Beethoven’s Centenary1 (Extract)

George Bernard Shaw

1Thanks to broadcasting, millions of musical novices will hear the music of Beethoven this anniversary year for the first time with their expectations raised to an extraordinary pitchby hundreds of newspaper articles piling up all the conventional eulogiesthat are applied indiscriminately to all the great composers.And like his contemporaries they will be puzzled by getting from him not merely a music that they did not expect, but often an orchestral hurlyburlythat they may not recognize as what they call music at all, though they can appreciate Gluck and Haydn and Mozart quite well.The explanation is simple enough.The music of the eighteenth century is all dance music.A dance is a symmetrical pattern of steps that are pleasant to move to; and its music is a symmetrical pattern of sound that is pleasant to listen to even when you are not dancing to it.Consequently the sound patterns, though they begin by being as simple as chessboards, get lengthened and elaborated and enriched with harmonies until they are more like Persian carpets; and the composers who design these patterns no longer expect people to dance to them.Only a whirling Dervishcould dance a Mozart symphony:indeed, I havetwo young and practised dancersexhaustion by making them dance a Mozart overture.They very names of the dances are dropped: instead of suites consisting of sarabands, pavanes,gavottes, and jigs, the designs are presented as sonatas and symphonies consisting of sections called simply movements, and labelled according to their speed (in Italian) as allegros, adagios, scherzos, and prestos.But all the time, from Bach’s preludes to Mozart’s,the music makes a symmetrical sound pattern, and gives us the dancer’s pleasure always as the form and foundation of the piece.

2Music, however, can do more than make beautiful sound patterns.It can express emotions.You can look at a Persian carpet and listen to a Bach prelude with a delicious admiration that goes no further than itself;but you cannot listen to the overture towithout being thrown into a complicated mood which prepares you for a tragedy of some terrible doom overshadowingan exquisite but Satanic gaiety.If you listen to the last movement of Mozart’s, you hear that it is as much a riotous corobbery as the last movement of Beethoven’s: it is an orgyof ranting drumming tow-row-row, made poignant by an opening strain of strange and painful beauty which is woven through the pattern all through.And yet the movement is a masterpiece of pattern designing all the time.

3Now what Beethoven did, and what made some of his greatest contemporaries give him up as a madman with lucidintervals of clowning and bad taste, was that he used music altogether as a means of expressing moods, and completelypattern designing as an end in itself.It is true that he used the old patterns all his life with dogged conservatism (another Sansculotte characteristic, by the way);but he imposed on them such an overwhelming charge of human energy and passion, including that highest passion which accompanies thought, and reduces the passion of the physical appetites to mere animalism, that he not only playedwith their symmetry but often made it impossible to notice that there was any pattern at all beneath the storm of emotion.begins by a pattern (borrowed from an overture which Mozart wrote when he was a boy), followed by a couple more very pretty patterns; but they are tremendously energized, and in the middle of the movement the patterns are torn up savagely; and Beethoven, from the point of view of the mere pattern musician, goes raving mad, hurling out terrible chords in which all the notes of the scale are sounded simultaneously,just because he feels like that, and wants you to feel like it.

4And there you have the whole secret of Beethoven.He could design patterns with the best of them; he could write music whose beauty will last you all your life; he could take the driest sticks of themes and work them up so interestingly that you find something new in them at the hundredth hearing: in short, you can say of him all that you can say of the greatest pattern composers; but his diagnostic, the thing that marks him out from all the others, is his disturbing quality, his power of unsettlingus and imposing his giant moods on us.Berlioz was very angry with an old French composer who expressed the discomfort Beethoven gave him by saying “,” “I like music that lullsme.” Beethoven’s is music that wakes you up; and the one mood in which you shrink from it is the mood in which you want to be let alone.

5When you understand this you will advance beyond the eighteenth century and the old-fashioned dance band (jazz, by the way, is the old dance band Beethovenized), and understand not only Beethoven’s music, but what is deepest in post-Beethoven music as well.

(1) What are the similarity and difference between chessboards and Persian carpets? (para.1)

(2) How are the last movement of Mozart’sand the last movement of Beethoven’ssimilar? (para.2)

(3) How did Beethoven treat patterns? (para.3)

(1) He wasn’t very l________; he didn’t quite know where he was.

(2) He blew ￡533,000 in an 18-month o________ of spending.

(3) Her childhood was o________ by her mother’s incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

(4) I feel very sorry for the competitors who have all worked themselves up to a very high p________ for this first day.

(5) The presence of the two policemen u________ her.

(6) They were ________ ________ extreme poverty.

(7) When his boss talked to him he was just ready to ________ ________ his job.

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