Posts Tagged ‘Ludwig van Beethoven’
Quote of the Day
On my way to Vienna yesterday, sleep overtook me in my carriage, which was by no means strange, for having been obliged to rise so early every morning, I never had a good night’s sleep…Now during my dream-journey, the following canon came into my head…But scarcely did I wake when away flew the canon, and I could not recall any part of it. On returning here however, next day, in the same carriage…I resumed my dream-journey, being, however, on this occasion wide awake, when lo and behold! in accordance with the laws of the association of ideas the same canon again flashed across me; so being now awake I held it as fast as Menelaus did Proteus, only permitting it to be changed into three parts.
—Ludwig van Beethoven, in a letter to Tobias Haslinger
Quote of the Day
Beethoven writes first in pencil, and then he goes back and with ink goes over the lines that he likes. When he has a clear idea, the pen barely touches the paper, but when he gets stuck, you can see the torture; there are scratches and it becomes like a Jackson Pollock painting. And there are food stains, indicative of what he was eating; and a lot of water stains, because every so often he would pour cold water on his head—it was a mania of his—he said it was to reset his thinking. And what was even more moving to me was that sometimes he would write something like lento maestoso, right next to a marketing list: cheese, milk, eggs.
Quote of the Day
“Lipkin! Make a sforzando here!” “Ludwig, I don’t feel like it!” “Shut up and do what I tell you!”
—Seymour Lipkin, describing an imaginary conversation with Beethoven
Beethoven, Freud, and the mystery of genius
“The joy of listening to Beethoven is comparable to the pleasure of reading Joyce,” writes Alex Ross in a recent issue of The New Yorker: “The most paranoid, overdetermined interpretation is probably the correct one.” Even as someone whose ear for classical music is underdeveloped compared to his interest in other forms of art, I have to agree. Great artists come in all shapes and sizes, but the rarest of all is the kind whose work can sustain the most meticulous level of scrutiny because we’re aware that every detail is a conscious choice. When we interpret an ordinary book or a poem, our readings are often more a reflection of our own needs than the author’s intentions; even with a writer like Shakespeare, it’s hard to separate the author’s deliberate decisions from the resonances that naturally emerge from so much rich language set into motion. With Beethoven, Joyce, and a handful of others—Dante, Bach, perhaps Nabokov—we have enough information about the creative process to know that little, if anything, has happened by accident. Joyce explicitly designed his work to “keep professors busy for centuries,” and Beethoven composed for a perfect, omniscient audience that he seemed to will into existence.
Or as Colin Wilson puts it: “The message of the symphonies of Beethoven could be summarized: ‘Man is not small; he is just bloody lazy.'” When you read Ross’s perceptive article, which reviews much of the recent scholarship on Beethoven and his life, you’re confronted by the same tension that underlies any great body of work made within historical memory. On the one hand, Beethoven has undergone a kind of artistic deification, and there’s a tradition, dating back to E.T.A. Hoffmann, that there are ideas and emotions being expressed in his music that can’t be matched by any other human production; on the other, there’s the fact that Beethoven was a man like any other, with a messy personal life and his own portion of pettiness, neediness, and doubt. As Ross points out, before Beethoven, critics were accustomed to talk of “genius” as a kind of impersonal quality, but afterward, the concept shifted to that of “a genius,” which changes the terms of the conversation without reducing its underlying mystery. Beethoven’s biography provides tantalizing clues about the origins of his singular greatness—particularly his deafness, which critics tend to associate with his retreat to an isolated, visionary plane—but it leaves us with as many questions as before.
As it happens, I read Ross’s article in parallel with Howard Markel’s An Anatomy of Addiction, which focuses on the early career of another famous resident of Vienna. Freud seems to have been relatively indifferent to music: he mentions Beethoven along with Goethe and Leonardo Da Vinci as “great men” who have produced “splendid creations,” although this feels more like a rhetorical way of filling out a trio than an expression of true appreciation. Otherwise, his relative silence on the subject is revealing in itself: if he wanted to interpret an artist’s work in psychoanalytic terms, Beethoven’s life would have afforded plenty of material, and he didn’t shy from doing the same for Leonardo and Shakespeare. It’s possible that Freud avoided Beethoven because of the same godlike intentionality that makes him so fascinating to listeners and critics. If we’ve gotten into the habit of drawing a distinction between what a creative artist intends and his or her unconscious impulses, it’s largely thanks to Freud himself. Beethoven stands as a repudiation, or at least a strong counterexample, to this approach: however complicated Beethoven may have been as a man, it’s hard to make a case that there was ever a moment when he didn’t know what he was doing.
