Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Publication of op. 9 was announced in June 1798. By that point, with five string trios under his belt, Beethoven had taken a metaphorical deep breath and was well into sketches of a string quartet in D major. Prince Lobkowitz had commissioned a set of six quartets each from Beethoven and Haydn. As Beethoven started to work on the second quartet, he sketched on a random collection of loose sheets. Such sheets formed an unwieldy pile of material dating back some dozen years, which he ferried around with him from flat to flat. Now he bought himself a sketchbook made of stitched-together sheets of printed music paper, and began working in it.

  From then on, these books, sometimes purchased and sometimes sewn together from loose sheets by himself, contained most of his jottings and drafts. At first they were large, for working at home. Later he also made smaller books that could fit in his coat pocket, for sketching during his daily walks and rambles. The sketchbooks may have helped to give him more focus. Now a work in progress was something he could hold in his hand, leaf through.3 They became indispensable companions through the day. In that first one, he worked on a broad spectrum of pieces: a piano sonata in E major, eventually op. 14, no. 1; the string quartet in D major, eventually the third of the Lobkowitz set; revisions of the B-flat piano concerto. He also did the first work on the Septet op. 20 and the eventual first of the Lobkowitz quartets, in F major.

  In the middle of these multilayered projects, in 1798, Beethoven acquired a friend closer than any he had found since Bonn. Karl Friedrich Amenda came from Courland, then part of western Russia. Born a year after Beethoven, he had been something of a violin prodigy, but felt a call to the ministry and got his degree in theology. Amenda arrived in Vienna in the spring of 1798, worked a while for Prince Lobkowitz, and eventually found a job teaching music to the children, with her second husband, of Mozart’s widow Constanze. Amenda’s time in Vienna was a testament to his amiable and earnest character; despite his severely pockmarked face, people were drawn to him.

  Amenda was one of the people who in those years were already seized by Beethoven’s music. Several times when he spotted his hero in a restaurant, Amenda tried to make conversation, but he could not break through Beethoven’s reserve. One day he was playing first violin in a quartet at Constanze Mozart’s house, and a hand kept appearing to turn his pages. At the end of the piece he looked up from the music to discover that his page-turner was Beethoven. The next day, at a dinner party, the host declared, “What have you done? You’ve captured Beethoven’s heart! Beethoven requests that you rejoice him with your company.” The next morning, Amenda hurried to his hero’s flat; after a warm greeting, Beethoven suggested they play through some violin and piano music. They went on for hours, probably reading through new Beethoven and old Mozart pieces. (Beethoven was working on op. 12, his first set of violin sonatas.) Finally Amenda left, but Beethoven followed him home; there were more hours of music making, then back to Beethoven’s flat for the same, well into the night.

  The two men became inseparable, seen around town together so much that when one appeared alone on the street, passersby would shout, “Where’s the other one?” In Amenda, Beethoven found an idealist of his own stripe, an able violinist, a Schwärmer for music and literature and philosophy and aesthetics, voluble in the high-Enlightenment talk Beethoven had missed since his Bonn days. Here was somebody he could embrace and admire, who admired him in return and understood him as a man and an artist.

  They made music and had fun. Once, Amenda declined to believe Beethoven’s modest description of his own violin playing and demanded to hear him play the solo part in one of his sonatas. After a few bars of intolerable sawing, Amenda cried, “Have mercy—stop!” and they both broke up laughing. Another time, after Beethoven had improvised at the piano for Amenda alone, his friend said it was sad that such glorious music should be lost to the world. “There you’re mistaken,” Beethoven said, and played the whole thing again, note for note.4

  The quality of their relationship, and of Amenda’s insight, is found in a fervent letter he wrote Beethoven the next year, after the death of his brother called him back to Courland. For address, Amenda uses the intimate du, “thou,” reserved for close friends, an intimacy always mutually and ceremonially agreed to.

  My Beethoven,

  I still approach you with the same heartfelt love and esteem that the value of your heart and of your talent irresistibly and eternally demand of me . . . Friend! grant to very many other friends of music the good fortune of becoming acquainted with you better. You are responsible not only to yourself and to them, but indeed to the general progress of your art . . . Outside of Vienna, believe me, the musical public is still too backward . . . to be able to evaluate your beautiful compositions according to their worth. You yourself must play for them, and compose for them pieces of all sorts according to their prevailing comprehension; [you] must educate them to your level, as you have done with me and others in Vienna.5

  He goes on to promise that he will acquaint “rustic Courland” with Beethoven’s music, and rhapsodizes about a girl who “has captured your Amenda.” In the letter, Amenda essentially charts a course for Beethoven, or confirms a course Beethoven was already on. Don’t neglect sometimes to write broadly, Amenda said, not just for connoisseurs. After his serious first two opus numbers, Beethoven would issue a steady stream of lighter pieces in a range of media, some earning opus numbers and some not. At the same time, Amenda goes on, for your most important works, “you must educate them to your level.” In other words, Beethoven needed to teach people how to listen to his music. Haydn and Mozart had done the same in their day, but Beethoven’s challenge to eighteenth-century taste was more aggressive than theirs.

