“HONOR TO BEETHOVEN” was the motto that appeared at the top of a program, printed by the Beethoven Quartet Society, in 1845. Over the course of eight weeks, the group of passionate London musicians mounted the first-ever survey of Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets. The Society distributed scores for dedicated audience members to peruse; attendees were asked to arrive thirty minutes early so as not to disrupt the music.
That spirit of veneration has changed very little. Today, cycles of Beethoven’s quartets, symphonies, and piano sonatas are ubiquitous. Up-and-coming string quartets frequently take a crack at performing the complete Beethoven. A traversal of the composer’s nine symphonies has become a regular staple of the concert hall. And this week marks the release of the third volume in the pianist Jonathan Biss’s cycle of all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas. In tandem, Biss will play a recital at Carnegie Hall tonight that will include two of the works. “There’s something seductive about this process of really going to your limit with this music,” Biss told me. “Beethoven’s music, it has this thing in it—of asking for extreme measures to be taken.”
The benefits of listening to a full set of sonatas, symphonies, or quartets are obvious: they paint a rich portrait of a composer’s musical development, allowing connections to be heard across an artistic career. Biss spoke of Beethoven’s sonatas as “twenty-five hours’ worth of a private diary of a genius.” For the interpreter, cycles offer an opportunity to grapple with repertoire on a grand scale. “The appeal of the Beethoven sonatas is that I won’t come to the end of what fascinates me about them, or what puzzles me about them,” Biss said.
Yet, there is something puzzling about the classical fixation on cycles. Unlike Wagner’s “Ring” or Schubert’s “Winterreise,” Beethoven’s sonatas do not tell a singular, unified story. The composer did not know that he would write a ninth symphony when he composed his first. These omnipresent cycles represent, instead, an anachronistic grouping—one made only in hindsight and informed by a shrewd combination of the Romantic ethos of classical music and the box-set mentality of the record industry. And, though they claim to embrace a wide swath of music, cycles are symptomatic of the past century’s thinning of the repertory, one that has squeezed out much fascinating music and left behind only the most pre-sanctioned of classics.
The cyclic approach dates back to the end of Beethoven’s life, when his music helped define the orchestral repertory, itself a new concept. In the early nineteenth century, a typical concert might include a single movement of a symphony as an overture, followed by a grab bag of shorter works for varying forces. Opera arias were often thrown into the mix. The piano recital as we know it did not exist. Performing a Mozart or Haydn symphony in toto was still a rare phenomenon; in Berlin, it was a minor miracle when Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony was played four times within a single five-month stretch.
Then, in its 1825-26 season, the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performed all nine Beethoven symphonies, an unprecedented feat. Under the guidance of the music director and critic Friedrich Rochlitz, Leipzig had become a hub of serious music. Advocating for the cycle approach was the Berlin-based critic A. B. Marx, among the first to call for complete performances of the symphonies of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Well respected as a theorist—he was responsible for popularizing the idea of “sonata form” now familiar to any undergraduate music major—Marx also edited an influential music journal and was the rare critic to draw praise from Beethoven himself. For Marx, Beethoven represented not only an artistic pinnacle but a pedagogical opportunity—he wrote that “only when we in Berlin have come as far as Leipzig, where year-round all the Beethoven symphonies and those by other masters are performed, will then the sense of the public for such artworks be sharper and more responsive.” Hearing, say, the whole of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony would foster better over-all listening habits. Cycles like Leipzig’s could build an audience for instrumental music, enjoyed in silent reverence.
That didactic, music-appreciation streak is present in today’s cycles, as well. Along with his recording project, Biss recently led “Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas,” an online class through Coursera sponsored by the Curtis Institute of Music (the course will be repeated in March). Over five weeks of lectures, Biss used the sonatas as a lens into Beethoven’s life and time. “My idea was to give the audience a basis for then exploring other bodies of music they might love,” he told me.
Marx and others instructed a generation of listeners in how to appreciate Beethoven’s immense orchestral works. But the piano sonatas and quartets—more intimate and knottier music—took longer to catch on in the public sphere. In 1878, the great pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow began playing Beethoven’s final five sonatas in a single evening. At first, it was a hard sell. “Berlin must have sunk very low if it cannot listen to my reading of Beethoven’s complete testament,” he wrote to a friend. “Well, if the middle class cannot listen … let them walk out.” But, by the end of the eighteen-eighties, Bülow had launched a four-evening Beethoven cycle, touring cities with popular recitals that included most of the sonatas.
Fifty years later, the Romantic era’s “Honor to Beethoven” fervor dovetailed with the rise of the recording industry. In 1932, HMV launched the Beethoven Sonata Society, through which subscribers could purchase recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, issued regularly by Artur Schnabel, the reigning intellectual pianist of his day. Schnabel remains the eminent Beethoven interpreter on record; the longtime Times music critic Harold Schonberg proclaimed him “the man who invented Beethoven.” Among a stable of prewar keyboardists, Schnabel stood out as the anti-virtuoso, embodying the same commitment to the Austro-German repertoire as Marx and Bülow (he was one of the first to perform Schubert’s sonatas in concert). Recording the complete sonatas was a radical gesture in Schnabel’s time—the technology dictated that each movement had to be broken into four-minute snippets—and one he referred to as an “experiment.”
