A Liberating Approach to Beethoven’s Music

The heroic side of Beethoven’s music, which strongly characterizes the symphonies of his middle period, did much to push music into the modern age. The Third and Fifth in particular are bounding and indecorous public statements, music intended to embolden and ennoble a listener. Indeed, the popular romantic image of Beethoven as the intrepid overcomer of obstacles--personal (his deafness), social (the aristocracy’s possessiveness of music and its makers) and musical (the technical limitations of instruments)--began in earnest with these mighty symphonic utterances.

In a talk to the audience Wednesday night, John Eliot Gardiner, the British conductor who is surveying the nine Beethoven symphonies with his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique at the Orange County Performing Arts Center this week, pointed to the French Revolution as the heroic inspiration for Beethoven. Using his musicians, with their period instruments, and the singers of the Monteverdi Choir to perform examples, Gardiner demonstrated just what made Beethoven a revolutionary.

Overwhelmed by his fervor for overthrowing ancient regimes, be they governmental or musical, Beethoven tuned his ears to the soundtrack of the revolution. Gardiner, for instance, pointed to the style of the funeral march of the “Eroica” Symphony (the Third) as originating in wind-band processions on the streets of Paris honoring revolutionary heroes. He also showed how a political impulse drove him to turn a mannerly Haydn-esque theme in the first movement of the Second Symphony into an audaciously rousing coda. He had the choir sing “la liberte” along with the Finale to the Fifth Symphony, and it fit just fine.

This revolutionary spirit is something that the early music movement, out of which Gardiner comes, finds especially appealing. It was Gardiner’s second point that to properly appreciate just how revolutionary Beethoven was, we do well to hear him in the full context of his times, and that means the use of the period’s instruments. In an excerpt from the scherzo of the Ninth Symphony, he contrasted the powerful effect of a timpanist gleefully banging away with all his might on skin drums and the turbocharged ease of playing booming modern drums made with plastic heads.

And so with Gardiner’s performances of the heroic symphonies (the Third and Fourth on Tuesday, the Fifth on Wednesday) the excitement often came from sheer human energy. On Monday night, Gardiner had maintained a certain balance between manner and mannerism, with the still-classical First and Second symphonies. Here, to achieve a sense of power, he asked for extreme playing. The sound wasn’t tidy and wasn’t meant to be.

But there is also in Gardiner’s interpretations, which are driven very fast but stay on a very carefully worked-out track, a safety net in structural rigor. One phrase follows another with absolutely sure logic of a dialectic. The direction these works are following is always very clear.

It is possible to think of Beethoven’s symphonies as representing the madness of their age, as reflecting the French Revolution not as an ideal for a new order but as sheer anarchy. And that wildness may actually be what made Beethoven’s own audiences into fanatics. Only a century later did theorists start finding all the internal consistencies in the music, start hearing the symphonies, in a sense, backward, by anticipating their conclusions in their initial motives. From the opening notes of the Fifth Symphony, the tightest yet most radical of all the middle symphonies, to its affirmative Finale, Gardiner never for an instance left a listener in doubt about the music’s direction.

But then maybe it is absurd to try to conjure up the dangerous uncertainty of a people’s revolution in a posh concert hall and in an age of stock-market confidence. Vigorous and exhilarating, but not exactly revelatory, these performances Tuesday and Wednesday were sure, we knew, to end in triumph--and standing ovations.

* Gardiner’s Beethoven cycle concludes this weekend at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, with performances of Symphonies Nos. 6 and 7 tonight and Nos. 8 and 9 Saturday, both at 8 p.m., $20-$60. (949) 553-2422.