Beethoven essentially invented the modern orchestra. That may sound like an extravagant claim, but it’s true to the historical facts. He didn’t do it in Vienna, or in the German-speaking lands, or even necessarily by design. Believe it or not, it happened in Paris. On August 9, 1828, a little more than a year after his death, conductor and violinist François-Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849) led the inaugural concert of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (the Orchestra of the Conservatory Concert Society). This ensemble, containing the finest musicians available—including numerous professors at the Paris Conservatory and other instrumental virtuosos active in the French capital—was formed specifically for the purpose of presenting all of Beethoven’s major orchestral works to the French public. That first concert featured the Eroica Symphony. It was both a resounding success and a cultural milestone, immediately recognized as such.
If the Paris Conservatory was at that time the world’s most prestigious, then the orchestra was its crown jewel. It became the model for virtually all of the great European orchestras that followed and set new standards for the few already in existence. Beethoven’s music provided its calling card. In its first twenty years, the Société des Concerts gave 318 performances of his works, including 188 of the symphonies alone, all in “seasons” comprising (initially) only six individual programs. Of course, we need to bear in mind that in the days before recordings, a limited repertoire combined with more frequent repetition was essential. If you wanted to hear the most recent big hit or novelty, and the concert hall could barely seat one thousand patrons, and no significant competition or alternative was available, you had to hope that the same pieces would appear frequently in response to public demand—and so they did.
Prior to the French orchestra’s establishment, and for a long time afterward, performance standards were, to put it mildly, variable, and regular seasons sporadic. Most ensembles were either the private property of wealthy aristocrats or else organized on an ad hoc basis for a single event or limited series. These invariably were scheduled during a time when the rich folk would be in their urban residences—usually before the annual summer outbreaks of cholera, plague, smallpox, or what have you. Musicians were expected to perform new, unfamiliar works after a single rehearsal, or even at sight. Haydn offers the iconic example of eighteenth-century orchestral culture. Most of his symphonies were composed for the very small, private orchestra of his employers, the noble Esterházy family. The later “Paris” and “London” Symphonies were commissioned for public concerts in those cities, and the size of the ensemble was correspondingly larger.
When Haydn received an honorary doctorate at Oxford, at which a couple of his latest symphonies were performed, he felt obliged to beg the organizers to hold at least one rehearsal in advance. Beethoven, in premiering his latest works at his own benefit concerts, had to hire and pay his own players, print and sell his own tickets, lease the venue, and in general make all of the necessary arrangements himself. The results sometimes were disastrous. A concert featuring orchestral music as the main item was a sometime thing, for both financial and logistical reasons. From the artistic point of view, instrumental pieces took a back seat to vocal music, both sacred and secular. Well into the nineteenth century, it was unusual to find a purportedly orchestral concert that did not feature a noted singer or two as an added attraction.
However, from 1828 onward, it became possible to arrange a program in which the featured symphony was the main event. Beethoven made this possible. His works put orchestral writing on an even footing with music in other genres. The symphonies and concertos are, for the most part, lengthier and more difficult than any that had come before. They require many rehearsals to master and sound their best, the kind of results only possible to obtain from a regularly constituted, full-time ensemble. Even more important, they reward the effort in terms of their brilliance, virtuosity, excitement, and expressivity. All orchestral music is public, in a sense, but Beethoven’s is designed for the general public—literally, for everyone within range of hearing. Its lack of a sung text only enhances its universality, and in the one symphony where Beethoven does employ singers—the Ninth—the text is explicitly about universality: the brotherhood of all mankind.
Critics, even those who acknowledged Beethoven’s genius, often found him loud, crude, and sometimes obscure, but audiences loved him. He became a bankable commodity. The Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire continued to feature Beethoven on its programs for the next 140 years, until it was disbanded by the French government and absorbed into the newly established Orchestre de Paris in the late 1960s. It was a sad loss: the only ensemble that could boast of having preserved a consistent, unbroken performance tradition dating back to Beethoven’s own lifetime. Over the course of the virulently nationalistic nineteenth century, German ensembles assumed the mantle of Beethoven’s true heirs; today, the “historically informed” performance movement makes similar claims, but none of them can boast of a similar pedigree.
