Thoughts on the Beethoven Year

Thoughts on the Beethoven Year

Isabel Mundry

The works of Beethoven stand as a paradigm of music in the spirit of Enlightenment and progress. It is with good reason that we have begun to critically examine these values, and the more consequent we are in doing so, the more honest we have to be in reflecting anew on the significance of Beethoven’s music. I increasingly tend to hear this music from the perspective of people from different cultural backgrounds who are critical toward the paradigms of the central European canon. This influences my own listening as well. I am more aware, for instance, of the limits of the notion of self as it is emphatically present in Beethoven’s music. The meaning I used to ascribe to this music as the child of an educated bourgeois German family has long disintegrated. But the music has survived it. I still listen to it, albeit in a different way. That is the good thing about consistent music: in the long term, it seems to be immune to attempts at monopolization. There are works I have heard performed, after a fashion, on the street dozens of times—yet I still love them. In the same way, the omnipresence of Beethoven’s music, even in an anniversary year, has no significant influence on my relationship to it.

As a creative artist, Beethoven to me is a composer whose works I can admire, although I will only rarely allow them to speak to me while I am developing a composition. There is, however, one crucial thing I have learned from his music: that over time every detail can become vital and that every moment can be simultaneously perceived as a statement and a question. Some of his contemporaries, including Schubert and Brahms, likely experienced Beethoven’s example as a burden—but this burden eventually seems to have been transformed into stimulation. I think one should take a relaxed approach to the fear of being influenced: if the work of another person were to impress me to the point where I was unable to respond, then I am no longer a composer. Composing to me is a creative form of forgetting. Influences may return, but in the act of one’s own writing something about them reveals itself to be fundamentally new.

There is no need to remind ourselves of Beethoven’s music. But we might take the opportunity of an anniversary like this to ask ourselves which ways of listening we are neglecting. Until now, in classical concerts we have been guided by the ideal of attention focused on structure, which is supposed to make the sensation of the space and of our own bodies disappear. I would be interested in examining ways of performance in which these categories, usually suppressed, reemerge. In that way, light, the silence between pieces of music, or the turning of the pages of a program book could be allowed to relate to our listening to the music. This would probably result in listening to Beethoven’s music in a different way as well. We would have to stage such listening situations. These might be performances in which there is an interplay between the music’s presence and its absence—not in the sense of qualification, but in the sense of realigning our attention. Beethoven’s music will stand its ground.

Isabel Mundry’s Der Körper der Saite for Cello and Ensemble will have its world premiere in the closing concert of the Pierre Boulez Saal’s 2019–20 season.