This Day in Classical Music History (Beethoven Makes Public Debut)

March 29, 1795—In Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, 24-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven served notice of a new era in music with a debut in which he played one of his own compositions, leaving listeners running out of superlatives for a new, young force daring to break convention.

I see all kinds of quiz results taken by friends on Facebook. I’ve always avoided these until last week, when, on a classical music history site, I took one that matched my psychological profile to the closest composer. I was expecting—all right, hoping—that the response that would come up would be George Gershwin, a figure of real accomplishment who also happened to be a pretty convivial guy.

Instead, I learned, I matched up most closely with Beethoven.

If you want to know the truth, I read the assessment with some ambivalence. Being compared with a genius is flattering, if transparently ludicrous. But being compared with one whose tempestuous nature led contemporaries (and even a few biographers) to question his sanity—well, that was a different story.

Then I read the summary of why we matched. It seems that we both were enormously, even obsessively, driven in our creative pursuits, sometimes to the point where we worked in solitude for maximum concentration. Neither of us could be said to have many friends, but those friends we did have, we felt intense loyalty to.

Phrased that way, I suppose, we did have something in common. (And so now, Faithful Reader, you have two profiles: not just one of the composer, but also one far more elusive in this blog: of myself.)

Historical eras are notoriously arbitrary conventions, and perhaps none more than musical ones. For instance, what distinguishes the Classical from the Romantic composers? Beethoven, for instance, is generally lumped in with Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a Classical composer, but that seems, as much as anything else, a convenient way of classifying him with them according to a preset timeline and a personal association of the three.

In other important respects, though, Beethoven can be seen as a harbinger of the Romantic Era. His music, like others of the latter era, dealt with nature (e.g., the “Pastoral” Symphony); found many of its deepest wellsprings in literature (Plutarch provided spiritual consolation as his hearing deteriorated); dealt with the tumultuous power of love (the Moonlight Sonata); and embodied his advocacy of greater artistic and political freedom (he stripped his dedication of the Eroica Symphony to Napoleon after the latter had himself crowned emperor of France).

Learning at the hands of Haydn would have been an opportunity that almost anyone else would have dreamed of, but Beethoven was soon intent on cutting loose on his own. Before long, he received his chance at a series of charity concerts, benefiting widows and orphans of the Society of Musicians, at the Burgtheater, the national theater of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

He may have been outspoken in his republican sympathies, but an artist—even one, like Beethoven, intent on creating a commercial market for his work that would liberate him from patrons—has to start somewhere. For Beethoven, it was this national court of the empire in which he lived. The first benefactor of the theater, Emperor Josef II, had boosted attendance simply by showing up, providing a venue where those who hoped to influence imperial policy.

The stakes for Beethoven’s first public performance were enormous, demonstrated by the stress-induced abdominal power that had not bothered him in his native Bonn but that had bedeviled him since arriving in Vienna. Now, “severe colic” plagued him at the most inopportune moment: just as he was striving to complete his composition in time for his show. In the end, he was only able to get it done with two days to spare, as copyists sat in an anteroom, receiving one page at a time of the finale.

It is difficult, given the place that Beethoven occupies in the now-starchy classical music universe, to get a sense of the seismic impact of his performance. “Apart from the beauty and originality of his ideas, and his ingenious manner of expressing them, there was something magical about his playing,” observed fellow pianist-composer Carl Czerny. Late last year, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, in listing Beethoven’s unique contribution to classical music instrumentation, pointed out that “The modern piano bears the imprint of his demand for a more resonant and flexible instrument.”

Contemporary listeners knew they were in the presence of something overwhelming, but none of the acclaim translated into the groupies who would throw themselves at a later piano life force, Franz Liszt. Beethoven courted a number of women in his lifetime, but as soon as they got a load of his temperamental outbursts and often slovenly, smelly apparel, they’d had enough.

The composition that Beethoven tried out that magical night in 1795, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major, was one he had been working on ever before arriving in Vienna several years before. He was not terribly impressed with it, perhaps feeling it a bit derivative of Mozart, and so he would revise it a fair amount before he would allow it to be printed several years later. That only demonstrated his perfectionist streak all the more.

