![]() In a way, this reminds me of the urban legend that Einstein failed all his classes in high school. Beethoven, in Bernstein’s conception, seems to be so great that even having bad, or at least unremarkable technique only made him better. Leonard Bernstein has made the same point in a video that has become somewhat famous, with the intention to praise Beethoven by saying that his greatness did not come from technical skill, but something seemingly superhuman, even divine: “It’s as if he had some private telephone wire to heaven”, Bernstein says. The second point, of Beethoven having bad technique, is interestingly enough not always made as a criticism of him (although it can be). Beethoven chose to use the rules in his own way, but to say he radically broke with convention is inadequate. And although he does seem to let go of these Classical models of form in his late works, he just as often falls back on even older models, such as the fugue or the theme and variations. Even the pieces from his ‘heroic’ period, growing larger in scale and more ambitious in their structure, still follow a typically Classical conception of form where the narrative of a movement is told by way of themes that change through a combination of harmonic and motivic development. Moreover, Beethoven’s early works are actually very exemplary of the traditions of capital-c Classical harmony to the point of literally being used as examples in textbooks. All composers at any point in history have both adhered to some conventions set by their predecessors and broken away from others. The ‘rules’ of music at any particular time have never been exactly defined. In all honesty, I think both these statements are dubious at the very least. The second is that his technique was just bad. The first of those is that Beethoven “broke the rules”, “shattered all conventions” of classical music. There are two statements often made about Beethoven that, in a way, kind of sound like the same statements said with a positive or negative tone. But how can a man both be praised as a revolutionary renewer of music and be denounced as a symbol of ageing institutions clinging to an archaic past? Where does this image come from, and who is the real Beethoven? While he is constantly praised in almost all major publications as a great man, as a genius, and as an inventor who redefined classical music, there is a new generation who sees in Beethoven a symbol of all that is wrong in classical music culture: Its urge to cling to the past, to constantly worship the same historical figures – “dead white men”, as the saying goes – and in this way, perhaps unconsciously, perpetuate colonialist or sexist ideas. Out of the three composers most likely to appear in a random classical music magazine’s list of “greatest of all time” – Bach, Mozart and Beethoven – the latter is likely to be the most controversial.
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