Beethoven: China’s Sage of Music

Ludwig van Beethoven was first introduced to the Chinese public at the dawn of the twentieth century, a tumultuous time of questioning and crisis. 

Over the course of the eighteenth century, China had been invaded by European powers in two Opium Wars, devastated by an internal conflict incited by millenarian rebels which left millions dead and soundly defeated by the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The foreign nations who triumphed over China created semi-colonial enclaves in coastal cities such as Shanghai in which their expatriate citizens lived according to their own laws rather than China’s. In 1900, a secret society, the Boxers, led a bloody anti-foreign uprising that prompted military intervention by eight foreign countries. The Eight Nation Alliance captured Beijing and, in an ultimate act of humiliation, occupied, looted and otherwise desecrated the Forbidden City where the emperor lived.  

Desperate to ‘save China’, tens of thousands of patriotic young Chinese departed for Europe, the United States and Japan, determined to learn from the very same people who were carving their nation up ‘like a ripe melon’. Convinced that the culture of the West was the source of its strength (and that of Japan, which had already imported much Western learning), they studied, translated and propagated works by Western intellectuals like Rousseau, Darwin, Dante and Shakespeare. Among these idealistic reformers was a brilliant young artist and polymath named Li Shutong who left for Japan in 1905 and discovered Beethoven while studying at an art school in Tokyo.  

Li was a strong believer in the importance of moral exemplars and an adherent of the Confucian ideal that man could be ‘perfected by music’. In Beethoven he found a perfect role model for a China that needed to triumph over adversity and reinvent itself for a new age. He dubbed Beethoven the Sage of Music and introduced the composer via a small music magazine that was printed in Tokyo but distributed in Shanghai. For its first (and only) issue, Li drew a charcoal sketch of a wild-haired Beethoven and wrote a short accompanying biography in which he emphasized the many hardships the composer had had to overcome – stormy family relationships, romantic disappointment, the unstoppable onset of deafness – and the honesty, sincerity and profundity with which he approached his music. Li’s article was probably only read by a handful of people, but it sufficed to kindle an interest in the composer. Soon such renowned writers as Lu Xun and Xu Zhimo were referencing Beethoven in their essays and poems. Their focus, like Li’s, was on Beethoven’s life story rather than his music.   

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, an artist named Feng Zikai offered the first comprehensive accounts of Beethoven’s life. Feng explained that Beethoven was not just a great musician but a ‘hero’ to all mankind. He explained that the composer ranked with Napoleon in terms of importance – but that while Napoleon would one day be forgotten, Beethoven would be remembered forever. Feng also outlined Beethoven’s oeuvre, discussing all nine symphonies and 32 piano sonatas. Around the same time, the Berlin and Bonn-based scholar Wang Guangqi took the interesting step of placing Beethoven in a Chinese context by comparing him to the renowned historian Sima Qian (c.145–86 BCE), one of China’s great heroes. Sima was castrated in punishment for ‘defaming the emperor’ by speaking his mind, but overcame this painful and humiliating emasculation to write a monumental history, just as Beethoven overcame his deafness to write the monumental Ninth Symphony.  

Knowledge of, and access to, Beethoven’s music followed upon the growing interest in the composer’s life. China’s first orchestra – now the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra – certainly played Beethoven soon after its founding in 1879. Indeed, the first extant program of the orchestra, which dates to the 1911-12 season, includes the finale from Beethoven’s Third Symphony; all told, the orchestra played music by Beethoven eight times in that season alone. However, in the quasi-colonial, often overtly racist foreign settlements of Shanghai, the orchestra was comprised exclusively of foreign musicians and Chinese were not generally permitted to enter the venues where they performed.  

This finally changed when a charismatic Italian conductor named Mario Paci took the helm of the orchestra in 1919 and later threatened to quit if Chinese people were not allowed to attend concerts; by the mid-1920s, about a quarter of the audience was Chinese. In March 1927, Paci staged a concert to commemorate the centennial of Beethoven’s death that included the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in China. Paci permitted a young Chinese violinist named Tan Shuzhen to join the second violins on this special occasion: an event that marked the beginning of the orchestra’s integration and the end of the bifurcated understanding of Beethoven in China. Henceforth, many Chinese would seek inspiration not just by reading about Beethoven’s life, but also by performing and listening to his music.  

