Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  His youth and inexperience show in material that is lively and ingratiating while at the same time amorphous and generically eighteenth century. Beethoven had already found elements of his mature voice, but he was not yet settled into that voice—which is to say, he had not yet picked out his essential voice from the competing ones in his music. To Beethoven at twenty-three and twenty-four, what the future would recognize as “Beethovenian” was simply one direction of his work, the part that escaped the safe and conventional, the part that more and more he would be drawn to.

  There are other signs of immaturity and caution in the trios. Like piano trios of the past, the first two are heavily weighted to the piano, the cello much of the time anchored to the bass line and only occasionally soaring on its own. The violin is mostly written down in the staff, as if Beethoven were uncertain about taking it high on the E string.

  In the E-flat, after a pleasing if passionless first movement comes a slow movement of stunning depth, the music singing and inward, strangely shadowed for a major-key movement. From a poignant but simple beginning, with a touch of the galant style, the movement finds its way to a place haunting and fresh.42 The middle lands on the deep-flat minor keys that, for Beethoven, were touched with brooding and sorrow—A-flat and E-flat minor—with a surging, yearning expression that a later time would call Romantic. That freshness carries into the scherzo, with its blend of dancing merriment and quietly pensive long notes. The sonata-form last movement is mainly devoted to Haydnesque whimsy, and also recalls Haydn’s freedom in treating form: the recapitulation is much recomposed, more than Beethoven would tend to do in the future.

  Trio No. 2 in G Major begins with an extended Adagio introduction that prefigures two things: the violin presents a slow version of the coming Allegro theme, and the introduction as a whole foreshadows the poignant atmosphere of the second movement. Otherwise, the outer movements of the G Major are nimble and witty and large scale; but, in his drive to expand the material, Beethoven did not notice that he expanded it further than it deserved. He would rarely commit the sin of padding, but in these two fast movements he padded lavishly. The slow movement is as fresh and inwardly expressive as the previous trio’s, once again strangely affecting for a piece in a major key.

  No. 3 in C Minor is the first work to demonstrate how that key galvanized him: a repertoire of effects in the direction of fierce and implacable, what would come to be called his “C-minor mood.” It begins tentatively, with quiet sighs recalling some of Mozart’s soft beginnings of intense pieces—say, the C Minor Concerto, K. 491. Then a searing theme in a relentlessly repeating rhythm breaks out to define the dynamic, driven, and obsessive core of the work. In every way, this last of the op. 1 trios outdoes the others: in focus, in intensity, in the growing liberation of the cello from the bass line and the violin from the staff line.

  But the main effect of the C Minor Trio is visceral. Having rambled and padded and pleased to various degrees in the first two trios, here Beethoven reached out and seized his listeners by the throat. He shows a mature skill in the difficult art of sustaining high intensity from the beginning to end of a movement, providing a few calm passages for the listener to catch a breath.43 His dark key of E-flat minor makes an appearance on the second page. As a sign of its demonic provenance, the first movement and the whole trio return again and again to the tritone, an interval so ambiguous and fraught that its traditional name was diabolus in musica, “the devil in music.”44

  With the slow movement’s variations on an Andante cantabile theme, Beethoven took up the genre with which at that point he had more experience than with any other, his row of keyboard variations going back to his first published work. Like the slow movements of the previous trios, this one is in a shadowed major key. The shadow lingers through the variety of texture and mood of the first three variations and deepens in the E-flat-minor fourth variation. The main theme of the third-movement minuet is in a driving C minor, its quiet intensity broken by fortissimo chords and offbeat accents.

  The finale does not so much begin as pounce on the listener. We are off in another fierce and obsessive C-minor movement that stops only for charged silences that are shattered by new explosions of energy. The feeling of the finale is like an echo of the first movement, with a similarly gentle E-flat-major second theme that briefly quiets the whirlwind. The coda seems almost to unravel, ending on vacantly repeated notes pp in the strings, the piano slithering upward in C-major scales that sound not hopeful and resolving but exhausted and defeated.

