From this Friday on you can hear Ludwig van Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony on CD and in the stream (BMG), on Saturday the live premiere is in Bonn, with the Beethoven Orchester Bonn under Dirk Kaftan and the organist Cameron Carpenter, the concert is in the live stream to be experienced from 7 p.m. (Telekom). Beethoven’s tithe? The composer never composed a tithe, but he did leave sketches for it. They have now been composed using artificial intelligence. The expectations are high. The tenth should surpass the ninth, which is celebrated worldwide as the peak of the genre, in weight. Beethoven offered the tithe to the Royal Philharmonic Society in London in 1827. But because he died in the same year without having completed the work, a myth has grown up around it ever since.
So how would it have sounded? It’s not your first attempt to find out. Thirty years ago, the British musicologist Barry Cooper composed the first two movements on the basis of the traditional sketches. As early as 1979, the French composer Pierre Henry had put together a tenth of audio fragments from all nine symphonies in a collage-like manner. A two-hour piece “Musique concrète” was premiered in Bonn in 2019.
Matthias Röder, director of the Karajan Institute in Salzburg, who heads the AI team that completed Beethoven’s tithe.
(Photo: Hubert Auer / dpa)
For Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, Telekom has now started completing the last two sentences of the tithe. Matthias Röder, a specialist in the interfaces between music, art and technology in Vienna, got down to work with a team of music IT specialists. Walter Werzowa, music producer with the former number one hit “Bring Me Edelweiss” and composer of film music and advertising jingels, finally decided which computer-calculated variants of motifs and themes should be used.
The third movement was a scherzo, with its central da-da-da-daaa motif, offering a fragile echo of the fifth as its unworthily aged head theme. And the finale? Beethoven’s idea of a chorale setting integrated into the symphony was dutifully implemented, albeit a bit wooden. Below is a bass voice, a humming organ point of the cellos and double basses, often barely audible. Such means were used to teach the poor believers to fear during the penitential sermon. Above that, strings flashes, reinforced with kettledrums and then real, but banal organ sounds. At this point, at the latest, sensible musicology and the edelweiss philosophy finally cross each other.
Everyone instinctively knows: Even compositional sketches have the right to rest for the dead
Nevertheless, Walter Werzowa can dispel the most obvious points of criticism. That such a computer never had lovesickness, for example, or that with Beethoven, who always rebelled against the rules, the rules of composition are not always adhered to. Firstly, according to Werzowa, Beethoven’s feelings were contained in his music, which was used as the basis for the new composition, and secondly, the same percentage as Beethoven’s deviations were programmed.
That sounds a bit under-complex, here the serious musicologist would not end his research and give preference to statistical truth, but continue researching and pondering how such a deviation comes about and what it really means. He would never come to an end with it and never finish composing a Beethoven symphony. He instinctively knows: Even compositional sketches have a right to rest for the dead.