Beethoven: A Life In Nine Pieces - Laura Tunbridge

The podcast host discusses classical music and the challenges faced by those trying to get familiar with it. They introduce their guest, Laura Tonbridge, a professor and author of a biography on Beethoven. They discuss the structure of the biography, focusing on nine pieces of Beethoven's music. They talk about Beethoven's early life, his career in Vienna, his marketing strategies, and the popularity of his Septet. The podcast host also mentions that Laura's biography is available in audio format on Audible. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the RTDU Podcast. My name is Vaso Karmenikas, and today I would like to talk about classical music. In my life, I've encountered two types of music lovers. The first type included people who were experts in classical music, and the second type of people were those who tried to keep their distance with the classical music world. Not necessarily because they disliked it, they were curious, they just didn't know where to start getting familiar with it. In 2020, classical music community celebrated 250th anniversary of one of the most famous composers of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven. But again, those who were curious and wanted to get more familiar with Beethoven's music didn't know where to start. For this reason, I decided to invite to this podcast Laura Tonbridge. She's a professor at University of Oxford, and she's the author of a new brilliant biography on Beethoven, which is called Beethoven, a Life in Nine Pieces. I stumbled upon her biography accidentally in September 2020, and it became one of my top reads of that year. I think this interview will be useful for both types of listeners that I mentioned before. I think experts will discover something new, and I think those who are curious and who were looking for a place to start with classical music and Beethoven will find Laura's book and this interview very helpful. I hope you'll enjoy this episode. Thank you so much for coming, and I really enjoyed reading your biography. It was particularly that we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven this year, which was very strange. Lots of things cancelled. So having a fresh biography, fresh perspective is really nice to celebrate this occasion. One of the things that was really interesting about your biography is how it was structured, how brilliantly you combined music with his life, with the personality of Beethoven. I guess my first question to you is, could you please tell when you were about to embark on such an endeavor of writing a biography, how did you choose this approach? I knew that I wasn't going to write a big, comprehensive biography that dealt with everything from birth through to death, and then I wanted it instead to be about introducing people to Beethoven's life and work through ideas about how we think about his music, but also by being selective, also wanting to have music as part of the biography, because I think quite often with artist biographies, there's a lot about their everyday life, and then in some ways the works get pushed to one side and you say, ah yes, and then they went off and they created this. And I wanted to see what happens as a writer, but also thinking about how we tell artist biographies by actually making sure the music is there. So in some ways basing the book around nine pieces meant that automatically I was thinking about the artist being central to the life, and then I could think about the stories that are told through those works. So that was how I came about thinking about the structure, knowing that I was going to be selective, and knowing that I wanted to combine life and works throughout. Yes, that's one of the things that I found really enjoyable about your biography, is that you focus on Beethoven's music, is that you focus on telling Beethoven's life through his creative process, rather than just telling his life in chronological order. I think if there are listeners who want to get more familiar with Beethoven's life and his music, I think your biography is a great place to start. I wanted to ask you about music that you decided to focus each chapter of your biography on. Some of Beethoven's music was performed more often when he was alive, back in his time, and is performed much less in our time. How did you decide which music to focus your chapters on? I thought about it in terms of combining what happened during his lifetime, as you said, and in lots of ways that has to do with the performance context in which Beethoven was working, and what he had access to. So it was interesting for me to look at his career less in terms of the pieces that are famous now, but more in terms of how successful various concerts were through his lifetime. And that actually became a way to whittle down to thinking about what are the moments when Beethoven really enters the public arena in people's consciousness in Vienna. And so then from there you have the concert in 1800, the first benefit concert he puts on for himself, which gives the Septet as the most popular work out of that program. And similarly with 1808, you have this very famous concert dedicated to his works, which includes the premiere of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, but also the choral fantasy. And that shows Beethoven as improvisers, playing at the piano, as well as directing the orchestra, as well as putting on all these large scale compositions. So you had a sense of actually what it might be like or how people would have encountered Beethoven in Vienna actually during his lifetime. And what became clear from looking at those situations was that they're not necessarily the pieces that we now really appreciate and put on a pedestal, but actually tend to be the pieces that are slightly overlooked in histories as the composer. And so a slightly different perspective emerged of how we think about Beethoven, and also what values we ascribe to his music. So it became an alternate route into understanding the life, I suppose. That's what I liked about the music that you chose for the chapters of your book, is that they made Beethoven more tangible, more relatable, and they showed how different events in his life shaped his creative process. What was his life before he arrived to Vienna, when he was in Bonn, a young musician in his native city? He came from a family of musicians. His father was a musician in Bonn, and his grandfather had been before him. And in some ways, you can think of him as growing up in that kind of artisanal background, where the expectation was that he would receive his musical training because he showed an aptitude in an early age, and then enter the course at Bonn. Now, there were a couple of things that happened that meant that his career diverted to Vienna instead. One of them was that the elector of Cologne, Maximilian Franz, decided to give the young Beethoven the opportunity to go to Vienna to study, initially at first with Mozart, and then Beethoven's mother became ill and died, and so he came back to Bonn. And then later, Beethoven was sent to Vienna again with financial support to go and study with Haydn. And at