened to any of that was it part of his life Yes, it was very much part of his life. It was also part of his composing life that I think we tend to forget.

Beethoven was relatively unusual in that he could determine the opus numbers of his works of his publications. But there was a lot of music that was published without an opus number, and a lot of this was the more popular repertoire, so dancers, songs, airs, arrangements of Italian opera that were very, very important for giving him a popular base within the audiences for his music. So really engaging with that kind of the side of Viennese musical life. Erica, how did he begin to stand out from other composers? He's still in Vienna. He's on Young Man, 22, 22. He's making his way. He's obviously standing out, as we've been told.

How did he go on from there? How did he more than stand out? We've been told, they gave him a salary, or they'd lumped together. So it must have been pretty good, but we didn't realize, I didn't understand how he got there. Well, his biggest leg up really was being accepted very quickly as a musical genius, even before he had actually published any great works or produced any great compositions because he came there to study

so he had his head down and he was working by himself but in the meantime getting a reputation in these salons as a great improviser and really the Viennese music circle was looking for a new Mozart as well they were looking for a new superstar on the music scene and Beethoven seemed quite likely to be able to fulfill that so that by the time he did publish his first major open

which was his piano tree was Opus 1 in 1795. He was basically already recognised as the greatest young musician on the scene. So there was a directory of musicians published in 1796, which described Beethoven as a genius, and second only to Hayd and who by then was acknowledged as the greatest musician, and he was obviously of an older generation. But Beethoven was really a composer performer, rather than primarily a composer in his early days.

So he started producing some quite serious keyboard-based works. We have the Piano Trio's Opus 1, the Piano Sanata's Opus 2, and they are sort of in the mould of Hayden, but with an extra ingredient of seriousness. So he very much likes his minor keys. They're big, expansive works. They use four movements rather than three, which is normal for a sonata, so that already makes a statement that these are more like symphonies

than like chamber music. So by the end of the 1790s, he was a genius. He was recognised as a superstar. Was the legacy of Mozart hovering over him all this time? It was. In Vienna and in his own mind. Yes, already in Bonn, a few people said about him that he could be the next Mozart if he continued in this way. And we have to remember, Mozart died only a year before Beethoven arrived in Vienna. And he had also died very young. So he was still a young superstar by the time he died. So that post was vacant as it was on the music scene

And very quickly Beethoven was accepted As stepping into those shoes Can we just clarify the financial support He goes there not impoverished but not much money as I understand He quite soon settles in with enough And maybe a little bit, anyway, enough to live on How can you just clarify how he got that? Yes, well initially he still had a salary

From his court position in Bond because the journey was supposed to be temporary. He was supposed to go and study and then go back to Bonn and fulfil his court duties there. But the court disbanded because it was invaded by the French Revolutionary Forces. And then his father died. So suddenly there was nothing for him to go back to Bonn for.

And that salary stopped. But he received a lot of support from aristocrats on the Viennese music scene. A very important aristocrat was Karl Lichnowski, who supported him very early on. He, for instance, as Laura mentioned, helped support the publication of his first works. He also gave him a small salary for a few years,

not to fulfil any duties, just simply to support him. But really the most extraordinary thing happened in 1809, which is something Laura's already mentioned, when the circumstances were that Beethoven had been offered a court position in Castle at the court of Jerome Bonaparte. as a capelmeister there and Beethoven actually accepted that

he was in castle so he accepted that because he was not badly off but still having to constantly produce things in order to make a living so that was getting a bit of a drain he wanted to focus on bigger works and when the Viennese public

learned that he had taken up that position these aristocrats club together three of them and drew up this amazing contract which said we were going to give Beethoven a lifetime salary simply so that he will no longer be embarrassed by the necessities of life

and that nothing would clog his great genius so they just wanted him to be in Vienna and to compose so he was recognised as being such an important musical asset to the city that they were willing to give him a salary with no expectation in return and he's like he never left Vienna

