Listening To Beethoven's Stranger Works, 250 Years After His Birth

All throughout this new year, in Boston and around the world, music lovers will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of composer Ludwig von Beethoven. Many of his most famous works, like the Fifth and Nine symphonies, are recognizable to all of us. WGBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath sat down with local composer and music scholar Jan Swafford to listen to some of Beethoven's less familiar music.

Arun Rath: So I'd like to start off with a piece that I would guess most people are not familiar with at all, not being aware that Beethoven once wrote a large symphonic work that had guns in the orchestra. Literally, this is a piece that has a musical rendition of a battle between the French and the English, with muskets and howitzers on both sides.

Jan Swafford: Yes, this is the "Battle of Vitoria," also known as "Wellington's Victory." I have to tell you, I remember the first time I heard "Wellington's Victory." It was with some of my fellow band members sitting on my girlfriend's porch in about 1960, when I was 13. And we put this thing on and we just cracked up. We didn't really crack up because it's so bad, though it is. Beethoven knew it was. He wrote it to be bad.

Rath: We should say it's considered kind of rubbish in terms of a piece of music.

Swafford: It is kind of considered to be rubbish. Two stories about that. In the first place, what cracked us up actually is not the quality of the music. It was the fact that one of the tunes he used, it's sort of the British tune versus the French tune — the French tune uses the American version of "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," which is actually a French military march — and that's what we were giggling about.

And the other thing is, when somebody ran this piece down in a newspaper criticism, Beethoven scrawled on the criticism, unfortunately, a word that I can't use on public radio, on the air. He said, 'My waste is better than anything you ever did.' And what Beethoven was saying with that was, 'I know this piece is waste.'

Rath: My waste product is better you on your best day. So let's go from there to some stuff that's not rubbishy, but I think still pretty fun. And one of the things that I've always liked since I was a young man, since I was a teenager, first listening to Beethoven, getting into the late music, when I was also listening to jazz at the time. And I was surprised to hear what first sounded like jazz to me in Beethoven in this late piano sonata.

Swafford: Well, this is the Opus 111, the variations, the sublime variations, and as variations tend to be, they're in different moods. And one of them happens to be kind of jazzy or even like ragtime. I remember playing this for a class when I was teaching on Beethoven's piano sonatas, and we kind of all agreed about that. It's pretty jazzy.

Rath: So what's up with that? Because we're 100 years before Fats Waller, who was doing that with his left hand.

Swafford: Well, it has to do just really with the rhythm, which is just — it's all what I call the Beethoven mono-rhythm, what we call a dotted rhythm. It just goes on and on, constantly varying.

But that's very characteristic of jazz and, that's why we hear that Beethoven variation and we say, 'Oh, that's kind of jazzy.'

Rath: And this mono-rhythm thing that you're talking about: You've written about how modern Beethoven can sound. This is sort of minimalism that we hear from from some modern composers, people like Philip Glass.

Swafford: Beethoven had his own version of minimalism and it turns up in various ways, one of which is the Sixth Symphony. He would just repeat things sometimes in ways that Hayden and Mozart didn't.

Rath: There are also times that for me, his work goes beyond funny to being a little bit scary, almost a little bit obsessive-compulsive and neurotic in a way that scares me.

Swafford: You're talking about the "Grosse Fuge," and I wouldn't call it a little bit obsessive. I would call it utterly obsessive. It's one of the most avant-garde pieces ever written. One of the first reviews of it said it's incomprehensible, like Chinese.

Rath: It's the kind of thing that if you listen to it closely, it kind of gives you a nosebleed. You sort of need to take a nap after that.

Swafford: Beethoven could get obsessive, and sometimes he did in his music. I think that's one explanation for this. And he decided to write the ultimate fugue, and to use just about every known fugal device in one piece, which nobody ever did.

Rath: A fugue, for people who don't know, is music that's written in several voices at the same time, with overlapping parts.

Swafford: Yeah, with a little melody that is handed around from part to part. And this one, it just chugs on at fortissimo for page after page after page in an absolutely obsessive way, and also in an absolutely incredibly difficult to play way. It's also tremendously exciting and just a unique piece. There's nothing like it, nothing else like it, and it ends beautifully and gently.