This may be why Freud’s genius—which was very real—seems less mysterious than Beethoven’s: we know more about Freud’s inner life than just about any other major intellectual, thanks primarily to his own accounts of his dreams and fantasies, and it’s easy to draw a line from his biography to his work. Markel, for instance, focuses on the period of Freud’s cocaine use, and although he stops short of suggesting that all of psychoanalysis can be understood as a product of addiction, as others have, he points out that Freud’s early publications on cocaine represent the first time he publicly mined his own experiences for insight. But of course, there were plenty of bright young Jewish doctors in Vienna in the late nineteenth century, and while many of the ideas behind analysis were already in the air, it was only in Freud that they found the necessary combination of obsessiveness, ambition, and literary brilliance required for their full expression. Freud may have done his best to complicate our ideas of genius by introducing unconscious factors into the equation, but paradoxically, he made his case in a series of peerlessly crafted books and essays, and their status as imaginative literature has only been enhanced by the decline of analysis as a science. Freud doesn’t explain Freud any more than he explains Beethoven. But this doesn’t stop him, or us, from trying.
The confidence game
Mastery comes in all shapes and sizes, but we’re often most impressed by the kind that announces itself to us from the start. Take Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. From that first, massive orchestral chord, followed by the piano’s cascading response, we know that we’re in the hands of a composer who is perfectly aware that he’s unlike any other man who ever lived. (Whenever I hear it, I think of a slightly restructured version of that famous quote from Douglas Adams: “Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe, Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human, and Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven.”) The same is true of the opening of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony, with its threefold declaration of purpose that manages, even after endless listenings, to seem both inevitable and like nothing else you’ve heard before. And in both cases, it’s the expression of the composer’s confidence that grabs the listener, an intuitive sense that only a lifetime of thought and exploration could have resulted in such monumental simplicity.
In film, the same impulse sometimes lies behind the opening shot, which serves as a statement of intention. Kubrick—a meticulously intelligent craftsman who also loved showy, obvious effects—always strove to seize the audience from the first frame, and each of his films from 2001 onward begins with an unforgettable image. As in most other ways, Kubrick was ahead of his time: movies these days seem increasingly obsessed with their first five minutes, to the point where they dispense with opening credits altogether in their rush to deliver that first big moment. This is largely a response to the fact that we’re just as likely to catch movies at home than to see them in a theater. Once we’ve paid for our tickets and are seated in the dark with a row of strangers between ourselves and the exit, we’re likely to give a movie the benefit of the doubt for at least the length of the first act. If we’re watching it streaming on Netflix, we’re more liable to treat it like a television show, which has only a few minutes to grab our attention. And if it fails, we turn to our phones.
As a result, movies and television shows have become more front-loaded than ever, and the same trends—the omission of main titles, the emphasis on an early narrative hook, the need to blow us away with action and violence in the opening scene—can be observed in both. It’s even started to affect the novels we read, which, as Jonathan Franzen once noted, are no longer competing just with other books for the reader’s attention. Even literary fiction is increasingly expected to read like a mainstream bestseller; the opening of a book like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is all but indistinguishable from that of a paperback thriller. Yet this can also be a narrative miscalculation. Playwrights have known for a long time that it’s a mistake to start the play on a moment of high drama: you can afford to spend a few minutes introducing the viewer to your world before disrupting it, and a dramatic development holds more weight if you’ve established a baseline of normality. Start off too fast, and you’ve got nowhere to go, and the rest of the play can feel weighted down by the depressing realization that it’s never going to top its opening moments.
In his indispensable guidebook Adventures of the Screen Trade, William Goldman offers a long sample of a misconceived opening for a screenplay—a beautiful girl running for her life through a forest to escape a disfigured giant—and sums up his analysis of its faults by saying: “Well, among other things, it’s television.” But it’s even worse than that. Listen to the Emperor concerto again, and you know that it opens the way it does because Beethoven is superbly confident in his own gifts. The first twenty minutes of your average action movie speaks to the opposite, a kind of desperation, concealed by gunshots and relentless cuts, that the audience’s attention will stray for even a minute. It’s the difference between real confidence and, well, a confidence game. An aggressive beginning can be fine in its place, but it isn’t speed or even technical proficiency to which viewers respond: it’s that confidence. And they can sense its absence even through a flurry of activity, even as they sense its presence in openings as leisurely as those of Tokyo Story or The Magic Mountain or The Goldberg Variations. Show them confidence, and they’ll follow you anywhere, but without it, not even the loudest opening chord in the world can convince them to listen.
Quote of the Day
The message of the symphonies of Beethoven could be summarized: “Man is not small; he is just bloody lazy.”
