7

THE RECEPTION OF THE ‘EROICA’

As we have seen, Beethoven’s new symphony was launched with a handful of semi-public performances by the private orchestra of its dedicatee, Prince Lobkowitz. It is certain that by today’s standards these would have been fairly painful affairs for the hearers. Neither of Beethoven’s previous two symphonies had proved easy to play, but the challenges of the ‘Eroica’ were in a league of their own. This was no average eighteenth-century chamber work, which would have been well within the players’ scope by being shorter, with fewer excursions into unfamiliar keys, with more musical clichés giving opportunities for playing on autopilot, and generally more predictable in every sense. That being said, the number of instruments needed for the ‘Eroica’ was not much greater than was required for Mozart’s late G minor Symphony, a performance of which in Baron van Swieten’s house with the composer present was so distressingly bad that Mozart reportedly had to leave the room. The raggedness of an orchestra naturally tended to increase with the number of instruments and the difficulty of the music, and it was really only in the second decade of the nineteenth century, when symphonists such as Beethoven had nourished a fashion for ever-larger ensembles, that the role of a separate conductor for an orchestra became established as a matter of course and out of real necessity. With few exceptions the tradition of a continuo player leading from a keyboard had barely outlived the eighteenth century, and a member of the orchestra—usually the Konzertmeister (the leader of the first violins)—would indicate the time in the trickier places by waving his bow. Beethoven’s own interventions as a conductor in the rehearsals for the ‘Eroica’ were disastrous and muddled still further players already at sea in his difficult work. Complete breakdowns and restarts were frequent.

The programme contained the First and Second Symphonies, the Piano Concerto in C minor (soloist Beethoven) and the first performance of the oratorio Christus am Oelberge. It began at 8 a.m.; by 2.30 everyone was exhausted and angry. But for dear, kind Prince Lichnowsky… the day would have been a fiasco. He it was who thoughtfully provided baskets of bread and butter, meat and wine, fed the hungry men and persuaded them to try again. Even then the oratorio was not a great success. For once the crowd instinct was right: Beethoven had misjudged his style, as he himself admitted later.¹

Only the previous year Beethoven had confided in a friend, the violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, that he was dissatisfied with his works so far. ‘From today’, he said, ‘I intend to take a new road.’ The ‘Eroica’ was therefore Beethoven’s first symphony in what he thought of as his new style.

The first proper review was of a performance in January 1805 and appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on 13 February. The reviewer began ominously with a gushing eulogy of Beethoven’s First Symphony as ‘a glorious work of art’ with ‘an extraordinary wealth of lovely ideas treated in the most splendid and graceful style, with coherence, order and clarity reigning throughout’. Having established this point of comparison he put the boot in. In essence, he said, this new Third Symphony was

a daring, wild fantasy of inordinate length and extremely difficult to play. There is no lack of striking and beautiful passages in which the composer’s power and talent are obvious; but often the work seems to lose itself in utter confusion. It begins with a powerfully scored Allegro in E flat, followed by a Funeral March in C minor, treated fugally towards the end.… This writer belongs to Beethoven’s warmest admirers, but in the present work he finds very much that is odd and harsh that enormously increases the difficulty of understanding the music and almost completely obscuring its unity.²

The same critic was still more dismissive of another performance in April, this time criticizing the symphony’s inordinate length, recommending that Beethoven shorten it and saying it had lasted ‘a full hour’, which does suggest much slower tempi than would be usual today. The performance he was referring to took place in the Theater an der Wien and was the work’s true public premiere, which the composer himself, now very deaf, conducted with a flurry of distracting gestures and ferocious glares. It was scarcely a triumph. The orchestra was as much at sea as the audience, and at one point the pianist-composer Carl Czerny heard the heartfelt cry from the gallery of a man who, no doubt bitterly thinking of his entrance fee, shouted in exasperation, ‘I’d give another Kreutzer if only it would stop!’ Baffled as many of Beethoven’s listeners might have been, they probably would not have gone as far as the wise men of Prague Conservatory a little later who, when the ‘Eroica’ was performed there, declared it ‘morally depraved’ (ein sittenverderbendes Werk). Nor did it help the symphony’s immediate reception that it was not finally published until 1806, which made the parts more accessible and reliable than those transcribed by copyists. After that, with one or two notable exceptions, its fame and acceptance grew rapidly the more it was heard.

All the same, there was at the time no lack of dissenting voices of those who thought the ‘Eroica’ was an incoherent din, and some people just never did acquire a taste for Beethoven, who seemed to them to grow ever more outlandish, his late works being quite impenetrable. George Onslow (1784–1853), a French composer with an English father, said in an interview with Joseph d’Ortigue, a music critic, ‘Beethoven’s last quartets are mistakes, absurdities, the daydreams of a sick genius… I would burn everything I have composed if I ever wrote anything resembling such chaos.’³ And on 6 February 1881 John Ruskin—himself a musical dilettante of the Mendelssohn school—wrote in a letter to his friend Dr John Brown: ‘What you say of Turner is such a joy to me, but how did you get to understand Beethoven? He always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.’

