Beethoven's Symphonies Critically Discussed Part 5

In Teutonic language, which finds in the highest imaginings only the symbol and apotheosis of human worth and endeavour; which believes, indeed, that by man came and comes the resurrection from the dead; and which regards that life as the most priceless page in human history, to be for ever applied and interpreted by sympathy at will; and first becoming truly divine when we regard it as truly human--in Teutonic thought and dialect, we will conclude with this eloquent and intrinsic application to the greatest of Beethoven's symphonies:--"Nohl names the work the musical Faust of the moral will and its conflicts; a work whose progress shows that there is something greater than Fate, namely, Man, who, descending into the abysses of his own self, fetches counsel and power wherewith to battle with life; and then, re-inforced through his conviction of indestructible oneness with the G.o.d-like, celebrates, with dythyrambic victory, the triumph of the eternal Good, and of his own inner Freedom."

THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY, NO. VI, OP. 68.

"Here (in Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, in the summer of 1808, lying by the brook with nut-trees, listening to the birds singing), I wrote the 'Scene by the Brook,' and the goldhammers there up above me, the quails and cuckoos round about me, helped compose."--Beethoven to Schindler. These last words throw a light on the oft-abused pa.s.sage where the birds are imitated. We should not judge a Beethoven hastily--especially not a.s.sign to his action low grounds. We here see that the pa.s.sage was not introduced in mere material imitation, but rather as a genial tribute and record; _so_ the pa.s.sage becomes beautiful, and the opposite of superficial. Emerson says, "Yon swallow weaving his straw into his nest should weave it into my poem." No doubt, in the savage--in his pa.s.sionate love of freedom and roaming--we already find the germ of the poetic love of nature; and some two thousand years ago we find such sublime celebration as this (and what ages of evolution does it imply!)--

"As when in heaven the stars about the morn Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest."--Iliad (Tennyson).

"A rock-wall'd glen, water'd by a streamlet, And shadowed o'er with pines."--Euripides (Milman).

"Yon starry conclave Those glorious dynasts of the sky, that bear Winter and summer round to mortal man."

--Aiskulos (Idem).

"Smooth lies the surface of the purple seas, Nor curl'd, nor whiten'd, by the gentle breeze; No more, hoa.r.s.e dashing from the breakers steep, The heavy waves recoil into the deep; The zephyrs breathe, the murm'ring swallow weaves Her straw-built chamber 'neath the shadowy eaves."

--Agathias (Idem).

And yesterday, was written--

"Vesuvius wears his brilliant plume Above a sun-lit dome of snow; And darkly thro' the illumin'd gloom Extends his mighty base below: On Mount St. Angelo's ponderous crest, And in his furrows, snow, too, sleeps; Great glitt'ring clouds are piled o'er that: All rises out of glamourous deeps;

For, glinting up, thro' olive bowers, And many an arm-outstretching tree, Is the sun-tipt, early-winter-morning, Slumberous, breathing sea."