that stage, something else changed the course of Beethoven's career in some ways, which was that the Rhineland was taken over by the French troops. So the court there was disbanded, which meant that Beethoven had nothing to go back to. And also at that stage, the elector withdrew his allowance, so he was set free but left in Vienna. And so you have someone who has grown up in a fairly enlightened city, which is culturally quite active, and has received a strong musical training from an early age, and is destined for a career as a musician, but within a court environment, and then finds himself in Vienna, where he's earning his living, initially at least through performances and for teaching, and gradually building up a reputation as a composer. He'd always intended to go back to Bonn, there's always a slight homesickness for the Rhineland in his later letters. But he ends up staying in Vienna and obviously establishing himself there. And that opens up lots of doors for him, in terms of developing his career, and perhaps also the type of music that he was able to produce. So that's his earlier life. I mean, his family life itself was quite complicated and difficult. His father was alcoholic, and also quite a tough father, perhaps quite abusive to his sons. His mother, as I mentioned, died, leaving Beethoven as the eldest, actually responsible in some ways for looking after his younger siblings. And what's interesting is that he integrated himself into Bonn life, the friends of the family, people like the von Breuning family, in some ways adopted him and helped to improve his education, gave him access to libraries, introduced him to people. So he found a way into more elevated social circles and more educated circles, and took advantage of those connections. And they helped him professionally as well. So although his immediate family was quite difficult, I think he benefited a great deal from friends and patrons who really supported and encouraged him. How much did hard work play in success of Beethoven? Because we often hear stories about those composers being geniuses and prodigies. And for example, Mozart being born a prodigy and starting easily play piano when he was three or four. I think those stories neglect how much hard work did these people put into creating their music. For example, you mentioned sketchbooks that Beethoven used to compose his harder masterpieces. It was years of hard work. How much did Beethoven's efforts play a role? How much did his father's push to create from Beethoven next Mozart did play a role in Beethoven's life? He was recognized to have a great musical aptitude from an early age. And his father did try to promote him as a prodigy in the similar vein to Mozart, although he was already slightly older. But actually, Beethoven took longer to really properly establish himself. If you think about it, he was acclaimed in Vienna when he went there in the 1790s when he's in his 20s, but it's really in his 30s that his career takes off, which is a very different pattern to Mozart. And actually, for that matter, it's a very different pattern to a later musician Schubert, who of course died at 31, having produced so much music. Beethoven at that stage, his career was only just taking off in terms of producing most of the works that we know now. So he worked hard, the sketches in some ways reflect how much he worked and revised his pieces, how many notes he took. But there's lots of different reasons for that. Partly it has to do with creating ambitious longer forms, which meant that actually there needs to be a degree of planning. And the other side of that is that although it seems as if music poured out of Mozart almost without thinking, that's the sort of assumption that we have about Mozart, we just don't have the paper trail in the same way. What's really unusual about Beethoven is he kept so much and actually all the carelessness around him in terms of his daily life, he did look after his musical materials and keep track of his sketchbooks. So you can see him really recording in some ways what his thought processes have been, which means he can revisit ideas, he's got a longer memory range in terms of what his plans are. That's a very different way of working, but maybe just different rather than in any way lesser than Mozart's. I find the sketchbooks and the fact that we can look at how he worked, how he composed is just a phenomenal thing, source of information. You mentioned that his arrival to Vienna and that he was already established, known in certain circles. Can you please tell me about He comes to Vienna. It's a city with lots of its hub of culture. How does a 20-year-old feel in this situation? What does he do in Beethoven's case? What does he do to make himself known, recognized and fed? And fed most importantly. One of the interesting things is that actually he recognizes the need to dress properly and spends quite a lot of money, probably too much money, on getting new outfits and looking like a man about town. That helps to ingratiate himself in the salon society where music is being made in palaces and by counts and princes. And so he can then find his way, with some good letters of introduction from the nobility in Bonn, to become known as somebody who's very good as a performer, who is a potential piano teacher for the wives and daughters of the nobility. And so from that point of view can begin to build up a professional reputation. And then on the back of that becomes more and more known as a composer. So he has this multi-pronged attack on Vienna. And also I think realizes the importance of working with people. And I think if we look only at later in his career, it's easier to think of Beethoven as being very independent. But at this point he was performing to people's concerts. He was prepared to put in the time and the effort to ingratiate himself with other musicians, with potential patrons, and to persuade them in some ways to support him. It's interesting how quickly he's offered accommodation by people, how much he's able to rally people around to support his first publication of his first opus, the Piano Trio Op. 1. And you can see that networking is a really important part of how he establishes himself in Vienna, by presenting himself as something of a dandy, as something of a fashionable composer, as a very adept virtuoso pianist. So there's lots of different ways in which it's quite a different image of Beethoven from his later years. Before we continue with Septet, I wanted to ask you about copyright laws back in Beethoven's time. Beethoven wanted to earn as much money as possible from different publishers, selling his works to two different publishers without telling them. Could you please tell about Beethoven as a marketer, as a person who wants to earn money, and about the copyright laws back in his time? One of the things about publishing at the time is that although you do have a sense of the composer's name and rights to a piece being important, there's also what we would now think of as being quite an active pirating industry, in that there are lots of other editions of pieces being released, there are lots of arrangements being done without the composer's