Tall on the podium

UNLIKE Bach or Mozart, Beethoven has never gone out of fashion. No other composer has touched so many people, inspiring feelings of heroism, victory over suffering and hope over despair.

Leonard Bernstein, however, rejected such impressionistic, unmusical reactions, preferring to honor Beethoven for his work’s structural uniqueness.

“Beethoven, more than any other composer before or after him, I think, had the ability to find exactly the right notes that had to follow his themes,” Bernstein wrote in “The Joy of Music.” “But even he, with this great ability, had a gigantic struggle to achieve this rightness: not only the right notes, but the right rhythms, the right climaxes, the right harmonies, the right instrumentation.”

Well, yes.

But for most people, who don’t know “right notes,” “right rhythms” or “right climaxes” from a kazoo, it is Beethoven’s moral power that sets his music above others: the vaulting triumph of the “Leonore” Overture No. 3 or the awesome call to universal brotherhood in the Ninth Symphony.

This season, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are mounting a series called “Beethoven Unbound,” in which the composer’s nine symphonies are juxtaposed with contemporary works. The Philadelphia Orchestra, under music director Christoph Eschenbach, is doing much the same thing. James Levine and the Boston Symphony are pairing Beethoven with Schoenberg. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony recently put a new timpani concerto by William Kraft with Beethoven’s Ninth.

But look anywhere, at any series -- concert, chamber music, solo recital or even opera -- and Beethoven will not be absent.

More likely, except for opera (he wrote only one), he’ll be central.

What does it mean to contemporary composers to have this titanic, idolized figure in their lives? A few major ones, such as Pierre Boulez and Steve Reich, declined to comment. Others expressed a surprising range of responses, which appear on Page 56.

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They’re still keeping score

Ask modern-day composers what they think about Beethoven’s unflagging legacy. From stimulating to stifling come the replies

MICHAEL GORDON

MIAMI-BORN Michael Gordon, a founder of New York’s Bang on a Can Festival, has composed a symphony, “Decasia,” with film by Bill Morrison, which will be performed March 28 as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” series. He also is rewriting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 on commission for Germany’s Bamberger Symphony. It will premiere next September.

“One of the things about Beethoven that’s interesting to me -- the big leap that happened -- is that, in a certain sense, material became unimportant. The reason why people listen to Mozart is because he’s got the best tunes. With Beethoven, it’s no longer ‘I’ve got the best tunes’ but ‘Whatever I have, I can do the best things with it. Give me some trash and I’ll turn it into something great.’

“The role of the composer changed from being this person who’s supposed to entertain you by how great their melodic invention is, or how great their counterpoint is, to someone who becomes an architect of big schemes and big claims. It’s the architecture you admire, not the rivets or the woodwork, this huge skyscraper. It’s the defining moment in classical music. Everybody’s been dealing with that change of perspective for the last 200 years.

“My project is not even so much about Beethoven as it is about the idea that our palettes as composers are very wide, and they include all the music that’s ever been written and all the styles that have been written. I can reference Beethoven in a way that isn’t Beethoven-worshiping or Beethoven-trashing, but it’s great material and we’re going to use it.

“There’s another thing that I always find very funny: He was kind of a bum. He wasn’t upright in his business dealings. Apparently he was a glutton, an unpleasant guy. It goes on and on when you read about him. There’s this juxtaposition. He’s closer to the stories of heavy metal bands bringing sharks into their bedrooms and cutting them up than to the elegant people in gowns, tuxedoes and ties who go to concerts.”

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WILLIAM BOLCOM

SEATTLE-BORN composer William Bolcom has written film music, popular songs, operas, chamber works and symphonies. His “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” a setting of William Blake’s poems for soloists, choruses and orchestra, was premiered at the Stuttgart Opera in 1984 and locally performed by the Pacific Symphony in 2003.

“Somehow Beethoven is what’s left when you pare down to the essentials. I’m reminded of a conversation with Madeleine Milhaud a few years ago (when she was only around 100), where she spontaneously said that was the only music she cared to listen to anymore -- except maybe her late husband’s, and I’m not even sure of that.

“Before I die I think I’ll make the same request Stanley Sadie (the late Grove’s editor) made, that someone play the Opus 135 slow movement as he left this world. (I may be greedier and ask for all the last quartets.) It’s like reading the Book of Job -- if you really listen, these works cure your heart’s miseries.

“How do I think of my music in relationship to old Ludwig’s? Shame, embarrassment perhaps, but certainly the acknowledgment of his influence on every measure.”

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NED ROREM

CELEBRATED American composer Ned Rorem has written 15 books, 300 art songs and dozens of orchestral, chamber and choral works. His opera version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” will premiere at Indiana University in 2006.

