What mainly made up 1794 for Beethoven was continuing contrapuntal studies with Albrechtsberger, practicing piano intensively, and working on the new piano trios and piano sonatas. He continued to revise the B-flat Piano Concerto, probably adding a new slow movement. Soon he would write a concerto in C major, more mature than the earlier one but still more conventional than otherwise. Beethoven was cagey in these years, more himself in smaller works than in larger.
In 1795 he was ready to place the previous year’s projects before the public. At the beginning of March, for a gathering at the palatial home of Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz, Beethoven played a program including perhaps one of the concertos, perhaps an improvisation. “One named Beethoven touched everybody,” wrote a member of the audience.19
This new patron, Prince Lobkowitz, was two years younger than Beethoven, another indefatigable aristocratic music fancier, from one of the most prominent and influential families in Austria.20 Suffering from a deformity that required him to use a crutch, he was not able to take on the usual military or diplomatic careers of men of his class, so he turned to the arts. An able bass singer and violinist, Lobkowitz in 1796 founded a private orchestra that traveled with him among his palaces and country houses; he was one of the last of the Viennese nobility to follow that outdated fashion.21 He made his musicians and his home available to composers for programs and tryouts of new pieces. Sometimes there would be multiple rehearsals going on in different rooms of his palace.22 In her memoir, Countess Lulu von Thürheim had a touch of sympathy for this prince: “In his castle at Eisenberg the door was open to artists and the dinner table was laid uninterruptedly . . . He himself composed several operas and, although he walked with a crutch, he took an active part in the performances. Even though he was himself a spendthrift, his purse was open to all and sundry who called on him for help.”23
As he did with Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven would quarrel periodically with Lobkowitz, and like Lichnowsky, this prince had his eccentricities: he would let mail go years unopened, spent weeks in total seclusion, obsessively watched people on the street by way of a mirror.24 But in contrast to the imperious and demanding Lichnowsky, Lobkowitz was a mild and forgiving sort, especially when it came to first-rate musicians. When he and Beethoven fought, they fought as equals.25
Beethoven’s private concert for Lobkowitz at the beginning of March 1795 may have been a warm-up for a major part of his campaign that came at the end of the month: his public debut in Vienna. He took part in three benefit concerts in three days, the first two for the Tonkünstler Society at the venerable Burgtheater. Two days before the first concert, Franz Wegeler visited his old friend and witnessed a sight he never forgot. Beethoven was composing the finale for the C Major Piano Concerto, handing each page of score with the ink still wet to four copyists sitting in the hall, who were writing out the instrumental parts for a rehearsal the next day. At the same time Beethoven was wretchedly sick to his stomach, a familiar condition for him. So Wegeler watched his friend finish a rondo finale for piano and orchestra virtually in one sitting, his work interspersed with violent fits of vomiting. The next day Wegeler heard the concerto rehearsed with the whole, presumably small, orchestra crammed into Beethoven’s flat. Here Beethoven produced another feat. Finding that his piano was a half step flatter than the winds, he played his solo part in C-sharp major.26
On March 29, 1795, the Viennese musical public heard Beethoven premiere the concerto in a program including an oratorio by Herr Kapellmeister Kartellieri called Joas, King of Judah. The next day he did an improvisation at the second Tonkünstler benefit. On the thirty-first, he played a Mozart concerto during a performance of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza del Tito, in a program for the benefit of the composer’s widow Constanze.27 Which Mozart he played was not noted, but it was likely the D Minor, Beethoven’s favorite, the most dramatic, demonic, call it Beethovenian of Mozart concertos.28 In the Wiener Zeitung of April 1, there was a notice of the first Burgtheater concert: “As an intermezzo . . . the celebrated Herr Ludwig van Beethoven reaped the unanimous applause of the audience for his performance on the pianoforte of a completely new concerto composed by him.”29
The first two piano concertos are exercises in the style of the day, no less telling for that. Beethoven took up each musical genre individually, distinctly, with reference to its literature and traditions. In comparison to the bold personalities of some works, such as the sonatas and trios from op. 1 on, the relatively well-behaved first two concertos suggest that, so far, he was inclined to view the genre in terms more practical than ambitious. As with Mozart’s concertos, these were vehicles for his career as a virtuoso. In any case, he was not yet ready to challenge Mozart’s supremacy.