Fortunately, the legacy of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra in Beethoven was captured just in time, in the late 1950s, when French EMI recorded a complete symphony cycle under the baton of the excellent, very underrated German conductor Carl Schuricht. These fine performances, recorded mostly in very good mono sound (the Ninth can be heard in its first stereo release on the Testament label), have seldom left the catalog, and for good reason. The orchestra’s consistent rhythmic freshness, textural transparency, lean and wiry strings, characterful woodwinds, and piercing brass seem made for Beethoven, and the players willingly embrace Schuricht’s consistently lively and exuberant interpretations. Later cycles certainly feature better sonics, more polished ensembles, and perhaps more probing conducting, but none more idiomatic or committed than this.
According to contemporary reports, the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire at its inaugural concerts numbered about eighty-six players, and thereafter settled down to a regular roster of eighty—roughly the size of a modern orchestra today. Don’t let anyone tell you that because Beethoven often had to make do with many fewer musicians, he planned his orchestral works for these smaller forces, and they sound better when presented that way. The numerous chamber orchestras and period instrument ensembles active today operate under the same financial constraints that Beethoven did. To be sure, the music can be presented with reduced personnel, and a great performance speaks for itself (we will mention a few), but mini-Beethoven is seldom preferable to the full-size version and certainly enjoys no special sanction or claim to authenticity.
Early music groups, in particular, often make a fetish of stripping every piece they touch to the bare minimum number of performers required. To this pernicious habit I can only quote the great English writer on music Donald Francis Tovey, who memorably claimed, “Scholarship itself is not obliged to insist on the restoration of conditions that ought never to have existed.” No problem of balance or texture in Beethoven cannot be solved with a full-size ensemble, and large forces always can be reduced for especially intimate passages; but if you start small, you’re stuck with it. You can’t cheat physics. Beethoven’s music is big—in scope, in vision, in expression, and in sheer sonic splendor. A performance that doesn’t deliver these qualities, never mind the number of participants, invariably misses the point.
One sure sign of the general perception of Beethoven’s “bigness” has been the historical tendency to recast some of his chamber works in orchestral garb, especially the late string quartets, the Hammerklavier Piano Sonata, and the early Septet, op. 20. For this reason, I include them in the work listing at the front of this book and will offer a brief discussion of this “quasi-orchestral” Beethoven on disc by way of conclusion in the last chapter. The idea that Beethoven’s music, in its energy and scope, bursts the bounds of smaller forces has always been with us, and it says a lot about his natural affinity for the symphony orchestra that it has been taken so seriously (and, in many cases, implemented so successfully).
Accordingly, whereas Beethoven’s ensemble writing often sounds strikingly different from that of his predecessors, the results he gets arise not so much from the multiplicity and variety of instruments involved as from how he uses them and from the range and breadth of his musical ideas. It is true that he enlarged the symphonic orchestra by adding piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombones, although he was not the first to do so—just the best. All of these instruments appear in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, and the latter features additional percussion (cymbals, bass drum, and triangle) besides. On the other hand, Haydn had used an ensemble of similar size two decades earlier in his last grand oratorio, The Seasons, of 1801. In fact, Haydn does his star pupil one instrument better by adding a third trumpet in the closing chorus.
What Beethoven did, however, was take these hitherto exotic extras, familiar visitors to operatic and theatrical orchestras, and use them in a purely instrumental setting, apart from any pictorial or incidental associations that they might have had. For example, trombones often were found accompanying the choir in liturgical music, or backing supernatural events such as Don Giovanni’s descent into hell in the last act of Mozart’s famous opera. When they turn up, with the piccolo and contrabassoon, in the celebratory finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, their presence contributes to music simultaneously higher, lower, louder, and more explosive than anything ever heard before.
