Would Beethoven have loved Boston? Would he have gone to the aquarium? What about Kowloon?

Fran Magazine: Issue #120

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First of all

Everything’s fine! There was no Sunday Dispatch this weekend because I didn’t have much I wanted to write or talk about, and I had family in town. Sometimes the every other week Sunday Dispatches feel like more robust diaries, depending on the weeks. All of which is to say, I’ll be back this weekend with an extra-big dispatch. If you’ve been missing out, upgrade your subscription here. Paid subscriptions are $50 annually (compared to the $60 annual if you subscribe monthly!).

Not not classical music hour

Back in late June, when I was still unknowingly in the throes of mononucleosis, I got hit with a violent short-term case of “the shoppies” and I decided to take part in the annual NYRB sale even though I’d made a solid effort to stop buying books and otherwise rely on my Brooklyn Public Library card and galleys I get through work or friendship or some combination of the two. Whatever! I wanted 40% off four books — good deal.

One of the books I got on a whim was Paul Griffiths’ Mr. Beethoven, a fictional account of a trip to Boston that Ludwig van Beethoven took in 1833 to premiere a new oratorio commissioned by that city’s Handel and Haydn Society. It’s a convincing conceit in and of itself, but this commission was real (though it’s from 1823, not 1833), and Beethoven did apparently agree to it, though this Boston Oratorio (great title) never came to exist, nor did Beethoven make it to the United States before his death.

the grand opening of the H+H society

Griffiths was the classical music critic at The New Yorker in the 1990s, and then for The New York Times in the early 2000s. His criticism is sharp and funny. Consider a little rant on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony from 2002:

Lorin Maazel conducts the New York Philharmonic in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony! Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony! Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony!

Once again the major orchestras have announced their plans for next season, and once again those plans look terribly alike. One is tempted to congratulate the Chicago Symphony, which is not only declining to play Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in 2002-3 but also going the entire season without performing a note by this composer. The Cleveland Orchestra, alas, merits no such praise.

And later:

Mr. Eschenbach will present it at the end of a concert, following a Berlioz overture and Oliver Knussen's recent Violin Concerto. Mr. Maazel also has it at the end of a concert, following a Mendelssohn overture and Krzysztof Penderecki's recent Adagio. Mr. Salonen, too, places it last, after the Dvorak Cello Concerto — which is exactly Jahja Ling's choice of programming [in Cleveland] this summer.

But in no case does the rest of the program have any connection with the Shostakovich piece. The audience will get a great work; it may even get a great performance; but it will not get a great concert, because it will not get a great program.

For the record, this is also how I felt about every single symphony orchestra in America programming Beethoven’s Fifth last year, but I also never went to go see it.

Whereas Griffiths’ lightness of tone benefits his criticism (is there a contemporary classical music critic who isn’t a little funny writing for a major publication? probably not), I’ve found the relentless optimism of Mr. Beethoven a bit of a harder pill to swallow.

This might be a question of form over substance: Griffiths combines narrative historical writing with moments of pure invention. An example:

It has long been supposed that the composer made no significant advance on the score of his oratorio during the weeks between his arrival in Boston, in May of 1833, and his departure for Quincy at the end of June. Of course, this assertion could easily be thrown into doubt were there to be found, say, a cache of sketch pages written on paper that could not have been acquired other than in Boston, inscribed with ink that would point to a Boston supplier or manufacturer.

There’s this back and forth bit of “this could be real” and “but of course it also couldn’t” and “oh but wouldn’t it be fun if it was.” I much prefer when a novel is willing to stick to its core conceit, and Mr. Beethoven is much more pleasurable to read when it inches towards the genuinely experimental in lieu of its winking historical fiction.

