Beethoven Hero

Scott Burnham

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691215884
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique classique

Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, Beethoven Hero explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identification with its musical process? Starting with the story of heroic quest heard time and again in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, Burnham suggests that Beethoven's music matters profoundly to its listeners because it projects an empowering sense of self, destiny, and freedom, while modeling ironic self-consciousness.
In addition to thus identifying Beethoven's music as an overarching expression of values central to the age of Goethe and Hegel, the author describes and then critiques the process by which the musical values of the heroic style quickly became the controlling model of compositional logic in Western music criticism and analysis. Apart from its importance for students of Beethoven, this book will appeal to those interested in canon formation in the arts and in music as a cultural, ethical, and emotional force--and to anyone concerned with what we want from music and what music does for us.

Chapter One

BEETHOVEN’S HERO

WE BEGIN BY retelling a story that has been told for almost two hundred years: the story many generations of listeners have heard in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony. Like a great myth, this story is told in numberless ways, fashioned anew by each generation. Different agents move through its course to similarly appointed ends: we hear of the destiny and self-realization of real heroes, mythical heroes, or even humankind itself. These sorts of programs are still generated today, though much less frequently, and even at the height of the formalist disdain of such interpretations, earlier this century, the old story is preserved—if only in a translated version with new metaphors, telling of the animadversions of a process or a structure, or the development of a theme and its motives. For the trajectory of these stories is always the same, or nearly so: something (someone) not fully formed but full of potential ventures out into complexity and ramification (adversity), reaches a ne plus ultra (a crisis), and then returns renewed and completed (triumphant). The use (whether overt or covert) of such an anthropomorphic scenario is a sign that the stakes are high, the game played close to home.

To expedite the telling of this story, I shall concentrate on those passages that have attracted the most commentary and that are heard as crux points, hinges, turning points, ends, and beginnings. These include the first forty-five bars, the new theme in the development and its climactic exordium, the horn call, and the coda. The interpretive readings of several different generations of critics and analysts—ranging from A. B. Marx and Alexandre Oulibicheff through Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schering to Peter Schleuning and Philip G. Downs—will combine to form a composite narrative.¹ Emphasis throughout will be on the similar ways in which all these commentators react to the musical events of the movement, however dissimilar their language and explicit agenda.

I am purposefully limiting the discussion to the first movement. Wilhelm von Lenz once observed that this movement is closed within itself, “like an overture raised to the power of a symphony.”² Many of the other writers I have looked at implicitly subscribe to the same view, for most of their interpretive energy is pledged to the first movement, with the remaining movements receiving progressively less and less coverage. Critics attempting to develop a programmatic interpretation that satisfactorily links all four movements of the Eroica face a number of stiff challenges, not the least of which is the presence of two movements after the hero’s funeral. If Berlioz hit upon the happy expedient of hearing the Scherzo as a musical transcription of ancient Greek funeral games, there still remained no comfortable way to incorporate the finale. Most critics allow the finale to pick up a very different narrative strand from that projected by the first three movements—here, Beethoven’s use of the theme from his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus provides a convenient and irresistible extramusical clue. The recent Prometheus-based interpretation of the Eroica by Peter Schleuning attempts to make a virtue of this situation, by claiming that the finale is the programmatic goal of the entire symphony, which allegedly follows the Prometheus story of Beethoven’s earlier ballet through all four movements. Wagner, as we saw in the introduction, preceded Schleuning in the view that the finale crowns one long process; for him, the finale works to unite the facets of Mankind projected by the earlier movements into a heroically complete man. I would argue that the urge to create an embracing narrative for the entire symphony arises at least partially from the ease with which such programs are generated for works like the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, and from the perception that such “through-composed” multimovement designs represent a higher form of the symphony.³

But it is not merely to avoid the interpretive challenges of the subsequent movements that I propose to limit this discussion to the first movement. As I stated in the introduction, it is primarily this movement that has been responsible for the stature of the Eroica, for its role as a turning point of music history. The unexampled drama of this movement singlehandedly altered the fate of sonata form, the defining form of the classical style, not to mention that of the symphony. And the homogeneity of its reception, the nearly universal feeling that it is most meaningfully heard as a powerfully stirring version of that premier story of Western mythology, the hero’s journey, fairly demands that it be placed at the outset of our own journey.

I

The first forty-five bars of the Eroica Symphony comprise one of the most raked-over pieces of musical property in the Western hemisphere. No one denies the overtly heroic effect of the two opening blasts, and it is almost comic to see how programmatic interpreters inevitably rush off with the impetus of these two chords only to stumble a few bars later when they realize that something distressingly less than expeditious heroism is implied by the much-discussed C# in bar 7. The tendency for critical discourse to slow down when passing this spot mirrors the inability of the piece itself to get started in a convincing fashion. What kind of a hero would pause so portentously at the very outset of his heroic exploits?

