Beethoven - The new attitude
One of the most noteworthy social facts aboiut the early 1800's is the gradual change in the individual's position toward his society. Through much of the 18th centruy a person had been bound by tradition, by religious and civil authority, and by class. A persons's lifework was marked out for oneself, almost preordained, in fact; and the freedom with which one could move within that lifework was strongly circuscribed. The musician in that society existed only through the grace of a patron; and was supported by and beholden to such a patron almost entirely.
Haydn provides the perfect example; for throughout his nearly 30 years of service to the Esterhazy's, he was in effect a high-class servant, and his mode of life would have been unthinkable outside that service.
During the course of the century social attituded changed. Writings of the philosophers and rationalism, the works of Rousseau and Voltaire, the American and French Revolutions, the emergence of the democracies....these all had been steps on the path toward emancipating the individual. And while Haydn was content to remain within the framework of the old system, Mozart's life, as opposed to Haydn's is an equally good example of an individual caught in a transitional period; content to accept the security offered by the system, but too independent to conform to its requirements.
It remained for Beethoven successsfully to complete the struggle against patronage. True, he did have patrons occasionally; but he scorned them even as he made use of them. He was subserviant only to his art, and he cleared his own path---perhaps the first important musician [Handel excepted] to do so. Beethoven became the symbol of the 19th century's free individual.
As a principal feature of the old system, works were commissioned or written for specific occasions. Haydn and Mozart were men of their own time, wrote for their contemporaries, and considered carefully the technical levels of those to whom the works were addressed. Only rarely did they exceed those levels.
Now, Beethoven too accepted commissions and wrote to order; but in him a new attitude is apparent. For the content and technical quality as well as the musical stature of many of the commissioned works far transcend the occasion. And in works which were not occasional pieces or commissioned--- of which types, incidentally earlier composers knew little ---the new attitude is still marked. In them, Beethoven wrote not for his public but according to the dictates of his musical spirit. His imagination and his sense of fitness determined the shape and content of his music. He rarely attempted to be merely entertaining or to meet the social cultural needs of his contemporaries; he forced his public to rise to the 'new world' he created---or revealed. The enormous increase in the technical difficulty, the sheer size, and gthe power of his works is but external evidence of this heightened purpose. It is with the emotional content, the kind of emotions affected, that Beethoven brought a new impulse to music. A composition deserved to be written--even more, had to be written---simply because Beethoven willed it so; whether a practical possibility existed of having it performed or understood immediately interested him not at all.
--Homer Ulrich--
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~ Unsterbliche Geliebte ~
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