Beethoven’s Other Legacy

Before we begin celebrating Beethoven next week with his nine symphonies being played at the Performing Arts Center, we should pause to realize how much he had to change his world to create the music that has spoken to audiences for more than 200 years.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born into a world in which musicians were servants. But through the force of his music and his personality, he changed that, much as he changed the course of music.

Franz Joseph Haydn’s patrons, Princes Paul Anton and later his son Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, for instance, hired people to be valets if they could also play instruments.

“They could do double duty--play in the orchestra, but also help the prince get dressed,” said William Meredith, the founding director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies in a recent interview from the center’s offices at San Jose State.

“Some musicians, like Haydn, found a way to work within those strictures. It was a mixed bag. In Haydn’s case, he had his own orchestra, but he had to appear when he was told to appear.

“[Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart didn’t ever achieve that kind of situation, though that’s what he wanted. I wonder if he would have succeeded in it. Certainly his financial worries during his last year were due to not having the kind of stable job that Haydn had.”

Beethoven refused to go along with that status quo, however.

Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770, Beethoven began to win the respect and attention of the local aristocracy as a young musician and composer. It was inevitable that he move on to Vienna, then the musical capital of the country, if not the world.

When he moved there in 1792, he carried letters of introduction from his aristocratic friends, “which opened a lot of doors,” Meredith said.

“But Beethoven had to go to great pains not to do things that would make people think he was a servant. He would not play at parties when he was asked because that would be something a servant would do. He didn’t want to be thought of as being there essentially to be the entertainment. Other guests were not there to entertain.

“He was very sensitive about that. He was trying to establish himself as an equal to the nobility. He felt his nobility was in his musical talent, rather than in something hereditary.

“But he had to be extremely circumspect. For most of his life, he was supported by the nobility and completely dependent on them.”

As he grew increasingly deaf, however, with symptoms appearing perhaps as early as 1796, he began to be isolated from the society that had once feted him, and he became increasingly focused--obsessed, rather--with writing down the music he heard within.

“When he first went to Vienna, he was very well-dressed, sort of a dandy,” Meredith said. “Women liked him a lot. Over his lifetime, he grew very cavalier about his clothing, which is a nice way to say it.

“There’s a famous story of him going to the window and staring out of it. He heard boys laughing at him. When he looked down, he saw he was standing there naked. Sort of like the forgetful professor.

“A person completely absorbed by composition doesn’t have time to think about what kind of shirt to wear or what was in fashion. Beethoven was obsessed in this sense. He wasn’t on the normal plane of how people react to each other.”

It’s interesting to think about what kind of music Beethoven might be writing if he were alive today.

“Beethoven inherited the musical language of the day and so radically changed it that there was no going back,” Meredith said. “I can only imagine that the same thing would happen if he were alive today. He would choose some aspect of the musical language of today and radically change it. But I would doubt it would be the academic language of today.”

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For Beethoven, music was “a philosophy in sound, an ethical and moral force,’ Meredith said. “And he succeeded through his music in proving that music could do that.

“One of the things that I have learned from Beethoven’s music is that when you go through life, lots of things happen to you that are bad or tragic or things that you have to deal with.

“Beethoven through his life adopted a heroic response to these things. Later, he realized that the heroic response is too easy and that other kinds of responses are necessary.

“He went from being a youthful extrovert with this heroic style to a style of indecision and ambiguity. To me, what’s great about the late music, which is some of greatest music ever written, is that it is ambivalent. It is not completely clear. It’s not the easy victory of the Fifth Symphony, not that that victory is easy.

“But we have to remember that Beethoven did his best to raise his nephew, Carl, and that his nephew committed suicide. Beethoven had to learn that for things to work out, high moral ideals have to be moderated in the face of human weaknesses.

“The older he got, the wiser he got, the more willing he was to let ambiguity and the uncertainty of life into his music.”

* John Eliot Gardiner will conduct the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies in five programs from Monday through Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (No concert on Thursday). The series is presented by the Philharmonic Society. Limited seating available. $20-$60. (714) 556-2787.