“The programming of 99% of the orchestras in America is Beethoven or Mozart or Dvorak. One-tenth of 1% is living composers. That’s not the case with the book section, where contemporary books are reviewed. In theater, we speak of a revival of Albee or Ibsen, but we don’t speak of a revival of Beethoven when Beethoven is the rule. It’s only music that lags behind.

“It is a little bit insulting for you -- not you personally -- to ask a contemporary composer about Beethoven, when it’s they who should be performed. I’m 82, and I’m not nobody. But I’m not sure that I have an orchestra piece, much less an orchestra and chorus piece, or songs with piano, on any concert on any program in America.

“As for Beethoven, if I don’t hear another Beethoven piece again in my life, it won’t be too soon. Forty years ago I wrote in an essay that I never go to concerts anymore. I can’t care less that someone will play the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata a bit better or worse than someone else did last night. Most composers get my point. I know everything Beethoven ever wrote. I don’t need him anymore.”

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DAVID DEL TREDICI

A California native, David Del Tredici came to prominence with a series of works based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books beginning in the late ‘60s. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and over the last decade has written dozens of songs and vocal works on texts by American poets. On Nov. 20, Leonard Slatkin will conduct the National Symphony of Washington, D.C., in the premiere of “Rip Van Winkle,” commissioned by the orchestra.

“I can’t imagine musical breathing without Beethoven. It’s like learning from Mt. Everest.

“But at school, Beethoven is always rammed down our throats. It’s Beethoven’s fault that the current craze over theorist music began. This way of analysis -- a very superficial way of analyzing music -- came about because Beethoven was so clever, and what he did so instinctively and with fire and bravado and craziness has been sort of domesticated and made theoretically necessary in the 20th century. So I resent that Beethoven did all that. But that’s not to take away from his boldness.

“I also love the fact that Beethoven was a complete personal and social mess. This whole aspect of him is thrilling to a composer. You can be a mess and be a genius and be a misfit and actually get better. Did deafness force him inward? How on earth did he imagine a piece and not hear it? It’s a big mystery that nobody understands.”

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DAVID LANG

LOS ANGELES native David Lang, another Bang on a Can Festival founder, has a piece, “Orpheus Over and Under,” slated for the March 30 “Minimalist Jukebox” program at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is also rewriting Beethoven’s “Fidelio” on commission for the Sage Gateshead, a new arts center in Gateshead, northern England.

“What’s interesting for me about Beethoven is that what happens musically is amazing. He was one of the first people to ask, ‘What are all the things that these instruments can do and these orchestras can do?’ -- which was a question people hadn’t really acknowledged before. You don’t listen to a Mozart symphony and imagine Mozart asking himself how loud, how high, how quickly can it change. He was not taking the orchestra out on a test drive. He’s doing things that are beautiful and fantastic, but Beethoven is really involved in that question, how can he push everything he’s inherited to its limit.

“He was so relentlessly innovative. One of his ideas is that a piece of music is supposed to have the same idea operating at the end as at the beginning. You’re supposed to follow it and remember it 45 minutes later in a separate movement. That’s a revolutionary idea. Nobody ever did that before.

“But what’s more interesting to me, he was one of the first people to see music as a tool to talk about justice or freedom or politics. In Mozart’s operas, you get a first inkling that someone has imagined that music can be used as social commentary of some sort. But Beethoven believed a musician’s job is to participate fully in society. That his music is a tool to participate in society -- and that is revolutionary.

“ ‘Fidelio’ is a really great opera and has some of the most beautiful music in it. What’s always been frustrating to me, and to Beethoven, who rewrote it several times: He walks up to that moment that could have a powerful political statement, backs off and changes it into a domestic opera. The point is not ‘Death to tyrants,’ it’s ‘God bless a woman who loves her husband.’

“For years, I’ve had this idea of taking the libretto and redoing it to see if there’s a way to fulfill the political commentary at the end and not flinch. I’m definitely doing it.”

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LOUIS ANDRIESSEN

DUTCH composer Louis Andriessen has written stage, orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works. His “De Staat” and “Workers Union” will be performed on the “Minimalist Jukebox” programs, March 24 and 30, respectively.

“I consider Beethoven one of the most important composers. We can learn from him all the time. His ideas can be very good or very poor, but the quality of music is not in the ideas but what he does with the ideas.

“The opening of the Fifth Symphony is so strong, but what he does in the next 10 minutes -- a continuous development of the material -- is just amazing. One of the problems for composers who have a lot of promise is that they have one idea but don’t know how to continue. Then they take up another idea. That’s a very low-level thing to do in composing music. The little transitional motives are extremely important. Beethoven was the first composer to do that on the large scale.”