Beethoven and his contemporaries
Came across this interesting article:
EVEN A GIANT HAS HIS PEERS
Beethoven was the greatest composer of his time. Everybody knows that.
We know it because the prevailing musical culture tells us so. From concert repertoire to music history texts to ingrained popular perception, everything serves to reinforce the idea that during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, musical Vienna (and by extension musical Europe) was populated by one overpowering genius and a whole bunch of guys named Moe.
What we don't know -- much -- is what those also-rans were up to, or exactly where their inferiority to Beethoven lies, or what musical traditions Beethoven was interacting with.
Beethoven's music comes down to us in lordly historical isolation, engaging in cross-generational dialogue with that of Bach, Mozart and Haydn before him and Wagner and Brahms afterward. But it bullies the creations of his contemporaries into silence.
That's why "Beethoven's Vienna," the San Francisco Symphony's annual composer festival that starts a three-week run Thursday in Davies Symphony Hall, is such a welcome corrective.
The program that music director Michael Tilson Thomas has assembled has Beethoven as the headliner, of course -- both historical perspective and the exigencies of the box office demand it. From the "Eroica" and Seventh Symphonies to the Third Piano Concerto to "Fidelio," the composer's lone opera, Beethoven's music will once again dominate the landscape.
But the schedule is not designed simply to revisit these familiar masterpieces for the umpteenth time. Rather, it surrounds them with the music that Beethoven and his listeners would have had in their ears and minds -- the grandiose orchestral music of Luigi Cherubini, the tuneful craftsmanship of Anton Reicha and Anton Diabelli, and the virtuoso piano works of Muzio Clementi, Joseph Wölfl and Jan Ladislav Dussek.
For most contemporary music lovers, these names are either complete ciphers or vague shadows hovering on the periphery of our consciousness. We hear their works rarely, if at all, and most of us have only an elusive sense of what they were up to.
But for Beethoven, they were the all-important cultural context in which -- and against which -- he operated. And without that context, it's impossible to fully understand the scope of Beethoven's achievement.
The point is clearest in connection with piano music, because that is where Beethoven was most closely in touch with the currents of his day. As a young musician newly arrived in Vienna from the provincial city of Bonn, Beethoven found that his skills as a keyboard virtuoso offered the surest road to financial and social success.
That meant giving frequent performances, both in aristocratic salons and before the public, and creating music that would show off his chops as both an improviser and a composer of written music. It also meant engaging in periodic musical prizefights to maintain his primacy in a city that by some accounts boasted more than 300 pianists.
One of his antagonists in those sparring matches was Daniel Steibelt, a vainglorious Franco-Prussian musician who in 1800 challenged Beethoven to a piano-playing duel and was thoroughly whupped. Steibelt, whose life and work are a particular enthusiasm of Thomas', will be represented on the opening program by, among other things, his "Bacchanal" for piano and tambourine.
Beethoven's piano music needs to be heard against the backdrop of these quasi-athletic artistic competitions. The concertos and early sonatas take the aggressive, show-offy edge that must have infused those salon showdowns -- who can wring the most variations on a simple theme? who can play the fastest passagework? who can improvise the most dazzlingly varied material? -- and transmuted it into a more rarefied artistic realm.
The transmutation was even more extreme in the case of the symphony -- beginning with the "Eroica," the longest and most formally ambitious such work any of Beethoven's contemporaries would have heard. But again, it takes a glimpse of some of the other music of the period to drive the point home.
Not that the other composers of the early 19th century are simply historical punching bags, to be performed only so we can hear how far Beethoven soars above them. On the contrary, listening to the music of a composer like Cherubini tells us much about Beethoven's sources of inspiration, and particularly the traditions of public music-making (many of them born in the wake of the French Revolution) that he drew on in the "Eroica."
The historical void that now surrounds Beethoven's music is a fiction, and not a very helpful one at that. It's easy to understand how it arose -- both in his day and in ours, Beethoven outshone all his contemporaries more than any other composer.
His only obvious rivals are Schubert, who wrote music of extraordinary genius without ever taking his place on the public stage, and Rossini, who held sway in such a different geographical and artistic arena that he might as well have been a sculptor or poet. Other than that, Beethoven almost single- handedly defined his age.
But that doesn't mean that everyone else obligingly shut up, and it doesn't mean that Beethoven, even in his deafness, was oblivious to the music of his time.
Like any other artist, he was constantly engaged with the surrounding culture -- arguing, refuting, outstripping and expanding on the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. And unless we hear that music ourselves now and again, his triumphant achievement exists in a vacuum.
