Ludwig

“If, my dear Emilie, you should ever desire to have anything, do not hesitate to write to me. The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits. He has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps admire him, he laments that he has not yet reached the point to which his better genius only lights the way for him like a distant sun. I should probably prefer to visit you and your family than to visit many rich people who betray themselves with the poverty of their inner selves…

If you want to write to me, dear Emilie, just address it directly to Teplitz, where I will be for another four weeks. Or send it to Vienna. It really doesn’t matter. Look upon me as your friend and the friend of your family.

Ludwig van Beethoven”

— Letter to a girl

At the turn of the twentieth century, the City of Boston was building a new concert hall. Rivaling the grandest halls of Europe, Symphony Hall was America proclaiming that it had arrived as a preeminent global hub of high culture. Elites nationwide were gathered to advise on every aspect of the design and construction of this great new hall.

The designers decided to inscribe the names of history’s greatest composers along the hall’s proscenium arch. They ringed it with plaques and set to determine whose names deserved placement. This would be, they thought, a hall that would stand for centuries. Who, from their vantage point midway through the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, would withstand the test of time?

Names like Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Handel, Haydn, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky were considered. Yet in the end the august committee tasked with picking the names could settle only on one, one composer whose work they were sure would endure through the ages. A century and a quarter later, every plaque along the proscenium arch remains blank, save one, dead center, angled over the stage as if gazing downward: Ludwig van Beethoven.

Why Beethoven?

As a man and as an artist, he can only be understood as a transitional figure. He straddled the classical and romantic eras of music, yes, but also lived through the birth of early capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the nation-state. He was born in an era when the economics of music depended on patronage, but by the time he died it was possible to be a popular artist, selling concert tickets and sheet music to a nascent middle class. Many of the instruments for which Beethoven wrote, and especially his primary canvas, the piano, underwent technological transformations, often fundamentally changing what sounds were even possible to make. The American and French Revolutions, the rise and fall of Napoleon. Beethoven lived through the birth of the modern not only as participant but as midwife.

Never before, and never again, will such a man exist.

He came of age in the old world and died in the new world; he saw the new through the eyes of the old, but he saw so far into the new that by the end of his life he had practically already invented 20th century music.

Beethoven is the original Artist, in the modern sense: the lone man shaking his fist at the powerful, the rebel, the rockstar. Yet he did not fully understand himself in that way, because he was inventing the mold that every rockstar to come after him would occupy. But he did get that something was different about him and about his era. He is the first composer who obsessively preserved all his papers, including the many sketches and drafts he made of his music. Many composers of the past—including the great ones—barely had a sense that their music would be listened to at all after their death. Ludwig sensed not only that his music would be known long after he died, but that the people of the future would want to know how he made it, that his creative process would itself be an object of study for future humans. This is a new kind of awareness of oneself as a participant in history, a distinctly modern kind of haughtiness. Beethoven lived during a broader human awakening, and he was an especially awakened man.

Beethoven’s music cannot be understood as a merely aesthetic, or even merely ideological, project. Instead it is also an epistemological project. Beethoven’s music depicts epistemic journeys, and often it is an abstract representation of thinking itself. Beethoven therefore can be understood as creating informational artifacts intended to capture the fundamental processes of human cognition. Beethoven sought to build the totalizing thing, the experience of thought itself, the first musical stories told from the first person. Not what it is like to see this or that, not even what it is like to be sad or happy or sullen or elated. Not what it is like to live, but what it is like to think.

Beethoven’s orchestras think out loud, proposing, rejecting, reconsidering, and ultimately acquiescing to ideas. The Ninth Symphony depicts a personal struggle and a civilizational one—but it is not just the struggle itself it depicts. Rather it is the process of the struggle, showing how the struggle transforms ideas and what it is like to have ideas transformed in your mind.

Similarly, the 15th String Quartet’s Heiliger Dankgesang (Holy Song of Thanksgiving) portrays a recovery. But it is not just a portrayal of a recovery—it is recovery. You are the one who is meant to be recovering. Listening to Beethoven is less like a movie and more like a video game; a first-person experience.

He architected all of this out of the simplest musical parts, sometimes little more than the sonic equivalent of grunts. Think of the four-note motif of the Fifth Symphony or the prayer-like, three-note pattern that begins the Moonlight Sonata, that world-historical earworm. The simplicity is itself remarkable, but Beethoven’s real genius is in his capacity to transform these simple ideas kaleidoscopically into an endless range of emotional and intellectual registers. In all of his music, Beethoven is searching for a fundamental unity between all ideas, all emotions, all of the human condition.

Because of this, for those who experienced Beethoven deeply at a young age, there is a certain meta-pattern of cognition bearing Ludwig’s signature. It is not that Beethoven “inspired” me, but that I feel that the architecture of my mind was shaped by his hands.

It may be the case that Beethoven’s music bears this deep meta-cognitive property because of another of his famous traits: his deafness. By the end, his hearing loss was so total that he lived wholly within his mind. There are moments in the late-period music where it almost sounds like you are listening to someone remembering what music sounded like. The ghostlike waltzes and marches of the late sonatas and quartets come to mind. It is haunting once you know what you are listening to.

Shockingly, it really does appear to be true that, at the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Ludwig insisted on conducting an orchestra he could not hear. Of course, the orchestra obliged the musical legend, though in practice they were led by a backup conductor who had instructed the orchestra to ignore the composer’s wild gesticulations. Beethoven, conducting in his honorary role, fell disastrously behind time with the orchestra, such that he was still conducting after one of the movements had finished. He had to be turned around to see the audience clapping for him. He could hear neither his music nor the standing ovation it had evoked. I have no words to tell you how this little moment makes me feel, other than that it robs me of all the air in my lungs.

Beethoven stood alone then, just as he stands alone now in the proscenium arch. Beethoven—that distant historical figure, that scowling bust—always stood alone. And that’s why I don’t think of him as Beethoven. For me, he always has been, and will always be, Ludwig, my friend.