  The publication of op. 1 did for Beethoven what he intended it to do. The opus represented his first large-scale essay in what amounted to a high-Viennese style and genre, and it caused a stir in Vienna that spread from there. As he also hoped and expected, it was the C Minor Trio that most seized players and listeners, except the backward-looking ones like Haydn. In the next years Beethoven would sometimes please the old master with a piece, but with the C Minor Trio he had staked his own territory. And that was the work which, as far as Beethoven was concerned, Haydn wanted to suppress.

  At the same time, a mutual acquaintance of Haydn’s and Beethoven’s recalled that in the next years Beethoven felt “a sort of apprehension, because he was aware that he had struck out a path for himself which Haydn did not approve of.”45 Beethoven did not like having apprehensions like that. In his long and unforgiving memory, the image of Haydn gained a permanent niche near the center of his creative consciousness. Even beyond the grave, Haydn would remain a goad, a judge, and a rival.

  Listening to the fiery C Minor Trio, sitting in Lichnowsky’s music room wearing his old-fashioned knee breeches and wig, Haydn had plenty of reason for concern. This youth with no charm and no deference to his betters or his teacher, with no wig and wild hair: who knew what he might perpetrate? In his long experience of art and of the world, Haydn perhaps understood what was happening. It is what happens to most great artists who live into their own legend among creative progeny who are struggling to get out from under them. Even though he was at the summit of his fame and with splendid works still ahead of him, Haydn had to sense that now he was the past and this youth was the future. That future was audible, enough to trouble the old man, in the C Minor Piano Trio.

  When he published the op. 1 Trios, the Great Mogul was twenty-four years old.

  12

  Virtuoso

  TOWARD THE END of 1795, Beethoven fell into a flurry of activity. In November came the annual ball for the pension fund of the Society of Plastic Artists, held in the large and small Redoutensaals (ballrooms) of the Hofburg, the imperial palace. For the occasion, he composed twelve minuets and German dances. Haydn and Mozart had supplied music for earlier balls. The announcement for this year’s read, “The music for the Minuets and German Dances for this ball is an entirely new arrangement. For the larger room they were written by Royal Imperial Kapellmeister Süssmayr; for the smaller room by the master hand of Hr. Ludwig van Beethoven out of love for the artistic fraternity.” These little occasional pieces marked Beethoven’s Vienna debut as an orchestral composer and as a conductor.1 Three weeks later, on December 16 (probably his twenty-fifth birthday), Beethoven performed in a Haydn concert in the small Redoutensaal. Haydn conducted three of his London Symphonies, Beethoven contributed the Piano Concerto in C Major and perhaps an improvisation on a Haydn theme. In January the two collaborated in another concert.2

  On the day after Christmas, youngest brother Johann Nikolaus van Beethoven arrived in Vienna. In contrast to brother Carl Caspar, who was small, volatile, and unhandsome, and at that point attempting a musical career, Johann was tall, dandyish, not bad-looking despite uneven features, even-tempered if not notably bright, and he had no particular interest in music. In Vienna, Johann continued his chosen profession, going to work at an apothecary shop.3 He arrived in town with two more Bonners, Stephan von Breuning and his younger brother Christoph. Matthias Koch, brother of Babette of the Zehrgarten, was already in town visiting Franz We
geler. It was a cheery time for Beethoven, his career humming and hometown friends around him.4 Of the Bonn friends, only Stephan von Breuning remained in Vienna for long. Relations between him and Beethoven also cycled up and down, as they did among the Beethoven brothers.

  After the second concert with Haydn, Beethoven and his patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky set out on a pleasure trip and concert tour initiated and arranged by Lichnowsky. The prince was recapitulating a trip he had taken with Mozart seven years before. He and his new protégé were hoping for a similar success. Though Beethoven was not given to magical thinking of any sort, perhaps it seemed to both of them that there was a power in following Mozart’s footsteps.

