Destiny in D Minor

By NORMAN LEBRECHT

Nobody understood Beethoven. Vienna in his own time, the early years of the 19th century, recognized his unruly genius but could not fathom why he wrote so far beyond popular comprehension or what kind of man he was. What they saw in the flesh was a disaster—a musician driven to fits of rage by debilitating deafness, reckless in hygiene and dress, ruinous in human relationships, yet revered by fellow artists as a force of destiny. What they saw, in other words, was a caricature.

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The image became no clearer after his death in 1827. By midcentury, Beethoven had been put on a pedestal, one level below divinity. Hector Berlioz stood in awe of "that frightening giant Beethoven." Franz Liszt saw him as "the pillars of fire and smoke which led the Israelites through the desert." Richard Wagner, smitten from age 11, acknowledged Beethoven as the one composer before himself who sought to redeem humanity through the power of art. It was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, not one of Wagner's own operas, that Wagner performed in 1872 to consecrate his shrine at Bayreuth.

Of all Beethoven's works, the Ninth Symphony is the least explicable. What on Earth was he doing decorating its finale with a chorus and soloists singing an ode of Schiller's, ostensibly about joy but in reality about brotherhood and liberation? What is the Ninth about? Is it a charter for social reform or for individual rights? A religious ecstasy? Does the symphony mean to us what it meant to Beethoven? Does it mean anything useful at all?

These are some of the questions that set Harvey Sachs off on a painstaking search to discover the roots of Beethoven's last symphony in the time of its creation. The year was 1824, and the Congress of Vienna had turned Europe back to a network of despotic monarchies, as if the Enlightenment and French Revolution had never happened.

The Austrian minister Metternich, unsatisfied by his near- unlimited powers, enacted in 1824 a series of decrees to run the empire as a police state in which a jocular remark or the wrong kind of friend could land anyone in jail. "Not now," jotted Beethoven in the notebook he used for café conversation, "the spy Haensl is around."

“One can hardly keep from wondering what [Beethoven's] thoughts were when he completed certain pieces—pieces in which and through which he had explored new paths, done things that he knew would shake up and probably puzzle the musical establishment, and in effect rechanneled the riverbed of music history. ” Read an excerpt from "The Ninth"

It is tempting to imagine that the Ninth Symphony was a creator's riposte to the forces of reaction, but there is no evidence for this theory. Why and how Beethoven advanced from the lightness of the Eighth Symphony to the massive substance of the Ninth is unexplained by any remark he made. The premiere itself was coupled with a new overture, "The Consecration of the House," and three arias from a Mass in progress. Beethoven was in full flood in the spring of 1824.

The Sachs quest starts in Beethoven's rented rooms in Vienna's shabby third district, his domestic chaos matched by the haphazard organization for his May 7 concert at the Kärntnertor Theater. None of the imperial family was available to attend, usually a prerequisite for society ticket sales, but the house sold out on word that Beethoven was bursting the corsets of music with another mighty offensive.

The regular 45-piece orchestra, augmented by amateurs and part-timers, was never going to be up to the task; the chorus was a rabble of volunteers; and the bass soloist had to be replaced at the last minute when he flubbed the top notes. The two female soloists were an 18-year-old and a 21-year-old; Beethoven, who was 54, kept trying to kiss them.

Ignatz Schuppanzigh, a trusted friend of the composer's, led the performers from his violin, with the seated Beethoven in an inappropriate green coat giving a start beat to each movement. The scores were hand-copied, and the outcome must have been scrappy at best, but the audience rose in rapture and reviewers concurred that Beethoven, as one of them wrote, had "advanced still further onward."

A repeat performance was scheduled within a fortnight, and the symphony quickly took on a life of its own. Over time it supplied the big theme for Brahms's first symphony and the opening shimmer for Mahler's. Haydn may have invented the symphonic form, but it was Beethoven in the Ninth who gave the symphony its capacity for continuous evolution.

The Ninth changes symphonic expectations not just because it concludes with four vocalists and a chorus. Every movement defies precedent. The first seems to begin with the orchestra tuning up; the second alternates solemnity with flippancy; the great adagio delivers something far more ethereal than the pastoral idyll of the Sixth. Classical style is alternately mocked and abandoned. Even on a sketchy first impression it must have been clear to Vienna that hearing a symphony would never be the same again.

Beethoven never wrote another. His last three years were occupied with three piano sonatas, the "Diabelli Variations" and five string quartets, works in which Mr. Sachs detects an urge on the composer's part to turn self-revelation into a universal message. He defines this desire rather clunkily as "universalizing the intimate," but you can see where he is heading: to the dawning of the artistic ego that gave the Romantic age its character and color.

As Beethoven's Ninth received its premiere, Lord Byron was being embalmed at Missolonghi and shipped home for burial, self-martyred in the cause of Greek independence—more classical metaphor than political realism. Byron's death at 36 set the tone for the Romantic era. In Russia, Alexander Pushkin was "very glad of [Byron's] death, as a sublime theme for poetry." Pushkin stopped work on "Eugene Onegin" and wrote a larger saga, "Boris Godunov."

In France, between one revolution and the next, Stendhal was writing epochal essays while his friend Eugene Delacroix, before embarking on his bare-breasted "Liberty Leading the People," painted "The Massacres at Chios," a scene from Byron's Greek war that has been described by the novelist Margaret Drabble as "a masterpiece of Eros and of Death." More contemplative than his Romantic contemporaries, Heinrich Heine went for a long walk in the Harz Mountains, cherishing a German landscape from which he would soon be exiled.

It was Heine who gave Romantic art its declaration of independence. "I am for the autonomy of art," he wrote. "It must not be seen as a servant of religion or politics; it is its own definite justification, like the world itself." Heine and Beethoven, Rhinelanders both, were never kindred souls, yet together they broke the creative impulse free from the demands of the state and society. From now on, the artist would go wherever his spirit led him.

Mr. Sachs, whose previous books include landmark biographies of Arturo Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein, adds depth of field to the Ninth Symphony by presenting it as the first sounding of a free new world. He analyzes its content with clarity and accepts that assigning meaning to the music can only mislead. To hear the Ninth Symphony played today as the anthem of the European Union, an exclusive economic cabal, cannot possibly have been what Beethoven had in mind.

"The Ninth," a fresh, often challenging approach to one of the cornerstones of civilization, is a hugely welcome antidote to the excesses of academic musicology, which can be given to interpreting one of the world's most profound artistic achievements simply as, in one depressingly representative sample noted by the author, "a sexual message" written by a man "in terror of impotence or infertility." Mr. Sachs strikes a truer note, affirming that it is possible to write about a great symphony in a way that makes the music relevant to each listener at every level of individual engagement. Just as Beethoven intended.