Beethoven 1806 by Ferraguto Mark;

Author:Ferraguto, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Music for a Culture Hero

Opus 60

As early as 1831, a British commentator noted that Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony was the “least frequently brought forward” of the first six, though, he hastened to add, it was “not inferior to any.”1 Seven years later, a French critic wrote that in Paris the “sublime symphony in B-flat” had not only been neglected but was also routinely dismissed as “a work of folly, without true beauty and without meaning.”2 While the Fourth Symphony came to occupy a significant place on European concert programs in the later nineteenth century, it remained a seldom-performed work in many American concert halls through much of the twentieth. On the centennial of Beethoven’s death in 1927, the British conductor Sir Henry Wood was astonished to find that the Fourth Symphony had never before been heard in Los Angeles: “Think of so attractive a work having been almost entirely neglected. I put in that ‘almost,’ because it appeared that some conductors had gone as far as rehearsing it. But when the pinch came their courage failed, and down went No. 5 instead!”3

Wood’s account highlights the discomfort this symphony has often caused for performers, critics, and even audiences. Indeed, the symphony’s reception history is a tale of apologias and rescue attempts—as one critic opined, the Fourth Symphony has been subject to “more misrepresentation than any other work by Beethoven.”4 Lacking descriptive titles and other extramusical signifiers, it posed a problem for nineteenth-century critics applying programmatic modes of analysis to Beethoven’s music, leading Alexandre Oulibicheff, in 1857, to label it the “bête noire” of Beethoven criticism.5 More recently, its aesthetic has been viewed as incongruent with that of Beethoven’s “heroic style,” a critical paradigm that has inspired an extraordinary proliferation of scholarship on the mature odd-numbered symphonies and, for more complicated reasons, the Pastoral, but has tended to marginalize the others. And yet the Fourth is by no means a neglected work today. According to the League of American Orchestras, the symphony received over two hundred performances by major American orchestras in the first decade of the twenty-first century; in the 2007–8 season (two centuries after its Viennese premiere in 1807), it was among the twenty most frequently programmed orchestral works in the country.6

One aspect of the Fourth Symphony that has garnered critical attention is its apparent indebtedness to Haydn and, to a lesser extent, Mozart. Scholars have attributed this indebtedness to a number of musical features: it begins with a “Haydnesque” slow introduction rather than in medias res; its codas are short and to the point, not expansive and dramatic; its textures and forms are relatively transparent; it concludes with a light, even comic, finale rather than a transcendent, weighty one; and it requires no additional instruments beyond the standard complement of the late eighteenth century (and only one flute). Donald Francis Tovey has suggested further points of contact: in the first movement, for instance, Beethoven handles rhythm in such a way that “Mozart’s own freedom of movement reappears as one of the most striking qualities of the whole.

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