Two of the men who helped to make this possible were Cai Yuanpei and Xiao Youmei. Cai, a pioneering educator and philosopher, studied in Leipzig in Germany in 1907 and again in 1913. He had a strong interest in aesthetic education which he saw as free, progressive and universal, and he believed fervently in the transformative power of art; it was his goal that ‘any kind of person, at all times, should have the opportunity to come into contact with art’. In Leipzig, Cai studied music, including the piano and the violin, and became a fan of Beethoven, whose music inspired him to write this little poem: 

Our nation’s music is too plain,

Westerners are surprised to hear.

I love Beethoven’s music,

Which embodies deep and broad aspirations.

In 1916, following his return to China, Cai was appointed president of the newly founded Peking University and began to implement the theories he had developed in Germany. This included creating the Peking University Music Society to train young Chinese in Western music, in part as a means of supplementing what Cai saw as ‘deficiencies in Chinese music’. In 1920, Cai invited the German-trained musicologist Xiao Youmei to run the nascent music school. Xiao had spent many years in Germany, studying at Leipzig Conservatory of Music, Berlin University and the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music. He had mingled with prominent European musicians – such as the Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch and the composer and conductor Richard Strauss – and had become a fan of the ‘dignified and serious’ musical sage Beethoven. Xiao oversaw the formation of a small orchestra of teachers and students. Between 1922 and 1927, they gave twenty-nine concerts in which they performed Beethoven’s works more than any others: the Second, Third, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Piano Sonata No. 8 and the Egmont Overture. Xiao wrote detailed programme notes for each performance in which he sought to explain Beethoven in a Chinese context; these were then published in the Peking University newspaper as a way of educating more people. For a performance of Beethoven’s Third, Xiao wrote that the composer of such a heroic work must have possessed a high moral standard. He further opined that if Beethoven were alive today, he would certainly dedicate this symphony to Sun Yat-sen (the president of the Republic of China,) who was upholding democracy in China, rather than to Napoleon, as he had originally done. Xiao suggested that the music of Beethoven’s Fifth, portraying the struggle to emerge from a dark world into brightness, could be viewed as depicting China’s revolutionary history over the preceding thirty years, thereby localizing the work into the Chinese context.

Eventually the complicated politics of the era led Cai to leave China again and Xiao to decide that he could not run a successful music school in Beijing, which was ruled by a philistine warlord. Instead, Xiao decided to move to Shanghai to establish a formal conservatory, which he would staff with musicians from the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The Shanghai Conservatory of Music opened its doors in 1927 and began training China’s first homegrown musicians, many of whom had been drawn to classical music by Beethoven. A young woman named Li Cuizhen, for example, arrived able to play all thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas from memory. The composition student Xian Xinghai explained how Beethoven had inspired him to write music. ‘Beethoven’s mother worked for rich people in the kitchen’, Xian told Xiao. ‘My mother did the same. My goal is to contribute to music just like Beethoven did.’ While at the Shanghai Conservatory, Xiao, who would go on to become one of China’s most renowned composers, wrote an essay in which he praised Beethoven’s genius and argued that the composer’s greatness sprang from his willingness to confront challenges and accept suffering; only when China’s music students cultivated this ability would they achieve any measure of success. 

The suffering that Xian saw as essential to the creation of great music was soon forthcoming as China was invaded and occupied by Japan during the 1930s and 1940s. It was during this period that the French-educated intellectual Fu Lei decided to translate Romain Rolland’s Vie de Beethoven into Chinese. Fu had read Rolland’s romantic account of Beethoven’s life while he was a student in Paris and been utterly overwhelmed. ‘I burst into tears,’ Fu later explained, ‘and suddenly felt as if I had been enlightened by the divine light and gained the power of rebirth. From that time on, I wonderfully took heart, which was indeed a great event in my whole life.’ Back in China, Fu saw parallels between the Japanese occupation of China and the turbulent era in which Beethoven had come of age. His hope, he wrote, was that his translation of Rolland’s biography of Beethoven would comfort and inspire his fellow Chinese citizens in their time of trouble. With the same goal in mind, Fu in 1937 began to translate Rolland’s ten-volume magnum opus, Jean-Christophe, a cradle-to-grave Bildungsroman inspired by the life of Beethoven. His translation of the Beethoven-inspired novel would be read by generations of Chinese; the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has even gone on record extolling the book. 

