On Playing Beethoven in Times of Sorrow
by Junius Johnson
It is somewhat customary at the beginning of an essay to make apologies. In that vein, let me offer the following: these reflections are hopelessly and shamelessly grounded in specificity. The specificity in question is my own experience as a performer of Beethoven. I do not speak of Beethoven’s music in an abstract sense, or of broader performance practice, or of the general experience of performing his music. I am speaking as a player of the french horn, and I am focused specifically on my set of experiences performing the second movement of the Eroica symphony while playing principal horn. This is not, I hope, something to apologize for, but it is necessary context. It also means that what follows comes in a confessional mode, in the Augustinian sense.
For me, Beethoven symphonies are complicated. With the exception of the interruptive beginning of the fifth symphony (which always feels to me as if we are beginning in medias res), they don’t satisfy as immediately as a Mahler or Tchaikovsky, who from the first notes of their symphonies rapture me into a world of wonders and inspire in me the sense that I am off on a strange and wonderful journey. Beethoven requires more patience: his tale begins not in a dark wood far away, but at my very own doorstep, and it is by degrees almost imperceptible that he leads me to the fairy forest.
This is, I think, integral to the power of the movement in question. The sharp, repeated chords of the opening of the first movement give way to travelling music, a hero’s theme. And by the time we arrive at the repeated chords that close the first movement, the twists and turns and transformations that have brought the hero to this point have left us far from home indeed. I arrive at the pickup to the second movement as one who has already seen and done great things, one who has logged miles on his soul.
And so this opening note, which is unassuming and understated without being apologetic, comes as an interruption to the exuberance that came before. It has a simple insistence that will not be ignored, and with it comes all the tragedy that ever entered the world. It is itself only a prelude, but by the downbeat I already know that my heart is breaking: I am already asking myself if I will ever be whole again, if the world will ever be bright again.
It is in this vein that I reach for the funeral march of the Eroica when I am in deep grief, sorrow, or despair: it provides an appropriately sombre space for me to lose myself in, to wallow in my pain. The strings have just the right mournful sound, and the flowing, meandering melody seems to promenade through my tragedy and lay out every single aspect of the grief for examination. The horizontal extension through time of the melodic line, underscored and prosecuted by almost nervous strings, creates the perfect instance in me of what the Germans call spannung, that tension that is so charged that it is electric. In measure 27, when the celli and basses begin their brief but total descent into the abyss, it seems that they plumb the very depth of my darkness, attaining the total accomplishment of a descent into Hell.
There is nothing in all the world so satisfying, from the standpoint of wallowing, than what comes next: a sforzando C in the 1st horn: raw, raucous, unbounded. I will confess that I think there is no scale for my conception of this note. It comes out of the dying away of the piano melody the lowest strings have just played, and it is followed by a piano that is the commencement of the next statement of the melody. But it itself belongs neither to the line that precedes it, nor to the melody that follows: it is an interjection. And the relation of sforzando to any dynamic is undefined: it means “more,” but not in a measurable way. The relation of forte to piano is calculable, in some intuitive sense; at the very least, one can name the degrees that lie between these two moods. But sforzando stands apart from and against all such calculations: is it one dynamic louder, or four?
The question can only be answered by the performers, and thus in relation to a specific performance.
To me this is everything, for it means that on this one C, the reins are slackened and the horse is given its head. If I am not stopped by the conductor (and I was once conducted by a wonderful friend who stood aside and let this happen), I will pour all of my rage, all of my despair, all of my longing, into this note. It is a primal cry of outrage against pain, directed at an uncaring cosmos and seeking by its very savagery to get someone, anyone, to notice this pain. Thus unfettered, it rings out more like Mahler than Beethoven, an interruption not just to the melodic line around it, but even to the very neat divisions of musical style that we so pride ourselves on making. And I will not allow it even a hint of decrescendo: in my hands, this C becomes a wall of sound that presses unrelentingly to the downbeat, where it instantly collapses into a piano so subito that the echo of the angry C perhaps outlasts the embers of this piano C, which, by contrast, is infinitely resigned. And so the piano C is no less crucial, for it is the relinquishing of all I might have thought I could do with the anger of one beat before, the confession that I am powerless, even in my rage, to change for one second the chain of events set in motion by the pickup to the movement.
Do you see what I am after here? This humanistic descent into Hell is not for the sake of revealing, at the depths of the darkness, the unexpected light of resurrection. I don’t go down in order to rise, I go down because it seems that only there can my grief truly find proper space for expression. The world above is too small, but more, too beautiful for my grief: my grief needs darkness, craves despair, and maximum distance from salvific light.
What follows is a march through the wasteland of utter despair, and the winds, but especially the oboe, understand this completely. I am always a little in love with the principal oboe player through this section, for he or she seems to be the spokesperson for my soul. The mournful melody the winds set in motion is ideal, because what I long for next is a tour of my pain, the parading before me of every instance of hurt and loss, so that the poignancy of each may be felt. This is what it is to give yourself over to despair: to tell out one’s griefs singillatim, one by one, and thus, by magnifying each atom, to maximize the pain. The bassoon in measure 56 treads a journey like the one the celli and basses had before, and it is exquisite. It leads again to a boundless C, but this one is not free to be only angry, because it has to go somewhere: Beethoven forces a decrescendo on me in measure 61, and then I must walk right into a D to C that feels like a sigh. Twice I do this, and then we gasp our last, dying away in measure 68. Here I could rest: here I could say that my complaint has been heard, and that all is, if not well, at least well spoken.
But it is precisely here that I encounter the scandal of this movement, which claims to be suited to funereal garb: the low strings march us inexorably and by the most banal progression to major. Each note is a blow to my soul: the G because this should be a space of silence; the A because, inexplicably, we are headed towards major. But there is yet hope: perhaps this is just a harmonic minor scale; but this hope is crushed by the B that follows. It may yet be a melodic minor, but I can’t make myself believe it. This is no thaw, this is spring, and sure enough, as if the proof of my ears on the downbeat were not enough, Beethoven has the nerve to scrawl “Maggiore” all over my part.
This major section is so offensive in part because it is so right. The offense is not that I feel that it should be minor, but that I know that it cannot be other than major. I am reminded of Bernstein’s words about Beethoven, which I had quite forgotten when I called them to mind reference precisely this movement:
Beethoven had this gift [the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be] in a degree that leaves them all panting in the rear guard. When he really did it — as in the Funeral March of the Eroica — he produces an entity that always seems to me to have been previously written in Heaven, and then merely dictated to him. […] When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can really happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you’re listening to Beethoven.¹
These tonalities are discordant with grief, and they grate on my self-pity. Indeed, the major triad I am forced to outline in measure 90, played at this point in my grieving, is nothing short of an expression of faith: deep and resonant. But I also feel it as premature. It comes, not before it should, but before I want it to, and so it chides me for not being who I should be, for arriving at that triad as the wrong person. It reminds me that Christ descended in order to ascend, that his entrance into Hell was not about wallowing, but about harrowing.
- Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2004), pp. 28–9.
Junius Johnson is an independent scholar, teacher, and amateur french hornist. He is the author of four books, including The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty, and numerous journal articles and translations. Through Junius Johnson Academics, he provides direct theological and language study to adults and children via online platforms.
