Symphony no. 6 in C minor ‘The Tragic’ by Ludwig van Beethoven II
Philips’ “Forgotten Masters” Series
Perhaps if a poll were to be taken of professional musicians, less than one per cent would admit to having heard of this composer. Probably a large proportion of the rest would believe the poll to be merely a practical joke of some kind. These same musicians would probably be astounded to discover that Beethoven II was the possessor of undoubted talent, and had composed at least one work worthy of the title ‘masterpiece’ and many others, like this symphony, of great interest. We hope that this recording will help to establish this symphony as a standard work of the concert repertoire.
Perhaps our musicians would ask why a composer of such talent has remained almost completely unknown. We can only surmise that his extremely unfortunate name has quite a lot to do with it. Whether he was named out of an impulse of sadism, or as a genuine tribute to a great composer, we do not know. We know only that it was yet another burden that was added to the many that Beethoven bore throughout his life.
Ludwig van Beethoven II was born in Mannheim in 1828. His father, Hans, was a piano tuner, and young Ludwig was born into a very musical family. At the age of three Ludwig began receiving piano lessons from his father, but the man’s dreams of a prodigy remained unsatisfied as Ludwig showed little musical talent. As Ludwig grew up he began to take an interest in law. He begged his father to be allowed to study at law school, but the man was adamant, and forced Ludwig to take up the violin. Beethoven, in his Scenes from an Unhappy Childhood, has touchingly described how he used to get up in the night and retreat to the little attic, there to read books on law until the early hours.
Eventually realising that his entreaties were hopeless, Ludwig resigned himself to a musical career. His violin playing improved and his latent musical genius began to manifest itself; he soon won a grant to study in Vienna.
It was at this point that he was viciously struck by one of the cruel blows of fate that were to dog him all his life. In the excitement of leaving for Vienna, Beethoven trapped two of his fingers in the carriage door. The bones were broken, and the wound soon became infected. Within a week he had lost two fingers of his left hand. The remaining fingers were hopelessly deformed. However, it was this accident, which seemed so terrible at the time (in his diary Ludwig writes: “I destroyed my life in a carriage door”), that was responsible for Beethoven turning towards composition.
His earliest works are uniformly uninteresting, although one can hear the young Beethoven trying to express his anger at the injustices of his life, and it is not until the Fourth Piano Sonata (with its unusual allegro con dolore first movement) and the First Symphony, The Pathetique, that he showed any talent for composition. His next work, the Violin Sonata, was the first to achieve contemporary recognition, which it did by virtue of its fascinating slow movement, the Marcia Funèbre.
One can see from his writing that at this time Beethoven was going through a very difficult and unhappy time as far as his amatory life was concerned. At the age of twenty-five, after his second broken engagement, he wrote the Konzertstück for Piano and Orchestra, in which much of his youthful suffering was expressed. Although this work is obviously very good, especially the mesto middle section, the piece has never been performed in full. Beethoven was never an expert orchestrator: what other composers knew instinctively, he had to study hard to accomplish. In this piece the violin parts in several places would be possible to play only if the violinists were to have the same deformity of the left hand as that suffered by Beethoven. Also, Ludwig suffered from not having learned the piano as a child. There is a great deal of bravura piano writing, but it is clear that Beethoven did not fully understand the limitations of piano playing, and the piece is completely impossible for a single pianist to play. Attempts have been made to play this part utilising three or even four pianists, but for various technical reasons these have not been a success. Louis Spohr made a little-known arrangement of the work for a chamber orchestra composed of flute, two clarinets, bassoon, wind machine and strings, but little of the music’s splendour comes through.
Despite his drawbacks so far as orchestration is concerned, it is clear to us today that Beethoven had many progressive ideas about music. One can see from his book Angst and Music (now out of print) that he even toyed briefly with the idea of atonality:
