Why we still need Beethoven

I recently was reminded that the 200th anniversary of the debut of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was approaching. Roughly 20 years ago I published the below essay on Beethoven, inspired by attending a performance of the 9th by Washington, DC’s National Symphony Orchestra. I quite like the essay and think it worthy of reprinting here. However, I want to mark the passage of the 22 years since I first wrote it by noting that I now view the subject with different eyes.

My main target then was post-modernism. Now I see an assault on the more positive aspects of modernity by more primal evils such as the antisemitism and obscurantism one sees erupting nearly everywhere. The effect is not unlike that felt by the protagonist in Arthur Schnitzler’s extraordinary Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, perhaps best known these days as the basis of the Kubric film Eyes Wide Shut. There, the bourgeois Viennese doctor, certain of himself as a man of science in an orderly world in which liberal values and positivism ostensibly reigned, keeps bumping up against deep and dark forces hidden behind surface appearances.

That was the point of the scene in the movie in which the protagonist, played by Tom Cruise, bumps up against frat boys.

The scene is taken from Schnitzler’s book. Except in the book, the frat boys are German nationalist fraternity brothers, members of a university Burschenschaft. They are antisemites, something Schnitzler himself did not need to spell out to his readers. The encounter rattled the protagonist, as would other encounters in the story. He thought civilization had moved forward. But maybe it hadn’t?

I think we still need Beethoven for the reasons I explain below. We need to feel the optimism he inspired. Unfortunately, after 7 October and seeing the world’s reaction, I am far less optimistic about the world or the prospects of the better sides of modernity. I need Beethoven now more than ever.

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At a recent performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by the National Symphony Orchestra, the music moved me. From the opening note to the awe-inspiring finale, it held me upright at the edge of my seat and filled my heart with song, optimism, and, yes, joy. This is probably not a surprise to most readers. Everyone loves Beethoven. But it should be a surprise. Beethoven's music functions according to an aesthetic that lies at the root of modern (though not modernist) art; it draws inspiration from and appeals to the most fundamental ideals of modernity. Us post-moderns are not supposed to let such things get to us. We should be too sophisticated for that. Happily, we aren't.

What makes Beethoven's music modern and thus, from a post-modern perspective, hopelessly out of date, are its aesthetics and its optimism. Aesthetically, Beethoven crafted his art in tune with the Romantic ideal of the sublime. Convinced of the existence of a primal, universal, all-powerful, and majestic truth that lay just beyond normal human perception, Romantic artists endeavored to capture their subjective experience of that truth and express it through their art. They believed that, as artists, they had a prophet-like ability to see, feel, and dream their way through to 'the other side.' Their ideal of beauty was to communicate the infinite through the finite, to share with us the entirety of the universe in a bar of melody or a stroke of oil paint. This is the key to the ethereal beauty of Beethoven's late string quartets: the composer, completely deaf, could now hear no other songs than the stirring of his own soul and somehow manages to set those songs to music. In the 9th Symphony I can think of at least two places where Beethoven nails it; that shiver I feel is the experience of the sublime.

Typically, Romantic artists regarded nature as the most favorable arena for capturing the sublime. Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner provide arguably the best known examples of this, and Beethoven similarly turned to nature in his evocative "Pastoral" Symphony. However, Romantic art, like all modern art, is never really about the nature it depicts or whatever else may be its ostensible subject matter. Rather, it is about the artist's subjective experience. The hallmark of Romantic art and arguably most modern art since is the conviction that to connect with the infinite beyond or behind the concrete world one should turn inward. Romantic art bespeaks a tremendous faith in the potential of the human spirit; it makes a virtual cult of human creativity and above all the creative genius. In this regard it should be clear that the Romantic fruit did not fall far from the Enlightenment tree, even if Romanticism lauded subjectivity where the Enlightenment emphasized objectivity. In both cases, moreover, faith in the human spirit usually translates into confidence in humanity as a whole. For in a world where men can know truth, they can connect at a deeply spiritual level and form bonds of mutual love and understanding. All of humanity can share the same experience of subjective truth. All of humanity can come together as a single subjective I.

