Beethoven inner turmoil and creativity

Beethoven: inner turmoil, beliefs, and creativity

POSTED APRIL 13, 2020

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth.  The German composer created some of the most magnificent music the world has ever heard.   His Ninth Symphony is considered by many to be the greatest work in the history of Western classical music.  His music accompanies Voyager mission on the furthest space mission ever undertaken and entertained Central African foragers who requested to hear a Beethoven selection over and over because "it makes us feel like birds." 

What inspired Beethoven?  What role did life events, his values and beliefs play in his creativity and works?  

Beethoven is often presented as the quintessential tormented genius.  Disappointments and tragedy dogged his life.  His was an irascible and volatile personality, and "he could slip from rage to raucous laughter to serenity within minutes. His hearing loss, which began while he was in his late twenties, became the central torment of his life."  Deafness is a terrible hardship for anyone.  For a composer, it is an existential threat to a life's work.  Beethoven conquered his initial impulse - suicide - and went on to seek "salvation in the music he could no longer hear". With his career as a pianist now ended, he dedicated himself to composing.  His deafness caused an increasingly creative approach to his music.  No longer able to hear the music that his contemporaries were producing, "he conjured a world of sound different from anything previously conceived. Much of his music reflected struggle and the attempt to achieve transcendence over that struggle. And his music, with its sudden shifts and enormous unpredictability, mirrored his emotional volatility. Beethoven was capable of translating melancholy and ecstasy into musical terms with unmatched virtuosity." (1)

Another factor contributing to Beethoven's creativity was his habit of taking a daily walk after lunch. Beethoven developed the habit of taking long solitary walks through the forested valleys of Vienna.   He used the time to reflect and think things through, making notes as he walked and as musical ideas occurred to him.  Beethoven wasn’t alone in using this walk as a period of reflection and idea evaluation, now referred to as "the incubation period" by people who study creativity.  Notable craftsmen and artists the world over share similar sentiments on the utility of breaking up their day with walks. (2)

Other life events, however, affected his work adversely - at least temporarily.  Most notable was the sharp drop-off in Beethoven's productivity in from 1812 (when he realized that his "Immortal Beloved" would never marry him) to 1821 (when he won a protracted custody battle for guardianship of his nephew).   Overcoming these difficulties freed and inspired him to create the masterpieces of his last years, including Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony.

And what about Beethoven's beliefs and values?  How did they affect his work?  

Born in 1770, Beethoven was a child of the Enlightenment and a believer in the ideals of the French Revolution - "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité".   He famously crossed out his dedication of the Third Symphony to Napoleon once he saw the destruction Napoleon's armies were causing and as he realized that Napoleon, rather than championing democracy, was setting himself up to be emperor.  And, of course, Beethoven could not have chosen a more apt text to express Fraternité -  the brotherhood of man - in his Ninth Symphony than Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" ("An die Freude").

Beethoven also had deep religious convictions and considered himself to be one who would extend God's glory to all of humanity through his music...a prophet of sorts in the Age of Enlightenment. The New World Encyclopedia puts it this way:

Privately, Beethoven often mentioned his religious convictions, observing in one letter, “I have no friend. I must live by myself. I know however, that God is nearer to me than others. I go without fear of Him. I have constantly recognized and understood Him.” In another letter to the Grand Arch Duke Rudolf, the composer wrote, “Nothing higher exists than to approach God more than other people, and from that to extend His glory among humanity.”  Critics have noted that, in both his greatest orchestral works and choral music, Beethoven explores the inner struggle, and ultimate triumph, over doubt. Beethoven's music has been recognized as a towering profession of faith, composed in an era of growing skepticism over traditional religious teachings.

Nominally a Catholic,* Beethoven was not a regular church-goer.  He was drawn to deism and pantheism, his diary has fragments of Hindu texts, and he is said to have kept aphorisms from ancient Egypt at his writing desk.  Although his religious music was deeply influenced by Catholic theological ideas** and although Beethoven considered his Catholic Mass, the Missa Solemnis, to be his crowning musical achievement, his concept of God as presented in that work is "not strictly Catholic or even Christian, rather pantheistic and all-encompassing."(3) 

Composer Jan Swafford (3) sees Beethoven presenting a "Divinity [that] lies beyond the stars, and here we are on Earth " in Missa Solemnis, but adds that "at the same time the Missa Solemnis is full of long lines ascending and descending. The human spirit rising up toward the divine, the divine light descending toward mankind. That idea of a cosmic interchange is embodied in the uncanny moment in the Benedictus that depicts the coming of Christ, the mediator between man and God, as a solo violin descending from the heavens." 

The last movement is the Agnus Dei.  After noting the Agnus Dei's jarring transition from pastoral music to the drums and trumpets of war at the "dona nobis pacem" ("give us peace") refrain, Stafford concludes that "Beethoven's mighty Missa Solemnis comes down to an unanswered prayer. Whether God has heard us, we don't know, but we do know that in the distance the drums of war are still beating.  Did Beethoven ever provide an answer to this unprecedented open ending? I believe he did. His answer is the Ninth Symphony."

And so we come to Beethoven's greatest work.   His Ninth Symphony has meant many things to many people.  In the words of author Harvey Sachs, the symphony "belongs to each person who... attempts to listen to it attentively."   In his book The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, Sachs describes Beethoven's only vocal symphony as a statement of freedom and as a "declaration in favor of universal brotherhood"  - an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree.  How can anyone hear the words of "Ode to Joy" without granting that Beethoven may actually have been getting at just that?

Swafford concludes his NPR piece: "The famous choral finale of the Ninth Symphony is based on Schiller's Ode to Joy, written at a time of revolution. Those words and Beethoven's music call for humankind to kneel before the creator over the stars, but for answers to turn to one another.  In the Ninth Symphony Beethoven proclaims that as comrades, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, we could unite to celebrate Joy, the beautiful God-engendered daughter of Elysium. And that path to peace is bestowed not from above but from within us and among us in universal brotherhood here on Earth. Man, help yourself."

In the documentary film In Search of Beethoven, a musician discussing Beethoven's impact on music and the world says, "If we had to pick ten things that are great about humanity, there would be several of Beethoven's works amongst them."  As would be the universal brotherhood celebrated by Beethoven and desired by so many others.  

References and Notes

(1) Bryan Maxwell, "The Music and Mind of Beethoven: Chords of Disquiet" 

(2) Gregory Ciotti, "Beethoven's Daily Habit for Inspiring Creative Breakthroughs" (Psychology Today)

(3) NPR, "Missa Solemnis," a Divine Bit of Beethoven

*Beethoven was baptized on December 17, 1770 in the church of St. Remigius in Bonn, Germany.  It is one of the only clues we have to Beethoven's actual date of birth - generally taken as December 16 since by the custom of the time, children were baptized within 24 hours of their birth.  (biography.com)

**Particularly those of his contemporary Johann Michael Sailer.  Sailer was a major figure in the Catholic Enlightenment, an attempt to "defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining their rationality in modern terminology and by reconciling Catholicism with modern culture".