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'Man know thyself'
EVEN A GIANT HAS HIS PEERS
Beethoven was the greatest composer of his time. Everybody knows that.
We know it because the prevailing musical culture tells us so. From concert repertoire to music history texts to ingrained popular perception, everything serves to reinforce the idea that during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, musical Vienna (and by extension musical Europe) was populated by one overpowering genius and a whole bunch of guys named Moe.
What we don't know -- much -- is what those also-rans were up to, or exactly where their inferiority to Beethoven lies, or what musical traditions Beethoven was interacting with.
Beethoven's music comes down to us in lordly historical isolation, engaging in cross-generational dialogue with that of Bach, Mozart and Haydn before him and Wagner and Brahms afterward. But it bullies the creations of his contemporaries into silence.
That's why "Beethoven's Vienna," the San Francisco Symphony's annual composer festival that starts a three-week run Thursday in Davies Symphony Hall, is such a welcome corrective.
The program that music director Michael Tilson Thomas has assembled has Beethoven as the headliner, of course -- both historical perspective and the exigencies of the box office demand it. From the "Eroica" and Seventh Symphonies to the Third Piano Concerto to "Fidelio," the composer's lone opera, Beethoven's music will once again dominate the landscape.
But the schedule is not designed simply to revisit these familiar masterpieces for the umpteenth time. Rather, it surrounds them with the music that Beethoven and his listeners would have had in their ears and minds -- the grandiose orchestral music of Luigi Cherubini, the tuneful craftsmanship of Anton Reicha and Anton Diabelli, and the virtuoso piano works of Muzio Clementi, Joseph Wölfl and Jan Ladislav Dussek.
For most contemporary music lovers, these names are either complete ciphers or vague shadows hovering on the periphery of our consciousness. We hear their works rarely, if at all, and most of us have only an elusive sense of what they were up to.
But for Beethoven, they were the all-important cultural context in which -- and against which -- he operated. And without that context, it's impossible to fully understand the scope of Beethoven's achievement.
The point is clearest in connection with piano music, because that is where Beethoven was most closely in touch with the currents of his day. As a young musician newly arrived in Vienna from the provincial city of Bonn, Beethoven found that his skills as a keyboard virtuoso offered the surest road to financial and social success.
That meant giving frequent performances, both in aristocratic salons and before the public, and creating music that would show off his chops as both an improviser and a composer of written music. It also meant engaging in periodic musical prizefights to maintain his primacy in a city that by some accounts boasted more than 300 pianists.
One of his antagonists in those sparring matches was Daniel Steibelt, a vainglorious Franco-Prussian musician who in 1800 challenged Beethoven to a piano-playing duel and was thoroughly whupped. Steibelt, whose life and work are a particular enthusiasm of Thomas', will be represented on the opening program by, among other things, his "Bacchanal" for piano and tambourine.
Beethoven's piano music needs to be heard against the backdrop of these quasi-athletic artistic competitions. The concertos and early sonatas take the aggressive, show-offy edge that must have infused those salon showdowns -- who can wring the most variations on a simple theme? who can play the fastest passagework? who can improvise the most dazzlingly varied material? -- and transmuted it into a more rarefied artistic realm.
The transmutation was even more extreme in the case of the symphony -- beginning with the "Eroica," the longest and most formally ambitious such work any of Beethoven's contemporaries would have heard. But again, it takes a glimpse of some of the other music of the period to drive the point home.
Not that the other composers of the early 19th century are simply historical punching bags, to be performed only so we can hear how far Beethoven soars above them. On the contrary, listening to the music of a composer like Cherubini tells us much about Beethoven's sources of inspiration, and particularly the traditions of public music-making (many of them born in the wake of the French Revolution) that he drew on in the "Eroica."
The historical void that now surrounds Beethoven's music is a fiction, and not a very helpful one at that. It's easy to understand how it arose -- both in his day and in ours, Beethoven outshone all his contemporaries more than any other composer.
His only obvious rivals are Schubert, who wrote music of extraordinary genius without ever taking his place on the public stage, and Rossini, who held sway in such a different geographical and artistic arena that he might as well have been a sculptor or poet. Other than that, Beethoven almost single- handedly defined his age.
But that doesn't mean that everyone else obligingly shut up, and it doesn't mean that Beethoven, even in his deafness, was oblivious to the music of his time.
Like any other artist, he was constantly engaged with the surrounding culture -- arguing, refuting, outstripping and expanding on the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. And unless we hear that music ourselves now and again, his triumphant achievement exists in a vacuum.
------------------
'Man know thyself'
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