5

CONSTRUCTING A SYMPHONY

How far should one go in presuming to link biographical detail with an artwork? There has long been a tendency among certain biographers, especially modern ones, to try to ‘get inside’ Beethoven’s mind during the creative process. The spur to this has usually been the archive of sketches and other documents he carefully hoarded. Older composers such as Haydn, Mozart and above all Bach have been largely spared the more graphic of such attempts, because they left comparatively few—if any—such pointers as to how a particular work was conceived, as opposed to noting who had commissioned it. A fascination with people’s emotional states was very much a Romantic phenomenon and one perfectly exemplified by Beethoven’s contemporary, the composer-writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was to write so passionately about Beethoven and most famously about the Fifth Symphony. This is how Hoffmann began his rhapsody about ‘a work that is splendid beyond all measure’:

How irresistibly does this wonderful composition transport the listener through ever growing climaxes into the spiritual realm of the infinite… The character of apprehensive, restless longing contained in this movement is made even plainer by the melodious subsidiary theme. The breast that is oppressed and alarmed by intimations of things monstrous, destructive, and threatening wheezes for air with wrenching gasps.¹

The oppressed breast and wrenching gasps are suggestive of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1782) and the whole consumptive world of the emerging Romantic period. Who knows if it bore even the remotest connection to Beethoven’s creative process? This particular way of writing about music was the progenitor of some of the worst purple passages in the history of Western literature, many of them perpetrated about the same symphony. Perhaps the most notorious example is that in Chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, describing a performance in the Queen’s Hall, London. Forster’s editorializing begins with the bland and unverifiable assertion, ‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’ His ensuing description tells us nothing whatever about the music and everything about the musically illiterate English middle-classes of the Bloomsbury period. We begin at the end of the slow movement:

Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said ‘Heigho’, and the Andante came to an end… Helen said to her aunt: ‘Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing… Look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,’ breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right. Her brother raised his finger; it was the transitional passage on the drum. For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then—he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. Any fate was titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.

Goblins, elephants, demigods, angels. As an accomplished composer himself Hoffmann could surely never have perpetrated this menagerie; but as a Romantic writer raised on the novels of Jean Paul his language was undoubtedly that of the emotions music could evoke and a certain extravagance was always likely. One drawback of this way of writing about music is that it becomes nearly inevitable that such writers confuse their own reactions with the composer’s intentions.

There is a case to be made for calling Beethoven the first genius in the modern sense. Previously, an exceptional artist such as Mozart simply had genius as a gift from God. It inhabited rather than personified him. But with the writings of Hoffmann the idea of the genius took hold: an exceptional artist who by his own efforts rather than supernatural ones transfigured himself into a victorious Olympian, a metamorphosis that requisitioned every aspect of his life and being.

To some extent we still retain this notion. Johann Rochlitz, a tenor singer who knew Beethoven well, once described him as ‘a very able man reared on a desert island and suddenly brought fresh into the world’.² And there he is: the Caliban archetype of the modern-style genius untainted by a debased civilization, uncaring of social conventions and even of the law, taking dictation from his inner daemon. A holy man, a sadhu, his body covered in filth and ashes but his mind dwelling among the stars. A certain strand of Beethoven biographies has always helped this image along with imaginative word-portraits of the composer striding tousled about the Austrian landscape, howling snatches of music, stamping his feet to inner rhythms and occasionally stopping to scribble illegible notes on a tattered sheaf of manuscript paper or to shake his fist at the elements as a sort of symphonic King Lear. For all one knows it might have been exactly like that: it remains a harmless fancy. Yet trying to guess the thought processes of creative artists is inevitably presumptuous, no matter what they said about themselves. The same applies to assigning a ‘meaning’ to a piece of music even if, as with the ‘Eroica’, the composer assigned it the title ‘Bonaparte’ from the first and labelled its slow movement ‘Funeral March’. Quite enough for speculation; yet nothing like enough for psychoanalytical certainty.

Then there is the problem of the Past, where things were thought and done differently. Was Mozart’s late G minor Symphony ‘autobiographical’? It is not even clear what this might mean other than in vague terms of the work’s ‘mood’—and even that is open to radically opposed interpretations. Today we hear it as redolent of passion and tragedy, whereas Schumann, the arch-romantic and one of the nineteenth century’s astutest composer-critics, perceived only a ‘Grecian lightness and grace’.