No, he never left, yeah. So it was kind of by accident and he ended up there, but it was a happy accident. But by design on that part that he stayed. John, John Declays, can we talk about music without words and that he consciously must have done? Tell us how he arrived at it

and why it was so important to him and why he developed it so dramatically. Well, I think my view is that when you came to Vienna in those days, one of the first things you become very aware of as a creative artist is the role of the censor. It was a very authoritarian kind of society,

and people say that's one of the reasons the Viennes are so cheerful because they want to escape from these political pressures for various political reasons. It became very authoritarian after the reign of Joseph II, who was a very enlightened monarch, and one of Beethoven's heroes, he wrote a cantata while he was still in Bonn, celebrating,

if that is the word, the death of Joseph II. Marking, perhaps. Marking, but also celebrating, because it was a legacy they all knew was going to go backwards. That's why I mentioned the word. I know it seems inappropriate,

but the mood of the cantata is not quite just of sadness. This is something, that was very special at the time because Joseph II was a remarkable who tried to change many things about education, including the function of music. So let's get back to Mozart and music without words.

Sorry, I'm digressing. But the point about music without words, I think, was an ambition of Beethoven's because he felt through performance. And this is where the improvisation comes in that Eric has already mentioned. He'd read CPE, book about performing at the keyboard, you can move people in ways that are not limited by words.

He was also going into place that if you wanted to make money, you're at operas. Most of that had made enough money. Well, of course, he spent a lot of money too with operas. Beethoven thought operas were, and that's why he brought in a word censor, because operas were easy to censor, but words without music are quite difficult to get us. You cannot censor a piano. So he didn't do opera. We might come to the one opera later, but he didn't. of the opera, but what can you tell us about

how he became more and more intrigued about developing big, he became his long, intricate, complicated and yet popular symphonism? Yes. Well, the complexity, there's a certain sort of didacticism about Beethoven, which not everybody likes that, you know, you have to listen to this. I'm forcing you to listen to this,

and this authoritarian thing has got on people's nerves over the period. The other thing is, though, that through abstract music and certainly improvising, first of all, then putting that in compositional terms, you can whip up the feelings of the audience, you can take them on emotional journeys. There's a very important word in Germany, Schwermerer, which is enthusiasm, which he got from Christoph Gottliebneva, who was into two things, virtue and schwermerer, enthusiasm, this idea of enthusiasm, which was a philosophical category, actually, in the 18th century as well.

and to communicate that to an audience without the encumbrance of words Beethoven saw, I think, in ways that Haydn didn't, and Mozart didn't always, that you could move audiences in a particular way and actually impress them, and it could reach a lot of people. Laura, he's seen as a bridge

between the classical tradition and romantic tradition, Did he see himself as that? And if he didn't even so, what was he? I'm not so sure that he did. I think actually the idea of Beethoven as romantic is more of a critical term than a creative one. I think it's something that people began to write and use that term around him.

So very famously, ETA Hoffman in 1810, writing about the Fifth Symphony, refers to Beethoven as romantic. And then he's pulling out this idea that there's a kind of emotional, or maelstrom to his music, that's some kind of idea of inner turmoil and connected with this idea of instrumental music,

that there's something about that wordless art form, which is inherently romantic. But what does it give you up? What does it tell us about it? Let's run with it for a moment or two. Is there anything in it, or shall we pass on? There's something very important in it in the way that we now think of Beethoven.

It also signals that in some ways he was a transitional figure between what we think of as being the classical period and going into romanticism. As is quite often the case with music, there's a sense in which it can lag behind literary and philosophical movements. It's not necessarily the case that musicians were so terribly up to date with the latest thinking in terms of philosophy or literature. However, it was all around at the same time, and people were beginning to listen to this music because it didn't have words in these quite sophisticated romantic ways. But John mentioned how music could and did move, his music did move people, as music moved people for him. thousands of years, one one assumes.