Ironically, seeing that Beethoven had been planning to use this symphony as a calling card for his move to Paris, it seems not to have been performed in France until 1825 when it was cautiously given, together with the Seventh Symphony, in a private performance. Afterwards a member of the orchestra generously allowed that ‘these two symphonies contained some tolerable passages; and that notwithstanding length, incoherence, and want of connection they were not unlikely to be effective’.⁴

In some ways it was the ‘Eroica’ that fixed the symphony as music’s leading form in the nineteenth century. Its expansion of musical language—its fluidity of form, the stretching of the harmonically permissible with brutal dynamic contrasts—led inexorably to Wagner and the cementing of a kind of Teutonic hegemony over the century’s musical taste. This was often fiercely opposed by composers of other nationalities (especially French), who found themselves comparatively helpless before the near-universal acceptance of German culture’s brand of high moral seriousness as the sine qua non of ‘proper’ music. The self-proclaimed new style in which Beethoven had written the ‘Eroica’ was much later to be named his ‘symphonic ideal’, as will be seen in the next chapter. The imperious, buttonholing quality that made its first movement so impossible to ignore was exactly what some people disliked about the ‘Eroica’ and Beethoven’s later symphonies, particularly the Fifth and the Ninth. They were all too clearly public music designed to sway and edify: arguably the earliest manifestation of a certain hectoring quality that was to become more evident in later Germanic symphonists such as Richard Strauss and Mahler (‘Listen, damn you: this is serious! It’s for your own good’).

There was always opposition to this awed weightiness in France and Italy. Years ago at a concert in Florence I saw a programme note whose writer said the glory of Bach was that he committed one to nothing other than formal beauty, so it was hard to become bored with him, but that Beethoven demanded constant attention like ‘a mutinous adolescent’—a phrase I have never forgotten. In the twentieth century, transatlantic musicians also managed slowly to haul themselves from beneath the stifling horse-blanket of the German classics. ‘If I hear another bar of the “Eroica,” I’ll scream’, Glenn Gould remarked when interviewing himself about Beethoven.⁵ Elsewhere he described Beethoven as ‘the one composer whose reputation is based entirely on gossip’.⁶ He was more specific when singling out Beethoven’s so-called ‘middle period’, which is usually dated as having begun immediately after the Heiligenstadt crisis. The ‘Eroica’ therefore qualifies as its first major work. ‘In this period’, Gould said,

Beethoven offered us the supreme historical example of a composer on an ego trip, a composer absolutely confident that whatever he did was justified simply because he did it. I don’t know any other way to explain the predominance of those empty, banal, belligerent gestures that serve as his themes in that middle period… All in all, I’d have to say that Beethoven’s most consistently excellent works are those from his early period, before his hearing started to go—let’s face it, that did affect his later work—and before his ego took complete command.⁷

The contemporary American composer Ned Rorem makes no bones about Beethoven being someone whose music he simply doesn’t need in the way that he needs French music, despite having performed many of Beethoven’s piano works in public and ruefully conceding that he (together with Schubert) is ‘untouchable’. Untouchability, of course, is the worst aspect of the Pantheon’s fossilizing tendency in that it leaves no real middle course between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection. John Cage reportedly disliked Beethoven while Michael Tippett was a devotee. Benjamin Britten famously repudiated his early obsession with the composer, saying in 1963, ‘Sometimes I feel I have lost the point of what he’s up to. I heard recently the [last] Piano Sonata, Op. 111. The sound of the variations was so grotesque I just couldn’t see what they were all about.’⁸ This judgement makes Britten sound indistinguishable from any of Beethoven’s more querulous Viennese critics a century and a half earlier.

Yet for certain contemporary composers Beethoven is a figure to whom they find themselves returning. After taking Beethoven somewhat for granted for much of his life, Harrison Birtwistle has said:

Nowadays I have a completely different feeling about Beethoven, in a way I couldn’t have felt in the past. He’s a composer who never, ever, does what you expect him to. And what he does is never contrived. There’s an early piano sonata—No. 11 [the B flat major, Op. 22, of 1800]—it’s a bit like an embryonic ‘Hammerklavier’. I thought it was extraordinary. In one sense you know the harmonic language but everything seemed new, as if for the first time. In some ways these thoughts [about Beethoven] have made me qualify my feelings about music I don’t like. Or didn’t like. Or didn’t think I liked.⁹

Yet if Glenn Gould liked some of the early Beethoven (though the sonata Birtwistle singles out happens to be one that Gould particularly disparaged), there are modern musicians who find the late works indispensable. While conceding that Beethoven is not really a regular topic of conversation among his contemporaries, the composer Colin Matthews admits that ‘they (like me) are likely to be drawn much more to the late sonatas and quartets than to the symphonies. The late works mean a great deal to me personally—and I don’t think anyone writing quartets can possibly shut their ears to these so great works.’

That a modern composer can still experience this difficult music as a source of inspiration is surely an impressive indication of just how far ahead of his time the visionary old composer was. And not merely ahead of his time, either, but sometimes outside it altogether. If when you hear the slow, songlike theme that opens and closes the last movement of the E major Piano Sonata, Op. 109, the conviction suddenly comes that this is music for the end of the world, trying to get your inner sceptic to refute the idea is fanciful. My guess is you will fail, and Beethoven’s serene and weightless song really will be the one the world ends to: terminal stillness finally made audible.