BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, November 17, 1824

Carl Schwenke returns to visit Beethoven, to collect the manuscript that was promised last week. Beethoven has written out for him a four-part canon, punning on his name, “Schwenke dich ohne Schwänke,” [Swing without Wavering] WoO 187. The whereabouts of the original manuscript given to Schwenke are unknown, but several copies were made, including one for the engraver when it was published in 1825. A copy made by Joseph Sonnleithner, from Schwenke’s original, is now in the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, bears today’s date. Sketches for the work can also be found in the Kafka Miscellany, British Library Add. ms. 29997, 23f.

The little canon for Schwenke can be heard here, performed by Accentus:

Beethoven today writes from Vienna to Hans Georg Nägeli in Zurich. “My very dear friend! Overworked and due to the late season, not being careful enough, I became ill again. Believe me, it was not possible to write to you sooner. Regarding your subscription proposal [to Nägeli’s book of poetry, Liederkränze], I only received one subscriber for 2 copies, Herr v. Bihler, educator of the family of His Imperial Highness Archduke Karl — attempts were made to get hold of the Archduke himself, but in vain – I have encouraged them everywhere, but unfortunately one is inundated with too many such things here – this is all I can write to you at the moment. I also pressed Hasslinger [sic] about it – in vain – One is really poor here in Austria, and little is left over for art and science due to the difficult times still ongoing because of the war – As far as the fees are concerned, I will be happy to take care of that later, just write to me clearly specifying where [I am to send the funds.] I embrace you in the spirit and you may always count on your most esteemed true friend, Beethoven.” Beethoven had previously confirmed his own subscription for the book of poems, and six copies for Archduke Rudolph.

Brandenburg Letter 1898; Anderson Letter 1319. The letter, which bears a WIEN postmark, is held by the Bonn Beethovenhaus (H.C. Bodmer Collection Br 174) and can be seen here:

https://www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4569553572986880/scan/0

Today’s Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Nr.46) at 391-397 contains a lengthy and thoughtful review of S.A. Steiner’s publication of Beethoven’s Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, op.112, on two poems by Goethe. It is not so much a review of the work as a meditation on the natures of poetry and music, and whether they can coexist in a single work.

Marx begins auspiciously: “An immortal extends his hand to the immortal. Who is not moved by this greeting from Beethoven to Goethe? It is always a day of celebration for the newspaper when it can talk about Beethoven, the living among so many living-dead.”

In the first poem, Meeresstille [Calm Sea], Beethoven admirably gives a sense of the singer’s spirit feeling alone, a lost point on a gleamingly smooth water, surrendered to its power. The fear of death, lonely and abandoned, is the soul of the poem. Beethoven has captured the poem by use of the entire orchestra and a full choir; everything paints the smooth, treacherous silence. The string instruments lie motionless, spread out. The other instruments, interrupted by pauses and pizzicato, eventually pass by, so that one can hear the depths lying undisturbed. “Everything is united in this way to paint the anxious silence, the false calm.” Beethoven heightens the sensory image by the elaboration of the word “wave,” to which the voices each time move gently. “What intent could have moved Beethoven to so paint this insignificant word, ‘wave?’ But he had to, because his soul was filled with the image of the sea, and this emerged in its entirety.”

“Only here does the whole orchestra (only the trumpets and timpani remain silent) join in with a scream, and then the previous silence returns. Only this cry of horror in the fear-filled silence indicates the meaning of the whole thing, and it coincides with the most terrifying aspect of the poem: this immense vastness, which no step can drown out, no arm can fight through, no glance can fly over. It tears apart even the bond of fear.”

The second poem, “Glückliche Fahrt” [Prosperous Voyage] is appropriately more joyful. “How everything here lives and flows, how the instruments roar and surge, how they crowd when the singers rest, how all the voices call out to each other in joyful embrace. And how ‘Land! Land!’ is called out in celebration. Finally, the instruments salute like flags of peace. This is something anyone who knows the power of music and Beethoven can guess.”