say-so. And one of the things that Beethoven tries to do is to control that, so that it's his versions of music that's released into the public rather than anybody else's. On the other hand, if a piece is popular and it does spread, then that's obviously advantageous to him as well. But there aren't the same authorial rights over printed music as there are now, and Beethoven was really somebody who tried to assert those, but also was concerned with how that worked internationally, because you'd find that there would be different editions of music published in different cities and then in different countries, and trying to have any kind of control over that was really difficult. And you can see Beethoven trying to assert that, and also playing publishers off against each other. One of the sort of entertaining aspects of reading through his letters is how hard-nosed he was as a businessman, but also how he would say to one publisher, oh yes, of course you can have exclusive rights to this, and then be saying the same thing to another. And you can see him really wheeler-dealing in terms of how he was selling his music. So that was an important part for him. He was taking advantage of the fact that there was a proliferation of publishing houses in Vienna and in other German-speaking cities during this era. So there was a market for music, the music you can make in the home, but also music you could get to know and appreciate as a connoisseur, and Beethoven's music fit very well into that. He also sold some exclusive rights to certain publishers, but then it turned out that he sold the same exclusive rights to another publisher somewhere, and that of course caused a lot of mistrust from the publishers to Beethoven. It kind of reveals, makes him kind of more human, you know, with giants like that. We imagine them like towering figures with very strict morals, but here is real marketing going on on his behalf. Yes, and actually a real marketing going on by himself as well. I mean, he does have people who assist him, and when one of his brothers moves to Vienna, he then also starts and actually becomes known as quite a hard negotiator, even harder than his brother. And so, but actually thinking about Beethoven's working life, he's spending a lot of time writing letters to people and trying to get his music published and played. And that business side of Beethoven is something that I think is important to remember. It's not just him creating pieces, but actually selling them as well. Let's continue to his success. You choose the name of your first chapter or first piece is a success, Septet. Why that piece was more popular at his time than it is at our time? At our time we hear his Eroica, Ninth Symphony, Moonlight Sonata performed more often. Why Septet? Why was it more popular back in his time and it's not as popular at our time? It's partly to do with musical style. It has an easy melodiousness to it, which was more in favour than the more complicated writing that took a little bit more time to get to know. But it also has to do with chamber music and the kinds of ensembles that were popular then. And also how easily it was arranged for other instruments so that people could play it at home and in their own situation. So it was a piece that I think now the difficulty is that we would expect to hear it on a concert stage. And yes, it can be heard on a concert stage and it is a lovely piece, but it's quite long. It is something that belongs more to the serenade or divertimento tradition of being entertainment music, I suppose, being reasonably easy to listen to, being slightly flashy and having a virtuoso violin part. But actually, it's not a kind of music that sits very easily on our concert programmes today because we're used to having a symphony orchestra and nothing but a symphony orchestra apart from maybe a concerto. So the idea of having seven players playing for half an hour is something that actually is just very hard to programme and we're not used to that kind of music making in the home either. So there's a reason why the context for the success of the septet was important and also a very practical reason why it's kind of fallen out of the repertoire. Getting back to Beethoven marketologist, was there a purpose writing septet? There was a purpose in mind for success? Or was it like more Beethoven exploring, experimenting with music? In some ways, it was quite canny because it was a showpiece for the players, for Schufanzig, who was the violinist. It has a kind of fantastic cadenza towards the end. So it was something of a party piece from that point of view. It fit in some ways into more of a convention of the time. I'm not saying it's a radical ensemble. Large scale chamber groups were actually reasonably popular then. So in some ways, it's a more traditional form than others, than larger scale pieces. But it's not Beethoven at his most experimental. It's actually Beethoven at his most crowd pleasing. And I think that's why it's so successful. And also perhaps why we're slightly resistant to it now. We're not quite so fond of that side of Beethoven or don't admit it. We tend to think more in terms of the serious artist rather than somebody who is actually willing to play to convention and to write pieces that will please both performers and audiences. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode so far. And before we continue, I wanted to mention that Laura's book is actually also available in audio format on Audible. And she has actually narrated it. So I personally really like when authors narrate their own books. It creates a special connection. It improves the quality. And if you're not an Audible subscriber yet, you can get Laura's book for free if you click on the link in the description of this episode. I personally have been an Audible subscriber for 7 years now. And to be honest, I cannot recall any other subscription service that I paid for for 7 years straight without taking any breaks. I am very thankful that they are sponsoring my podcast. So my Audible subscription more than paid off. Thank you, Audible. Anyway, thank you for listening and let's continue with the rest of the episode. Along with this copyright thing that we discussed and this aesthetic, it's really phenomenal to see his marketing side, a genius in music but at the same time in marketing. And it is at this time that he starts using sketchbooks that we also mentioned. What was the process of sketchbooks? How did he sketch? Did he sketch certain parts that he used much later in his life? Or was he focusing on a single piece and working only on that? Yeah, it varied. And from the way we've been able to piece the sketchbooks together, you can see that there are concentrated periods of working on different pieces with some marginalia which shows that he's got ideas for other things or for smaller pieces. And so there's a certain overlap in terms of his working processes. It changes in terms of what he's writing down. So when he's playing a lot and improvising a lot, sometimes ideas from those improvisations at the keyboard feed into writing for the concerto, say. And then you can also see him beginning to work on what are called