Beethoven’s regular demand for trumpets and timpani was also extraordinary for its time. Although routinely called for in music of a festive or military character, their presence in the symphony orchestra was by no means a fact to be taken for granted. Trumpeters and drummers usually were members of the local town guard or military garrison, not full-time players of “art music.” Haydn established them as permanent participants in the ensemble with his twelve “London” Symphonies. Beethoven ratified this decision, and in effect made it standard. All of his major orchestral works require trumpets and drums, with the single exception of the Second Piano Concerto (actually his first in order of writing). From Beethoven on, it was not the presence of these instruments in the orchestra that was unusual but, rather, their absence.
Far more significant than these innovations, however, was the manner in which Beethoven treated the individual instrumental sections. The classical orchestra basically consisted of a large body of strings opposed to a smaller assortment of woodwinds (flutes, oboes, bassoons, and eventually clarinets), a couple of horns, and finally trumpets and timpani to mark the rhythm and add pizzazz to loud passages. Haydn and Mozart already understood that the key to great orchestration lay in the handling of the woodwinds, both as solos and in groups. The reason for this is simple: the winds (including horns for our purposes) have the most coloristic variety within their section and therefore offer the best opportunity both to characterize a melodic line and prevent monotony in otherwise simple accompaniments. Beethoven took this process a step further, emancipating the wind section and using it with unprecedented freedom and imagination.
You can hear this from the very first notes of the First Symphony, a bright pair of chords for the woodwinds backed by pizzicato (plucked) strings. It’s a new sound, but even more important, the timbre draws attention to the amusing fact that these chords harmonically represent not a beginning but an ending. As if realizing their error, the woodwinds try again with another pair of similarly misplaced chords. Only at the third attempt does the rest of the orchestra enter with confirmation that they’ve finally gotten things right. It is absolute acceptance of this odd start. From this humorous example we can conclude that Beethoven’s exploration of new colors and timbres was not gratuitous but, rather, a significant enhancement of the music’s expressive meaning. It is, in short, an integral aspect of his personal musical language and to what later became the symphonic ideal: it should include no effects without causes, and all of the various parts should work together in furtherance of the music’s ultimate goal.
To this end, Beethoven gave difficult and surprising solos, both singly and in sections, to members of the orchestra unaccustomed to the spotlight. The Violin Concerto begins with its main motive gently tapped out by the timpani, of all things. He also adopted unconventional tunings to permit the drums an extra degree of participatory freedom. The solos in the Ninth’s second movement are justly famous. Less frequently mentioned but no less remarkable are the soft, two-note timpani chords in the closing bars of the same work’s Adagio. The middle section of the Third (Eroica) Symphony’s Scherzo is a trio for three horns, another instrument that assumed new importance under his watch. Beethoven rightly can be said to have discovered the power and poetry of the double basses, whether in their thunderstorm rumblings in the Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, or their “speaking” recitative at the start of the Ninth’s finale. In every one of these and many other instances, which we will discuss in their appropriate places, the unusual colors serve a genuine musical purpose in addition to being inherently ear catching.
Beethoven’s orchestral writing has many proprietary characteristics more generally that he either invented outright or appropriated and used in an individual way. The more you listen, the more obvious these musical “figures of speech” become. Some of them were absorbed into the common practice of Romantic music, used by later composers so frequently that we easily forget their original source and no longer associate them with Beethoven specifically.