In the sister arts--sister graces--painting and music, down to Turner and the Turner of music, Beethoven (he also would have given us the Python slaying Apollo, and the going home of the Temeraire, the Plague of Darkness, aeneas leaving Carthage, and Italy, Ancient and Modern: Schumann, too, is very Turner-like, perhaps more so, has more of that mystical glamour--Beethoven, like Rembrandt, only ideal); in the sister arts, Nature could not fail to be celebrated, or rather let us say ideally reproduced, and even transfigured, through the geniuses of these arts, her eldest children--nay, herself (made man). In Beethoven, then--a tone-poet, German, and _born on the Rhine_, at, perhaps, its grandest part--as we might expect, this worship and celebration of nature, this apotheosis in tone, culminates. Her sweetness and her grandeur, coloured, too, by his own Beethoven-soul, are by him sublimely revealed--in many a page and pa.s.sage dear to the sympathetic knower. It was, then, impossible that Beethoven should _not_ write (bet.i.tled or not) a Pastoral Symphony; and this, if only as one manifestation of his (like nature) many-sidedness. Moreover, though the Greek poesy reads as fresh as if written yesterday, nevertheless nature-worship, such as we understand it--an overpowering sense of her mysticism, a rapturous _losing_ of ourselves in her--seems a thing not only specially Teutonic and modern, but modern even among the Teutonic peoples themselves, dating after the Reformation; and, indeed, almost as though nature-worship was to supply the place of religion (in the narrow sense, worship of an anthropomorphic maker of nature), rapture in her to supply the place of religious rapture, no longer possible; if so, a beautiful ordinance! Hence, then, if we go a little way below the surface, the present masterpiece, Beethoven's universally favourite (though far from greatest, indeed, the Symphony in D is superior--much more powerful, especially the first movement, and at least equally fresh) "Pastoral Symphony." It does not, indeed (at least the opening allegro), celebrate that peculiar, that sacred sentiment we have been speaking of; it does not utter the unutterable, but it is a true and lovely nature-poem nevertheless, worthy of all acceptation; without it the splendid series of symphonies would have been incomplete. Let us approach it.

What STRIKES us in this "household-word" work, especially in the first movement, is its significant simplicity. It is wonderful, as revealing to us how _profoundly_ simple a great man can be, and is; sublime in that, as well as in his opulence and power; indeed, simplicity is an inevitable concomitant and _sine qua non_ of power; even in a Napoleon, let alone a Shakespeare, a Newton, and a Beethoven.

So simple is the allegro, that it almost seems studiously so--almost as though Beethoven thereby wished to convey a reproach, at least a monition, to the artificial, and said, "Thus I hold the mirror up to Nature!" Musically, the piece (as it has always seemed to us) rather suffers by this. The ideas are more than usually re-repeated; and, remarkably, reiterations (though perhaps there was a psychological reason for this in the soul of Beethoven, as instinctively expressive, over and over again, of the one great joy he felt, or as saying--"After all, the essence and compelling spirit of this great Nature is one"). Moreover, the ideas, though in themselves beautifully pure and characteristic, seem almost _too_ simple, nay we had almost said languid, for they rather suggest to us the gratification of a convalescent than of a pa.s.sionately profound (aye, and profoundly pa.s.sionate) lover of nature, such as all Germans are, such as Schumann intensely was, and such as Beethoven must have exceptionally been.

(Brendel says, Haydn's love of nature, as revealed in his music, was that of her very child, unconscious; Beethoven's, that of a town-dweller, conscious. But to this I would reply, town-dweller by compulsion). On the other hand, if Beethoven wished to enter a protest against _Schwarmerei_, for nature, none could be more effective than this movement. But nature ever was and remains mystic, and no celebration of her, above all by a Beethoven, can satisfy us which does not shadow forth, is not overpowered by, a sense of this--sense peculiar to this latter age; more so, even, than the similar companion-sense of love. Love without _Schwarmerei_ were not love; no more is love of nature. For these profounder realizations of nature, "glances into the deepest deeps of beauty," (Carlyle, on the remark about "the lilies of the field") reflected adumbrations of her wizardry, a sense of her intoxicating aroma, the ecstasy in her bosom, that mesmerizing infinitude of hers, we must look to Beethoven's sonatas, or other portions of his symphonies; and to such music as Schumann's; hardly in his Pastoral Symphony (except somewhat in the andante); more in his Pastoral Sonata--_that_ first movement is _profound_, as well as richer. There we see the poet-philosopher, nay, high-priest of nature; and the movement, four-square, almost perfect, is one of the masterpieces, and most precious legacies of Nature's Eldest Child. In the present movement we have peaceful pleasure, but not rapture, if even joy, or delight (in the Sonata Pastorale we have contemplative joy)--though Beethoven may possibly have expressly chastened the expression of feeling, as being, so, more "pastoral." Be that as it may, here we have sweetness rather than power (except, indeed, behind all); nay, rather the gratification of an habitual dweller in the country (and he no longer a young man), than the burst of rapture we might have expected from a lover of nature only just let loose from town. However, Beethoven _has_ written over the movements--"_Awakening_ of cheerful emotions on arrival in the country." He further said, the symphony was feeling rather than painting. This is a matter of course from a Beethoven; and note, it is a Beethoven's feelings that are depicted. What we have in the work is Nature _plus_ Beethoven--nature photographed after pa.s.sing through him, and so becoming idealised. We have, however, both scene-painting and soul-painting through the emotions here excited and described; we see also the landscape which to a great extent occasioned them; (thus, this, like Goethe's, is an occasional poem). It is a truly pastoral district; quiet, sunny scenery, with a scent of the earliest hay; but nature in her splendour, with, say, in the distance, the great sea; nature, a blaze of flowers embosomed in hills, as in our own beautiful England in May; let alone nature in spring, with her background of Alps and Appenines. Nature, whose greatest hint--the secret of whose greatest power is, Immortality; a promise of that is hardly here celebrated; or, rather, that hint is not, for it is in every landscape:--"I, too, have looked upon the hills in their hazy veil, but their greatest charm, to me, was their promise." Neither, in spite of Elterlein's charming allusion, have we the scenery where, or the time when (_soust_) as Goethe so truly, sublimely expresses it (in two of his most inspired lines)--