  By the middle of February 1796, the two were in Prague, where once Don Giovanni had found a sensational premiere. They got a room in the inn Zum Goldenen Einhorn, the Golden Unicorn, where Lichnowsky and Mozart had also stayed. It would have been like the prince to see to it that Beethoven got the same bed Mozart had slept in. When Lichnowsky departed, this protégé stayed on in Prague, secured a piano, and got to work. In a fine frame of mind, Beethoven wrote brother Johann: “First of all, I am well, very well. My art is winning me friends and renown, and what more do I want? And this time I’ll make a lot of money. I’ll stay here for a few weeks longer and then travel to Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin . . . I hope you will enjoy living in Vienna more and more. But do be on your guard against the whole tribe of bad women . . . And now I hope that your life will become more and more pleasant and I trust that I shall be able to contribute to your happiness.”

  Along with the boasting, there is a bit of affection in the letter, as well as the big-brother admonitions that Beethoven was given to, especially when it came to women. As a teenager he had been his brothers’ keeper, and he had not given up the role. At the end of the letter he adds, “My greetings to our brother Caspar.” (In Bonn, Beethoven’s younger brothers had gone by their first names, Caspar and Nikolaus. In Vienna, for some reason, both began to use their second names. Beethoven had not made the switch.) Then Ludwig violently crossed out his middle brother’s name.5 In letters it was as if he could not bear to write the name of a person he was angry at. More than once, he left an empty space to represent the name. Sometimes Nikolaus would be the void, sometimes Caspar. This time he relented: after crossing out Caspar’s name, he underscored it with a wavy line, indicating it was to be put back in, Caspar for the moment forgiven.

  In Prague Beethoven worked on some Goethe settings, tinkered with the Symphony in C, composed six German dances, an easy piano sonata that would eventually become op. 49, no. 2, and a wind sextet eventually op. 71 (he claimed to have written the latter in one night). He also dashed off some weightless and charming mandolin pieces for Countess Josephine de Clary, who played the instrument. On February 11, he gave a concert to benefit the Poor Institute, and gave another concert in March.6

  The most ambitious and entertaining product of the Prague sojourn was a large concert scena for soprano on an Italian text: Ah! perfido. The text is deliciously melodramatic, demanding quick shifts of direction and mood. Addressing the lover who threw her over, the singer begins furioso: “Ah, faithless liar, vile deceiver, thou leavest me?,” and so on. Suddenly her rage melts into despair: “I am unchanged; I have lived for him—let me die for him!” At the end, with a certain air of voilà, she calls on her very suffering to move him: “Am I not worthy of compassion?”7

  There is a feeling that Beethoven had great fun with this piece and did not feel compelled to be original. In it he largely submitted to Mozartian and Italianate operatic conventions, underlining emotions in a barrage of vocal pyrotechnics and colorful instrumentation. There are a few peculiar touches, including wild octave-and-a-third virtual glissandos on the word affando, “affliction,” and a few bars in the bizarre key C-flat major. The scena is modeled on the “Bella mia fiamma” Mozart had composed for his friend Josefa Duschek. Beethoven, in other words, was continuing in Mozart’s footsteps, and not only in the music. Mme Duschek was still active, and though the piece is dedicated to Countess Clary (who also sang), Beethoven wrote it with Duschek and her celebrated dramatic skills in mind. She premiered it in Leipzig that November.8

  While Beethoven was happily occupied playing and composing on the road that spring, his future and the future of Europe were taking shape far to the south. A new commander arrived to take over the French army in Italy. He was Napoleon Bonaparte, then twenty-six, who had recently earned the gratitude of the ruling Directory by using cannons to cut down a royalist revolt in the streets of Paris. In Italy on March 28, 1796, in his first address to an army under his command, Napoleon cried, “Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed . . . Rich provinces and great towns will be in your power, and in them you will find honor, glory, wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness?” His soldiers would not be found wanting in thumping the Austrians. When regions of Italy were free of Austria and under French rule, Napoleon would turn his implacable ambition toward Vienna.