But did he deliberately use that as a way to communicate beyond the way he'd heard people even hadn't communicated before? Did he say, I can make this more richer than literature, richer than painting? Because he was very competitive. Let me put that to one side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, certainly competitive, certainly ambitious,

and wanting to express perhaps more in music than been done before. What was that? What was the more he wanted to express? If you wanted to go down the spiritual route, you might think that there was some sense of the otherworldly that you could hear or might be conveyed within Beethoven's music. There might be something within his personal experience. Without words.

Yes, also be an idea of exploring the potential of abstract forms. And one of the ideas that we might pick up from romanticism as an idea of kind of chaos and complexity, and that's something that as you look through Beethoven's career, you can certainly see as being the case, that that idea of experimentation and the kind of radical extension and explosion of tradition is something that you might want to hear within Beethoven's works and which he might arguably have been exploring within them.

Was that noticed, Eric, was that noticed early on? Did he come to it later in his career? Was he thought of as different because of his attempt, which is success at complexity and also yet keeping a lot of people engaged? There was a very important turning point which leads into what we call Beethoven's middle period, the second period. The first big symphony from that period is symphony number three,

the Eroica Symphony. So that symphony is almost twice as long as the two previous ones. And he knew what he was doing to audiences because in the printed first edition of the parts, he added a note to the first violin saying because the symphony is deliberately a lot longer than his usual, I recommend that it's performed early on in a concert so that the audience is not too tired.

So he really wanted his audience to listen carefully. This was not, like you said at the beginning, this was not entertainment music. This was something that had meaning. What meaning did he put into Eroica? People are never. What meaning was he trying to, well, what meaning was in it?

Well, the very famous story about the Eroica Symphony is its original intended dedication. Originally, Beethoven wanted to dedicate this work to Napoleon Bonaparte. Then he decided he was going to actually name it after Napoleon Bonaparte. This was in the year 1803 when he composed it. And then what happened was he heard the news that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor. Rather than being First Consul of France, he had now taken the crown and he was emperor. And Beethoven apparently was so disillusioned thinking that Napoleon was now just a tyrant like everybody else that he tore up that dedication.

but the print of the idea of Napoleon is still very much in the symphony. And what's now? Well, it's actually quite difficult to get to the heart of, and I think that's deliberate. So we have a very stormy and very struggle-filled first movement, which really conjures up to listeners the idea of some sort of epic struggle, some sort of inner turmoil perhaps, but there's certainly a sense of heroism there. And then we have a second movement, which is the funeral march. and it's incredibly tragic and incredibly dark,

which is a lot more extreme than you would expect to have in a piece of instrumental music. Normally you know what to expect. You're going to have a fast movement, a slow movement, a dance movement. But here we have something that's trying to say something more. And we the audience are not entirely sure. We're not even sure who the great man is that the symphony is supposed to be dedicated to. But there's a meaning there that we are invited to try and understand. Is there one meaning, sorry, is there one meaning, or is it open to multiple meanings?

I think it's very much open to multiple meanings. People have tried to find a definite meaning in that symphony. So people have speculated that actually the figure is not Napoleon, but it's Prometheus, because the finale uses a theme from Beethoven's ballet Prometheus. And so it's possible to read some sort of narrative in there about the death and resurrection. But I think it's very much many possible meanings. John, John, John Deuthor, quite an early age, late 20s, early 30s, there begins to be a marked, and you're noticeable.

deterioration in his hearing. Can you tell us about that? And then he wrote this great testament to his brothers in which the letter which he never sent to them in which he said he thought of taking his own life or what was he to do if he couldn't do music, but he did go on. So can you tell us about the deftness and how that set in?

Yes, this is the Heiligenstadt testament. He wrote that in a place just outside Vienna, where he tells his brothers, he had two brothers who came to Vienna after Bonn, the court at Bonn, was dissolved in the 1790s by Napoleon. It's an important little fact that. And he's telling his brothers, I have been having lots of illnesses.