The closely related teleologies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism together form the core of what post-modernism now scorns as the 'myth of modernity.' Not only are we deeply skeptical of the existence of a single, universal truth, but now we have convinced ourselves that the unity of subjective vision postulated by modernity is an absurdity. We can never transcend our individual subjectivities, both for purely epistemological reasons and because they are conditioned by particular historical factors such as economics, race, gender, culture, and so forth. We can never connect. In fact, the most we can aspire to is a multi-cultural society in which everyone assumes a consensual agreement to respect one another's autonomy.

Moreover, if history has taught us anything, the human progress heralded by Schiller's poem-so gloriously set by Beethoven-is a sad delusion. Modernity brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, thank you very much, and not some universal brotherhood in which we all join together and harmonize with God. In fact we can lay some of modernity's worst creations - nationalism, anti-Semitism, and fascism - directly at Romanticism's feet. It is no wonder that Beethoven's optimism has given way to irony and cynicism.

Or has it? Listening to Beethoven the other night, I found myself believing, even if only for the duration of that evening, in humanity, in progress, and in truth. More radically, I felt infused with confidence in the superiority of Western civilization. We have symphonies. We have liberty. We have science. We have the sublime. It's all true. Universal even. In other words, I felt modern again.

One might argue that my new-found modernism was nothing more than nostalgia. Perhaps nostalgia alone was what motivated all those people to pack the National Symphony Orchestra that night. We were there to honor the memory of modernity like aging baby boomers going to Crosby, Stills, and Nash concerts and telling their children about how they were once part of 'the movement.' This is a possibility. Has not our society been particularly hungry for a little reassurance lately?

I am convinced, however, that the secret to Beethoven's enduring power lies not in nostalgia but in the fact that the idealism embodied in his music resonates with our own latent beliefs. Modernity may well be a myth, but most of us are still under its sway at least some of the time. I think this is a good thing. As we presently are struggling with people who seek to destroy our culture, I think we would do well to affirm the ideals, hopes, and visions that define it while at the same time being cognizant of how we have often gone wrong.

First, I think there is no reason why the traumas of the last two centuries need to obscure the accomplishments of modernity or detract from the potent truths that Beethoven reveals. Although Beethoven's splendid art made Wagner's hate-filled kitsch possible, there is nothing about Beethoven that made Wagner necessary or inevitable, no cultural Sonderweg leading from Caspar Friedrich David to Leni Riefenstahl or even from Delacroix's orientalism to the countless crimes perpetrated by the West against the "third" world.

Moreover, now that we know the damage modernity can cause, we should be able to heed the bright trumpet call that Beethoven sounds while taking care to cause no harm. Can we renounce playing Prospero to a planet of seething Calibans? I think we can. Beethoven, after all, felt sufficiently confident in his views to press on with the Bonapartist Fidelio even after his disillusionment with Napoleon, as if to say that the Emperor's abuse of truth in no way invalidated the existence of truth itself.

And what is that truth? The trick is to listen closely to Beethoven. Turn the volume up or get a good seat in the orchestra section. But above all do not let cynicism corrupt the purity of his music by imposing echoes of Wagner, "The Watch on the Rhine," and Maxim machine guns. Those things are simply not in the score. On the contrary, Beethoven created his art at a time when the world was still positively bursting with optimism. That's why we need Beethoven now, as much as ever: the optimism, the possibility of truth, the beauty of progress. Feeling and understanding these values does not require checking our historical consciousness at the concert-hall door; on the contrary, we can appreciate them more fully with the understanding we've gained in the last two centuries. If anything, the echoes that we hear in his music are the sounds of soaring human spirit, of emancipation and enlightenment. The progress Beethoven and his contemporaries dreamed of is not an impossibility, even if it is occasionally hijacked.

Post-modernism can certainly be very beneficial, for it cautions us against approaching other cultures with the same hubris that marked out treatment of the 'Other' in the past. However it lacks positive content and thus offers little with which we can combat the anti-modernism of those arrayed against us. We can and should reach back into our culture and pull forward those aspects of modernity that represent the best of us. Few things do this so well as Beethoven. May the day never come when his music no longer inspires us to sing along.