A. B. Marx and Aléxandre Oulibicheff offer a neat solution to this dilemma in their Napoleon-oriented programs, both dating from the 1850s: elements that impede the forward progress of the music or undermine its tonality are seen as external to the hero Napoleon and do not signify any weakness or vacillation on the part of the great general.⁴ Napoleon himself is stuck in forward gear, and the concept of the heroic implied in these interpretations is that of a singularly obsessed hero fighting against a recalcitrant external world.⁵ For both Marx and Oulibicheff, the music of the first forty-five bars represents morning on the battlefield, thereby establishing a setting for the ensuing battle. Marx, for example, notes that the theme (which he explicitly associates with Napoleon) first sounds in a lower voice and is raised in three successive stages to a full orchestral tutti statement. His program acknowledges this musical process by casting the entire section as a conflation of the rising of the sun on the battlefield with the rising of Napoleon onto his battle steed. Moments of tonal vacillation, such as the C# at bar 7 or, in the next statement, the sequential move to F minor, are associated with shadows and mists—things that hide the light of the sun (and of the rising hero).⁶ These moments are always followed by an even more decisive statement of the theme, and a pattern of statement-liquidation-stronger statement is established. Not only does the hero persist; he grows stronger.

This pattern, which is noted in programmatic terms by both Marx and Oulibicheff, can help us identify what is surely one of the most striking features of this opening section: it functions simultaneously as an introduction (setting) and as an exposition of the first theme. That is why the theme cannot appear in full tutti splendor (Napoleon cannot appear in the saddle) until after the big dominant arrival and prolongation in bars 23-36. The dual image of sunrise on the battlefield and the hero preparing to present himself to his troops captures an important aspect of the musical process.

But that is not all. There is also a sense of musical development in these first bars. Both Marx and Oulibicheff note that the ambiguity provided by the C# in the bass and the subsequent syncopated G’s in the first violins works to extend a simple four-bar phrase into a thirteen-bar Satz.⁷ The fact that the theme always veers away from E

through the introduction of chromaticism is a mark of developmental instability as well as developmental extrapolation. In Marx’s reading, this kind of vacillation contributes to a pattern of action and reaction that extends throughout the entire movement.⁸ The identification of the main theme of the movement with the protagonist Napoleon, who must exhort his troops to victory, conforms to the tendency of this theme to act more as a developmental force than as a melodic entity, even during the course of its own exposition.

Several critics of the twentieth century give the developmental and transitional features of this opening section a psychological reading. Alfred Heuss elaborates a view of the hero as a willful and wily leader, whose strategic mainspring is his quicksilver unpredictability, heard in the “demonic uncertainty” of the famous C#.⁹ The opening forty-five bars represent for Heuss a process in which the hero becomes conscious of his inner nature (expressed by the cello line at the outset) and transforms it into his public exterior (the transference of the theme to the upper register); when the theme is heard in both bass and soprano (bars 37ff.), Heuss exclaims: “And now . . . the hero looms before us as a giant, fully in tune with himself, both inwardly and outwardly a heroic character of hugest proportion.”¹⁰ In this rather more psychologically complex reading than Marx’s black and white opposition of hero and external world, Heuss places the vicissitudes of the opening bars within the mind and character of the hero. This type of interpretive strategy, which in its shift of perspective makes the music out to be more a drama of the self in the first person than a depiction of some other self, is echoed in three other roughly contemporaneous interpretations.

Paul Bekker, Arnold Schering, and Romain Rolland all center their interpretations on the dual nature of these opening bars, hearing the passage in the same way as Marx and Oulibicheff but construing it differently. For Bekker, the hero vacillates in his own mind between “vorwärtsdrängende Tatkraft” (forward-driving energy) and “klagend resignierendes Besinnen” (plaintively resigning deliberation). He claims that these two facets of the hero’s inner conflict can be followed throughout the entire movement (thereby matching the extent of Marx’s narrative structure of actions and reactions).¹¹ Thus Bekker has transferred the scene of the action from an actual battlefield to a psychological process. At first blush, Arnold Schering’s controversial interpretation seems to place the conflict right back on the battlefield, and not even a battlefield from modern European history but the plains of ancient Troy. Hector is said to be the hero of the first movement, the symphony as a whole to consist of selected scenes from the Iliad.¹² Yet the starting point for Schering’s reading is that of Bekker’s: an aggressive/passive duality. Instead of hearing this duality as a conflict within the psyche of the hero himself, Schering personifies the hesitating side of the her...