  That March, the three piano sonatas of op. 2 were published. Now in contrast to the piano trios, Beethoven was writing for his own instrument, solo. As he worked on the music at the keyboard, the products of improvisation, his main idea engine, could go onto the page without having to be translated into catgut and horsehair.

  As a whole, op. 2 plays out in a direction similar to, and as calculated as, op. 1. If none of the sonatas has the visceral impact of the C Minor Trio, they are altogether more focused and more consistently original. As with op. 1, Beethoven presented two pieces in major keys, one in minor; all have four movements; all tend toward a big, quasi-orchestral sound. By op. 2, no. 2, Beethoven had mostly escaped conventional eighteenth-century gestures and style. He made each sonata a distinct individual with its own sonority, which is to say, each has its own kind of pianism, its particular handling of the instrument.

  The taut and sinewy first movement of no. 1, the Sonata in F Minor, sounds Mozartian, not only because the darting upward arpeggio of its beginning recalls the “Mannheim rocket” figure Mozart used in the G Minor Symphony but also because it sounds like harpsichord music, with spare textures, forthright rhythm, and variety of articulation. In contrast to all the other pieces in the first two opuses, this sonata is relatively compact, with regular recaps and no codas at all. The tonal personality of the first movement comes mainly from a tendency to flavor major-key passages with a tincture of minor, what the Germans call moll-Dur, “minor-major.” Only at the last cadence of the first movement does Beethoven bring in full, two-fisted, entirely pianistic sonorities.9 The second movement is another of his poignant and soulful slow movements in a major key, its opening another of his looks back to the eighteenth-century galant atmosphere. In fact, for its theme he dipped into his mine of ideas from Bonn, here reworking an idea from the slow movement of his old C Major Piano Quartet.

  As a theme for the finale of the F Minor, Beethoven did something singular: he took the crashing chords from the end of the first movement and made them into the leading theme of the finale. It is as if the finale picks up where the first movement left off, raising the intensity. In contrast to the bony, constrained, backward-looking sound of the opening, the driving and implacable finale is rich in sound, full of extreme volume jumps, unmistakably pianistic. The A-flat-major central section recalls the first movement in a different way, with the same rising arpeggio and left-hand rhythm as at the beginning, now smoothed and gentled. At the end, instead of the expected turn to a resolving and hopeful F major, there is a headlong F-minor plunge from the top to nearly the bottom of the keyboard.

  Did Beethoven intend some sort of symbol with the F Minor Sonata? In this first published solo sonata of his adulthood, it is as if in the opening movement he says farewell to the harpsichord and to the past, and in the finale brings us once and for all into the world of the piano, which for Beethoven was not Haydn’s or Mozart’s world but the future: his world.

  He shaped t
he Sonata in A Major, op. 2, no. 2, to be as mercurial and expansive as no. 1 was lithe and taut. By the second line of the A Major, he has presented four ideas: a downward hop, a downward swoop, a downward stride (each of these a development of the hop), and an answer in the form of flowing contrapuntal lines rising upward. These gestures, and their tendency to playful, ebullient juxtaposition, will be prime ingredients of the sonata to come. But then Beethoven plays a wild card: the E-minor second theme breaks into high spirits as something suddenly troubled, surgingly (and pianistically) passionate: Romantic.10 So the narrative he fashioned for the A Major Sonata is marked by gaiety periodically interrupted by incipient anxiety or melancholy. Contradiction will abide in the sonata. This quality explains the way the ending of the first movement, on the way to being loud and assertive, suddenly falls into a soft and ambiguous halt.

  Here already, we find a distinctive Beethoven pattern: the expressive effect, the dramatic narrative, is embodied in a sonority particular to this piece. From this beginning onward, each Beethoven piano sonata would be a singular emotional world expressed by a singular approach to the instrument. In the sonatas of his full maturity, that quality would only be intensified.