Biss is, in a sense, a grandson of Schnabel—his teacher, Leon Fleisher, studied with the pianist in his youth. In “Beethoven’s Shadow,” a 2011 Kindle e-book, Biss describes his belief that he shares some of Schnabel’s musical ethic. “His aforementioned sanctification has to do with the spirituality and, frequently, the sense of ecstasy he was miraculously able to create on old records,” Biss writes. When we spoke, Biss marvelled at Schnabel’s recordings—how, despite the vagaries of early recording technology, the pianist “managed to find some kind of essential truth in those pieces.”
Beethoven cycles were also politicized. In 1933, when the Nazis took power, Schnabel was in the midst of a series of Beethoven sonatas in Berlin; the government quickly halted his radio broadcasts, because he was Jewish. Within a year, German radio began airing a Beethoven symphony each night and declared that these Beethoven evenings “contributed to radio’s effort to conquer the whole German Volk.” The political charge attached to Beethoven’s monumental achievement went far back. Undergirding Marx’s push for the composer’s music was an acute nationalism—he wrote that the symphony “could be identified as virtually the exclusive property of the Germans.”
At the same time, Beethoven cycles were unleashed as anti-Nazi propaganda. Through the thirties and the war years, Toscanini repeatedly performed the nine symphonies as a way of wresting them away from Hitler’s cultural machinery. Shortly after signing a public denunciation of Hitler, the conductor led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the “Eroica” Symphony—a tyranny-fighting work if there ever was one—as part of a five-concert series; Nazi radio subsequently banned the conductor’s broadcasts. In 1944, the exiled Budapest String Quartet ran through all of Beethoven’s quartets at the Library of Congress. Programming Beethoven en masse became a way of staking ground, a large-scale annexation of classical music’s authority.
In the postwar years, Beethoven cycles performed the more mundane function of raking in money for the record industry. Sales of Toscanini’s complete set ran into the millions. Karajan issued four compendiums of Beethoven symphonies, one of which is said to have sold over eight million copies. The symphonies of Mahler, the string quartets of Shostakovich, and the keyboard works of Bach are all regularly given complete treatment. Live cycles have become a regular feature of the concert season. In 2011, WQXR sponsored a thirty-two-sonata Beethoven marathon (Biss was one of its participants); Gustavo Dudamel’s 2012 “Mahler Project” unleashed the composer’s nine symphonies over five weeks with two orchestras; Yefim Bronfman will play all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic in June; the Hagen Quartett surveyed all of Beethoven at the 92nd St. Y last fall; the Takács Quartet regularly tours with Bartók’s six quartets (they will perform the cycle at Carnegie Hall this weekend).
And, though it is easy to observe the cycle format’s strengths, there is much that it overlooks. In 2013, recording thirty-two Beethoven sonatas lacks the experimental edge it once carried. While programming all of the composer’s symphonies together offers a portrait of Beethoven as an artist, it presents a limited depiction of his time. The listener hears connections among the symphonies, but not around them. What set Beethoven apart from his contemporaries? How did his music breathe the air of the Napoleonic wars? Within the cycle, we hear the connections between the heroic style of the “Eroica” and the Fifth Symphonies, but we lose the sense that it was a language grounded in the bluster of the French Revolution. The music gains transcendence at the loss of context, shedding history for abstraction.
Attempts at enhancing the overall concept don’t fare much better. There has been a preponderance of “Beethoven Plus” festivals—Beethoven and Berio, Beethoven and Schoenberg, Beethoven and Mason Bates—that do little to upset the underlying dynamic. More compelling are ventures like Biss’s other recent project, “Schumann: Under the Influence,” which upended stereotypes about the composer by presenting his music alongside his progenitors (Purcell, Schubert) and his progeny (Janáček, Timothy Andres).
Insisting on more performances of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, Marx wrote that “no recent composer has come out with works that compensate for the exclusion of any of these.” Coinciding with the advent of cycles was the calcification of a narrow musical repertoire, a process that continues today. Those “recent composers” that Marx maligned have vanished into history. We might learn the most about Beethoven by juxtaposing his music not with more Beethoven but with oft-ignored contemporaries like Weber and Cherubini. “A really great artist once complained to me that to smuggle Beethoven into the masses one has to wrap his music up in Lehar’s,” Schnabel said in a 1940 lecture. “Whether he believed it or not, it is objectively untrue, and moreover, will never work. Who presents treasures and trash cannot claim to be a champion for the treasures, for he always takes the risk that the trash might be preferred.”
For modern audiences, Lehar is the rarity. While cycles offer a horde of treasure, it is one with a familiar gleam. We should ask of our most intellectually searching musicians that they search in more than one place, that they explore the outer limits of the repertoire rather than works already ordained with masterpiece status. It might do more honor to Beethoven.
Image: Three Lions/Getty