Perhaps the best known of these is the big concluding windup. You know what I mean: a series of loud, crashing chords for the full orchestra, separated by suspenseful pauses, often accompanied by a loud roll on the drums. Just about everyone who came later used this ending, especially to conclude triumphant finales. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák hardly could have functioned without it. These memorable concluding bars are, however, in Beethoven at least, the outcome of a larger formal process, one that we might conveniently call
A musical “coda” (Italian for “tail”) is exactly what the word implies: an added bit at the end designed to bring a piece to a satisfactory close. In its simplest form, it consists of a “cadence,” or harmonic formula, that permits the music to conclude in its home key. Most codas in the classical period are relatively short—or they were until Haydn got his hands on them and realized he could expand the coda into an independent section containing a good bit of extra thematic development and dramatic incident. Indeed, the length of the coda doesn’t really matter as long as it gives the feeling of arriving at a firm conclusion. The reasons for this we’ll talk about in more detail in the next chapter. For now, all we need to know is that Beethoven took Haydn’s initial concept and ran with it.
The iconic example of “the coda that just won’t quit” occurs in the finale of the Fifth Symphony. Its triumphant musical procession, which already has been chugging along for a good six or seven minutes, shows no sign of stopping until suddenly it pulls up short with a series of abrupt, final-sounding chords, interrupted by the bassoons playing what seems like an entirely new theme. It’s not, but for reasons you might find it hard to put your finger on, when that seemingly new tune appears, you just know that the music is starting to look for the right ending. All of the ensuing pauses and digressions, the abrupt dynamic contrasts from very loud to very soft, the climaxes that rise and fall, are Beethoven’s way of stopping the musical juggernaut that his finale has unleashed.
However, because the movement has accumulated so much physical energy, this process takes time—about two and a half minutes to be exact—with the added bonus that the coda doesn’t merely stop the music dead but ratifies or even enhances its expressive point: a feeling of boundless, unquenchable joy in victory. The result, then, isn’t just one of the many usual concluding formulas but, rather, an active search for exactly the right ending, both to the finale specifically and the entire, half-hour-long symphony in general. When it finally arrives, the last gesture couldn’t be more emphatic; and if you’re tempted to chuckle along the way, then that’s part of Beethoven’s plan, too. It’s entirely characteristic of him: a work that begins in frenzied fury ends in equally frenzied high spirits.
Perhaps the most extreme, and funniest, case of the coda that just won’t quit in all of Beethoven occurs in the finale of the Eighth Symphony. That movement, which plays for about seven to eight minutes, contains 502 bars (or “measures”) of music, with the coda starting at measure 267. In other words, it occupies about half of the movement.
However, not all codas are loud and boisterous, even in otherwise quick pieces. The coda to the finale of the Pastoral Symphony is peaceful and nostalgic. The Funeral March second movement in the Eroica has an extraordinary coda that’s mostly very hushed and about as sorrowful as music gets. That in the Adagio of the Ninth, on the other hand, is radiant. Some codas begin imperceptibly, whereas others (in the finale of the Eroica, the Egmont Overture, or the Leonore Overtures nos. 2 and 3) are fully independent, almost detachable episodes. All of them give Beethoven the opportunity to expand the music’s expressive range and find new meaning in its basic material. None are formulaic.
Along the way to one of Beethoven’s proprietary endings, especially in quick music, chances are good that we’ll encounter another of his characteristic orchestral fingerprints:
One of the marks of a great composer is his ability to personalize even the most mundane musical gesture. The crescendo—that is, the dynamic nuance of gradually getting louder—is as old as music itself, but only in the classical period did composers begin to notate the practice precisely and regularly, as opposed to leaving it to the discretion of the performers. Its desirability as an orchestral effect is obvious, and it became a mid-eighteenth-century specialty of the virtuoso ensemble in residence at the court of Mannheim, Germany. Visitors flocked to hear the Mannheim orchestra in order to experience the famous crescendo, and a talented group of resident composers, headed by the Stamitz family, happily provided new works to meet the demand.
Beethoven’s habit of marking his scores in great detail, combined with his uniquely energetic, dramatic approach to composition generally, made him a “natural” when it came to the strategic employment of the crescendo. He was also lucky historically. Orchestral effects such as those featured in Mannheim had not yet become routine, so Beethoven had a relatively open field when it came to devising proprietary methods. Crescendos can be made in countless ways. You can simply play a tune, gradually increasing the volume. You can swell individual notes, chords, or groups of chords. The crescendo can be short, long, and everything in between. Most such options are generic and, therefore, impossible to stamp with any degree of individuality.
