What Beethoven Heard

Too often Beethoven's music is not what he intended.

Since Ludwig von Beethoven began composing more than two centuries ago, some conductors have devoted their careers to his music—or rather, to their interpretations of his music. The German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler squeezed an extra ten minutes from the third movement of Beethoven's famous Ninth Symphony. Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer and New York Philharmonic conductor, even added the tuba, an instrument not yet invented in Beethoven's day.

"Beethoven's music has been completely stood on its head by modern performance practices," says music professor William Summers. "You make it bigger and longer and louder. There's this whole tradition of composers contributing to the Beethoven myth, most often by dramatically changing, bowdlerizing the music."

Summers seeks to shatter this myth of music and the man who wrote it. In his course "Beethoven in Context," he surprises his students by contrasting Beethoven's music as we know it to the same pieces played on the instruments of Beethoven's era. When Summers, who played his first Beethoven symphony when he was 17, performs the First Concerto on a forte piano, his students are startled to hear the softness of the piece. "He asked us to listen for subtlety—not for bombast and power," Summers says. "What happens is you've turned the modern orchestral performance of a Beethoven concerto into this titanic struggle between the soloist and the rest of the orchestra. In fact, a Beethoven concerto is not a competition at all. It is this beautiful combination of a very soft, very articulate, subtle voice—which is the forte piano and this stronger, more powerful voice. When you hear a period performance, you realize Beethoven didn't pit them against each other because the piano would have lost, hands down. He knew that."

In fact, Summers says, modern orchestras cannot play Beethoven's music as it was intended. They are simply too big, too loud. "It's as if you were asking Arnold Schwarzenegger to do the same kinds of gymnastics that you would ask Nadia Comaneci," Summers says. "Schwarzenegger simply couldn't do it. Not because he doesn't have massive body strength, but the massiveness of his body makes it impossible for him to be subtle and lithe."

In the opening of the Moonlight Sonata, for instance, Beethoven instructs the pianist to hold the pedal down for the entire first section. That worked fine with the soft forte piano of Beethoven's era. But try to play it that way on a modern piano, which can hold a note for two minutes. "It sounds like you're nuts," Summers says. "It sounds like the piano broke. You simply can't do it."

Summers also dwells on Beethoven's personal life to shatter another myth about the composer: that he was a frantic-haired, eccentric genius. Born in Bonn in 1770, Beethoven moved to Vienna in the late 1700s to study with Joseph Haydn, then the best-known living composer. But the relationship between the two musicians soured after Beethoven convinced his mentor to write to the elector in Bonn, asking for a raise on Beethoven's behalf. Haydn agreed, and sent along some music that Beethoven said he had recently composed. The elector, recognizing the music as pieces Beethoven had written before he moved to Vienna, suggested to Haydn that Beethoven returhome since he was apparently not progressing. Haydn was deeply embarrassed. But Beethoven stayed on and composed copiously during the following 15 years. Then a personal crisis intervened—his brother died—and Beethoven barely wrote music for four or five years. The composer waged a well-publicized and emotionally draining legal battle against his sister-in-law for custody of his nephew, Karl. "It was a very, very sad period in his life," Summers says. "It is definitely where biography militates against art." Only after Beethoven won custody of the boy in 1820 did he again begin composing. His nephew, however, grew so unhappy in Beethoven's custody that he tried to commit suicide.

Relationships were not easy for Beethoven. To his acquaintances, he was gracious. But he unleashed his mercurial temperament and tempestuous outbursts on his close friends. His relationships with his brothers were often strained, his romances, painful. The women he fell in love with were always unattainable; they were either married or nobility or otherwise unavailable. "I do not think I would have wanted Beethoven as a neighbor," Summers says.

Not did Beethoven observe the niceties. Summers tells the story about Beethoven and John Wolfgang von Goethe strolling through a resort near Vienna when they found themselves face-to-face with the royal family. Rather than stopping and doffing his hat, as was customary, Beethoven pushed past the royals who provided much of his salary. (Another inaccurate myth about Beethoven, Summers points out, was that he was too stubborn to accept patronage.) "He had had so many important successes," Summers says, "that these noble people actually considered it a virtue to humor him in his bad manners and his gruffness."

Some of Beethoven's brasqueness grew from his frustration at his progressive deafness. He began withdrawing from society in 1802, when he was 32. By the time he was 48, he was stone deaf. Although Beethoven complained bitterly about his deafness, Summers says it didn't seem to hinder his composing. "The late works are certainly forward-looking and unusual in many respects," the professor explains. "But Beethoven had a long memory of sounds so he wasn't composing in a vacuum." Beethoven died in 1827, probably from a combination of cirrhosis of the liver and other progressive diseases.

Summers's devotion to Beethoven's biography—he makes his students memorize the medical details of Beethoven's deafness, for example—is an attempt to get students to see Beethoven as a real person. "If he's not completely human," explains Summers, "then he's removed somehow from a life we lead. And then the extraordinary nature of his accomplishments can be trivialized because he's that eccentric genius."

Reality is a keen reminder of just how great the distance is between mortals and immortal music.