concept sketches, which think about pieces as a whole and think about the overall shape of them. So you have both very detailed working and small scale ideas versus something which is much more structural. And it's really interesting to see that in play because in some ways you can see that mirrored in the way that we now understand and analyse Beethoven's music, that you can have both an attention to the minutiae, but also something which is thinking much more of them as a whole. And as his career develops, you see a shift from him being primarily a performer in these pieces to being the composer of the large scale, grand ambition kind of works. And that obviously changes in terms of how he's thinking about genre and the kinds of ideas that he's noting down. It might also be connected with his hearing loss, and if there's any sense in which he's writing things down more as a memorandum as he goes, but that's a little bit hard to pin down. Was use of the sketchbooks kind of innovation on his behalf or was it used by the other composers as well? Yeah, he seems to have used them more than most other composers. But also, as I mentioned, he kept them. So one thing about other composers, they may well have used sketches, but there isn't that same sense of holding on to them. So we know that Beethoven used sketches, that's something that's very obvious. And you can see that he is returning and revising works extensively. We don't have similar records in the same way for composers before him. And subsequently we do. I think maybe either because Beethoven becomes a model or because pieces are getting larger and more complex, people start to use sketches much more. But although we have manuscripts and autographs of pieces, with small scale revisions, that idea of building up from initial ideas through to the final piece isn't something that's so easily traced in previous composers. You connect your chapter on Beethoven's friendships with his Kreutzer Sonata, which was famously dedicated to Kreutzer, but Kreutzer himself refused to play it. Can you please tell about Beethoven and his relations with friends? Because he had a temper. Some of his friendships lasted for his entire life, but some others broke down for no reason. What was it like to be a friend of Beethoven? I was really keen to look at Beethoven's friendships because he is somebody who tends to be seen as such a solitary figure, whereas reading the letters, looking at his life, it's really obvious that he depended on friends in all kinds of ways. If you say he was difficult and had a temper, actually he fell out with friends as much as he made friends. But those who endured were really important to him, significant personally and also musically. So a really nice example of this is George Bridgetower, who arrives in Vienna as a living violinist, and Beethoven becomes friends with him. I mean, they're both young men about town and enjoy going out drinking, and they're both very good musicians. So you can see them enjoying playing with each other in some ways, competing with each other. And in order to help Bridgetower establish himself in Vienna, Beethoven agrees to support him in putting on a concert. And not only that, but to complete a violin sonata he'd had ideas for, already had written some movements for. And that is the sonata that is now known as the Kreutzer Sonata, which Bridgetower and Beethoven premiered together. And Bridgetower embellished some of the music as he was giving the first performance of it, which Beethoven really liked. And so you can see a real exchange of ideas and enjoyment of each other's company in the way this music was put together. And that's not a side of Beethoven's creative process that we talk about too often. So I was really keen to do that. But also to give a place to musicians such as Bridgetower, who now have been mostly forgotten, in part because of the dedication to Kreutzer, which means that people just assumed that the sonata was for that particularly famous Parisian violinist. But also to think about who gets a place in history and who doesn't. So you have a lot of things going on in terms of thinking about Beethoven as a collaborator, as somebody who depends on others, as needing friendship. But you also have that sense of, you know, why do certain musicians have a reputation that maintain beyond their lifetime? And why have other musicians not? So you can begin to think a bit more broadly about how we write histories. It's interesting how good to musicians collaborate. And then, as you mentioned, like, it's not known why they fell apart. But one of the reasons is that they perhaps got drunk and fought over a girl or something like that, some kind of relationship. And also, like there are, you mentioned about names that it is very hard to pronounce at first. I mean, Schupanzig, Beethoven used to mock him in a sense of his weight. And it shows, again, a human side of Beethoven, of a person who can fall apart with such a person as Bridgetower, but at the same time, mock, you know, another great musician. Yes, I mean, you had to be quite robust to be a friend of Beethoven's, I think. And he was, I mean, all of these stories about him teasing people and making fun of them and all of that, which you see a lot, he likes puns on names and all of that kind of thing, which is sometimes quite crude. It does make him human. It doesn't necessarily put him in a better light. So it's an interesting thing of actually thinking about him in this sense as being, laddish is probably not quite the right word, but something like that. And then whether that makes us like him more or whether it makes us think, OK, so he's a little bit rough around the edges. And actually, how do we deal with that? And is it something we just sort of brush onto the carpet and say, actually, that's not part of the artist's makeup, really, or whether we acknowledge it and actually, in that sense, make him more human, as you say. I would like to ask you, maybe in more detail, you can say that some of his friends were part of organizations such as Freemasons and Illuminati, and they were very close friends to him. And Beethoven himself was very well versed in different religions, mysticism, and he was very knowledgeable. Did the memberships of those friends in such secretive organizations anyhow impact Beethoven's views, his views on religion, politics, anything? They may well have done. Partly, actually, through what they talked about, through what they read. Beethoven was quite often given access to the libraries of friends and patrons, and that's from an early age and from his first teachers in Bonn who were members of Illuminati and would have subscribed to those kinds of ideals. So you can see things in Beethoven's statements and letters and the kinds of things he attracted to reading that reflect some of those societal things. And also the other aspect of Freemasonry, which was important was this idea of networking and introducing people to each other. And you can see Beethoven, through his friendships with members, is somehow benefiting from that as well. But he had really wide-ranging interests in terms of what he read and what he was interested in terms