Basically, he's saying, I am suffering. And the worst thing is that I have encroaching deafness, which of course for any musician is a terrible thing to learn from the doctors. It wasn't actually that bad at the time. But I think the important thing about his trajectory as a composer at this point, he planned his life out in the 1790s to a certain extent with the help of Lishanovsky. But he realised that it was not going to go according to time. When you mean he planned his life out?

Well, he planned he was going to do this. He was going to do a symphony then and he was going to gradually make his mark in a certain strategic way. He was very well known, but that's not the same thing as establishing yourself in publication and politics. as a composer. But here he realised that his life was probably going to be different. And I think the thing about this document, which is very important in the Beethoven literature,

it's him giving himself a reason for why he is suffering. And he's also, by not sending it, say, I'm not going to commit suicide, I'm going to overcome this suffering. In a sense, that's what the

Iroca Symphony is about. It's about something that's very problematic. in the beginning movement, then you have the funeral march and so forth, and in the end, it's an overcoming of this particular state of mind. I would quite like to return to the deafness later on as how does it affect its composition

because there's obviously a discussion to be out about that. If we just move on to get through a few major points, Laura, the next one, I'd like to go to Spidelio, his opera. What do we learn about him from that? Well, that he's struggled in some ways to come up with the kind of perfect final form of this. He was based on a French libretto originally.

It was composed in the early 1800s in its first form. Interestingly, as Leonora as being based around the figure of Fidelia, who's imprisoned and his wife disguises herself to go and rescue him. In some ways, this fits into the idea of French revolutionary opera much more easily than it does into the kind of Viennese tradition. So it's borrowing from outside in terms of a... sources. It's a long work, quite often it's seen as being something that doesn't quite work dramatically. Its first performances were also slightly stymied by being premiered at the time

when Napoleon had first occupied Vienna. He then returns to the opera and revises it and restructures it around 1814, 1815, when it becomes towards the version of Fidelia that we know today. When did you learn from it though? He didn't go on to write operas. He seemed to learn not to write more operas. Well, he had other operatic projects in mind that he didn't pursue. I think part of the idea is that actually he established himself as an instrumental

composer that he could work more freely within that realm. The collaborative aspect of opera is always problematic. It was important for establishing his kind of public figure. And it sort of limped slightly, although it's got much magnificence in it, it has slightly limped

along, of a sense. really and before you three I'm saying that very tentative. I'm going to move on. An important question you ask people how many stars would you give Fidelio out of five? I wouldn't dream of asking that sort of question but if you want to ask it you can answer yourself. I would give it six

but a lot of people only give it two. Six out of five? Six out of five yes. I think we'll leave all. I think it's wonderful. It's too difficult there you are you see. I'm not so sure about that I think there are moments which are fantastic but actually become a dramaturgy of it is not necessarily such a

I said and we all think the moments I don't know it doesn't matter what I think. I think the thing about Fidelio is people say in it Laura's quite rightly said it comes out of the French revolutionary phase but which French Revolution are we talking about here because it's definitely has its origins and a play

that was performed in Paris after the fall of Robespierre and after the reaction against the terrorist so we're talking here about a more royalist idea of freedom. Before you run away with anything, I think there are good things in it, but I've never enjoyed it much as a complete opera. My opinion is of no consequence whatsoever.

That's where I'm turning to Erica. Laura's mentioned that he concentrated on instrumental works. About this time, he's working, his deafness is deteriorating. And what sort of instrumentalist work is he doing that he hadn't done before? How is he developing his instrumental work? So this is around the time of his deafness. Well, he... No, not in terms of bedepardous, not yet.

What's he doing after Pidelia? What sort of work is he doing? Well, there are symphonies every so often, so there's a big ten-year gap between the seventh and eighth and the ninth. But at various points, he's writing piano works. He's still very much a pianist at root, so we have piano sonatas from all stages of the year. Is he still able to perform, despite this encroaching deafness?

