Early in his career, Beethoven provided music for a ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, which told a version of that myth in dance. An unpretentious little contredanse from that score later became the theme of the awe-inspiring variations finale of his Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica” or “Heroic.” Vast and searching in its content, the “Eroica” was a musical revolution in itself, inspired by the idea — shared by many
Each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies strives toward the “sublime,” to an experience beyond the everyday, which Enlightenment writers substituted for the God of organized religion. besides Beethoven — that Napoleon Bonaparte was the new Prometheus, shattering the old regimes and bringing power to the people. After famously tearing up the title page of his “Bonaparte Symphony” upon hearing that Napoleon himself had taken on imperial airs, Beethoven apparently decided that it was useless to look to others and instead became his own Prometheus, in a solitary stance that matched the isolation caused by his increasing deafness. When Beethoven finally met his idol Goethe in 1812, the latter observed of him: “A more self-contained, energetic, sincere artist I never saw. I can understand very well how singular must be his attitude toward the world.” Severance Hall 2016-17
Beethoven’s symphonies, from the high wit of the First to the serene fervor of the world-embracing Ninth, trace this journey from public artist to lone visionary. “Power to the people” is a theme that runs throughout, whether the composer is deeply probing the human condition in the Third and Fifth Symphonies, or, in the rustic Sixth and Eighth, celebrating the lives of folks who don’t probe anything very much. Each of the nine symphonies, in its own way, strives toward the “sublime,” the experience of something greater than our everyday existence, which Enlightenment writers substituted for the God of organized religion. To Hegel, Schopenhauer, and their successors, the comic was the sublime’s twin, combining with it to form “humor,” an inspired version of which gives Beethoven’s Eighth its irresistible vitality. According to the later 19th-century philosopher Theodor Lipps, “The mission of humor is to make the sublime appear more lovable, while on the other hand its mission is to seek out the sublime in the concealed, in narrowness and oppression, in the ill-considered and disdained, in every kind of smallness and lowliness. . . . Sublimity in the comic defines the essence of humor.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a dramatist whose work Beethoven knew well, wrote in his essay Laocoon: “The ridiculous . . . requires a contrast between perfections and imperfections. This is the explanation of my friend, to which I would add that this contrast must not be too sharp and decided, but the opposites must be such as would admit of being blended into each other.” And it is, indeed, impossible to separate the rambunctious spirit from the classical discipline of the Eighth Symphony.
Beethoven and Respighi
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