The crescendos we want to consider, however, are more specialized. They are distinctive, extended passages whose main purpose is to build tension by getting steadily louder, introducing at their peak an important theme or gesture by way of a climax. Beethoven’s Italian contemporary Gioachino Rossini, for example, wrote opera overtures that became famous for the “Rossini crescendo,” a brief tune repeated over and over, gaining volume and intensity, and exploding in a “tutti” (full orchestral) passage of great brilliance and verve. The “Rossini crescendo” was more than a simple expressive nuance added to an important harmony or melody; it was a definite musical object all by itself, one displaying a clear formal function. This is what made it special.
Beethoven’s personal take on the crescendo is similar to Rossini’s, in that it consists of a distinct episode that relies on the accumulated weight of repetition as the various instruments enter and the volume increases. Unlike Rossini, however, Beethoven does not employ a new “crescendo tune,” repeating it with little variation. Instead, he takes a brief group of notes—a motive—clearly derived from the main thematic material and builds his crescendo either through obsessive repetition, or, even more arrestingly, through reiterations of tiny, rhythmically identical variants. Typically, the strings play the motive while the winds support them with sustained chords. This may sound technical, but the result comes across as spontaneous, attention grabbing, and extremely effective in practice. As the music gets louder, and the motive rapidly spreads through the full orchestra, the crescendo seems to come at you from all sides, generating an extra degree of nervous intensity and forward momentum.
If the job of the coda is to steer the symphonic drama safely home, the crescendos are musical locomotives. They execute transitions from one theme to another, develop previously heard ideas in a dynamically charged way, and propel the music over major sectional breaks. As part of a movement’s connective tissue, they belong in the category of what I call “motion music.” This idea will be more clearly defined and discussed in the next chapter. For now, all you need to know is that Beethoven’s proprietary crescendos generally occur around and between the important tunes.
For example, all three overtures: Egmont and Leonore 2 and 3, previously noted for their distinctive codas, present their initial allegro themes twice, first softly, then loudly. In order to get from one statement to the other, Beethoven features a substantial passage of crescendo texture based on a bit of the principal idea. In the first movements of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, as well as the Fourth Piano Concerto, distinctive crescendos assist with the transitions between the first and second themes (later we’ll call them “subjects,” but “themes” will do for now). In the Emperor Concerto, a typical crescendo introduces the return of the work’s virtuosic opening measures about two-thirds of the way through the first movement. An especially explosive example occurs in the same spot in the Eighth Symphony.
Beethoven’s most systematic use of the crescendo, however, occurs in the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony. Here, we do find one in an expected place: between the two contrasting statements—first soft, then loud—of the initial tune, but the second theme is virtually nothing but a crescendo backed by a simple bit of melody, while two gigantic ones comprise most of the central “development” section. Indeed, we might legitimately say that the entire piece is organized around the concept of the crescendo, rising and falling in great waves of unusually mellow and euphonious sound (remember, it’s supposed to be “pastoral”). The whole movement stands as a remarkable testament to Beethoven’s imaginative use of simple ideas—the real nuts and bolts of music—to create strikingly original results. Nothing else in the symphonic literature is quite like it.
If the crescendo describes one of Beethoven’s most important vehicles for achieving forward momentum—we might call it movement along the horizontal plane—we should also consider its companion technique as well, used to create a feeling of vertical movement. This doesn’t have a technical term at all—not in Beethoven, and not in music generally—so we’ll have to make up our own; yet it’s one of the most telling of his stylistic fingerprints. We’ll call it
A “Beethoven Bounce” is simply a repeated jumping from low pitch to high, or high to low, that gives the impression of bouncing up and down (or down and up), usually vigorously, but sometimes more gently. It can occur anywhere, but it always has the effect of energizing the musical texture. The leaping start of the Ninth Symphony’s Scherzo is one example, as is the jerky rhythmic figure at the opening of the Fourth Symphony’s slow movement. Beethoven uses the bounce to imitate lightning bolts in the storm section of the Pastoral Symphony.