(To see—and hear—what the effect was about with this work, please see this YouTube clip of this composition, featuring the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelson, with Paul Lewis on the piano.)

Quote of the Day (E.M. Forster, on Why His Poor Piano Performances Were Useful)

“These grow worse yearly, but never will I give them up. For one thing, they compel me to attend no wool-gathering or thinking myself clever here – and they drain off all non-musical matter. For another thing, they teach me a little about construction. I see what becomes of a phrase, how it is transformed or returned, sometimes bottom upward, and get some notion of the relation of keys. Playing Beethoven, as I generally do, I grow familiar with his tricks, his impatience, his sudden softnesses, his dropping of a tragic theme one semitone, his love, when tragic, for the key of C minor, and his aversion to the key of B major. This gives me a physical approach of Beethoven which cannot be gained through the slough of ‘appreciation.’ Even when people play as badly as I do, they should continue: it will help them to listen.”—E. M. Forster (1879-1970), “Not Listening to Music,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

The portrait of British novelist-essayist E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was painted by Dora Carrington around 1924 or 1925.

This Day in Classical Music History (Mysterious Beethoven Death Solved?)

March 26, 1827—Late in the afternoon, lightning streaks illuminated the room where Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying. The composer, as defiant toward the elements and death as he had been all his life toward musical and social convention, raised and shook his fist at the storm raging outside, then, exhausted from the struggle, slumped back and perished. 

After 20,000 lined the streets of Vienna to pay final tribute at his funeral, questions began to crop up about the cause of death. Foul play didn’t come up, mind you, but all kinds of other possibilities did, especially because of the ill health with which the composer struggled so long.

Beethoven had been caught in a rainstorm a few months previously and he had never been the same afterward, so pneumonia was one logical cause of death. But over the years, some wondered about dropsy, a condition involving an accumulation of diluted lymph in body tissues and cavities. Some mentioned alcoholic cirrhosis, infectious hepatitis, sarcoidosis and Whipple's disease. Still others speculated darkly about syphilis, a disease that, before Paul Ehrlich’s discovery of the “magic bullet” that would kill the microbe bearing the condition but not the patient, involved shame for its sufferers and their families. Syphilis, it was suggested, could have caused the deafness that altered the course of the composer’s life.

Over the last decade, what appears to be a solution to the mystery was proposed. It came not from a musicologist, a historian/biographer, nor even a doctor, but from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The medical detective work began with strands of the composer’s hair clipped from his head the day after his death by the young musician Frederick Hiller. The precious relics stayed through several generations of Hiller’s family until after World War II, when they presented it to the Danish physician Kay Fremming in gratitude for his work on behalf of Jews. After his death, they were purchased by four American admirers of the composer.

Now, a question might be popping into the heads of Tea Party sympathizers (even some who aren’t): Why on earth was the Department of Energy concerning itself with this rather than, say, diminishing American reliance on foreign oil? Well, as one of the medical detectives, Dr. William Walsh, explained it in a PBS interview in 2005, his collaborator on the process was studying how bacteria can take lead and other toxins out of the environment, while he himself was trying to understand the causes of autism and Alzheimer's Disease. 

The researchers were able to dispense with the most sensational hypothesis of Beethoven’s cause of death. They found no traces of mercury, the most common treatment in those days for syphilis.

But the medical detectives came up with a connection between Beethoven’s death and the physical agonies that began to plague him in his early-to-mid-twenties. None of the many doctors he consulted could alleviate his terrible abdominal pain. By the age of 29, he was writing his brother that he had contemplated suicide over the condition. 

Using DNA analysis of the strands from Beethoven’s hair as well as a fragment of his skull, Dr. Walsh, an expert in forensic analysis, concluded that Beethoven's misery had been caused by lead poisoning. The composer might not necessarily have even been exposed to high levels of this, but if he could not eliminate the poisons from his system, they would have accumulated over time. It might have contributed to his death as well.

The work of Dr. Walsh might explain much, but it also opens another avenue of speculation: for instance, on Beethoven’s level of productivity compared to other greats of the classical era, Frank Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

In a college music humanities class, our instructor had pointed to the number of symphonies this trio had composed: Haydn, 106; Mozart, 41 that are formally numbered; Beethoven, only eight. That last total, the instructor explained, came about because Beethoven was attempting not so much to complete a composition as to utterly transform a particular musical form.

