Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In the A Major, Beethoven virtually embodied his generating idea of contradiction in the sound of the second movement, which combines what seems like a sustained string chorale in the upper voices with a pizzicato bass accompaniment. The flighty A-major main theme of the scherzo is answered by a dark and intense A-minor trio. In format, the finale is a traditional sonata-rondo, but rather than the usual high-spirited rondo, he marked this grazioso, “gracefully,” the main theme warmly singing. The contradiction, the incipient darkness that has dogged this piece, returns and boils over into fury in the driving, pounding A-minor middle of the finale. The last pages seem to attempt a resolution of the stark dichotomies in the piece, but the attempt fails: the sonata ends as if with a rising cry sinking to a sigh. Already in op. 2, Beethoven is capable of great psychological subtlety in painting his tonal pictures, what Christian Neefe had taught him was the task of the composer: to study human characters and passions and embody them in tones.

  If his first two piano concertos had on the whole turned out well behaved and comfortably late eighteenth-century, what Beethoven really had in him for concertos is first suggested in the Sonata in C Major, op. 2, no. 3. In this brilliant and thematically tight-knit piece, he alternates quiet, inward music with explosions of virtuosity, the whole seeming to be a two-handed version of a piano concerto, complete with cadenzas at the end of the first and last movements. His soft beginning sounds rather like a string introduction, into which a virtual soloist bursts with a bravura fortissimo passage. With these sorts of shifts of texture and color, he gives the C Major a kaleidoscopic quality.

  Beethoven was thinking intensively about what kinds of ideas hold a work together. He was already adept in wielding small, two-to-four-note motifs like Haydn, to build themes through a piece. As early as the old Piano Quartets and more so now, he showed his characteristic (if likely unconscious) propensity: take what Haydn and Mozart did and do it more. As with Haydn, Beethoven’s motifs are the simplest and most common things in music: an interval between two notes, a scrap of scale, an arpeggio, a note out of key, a turn figure, a rhythmic figure. Because his building blocks are so simple, so innate to music itself, they can be woven constantly into a musical fabric that seems free unto capricious. As Haydn demonstrated over and over, the ability to be surprising yet logical was a prime Classical quality: the surprise in Haydn’s Surprise Symphony is carefully prepared but still makes listeners jump out of their seats. That kind of surprise is something else Beethoven learned from Haydn. And from opp. 1 and 2 on, there is an overriding principle: Beethoven never sacrificed the technical for the expressive, or the expressive for the technical (at least, hardly ever). Both sides worked together, to the same ends.

  How he would choose and develop his material would change and deepen over time. In any case, behind all his piano works lay thousands of hours of improvising at the keyboard, engendering an enormous fund of ideas and textures and colors that lay at hand for him. Eventually, he would thematize nearly every element of music, including single chords, single notes, and silence. One of the leading motifs in the Sonata in C Major, for example, is the opening gesture, which amounts to a slow trill. The trill becomes a theme that stretches all the way to the electrifying triple trills of the end.11 That highly difficult combination of trills, two of them in the right hand, was part of Beethoven’s bag of tricks as a virtuoso.12

  With the three piano sonatas of op. 2, Beethoven began a long journey no one could have foreseen at that point, he no more than anyone else. In the history of keyboard music there had been only one truly synoptic body of keyboard works, a collection that showed not just the full range of what an instrument can do but the full depth and breadth of what music itself can do and can be. That collection was J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which as has been noted, Beethoven grew up playing. By the time his journey was done, the second great synoptic body of keyboard music would be his piano sonatas, a journey through the possibilities of music and emotion, finishing in territories of feeling and spirit and sonority unknown and unimagined until Beethoven found them.

  His eternal obstacles in that journey would be, first, the limitations of the human body and mind and creative potential against which he struggled relentlessly, and second, the limitations of the instrument he was writing for. He would never be satisfied with his pianos or with the piano itself, though it would evolve considerably during his lifetime—that evolution partly flowing from him.

