Emily Wilson and Beethoven

some well-intended mansplaining

An important artistic device appears in the first line of Emily Wilson’s recent review, when she describes Nolan’s Odyssey as an excellent way to escape the heat. But soon we get an even finer example:

My teenagers had a good time.

This device is—of course—a troll. What gives this troll a special kick is that she is not only trolling the teenage mindset of American blockbuster movies; she is also low-key trolling her own children! That takes guts. I would love to listen in on Wilson’s family therapy sessions when this comes up.

To be honest, I enjoyed The Odyssey a good deal, well-armed with ear plugs and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. For three hours, riding a fierce sugar high, I had no desire to look at my phone. But as I read Wilson’s words, a wave of reality crashed in. The teenage part of me had been delighted; the adult part asked itself “who was Odysseus?” and had no idea. Penelope, Telemachus—even more forgettable and forgotten. I did remember a super cool and scary Cyclops though! So Wilson’s troll was a messenger of truth, a mixture of discomfort and belated self-awareness and amusement.

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As I pondered the endless Wilson discourse—was she too mean-spirited?, too smug? the living embodiment of elite scorn?—I was reminded of an early Beethoven letter. Ludwig is writing to a friendly Countess to explain some new variations that he was sending in the mail:

The Variations will be somewhat difficult to play, especially the shakes in the Coda. But don’t let that alarm you. It is so arranged that you need only play the shake; the other notes you leave out, as they are also in the violin part…

Notice how he pretends to be helpful, ever so considerate. And then, wham:

I never would have written anything of the kind, but I had already frequently noticed that there was someone in Vienna who generally, when I have been improvising of an evening, noted down next day many of my peculiarities of composing, and boasted about them… And there was another reason for perplexing the pianists here, viz. many of them are my deadly enemies, so I wished in this way to take vengeance on them, for I knew beforehand that here and there the Variations would be put before them and that these gentlemen would come off badly.

This is generally viewed as a hilarious snapshot of the composer—and it is. But there can be no question that this is a troll. And it is not just verbal bad behavior, not just Beethoven in his personal life being a prankster or cad or crazy person. No! You cannot say here that Beethoven the man was different from Beethoven the composer. This letter offers hard, indisputable evidence that he wove trolling into his musical choices. And he seems to enjoy it, even to brag about it.

ChatGPT informs me that the difference between a troll and a provocative remark is a matter of intent. Intent is hard to pin down. So the line between a smug insult and socially useful snark is as slippery as Odysseus himself. But even by this forgiving definition, Beethoven clearly fails the test. His intent is malign. Most of us might just make a mean remark, or write a sternly worded letter; but Ludwig, when wronged, writes some really annoying trills.

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Who among us has not felt trolled by Beethoven? For years, maybe even since my teacher first assigned me the “Waldstein” at age 13 or 14, I suspected that he was trying to ruin my life.

There are overt passages of trolling in the Beethoven piano repertoire. For instance, this movement from Op. 31 #1, where he satirizes Italian opera:

It’s all there: the predictable pizzicatos in the strings, the long sustained cantilena, the simple harmonies, the congenial and lilting melodic clichés. He had good reason to resent this genre; it was a threat, rising in popularity in Vienna, a new musical blockbuster if you will. Like the letter I quoted, at the beginning of the movement you might think “oh Beethoven is just writing a beautiful, extended aria.” You could imagine his purpose is pure. Perhaps a homage? But then, wham:

He takes a typical singer’s overdone ornaments and amplifies them into the most absurd (and difficult) whorls. It is funny to see pianists play this movement with deep, unsuspecting seriousness, with no awareness that they are being played. This mistake is perfectly understandable, since the thing of it is that Beethoven, by amplifying and distorting, pushes through the satire to some sublimity. How the hell does he do that? It’s annoying how good he is at that. Part of the mastery of the troll is that he gets it both ways—he gets to have fun at people’s expense and yet accomplish serious work. Yet another part of the troll is how annoyed you are by the success of the troll.

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Let’s take a more serious example: Op. 57, the “Appassionata”. The pianist hunts around the keyboard, stealthily and quietly, up and down arpeggios, looking for what can not yet be known. Enigmatic bits of melody. Eerie trills. A masterclass in dark suspense. And then suddenly, wham:

All pianists know the terror of this passage. Let’s be honest: Beethoven could full well have written a terrifying outburst that would not have been quite so difficult and awkward. In fact, if it hadn’t been quite so cruel, not just that one line of spiky arpeggio, the outburst could have been louder, deeper, more “grateful” to the instrument. It could have been more of a success—in a certain way.

You will rightly object—this is not a troll! But have you ever endured a day of piano auditions, listening to one poor terrified candidate massacre this arpeggio after another? Have you spent an hour of your life working with a young pianist, teaching them how to anchor with the thumb, or cross over more efficiently, or stay closer to the keys, or any of a million other helpful piano tips that may not raise the percentage possibility of success meaningfully above 60, all the while wishing you were having an Aperol Spritz on the beach? I think piano mentors of the world might agree with me—this passage keeps dependably trolling two hundred and change years later. I often imagine Beethoven laughing at us all, still, all these years later trying to surmount this obstacle, trying to sanitize and perfect what was always supposed to be a semi-impossible task.

