Roll over Beethoven?
Not if comparative literature professor David Hertz can help it
NOTE: The following story appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of The College. For a PDF of the entire issue, go to http://coas3.coas.indiana.edu/CollegeMagazine/w2006/CollegeMagazine.pdf.
Ludwig van Beethoven wrote what every schoolchild recognizes as the theme song for fate knocking at the door — the ominous da-da-da-dum that opens his fifth symphony, as anxious and anticipatory a four-note sequence as has ever been played.
The number of schoolchildren (or adults, for that matter) these days who recognize anything else Beethoven wrote is so small as to add up to, if not fate knocking at the door, at least very serious trouble for classical music.
Photo of David Hertz, ©Jeremy Hogan
The problems that bedevil the industry are grave: Major symphony orchestras are hogtied by debt; costs are rising; the audiences are aging and thinning out. Record stores aren't selling classical music; music magazines aren't covering it; and kids sure aren't illegally downloading it onto their MP3s.
It's hard anymore to imagine a time when the composer and pianist Franz Liszt was a sex god on the order of Mick Jagger, when a performance of the newest work by Stravinsky, like a soccer match in Manchester, could lead to a donnybrook.
There's plenty of reason to worry.
The truth is, classical music is — and maybe always has been — an anxious business on many fronts. For performers, it is an exacting art that requires many years of training to even approach technical perfection, and yet mere technical perfection is insufficient for success. It is performed, as a rule, in imposing buildings reminiscent of churches or old-world law courts — places of judgment, not relaxation and good times. Listeners sit still in narrow, upright seats; speak in hushed voices if at all; wear fancy, uncomfortable clothes; and — except for those of us lucky enough to live in places like Bloomington — fork over quite a lot of money for the privilege. This is the very opposite of what your typical American usually means by the word "fun"— nothing at all like Miller time.
The students in David Hertz's class, Beethoven and His Era, look a lot like typical Americans. They don't look like aficionados of classical music, if you think classical music is the province of a staid and elderly elite. Gathered around a U-shaped table in a seminar room at the IU Jacobs School of Music, most are dressed in well-worn jeans and sweatshirts. One wears a baseball cap and is sprawled nearly horizontal in his chair.
Hertz chats with students before class, and his teaching style is so informal it's a little hard to tell exactly when his lecture begins as he shifts from answering a student's question about the upcoming midterm to musing on the value of Maynard Solomon's biography of Beethoven, one of the required texts for the class, then heads to the piano, talking all the while, to play a few bars to illustrate a point.
What is clear, though, is that Hertz is totally absorbed in the conversation he is having with the class, and that he doesn't have any doubt that they will be as captivated as he is by the life and work of the composer who virtually invented the modern practice of classical music.
Taught through the Hutton Honors College, Beethoven and His Era is a hybrid, combining music history and theory with literature, history, and philosophy. The students spend a semester listening critically to Beethoven's music, learning about Beethoven's life, and studying the political, cultural, and literary milieu in which he worked.
Hertz, a professor of comparative literature, took his inspiration for the class from the music festival Leon Botstein founded in 1990 at Bard College. At the Bard Festival, two summer weekends are devoted to concerts and lectures, symposia and panels on the life and work of a single composer. Hertz, who says he was lucky enough to participate in the sessions celebrating the American composer Charles Ives, came away with new ideas about how to construct a class that draws on all the resources available to him at IU.
He liked the idea of a single focus. "In 14 to 15 weeks you can really get to know a body of work," he says, "and it's a richer listening experience if it's contextualized."
Photo of David Hertz, ©Jeremy Hogan
He also liked the idea of getting the students out of the classroom to take advantage of cultural offerings undergraduates may not otherwise expose themselves to. Music in particular is close to Hertz's heart — he started out as a music student at IU before earning a doctorate in comparative literature at New York University — and with the music school at hand, working it into the curriculum is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Although he completed his doctorate in comparative literature, Hertz also studied with a number of legendary music teachers, among them pianists Sydney Foster, Abbey Simon and Marion Hall, and the composer Bernhard Heiden. He attended Juilliard while in high school, and as a student at Indiana he took chamber music classes with Menachem Pressler. Largely because of his interdisciplinary background, Hertz was appointed to the NEH Council on the Humanities in 2003.