  In 1796, the year of his tour, Beethoven wrote two letters to Johann Andreas Streicher, a well-known piano maker who had recently set up shop in Vienna. Streicher had married a woman equally distinguished in the trade: Nannette Stein, daughter of piano maker Johann Andreas Stein of Augsburg. Beethoven had gotten to know father and daughter Stein en route to Vienna on his first visit. In one letter to Streicher, from Pressburg during the tour, Beethoven pays a backhanded compliment to a piano Streicher had sent him: “I received the day before yesterday your fortepiano, which is really an excellent instrument. Anyone else would try to keep it for himself; but I—now you must have a good laugh—should be deceiving you if I didn’t tell you that in my opinion it is far too good for me, and why?—Well, because it robs me of the freedom to produce my own tone. But, of course, this must not deter you from making all your fortepianos in the same way. For no doubt there are few people who cherish such whims as mine.”13

  In fact, Beethoven was beginning a campaign to do exactly what he disclaims doing. He wants to press Streicher to move his instruments toward a more robust weight and sound. His next letter to Streicher shows his agenda. He softens the blow by starting with a personal ­matter:

  Your little pupil, dear St, apart from the fact that when playing my Adagio she drew a few tears from my eyes, has really astonished me . . . I am delighted that this dear little girl, who is so talented, has you for her teacher . . . There is no doubt that so far as the manner of playing it is concerned, the fortepiano is still the least studied and developed of all instruments; often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp. And I am delighted, my dear fellow, that you are one of the few who realize and perceive that . . . one can also make the pianoforte sing. I hope that the time will come when the harp and the pianoforte will be treated as two entirely different instruments.14

  Though he writes in terms of the “manner of playing” that makes the piano sound like a harp, he implies that the real problem is the instrument itself. It is especially hard to make a singing adagio if the sustain of each note is hardly longer than the plink of a harp. And the all-wooden instruments were still delicately built, like a harpsichord. Once, back in Bonn, Beethoven had furiously plowed through a Mozart concerto, breaking strings as he went, while Anton Reicha frantically pulled the broken strings out and disentangled the hammers. What Beethoven wanted from pianos, as he wanted from everything, was more: more robust build, more fullness of sound, a bigger range of volume, a wider range of notes. As soon as new notes were added to either end of the keyboard, he used them, making them necessary to anyone wanting to play his work. There would be moments in his piano music when a pattern would surge up to the top note on the keyboard and then, almost with an audible curse, fall back.15 From early on, piano makers asked for Beethoven’s opinion, and they listened to what he said.

  The next stop on what was becoming an improvised extended tour was Dresden. In that beautiful, ornately Baroque city, Beethoven spent a profitable week. He was used to arriving at a town a stranger and soon having listeners at his feet. He had been doing that since he was a boy. Bonn official August von Schall was in Dresden and sent two reports to exiled Elector Max Franz on this musician still considered to be an employee, pending the return of the court to Bonn. “Young Beethoven arrived here yesterday,” Schall wrote. “He’s said to have gotten enormously better and to compose well.” Later he reported, “Beethoven was here for about eight days. Everyone who heard him play on the clavier was delighted. With the Elector of Saxony, who is a connoisseur o
f music, Beethoven had the privilege of playing quite alone and without accompaniment for some one and a half hours. His Grace was exceptionally satisfied and gave him the present of a gold snuffbox.”

  From there, Beethoven went on to Berlin via Leipzig, where C. P. E. Bach had worked for the court of Frederick the Great. The current Prussian king, Frederick William II, was the nephew and successor of Frederick and equally enthusiastic about music, with more progressive tastes than his uncle had. During Mozart’s tour of 1789, Frederick William had given him a commission totaling nearly 4,000 florins.16 Beethoven knew about this king’s interest in music, and about his generosity. He would linger in the Prussian capital for a highly profitable two months, June and July of 1796.

