In the shadow of a titan
Beethoven and his successors In the shadow of a titan Beethoven and his successors

For the composers who followed him, Ludwig van Beethoven was both an inspiration and a challenge. How could anyone dare to measure themselves against a man who had left behind such consummate symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas? Our series Berliner Philharmoniker Ensembles explores this uneasy relationship between role model and successors.

“As the Frenchman has his revolution and the Englishman his seafaring, so the German has his Beethoven symphonies.” Whether Beethoven would still cut it as a national emblem today is another question – but for Robert Schumann, writing in 1839, the matter was settled. His music combined rigorous formal logic with extraordinary emotional force in unprecedented ways, drawing on Classical forms while pushing towards the expressive world of Romanticism. He also came to embody a new model of the composer as an independent artist rather than a servant of court or church.

Beethoven’s deafness and the difficulties of his personal life contributed to the heroic image that grew around him during his lifetime and intensified after his death in 1827. “I have never encountered an artist so concentrated, so vehement, so deeply felt,” wrote Goethe after meeting Beethoven in 1812. For the composers who followed, Beethoven’s achievement posed a problem: how could they absorb his influence without simply remaining in his shadow? To mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, the Berliner Philharmoniker Ensembles series sets his music alongside works by several of the composers who followed him.

It was Johannes Brahms who suffered most acutely under Beethoven’s legacy. “You have no idea what it feels like for someone like me to hear a giant like that marching along behind him all the time,” he wrote, exasperated, to a conductor friend. It hardly helped that Schumann had effectively proclaimed him Beethoven’s heir in a newspaper article. Under the weight of this expectation, Brahms initially steered clear of the symphony and string quartet, two genres in which Beethoven’s example loomed particularly large. He laboured over his First Symphony for almost fifteen years, and, by his own account, fed twenty string quartets into the fire because they failed to satisfy his exacting self-criticism. He was forty before he published his first quartet, op. 51 no. 1, which the Philharmonic String Quartet will perform on 10 February 2027.

The same programme also features a string quartet fragment by Franz Schubert, who was similarly daunted by the long shadow of his predecessor: “Sometimes I do quietly believe that something might come of me, but who can still achieve anything after Beethoven?” he asked. Schubert, however, rarely appeared before an audience – he gave only a single public concert in his entire life – while the intimate art of the Lied, cultivated with friends in the domestic salon, occupied a particularly important place in his work.. Song was central to Schubert’s musical imagination, and his instrumental writing often unfolds through expansive melody rather than the concentrated motivic development associated with Beethoven. A direct comparison is further complicated by Schubert’s early death: he wrote his final quartet at just twenty-nine, the age at which Beethoven had only just ventured into the genre for the first time. Who knows what worlds Schubert might still have discovered?

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, by contrast, felt little of this anxiety. He presented his first mature string quartet at just eighteen – in the year of Beethoven’s death –  and the work will be heard in the opening concert of our cycle. That he had studied Beethoven’s quartets closely, especially op. 132, is evident from numerous parallels and direct quotations. Yet his elegant musical language is far removed from the raw abruptness that marks Beethoven’s late works. The way he absorbs Beethoven’s influence rather than simply imitating it is remarkable – all the more so since he quotes not only his model but also one of his own songs.

Beethoven was likewise a natural point of reference and an enduring source of inspiration for the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The final concert of the series includes his piano trio Contrasts, in which the cello part so familiar from Beethoven’s chamber music is replaced by a clarinet, opening the door to quite different, folk-inflected sound worlds.

Yet another facet of Beethoven’s legacy comes into focus at the wind concert on 6 January: his Octet, op. 103, stands as one of the founding documents of wind chamber music. In his day, an ensemble of two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns was known as Harmoniemusik. Aristocrats – such as the prince-archbishop of Bonn whom Beethoven served – kept such ensembles for ceremonial dinner music or outdoor occasions; in Switzerland, military bands are still called by that name today. Beethoven’s achievement was to push the genre’s compositional potential far beyond mere functional entertainment, establishing it as a genuine concert form.

Beethoven’s legacy may have been daunting for the composers who followed him. But the challenge of responding to it proved a powerful creative stimulus in its own right, and music history is the richer for it.