Because it’s a purely rhythmic idea, usually made up of just a few repeated notes or chords, when it occurs at the end of a melodic section, the bounce often gives the impression that Beethoven has gotten so excited that organized thought (i.e., a tune) can no longer contain his enthusiasm, so the music instead resorts to a kind of primal, physical gesticulation. You can hear especially jolly examples at the start of the Fidelio Overture and at the close of the exposition sections of the Seventh Symphony’s first movement (more on “expositions” in the next chapter) and the Fourth Symphony’s finale. The Coriolan Overture begins with an angry bounce, and because the piece basically is one long temper tantrum, it features several others once it gets going. The initial entry of the soloist in the first movement of the Violin Concerto, on the other hand, offers an example of the bounce at its most graceful as the violin gently rises into view. Beethoven even finds room for a pair of bounces at the first two loud outbursts in the Eroica Symphony’s funeral march.
Beethoven discovered the value of the bounce early in his career. It’s one of the things that makes the outer movements of the First Symphony sound less like Haydn and Mozart and more like the new guy in town. The classical style that Beethoven inherited relied on certain harmonic and rhythmic formulas, especially to mark the ends of major sections. Remember “cadences” from our discussion of the coda? These tend to lower the music’s energy level by inserting a pause or coming to a point of rest. Beethoven, on the other hand, likes to keep things moving as much as possible, and using the bounce at these points accomplishes this. The music may break off for a moment, but its energy and momentum carry over into the next passage or section.
Another advantage to being bouncy has to do with Beethoven’s handling of rhythm more generally. He loves syncopation—the practice of accenting what ordinarily would sound as weaker beats. For example, if you’re writing in three-quarter time (3/4 as notated musically, aka waltz tempo), you hear the basic rhythm as ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, and so forth. Beethoven, in common with most other composers, uses this particular meter very often, including in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony and in the main body of the Egmont Overture, two of his most heroic-sounding and dramatic compositions. The reason he liked triple time (as it’s often called) is the same reason we dance to it: it has an extra lift and sense of motion. However, an obvious waltz rhythm hardly would do such serious, indeed epic, music justice.
One of Beethoven’s solutions, then, is to throw the accents onto the weaker beats, often joining together the second and third: one-TWO-THREE, one-TWOTHREE. This pattern produces a distinctive bounce. You can hear it in the first movement of the Eroica at the close of the exposition from measure 109 (if you follow scores). In this case, the bouncing rhythm accompanies a melody, as it does from measure 665 in the coda, right after the triumphant statement of the main theme on the trumpets. In the Egmont Overture, on the other hand, Beethoven reverses this pattern at measure 110: ONETWO-three, ONETWO-three, to close the exposition in a mood of high excitement. Dividing the three beats in a measure unequally and using syncopation, combined with appropriate scoring, generates the kind of forward impulse and, well, bounce that gives Beethoven’s music so much of its distinctive power. You might not want to dance to it, exactly, but you feel the rhythm in your gut nonetheless.
You may find it curious that the three issues just discussed—codas, crescendos, and the Beethoven bounce—have absolutely nothing to do with the part of the music that most listeners probably care about above all others: the tunes. Indeed, none of them would matter so much if Beethoven did not write great tunes, too, but these are best discussed in their individual places. Moreover, the large orchestral works aren’t just about presenting the melody; they are about what becomes of it over the course of a movement. This, in turn, depends on the musical environment that the tunes inhabit, one that contains a wide range of additional ideas and gestures specifically tailored to the orchestral medium.
