Beethoven as a pioneer in the formation of supranational communities

As our regular readers know, we in GRASP are committed to the cultivation and preservation of human community in our increasingly dematerialized world. Given that Ludwig van Beethoven has usually been described in popular accounts as a difficult, irascible man who managed to regularly alienate his friends and lovers throughout his tempestuous life, it may be difficult to imagine him as a standard bearer for this vision. But I would like to persuade you otherwise through a personal reflection.

I was a true post-war child when, in the 1950s, at the age of twelve, I had the privilege of participating in a student exchange programme to France, Germany's ‘hereditary enemy’. Hard to imagine for today's generation, my parents bought their first record player around 1955, along with a few shellac records – treasures at the time – featuring music by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. As I recall, a 30 cm record played at 78 rpm could only hold part of even the ‘short’ 5th symphony of Beethoven. I only remember that this composer particularly appealed to me from this minimal collection, which prompted my parents to pack Felix Huch's biographical work ‘Beethoven's Perfection’ in my suitcase for my trip to visit my exchange friend Patrick Gillard, who lived in the Loire town of Blois. This holiday reading brought me closer to Beethoven as a person in terms of his life in Vienna, but not initially to his music. That happened in a rudimentary way when I took piano lessons, as was customary in an educational household, ultimately with little success. The maximum of my ability ended with the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. At least half of my piano lessons took the form of conversations with my piano teacher, rather than learning the art of playing the keys. And so, this part of my educational career came to an end after just two years. Looking back, with the benefit of life experience today, I am certain that my piano teacher, a matron in stature and age, was in love with me and found a substitute fulfilment of her affection in our conversations. She wanted to gain access to my inner convictions by discussing the psychology of the world politicians of the time, such as John F. Kennedy.

From this phase onwards, Beethoven became a ‘common’ composer for me, whom I encountered in many concerts and performances in the decades that followed until, relatively recently, I had the privilege of meeting a profound Beethoven connoisseur and passionate pianist, Roland Schatz, who, instead of pursuing a career as a pianist, turned to journalism and scientific opinion research, a field of knowledge economy in which we met professionally, and this – somewhat emblematically – in Vienna, where I had been living since 1998 and where Roland, in addition to his own publishing activities in Zurich, heads an office for a private philanthropic investment fund.

During one of our meetings in Vienna, I received news from a colleague and friend from Great Britain, with whom I share an interest in issues relating to the development of the knowledge society, that her husband had died at an age when it was hardly to be expected. I remembered that Roland Schatz had not only told me a lot about Beethoven's effect on human emotions and spirit, but also that Beethoven had offered to comfort a friend who was deeply affected by the death of her husband with music, and only with music, not with words. The story seemed to me to fit my British friend's situation perfectly, and Roland provided me with his 2018 exposé on Beethoven, entitled ‘Beethoven: The role model for a Good Life’, in which this episode is described. (The entire exposé comprises twenty pages and describes Beethoven's compositions and their effect on the listener in a vivid and fascinating way that only someone intimately familiar with his music could put down on paper.)

So far, so good – if I hadn't recently had a revelatory experience. My wife and I have been living in Tenerife for about half of the year for quite some time now, where we enjoy a seasonal concert subscription with about twenty classical concerts by the excellent local symphony orchestra in their concert hall, which was designed by the star architect Santiago Calatrava. The second half of the most recent concert featured Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and something happened to me that I had never experienced in the previous sixty-five years: In a ‘foreign’ environment – the capital of the West Canary Islands, Santa Cruz, certainly represents a different atmosphere than Vienna – I experienced this concert, which, with its melodies, its ‘Viennese’ interpretations, its dynamics and melodic lines, transported me to the world of my origins and put me in a special emotional state. For the first time, I realised that Beethoven not only sets the human spirit and soul in motion with his revolutionary compositional philosophy, but that his inclusive processing of melodies from a wide variety of cultural sources also transports the listener into a different sphere of perception.

Beethoven's Vienna was a melting pot of many cultures that came together there from the many countries of the Danube Monarchy, encountered each other and cross-pollinated. Beethoven himself and many composers before and after him – Haydn and Brahms are only two prime examples – drew artistic inspiration and innovation from this ‘cross-pollination orgy’ that could not be experienced anywhere else. The Seventh Symphony, experienced in a place far from Vienna and with a completely different philosophy of life, struck a chord with me. Not only did I find myself transported to another sphere, but I also suddenly realised why Beethoven, in particular, created world music with his compositions.

Even though Beethoven did not quote specific folk songs unchanged, the basic rhythmic patterns and formal elements of the Seventh Symphony strikingly reflect the cultural environment of the multi-ethnic monarchy – especially through the dance-like vitality that was characteristic of Vienna and its neighbouring regions at that time and still is today. These include recognisable musical sequences in the symphony such as Ländler, Bohemian and Moravian dances, Hungarian dance rhythms, ‘Illyrian’ (South Slavic) melodic influences and, last but not least, the Viennese popular music of his time. According to Richard Wagner, the Seventh Symphony is considered the ‘apotheosis of dance’.

The diversity of musical influences from many regions may also explain why the ‘Ode to Joy’ from his last symphony, the Ninth, was chosen as the unofficial anthem of the community of European states, a cultural area that stands as a prototype for a peaceful, multicultural, science-friendly, and educated future on our planet. The message of the ‘Ode to Joy’ was that we are all a community, we are all brothers and sisters (‘Mortals, join the mighty chorus … Joining people hand in hand’). This is one way of demonstrating that powerful music like the Ninth can be one of the forces contributing to ‘GRASP’s objectives of creating and preserving human community in our immaterial world’.

My GRASP colleague John Favaro, in his GRASPnetwork blog of October 2018 Making the Invisible Visible with the Theatrical Arts, had the same idea in a different context when he wrote (quote): ‘… in [jazz legend] Count Basie’s band, improvisation wasn’t just about creating music– it was about creating community: Count Basie's drummer, Jo Jones, used to say his job wasn't to be a virtuoso on the drums … you accent what other people do, and together you create something that none of you would have done individually.’

This is how we interpret today’s improvisational music in GRASPnetwork – and indeed any type of improvisation, including our knowledge huddles that involve improvising around (visual) artful thinking to elicit new ideas: a means, a technique, something that in the hands of a competent person can help us achieve our objectives of creating and preserving human community in our increasingly immaterialized world.

I think that Beethoven, around 160 years earlier, played such a role in building a sense of community among well-meaning people, thus playing a much greater role in pursuing the idea of commonality than one might conclude from ‘merely’ enjoying his music.