The more recent medical diagnosis makes one wonder about the suggestion by my instructor. What if Beethoven was not simply being perfectionist, but was also horribly distracted by his medical condition?

Traditionally, it’s been Beethoven’s deafness that has been cited as a contributing cause of his depression and irritability. The lead poisoning diagnosis fills out the picture, but there’s one thing it can’t do: account for the composer’s refusal to take any drug that might dull his mind during composition, or explain the courage he needed to surmount his frailty.

This Day in Television History (Leonard Bernstein, in Debut as Great Musical Communicator)

November 14, 1954—Eleven years to the day he electrified classical music audiences by appearing for the first time at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein made a debut of a different kind: as a master music teacher for the television age, on the CBS arts-and-entertainment show Omnibus.

The appearance, in which he led viewers through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, describing the composer’s tortured attempts to come up with just the right notes, capped a year of frenetic activity for the multi-tasking maestro.

At the start of 1954, he temporarily set aside plans to collaborate with Lillian Hellman on a musical adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide—their response to the cultural blight of McCarthyism—to work on an Oscar-nominated score for On the Waterfront, and in the summer he had toiled over Serenade, his “violin concerto” for soloist, string orchestra, harp, and percussion. In the fall, while meeting three or four times a week to discuss Candide, he was also teaching a seminar on musical theater at Brandeis.

That’s when he was approached to do a program on Beethoven by a feature editor for Omnibus, a culture magazine show funded by the Ford Foundation. The show was distinctive in a couple of ways: for what it said about the head of the network on which it appeared, William S. Paley, and for what it demonstrated about the initial optimism spawned by new forms of entertainment.

In David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, Truman Capote noted that the CBS founder “looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” Part of Paley continually acceded to the lowest common denominator, as in the 1960s, when he seemed bent on stocking his primetime lineup with one dumb-hick show after another (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and Hee Haw).

But another side of him wanted to make CBS “the Tiffany Network,” a force for socially responsible journalism (Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now) and cultural-enhancing programming. Omnibus, with British journalist Alistair Cooke performing the same urbane host role that he would years later on Masterpiece Theatre, was an example of the latter.

(Nearly 30 years later, Paley sought again to create culturally relevant programming, this time with the CBS Cable network. That effort lasted only one year, compared with the four Omnibus stayed on the mother network’s schedule in the 1950s. (Omnibus moved to ABC and NBC before expiring in 1961.)

Omnibus illustrates both the inherent hazards and lasting triumphs of this kind of programming. In the 20th century, nearly every new medium was hailed for opening up new creative possibilities, only to fall victim to the lure of lucre. During the 1930s, radio brought to the fore the likes of Norman Corwin and the brilliant young Orson Welles. But by the end of the 1940s, Kirk Douglas’ George Phipps character in A Letter to Three Wives, acting as a virtual stand-in for writer-director Joe Mankiewicz, was assailing the purpose of radio writing: “to prove to the masses that a deodorant can bring happiness... a mouth wash guarantee success and a laxative attract romance.”

More recently, cable TV has garnered most of the awards at the Emmys with shows like The Sopranos. But look around all the cable channels these days and answer: how many of these innovative, thought-provoking channels are being put on the schedule versus, say, reality shows?

The situation was far different in 1954. Humphrey Burton’s biography, Leonard Bernstein, notes that his subject instantly seized on the intriguing idea presented by the Omnibus feature editor.

Despite his other commitments, the composer flung himself into the new assignment: writing his own script, sharpening it in consultation with producer Robert Saudek, memorizing lines, practicing all of this plus the extracts of the Fifth Symphony that he would conduct and play on the piano.

It was as exhilarating as anything Bernstein had ever done before—a chance to combine his roles as conductor, pianist, teacher, and himself—the creation of The Leonard Bernstein Brand, if you will—and all broadcast live. He not only had to be good, but perfect.

You can see Bernstein’s 20 minutes of material, broken up into sections, on YouTube. Take a look at this example and you’ll see how the composer wove visuals, startling comparisons, and pitch-perfect performing:

* Bernstein appeared at first as a silhouette in a circular spotlight, surrounded completely by darkness—as effective a dramatic opening on TV as it would be in a theater.

