Beethoven composed his Fourth Piano Concerto in Vienna in the years 1803-06. In that period there was an unusually keen interest in the Orpheus legend; and so it is not surprising to learn that all three movements ... were undeclaredly or better described, secretly based on that famous story. So begins Owen Jander s Beethoven s Orpheus Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in its Cultural Context. In this fascinating and controversial book, the author maintains echoing the interpretation first suggested by Adolph Berhard Marx in 1859 that the three movements are based on the Classical versions of the Orpheus legend by Virgil and Ovid. Jander tells us the full story from the opening phrase of the first movement to the last measure of the finale of how the Orpheus legend informs every note of Beethoven s music.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exploring Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto as an "extraordinary" work,
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This review is from: Beethoven's Orpheus Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in Its Cultural Context (North American Beethoven Studies) (Paperback)
Jander's book on the beloved Fourth Concerto is indeed--as the back cover announces--"fascinating and controversial." The book began as an article on the middle movement published in the prestigious musicological journal "19th-Century Music" in Spring 1985 (26 years ago) in which Jander traced the history of connecting the middle movement to the story of "Orpheus taming the wild beasts with the music of his lyre." That association dates back to the famous critic A B. Marx (1859), who also pointed out that the music was musically indebted to Gluck's opera "Orfeo ed Euridice." Jander's detective work in the article showed that the progression of musical events in the piano concerto matches quite closely a version of the opera "Orpheus" by Friedrich Kanne that was premiered in 1807. Jander's argument on the second movement has found wide favor since its appearance, and it is rare to read program notes on the concerto without finding a reference to his work. While the article does contain scholarly conjecture (as does almost all interesting musicological work), it is based on the history of Beethoven's Vienna.
What makes the book "controversial" to people uncomfortable with the topic of homosexuality is its extension of the Orpheus myth to the outer movements, including in part the famous tales recounted in Ovid's "Transformations," of boys beloved by the gods. Jander argues that the famous opening of the concerto and the outright weird beginning (the piano enters first in G Major--a key of no sharps or flats--and the orchestra enters in B Major, a very rare key in the period with five sharps) is related to Orpheus's famous powers to charm all of nature. He also argues that the last movement recounts the tale of the Bacchantes chasing Orpheus and finally destroying him by tearing his body to pieces, though Orpheus's head continues to sing as part of the end of the story. Once again, key characteristics are part of the story, as the third movement begins "off-key" in C Major, which was described by the theorist and composer Galeazzi in 1796 as a key that was "grandiose, military, fit to display grand events, serious, majestic, and tumultuous." (Jander does not, however, discuss the fact that key characteristics support his argument in every case.) Jander, a retired professor from Wellesley College, is known for his ability to uncover scholarly connections between Beethoven's music and the people, music, books, and times around the composer. It is true that the book contains speculation, but it is scholarly speculation that is not uncommon in scholarly writing devoted to the interpretation of creative works, be it a piece of music or a painting. In a thoughtful review on his musicology blog "Dial 'M' for Musicology," University of Colorado professor Jonathan Bellman concluded," "it is unquestionable that Beethoven's Fourth is one of those works that requires an extraordinary explanation. Unexceptional explanations ... simply do not answer the call. So I am not convinced by every last point, but I am sympathetic to Jander's ideas (some very much so), and above all I appreciate that he wrote the book more or less honoring what was clearly a life-long obsession with a superb, utterly bewitching musical work."
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fantasy masquerading as musicology and analysis,
By
This review is from: Beethoven's Orpheus Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in Its Cultural Context (North American Beethoven Studies) (Paperback)
Millions of us love Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. The author of this book, Owen Jander, not only loves the concerto but also the myth of Orpheus. He seems to not only love the traditional portion about Orpheus losing Eurydice after recovering her from Hades, but also the portion where the hero expresses his disappointment by renouncing the love of women in favor of boys favored of the gods (such as Ganymede and Hyacinth). This is all ok as far as it goes.
But he then makes a series of extrapolations without any direct evidence. He says that the Orpheus myth was popular in Vienna around the time Beethoven was composing this work. He points out that Beethoven had a score of a work based on this myth in his library. (To show you the level of assumption at work here, the author assumes the work came from his teacher, Salieri, without any evidence and then further assumes that Beethoven asked for it and assumes further that Beethoven told Salieri that he wanted it to compose a work on the subject (page 22).) He then projects onto the concerto his own imaginings about how the myth is set into the work. The only evidence he offers about the concerto being based on this myth is Czerny's comment that the slow movement that we listeners cannot help thinking of an antique tragic scene when we hear it. OK. There are lots of antique tragic scenes. But the author goes further and supposes that Czerny heard this from Beethoven. Again, no evidence is provided, just assertions that are proved by the author asserting them. The book then takes us through the setting of even individual words from the myth in the concerto itself. He uses illustrations of the myth that were available in Beethoven's time as if they inspired Beethoven's composition without the least evidence that Beethoven had even scene them, admired them, or that they had anything to do with this work. I love Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony (well, I love more than that, but for this story let's stick with the 5th). I became familiar with the work as a teenager about the same time as I read Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy". In my mind I could map scenes from the book onto the symphony as if it were the score for a movie of the sci-fi masterpiece. That I did this is of course no evidence that Tchaikovsky had such a story in mind since the work was written decades before Asimov ever wrote his story. I also doubt there is any evidence that Asimov wrote the work because he was inspired by that music. My fantasy was merely that, my own fantasy. As I became more educated about music and how it worked, I put aside my teenage inspirations and learned to hear music in more solid and powerful ways. I think Beethoven's great fourth concerto also deserves better than Mr. Jander's personal fantasies masquerading as analysis. Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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