The main aspect of Griffiths’ novel that both compels and annoys me is his fascination and optimism towards early colonial America as an existing entity and the good time that Beethoven is having while visiting there. That’s not to say I want a novel where Beethoven goes to Boston has a bad time (though that’s a pretty good idea), but that I’ve found that in there is a whole mini-field of interest as to whether figures from the classical music world made it to America and what they thought of their time there. I suspect this is because something like classical music feels far away in time, when actually there was a great period of overlap between these figures and the times we now live in. In Griffiths’ novel, Beethoven sees fireworks for what might be the first time (surely someone who lives in Vienna in the late 19th century might have already seen fireworks?) and learns American Sign Language. And, of course, he has a great time in Cape Cod. To me this projects a kind of corny American optimism — maybe these stodgy Europeans could have had a good time if they only got out of their rigid class system, or whatever — and also feels far more ahistorical than a literal ahistorical event. Some of this, I know, is meant to be funny (Beethoven’s translator is literally named “Thankful”), but most of it seems to be interested in cheering up a famously grumpy guy. There are other instances of historical namedropping — Thoreau pop up briefly Melville — all of which have the tone of that one recent David Mitchell novel where there’s a scene in which the fake band meet the Beatles.

There’s a great small Reddit conversation from about a decade ago where someone asks why we don’t have any record of guys like Mozart or Haydn talking about the founding of America. Did they know about it? What were their thoughts? Napoleon weighs heavy on some composers (Beethoven), but not George Washington? What gives!

The first and obvious answer is that for all the excitement of revolutionary America, the newly independent colonies didn’t possess the type of meaningful wealth that would motivate a composer to come work there. To be a full-time artist or composer at that time was to rely heavily on patrons and governments and royalty — not unlike now — and a country with not a ton of those didn’t offer the types of bountiful opportunities to inspire those who had to worry about where their next meal was coming from. Beyond that, I think it’s safe to say that most of these composers, especially the Austro-Germanic ones, were too busy beefing with each other in pamphlets in Europe to get too involved with the politics of a nation overseas. That said, for places in the world that remained under colonial control far later in time, you see small movements that embrace classical music. There’s a great example of this in James Gray’s Lost City of Z in which the English explorers stumble across a staging of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte in the middle of the jungle.

Of course, there are also plenty of composers who did make it to America way later in time: Dvorak, famously, lived in New York City and Iowa; Mahler went to New York; Prokofiev did a whole tour of the states. There’s that bit in the Bernstein letters book where he’s always talking about what a nervy little freak Shostakovich is. Obviously this is later in history, when travel is more affordable and the American classical scene is more robust. I remember being fascinated with Prokofiev’s U.S. tour back when I lived in the Midwest because he was one of few composers of that era to make it as far west as Chicago (and then eventually Los Angeles). But when I read the giant Prokofiev biography by Harlow Robinson, I was dismayed to learn that Prokofiev had a horrible time in Chicago where he thought everyone was a moron.¹ A shame, mostly, because he was there when he was 27 — the ideal age for a person to thrive in Chicago. His opera was poorly received, reviewed negatively. Still: he returned to the city a few more times, conducting his own work. By the end of his life, he’d grown a begrudging respect for the life of a “touring artist.”

Griffiths’ novel is at its most successful when dealing with the part of Beethoven being in Boston that does feel timeless — the anxious rush around several people responsible for bringing a celebrity to a place and making sure they have a good time. Is Beethoven warm enough? Is he getting from Point A to Point B on time? Is the work he’s been commissioned to do actually getting done? These external discussions around Beethoven are far more entertaining than the rendering of Beethoven himself. In fact, I was disappointed to see a note at the end of the novel that all of Beethoven’s dialogue is something he said at one time or another, taken from journals or letters, obviously repurposed towards this project. Perhaps the “found novel” is not a form I’m necessarily compelled by unless the book itself feels more artistically sound.² That we don’t know what would have happened during an event that never actually happened is kind of a thrill. Think about how much stuff we do know — I’d have much rather never learned about Prokofiev’s bad time in Chicago when I could have otherwise imagined him going to Portillo’s³ (jk) — and the ways in which that limits our understanding of what can and can’t be. When Beethoven sails away at the end of the book, the American characters stand on the dock and wonder if he was ever really there. The word “really” stands out: the more Griffiths relies on that purported realness, the less present Beethoven feels, a ghost on the shores of history.

1. I can’t remember the exact place in the book — since donated — but he does say something along the lines of the city being full of middlebrow consumers who don’t understand art. And then he arrives in LA soon after with little remark towards the audiences there, instead praising the palm trees.

2. A days-long discussion has overtaken the apartment that basically anything is justifiable in art so long as the end result is actually, well, good.

3. Did you guys hear about their new cake?