Beethoven’s metronome, or following the rules you know
In 1815, Ludwig van Beethoven received an unusual gift from an even more unusual acquaintance: a metronome, built using an innovative double pendulum, presented to him by the inventor Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. (Mälzel was a fascinating character: in addition to blatantly stealing the design for his metronome from a rival in Amsterdam, he built ear trumpets for Beethoven and ingenious musical automatons, as well as being the promoter behind the famous, and fake, Mechanical Turk. If somebody hasn’t written a novel about him yet, they should.) Beethoven doesn’t appear to have been entirely comfortable with the metronome, though, and a new study suggests that many of the unusual tempo markings in his scores, which scholarly consensus regards as “absurdly fast and thus possibly wrong,” may have been due to the fact that his metronome was damaged. As a result, many of his pieces need to be adjusted in performance, even though they work beautifully according to their own internal rules—or at least with the metronome that Beethoven had at the time.
And we’re all in the same position. Whenever an author begins to write a story, he brings certain rules, preconceptions, and metrics to the table: ideas about how quickly a story should move, how much description or dialogue is enough, how to handle internal monologue, how to treat transitions, and, more generally, what the best tone and voice for the narrative should be. These are rules and guidelines that the writer has established for himself over the course of many projects, finished or otherwise, and through countless drafts and revisions. Some of these assumptions are more visible than others, but they undergird every choice that he makes. And it’s quite possible that some of them are wrong. Sometimes you don’t realize this until after years have passed, and you’ve had a chance to revisit your old work with an objective eye. No one ever sets out to write a bad story, but you’ll often discover on reading something over again that your rules at the time were flawed, incomplete, or poorly applied. Your metronome could be broken; you just don’t know.
Yet the important thing isn’t to get every rule objectively right—or to slavishly follow the rules laid down by other writers—but to follow the rules you think you know to the best of your ability. There’s no shame in admitting that you haven’t figured out the rules of fiction to your own satisfaction: nobody knows all the rules all the time, not even Updike or Nabokov or Bellow. What is shameful is failing to live up to the rules and standards you’ve set for yourself, whether through sloppiness, laziness, or overconfidence. As with most other things about storytelling, David Mamet in On Directing Film says it best:
If I knew a better answer…I would give it to you, but because I don’t, I have to go back to step number one, which is “keep it simple, stupid, and don’t violate those rules that you do know. If you don’t know which rule applies, just don’t muck up the more general rules.”
In my own case, whenever I’ve found that a story I’ve written hasn’t lived up to its full potential, it’s invariably because I failed to apply the rules I knew best: I didn’t cut enough, or I didn’t revise enough, or I didn’t make the throughline clear. These aren’t mystical laws; they’re practical rules I’ve figured out for myself after making a lot of wrong turns. And if I fail at making a story work, it’s because I didn’t treat my own rules with sufficient respect.
What those rules are, of course, will vary enormously from one writer to another, but the search for a personal set of rules is an essential part of any artist’s life. Your rules won’t be the same as mine, or Elmore Leonard’s, but you need to treat them as if they were sacred. If nothing else, they give you a lens through which to regard seemingly unsolvable problems: as Mamet says, if you don’t know the answer, you can at least make sure you’re proceeding in a way that’s consistent with the rules you do know. You don’t need a lot of them, and they don’t need to be any more complicated than “Don’t bore the reader.” Eventually, you’ll conclude that some of them are broken, and you’ll either discard them entirely or replace them with superior versions. But following the rules you trust at any given moment is the only way to produce a personal body of work. Differences in style between writers come down primarily to the sets of rules they’ve chosen to follow, and without that choice, made with full awareness, it’s impossible to develop a consistent personality or intuition. Your metronome may well be broken, at least by the standards you’ll later apply—but for now, you still need to trust it.
(Note: If you haven’t done so already, you might enjoy checking out my new article on Salon, on the twentieth anniversary of The X-Files and its lessons for modern television.)
Quote of the Day
There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his artworks, and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be half a tradesman.
An artist at work: Ludwig van Beethoven
I arrived at the master’s home in Mödling. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon. As soon as we entered we learned that in the morning both servants had gone away, and that there had been a quarrel after midnight which had disturbed all the neighbors, because as a consequence of a long vigil both had gone to sleep and the food that had been prepared had become unpalatable. In the living-room, behind a locked door, we heard the master singing parts of the fugue in the Credo—singing, howling, stamping. After we had been listening a long time to this almost awful scene, and were about to go away, the door opened and Beethoven stood before us with distorted features, calculated to excite fear. He looked as if he had been in mortal combat with the whole host of contrapuntists, his everlasting enemies. His first utterances were confused, as if he had been disagreeably surprised at our having overheard him. Then he reached the day’s happenings and with obvious restraint he remarked “Pretty doings, these, everybody has run away and I haven’t had anything to eat since yesternoon!”
—Anton Schindler, biographer of Ludwig van Beethoven
Quote of the Day
I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, often for a very long time, before writing them down…I change many things, discard others, and try again and again until I am satisfied; then, in my head, I begin to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height, its depth…I hear and see the image in front of me from every angle, as if it had been cast [like a sculpture], and only the labor of writing it down remains.
Alec Nevala-Lee 