If we concede again that this is serious music, I implore you to keep in mind the guy who wrote this passage in the “Appassionata” is the same guy who wrote that letter about deliberately impossible trills. He knew how difficult or borderline absurd the things he was asking for were, and he did not care—and he kind of enjoyed it.

There’s a similar awkward passage near the opening of the “Tempest”, weirdly finger-twisting:

Perhaps you know the story of Ferdinand Ries, the student performing a Beethoven sonata in a salon for the master. Ries made a mistake in the left hand, and got a public tap on the head from the composer. Then Beethoven sat down to play the “Tempest.” Ries says Beethoven soon “blundered noticeably.” I’m 98% sure that it was this place. A delicious Beethoven anecdote, because, in a rare moment of cosmic justice, the composer is karmically trolled by his own troll! A princess in attendance subsequently thwacked Beethoven on the head as punishment. Even rarer: a tangible, physical manifestation of a karmic rebound, and amusing evidence that Beethoven’s friends knew perfectly well he was a troll, something we in our worshipfulness tend to forget. (How often I’ve wanted to thwack Beethoven on the head…)

In both the “Tempest” and “Appassionata” you have music that is attempting to create an unusual atmosphere of suspense or fear, even terror. And Beethoven writes unusually terrifying passagework for the pianist. I would argue this is not a coincidence.

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My catalog of trolls in Beethoven would be large. Many people would likely object, and would want to make a distinction between “serious” and “unserious”, between Beethoven’s pranks and his deep spiritual adventures. My reply is that, yes, there are sillier trolls and more profound ones. I don’t mean to imply that Beethoven is silly—on the contrary. In fact, it is precisely his willingness to troll the most serious depths that makes him great. There is a line connecting his pranks and his revolutions, a continuum between the satires and oafish jokes and the weird, unsettling chasms he creates in our sense of what music ought to be or mean.

So maybe, on the mildly annoying/silly side, that passage near the beginning of the “Archduke” trio where the pianist has to squash all those trills into triplets, and likely spoil the epic majesty of the opening with a bunch of epic wrong notes. On the more serious side of the continuum, the way in the slow movement, after one of music history’s most beautiful themes, you get a strangely empty variation, where the cello plays little fragments—not quite melody—and the piano just drapes arpeggios around it. I watched the young fellows at the Music Academy of the West struggle with this one. What is the main voice, you wonder? Where is the tune? What kind of variation is this? The emptiness forces you to listen differently, to be patient, to think about the harmonies and the passage of time. Ludwig is subtly trolling you into Zen.

Or that moment in the “Hammerklavier” where he writes “a fugue in three voices with some license” before the craziest fugue ever written. Or that moment where you begin to wonder, how f$@!ing long this fugue subject is actually going to go on?…

or the moment at the end of the 106 scherzo where he keeps playing at the silliest possible motive, like a child’s nyah-nyah-nyah, and then uses the same notes to begin one of the deepest, darkest laments of his life

Or the moment in Op. 109 where you start with an innocent, rustling Vivace and suddenly find yourself stranded and lost in a Adagio espressivo? Or in the Arietta of Op. 111 where he doubles the rhythm yet again and in the ecstasy of unfolding his idea arrives at proto-boogie-woogie, somehow provoking many acrimonious arguments centuries later. How did we begin with this most austere and pure and simple of themes, and end up here in this forest of crazy syncopation and dissonances out of nowhere and a time signature that in fact was so weird and unprecedented that Beethoven himself failed to notate it correctly, so that he to some extent trolled himself (again)? It is this line of bizarre and daring and borderline ridiculous that he navigates fearlessly, in pursuit of the most unique, life-changing visions …

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You get the picture. Perhaps you can see why I have little patience for the moral scolding of Joyce Carol Oates, inserting herself into the scandal by declaring that Wilson’s trolls were out of bounds.

In America, we have seen how futile it is to summon moral outrage as an antidote to the troll. I would argue one reason is a misconception. A troll is not a neutral weapon. You cannot say that it depends on the person using it, and their motivations, whether it is turned to good or evil. The truest troll is both. Its habitat is on the boundary, and part of its superpower essence is non-allegiance, the state of being good and evil at the same time (like us).

Many people seem to feel that the main line of Beethoven’s life was struggle against suffering, illness, and adversity. Yes—he had terrible physical ailments and his creative courage in the face of these was astonishing. For me, the more compelling line is his struggle to be good, against some parts of his nature. Again and again, he tries to be a more constant friend, less susceptible to rages and tantrums, a devoted and moral person without sexual urges, etc. etc. He aches to improve and mostly fails. The struggle between evil and good was central to him, and so the troll is his ideal artistic vehicle—he understood it, he lived it. The wickedness built into the troll, he knew, could be folded in together with aspirational purity; it could be redeemed for shock value, or precious ambiguity, or ravishing beauty, or any number of complacency-shredding goods.

Is this an essay in defense of the troll? Not exactly. It is a tragedy how much certain vacuous and vicious trolls have infected our political life and institutions. But the value and power of the device is that it accepts the mix of virtue and vice in all of us—a reasonable job requirement for art. Odysseus was a stunning example of trolling humanity. Therefore his story is anti-didactic, profoundly relatable, and resilient. It’s possible (at the risk of mansplaining further) that this might have been part of Wilson’s point? Like certain over-reverent interpreters of Beethoven, Nolan tried to purge some of the wickedness from his wanderer, to iron him out, to wring a neater moral sense out of him—certainly a mistake.