"_Sturzte_ sich der Himmelsliebe Kuss Auf mich herab in ernsber Sabbath stille."

When Beethoven wrote this music he had not in mind his revered Shakespeare's magnificent--

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heaving alchemy."

This, rather, the immortal Symphony in A suggests; or such lines as these:--

"My other mighty pa.s.sion was for thee, Thou glimmering, glamouring, manifestation of G.o.d!

Unspeakable Nature, with thy distant sea, Wave-framing hills, dim woods, and flowery sod; My haziest, sweetest memories, are of you, Where inland-county beauty guards its stream; Oh! 'violet' memory 'dim' with _my_ tears' dew; Oh! shadowy pausing, touch'd with earliest beam; And sea-side recollections stir my heart, The calm's majestic cheerfulness, the storm, The bluff that through the vapours seem'd to start, A thousand miracles of tint and form; And ever as I yearn'd on wave and hill, The unconscious secret was thy Promise still."

The "Scene by the Brook"--

"I draw them all along, and flow To join the br.i.m.m.i.n.g river; Men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever."

(exquisite image of immortality bearing along mortality)--is richer in significance. There, indeed, we do get some of those deep glimpses, far glances (and tender ones into flower-cups)--those unspeakable hints (note especially, as usual, the pa.s.sage in the extra-poetic key of G flat; where, however, also as usual, Beethoven lingers too little; indeed, even he seems rather to _deviate_ into such keys, and to be afraid of dwelling in them). We see Beethoven, the colossally _un_happy soul, here at least happy, nay, blessed; lapped in flowers; caressed by the stream; soothed and tended by all the "angels and ministers of grace" of nature; while the everlasting heaven p.r.o.nounces its benediction over him.

For our own part, we are specially affected, because we call to mind a brook where we also were wont to be happy. But, it was not in quiet scenery, but in a Swiss mountain-valley; the brook came from heaven, and coursed through pine-woods and pastures into a stupendously beautiful lake, the shadows of whose mighty guardian Alps are reflected also in the Moonlight Sonata; while, afar off, as it were in colossal admonition, towered those eternal reminders, the peaks of the Bernese Oberland.

