The great difference between Beethoven (1770–1827) and Mozart, who was only fourteen years older, was that Beethoven thought of himself as an artist. There is no mention of that word in Mozart’s letters – he considered himself a skilled craftsman who, as Haydn and Bach had done before him, supplied a commodity. But Beethoven saw himself as part of a special breed, a creator, and that put him on a par with royalty and other elevated souls. ‘What is in my heart,’ he said, ‘must come out.’71 Goethe was just one who responded to the force of his personality, writing, ‘Never have I met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity, such vitality and great-heartedness. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt to the world and its ways.’72 Even the crossings-out in his autograph music have a violence that Mozart, for example, lacked.73 Like Wagner after him, Beethoven felt that the world owed him a living, because he was a genius. At one stage, two Viennese princes settled some money on Beethoven, to keep him in the city. After one of them was killed in an accident, Beethoven took the man’s estate to court, to enforce payment. He felt it was his entitlement.74
In a lifetime of creating much beautiful music, two compositions stand out, two works which changed the course of music for all time. These were the Eroica symphony, which had its premiere in 1805, and the Ninth symphony, first performed in 1824.75 Harold Schonberg wonders what went through the mind of the audience on the momentous occasion when the Eroica was first performed. ‘It was faced with a monster of a symphony, a symphony longer than any previously written and much more heavily scored; a symphony with complex harmonies, a symphony of titanic force; a symphony of fierce dissonances; a symphony with a funeral march that is paralysing in its intensity.’76 This was a new musical language and for many the Eroica and its pathos were never surpassed. George Marek says it must have been an experience similar to hearing the news of the splitting of the atom.77
Beethoven was a romantic enough figure anyway but the hearing difficulties that began to afflict him around the time that Eroica was first performed and would in time develop into complete deafness, also drove him inwards. Fidelio, his grand opera (though perhaps with too many characters), the great violin and piano concertos, the famous piano sonatas, such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata, all had their mysterious, mystic, monumental elements. But the Ninth symphony was pivotal, and was always held in the highest esteem by the romantics who came after. By all accounts, its premiere was disastrous, after only two rehearsals and when many of the singers could not reach the high notes. (The lead singers begged Beethoven to change them, but he refused – no one had a more magnificent will than he.78) However, what the Eroica and Ninth symphonies have in common, what made their sounds so new and so different from the music of, say, Mozart, was that Beethoven was concerned above all with inner states of being, with the urge for self-expression, the dramatic intensity of the soul. ‘Beethoven’s music is not polite. What he presented, as no composer before or since, was a feeling of drama, of conflict and resolution . . . The music [of the Ninth] is not pretty or even attractive. It merely is sublime . . . this is music turned inward, music of the spirit, music of extreme subjectivity . . .’79 It was the Ninth symphony, its gigantic struggle ‘of protest and release’, that most influenced Berlioz and Wagner, that remained the (largely unattainable) ideal for Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.80 Debussy confessed that the great score had become, for composers, ‘a universal nightmare’. What he meant was that few other composers could match Beethoven, and perhaps only one, Wagner, could surpass him.
Franz Schubert has been described as ‘the classical romantic’.81 He had a short life (1797–1828), all of which he spent in Beethoven’s shadow. But he too felt that he could only be an artist, telling a friend that ‘I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.’ He began life as a boy singer in a choir and then as a schoolteacher after his voice broke. But he hated that and turned to composing. Like Beethoven, he was small, five feet one and a half inches, as compared with five feet four. He was nicknamed Schwammerl (‘Tubby’) and as Beethoven’s hearing was bad, so Schubert’s eyesight was poor. More important, he was the perfect example of the romantic with two selves. While, on the one hand, he was very well read and made his name by setting many poems – of Goethe, Schiller and Heine – to music, he drank more than he should, contracted venereal disease and in general let his craving for pleasure drag him down. This showed in his music, especially his ‘Song of Sorrow’, the symphony in B minor.82 He was also the master of music for the unaccompanied voice.83
Schubert died in the year that followed Beethoven’s death. By that time, much of the modern world was coming into existence. New railways were connecting people rapidly. Thanks to the industrial revolution, vast fortunes were being made by the bourgeoisie, alongside desperate poverty. Aspects of this rubbed off directly on the world of music. It was no longer simply a court experience but was now enjoyed by the newly-emerging bourgeoisie. They had discovered dance music, with the waltz, in particular, becoming a craze at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–1815. In the 1820s, at the time of Carnival, Vienna offered as many as 1,600 balls in a single night.84 But the city also had four theatres which offered opera at one time or another, and many smaller halls, at the university and elsewhere. Middle-class music-making had arrived.
Besides the new theatres, for concerts and opera, for example, the new technologies had a profound impact on instruments themselves. Beethoven had increased the size of the orchestra and, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Berlioz would increase it still more. At the same time, the new metal technology greatly improved the otherwise unreliable wind instruments of the eighteenth century. Keys and valves were devised which enabled horns and bassoons, for example, to play more consistently in tune.85 The new metal, articulated keys also enabled players to reach holes their fingers couldn’t otherwise span. The tuba evolved and Adolph Sax invented the saxophone.86 At the same time, as orchestras grew in size, there emerged the need for someone to take control. Until then, most ensembles could be controlled either by the first violinist, or whoever was playing the clavier. But after Beethoven, around 1820, the conductor as we know him today emerged. The composers Ludwig Spohr and Carl Maria von Weber were among those who conducted their own music with a baton, together with François-Antoine Habeneck, the founder of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra (in 1828), who conducted with his bow.
It was around this time, too, that the modern piano emerged. Two elements were involved here. One was the evolution of the steel frame, steel being developed as a result of the industrial revolution, which enabled pianos to become much more massive and sturdy than they had been in, say, Mozart’s day. The other factor was the genius (and marketing) of Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who debuted at nineteen and may just have been the greatest violinist who ever existed.87 A superb technician and a flamboyant showman, who liked to deliberately break a string during a performance, and complete the evening using only three strings, he was the first of the supervirtuosi.88 But he did expand the technique of the violin, introducing new bowings, fingerings and harmonics, in the process stimulating pianists to try to emulate him on their new, more versatile instruments.89