Yes, for a while. So he still was performing, in 1808, he performed the premiere of his first. his fourth piano concerto, so by that time he was already becoming hard of hearing. He performed for the last time in 1814 that we know, and at that time, in order to have a conversation with Beethoven, you had to shout. So he was struggling to have conversation. Around that time, he started using ear trumpets, and by 1818, his hearing had deteriorated so much that he communicated by using conversation books. These were pieces of paper or blocks of paper that he carried around. So if you wanted to say something to Beethoven, you would have to write it down rather than speak, and he would speak

back. So by his final decade, really, he was almost totally deaf. So he's making his work more common. Back to you, John. The Mrs. Salemnes, is this the work of a religious man and the work of a man who wants to make a work about religion? I think it's both in a way. One of the problems about Beethoven, religion is he never left any document that spells out his religious beliefs. But we do have the Mrs. Salemnis and the mass in sea, his predecessor that's been put in the shade, I think unjustly, because the mass in sea is also a wonderful mass. But the Mrs. Salemnes is proof, if any, were needed that Beethoven thought really extremely hard about the whole issue of the deity, the divine. went into each clause of the mass, did research on it in Archduke Rudolph's library,

managed to create a kind of music that's actually not like anything else he wrote. It's a very unusual piece. Would you describe it as a religious piece? I would describe it as a religious piece. I wouldn't describe it necessarily as a piece you want to hear in church. In fact, you can't do it in church.

You cannot conduct this as part of a mass. You can do the mass in C as part of a church service, but you can't do the Mrs. Salamis because it's too big. It goes beyond the church. It goes sort of beyond the divinity. And I think it also... What does that mean? Well, it wants to reach further than established Christianity. I think one of the things about Beethoven, who believed in the word virtue a lot and believed in the idea that humanity still needs to come together.

It's losing its sense of religion. It's the age is becoming too secular, you know, all those kind of arguments. I think this is one work, which is not only musically ambitious, and absolutely wonderful it's supposed to take you out of yourself into realms that you haven't explored in terms of religious feeling. It certainly does. Laura, what do we know about his working method? Well, actually, Erica's already mentioned his use of notebooks in terms of communication.

We've already spoken about the way that he was an improviser, and that was important in the way it fed into his compositions. He was also somebody who sketched a great deal. So these could be sketches for works on a kind of conceptual level that would think about the overall structure of it. Yes. So he's carrying these notebooks and they're full of music? He had workbooks that he made up himself

and that he would jot down ideas on, but also he would return to ideas, save ideas, come back and revise. And that could be quite large-scale structural thoughts, but they could also be details. And you can have this sort of sense of the labour of producing these scores. We have this sort of extraordinary devotion, so Irene, getting up at dawn, working, working, working, working again, and then going out for a walk or a walk in the country, which is something he did most days or something he particularly liked.

Yes, and something he might have, can't do something similar, right? I mean, that idea of having the break within your day to contemplate, but the sort of romantic image is of him going with his notebook and transcribing thoughts as he went. But working, working, working is what we're talking about really, aren't we? Yes, but I think there are also kind of ideas of him socialising, of meeting with people, of being in taverns, of maybe not participating in social life as much as he used to in his youth, because in some ways his deafness meant that he didn't enter into society as gladly as he had done before.

So can we track that a bit further, Eric? His going depth, is writing more complex of work, taking a longer time he can afford to do so literally, because of the money coming in. And what sort of life does he have around him? He gets involved with several women and doesn't marry anybody and so on. Can you just make that more literate? Yes, well, the classic images of Beethoven being ill-tempered and a bit misanthropic.

