Beethoven ("The Master Musicians" Series)

Feb. 1986 Vol. 47 No.1
Beethoven ("The Master Musicians" Series). By Denis Matthews. Pp. viii + 279. (Dent.) 1985. £12.95.
No doubt Denis Matthews has done what was expected of him for this series, but I wonder what purpose it serves to produce a précis of Thayer (with one or two sentences from other sources) in 76 short pages followed by 147 of the standard kind of incredibly dull descriptions of the works, inspired, no doubt, by the methods of quantitative and statistical science:
Its first subject, a brusque binary theme with a pattern of semiquaver swirls in the strings and strong cross accents in the wind, begins by sitting heavily on a dominant pedal, the bass-note E . . . . . The development, like the first movement's, moves in triumph to C major, hence F major, . . .

This is our illuminating insight into the finale of the seventh Symphony. One might as well be told that the first violins play 136,725 notes, the first horn 586 and so on.

The aim might be to disinfect the "Master Musicians" series of any traces of consciousness; but it is sad that sensitive musicians should allow themselves to be misled by the prevailing clichés of a mechanical age. Thus, although Denis Matthews regrets the decline of "romantic metaphor" (referring to his predecessor in this series), he endorses our present era of "academic precision", which regards Beethoven as a "master of absolute music". Perhaps one day somebody will tell us, in scientific terms and with precision, what "absolute music" actually is, if it is not "meaningless music", and how music can strike us humans as significant and/or moving, even profoundly so—which surely is incontestable—and at the same time be "absolute", whatever that is. Until that happens all this other "precision" leads nowhere and is contradicted at source by its imprecise premise.

Perhaps "academic precision" simply means conformity, and one does get the impression that the most sought-after quality in a writer on music is never to think for oneself or even to look out of the window, never to have a single idea of one's own (which would be "romantic") or the smallest original perception. "Objectivity", the current religious ideal, is achieved by turning oneself into a tape-recorder. It seems hard to believe that anyone could find so little to say about the extraordinary phenomenon Beethoven, that the music can mean no more to him, or have any greater interest, than brusque binary themes and triumphing C and F majors, that the maximum meaning to be found in the ninth Symphony is "the triumph of the major over the minor key"—as long as we can find "triumph" somewhere all's well with the world, even if it is not quite precise or objective. Beethoven went to a lot of trouble to arrive at such a banal result—or it would seem that it was not he who was deaf but most of his listeners today.

We read of a note in the sketches for the Seventh about "a second symphony in D minor"—could there be any connection between the Seventh and this future D minor Symphony? Or, to take a small but pregnant example: "The brief oboe cadenza that follows the return of the first subject (in the first movement of the fifth Symphony) is incidentally the outcome of a melodic thread woven into the reprise some bars previously" (italics ours). (This oboe cadenza may be the soft spot of the whole movement!)

The only incidentally interesting pages in this book are the half-dozen or so of reproductions of portraits and miniatures of some of the leading characters in the drama, and of these the first prize goes to that of Ignaz Schuppanzigh.