What I have tried to do here is describe some of the more prominent and interesting features of that environment. It could be that if you took my initial advice and listened to some of the music before reading this, you already have noticed some or all of these elements. If so, you should feel confident in your superior listening prowess. If not, then you have some advance news of what to listen for, and hopefully this brief discussion will prove helpful. Either way, these various techniques and compositional strategies combine with the famous (and not so famous) tunes to produce Beethoven’s music in large forms. In the next chapter, we will take a close look at those as well.
Before doing that, however, I want to mention a few points that relate to recordings of the orchestral works that you should keep in mind to avoid getting snookered when shopping.
The first of these concerns Beethoven’s metronome markings. The self-proclaimed inventor of the metronome, Johann Mälzel (or Maelzel), was associated with Beethoven and got him to suggest mechanical tempo markings (in beats per minute) for the individual movements of the symphonies. These always have been controversial for a number of reasons, not the least being that Beethoven was quite deaf at the time he chose them, and it’s very doubtful that he ever heard performances at the more questionable designated speeds.
It is also pretty clear that some of the quicker tempos would have been impossible for orchestras at the time, and that the metronome markings do not take into account the natural fluctuations of pulse that would have been taken for granted both then and now in any normally expressive performance. Beethoven himself had reservations on that account. Some of them, such as those in the coda of the Ninth Symphony’s finale, seem to run counter to other tempo and expressive indications and seemingly contradict the plain character of the music. Nevertheless, the metronome markings can be helpful in indicating relative speeds between movements and in suggesting proportional tempo relationships.
Interestingly, a contemporary account of Beethoven’s Ninth mentions a duration of sixty-five minutes in total, basically the same as an average performance today, give or take a few minutes either way. Aside from anecdotal evidence such as this, we have no way of knowing what the parameters for an “average” timing would have been in Beethoven’s era. Doubtless they would have been much wider than they are now due to huge disparities in the quality of early nineteenth-century orchestras, plus the lack of homogeneity resulting from the absence of a generally acknowledged performing tradition—never mind the extensive documentation of that tradition that recordings afford modern players and conductors.
Today the situation obviously is quite different. Our superbly trained musicians often are able to play the music at Beethoven’s theoretically recommended speeds, but that doesn’t mean that they should. Sometimes the results can be exhilarating; at others, the music comes across as a garbled mess. Issues such as room acoustics, accent marks, and articulation signs all act as a break on the mindless application of a designated tempo. Where this becomes an issue is when conductors and their record producers try to use “authentic tempos” as a selling point. Don’t buy it. Nothing, and I really mean nothing, suggests that the metronome numbers that have come down to us as Beethoven’s markings are invariably correct, let alone binding on the players or in some way sacrosanct. Any statement to the contrary is mere puffery.
The same observations apply to claims by performers using new, “critical,” or “Urtext” (“original text”) editions of scores. With very few exceptions, these simply are a publisher’s ploy to keep Beethoven’s music in copyright. The differences between the latest version and the standard prints, in Beethoven anyway, usually are vanishingly few, often trivial, and likely to be inaudible in performance. For some composers and circumstances, the publication of such editions truly is a heroic scholarly undertaking—in Italian and French grand opera, for example—but Beethoven’s orchestral scores are a known quantity, and the choice of one edition over another is neither a meaningful artistic decision nor a legitimate selling point.
Finally, we need to discuss the question of “authentic” or “period” instruments and the “historically informed performance” (HIP) movement as it applies to Beethoven. At its inception, in the 1960s and ’70s, the main purpose of HIP was to permit us to hear reams of hitherto disregarded baroque and early music in circumstances as close as possible to what we believe audiences of the time experienced. This was tremendously exciting, indeed revelatory, and the scholarly apparatus that supported this effort has since evolved into an entirely new discipline: “applied musicology.” However, as the HIP movement began encroaching on the standard classical and romantic repertoire, its achievements began to sound less and less impressive.