And that is fair to some extent. And it's partly due to his deafness. It's something he recognised in himself and mentioned even in the Heiligenstadt Testament. So he says people see me as a man-hater, but no one understands. understands what I'm going through. But actually, even before there were signs of his going deaf, he was already known for his slightly fiery temperament. There are stories of aristocrats in these salons

literally begging him to play and him refusing. He had this slightly haughty temperament, which was part, I think, of his persona as an artist as well, particularly in the salons as an improviser. But yes, you mentioned he never married, but he did fall in love several times. He proposed twice, was turned down, and the first time because he was so ugly apparently and half crazy

and the second time we don't know why but he was falling in love with women who were out of his league a lot of the time so he was still a very hierarchical society so there wasn't really any way that he was realistically going to marry above his station but he fell in love with a lot of his aristocratic piano students for instance it was tempting to see that as deliberate that he's perhaps looking for an excuse not to not to be able to marry

but certainly in his final years he was very much an established bachelor and he stopped looking for there's one woman who fell in love with and wrote a letter to it we don't know her name but she was the one yes these now notorious letters he wrote to an immortal beloved this was in the year 1812

and he seems to have been very much in love with this woman and they were thinking of building a life together but by the end of these three letters it's established that they are going to have to live apart and never be together. And that seems to have been the turning point for him that after that point he was a bachelor

and no longer looked for that kind of relationship. Yes, I think this is an important subject. The letter to the immortal beloved, I think it's absolutely wonderful that we don't know who the woman's name is, but books have been written about who it is. There's an obsession with this letter. It was also like the Heiligenstadt Testament,

never sent, apparently. It was found in a drawer after, Beethoven's death, but it is another letter really about suffering and about how, you know, I'm never really going to get the woman I want. And I think it's like that, it's

almost giving a reason of why he's feeling the way he is. Can I ask, it's very difficult, and if there isn't time to give a proper reasonable answer, let's forget it. Is there any way of tracking the influence of his deafness on his music, because he became increasingly, increasingly,

increasingly deaf and the music became increasingly increasingly complex and long. Is there any correlation between that? I think that's very difficult to determine. A lot of people have said the certain way he orchestrates the seven symphony, for example, shows he was there, but I do think that's very hard to prove. Gertr was the one who he met in Tapelets.

This is the time when he wrote the letter to the Immortal Beloved and actually said, I like Beethoven. They almost met over a period of weeks every day and said his deafness, he is to be pity because his deafness means for him a social incumbrance, which is very hard for him to take. So socially, his behaviour changed. Richard Wagner had an interesting theory about this. He said his deafness actually made him think more about the relationship

between the practicalities of music and how one thinks about it on paper, ideally before anybody's performed it. And it somehow loosened the inhibition that one might have had. So he could actually write things on paper and his deafness allowed him to escape from that kind of restriction. But I think that's rather a fanciful theory as well. Is Aaron Corclaned room in his head? Laura, it said that Beethoven changed the way in music,

the way music was performed and was received. How did he do that? If you bear in mind actually how some of his first works were premiered, it gives us an insight into what he was responding to. So if you think about a concert that happened on the 22nd December 1809, this was a cold winter night, it lasted four and a half hours. It included the Sixth Symphony, a concertaria, movements from the Massian Sea sung in German, the premiere of the Fifth Symphony and the choral fantasy. That kind of concert was not unusual in Vienna at the time, the idea of mixing sacred work. instrumental works, symphonies, concert areas. The idea of kind of specialising and beginning to listen to music in a kind of more dedicated way

was something that was built into the way in which he started to think about quartets and some of these, in fact, he even said, this music is so complex, it's not really for public consumption. This is music that you have to put the work into to get something out of. He was also struggling against... But the interesting thing is that the place was full. So it's not only what he's... Not only what he's doing, it's how it is being received. It is very complicated, and people are saying,