of religious beliefs and so forth. So he might not have been a member, but he was almost certainly influenced by his acquaintances and the kinds of things that they would have discussed. So it's hard to give any kind of concrete proof, but you can say that there's certainly resonances between what Illuminati and Freemasons were interested in and the kinds of things that Beethoven picks up on as ideas. The reason why I ask this question is that Napoleon was an important figure for Beethoven and you quote in your book that Beethoven said that if he understood the art of warfare as well as he understands music, he could easily beat Napoleon on the battlefield. I hope I'm quoting correctly. Beethoven even dedicated his third symphony to Napoleon and then revoked it. Could you please tell Beethoven's relation to Napoleon, his relationship with Napoleon? What was it like throughout his life? Yes, I mean, Beethoven, like a lot of young men in the late 18th century, was really taken with Napoleon. And then the reason that's given by Riesveld when he removes the dedication from the manuscript to the Eroica is that Napoleon has declared himself emperor. And Beethoven sees this as being, at least according to the anecdote, the moment when he just shows himself to be like everybody else, he gets power and then it all goes to his head and he's no longer the hero of the kind that Beethoven appreciated. Kind of sort of abdicating, like Napoleon abdicating his dedication to the Enlightenment ideas. Yeah, he becomes more about power and about personal power than the kind of bringing people together, which was perhaps behind some of those Enlightenment ideals previously or post-revolutionary ideals, I suppose. So you can see him thinking actually he's just somebody who's now a power grabber and a despot potentially. So this is not somebody who he would subscribe to. But also, I mean, as his life goes on, then obviously Napoleonic troops invade Vienna and have a direct impact on Beethoven's daily life. So the political situation changes quite substantially through Beethoven's career. Heroism, though, has quite a firm attachment to the Third Symphony. And in some ways, you can see that's why it gets the nickname of an idea of heroism on the battlefield, maybe, because early critics heard the music as being about stories of the battlefield and defeat and victory. So it might not have been directly Napoleon, but the idea of being a hero of a certain type at the time. I mean, there are lots of battles going on throughout Beethoven's lifetime in terms of the military action around You can think of it more in those sort of ideas of what it means to be a hero. It becomes later attached more firmly to Napoleon once biographical readings come out. But there's always been an idea of heroism that's just whether or not it's attached to Napoleon or not is significant. How tolerant was Fionnese's ruling elite to Beethoven? Because he had very radical ideas that could have threatened their way of government, their power. Were they afraid to have such an influential person, influential and free thinking person in their capital? How did they deal with that? Yes, I mean, certainly people at the Emperor thought that Beethoven was too revolutionary. And you can see that there isn't the support for him in those circles. But as you mentioned, those who subscribe to Enlightenment ideals, those who were interested in Freemasonry or other kinds of political beliefs were people who supported Beethoven. And I think you can see it playing in a few ways. One of the other thing to bear in mind is that the nobility in Vienna was aware that it was losing its power. That was sort of inevitable in the political context. And one way in which it could cling on to cultural capital, if you will, or at least the power within the city is recognising the importance of music to Vienna in terms of its reputation and its heritage. Now, they already had people like Gluck and Mozart and Haydn who they could hang on to as figureheads. From the present generation, then Beethoven was the obvious person to talk to as somebody who could preserve and continue Vienna's reputation as a musical centre. So in some ways, he also held the ability who were his major patrons to reassert themselves in the life of the city. That's precarious because the economic situation is such that even the most affluent of princes and counts end up being damaged by recession, by hyperinflation. But they still have that sense of supporting Beethoven as representing what Viennese cultural life could and should be. Beethoven's financial situation varied throughout his life. I really like the anecdote that you gave that he really loved coffee, he drank a lot of coffee, but it was expensive back in his time. So he had to count each bean for his morning coffee. And if I'm not mistaken, it was 72 beans precisely that a cup of coffee needed. So he has to save money, but he wants to earn more money as we discussed. What was his financial situation at the time when he writes Eroica as a person, as a composer who is already established in Vienna and already created a name for himself? Initially, he arrives with some support from the court in Bonn. And then he's given an annuity by Prince Lichnowsky, I think, or maybe Lopkowitz initially. And then by towards the end of the first decade of the 19th century, three noblemen come together to give him an annuity, which was, in theory, providing with some financial stability so that he doesn't have to go from each commission or each performance, or from teaching quite so much, which is how he has been making his living. Now, he does pretty well. And actually, by the end of his life, in terms of the money that he leaves, you can see that he actually has done quite well. But he's also quite parsimonious, he looks after money quite carefully. And he keeps quite detailed records of his household expenses as well. As with all freelance musicians, all freelance artists, you know, it's precarious. And so there is a sense of which, you know, he's taking on a lot of work, because he's never quite sure when it's going to stop. So that's still his situation throughout most of his career, even when he has quite regular backing from people. So on the beers, nothing has changed. Yeah, really, nothing has changed at all. But it's interesting that, you know, you can see him really having to make sure that he's continually in work, and not being able to afford otherwise. And I think that's a part of, again, a part of the artist's life that tends to get overlooked a little bit, in terms of thinking, well, it's fine, he just produces this music. Well, it's actually no, he's actually having to do all this other stuff to support himself. And that continues. One of the other things that you mentioned in your chapter about, on heroism, is the Beethoven's participation in piano battles, and how one of his opponents, his surname was Steibelt, just stood up and left after some humiliating act from Beethoven. What did those piano battles that Beethoven participated in, what did they reveal about his personality? How did he use those piano battles for career purposes? Did he establish connections? Did he want