The Scherzo has always seemed to us an inspiration--as much as the storm; so original and powerful, so tuneful in its picturesque, spontaneous gaiety. It is Beethoven at his genialist. The sublimity of the storm may speak for itself: I will only remark, in reply to the German Hume, who rather cavils and carps, and is no Beethoven-worshipper (but Mozart), and says "the cause for such a very loud storm is too trifling"--that the storm _also_ perchance broke over crowned heads and the fate of empires (Napoleon died in a storm, and so, just as curiously characteristic, did Beethoven). Storms do, too, come up in the brightest summer day (without or within us); and, in short, though the criticism is truly philosophical, that it should be left doubtful whether the storm was a physical or moral one--of nature or human nature--Beethoven, as ever, is ent.i.tled to a genial interpretation, a liberal application. In the meanwhile, _as_ a storm--storm of music, as well as musical storm--it is as grand as original; shaking us with the fullness of those sublime emotions of the natural storm (and surely our German Hume would not disparage these!), and its introduction is a happy felicity.

_Beethoven's_ "Lobgesang," which concludes the work, is very n.o.ble in its unstudied beauty, expressing "pious and grateful feelings" by unsophisticated men after storm. The treatment of the greatly-simple theme is a masterpiece and model. Here is Wagner antic.i.p.ated, but not spoilt! To sum up: the first movement, very exceptionally, is the weakest of all; and the whole work, though a treasure of its own, coming from Beethoven, revealing him as singularly loveable, is in no way so surpa.s.sing as to preclude the attempt by a follower also to compose a Pastoral Symphony. We conclude with Herr Elterlein's summary of the work--very charming, although he finds in the allegro considerably more than we do.

"A refreshing morning breeze greets us; we have left behind the crowds and walls of the town. We are in the mood of Faust, on the sunny Easter spring morning. At first we are in silent rapture, the climax is not yet reached, Nature's myriad living voices do not at once re-echo in our inmost spirit. The farther we wander, the more natural beauties open up and greet us, the more multifarious becomes the scene. In proportion as the variety becomes richer, and the impression of this divine beauty--(_Gottesnatur_--German ought to be _known by every musician_, and read in the original, because their pregnant, often pantheistic, shades of expression, become lost in English; or, if 'transcribed,' are 'not English')--deeper, the more our rapture swells to utmost joy. Now, we perfectly revel (_schwelgen ganz_) in the full feast; entirely abandon ourselves to the impressions of absolute Nature; completely at one with ourselves, in this kingdom, we feel ourselves at one with her.

"We have now reached the acme of enthusiasm; our soul trembles in silent ecstasy; involuntarily the desire awakes in us, after expatiating in the universal beauty of Nature, to contemplate and enjoy her still life and operations in intimate communion.

"Therefore, the scene changes in the second movement. We are transplanted to a peaceful woodland vale, through which a brook babbles. _'Scene am Bach_,' the tone-picture is also called by the master; it is elaborated out in the most thoughtful manner, and displays before us, in the richest, fullest colours, the murmur of the brook, the rustling of the swayed tree-tops, and the song of the birds. At last the brook is still, the trees rustle no more; we have already once said farewell to the soft babbling that long kept us spell-bound--quail, cuckoo, and nightingale are alone still heard.--(Beautifully imagined!) as it were, also saying 'farewell' to the sympathetic wanderer up the vale; who, only another human form of them, had stayed so long with them, loving them like their brother, enchanted by their song--enchanted in Nature's bosom. This way of putting it (of receiving it) is only another proof of the non-materialism, non-superficialism, nay, of the beauty of this pa.s.sage (withal, quite brief--_only introduced at the end_); and a proof of the value and necessity of sympathetic audition of a Beethoven's works. (Only a poet--never Dryasdust--can rightly criticise a poet).

"In the third movement the scene is again changed. We find ourselves in meadows. The characteristic multiformity of this piece would have told us its meaning, without the master's words. So, too, the storm--those tones full of fearful, dark sublimity. At last, the tempest and its fury cease, only in the distance the thunder still growls; the blue sky again opens up, the evening sun casts its mild light o'er the landscape--(genial thought)--enlivened by shepherds whose shalm now sounds.

"The fourth movement, therefore, is dedicated to 'Shepherd's Song,'--'pious and grateful feelings after the storm.' The grateful strains begin softly, then swell ever more and more to topmost joy, pouring forth at their climax an intense, solemn, and yet again such a plain, simple thank-offering to Nature's Creator."