I don't understand that, but it's great, and I'm going tomorrow night as well. Yes, but the other thing to bear in mind is actually the kind of performance preparation culture was also very different. So you were listening to things that had been done on one rehearsal, or even the Costers spiritual were done as play-throughs in the afternoon. So the idea of hearing a polished performance, which is what we're used to today, is also not around in quite the same way. So the idea that you have to work on learning to play these quartets, that they're then going to be performed to a group of connoisseurs

and appreciated as such is important and in a way by writing such complicated music he's demanding a different kind of attention from listeners. Erica, is it possible to summarise his impact on classical music over the last century and half, two centuries, is it? Well, he was a huge influence on later 19th century composers of instrumental music and particularly in the symphonies. Laura started talking about some of the quartets

and some of the more experimental things he was doing in the smaller forms. In some ways those were less influential because they were so far out that people didn't quite know where to go after that. But the symphonies, he really transformed the symphony into something that was much more of a big narrative, something that you have to listen to with attention. So the idea that there's a long trajectory

over the course of the whole work is something that he did marvelously in works like the Fifth Symphony, which has this whole trajectory of struggle and overcoming and final victory. And that sort of set the standard for large-scale musical forms for the rest of the 19th century

and beyond into the 20th. John, briefly, I'm afraid. I think Beethoven established the idea that music was the best way of conveying the idea of suffering and sorrow which you can overcome. It's the idea of enthusiasm in the face of,

of adversity and also about freedom, freedom that we don't have yet, which is one reason I think why Beethoven is still a modern composer, people feel it means modern. It's a kind of state in music we haven't reached yet. Well, thank you very much, thank you all. Thank you, Laura Tunbridge, John Dithrich, Erica Burrenum, next week. And we'll be talking about Hamlet, words, words, words. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his. guests. I usually say what did I miss out but there's so much that I miss out that I'm not going to say that this time. What would you like to continue to talk about? I would like to talk some more about the very late works and the quartets in particular because I think something that's so amazing about them is that Beethoven was really writing so far ahead of his time. There wasn't an obvious audience or even performer base that was going to take up this amazing repertoire. We have found that some of them were performed in Vienna though.

Oh they were but they were. and quite enthusiastic because the musicians loved playing it and they thought these late works were absolutely fascinated. The audience is a different matter. And I think it is important to give the performance to their dues. So someone like Japanzig and the role he played in promoting, but also being prepared to learn this music and perform it was important as well. We didn't develop the idea that there'd been very few rehearsals until then and you had to rehearse for Beethoven's and music. So you brought it up, but we didn't develop it quite a bit of it. Yes.

to rehearse that. So, I mean, the idea that you basically have the kind of one rehearsal, full rehearsal, maybe a second rehearsal, if you're lucky, but basically then the performance is what it is. So this idea that now we have where you have, well, hopefully, quite a lot of rehearsal, or at least the idea of a kind of polished performance, is not really present in quite the same way. It's beginning to build up, mostly in these kind of smaller forms about chamber music.

And also, we don't have the kind of conductor playing a similar role that they do today. So the idea of the kind of conductor grand standing at the front of the orchestra is also not a figure who's present within the Viennese concert scene in the same way. So a lot of kind of significant changes happening within Beethoven's time. But it has become conductor's music. It has very much become music. Beethoven insisted on doing it himself, but he often got the beat wrong and so it all collapsed. One thing I think is important is the global reach of Beethoven, because he,

is tremendously successful in China and in Japan all over the world. Why is that? I mean, is it... When you tell me, why is that? Is it something to do? What kind of message is the music? Something like the Ninth Symphony, some of these big works. I think, you know, this idea of putting a name to suffering and overcoming suffering,

you know, eating bitterness, as they say, in China is very attractive to the Chinese mind. has been put as one of the reasons for his success there. Roman Roland, you know, who was big on this, was translated into Chinese. He wrote this book called Beethoven, the creator, in the 1920s, which is one of the best books on Beethoven, in my view. And that got very well known in China, and in Japan, this idea of the big nine,

where whole cities can, Osaka every year has practically the whole town, singing the ninth symphony. this idea of largeness of community is something that this music has locked into in these countries Yeah but it's interesting contrasting that monumentality with 19th century practices where for instance the finale of the 9th Symphony

that is so celebrated now wasn't thought to be so successful so quite often wasn't performed when they perform the 9th Symphony Yeah I'm just true I'm thinking though because the perception of it has changed and of people, you know, Leonard Bernstein puts the word freedom in the last movement at the fore, which is completely inauthentia, but of course it feels right and for the Chinese on this scale. And, you know, in the Japanese, where was it in the Olympic Games in 1998? Azaka conducted 2,000 people performing the 9th Symphony at the end of the Games.