The 1945 victory over Japan was followed by civil war rather than peace and in 1949 the victorious Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China. During the 1950s and early 1960s, many ideological debates ensued over the propriety of performing ‘bourgeois’ classical music in a newly established socialist country. However, while many left-leaning intellectuals argued against it, there were also many Communist Party members who had been students of classical music and they had the Soviet Union on their side, China’s ‘dearest elder brother’ and ‘great teacher’. The USSR was of paramount importance in helping China to rebuild after the war – it sent over ten thousand advisers to assist with infrastructure, industry and the arts – and it was a proponent of much classical music. The USSR’s interpretation of Beethoven as ‘the musical apotheosis of revolution’ was exported to China and the composer’s music came to be performed widely by newly-established symphony orchestras. 

In 1957, the 130th anniversary of Beethoven’s death was commemorated in Beijing with a concert that included the Fifth Symphony and the violin Romance in F; the East German conductor Werner Gosling also gave an influential talk called Beethoven’s Spirit Has Made All Progressive People Join Together. Public celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic in 1959 included a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that was the first by an all-Chinese orchestra and sung in Chinese by an all-Chinese chorus. Demand for tickets was so high that a dozen performances were added, enabling over twenty five thousand people to hear the Ninth in Beijing, among them Premier Zhou Enlai. At the official tenth anniversary celebration, attended by Chairman Mao Zedong and Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, an orchestra of 300 played Beethoven’s Egmont Overture.  

By the early 1960s, China’s political climate was moving increasingly leftward and in 1966 the Cultural Revolution broke out. During this period, performances of both Western and traditional Chinese music were forbidden, replaced by ‘model operas’ that had politically correct themes. Artists and intellectuals were humiliated and sometimes tortured; many resorted to suicide, including Fu Lei, the translator who had done so much to popularize Beethoven and Li Cuizhen, the pianist who knew all the Beethoven piano sonatas by heart. Although Beethoven’s compositions could not be played in public during this period, many still sought secret refuge in the composer’s music and example. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra conductor Lu Hongen, for instance, was arrested for his vocal defence of classical music and criticism of the Cultural Revolution. According to an account left by his cellmate, Liu Wenzhong, Lu coped with the beatings and abuse by humming his two favourite Beethoven pieces, the Third Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. In a great tragedy of modern China’s music history, Lu was sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, he asked his cellmate for a favour: ‘If you ever have a chance to escape China, help me do something I have wanted to do my entire life. Visit Austria, the home of music. Go to Beethoven’s tomb and lay a bouquet of flowers. And tell Beethoven that his disciple in China, Lu Hongen, was humming the Missa Solemnis as he marched to his death.’ Lu did indeed hum Beethoven’s mass as he was being dragged off to be shot in April of 1968. Many years later, Liu Wenzhong fulfilled his promise and laid flowers on Beethoven’s grave on behalf of his Chinese disciple, Lu Hongen.  

The Cultural Revolution finally ended in 1976. Just a few months later, Beijing’s Central Philharmonic sought permission to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s death; their request was deemed so sensitive that it was sent to the standing committee of the Communist Party Politburo, which at last gave permission to proceed. On March 26, 1977, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Fifth; the last two movements of the symphony were broadcast nationwide, a signal to many that the Cultural Revolution was really and truly over. The Beethoven broadcast was followed by visits of foreign orchestras like the Toronto Symphony under Andrew Davis, the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan in 1979; they all played Beethoven. In the early 1980s, a ‘Beethoven Fever’ broke out as crowds of people queued to hear orchestras like the Central Philharmonic and Shanghai Symphony play all of the composer’s symphonies. An account of Beethoven’s life was added to the national curriculum, where it remains to this day. As China’s economy took off in the 1990s and 2000s, spectacular concert halls and opera houses were built across the country. The music of Beethoven resounds in all of these.  

China has transformed almost beyond recognition in the century and more since Beethoven was first introduced, but the Chinese people’s loyalty to the German composer has never faltered. Indeed, Beethoven and his music have become a part of China’s social, cultural and political fabric and, just as Beethoven has been there for China, so China will be there for Beethoven.

Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai
Stanford, CA, 2020