A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Beethoven
I have deliberately put off my look at Beethoven until now, as I want to do justice to a composer whom I rate personally as the greatest of them all. I have even crossed the “who v whom” Rubicon, which has been niggling me for months. I know it should be whom when the name becomes the object/accusative of the sentence, but my rationale has been that this distinction has become redundant and archaic, and therefore now looks fussy. However, for this late (not final) article in my series about the great composers, I have decided to indulge myself, since I am about to make several sweeping and subjective claims for the superiority of a composer who still arouses strong feelings and emotions, and who has become something of a Marmite figure among musicians!
Ludwig van Beethoven was born, probably, on 16th December 1770 in Bonn, on the Rhine just south of Cologne. His actual birth was not recorded, but he was baptised on December 17th, and Catholic tradition at the time suggests that baptism occurred the day after birth. So, there we have our first enigma. The family was originally from Mechelen, a Flemish-speaking town in what is modern Belgium, and this fact brings us to the second enigma: why was a German called van Beethoven and not von Beethoven? The answer lies in the Flemish ancestry of the family, where the van would indicate the origin of the family in question. Rembrandt van Rijn was the usual moniker of the great Dutch painter, although no one has come up with a place called Beethoven as the hometown of the Beethoven family! The idea that the ‘van’ was an affectation of earlier Beethovens seems most probable.
Ludwig’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven, had come to Bonn from Mechelen, to the court of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, as a bass singer (I like him already), and had risen to the position of Kapellmeister. His son, Johann van Beethoven, had become a tenor in the court chapel, and supplemented his income by teaching keyboard and violin. Thus, the young composer was born into a very musical family, and it was not surprising to find him excelling at music, and being mentioned in the Magazin der Musik as a boy (of 11) to watch, playing “the piano very skilfully and with power, and sight-reading very well.” During this period in Bonn he became close to a very cultured family, the von Breunings, and also met Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who was to be a financial supporter in the future. At this time too his father’s health began to decline due to alcoholism, and with the death of his mother in 1787, he was forced to take on various jobs, such as teaching and playing viola in the court orchestra. In the year his mother died, he made his first visit to Vienna, where he eventually settled, and there is some evidence that he met Mozart. This reminds me of the famous meeting in Edinburgh of Walter Scott and Robert Burns (a fact) and the non-meeting of Bach and Handel in Halle, where the two composers missed each other by a day! Beethoven was only 14 years younger than Mozart, but the early death of the Austrian genius seems to put them in different eras.
Beethoven met Joseph Haydn in 1790 on the older composer’s journey to London. Two years later, on his homeward journey, they met again in Bonn, and Waldstein arranged for the young Ludwig to travel to Vienna to study with Haydn. Musical history was being made!
Much has been written about Beethoven, about his life, his deafness, his legal battles over his nephew Karl, his love life, his reaction to historical events during his life, his famous Heiligenstadt Testament and the letter to his ‘Immortal Beloved’, and the decline in his health, leading to his death in 1827 at the age of 56. That he could write so much fabulous music and still die comparatively young, seems extraordinary now, and the sheer volume of his compositions, in every genre and for every combination of instruments and voices, says much for this titanic figure in world music. The fact that over 10,000 mourners came out for his funeral procession three days after his death on March 26th 1827 speaks volumes for his contemporary fame, as well as serving notice of his everlasting renown.
One aspect of his life story which I always find fascinating, is the huge historical context of the era in which he lived. From his comfortable surroundings in Bonn, in the hills which look out over the mighty river Rhine, he must have become aware of the rumblings over the border to the south west in France, where the Revolution erupted in all its fury and violence when Beethoven was just 19. The aftermath of the revolution, the Reign of Terror, the emergence of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars which followed his rise, including the French siege of Vienna where Beethoven was living at the time, the cataclysm of Waterloo, all of this historical turmoil must have made a tremendous impact on the composer, and indeed all his contemporaries. Our obsession with the two world wars of the 20th century, have in many ways blinded us to the extremely volatile period from the end of the 18th century to our own own day. The American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783, obviously less reported at the time in Europe, also served notice that “the times, they were a-changing”, and the old order was coming to an end. Somehow, it seems that the world of music was waiting for something to happen too, and that change was, well, Beethoven!
A year after the Battle of Waterloo and the decisive defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Beethoven wrote his ground-breaking song cycle ‘An die ferne Geliebte’ (To the Beloved, Far Away), using poems by Alois Jeitteles, an Austrian doctor and writer. The six songs are through composed with some pianistic interludes and can only be sung together. The whole concept is innovative, and one can safely say that this is the first ever song cycle. Indeed, Beethoven described it as a Liederkreis (a circle or ring of songs) and, although there is no narrative or chronology, the theme of the first song returns in the last, completing the circle. The subject of longing for a distant lover became a common feature of Romantic literature and song, but Beethoven was the first to explore the subject. Jeitteles’ use of landscape and wild life in his evocation of the sense of longing felt by the poet is very personal, and there has been some speculation that Beethoven associated this distant vision of loveliness with the enigmatic ‘Immortal Beloved’ of his unsent letter.
I have been singing the cycle on and off for over 40 years, and I have found something new each time, either in the text or the melodic line. It contains some utterly beautiful phrases and gives the singer full scope to be expressive. As he imagines the lover seeing his songs and singing along with them, so he senses that she can feel some of the same emotion he feels. The deep longing (that fantastic German word Sehnsucht) in the phrase, “Und du singst, du singst…. und du singst was ich gesungen”, is superbly captured by Beethoven.