to increase his reputation by beating up the opponents? Or was there any other reason? Sure, all those things. I mean, partly the duels were sponsored by different aristocrats, so they were sort of fighting against each other. And then in terms of how Beethoven approached it musically and as a performance, he was quite aggressive, you might say. He was a confident improviser, he was quite experimental. And you can see in stories about Seyfert when he's playing against Steibelt, that he takes aspects of the other player's technique and plays on that and makes it into a caricature and exaggerates it. So it's not necessarily just him showing what he can do, but there's also this sense of responding to what other people are doing around him as well. So it's quite a, it is an opportunity for him to show off, show off his abilities. It is something where he obviously wants to win, there's a competitive aspect to this as well. But the whole idea of being able to have two pianists play off against each other, there's also a kind of entertainment aspect to this, which at least at that stage of his career, fairly early on, he's willing to partake in. What I found almost unbelievable, because I've never thought about it, is that back in Beethoven's time, rehearsals were very hard to organise and were very expensive. So many new created pieces were performed sometimes even unrehearsed, and one of them was his choral piece, which you mentioned in the chapter on ambition. Could you please tell why the performance of his choral work almost failed? He had to stop and yell at musicians in the middle of the performance. Could you please tell what was it like to organise a performance back in Beethoven's time? He was putting on this huge concert dedicated to his own music, and it was very long and it was cold, and people were being expected to stay in the hall to hear entirely new works that hadn't been rehearsed very much. And this was all supposed to end with a final extravaganza, which would show Beethoven at the piano improvising, would include chorus and orchestra and vocal soloists. And the stories go that the ink was still wet on the pages that were being handed out to the orchestra. I mean, this was really more of a read-through than a polished performance, and almost inevitably it falls apart. And I think that's an interesting thing to remember, because you can think of this as, you know, the premieres of some of the most famous symphonies he composed, but also the fact that the final piece actually shows Beethoven as, in some ways, overreaching himself and not being able to pull everything off quite as well as he wanted to have done. It's a success on a certain level, but it's a challenge for the audience and certainly for the performance. And you can almost imagine the poor orchestra, it's late in the evening, they're really cold, it's dark, they're playing this music that they haven't really seen before, and then they're getting shouted at by the composer. I mean, it must have been a horrific experience in some regards. Yeah, sometimes we idealize the historical events. We imagine it was all this polished, a person such as Beethoven would think everything in detail, but it turned out kind of the other way around. One other image of Beethoven that we have is of a bachelor, of a person who never got married, who was, again, you mentioned about his kind of late reputation of being in solitude, alone. He often fell in love with women who were off his league, kind of, and not in the right way. Can you just tell about his love life, let's say? Yes. I mean, apparently, he was always falling in and out of love. That's from being a young And then, in terms of the women he seemed to fall for, I mean, he had access to noble women as a teacher and as a performer and as a composer. But as many musicians find, he might be able to access those social circles professionally. But that doesn't mean that you're of a class to be able to marry these women at this stage in the 19th century. So there might have been passion between them, but there was really no hope that Beethoven would be able to marry them. There's just a divide between them in terms of class and social standing. There are some longer term relationships that he has. And then I think the thing that biographies most often focus on is the famous letter that he wrote in 1812 to a woman, unnamed woman, called Immortal Beloved, which seems to suggest that they've spent some time together and that he's looking forward to being reunited if they can be, but that she may well belong to somebody else. And so you have this image of Beethoven as being always thwarted in his love life. I think there does seem to be a stated need or desire to get married, which never happens. He never quite finds the right woman. And so from that, we have the assumption that he remained alone, but it seems likely that he had various liaisons. And it wasn't necessarily the case that he was entirely alone all the time. But there was still quite a lot of romantic intrigue in his life. Love was idealised and romanticised by authors such as Goethe, who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther. And it is said that this story had triggered high suicide rates among the young people who associated themselves with the tragic hero of the story. Goethe and Beethoven had actually met each other. They both admired each other's talent. But once they met in depth, they didn't particularly like each other's character. Do we know why? What were the reasons? From what we know from their reports, that Beethoven thought that Goethe was too concerned with court life and being socially respectable, I suppose. And Goethe, for his part, thought that Beethoven was going to have a difficult time because he was quite a difficult character. And obviously, also, interestingly, realising that his deafness was going to be an issue for him as well. So as you say, in terms of his personalities, they were very different. I think they did admire each other tremendously as artists, but that doesn't necessarily mean they liked each other as people. But it is interesting and it's amazing to think that these two titans of the early 19th century actually met in person at some point. It's phenomenal, you know, like sometimes you wish that there is a time machine just to see both of them interact. And for this chapter, you choose a piece by Beethoven, which is more about separation rather than being together with your loved one. It is based on a set of poems that were popular at the time. Why do you think Beethoven chose to talk more about separation rather than togetherness in love? It runs as a theme throughout quite a lot of the poems that he set in song. And that's partly because romantic poets were attracted to and invested in this idea of romantic connections at a distance, of being separated from your beloved. I mean, it was a poetic idea as much as anything else. Now, there might have been personal reasons why Beethoven was attracted to that theme in poetry. It seems with that particular text that actually he was also writing it because the poet Stoll was somebody who was a friend and Beethoven was supporting him. So there's lots