In the first place, the music of Haydn, Mozart, and especially Beethoven, never has been out of the active repertoire. Today’s modern instruments, orchestras, and performance traditions were shaped by the need to play this very music in conditions as near to ideal as possible. Also, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the best orchestras in Beethoven’s day—indeed, the only ones we would recognize as fully professional ensembles featuring something approaching modern performance standards—were likely far closer to what we are accustomed to hearing now than they are to any HIP organization, especially the ones that specialize in baroque repertoire and only make the occasional foray into later music.
Indeed, our distance from Beethoven himself, historically speaking, has been grossly exaggerated. Great conductors born within fifty years of Beethoven’s death lived to make magnificent recordings of his music, and some of them worked well into the era of stereo long-playing records. I’m thinking of men such as Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957), Pierre Monteux (1875–1964), or Bruno Walter (1876–1962). The first conductor to record a complete Beethoven symphony cycle, Felix Weingartner (d. 1942), was born in 1863, only thirty-six years after Beethoven’s death. Even Carl Schuricht, whose Paris Beethoven cycle I just mentioned, was born in 1880. You can’t convince me that some young HIP hotshot has a stronger connection to the musical aesthetics of the nineteenth century than they did and, consequently, knows how to play Beethoven more idiomatically. The audible evidence is ready to hand.
Many of the most effective “innovations” promulgated by the HIP movement, such as swifter tempos, certain approaches to phrasing and articulation, or the use of timpani with hard sticks and a willingness to play specific passages literally as regards instrumental balance and dynamics, have been completely co-opted by standard orchestras and their conductors, with results that tend to sound far superior than anything achievable on period instruments. After all, these orchestras still boast the finest players, the best-quality instruments, and a corporate identity and ensemble standard that no “pickup” group (which is what most HIP ensembles are) can hope to match. It’s telling that one of the most respected and authoritative founding fathers of the historical performance movement, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, when he came to record his Beethoven cycle, used a modern string ensemble mixed with a few period winds for the sake of their unique timbres.
The applied musicology crowd simply gets some details wrong. This is a discussion for another time, but suffice it to say that its more fanatical proponents have an understandable tendency to give greater weight to anything that makes a performance sound different from today’s norm. Much of their credibility rests on their ability to make a new sort of noise, for which they then can claim historical validation. The bottom line, as I never tire of saying, is that a great performance is a great performance, and it makes not a whit of difference if it’s thoroughly traditional in conception or one that follows that latest HIP thinking. Interpretations that do the music justice will have more in common with each other for this very reason, never mind trivial variations in playing techniques or instrument construction.
Beethoven was a transitional figure. His early music tends to respond better to the current HIP approach than the more adventurous middle period or later works. For example, no great period instrument recordings exist of the Ninth Symphony, a piece that in many respects looks far into the future and sounds like nothing else of its time; nor any major HIP recordings of the concertos that feature the classical fortepiano or the baroque violin, although some noteworthy performances combine modern soloists with period instrument ensembles for accompaniment. Modern instruments evolved to overcome the obvious deficiencies of their earlier counterparts, and the superior results achieved by the great pianists and violinists who play them speak for themselves. When we get a violinist of the caliber of Jascha Heifetz playing Beethoven on a baroque violin, or we find the Martha Argerich of the fortepiano, then perhaps we’ll have something to talk about. Until then, don’t be fooled into believing that it’s the instrument that makes the better performance.
In short, since the early nineteenth century, orchestral performance standards have changed markedly for the better, but performance ideals—not so much. This is because the actual music dictates both, and the most powerful voice driving this process remains Beethoven’s.
The symphony orchestra must be accounted one of the greatest products of Western civilization, truly an extraordinary creation. We tend to take it for granted, assuming that some one hundred individuals, playing roughly a dozen and a half assorted types of instruments, come together and make beautiful music as a matter of course. We all too readily forget just how remarkable a thing it is. For Beethoven, however, the orchestra was still very much in the process of becoming its modern self. If not exactly a blank slate, a lot about it remained to be discovered and exploited. This he did with a daring, an imagination, and an uninhibited gusto unmatched to this day.