It doesn’t get more modern than this
Why Beethoven matters more than ever It doesn’t get more modern than thisWhy Beethoven matters more than ever

Beethoven was not just a revolutionary composer, but also a far-sighted thinker – independent, deeply suspicious of authority, and profoundly humanistic. His uncompromising attitude in both his life and in his music, together with his belief in freedom and in self-determination, continue to make him feel strikingly contemporary.

In July 1812 the Bohemian spa of Teplitz (now Teplice), midway between Dresden and Prague, became the setting for an encounter between two of the age’s greatest cultural figures: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven finally got to meet in person. Beethoven played for Goethe on several occasions. Goethe wrote afterwards that the performances had left him “astonished”, though he also remarked on the composer’s “unbridled personality”.

 But Goethe’s record of this meeting contains no mention of an anecdote recounted by Bettina von Arnim: the two men, she claims, were out for a walk one day when they saw Empress Maria Ludovika of Austria approaching them with her retinue, whereupon Goethe stepped aside, removed his hat and bowed, while Beethoven folded his arms and walked straight through the imperial entourage. “I waited for you because I honour and respect you,” the composer told Goethe afterwards, “but you showed them too much honour.”

There is no proof that this encounter ever took place. Quite the opposite, in fact: Bettina von Arnim is known to have forged letters from Beethoven in order to underpin her narratives. She was friendly with both men, but it was only after they were dead that she rewrote the past in order to  portray herself as their close friend. The episode nonetheless highlights two things: the contrast between the image of the consummate court poet and that of the rebellious composer, and the fact that both images were consciously constructed and cultivated.

An uncompromising attitude

Beethoven himself was, of course, not above cultivating a marketable public image. Behind his rough exterior there was indeed an uncompromising artistic attitude, and social and political convictions that must have seemed extraordinary to his contemporaries. Even today, two centuries after his death, Beethoven remains one of the most compelling figures in classical music.

In addition to his meeting with Goethe, there are many other anecdotes – in this case well authenticated – that underscore Beethoven’s republican, almost anti-authoritarian convictions. “I don’t perform for pigs like him!” Beethoven growled when a young count persisted in flirting with a lady instead of listening to the music – the sort of behaviour Beethoven refused to tolerate, and which audiences would still consider rude today. To a prince he wrote: “What you are, you are through chance and through birth. There will be thousands more princes, but there is only one Beethoven.” (Incidentally, the “van” in his name is not a mark of nobility, but simply the Dutch word for “from”; the surname Beethoven is traditionally associated with beet farms.) He initially dedicated his Third Symphony, the “Eroica”, to Napoleon, but abruptly withdrew the dedication when Napoleon had himself crowned emperor, betraying the ideals of the French Revolution. Beethoven scratched out the name “Bonaparte” on his title page so vigorously  that he left a hole in the paper.

The culmination of Viennese classicism

The story of the Eroica also reveals a business sense that likewise makes Beethoven seem very modern. He was nothing like the liveried court musician his teacher Haydn had accepted being.  In writing his “Eroica” Symphony he had in fact been intending to apply for the post of court composer in Paris, but when there was no longer any prospect of this happening, the dedication to Napoleon no longer made sense. Beethoven changed the cover and dedicated the symphony to Count Lobkowitz instead, to secure another substantial fee. Unlike Mozart, who as a freelance composer and opera impresario lived perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, Beethoven managed to finance his life as an independent artist thanks to shrewd manoeuvres, the support of generous patrons, and the purchasing power of the rising bourgeoisie.

Whether Beethoven’s music itself can be called democratic is open to debate. With the symphony and the string quartet, at least, Beethoven favoured genres built on collaboration rather than simple hierarchy. Rather than setting a dominant melody against a merely accompanying background, Beethoven treats all the musical parts as genuine partners. Even his concertos are not virtuoso showpieces of the kind written by many of his contemporaries. He once mocked this kind of writing by placing a page from a colleague’s score upside down on the piano and improvising over it.

Beethoven is widely regarded as the composer who brought the Classical tradition to its fullest expression. His way of developing an entire work from the smallest motivic ideas, exemplified by his Fifth Symphony, creates a sense of organic coherence that listeners can follow almost instinctively.

Genius through struggle

Beethoven’s compositions have a direct emotional impact on their listeners. In doing so, they helped usher in Romanticism – think only of the famous “Moonlight” Sonata. At the same time, Beethoven played an important part in the growing nineteenth-century idea of music as an autonomous art form, valued not simply for its religious, ceremonial or social functions but for its own expressive power. His influence on later generations of composers was profound. “You have no idea what it feels like for someone like us to hear a giant like him always striding along behind us,” Brahms is said to have complained.

Beethoven’s achievement seems all the greater considering the circumstances in which he worked. That a man who had lost his hearing was able to write music at all remains a miracle. But it makes him seem less like an untouchable genius and more like a worker and a fighter. As his moving Heiligenstadt Testament – a letter to his brothers that he never sent – reveals, Beethoven struggled with thoughts of suicide before resolving to continue living and working despite his illness. He resolved, in his own words, to “grasp fate by the throat”. His resilience in the face of illness remains extraordinary.

“The people who understand my music”, Beethoven once explained, “will be free from all of the misery that others drag around with them. […] In the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom is the main objective.” The ideals of freedom and self-determination continued to shape Beethoven’s outlook throughout much of his life. Prometheus, the demigod who brought fire to humanity, was a figure of particular importance to Beethoven. In Greek mythology, the gift of fire symbolises the beginnings of civilisation and of human self-determination. In this context, it is telling that the words of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – the first symphony to incorporate the human voice – do not praise a higher authority but celebrate joy, a quintessentially human emotion. For many listeners, Beethoven’s music remains among the most profoundly human ever composed – and, in the context of its own time, among the most strikingly modern.