And that was linked into Cape Town, Beijing, Sydney, Australia, because they'd got over the digital delay. So all the cities were singing the night symphony in Japan. It's the most extraordinary idea. Beethoven turning in his grave, perhaps. But this is what the kind of mentality he's encouraged. And of course Beethoven's reach is not just global. It actually goes extraterrestrial because I think there's two different Beethoven works

on that golden disc which has been sent out into space. So Beethoven has been chosen as representative of music on Earth. which is an amazing theme. Yes. Of course he went laterally as well. Intergalactic. The famous roll over Beethoven. Exactly, yeah.

So that idea of the artist whose life is important as well is also significant there, the kind of composer where we spend all our time wondering about his biography and how it connects to his music has also proved hugely influential. Yes, I'd love to know how Chuck Berry came onto that title.

I mean, the idea of rolling over Beethoven. I suppose that's what we're doing here, really. Give Chakowsky the news, yeah. Yes. Yes. Chikovsky's of course, wasn't it very, yeah. Yes. They all were.

They all had Beethoven looking over. He was looking over their shoulder. Brab said the same thing as Chikovsky. I've got Ludwig here. I love Ludwig. Let me try and write a symphony. Did he up the game for everybody because of one? Yes, of course.

Yes. Including Wagner. And I think it is that taking music seriously and the kind of abstract music or whatever, any kind of music, elevating it, is what kind of raised the game. And also going one better. I mean, how do you trump the Ninth Symphony?

You see, the Mrs. Salimus is more difficult to Trump, because not everybody was into writing masses, but symphonies, it's a very public genre. I think it becomes a competitive game where not all composers win, I have to say. But Wagner to a certainly extent, I know this is elliptical and sort of demotic in a way. In a way, sort of picked up where Beethoven left off.

He thought, I can carry this forward. Is there anything in that? Yes. that's true I think but how you do that formally and musically is a big problem for Schumann Mendelsohn's idea was to actually shrink

the size of the symphony to do things on a more a novelette basis rather than a big novel and sound it's funny you should say it's rejected because he's ugly because one of you said I think it was you John in the notes there's all these portraits and

each one is different from the other you don't know what they're looking at He was notorious for being quite negligent about his appearance. You mean didn't wash and stuff? Well, he washed a lot, but he didn't tend to tidy his appearance very much. So his clothes were quite shabby. In fact, in the 1820s, he once was mistaken for a tramp and was arrested. And the police officer wouldn't believe that he was Beethoven.

And he said, yeah, sure you are. And they had to get a local musician to come and identify him. Because he was, yeah, he'd gone out without a hat and then he got lost. So he was just mistaken for him. You don't know what Beethoven-Lock. You don't know who the immortal beloved is. You don't know who Elis is for Elis. The thing that everybody plays, learning, you know, you don't know who's Elis.

There have been lots of guesses, but there's no proof who it is. I was intrigued by the fact that he's born the same year as Wersworthworth. There's a lot you don't know about Wurzler. We needn't go further with that, but it's just a little tiny thing, isn't it? Yes. Yes. Well, thank you all. Did you enjoy that? Yes, very much. Very nice.

Simon's coming in with an offer. You're not allowed to. reviews. On tea, your coffee. We've got some biennoisery if you want to take it. To your coffee, who'd like that? I like a coffee. I'd like a coffee, please.

Three coffees, Melvin. I like a black coffee, please. Yes, thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein. And if you're looking for an excuse to lie in in the morning, well, you've found it. The best of today podcast is how you can get the highlights of our program anytime, anywhere. At home, on your commute, while you're on.

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