of different reasons why he might have done certain texts. There's that interesting sense in which you have romantic writers and themes which will be picked up on in music, but actually musical romanticism in some ways is a slightly later 19th century phenomenon. There's a slight time lag between what's happening in literary terms and what's happening musically. And moments like that song seem like a contact point, if you will, between them. So you can see it in personal terms as him being separated from his lover, but you can also see it as more about him as a reader being attracted to themes that are popular at the time. Despite of seeing what happened to Napoleon and his rise and fall, and despite of knowing what violence was caused by the French Revolution, Beethoven continues to be dedicated to the Age of Enlightenment. He continues to be dedicated to French revolutionary ideas. And then he writes his only opera, Fidelio, and bases his opera on a libretto written by a Frenchman who also expresses revolutionary ideas in the libretto. Fidelio is a story of a young woman who breaks into the prison in disguise to save her unjustly imprisoned husband who is chained there. What was Beethoven's political stance at this time? What did he try to express by this opera and by using a libretto written by the Frenchman? Again, wasn't it dangerous for him? Yes, when Fidelio was first composed, it was based on a French revolutionary story, as you say, about an aristocratic couple where she goes to save her imprisoned husband. And these were very popular stories in the first years of the 19th century in Vienna. And there were lots of operas based on similar escape themes. And so the first version of Fidelio in some ways is very much of its time. By the time it comes to its third revision, second version, you find that Napoleon has been captured and Vienna is preparing for the Congress of Vienna and thinking about the shape of Europe. So you have a very different political situation. And it may well be that Beethoven's attitude to the plot and the characters changed with that time as well. There's the heroine of Leonora, who disguises herself to save her husband, Floristan. And you can see that being a personal heroism, even if it's a woman being heroic. But then you can also see, by the time you get to the 1814 version, that in some ways, the people who grant freedom is the governor who comes on at the end and allows them to be together. So there's a tension between personal liberty and state-given liberty that is apparent in the different versions of Fidelio. It's interesting that it does start out with his origins in France. And you can see Beethoven is quite a Francophile for the first half of his life, that's for political reasons and for artistic reasons as well. So I think, although we now think of him as this great Viennese composer, actually that's much more complicated in terms of where his influences came from. Was it dangerous for him to focus on such plots of being relatively very open in his Francophilia? Was it dangerous at the times of Metternich to be like that? It would have been then, but actually the first version of Fidelio is earlier. So he's okay by the time it comes to Metternich really having power within Vienna. Beethoven does run into potential problems because he's outspoken, because the idea of censorship, which is prevalent in Vienna during Metternich's era, is something that Beethoven is not prone to comply with. And so he could be a potentially difficult character for the authorities to deal with. In the first version of Fidelio, their censors insisted on certain things being changed, and they were complied with more or less so that it could be put on stage. You have to bear in mind throughout all of this period, there is actually quite a lot of regulation of what can be put on stage in theatres, in the opera houses, and Beethoven had to find his way around that. And this was the time when he started gradually to lose his hearing, and he wrote some letters to his friends and family expressing his desire to kill himself, to commit suicide because of that. How did he overcome it? How did he continue to compose all those masterpieces even after his gradual loss of hearing? The letter that he writes to his friends is actually from quite early on, it's from 1802 when he's 32. And you can then see this long, slow decline, and he tries various things to improve his hearing, from using hearing trumpets to amplify sounds, to when he's at the keyboard, having devices built that might again enhance the vibrations and the amplification of the sound so he can hear it better. In terms of how it affects how he works, it means that he stops performing around 1840 and 1815, which is perhaps later than you would expect. And he's already been using sketchbooks, as we've touched on. You can see in some ways the rate of composition slows. You might think that's inevitable, partly through illnesses, partly through political upheaval, partly through what's going on with his family. And what's interesting is that he's still maybe losing his hearing, but still sitting at the keyboard, still working things out on the keyboard. That's still an instrument that's important to him. And as you mentioned, he was always prone to taking advantage of new technologies and developments in instrument making when he could. So pieces become bigger in range because the instrument can play more notes. He's always asking for instruments to be louder. Now whether that's only to do with his hearing, whether that's also just because he wants them to be able to withstand performance in different situations, it's difficult to know. It's really hard to tell quite how he felt about things. But what we can see is that he continues to work in some similar ways, maybe slightly slower, but also he's writing these much bigger pieces, much more elaborate, much more experimental pieces. And whether he would have done that had he not been losing his hearing is almost impossible to answer. You mentioned several times that Beethoven was dedicated to the ideas expressed by Enlightenment thinkers of the time, the ideas of the French Revolution. But yet he goes on and writes a religious work, and you dedicate one of your chapters to the work called Missa Solemnis. Beethoven himself wasn't as religious as many of his contemporaries, and he knew that this work will face censorship, problems with performance, and yet he writes it. Why did he do it? What did he try to express? What does it reveal about Beethoven's religious views? I think it's the grandiosity of the piece that it becomes too large, too expansive to actually be part of a church service. And so the music in some ways takes on some of those spiritual aspects, and the way that he uses the orchestra to comment on the text, the insertions, the small insertions he makes to the words, means that it can be both something which is spiritual and contemplative and meditative, about the musical experience as much as the liturgical text that it's setting. And I think Beethoven did have a Catholic upbringing. He was writing it initially for the Archbishop's inauguration. And you can see that in some ways, it's