  The best-known musicians associated with the Prussian court were pianist Friedrich Heinrich Himmel and the Duport brothers, Jean-Louis and Jean Pierre, both of them cello virtuosos. The king himself was a cello player and commissioned works from Luigi Boccherini, who was living in Spain on a pension from the Spanish court. Soon, apparently, Beethoven had a commission from the king to write two pieces for one or both of his house cellists. The results, two sonatas, would be the main finished products from the tour, for that matter the most ambitious pieces Beethoven finished that year. In Berlin he also wrote part of the eventual op. 16 Quintet for Piano and Winds, started sketching a third piano concerto, worked more on the Symphony in C Major, and finished a small set of variations for cello and piano on a theme from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus; soon they would be joined by variations for cello and piano on Papageno’s song from Die Zauberflöte, “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.”

  Otherwise Beethoven played at court and in noble houses, showed off his improvisation, and performed his new cello sonatas, all of which would have caused a sensation. He played before the venerable Singakademie, then some ninety voices strong, and made the acquaintance of composers Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch and Goethe’s future friend and musical adviser Carl Friedrich Zelter (he would long resist Beethoven’s music but end up an admirer). Later, to Goethe, Beethoven recalled his annoyance when, at the end of one of his Berlin performances, people crowded around him in tears. “That’s not what we artists wish,” he complained. “We want applause!”17

  Mightily impressed with this latest genius, King Frederick William appears to have asked Beethoven to stay on at the Prussian court, but Beethoven declined what could have been quite a plush job. The explanation is contained in a description of his improvisation written years later by Carl Czerny:

  His improvisation was most brilliant and striking. In whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break out into loud sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty and originality of his ideas and his spirited style of rendering them. After ending an improvisation of this kind he would burst into loud laughter and banter his hearers on the emotion he had caused in them. “You are fools!” he would say. Sometimes he would feel himself insulted by these indications of sympathy. “Who can live among such spoiled children?” he would cry, and only on that account (as he told me) he declined to accept an invitation which the King of Prussia gave him after one of the extemporary performances above described.18

  If Beethoven’s episodes of rudeness, petulance, and scorn ever seriously alienated his audiences, there is no record of it. From early on, his temperament was part of his reputation.

  Beethoven got on well with the Duport brothers, absorbed the personality and playing style of Jean-Louis, and wrote him into the new cello sonatas.19 Things went less well with Friedrich Himmel, royal pianist and composer. Himmel was described by one acquaintance as “that dissolute eccentric who now lives almost perpetually in a state somewhat between being drunk on champagne and cheerless sobriety.”20 Beethoven and Himmel decided to improvise for each other. Beethoven played, then it was Himmel’s turn. As he had exerted himself to his utmost, he heard Beethoven snap, “Well, when are you going to start?” There was some unpleasantness over that, finally smoothed over. (“I thought Himmel had just been preluding a bit,” Beethoven explained.)

  When a musician performed for royalty, it was customary to maintain a facade that one was playing out of deference and gratitude, with nothing so vulgar as payment involved, but it was expected that gifts would be forthcoming. The king presented Beethoven with a golden casket filled with Louis d’or. In later years Beethoven declared with pride that the casket was “no ordinary box but one suitable for presentation to ambassadors.”21

  The cello sonatas in F major and G major that Beethoven wrote in Berlin and premiered with Jean-Louis Duport were published the next year as op. 5, dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia. It would be no surprise that these sonatas turned out confident, ebullient, fresh, and youthful. At this point in his life, Beethoven had every reason himself to feel the same. He was lionized and well paid everywhere he went. He felt completely healthy, which was not common with him. He was writing pieces inspired by two of the finest cellists in the world, for a cello-playing king who admired his music and wanted to sponsor new cello literature.

