Read Online Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford - Free Book Online Page B

for that reason, he never despised the church and nobility in their existence—or at least he held them in no special contempt compared to the rest of the world. His disgust with the Viennese aristocracy would be based on its behavior. In any case, nobles paid much of his rent.
    In a later century, the trust in bureaucracy and armies and despots benevolent or otherwise would lead Germany to catastrophe, but still a monumental achievement of the Aufklärung was the science of government. Progressive ideas created state bureaucracies in Vienna and Berlin and elsewhere that supported, at first, the liberal goals of the Aufklärung—and only later the goals of police states. It was the time of the rise of the
Hofrat
, the court privy councillor, and a welter of other titles. The courts’ demand for skilled administrators in turn created a new educated and ambitious middle class, hungry for power and also hungry for literature and ideas and music. This bureaucratic middle class was a primary engine of the Aufklärung in German lands. 26
    In the age of reason, German literature bloomed, some of it in the spirit of Aufklärung and some opposing it—one example of the opposition being the Sturm und Drang decade of the 1770s. The next generation in Germany turned against it all. If the resonating ideas of the Enlightenment were reason, truth, nature, order, and objectivity, those of the coming Romantics would be the subjective, the instinctive, the uncanny, the sublime, and nature in its great and terrible face. As one essential Romantic writer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, put it, “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the mechanism of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of Romanticism.” The Aufklärung looked to a radiant future of social and scientific perfection; the Romantics looked to the fabled, mysterious, ­unreachable past. The eighteenth century longed for freedom and happiness. The nineteenth century was caught up not in longing toward an end but in longing for the delirium and pain of longing itself.
    In 1785, in the middle of a decade with a fever of revolution in the air, Friedrich Schiller caught the spirit of the age in ecstatic verses called “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy). The poem’s essence was the Enlightenment cult of happiness as the goal of life, the conviction that the triumph of freedom and joy would bring humanity to an epoch of peace and universal brotherhood, the utopia he called Elysium:
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Joy, thou lovely god-engendered
Daughter of Elysium.
Drunk with fire we enter,
Heavenly one, thy holy shrine!
Thy magic reunites
What fashion has broken apart.
Beggars will be princes’ brothers
Where thy gentle wing abides . . .
    Â 
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers! over the starry canopy
A loving Father must dwell!
Whoever has had the great success
To be a friend of a friend,
He who has won a sweet wife,
Join our jubilation! . . .
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Brothers, drink and join the song,
All sinners shall be forgiven,
And Hell shall be no more.
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    Schiller’s poem is in the tradition of a German
geselliges Lied
, social song, intended literally or figuratively to be sung among comrades with glasses raised. 27 The verses themselves are drunken and reeling with hope. In dozens of musical settings,
An die Freude
was sung in Freemason lodges all over Germany and by young revolutionaries in the streets. 28 For Beethoven and for many of his era, these verses were the distillation of the revolutionary 1780s. By the end of his teens, Beethoven was determined to do his own setting of the poem. Perhaps he did, but if so, the attempt did not survive. When he took up
An die Freude
again, decades later, those verses still rang for him with what they meant to his youth, and to the Aufklärung.
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    At the center of the Rhenish Aufklärung lay Bonn, already in the 1770s, under