* Dressed in a dark suit and tie, speaking a bit formally, Bernstein livened up his presentation with vivid illustrations. Beethoven, striving for a shocking tone in his Fifth, wanted a “brusque, rude” opening, Bernstein observed, pointing out that a flute was not used because it would intrude “like a delicate lady at a club smoker.”

* To illustrate how Beethoven sought to balance different tones, Bernstein and the producers used musicians standing on a reproduction of the score on the studio floor.

* Demonstrating Beethoven’s relentless, agonized experiments with sounds (this, at a time when the composer was losing his battle with deafness), Bernstein pointed to the composer’s notebook—filled with cramped, overflowing, sometimes illegible handwriting—then contrasted it with a neat specimen from Igor Stravinsky.

Bernstein had taken an all-too-well-known composition and turned it into something fresh and exciting, revealing Beethoven’s multiple roads-not-taken. No more clear and vivid demonstration could be offered of how the finished masterpiece was “built with ferocity and shock.” Only a fellow composer of breathtaking ambition, such as Bernstein himself, could convey to the average viewer what was involved in this titanic inward creative struggle.

That appearance, widely acclaimed, earned Bernstein $3,500—money he could use at this point, since, even though he was now reaching the pinnacle of his career, he was going through the money quickly. He would go on to make several other appearances on Omnibus, explicating, among other matters, Johann Sebastian Bach and the American musical comedy.

Later, over the course of 14 years, Bernstein would also lead 53 Young People’s Concerts. His total achievement in the new medium was enormous: as critic Samuel Lipman wrote, it constituted “the last intellectually sophisticated and successful attempt made to interest and educate today’s vast public in the great masterpieces of the Western musical tradition.”

Bernstein had exposed a whole generation of young viewers to the marvels of classical music, and he represented a colossus in American music, as composer, conductor, pianist, educator and author. Yet all of those activities came to haunt him eventually.

A massive hit to Bernstein’s reputation came when a 1970 fundraiser he and his wife Felicia held for the Black Panthers became the subject of Tom Wolfe’s wickedly funny Radical Chic. Yet I don’t think that book, though it received much attention, wounded Bernstein that much. After all, he could say, that book concerned his political sympathies rather than his creative output.

What really hurt, I think, were two essays written a decade later. Leon Botstein in Harper’s (“The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein,” 1983) and Samuel Lipman in The New Criterion (“Lenny on our Minds,” 1985), while hailing him for his great talent—and his TV lectures—also took him to task for frittering away his energies.

Both Botstein and Lipman criticized his fondness for the grand gesture. Lipman even noted that “his heaven-sent gifts for the electronic communication of high musical art have foundered on the twin shoals of overintellectualization and exaggerated self-promotion.”

Lipman believed that Bernstein fell victim to the particular political climate of the ‘60s, but I think the explanation for Bernstein’s somewhat diminished creativity over the last two decades of his life was much simpler: his increasingly fragile emotional and physical state.

No longer able to suppress his homosexual instincts, Bernstein left his wife for another man. Her death from cancer two years later in 1978 left him with searing guilt, as did the curse she laid on him after he told her of his decision to separate: “You’re going to die a bitter and lonely old man.”
His incessant smoking also caught up with him, and Bernstein died, an exhausted shell, in 1990.
But Bernstein’s multiple roles, far from diminishing his creativity, helped him, I think. His own understanding of a composer’s creative struggles informed his classroom lectures, and the latter in turn made him think through logically parts of his work he had approached unconsciously.

Energy and flamboyance were part and parcel of Bernstein’s egomania, but they underlay the magnetism that made him an ideal communicator of the wonders of classical music. Many reasons have been given in recent years for the decline of classical music, but surely one negative factor is that nobody has emerged to take his place as TV’s great musical educator for a new generation.

This Day in Classical Music History (Beethoven’s Last Concert)

February 11, 1814—Following a creative drought caused by increasing deafness and depression, Ludwig von Beethoven performed for the last time in public as a pianist. Characteristically, the piece, one of his own compositions, turned out to be his most demanding one in the piano trio genre.