  Best of all, in writing sonatas for cello and piano Beethoven had a genre virtually to himself. He did not have to look over his shoulder, because Mozart and Haydn had never written for this combination, nor had anyone else written serious works for cello and piano as more or less equals. Beethoven knew that if he wrote ambitious and successful cello sonatas, they would be embraced by every cellist who cared about the status and the future of the instrument. The cello was coming into its own, detaching from its traditional role of reinforcing the bass in orchestral music, becoming a solo instrument and equal partner in chamber music. Coming into his own himself, Beethoven leaped at the chance to help emancipate an instrument.

  Op. 5 seems to ride on its own joy of discovery. The form Beethoven devised for these sonatas is particular to the genre he was creating. Both are in two large movements, the first movements beginning with long introductory fantasias that are essentially slow movements. Then in each come an Allegro and a dancing rondo finale. The Allegro of No. 1 in F Major has a foursquare theme, but neither here nor anywhere else in these pieces is eighteenth-century style much present. Rather, he found a voice neither backward-looking nor proto-Romantic.

  As much as anything, the sonatas are about the instrument, the cello’s colors, moods, big range, singing voice, and robust staccato. Though there is no sense of tragedy troubling the sonatas, the introduction of No. 2 in G Major is dark and brooding, leading to an Allegro molto of churning intensity that ends nonetheless with a big joyous coda, followed by a genial and puckish rondo finale.22 Inevitably, there are prophecies of later works, but on the whole, Beethoven wrote no other pieces quite like them, perhaps because never again would he find himself happy and hearty and fathering a medium he knew he would, in a way, own forever.

  By late November 1796, Beethoven was back in Vienna, taking up a busy schedule of piano students and new projects, rejoining old friends. The teasing and affectionate relationship he had fallen into with Zmeskall is shown in a note of this year to the baron, who had perhaps gotten tiresome, but Beethoven was in a jovial and forgiving mood: “From today the Count of Music has been dismissed with ignominy.—The first violin is being transported into the wilds of Siberia. For a whole month the Baron has been forbidden to put any more questions or to commit any more precipitate actions or to interest himself in anything but his ipse miserum”—his “miserable self,” in bad Latin.23

  When Beethoven’s twenty-sixth birthday arrived, in December, he received an invitation from his counterpoint tutor Albrechtsberger: “My very best wishes for your name-day tomorrow. May God give you health and satisfaction and grant you much good fortune. My dear Beethoven, if you should happen to have an hour at your disposal, your old teacher invites you to spend it with him.”

  Stephan von Breuning wrote of Beethove
n to Bonn family and friends, “In my opinion . . . the journey (or perhaps the outpouring of friendship upon his return!) has made him more stable, or actually a better judge of men, and has convinced him of the rarity and value of good friends. A hundred times, dear Wegeler, he has wished you were back with us, and he regrets nothing more than that he did not follow many of your suggestions.”24

  But Stephan von Breuning was premature in judging Beethoven changed. He was not a better judge of men or a better friend; he was simply in the best of health and the best of moods. None of that would last in the coming year, least of all the good health.

  Still, luck and talent had given Beethoven a splendid year. Music in Vienna in 1796 was summed up for the public by publisher Johann Ferdinand Ritter von Schönfeld in A Yearbook of the Music of Vienna and Prague. After listing some of the “Special Friends, Protectors, and Connoisseurs in Vienna,” including Princess Lichnowsky and Baron van Swieten, Schönfeld profiles leading composers and performers, noting their styles and quirks and making some critical points. In regard to St. Stephen’s Kapellmeister Albrechtsberger, “His main subject is church music, and his fugues are exceptional. He is no friend of modish music in the galant style.” The article on Haydn is extensive and mixed: “His symphonies are unequaled and, as many imitators have found, inimitable, it is equally true that they are his greatest works . . . But there is many a man of taste who will listen to his older products of this kind with greater pleasure than to his younger ones. Perhaps he has been wanting to show that he too can wear the garments of the latest musical fashion.”