The Infuriating 'Un

This is something of a sequel to my post entitled the lugubrious gondola, in which I shall talk about why I find Beethoven so infuriating, when the rest of the world exalts him as music itself. (The nineteenth century conductor and Liszt pupil Hans von Bülow famously designated him as one of The Three Bs, whom he considered the only composers in history who were not cretins, if his word be taken at face value, alongside Bach and Brahms, rudely ousting Berlioz from his former place in that venerable trinity. Berlioz was probably put there in the first place because they couldn't find any other composer whose name started with B. An amusing anecdote: von Bülow was such an intellectual musician that he once conducted Beethoven's ninth symphony twice in a row so that his vulgar, uncultured audience, whose attention was limited by their vulgarity and unculturedness, could fully appreciate the greatness of that work. That's about as funny as musicology gets.)

Beethoven for me evokes two alternating images: one is the rather well-known simulacrum of the Master seized by an artistic afflatus, and elevated to such heights as mere mortals like us couldn't begin to fathom; and the other is something that has to my knowledge never been immortalized on canvas: a creepy old man with a bulging paunch dressed in tight-fitting eighteenth-century clothes, and pirouetting grotesquely to some saccharine melody of his own creation. It's horrifying, but I can think of nothing else when I listen to, for instance, the second movement of his much-overrated Moonlight Sonata, or one particular passage in the first movement of the Waldstein that makes me want to headbutt a brick wall. It's so infuriating that Beethoven will not rise out of his grave to correct these offensive artistic errors.

His piano concerti, especially the famed Emperor Concerto, are entirely too tame for my taste, though, after listening to Rachmaninoff's concerti, it's really quite difficult to find any that aren't. The sort of intensity one finds in Rachmaninoff's concerti was actually, if I'm not mistaken, a nineteenth-century innovation. Even Chopin's concerti make one click one's tongue and shake one's head, but at least they are not musically as worthless as Liszt's concerto in E-flat, however exciting the climax may be. The point is that we can forgive the deficiencies of Beethoven's concerti and his compositions in general, if they are merely a consequence of the artistic crudeness of the age. (But then how do we account for Bach, whose music is as perfect as a work of art can ever be? He must not have been of this world.)

I'm not for a moment suggesting that Beethoven doesn't deserve the reverence that has been universally accorded him for over two centuries. Far from it. Anyone who doubts his greatness need only consider the post-Bach cesspool from which he single-handedly rescued Music. I cry for revulsion when I listen to some of the intervening composers, like Mozart and Haydn. It seems incredible that such horrors existed on this very earth less than three hundred years ago.