Because they were vehicles for himself, Beethoven did not regard his earlier piano concertos in the same terms as a sonata or symphony or string quartet. The latter were genres to be composed, premiered, perhaps touched up, then published as soon and as profitably as possible. His piano concertos were items to play around with for a while, revising as he went, the solo part evolving, the cadenzas left for improvisation.30 None of this is to say that he considered his first concertos potboilers, or that he did not take pains with them. As he performed them over the months before publication he polished them, in the process learning a good deal about the colors and balances of the orchestra. And as with other of his less overtly brash works in these years, the concertos have beautiful slow movements that are more original than their surroundings.
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, written first but published second, as op. 19, started life in Bonn around 1790. The first movement, much revised, was likely the only surviving element of the original version. A new rondo finale finished its evolution around 1798.31 Its opening movement has a military air, like G. B. Viotti’s and many concertos in that era, eventually including all Beethoven’s solo concertos. (If a convention suited his purpose, he used it.) For a main theme he juxtaposed brisk fanfares with lyrical phrases, both rather on the conventional side. As occurs often in Mozart, after an extended orchestral tutti the soloist first enters with a quasi-new idea derived from earlier material. The soloist emphasizes the lyrical aspect of the material, providing some quite lovely stretches.
In the end, the opening movement of the B-flat is grand and effective, but it still adds up to one of the most routine orchestral movements Beethoven ever published. It features rough transitions, stolid block scoring in the winds, and a drifting quality recalling a young small-town composer following his nose—and a mature composer who didn’t have the time or patience to fix everything. Beethoven surely understood that. It didn’t bother him excessively. When he first presented the B-flat to a publisher, he introduced it as a work “which I do not claim to be one of my best.” Yet as in the early violin sonatas and string quartets, beneath a not particularly bold surface, his searching nature can’t help showing itself. The first movement of the B-flat Concerto has startling tonal excursions: after some nervous modulations, the second theme arrives with a leap into D-flat major. In the recap, that theme returns in an even more peculiar G-flat major, another distinctively spiced key when pianos were not tuned in equal temperament.
The next two movements sound more mature, more Viennese. The Adagio in E-flat major is Mozartian in conception—it echoes the preciousness of the eighteenth-century galant mood and the lofty choruses of Mozart’s Magic Flute—but more nearly Beethovenian in tone, with an elegantly nocturnal atmosphere. The keys include a strikingly dark B-flat minor, and the handling of the piano is fresh and brilliant. Traditionally, concerto finales were lively and witty sonata-rondos—another convention, and Beethoven invariably conformed to it. The soloist ends the piece with a blaze of double trills in the right hand, a specialty of his at the keyboard.
While the B-flat Concerto developed over the better part of a decade before he was ready to put it in print, the later C Major, published as Piano Concerto No. 1, op. 15, was a quicker and more c
onfident affair. Beethoven had noted down a few ideas for it in 1793, including the rondo theme, then perhaps drafted the three movements sometime around the end of 1795. It was the completion of the finale, under trying circumstances, that Franz Wegeler witnessed.
Op. 15 turned out to be another well-behaved item, predictable in much of its material, including its foursquare military first movement, its droll rondo finale, its slow movement ornamenting an elegantly galant theme. If in his person Beethoven had left behind the courtly wig for a fashionable French-style hairdo, in his concertos he had not yet taken the wig off.
Again, but no more so than in the B-flat, this concerto works in some tonal experiments—in a C-major first movement, the second theme lands on E-flat.32 The more subtle experiment in the first movement is that its main theme is more a rhythm than a tune. Its marching tread, especially its opening long–short–short–long tattoo, Beethoven used as a scaffolding for themes throughout the concerto, starting with the first movement’s second theme and including the main theme of the next movement.
