Beethoven can give us tools to criticise late capitalism

• Author: Paul Gillespie
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

So says the conductor John Eliot Gardiner about Beethoven's anniversary: he was born 250 years ago this week. Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique has reinterpreted Beethoven's symphonies in the conviction that the orchestra's period instruments provide "greater individuality of timbre, more transparency of texture and an increased dynamism once all the instruments are stretched to their absolute maximum capacity of volume and expressivity".

The resulting sense of contemporaneity is amplified by Gardiner's belief that, for example, in his Fifth Symphony in 1808 Beethoven is quoting from the French composer Cherubini's Hymne du Panthéon, with its subversive message: "We swear, sword in hand, to die for the republic and for human rights." Expressed musically in conservative and aristocratic Vienna, the message would be decoded ambivalently, since nobody could accuse him of subversion.

As Gardiner says: "It's similar to Shostakovich writing during the time of Stalin." That point is in turn amplified from those particular historical contexts by Stravinsky's observation that the extraordinary Grand Fugue from Beethoven's late string quartet Opus 130 (1826) is "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever".

Beethoven waited eagerly in a nearby tavern to hear news of how the quartet was received by its first audience. Told the fugue was regarded as "incomprehensible" and did not go very well, he replied: "It will please them some day." He wrote as he thought fit and was not led astray by the judgments of his contemporaries: "I know; I am a musician." Asked how he thought Opus 130 compared with his other remarkable late quartets, Beethoven said: "Each in its own way. Art demands of us that we shall not stand still."

Universal appeal

These views on Beethoven and his own remarks bear out the universal appeal of his work, and raise the question of how it can be interpreted sociologically and politically as well as musically. There is a huge span of development across his compositions from the 1790s to the 1820s and an immense diversity of form and style, covering instruments and voices and ranging from the popular and established to the arcane.

Beethoven steadfastly and proudly upheld the values of individualism and a career open to talent over aristocratic hierarchies and inherited castes and class. He had to rely on patronage in Vienna but strove to escape from...