Trio in Bb Major, Op. 97, Beethoven’s sixth piano trio, has been nicknamed “Archduke,” in tribute to his recent patron and longtime pupil, Archduke Rudolph of Austria. The 26-year-old was not just any ordinary noble; he was not only the youngest brother of Francis II, Emperor of Austria, but also a force in the Roman Catholic Church (six years after this performance, he’d be named Cardinal-Archbishop of Olmutz).

Luckily for Beethoven, Rudolph was as good a friend as he was a diligent pupil (20 years a student of the composer). In 1809, in an attempt to keep the composer in Vienna, he and two other princes cobbled together a yearly annuity of 4,000 florins to surmount his restlessness about court life—flaring up all the more now that Jerome Bonaparte, newly installed as King of Westphalia by his brother, the Emperor Bonaparte, offered him a post as kappelmeister at a higher salary.

There were no conditions on the annuity from Rudolph and friends, except that the composer just stay put. He could create music whenever he wanted, for whatever occasion. I’m not quite sure, as some have claimed, that this made Beethoven the first “independent” composer, but it certainly gave him a leg up on poor Bach, Haydn and Mozart, who were, contractually speaking, part of the domestic staff of aristocrats—and, sometimes to their chagrin, treated as such.

Rudolph’s generosity is all the more impressive considering who he was dealing with. His notebooks exhortations to the contrary (“Never overtly show all men the contempt which they deserve, for one can never know when one may need them”), Beethoven was still given to irascibility. In the past, friends and admirers would have written it off to artistic temperament, a tendency strengthened by the composer’s immediate apologies for his displays.

By 1812, however, his deafness—the first symptoms of which appeared roughly around 1796--had progressed markedly. He could no longer, as he once had, perform in concert as a soloist. People had to raise their voices when speaking to him.

Eventually, the composer would use an ear trumpet and “Conversation Books” in order to communicate with the world. They weren’t helping him when he wrote his piano trio, however.

Many theories have been deduced about what caused Beethoven’s hearing impairment, but what might have mattered most, for his mental health, was what he thought of it. According to Maynard Solomon’s Second Revised Edition of his biography Beethoven, the composer thought, amazingly enough, that he himself was responsible, the result of rage against “a very ill-tempered, troublesome primo tenore” who was giving him problems about one of his operas.

Whatever one thinks of this idea, the mere thought of it must have been enough to fill Beethoven with self-loathing, even as his disability made him more paranoia about the rest of the world. (Think about it for a second: You can’t hear what people are saying, so maybe they’re talking about you.)

After the passage of time, it’s possible to joke about Beethoven’s travails, as Monty Python did with its sketch about “Beethoven’s Mynah Bird.” But the historical fact was much more serious. By mid-1813, Beethoven had grown so morose and slovenly as to alarm friends. The turn of the year finally found him coming slowly out of his torpor, buoyed enough by two new compositions, Wellington’s Victory and the Seventh Symphony, to take up more substantial work.

Some believe that the first performance of his last piano trio might have taken place in Rudolph’s own home. But at some point, the piece was deemed suitable for public performance. If the composer was going to be pressed into service to do so at a point where he had largely sworn it off, he’d have to feel a sufficient comfort level about this.

This was arranged, as two frequent collaborators joined Beethoven in this combo: violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh (leader of the string quartet that introduced many of Beethoven's quartets and later some of Schubert's) and cellist Joseph Linke (for whom Beethoven composed sonatas). Schuppanzigh in particular would make Beethoven come out of his shell: the composer loved the fun he could have teasing his friend on account of his bulk (the violinist used always to complain about climbing the four floors to Beethoven’s apartment) as much as he did about the high quality of his art.

One of Beethoven’s most famous pieces was nicknamed “Eroica,” but, in truth, his ability to return to composing at a time of self-doubt and heartache must itself be called heroic. Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, translated and edited by Michael Hamburger, includes much inspiration about the creative process and how to live one’s life in the face of disappointment, including the following:

“My present life must not continue! Art demands even this sacrifice. Rest in your recreations, so as to work all the more vigorously in your art!”

And perhaps, even more so, this:
“There is much to be done on earth; do it soon!”