On 26 March 2027, the musical world will mark the 200th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death. The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien is dedicating a special programme to the central figure of all subsequent generations of composers, who moved from Bonn to Vienna in 1792 and was swiftly embraced by the city: Igor Levit will perform all the piano sonatas, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under Daniele Gatti will perform the nine symphonies, and Franz Welser-Möst will conduct the Wiener Philharmoniker and the Wiener Singverein in the ‘Missa solemnis’ on the very day of Beethoven’s death.
There is widespread agreement that Ludwig van Beethoven’s compositional oeuvre represents the heart of Western musical heritage. Even – or rather, especially – the trio of the “Second Viennese School,” Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, regarded Beethoven as the focal point of music history.
Nevertheless, Beethoven remains controversial even today: for the highly gifted pianist Mihail Agranat, who died far too young in Vienna in 2001, Beethoven was the epitome and symbol of everything diabolical and pernicious in the realm of music, while he had made Mozart his idol. Although this view is certainly shared by very few people, many of Beethoven’s works still bear the stigma of being “bizarre,” “eccentric,” and “contrived.” Understanding Beethoven’s musical ideas and formal decisions remains an immense challenge, and the overwhelming popularity of individual works is largely based on simplistic misunderstandings.
The portrait of Beethoven painted by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a letter to his wife (Teplice, July 19, 1812) aptly expresses everything that Beethoven still demands of us as listeners today: “I have never seen an artist more concentrated, energetic, or heartfelt. I understand very well how he must stand strangely against the world.“
In any case, it remains an indisputable fact that not a single serious composer of the post-Beethoven era could ignore him: Whether this was perceived as a burden, as in the case of Johannes Brahms, or as an imposition, as in the case of Claude Debussy, remains a question of artistic temperament – and one may assume that the end of the debate about Beethoven will coincide with the end of human history
