Re-Discovering Beethoven

I have always loved the music of Beethoven; its power, energy, and level of sophistication amaze and mesmerize me. No matter how many times I hear it there is always something new to discover in a re-hearing of the 3rd Symphony for example, or some new perspective to be gained from the string quartets that one had not heard before.

Great music should be this way; each new hearing of a work should enable an active listener to pull back a new musical layer, or view the entire work from an entirely new angle. It is said that Beethoven probably conceived his works as a 3D structure. Indeed, in some of his writings on his music he talked of the breadth and depth of his compositions, which would suggest this three dimensional perspective.

I am currently in a re-discovery phase, which I go through from time to time. I was thinking on this idea of three-dimensional thinking, and have been re-reading Thayer’s Life of Beethoven. Concurrent with that I have given some thought to Beethoven’s third period, in which his music became far more introspective, personal and contrapuntal. Beethoven by then was almost completely deaf and seemingly more accepting of the situation (as opposed to the anguished time in his early thirties when he lived in fear of society discovering his deafness), had turned to the music of Handel and Bach for sources of inspiration as he completely revised his compositional style.

What set Beethoven aside from his great predecessors Haydn and Mozart was his utter unwillingness to repeat himself. It was as if he approached every new composition with the question “What have I done in this genre before and how can I make it fundamentally different?” That philosophy indeed did result in distinctive works that are very different from each other in many ways. Take a look at the 9 symphonies. Each exists in its own world, and is as individual as can be. Haydn and Mozart, who wrote 140 plus symphonies between them, achieved such symphonic individuality only in their very last symphonies.

So back to this thought of viewing Beethoven’s music as a three dimensional object. I was listening to his Grosse Fuge, Op 133 the other day. This work is truly one of the most perplexing of his late period, not at all understood by his contemporaries and probably still enigmatic to listeners even today. I’ve heard it several times, recognizing the musical language Beethoven employed was a direct link to the Romantic era and beyond, yet I’ve not fully appreciated all of those musical layers I mentioned earlier.

The work is abtract, dense and a challenge even to modern performers. One must have wondered what musicians of the day thought about performing it. Donald Grout, in his History of Western Music, points to the first section of this work, along with a section of the finale of the 9th Symphony and portions of the Missa Solemnis, all representative works from this last period, which require almost a “miracle” for them to “sound” in performance.

Someone recently produced a computer driven animation of the Grosse Fuge and posted it on Youtube. As I watched the animation while listening to the music I realized how cool this treatment really was, because I could see as well as hear just how complex and yet sublime Beethoven’s late style was. It’s a shame the posting does not credit the outstanding performers or the recording used. Some of the commentary is from contemporaries of the composer: