Beethoven: A Child of the

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army and the Loyalists had hammered out a new anti-Catholic alliance, and that between them they were determined to crush the Catholic resistance once and for all.

The summer of 1972 marks a clear turning point in the Irish Faced with the breakdown of the ceasefire and intensified army belligerence, the Provos retreated into the gliettoes and fought back. Yet this retreat signitied, as no other event had done, the bankruptcy of the entire Provisional CONFUSION In the face of the army's offensive, the Provisionals could only respond militarily when a clear political response on class lines was required. Such a response only led to confusion within the Catholic working class.

The crisis of proletarian leadership is not of course a crisis of a single moment, and failure to capitalise on the gains of 1972 would not in itself be sufficient testimony to the bankruptcy of the Provos.

But the sudden changes of July 1972. were themselves a. direct result of the Provisionals failure to advance a programme capable of uniting the working class on a clear anti-imperialist basis.

After Bloody Sunday, the Southern Irish workers demonstrated their clear support for the liberation struggle in the North. Yet the Provos let that support fritter away to such an extent that by Easter the Southern administration had established a special criminal court to try political cases, a court which was to send hundreds of Provos to Southern jails.

DEMAGOGUES

And in the North, Provisional failure even to try and win Protesant workers to its side on a common working class anti-imperialist basis left those workers in the hands of reactionary demagogues like Craig and Paisley.

The result - the creation of the anti-Catholic paramilitary outtit, the UDA, and the campaign of sectarian assassinations was almost inevitable.

Now, five years later, the war in Ireland is still continuing, but the prospects ol a clear cut anti-imperialist victory are more remote now than they were then.

IRA prisoners are now denied political status.

The focus of IRA activity has shifted from town to country, and though the army are on a hiding to nothing in border areas, the overali situation is one of stalemate and stagnation.

This degeneration of the struggle, accompanied by a growing isolation of the Provisionals, is irrefutable proof_ that petty-bourgeois nationalism is incapable of leading the anti-imperialist movement to victory.

The events of the past seven years furnish striking confirmation of Trotsky's thesis that only the working class can bring the struggle for national liberation to a successful conclusion.

Indispensible to that struggle is a revolutionary party which bases itself on a clear revolutionary programme and which forms part of an international revolutionary movement.

The construction of such a party is the most pressing task facing the Irish working class now. It is the duty of socialists who take their commitment to proletarian internationalism seriously to assist in this task.

In Britain, revolutionary socialists have a particular duty in this respect, one which is equally important as our work for the immediate withdrawal of troops. from Ireland.

Failure to address ourselves seriously to both these tasks will mean the continued fragmentation of struggles North and South, and as a result the continued domination of Ireland by British imperialism. That domination has given Irish workers their fill of Bloody Sundays; we must now ensure they do not suffer another repetition.

An oration by the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer was delivered before the coffin:

"The last master of tuneful song, the organ of soulful concord, the heir and amplifier of Handel and Bach's, of Haydn and Mozart's immortal fame is now mo more, and we stand weeping over the riven strings of the harp that is hushed... You have not lost him. you tare son him. No living man enters the halls of the immortals. Not until the body has perished, do their portals unclose. He whom you mourn stands from now onward among the great of all ages, inviolate forever"

The occasion was the funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven, who died one hundred and fifty years ago next month.

Grillparzer was in some respects wrong. Beethoven did in fact enter "the halls of the immortals" during his lifetime. He was the first composer to win from his own age the nearly universal judgement that he transcended it.

CURIOSITY

A sense of optimistic curiosity about the developments which led to "perfection" , a desire to master the past as part of the totality oi nature - these factors led 19th century European bourgeois society to resurrect the music of earlier "great" composers, as they did to historical investigation in every sphere.

Beethoven was the special case, the first great composer to be mummified in music's museum without first having to be exhumed.

He has remained there ever since, occupylig unshakeable position in bourgeois concert life and more recently in the culture of thế workers' states of "Eastern Europe.

In its strong individuality, its assertiveness, its aura of mastering the insurmountable obstacle, Beethoven's music appealed - and still appeals - to the cultural values of capitalism's most progressive phase.

PRODIGY

It has been interpreted in other ways as well: as evidence for the superiority of the German "master race" , or alternatively as a foundation stone for the musical application of the principle of socialist realism.

If Beethoven was immortal, he was not, as Grillparzer believed, inviolate!

Beethoven • was a child of the French Revolution. He grew up in an atmosphere in which the possibility for men to control their destinies seemed a reality as never before, yet where social change and political flux posed the greatest practical difficulties for the artist's survival.

Even his earliest childhood suffered effects of the musician's changing circumstances. In the late 18th century child prodigies were everywhere.

The thirst for novelty of bourgeois concert audiences in major cities such as London, Paris and • Vienna led eager parents to drive their children to premature accomplishment.

Beethoven's father, a bibulous tenor employed by the Electoral Court at Bonn, had ambitions of this sort for Ludwig, and in 1778 presented him playing the piano in concert as "his little son of six years" (he was in fact seven and a half).

The rigours of enforced precociousness may have contributed to the composer's neurotic personality, but they produced early mastery of some of the techniques of musical craft, particularly improvisation and harmony, and an iron determination in the : face of difficulty.

In 1792, at the age of 22, Beethoven travelled to the musical capital of Vienna, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

On the way he met the French revolution for the first time: his expense book for the trip records "tip [to the coachman| because the fellow drove us at the risk of a cudgelling right through the Hessian army going like the devil"

His stipend from the Bonn court soon dried up, when the Elector retreated before the advancing French army, and Beethoven was faced with the problem of earning a living.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the fact that Beethoven lived and worked at a time when the system of courtly and aristocratic patronage was yielding to the capitalist "free" market.

But the composer's own attitude towards the aristocracy was ambivalent.

He had been raised to be a court servant, as his father and grandfather had been before him, only to see what must have seemed an immutable institution crumble.

His great talent won him both patrons and friends among the aristocracy, such as the Archduke Rudolph, Princes Lichnowsky, Lobkowitz and Galitzin, and Count von Waldstein.

He even cultivated . a confusion between the Flemish "van" of his surname and the German "von" , to give the impression of noble lineage.

Yet he held the aristocracy in contempt, particularly when the elements of it which were supporting him failed to pay up, or when faced with the suggestion of his own inferior rank.

Conscious of his own immense abilities, he conceived of a sort of "aristocracy of merit" to which he, Beethoven, belonged.

This consiousness, the struggle for self-consciousness, the drive consciously to control the processes of creation (to see this one has only to examine the many sketchbooks in which Beethoven's musical ideas were painfully formed) these are • unmistabeable hallmarks of Beethoven's artistic character as well as of the age of bourgeois revolution to which he belonged.

RHYTHMIC ENERGY

Beethoven's earliest published works show a care in the working out of ideas otherwise found only in the music of such great predecessors as Haydn and Mozart.

They also exude a drive and rhythmic energy that mark them off from the products of even his ablest contemporaries.

The trios dedicated to Haydn (1793-4), the first set of piano sonatas (1794-5), the early concertos (1795, 1798), which he used •as vehicles for his own virtuosity as a pianist - all are Napoleon firmly rooted in the style of his musical mentors, yet by no means tentative, and 1n some respects ndividual, even eccentric Under the surface lies anothe characteristic, which is yet more Central o Beethoven's genius: the orging of subtly related music deas, of ideas that take account c each other, that can contribute to organic, dialectical processes.

La superficial way this trait manifests itself even in the sets of variations on opera tunes of the day gifted hackwork with which Beethoven tried to eke out a livin from the amateur market strings" of other composers, his composers, variations are not merely a succession of different ways of ornamenBeethoven ting a popular tune.

Each variation is related by development or conscious contrast to what preceded it, and the result is a logical and coherent, if artistically modest whole.