Even though the editor is highly delighted with this new creation by Beethoven, “yet it must be said that the composer did not promote the poet, did not enhance the effect of the poem, but rather diminished it. This is not the fault of Beethoven, but due to the impossibility of composing poems such as those mentioned at the beginning in a completely satisfactory manner. This opinion is strange, since everyone feels and has admitted how powerfully stimulating these poems must be, especially for musicians. A more careful explanation is therefore required, and a look at the basic nature of poetry and music.”

Poetry is a disembodied art; through it, the spirit sees pure thought and holds it in words which are the abstraction chosen by the spirit for them. Thus, poetry can take hold of any object by expressing its thought. It is not limited in its ability to do so like other arts. The poet’s spirit can immerse in itself, and focus on its inner workings. Rather than giving an uninterrupted series of ideas linked to objects, more distant impressions can be made, with the links not expressed in words. “In all of this, the musical element is not yet aroused; the pure idea, completely drawn from the physical, belongs exclusively to poetry.”

Yet the spirit stimulates the physical and the idea stimulates matter. This gives rise to tone and sound and becomes music. These musical elements of tone and sound are external, materially recognizable, mathematically provable, present in the tremors of the body, beginning with the auditory nerves. Thus even the most imaginative and most spiritual music does not cease to belong to the realm of the senses.

Goethe’s spirit in these poems has withdrawn from the senses and into itself. He has cut all ties with reality. The poems can be understood only if our spirit exercises a similarly absorbed activity. But this is not musical. Music would disturb this free immersion of the spirit in itself and tie it to certain sequences of sensory ideas, or through uninterrupted progression, force it to ignore all other ideas from which the verse could be interpreted. Composers of song must do this, but does this not rob the listener of the deepest beauty of the poem? “If, on the other hand, one wanted to fill a poetic pause with music, the listener would not only lose the pleasure of adding something from his own mind, but the balance between the poem and composition would be upset from intimate fusion. How long would the former have to give way to the latter?”

“So it is with the first of the poems composed by Beethoven. The poet extracts the idea of the terrible calm of the sea, places our spirit under the terror of this loneliness, and leaves it. Anyone who wants to experience the poem can only do so in solitude. In Beethoven, we are faced with a chorus of people – and the poem has fallen apart.” Yet the poet’s idea remains powerful enough to allow other forms to emerge from it.

“The idea that a terrifying scream breaks out from the silence of fear is beautiful in and of itself. But examine each individual voice, and each one must be called untrue. The appearance of the treble from the first E to the second A, and even the fall of the bass from high G to low G prove it most easily: this is not natural musical language. The voices have given up their individuality, their personal truth, and have become the composer’s instrument. This statement is confirmed everywhere. And so far as the poet has left the composer unmoved, the choir remains so too.”

[Marx quotes a part of Meerestille, “in the immense breadth”]

“But is this the language of sailors who will soon utter such a scream of horror? And can the poet’s idea permit a return to calm description after that terrible outcry, a complete reprise such as we find in Beethoven? It was perhaps desirable for musical completeness, but it makes the incompatibility of the poem with music all the clearer.”

“This resistance of the poem is less noticeable in the second: Glückliche Fahrt. But it is joined together against the first as its basis, and if the judgment expressed about this is true, then it must also be applied to the second. In the latter poem, the voices are far more individual and dramatically true than in the first, but the nature of the music, as in the first, made it necessary to extend the painting of the poem: the poet’s lightning disappears in a wide glow!”

“Even if the poems can gain nothing from the musical treatment, we still have a precious proof of what the great spirit of Beethoven is capable of, even where music has actually found its limits. The poet can receive no more flattering homage than when such a genius boldly crosses the sacred boundary through love for him.”

Frequent contributor Birthe Kibsgaard notes that Elisabeth Eleonore Bauer, in her book Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam (How Beethoven was Put on the Pedestal) notes that Adolf Bernhard Marx founded the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung “with the declared aim of putting Beethoven on the pedestal and to codify him as the greatest composer of all time. It was a successful story. What this magazine had to say about Beethoven as a national hero in the years 1824-1830 decides – for good or for bad – the picture that we have of Beethoven today.”