In the C Major, the character of the soloist is more distinctive than in the B-flat. Bringing the piano out of the militant opening tutti with a sweeping lyrical turn, Beethoven gave the soloist the character of, say, a jolly lieutenant in the regiment, sentimental but well muscled and his own man. For all his flamboyant passagework, he never plays the martial opening theme. The Largo second movement, in A-flat major—unusual for a work in C major—is atmospheric and introspective, gradually passionate. In the rondo finale the soloist is a rambunctious lad, with his floor-shaking dance that defies us to find the beat. On its last appearance he brings in the rondo theme in the wrongest of wrong keys, B major, before getting chased back to a proper C major. The style of this finale amounts to a playful version of the usually more placid dance called the englische, a genre that in a few years would come to preoccupy Beethoven.
In August Haydn arrived back in town from his second visit to England, which had been a still-greater triumph than his first. He had premiered six new symphonies of the total of eleven he wrote for his two visits. British music lovers had found their greatest hero since Handel. Once there had been a mutual influence between Haydn and the younger Mozart. Now maybe the old master was looking to keep up with the new man on the scene, to show that he could still learn and change and show the Great Mogul a thing or two.
Beethoven would have been quick to study Haydn’s new symphonies. With these and Mozart’s later ones, the symphony had effectively become the king of musical genres. It needed only a few more fresh and ambitious examples to secure it on the throne. As of 1795, it seemed likely that Haydn was about to make that happen. But he never wrote another symphony. Instead, he turned to genres traditionally considered more important: mass and oratorio. The reasons for that turn were simple: Haydn wrote only on commission, and from the later 1790s on, his commissions were for choral music. He looked at those masses and oratorios as the crown of his work. In the domain of the symphony, now the road was open for Beethoven to pick up where Haydn left off.
The month after Beethoven’s concerto performance, another notice appeared in the paper: local publisher Artaria invited the public to buy advance subscriptions to Herr van Beethoven’s new piano trios. Beethoven made sure that in the future, the published “Se vuol ballare” Variations were demoted to “No. 1” on the title page, so the Artaria edition of the trios would have the honor of being op. 1.
After airings of the piano trios at the Lichnowsky musicales, in musical Vienna there was a buzz of excitement over the publication. The price for a subscription to the trios was steep, yet when they came out in July there were 123 subscribers, including much of the cream of Viennese nobility. Karl Lichnowsky claimed twenty copies for himself and his wife. In fact, without telling his proud protégé (who would have been furious), Lichnowsky quietly slipped publisher Artaria 212 florins to cover the cost of engraving the plates. Other aristocratic subscribers made their debuts as important Beethoven patrons: Count and Countess Browne, Haydn’s employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, Prince Lobkowitz, Count and Countess Razumovsky, Countess Thun.33
Beethoven had made an unprecedented deal with Artaria, saying that he could keep most of the profits of the first four hundred copies of the trios sold. From the subscriptions and sales, he pocketed some 800 florins, the better part of a year’s living. That coup, however, gave him an unrealistic impression of his prospects: he would not make that much on a publication again for thirty years.34 As Mozart had discovered, when you were no longer the hot new virtuoso in Vienna, you found your affairs becoming more difficult.
Soon after Haydn got back to Vienna, he came to one of the Friday-morning musicales at the Lichnowskys’, to be hailed as conquering hero by the cream of Viennese cognoscenti. There the just-published Beethoven trios were played for him. Later Beethoven told his student Ferdinand Ries that Haydn “said many fine things about the trios, but also cautioned that he would not have advised his pupil to publish No. 3, the C minor.” The public, Haydn declared with the weight of his experience and fame, would not understand or accept that work.35
Beethoven was stunned and outraged. He knew the C Minor was the best of the three, the boldest and most personal. Given the way Beethoven thought, Haydn’s response could mean only one thing: his teacher was another rival, jealous and conniving, who wished him ill, who wanted to suppress the very work that could put Beethoven on the map.
The public response proved Beethoven right and Haydn wrong, but that the C Minor was the sensation of the trios did not calm Beethoven’s resentment. Soon appeared another matter equally galling. Having written the most ambitious of his symphonies for England, Haydn in the next years produced an oratorio of Handelian dimensions on a suitably epic subject: the Creation. His magnum opus, The Creation, would be received rapturously by the musical world.
