By Martin Kaaij

Following the premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Viennese audience reportedly reacted rather lukewarmly—according to the composer, because nothing was ever good enough and everyone was always against him anyway. It is a typical reaction that fits our general perception of Beethoven’s character. He was no easy man to deal with: stubborn, irritable, short-tempered, and suspicious. A loner tormented by his surroundings, his hearing loss, and above all, himself. Not only is his brilliant music unique, but so is our boundless admiration for the curmudgeon. His bust graces many a piano or mantelpiece, and certainly not because he looks so cheerful.

For nearly two centuries, biographers have done their best to explain why Beethoven was not always a ray of sunshine. His mother neglected him, his father was a drunkard and a failed musician, true love constantly eluded him, and somewhere between his twenty-fifth and thirtieth year, his hearing began to deteriorate. We do not know exactly how Beethoven coped with his deafness. From his sparse statements, one could assemble any desired mix of shock, denial, defiance, despair, and perhaps even shame.

In the final years of his life, he was completely deaf. As a result, at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he did not even realize it had ended. That symphony ends with 321 notes played at full force across four bars. Then, silence. The applause must have been thunderous. But he did not hear that either.

For an ordinary mortal, it is unfathomable how anyone could compose such magnificent music despite such a disability. Yet a bit of irritability becomes entirely understandable.

Scissors and Eraser

Beethoven was a perfectionist who completed nine symphonies over twenty-five years. That is roughly one symphony every three years. By comparison, Mozart wrote a symphony every seven months on average, and Haydn as often as every four months. We can only guess what went on in Beethoven’s mind while composing. But it is certain that he agonized over every choice, as his surviving sketches and manuscripts are filled with crossings-out and additions. In them, no note, chord, or rhythm seems safe from his scissors and eraser. For instance, he devised six different ways to begin the finale of his Third Symphony, where the first note was given a different duration in each version, yet ultimately returned to its original length—even as it gradually shot up three octaves.

The symphony was the calling card of the nineteenth-century composer. With a successful symphony, he proved his command over the mighty and steadily expanding orchestra, as well as his mastery of large-scale form. You see something similar with modern architects: building pretty houses is nice enough, but designing an entire city district—complete with offices, shops, schools, sports halls, lampposts, and paving stones—that is the real deal.

And just as such a district must satisfy a long list of practical requirements, a blueprint existed for a symphony in Beethoven’s time. It called for four movements: fast, slow, dance-like, and fast, with the fast fourth movement being distinctly lighter in character than the fast first movement. Seven out of nine times, Beethoven adhered to this scheme, but in the Ninth Symphony the middle movements are reversed, and the Sixth Symphony consists of five movements instead of four. There was a standard, then, but also room to diverge from it. Yet no one knows why Beethoven chose a different path on those two occasions.

Easy Listening

Composers take pleasure in continually throwing the listener slightly off balance—a gentle nudge here, a cheeky shove there, but beware: the listener must not topple over and must ultimately pop back upright like a roly-poly toy, lest the composer lose them altogether. A composer delivers these nudges with chords that catch the listener off guard, yet still feel pleasant and fitting. For people intuitively sense with surprising precision whether a chord is entirely ordinary, slightly odd, or downright wrong. This depends entirely on the moment it is used. Consider the ending of a Beethoven symphony, which announces itself well in advance. The entire hall recognizes the function of that harmonic progression: driving toward the finish line.

A major cornerstone of the symphonic blueprint is that the first movement is cast in what is known as sonata form. Neat rules govern this sonata form—for example, that it conventionally contains two themes: one cheerful and the other somber. This sets expectations for listeners who know the rules by heart. But even the convention of two themes was not safe with Beethoven. He used four on average, intertwining them with transitional phrases that could easily be mistaken for additional themes.

The genius of Beethoven lies in how he holds all these themes together while erecting a startling architectural structure, without demanding excessive effort from us to follow along. We hardly notice how complex his construction actually is. Your easy listening is my hard writing, he might have said. The best proof of his success is that we still listen to his symphonies with such immense pleasure.

Eternal Bachelor

In daily life, Beethoven was rather less orderly and perfectionist. His living room was strewn with manuscript paper, food scraps, stockings, trousers, and coats, and he had a habit of wandering through town in threadbare clothes and uncombed hair. Such unkempt bachelor habits do not typically help a man secure a refined life partner, especially when seeking love in high society, as Beethoven was prone to do. Yet unloved he certainly was not. At his funeral, the church overflowed and thousands of fellow citizens walked in procession behind his coffin to the cemetery. Kindness and conventional manners are universally prized. But for a great composer like Beethoven, humanity gladly makes an exception.

Text: Martin Kaaij
Illustration: Grootzus