Beethoven was probably in sympathy with radical circles in Vienna and, like them, at first saw the French Revolution as containing the possibility of liberation from the remnants of feudal oppression.

Alter years or threatenes war, the continued erosion of financial support from the aristocracy and two invasions of Vienna, his political attitudes, never particularly clear or consistent, underwent a change.

Despite his deep-rooted commitment to individual freedom, he probably welcomed the reactionary Congress of Vienna in 1814, for which his opera Fidelio was the crowning musical event.

Most of Europe saw in the figure of Bonaparte the epitome of the French Revolution. For Beethoven Napoleon was that, but something else besides.

The composer ciearty identifi with the general, saw in him t same characteristics of gesin invincible determination altruism that he imagined: himself.

From as early as 1798 1 conceived the idea of writing symphony on Napoleon - not pictorial descriptios, DUT a attempt to give musical expressic to states of the human spirit.

The result was his Thi Symphony, completed late in 186 and originally entitl "Buonaparte"

It marks a point of arrival Beethoven's artistic developmer and a point of departure t modern European music, To the energy, the coherenc che Wiltuliness of his early wo are added, as never before, t impression of struggle with an id and an overwhelming sense that t music's, form comes not from al received notion of constructio but from the dictates of t material itself.

MAMMOTH Its four movements contain range of expression, a combinati of humour and pathos, a capaci for irony and brusque change mood which were until th virtually without a parallel in sy phonic form.

In the mammoth opening alleg world sharpest confi unfolds, but also one of stress complexity; for Beethoven expan those parts of the moveme traditionally used for the elabo tion rather than the presentation ideas.

One can see in the slow mor ment a sublimation of the ope air funeral music, such as Gosse march on the death of Mirabe: heard in the streets of Paris in t early days of the Revolution; and the scherzo, a kind of milita exuberance CHALLENGE The Promethean last movement kind of variations on a theme ex loded from within was Beethover first (but by no means his la serious challenge to the traditios form of the symphonic finale.

That the symphony as we kn it today is called the "Eroica" a not the "Buonaparte" owes to t fall of a hero, though not of t heroic ideal, in Beethoven's eyes.

Already troubled by the Cona dat which Napoleon signed with t Pope in 1801, Beethoven react violently Napoleon's proclamation as emperor in M 1804 and tore up the title page the symphony:

"Is he then, too, nothing me than an ordinary human beu Now he, too, will trample on all t rights of man and indulge only 1 ambition. He will exalt hims above all others, become a tyrant' But Beethoven's illusions Napoleon, perhaps encouraged the hope of favours, persisted.

He once more changed t title of the Third Symphony ba before finally dropping it, spoke one of his pupils about a myst ious trip to Paris which ner materialised and as late as 18 used the offer of a court post fr Napoleon's brother Jerome, King remaining Westphalia, Viennese ¡aristocra blackmail t into subsidising him.

But Napoleon, however impo ant a stimulus, is only incidental the real meaning of the "Eroic Its heroism. is universal, I specific; of an age, not of a perso!

And if it also embodies t struggles of an artist, those strugg are themselves inconceivable exce in the context of the revolutiona battle against feudalism and of t fight for mastery over nature.

Beethoven's specific optimi was belied by the further devel ment of capitalism.

But the most fundamen qualities of his music, those progress and struggle, keep it ali and in our age are part of t rightful inheritance of t proletariat.

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"But the proletariat is held in check by just these groups who are their directing upper circles, in other words, by the Fabian politicians and their choral accompaniments. These bombastic authorities, pedants, arrogant and ranting poltroons, systematically poison the Labour Movement, befog the consciousness of the proletariat and paralyse its will. Only thanks to them do Toryism, Liberalism, the Church, the monarchy, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie continue to retain their hold and even feel they are firmly in the saddle. The Fabians, the ILPers, the conservative bureaucrats of the trade unions represent at the moment the most counter-revolutionary force of Great Britain, and perhaps of all the world's development." Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going?