bringing things together that have been lifelong concerns for him. Pinpointing Beethoven's spirituality, again, is a very difficult thing to do. And I think hearing it in a piece such as that, again, becomes about responding to ideas and imagery in the text, which is then made music. It was first performed, if I'm not mistaken, at 1824, in St. Petersburg with Galitzin. But later on, I think it was around the year after, it was performed in Vienna. And he wanted Misesonnis to be performed with his Ninth Symphony in connection together. What are the relations of, like, two relatively different works? Why did he want to perform both? And then it was censored, wasn't it? Like, it was only the first three movements of Misesonnis that was allowed to be performed. Yes, and they couldn't sing it in Latin. I mean, there are, again, restrictions on what could be presented in a secular concert that hadn't been designed for a sacred service. So there were restrictions on there. Also, in terms of resources and programming, and how two large pieces could be performed side by side. The other interesting thing about that is the Ninth Symphony and the choral finale. In some ways, there was some resistance to that mix of the choral work and the symphonic work being brought together. So there are lots of different ways in which they would perhaps not sit easily with each other on a concert program. But it's interesting that the Misesonnis is never heard in its complete form in Vienna during Beethoven's lifetime. And actually, what it would have done for his reputation had it been. One of the last pieces that you mention in your book is Grosse Fuge. I hope I pronounce it correctly. Grosse Fuge was considered as incomprehensible piece of music by the audiences and by the critics. Some critics compared it to the Chinese language. Only later on, composers such as Igor Stravinsky compared Grosse Fuge to a modern work of art and said that Beethoven was the first modern composer in history. What did make this piece so unique? And why did you include it towards the end of your book? Because it is not the last piece that Beethoven composed, as far as I know. There were various reasons. I was interested in this idea of endings and where we find endings of composers' lives. The Grosse Fuge is not Beethoven's last composition, but it is often seen as a kind of crowning glory of his quartet writing, maybe of his composition altogether. I was interested in that it's one of those works and there are some works in music history which seem to remain challenging and in some ways inexplicable through time and retain their radical elements and this big fugue is one of them. So either from Stravinsky saying it always seems contemporary to his critics in the 1820s saying it sounds like Chinese and what they really mean is yes, it seems like a language, but not one we understand. We haven't learned it yet. We don't know what it means. There's a sense of the music being out of time. When I was writing about endings, I was interested in the fact that the Grosse Fuge originally was written as the finale of the Op. 130 quartet. It was then deemed to be too big to really work with the preceding movements and so Beethoven published it separately and then composed an alternative finale, which is much lighter in spirit. And I was interested in then why people tend to resist that alternative finale, that now there's a much greater trend towards performing the quartet in its original version with the large fugue at the end rather than something which is much more throwaway. And I think in some ways that signals how we think of the end of Beethoven's life, that it is supposed to be more about the grandiose culmination of everything rather than something which is much more lightweight. And so it became a way of me thinking about actually how we present this life again. And actually what we now make of Beethoven's final years, as opposed to how they were thought of in the 19th century when people actually really didn't quite understand what he was trying to do. How did your opinion, your personal opinion change about Beethoven before and after writing a biography? Did it change radically after you researched him? Did you see him in a new light towards the final page of your biography? And in some ways less intimidated. I think one of the things starting out on this project was partly thinking what else can, what can you possibly say about Beethoven that hasn't been said before? But also how do you write about this music that everybody asserts is great, but actually what's made it great? What is it about it? And I think what I really learnt from looking sort of to the side of Beethoven in some ways, thinking about him in context and thinking about pieces that aren't so famous, is actually feeling more open towards hearing different kinds of music that he wrote and actually just a huge appreciation at the range of what he wrote. I think we now think of Beethoven as symphonies and quartets and sonatas, whereas actually looking at other genres gives a much broader picture of the kinds of different music he produced and played. And I think that really helped for me to make him much more approachable. Is that what makes him different from Mozart and Haydn before of his experimenting in different fields? Or is there anything, or there are other things that made him kind of be in the pantheon along with those two great composers? I think the experimentalism, the willingness to push boundaries is important. But you could say that Mozart and Haydn do that maybe to a slightly less obvious extent. I think also words have a lot to do with this and that Beethoven was written about so much and has been written about so much. And there are so many biographical stories that have been attached to his music and to the understanding of his music. And I think that's contributed a great deal to the Beethoven myth, but also how we think about and appreciate the music as well. And one last question about your future projects, future books. What should we expect? Is it going to be a biography of another composer or something completely different? It's connected but different. I actually have a project on about string quartets. And I'm writing about string quartets as a group. And so there's obviously some Beethoven connections in there, but I'm moving much more freely around to write about all kinds of string quartet music and all kinds of groups and actually looking at performers much more closely. There was so much written about Beethoven in the past 250 years that I could spend another two or three hours interviewing Professor Tombridge. But I hope you enjoyed this episode and I wanted to let you know that I created a separate page dedicated to this episode with Professor Tombridge where I included all the references that she made throughout the interview and you can find it on artidote.uk. And also I wanted to let you know that I send a monthly newsletter with book recommendations, with podcast updates and some of my own writing on art. If you are interested you can also subscribe to it on the artidote.uk. And thank you once again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye! Artidote.uk