With hundreds of musical events on campus each year, world-class musicians on the faculty, and even more visiting to give guest performances, Hertz can routinely assign attendance at a live performance of Beethoven sonatas or string quartets as homework, extending the festival spirit through an entire semester.
"I hope we'll get people to really deeply love concert-going," he says, adding that it will never be easier to get in the habit than "here in Bloomington, Indiana, where it's free and they can just walk to a concert."
Hertz also wanted the class to have time to explore the "mystery about one great personality. Just getting close to the story of his life — using the best available life — is important."
Beethoven, he says, is a natural for this sort of treatment. His life was rich in drama, from the political upheavals associated with the Napoleonic wars to his personal struggle with deafness — the most grievous affliction imaginable for a great musician. Shock-headed, demon-ridden, irascible, he has become the archetype of musical genius, so emulated and caricatured it is hard to recover the sense of how revolutionary he was, if you just hear snippets of his symphonies on public radio or on commercials.
Paradoxically, by devoting so much time to history, the class is able to hear that radicalism more directly, cutting through the interference of centuries. In a remarkable riff on the Sonata No. 23 in F Minor (the Appassionata), Hertz weaves together an analysis of its musical structure, the history of his own changing responses to the piece, reflections on Beethoven's political sympathies, and illustrations of all the experiments and innovations Beethoven is trying out in the "laboratory," as Hertz calls it, of the sonata.
As he sits at the piano, playing and talking, it is possible to hear, out of very familiar strains, something new and previously unheard emerge. Class member Aaron Waltke, a senior majoring in telecommunications, responds strongly to this element in Beethoven's work. "I tend to be drawn toward the avant-garde, or experimental and historical significance, be it in the 15th century or the 21st," he says.
Since he's been in the class, Waltke says, "I've been able to pick up on and admire nuances of form and style of other composers — baroque, classical, romantic or modern (or post-modern), even pop and rock — that I might never have been aware of otherwise."
"The barrier between classical and popular culture is not as rigid as people think," says Hertz.
If the Bard Festival was Hertz's inspiration, his motivation for developing the course was what he sees as a crisis facing the arts and humanities — a crisis that runs deeper even than the troubles facing classical music, affecting literature and all the arts.
Ultimately, Hertz's project is much bigger than this class, or classes like it (he has also taught Debussy and His Era and would like to tackle one of the Italians next). He hopes that other people like him, humanities professors at universities around the country, will look around them to see what special resources they have access to — and then use them, while they can, to help open up the arts to the young.
Universities — especially places like IU, with its renowned music school — have already become good at training artists. Hertz notes that to that end, IU was one of the first places to give tenured professorships to virtuosi — great musicians, such as the cellist Janos Starker, who became great teachers.
"But universities have to do more," Hertz says. To truly support music, literature and the other arts, universities need to produce not only the artists of the future, but also their audiences and supporters.
They also need to take care not to alienate. Hertz is sharply critical of excesses of academic jargon and turgid writing. Abstruse language, he says, can scare people away from the great things in the humanities. "If someone writes a difficult thing, it should be because it's the only way you can say that thing," he reasons.
His own varied background has encouraged him to think in cross-disciplinary and extra-academic terms. "I can maybe see some of the big problems in the humanities and the arts because of the varieties of my experience," he says.
In a talk he gave last year at the Reinvention Center in Washington, D.C., Hertz described what he was trying to do, and how. And then he gave some consideration to why it matters: "Have I given my students weeks of cultural conditioning so they can better enter the world of la grande bourgeoisie? Pierre Bourdieu might be right about the cultural capital of art. If so, why should only rich people with privilege enjoy it? If cultural conditioning is necessary, let's give it to our young people and find a way to usher them into this culturally rich world, a world that offers lifelong pleasure, solace and the best of company."
