527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
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Thank you.
Please welcome back to the stage Tom Holland and Dominik Sandberg. Welcome back, everybody. Always start the second half with a banger, they say. And that, of course, was the banger to end all bangers. The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony premiered in December 1808 in Vienna. And Dominic, the opening of that movement must be the most famous opening to any piece of music ever written, I'd have thought.
Absolutely.
So, we have had Mozart, and the second half is about a very different character, someone who is brooding, unfriendly, difficult, and... And here he is... ..to talk about Ludwig van Beethoven. Dominic, take it away. Uh...
When I wrote that joke, I knew you would laugh. So, Tom, you ended with Mozart's death and funeral in 1791. No great send-off, a slightly lackluster occasion. And let's start by fast-forwarding three decades to March 1827, to the death and funeral of his great successor Ludwig van Beethoven. And it's a completely different scene. As Beethoven lies dying, also in Vienna, Presents, cash, cakes are coming in from all over Europe. Beethoven's last recorded words greet the arrival from Mainz of a case of his favorite Rhineland wine. And his last words were, pity, pity, too late. And then he died. And when he did die on the evening of the 26th of March, it was the news story of the year. So when they held the funeral three days later, crowds had gathered outside Beethoven's apartment. There was a choir outside to see him off. The schools were all given the day off. On the way to the church and then to the cemetery, the crowds were so thick, it took them ages to pass through.
And all the way, some of the best-known people in Vienna were holding a kind of torch-lit parade, most famously, the young composer Franz Schubert. So clearly, something had changed since the death of Mozart, and a lot of that has to do with Beethoven himself. So many of you, I guess, will already have an idea of Beethoven in your mind. The wild hair, the ferocious frowning expression, the unkempt appearance, the papers falling from his pocket. An intellectual, an artist. Mozart is fun, and Beethoven is serious. That's the stereotype. And I think this is really important because I think it is Beethoven, more than anybody else, who invents this idea of the creator, the artistic genius, as a lonely, difficult, unhappy, but brilliant man, a bit like Tom. Now, One difference between Beethoven and Mozart, obviously, is that Beethoven is not Austrian. Beethoven is German. He was born in Bonn in the west of Germany in December 1770.
Bonn was a small town that belonged to the electorate of Cologne. And music was the family business. Beethoven's father was a singer, but his alcoholism stymied his career. Now, as with Mozart, his father pushed him ferociously. He started giving him regular keyboard lessons when Ludwig was just five. He would make him practice until he cried. He would make him practice until midnight. And he would beat him when Ludwig made a mistake. And did it work?
Did it?
No. No. It didn't, because although Ludwig was clearly very good, he wasn't a prodigy on the scale of Mozart. When he reached the age of 10, he was still barely known within his own town. Nobody effectively had noticed him on a continental scale. But then, at the age of 11, he got a new piano teacher, a massively important figure in his life, who rejoiced in the name of Christian Gottlob Nefer. And Nefer was a Protestant. The Beethovens were Catholics. And Nefer was tied in to the Enlightenment. So he was full of ideas about reason and virtue and reform, full of the writings of Voltaire and Kant. And he passes these on to the young Beethoven. Now, through his Enlightenment enthusiasms, Nefer is very well connected. And one of his friends is a chap called Count Ferdinand Waldstein.
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