When it came to his few keyboard rivals, Beethoven could be generous and friendly. But having an unassailable old-master composer as a rival ate at him. The struggle between the artistic debt and the veneration he owed Haydn and his uncontrollable jealousy would never be resolved. Until this rival was in his grave, after the affair of the C Minor Trio Beethoven had very little good to say about Haydn or his music. One element inspiring his works to the end of his life (among many other elements) would be the rankling drive to challenge and outdo Haydn.
In the event, Beethoven for once bit his tongue. There was no blowup over the C Minor Trio; relations between the two men remained polite, if strained. Soon they were collaborating in concerts—only there was more distance than before. Haydn had expected Beethoven to put “pupil of Haydn” on the cover of his first published opus. Most of his students, after all, were proud to name their teacher publicly. Beethoven refused. As far as he was concerned, he told people, he had learned nothing from Haydn.36 Op. 1 was dedicated to Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s most generous patron. Op. 2 would have a dedication to Haydn, but there would be nothing about his “pupil.”
If in those years Beethoven plotted his career like a generalissimo, if he composed with reference to the past, present, and future, he still composed with fierce attention to the shaping of the work at hand. So it was with the op. 1 Trios. Two are ingratiating, one aggressive, though to the ears of the time the first two sounded up-to-date enough. From a broader perspective, the word for op. 1 is uneven. There is a precocious sophistication of structure and tonal organization, and Beethoven had learned much about proportion, but all is inconsistent.37
In these trios Beethoven wanted to be expansive, both within the movements and in the pieces as a whole, and he made them rich and brilliant in sound. He wanted, in other words, to write the most ambitious piano trios to that time. They are the first to have four movements. Two have a scherzo, meaning “joke,” a genre Haydn invented, a three-beat form modeled on the stately minuet but sped up into a dashing and often witty movement (though like a minuet, a scherzo can have many moods). Trio No. 3 has a minuet, b
ut it is closer to a scherzo in tempo.
Beethoven composed the trios in order, learning and growing as he went. Sketches for no. 1 may have gone back to Bonn.38 Call its tone stately and high-Classical, Haydnesque in its nimble dancing rhythms, its coy flourishes recalling Mozart. It is the kind of piece listeners and critics of the eighteenth century called “pleasing.” For many in those days, pleasing was the main thing music was supposed to be. Changing that aesthetic would be one of Beethoven’s essential tasks, but that came later.
In op. 1, Beethoven already shows tremendous thematic discipline. There would be no apprentice works in any of the opus numbers. In the E-flat Trio, the first theme of the first movement, which Beethoven and his time called das Thema, the theme, lays out the leading ideas of the piece melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, gesturally, and expressively. The first idea in a work is das Thema of the whole in the same way that the first passage of an essay expresses the theme of the essay, though in music the theme is worked out in ways that are not expected to be perceived so much as sensed by listeners, conveying a sense of rightness and wholeness.39 Whether or not a work possessed “unity” was a leading motif of the time among connoisseurs, critics, and aestheticians. Much of the critical debate over Beethoven’s music would turn on judgments relating to questions of organic unity versus caprice, whether he was provoking for the sake of provocation.
In the E-flat Trio the opening upward-dancing arpeggio returns in varied forms in every movement. (The gesture would have been familiar to Beethoven as the traditional “Mannheim rocket” theme also used by Mozart.)40 At the same time, showing a pattern Beethoven would follow for the rest of his life, an equally significant motif is rhythmic: the Haydnesque rum-tum-TUM of bars 2 and 3 is as important to the music as any melodic motif. Augmented (slowed), it is the rhythm of the second theme; the first bar of movement 2 varies it; it is echoed in the repeated chords of the scherzo; it turns up in the second theme of the finale.41 Beethoven improvised on the page as he improvised in performance, but in all cases he improvised on specific ideas. In the first movement, one echt-Beethoven touch is the expansive coda, lingering far longer than most codas in Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven would write the longest codas of any music to his time (he would prove equally given to the abrupt, before-you-know-it ending). Already he was beginning to reconfigure the weights and balances of the formal models he inherited from Haydn and Mozart.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 22