Below, you will find my performance of ‘An die ferne Geliebte’ with Jan Waterfield from the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, in a recital in the Canongate Church.
As usual, if you can’t play my version just now, seek out Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and you won’t be disappointed.
Beethoven actually wrote surprisingly little for voice, which is a source of enormous disappointment for all of us, although the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony and Fidelio are ample compensation, I suppose!
In 1803, his oratorio, ‘Christus am Ölberg’, was first performed and in 1807 his Mass in C was premiered in Eisenstadt. I have neither heard nor sung the oratorio, and it is one of those pieces that people rarely refer to, so in my ignorance neither will I! The Mass was written to a commission by Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II, whose family had commissioned most of Haydn’s masses, and is conventionally scored for solo quartet, choir and orchestra. The prince was famously underwhelmed by the mass, disappointed that it was not up to Haydn’s standards, and Beethoven was furious at the public humiliation. I have sung the mass a few times, and, while it is true that it is not a masterpiece, I have always enjoyed performing it. It is by Beethoven, after all!
The 9th Symphony, premiered in the Theater am Kärtnertor in Vienna in 1824, takes us to the realms of the Gods, however, and who can fail to be moved by this wonderful composition, so perfect and so unique? That a man, already ill and plagued by deafness, could imagine such a piece, is a miracle in itself, and it still stands today as one of the crowning glories of all art, on a par with the Sistine Chapel, Chartres Cathedral and ‘Hamlet’. Never before had voices been introduced into a symphony, and what an introduction it was. After three movements of astonishing complexity, including one of the most beautiful slow movements of any symphony before or since, we are first bewildered by an outburst of almost primeval sound at the start of the last movement, followed by an unusual section of recitative-like music, on lower strings. Only Haydn’s representation of chaos at the start of ‘The Creation’, although expressed in a totally different way, had ever tried to convey the beginning or end of the world in music. Beethoven brings in several themes after the strange recitative section, and then the music collapses once more into chaos. From this apparent disaster, there emerges the cry of the solo bass voice, declaiming - “Oh Friends, not these sounds! Let us, instead, strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones!” These words, written by Beethoven, serve as a prologue to his setting of the great ‘Ode to Joy’, written in 1785 by the German poet, Friedrich Schiller. One of the foremost poets of German literature, Schiller, who had died in 1805, had a wonderful vision of the triumph of joy in the world, uniting the far-flung millions in a brotherhood of love and happiness. It was this hope for salvation, not through religion or an imposed order, but through humanity’s own union of solidarity and brotherhood, which enabled Beethoven to write the majestic finale to his Ninth Symphony, a crowning glory which transcends all previous expressions of redemption in music, and which for me makes this work the ultimate creation of the Enlightenment. One of the abiding memories from my career was when I sang Beethoven’s Ninth in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Now, it is well known that St Paul’s, although one of the finest architectural gems in Britain, has a difficult acoustic with a long echo., and it is probable that the audience were not as thrilled as I was to hear my performance, but it was undeniably fabulous for me to listen to my voice reverberating around that magnificent space, with its huge dome, in that most wonderful of symphonies.
It is however extremely difficult to sing! As the bass soloist, you have either been sitting for 45 minutes in front of the orchestra, with no chance to warm up, or you come in at the beginning of the last movement, still vocally tight, and, after 6 or 7 minutes, have to launch into one of the most famous lines in all music. Not content with giving you a top E almost immediately, the composer then makes you go even higher to an F sharp, and then sing a long phrase with nowhere to breathe. The other soloists soon enter, and all sing at the very edges of their voices, except the poor mezzo, who burbles along, largely unheard in the middle of the texture. I always reckon that Beethoven 9 is the mezzo’s best professional gig, as she sings a reasonable amount, is mostly covered by the other singers, and wanders home with a large fee! When the chorus enters, in one of music’s most extraordinary innovations, the notes are mostly at the extreme end of the range, and the sopranos especially sing amazingly high. Both the Ninth and even more so, the Missa Solemnis, push the voices of both soloists and chorus to the limit, and both these pieces are to be enjoyed at the end, rather than in performance, and you can’t relax for a microsecond when singing. The sense of achievement is awesome and cathartic, but the actual singing is full of tension, a result, in my opinion, of two things.
Firstly, I don’t think Beethoven had a real ‘feel’ for the voice. He knew the physical limits of range and possibility, but wrote as if for an instrument, where the production of the sound is to a certain extent mechanical, either with fingering or valve. The actual process of singing was a mystery to him, as it was to a lesser degree with Bach, and so the resultant vocal score has more of the feel of an instrumental part with words. The effect on the audience is still powerful, but it seems much more like hard work for the singer, compared to Handel, Verdi and Wagner, whose music is enormously satisfying to sing provided you have the right voice.
The second reason for the lack of satisfaction when singing Beethoven is the undeniable fact that, by the time of the composition of the great vocal works, he was completely and profoundly deaf. He could only imagine the sounds he was putting down on paper, and although his inner ear was beyond belief, I do feel he was creating in the abstract, and not the real aural world. What he was hearing internally bore little resemblance to the actual voices singing his music, and so the notes are not based on actual experience.
Nonetheless, it is a fact that these great vocal works represent the peak of man’s creative genius, and any loss of enjoyment in the performance leads on, fortunately, to a wonderful sense of achievement and perfection in the aftermath. The audience largely only experiences the second of these emotions, and it is our job, and indeed duty, to provide the listener with the best possible result of the combination of Beethoven’s genius and our endeavours in the performance.
Next time, we will look at the Missa Solemnis and ‘Fidelio’.