SYMPHONY, NO. 7, OP. 92.

In this magnificent symphony, the most picturesque of all, Beethoven seemed to have taken a new lease of originality. It is specially instructive and encouraging on that account; and, amongst other evidences, makes us weigh, whether his "third manner" (whereof this may be considered the n.o.ble isthmus that joins those continents), was really progress or decay, or a dubious transition step to something higher. However, the work is reckoned among those of his second manner, and so is certainly a potent argument for those who, with enlightened honesty (and not Philistine blindness), feel that Beethoven's second style is, _par excellence_, Beethoven--whether Wagner began or not where Beethoven left off. _Apropos_ of Wagner, does not this "Poco Sostenuto" call to mind that Wizard of the South's famous morceaux in "Lohengrin," in the same key? Is not the style--nay, the motiv--much the same?--

[Music]

There seems something of the same _mysticism_, though Beethoven is not tainted with the morbidness one scents in Wagner; seems, as a whole, broader, n.o.bler, more _natural_, more truly deep; in a word, more healthy, and therefore greater, notwithstanding Wagner's undoubted genius, and still more stupendous energy for which we most envy him.

This opening theme has a powerful tranquility about it--like that, say, of some Epaminondas; seems, as it were, an a.s.surance and announcement that Beneficence, at bottom and after all, is paramount in this stupendous paradox and discrepancy called the universe; notwithstanding, it seems to go on to say, the ground-ba.s.s of storm, on and over which true heroism will ever ride (_re-entry of the theme ff_); notwithstanding the painfulnesses, which are only subtler proofs and manifestations of self-justified righteousness and power--most sublime in its subtlest judgments--as the private life of every self-strict person knows. Then, a new theme--fragment of the same essential peace--enters; curiously (and beautifully) reminding us of that early, early work of Beethoven's (Oh, Rhine-lad, written _how_ long ago!), the Sonata in C dedicated to Haydn--

[Music]

but gaining by being slow.

But "action, action, action," which these climbing ba.s.ses--("And ever climbing up the climbing wave"), "life is painfully real,"--seem to say, soon break in again on this Elysian dream. It re-appears, however, like a heavenly messenger, holding us spell-bound, in a trance or veritable dream, whereof these two conflicting elements form the chief apparitions; conflicting, yet viewed largely, harmonious, like their counterparts in that oneness, Life,--whose painfulnesses are as much a _necessary_ part of it, as discords are of entire music.

THE VIVACE.

Great pictures--pictures of great action (like the actions themselves)--represent the moral qualities behind. Hence, many a page of music, eminently of Beethoven, may be objectively or subjectively interpreted, or both. It is the usual practice, and a natural one, to regard the "Eroica" symphony as objective, and the C minor as subjective--both ill.u.s.trating the grand abstract fact, Conflict. The _vivace_ of the A major symphony _strikes_, no less, as objective.

There is a ringing cheerfulness about it that suggests no spiritual struggles, psychological battle, but the open air and its beloved objects--by no means excluding the world's great foreground feature, man; rather, pre-eminently presenting and ill.u.s.trating him, and this from your Beethoven, the intensely subjective soul. Intensely subjective, yes! far more so,--more grandly so,--than your Byron; more _characteristically_ so than Shakespeare; but, nevertheless--nay, therefore--also more truly, n.o.bly objective than the former, kin with the latter (Turner is greater than Rosa).

It is impossible to overstate the bright, the exhilarating impression of these tones. Here we at once revel in the outer world, in all the

April of its prime,

and feel ourselves magically strung up to virile deeds, to face the "rugged Hyrcanian boar"--"to do or die." Here the ringing woodland of feudal times is around us, and all the panoply, pride, pomp, and circ.u.mstance of a royal chase. The motto of Stephen h.e.l.ler's admirable "Cha.s.se" was very apt, which records how the French monarch, plunged in gloom by the death of his beloved, seeks distraction in the chase.