  The fervor of Beethoven’s friendship with Amenda can be contrasted with the social divides and the tensions of his relations with aristocratic patrons like Lichnowsky and Lobkowitz, with his tendency to view performers like Ignaz Schuppanzigh as hardly more than servants, and with his bantering relationship with faithful minion Baron Zmeskall von Domanovecz: “Will the very high born personage, the Zmeskality of H[err] von Zmeskall, graciously condescend to decide where he can be spoken to tomorrow—We are quite damnably devoted to you.” In another note of 1798: “My cheapest Baron! See to it that the guitarist [a friend of Amenda’s] shall come to me today for certain. Amenda instead of paying amends . . . for his failure to observe rests, must let me have this [admirable] guitarist.” For whatever reasons, surely fondness among them, Beethoven was patient with the baron. They would never have a real fight, but now and then Zmeskall had to be taken down a notch:

  My very Dear Baron Muckcart-driver,

  Je vous suis bien oblige pour votre faiblesse de vos yeux.—By the way, I refuse in future to allow the good humor, in which I sometimes find myself, to be destroyed. For yesterday thanks to your Zmeskall-Domanoveczian babble I became quite melancholy. The devil take you, I refuse to hear anything about your whole moral outlook. Power is the moral principle of those who excel others, and it is also mine; and if you start off again today on the same line, I will thoroughly pester you until you consider everything I do to be good and praiseworthy . . . Adieu Baron Ba . . . ron ron/nor/orn/rno/onr/ (Voilà quelque chose out of the old pawnshop).6

  That mock-offended but mostly jovial note is striking in several dimensions. The reference in bad French to the baron’s eyes has to do with a viola-and-cello piece Beethoven had written for the two of them, Duet with Two Obbligato Eyeglasses, since both of them required spectacles to play it. The last line in parentheses indicates that the duet is enclosed by means of an arcane pun on versetzen, which can mean “to transpose” (as with music) or “to pawn.” The line about power as the moral principle of the superior man may reflect a philosophy or a momentary mood—Beethoven seems never to have written a sentiment quite like it again. Near the end of the note, he composes an alphabetical theme and variations on Zmeskall’s noble title. These notes to Zmeskall are among many that suggest Beethoven tended to write let
ters later in the day, after composing, in high spirits from a glass or several glasses of good cheer. Wine had made his father merry sometimes, volatile at other times. His son followed suit. Quite unlike his father, however, nobody ever reported Beethoven as a sloppy or abusive drinker or found him passed out in the street.

  In August 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte’s inexorable rise was halted for the moment when British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed a French fleet in the Battle of the Nile. That galvanized a new coalition of Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey, which for a while promised to end the French rampage. There is no record of how Beethoven viewed all this trouble, though he could hardly have been unaware of it. He remained happily and profitably at work that year.

  There was a flurry of piano sonatas, natural enough given that it was his instrument, that piano sonatas were among his most salable items, and that he did not feel intimidated by precedents in Haydn, Mozart, Clementi, or anybody else. Piano sonatas were also laboratories where he could experimnt with new ways of putting pieces together, with new sonorities and new voices. So it was with the three modestly scaled but significant sonatas of op. 10. All of them have a singular expressive pattern: sprightly-unto-joking outer movements set off by second movements of a poignancy and depth that intensify throughout the opus.

  Op. 10, no. 1, in C minor, amounts to another stage in Beethoven’s ongoing process of finding his sense of this key. To a degree, he would discover who he was as an artist by way of C minor. Still, the Beethoven voice the world would come to know is not quite that of this sonata—the fiercer moments of the op. 1 Trio in C Minor are closer. The C Minor Sonata has an opening theme darting upward in dotted rhythms answered by a quiet, poignant gesture, introducing a movement largely impulsive and headlong, spaced by flowing lyrical interludes, while the gentle slow movement in A-flat major is a touch backward-looking, galant, its themes sprouting ornaments in Mozartian fashion. A short finale turns the driving force of the first movement into fun and games, the themes scampering along. At the coda, there is a quiet and thoughtful moment recalling the second movement.

  No. 2, in F major, begins with a little hop and proceeds in a series of fits and starts, characterizing a movement wry and lively, with moments ironically grand and furioso. Rather than a slow movement, what follows is an oddly pensive and flowing, at times haunted, unscherzo punctuated with offbeat accents. Whatever griefs shadow those pages are eased by a good-humored finale, the main theme folklike and stamping.

  Then comes the stunning D-major, no. 3 in the set, the finest sonata and one of the most individual works he had produced yet. The progress of its four movements echoes the expressive shape of the previous two, but the comedy in the first and last movements is ratcheted higher, framing an unforgettable song of sorrow in the slow movement. Part of the humor in the outer movements is the stinginess of material: the first four notes of the dashing opening theme (a bit of descending scale) will dominate the first movement to a point of absurdity; the next three notes (a rising half step, then jump of a third) will dominate the finale.

  The twitchy and obsessive opening movement is rarely able to escape its scrap of scale, whether it is running up or running down. The last rush to the cadence is laugh-out-loud funny. (Whether intentional or not, that ending is also a near-quote of the opening of Mozart’s lighthearted Piano Concerto in B-flat, K. 450.)

  The D-minor slow movement is marked Largo e mesto, slow and mournful. That describes one of the most mournful works of music written to its time. It seems locked in a trance of sorrow, at once individual and world-encompassing. Moments of hope soon sink; the main relief is in bleak, trembling silences. What follows, a delicate minuetto, feels like a pulling together after the suffering of the slow movement. Then the droll finale, an Allegro rondo, begins with a couple of can’t-get-started stutters followed by sort of a sneeze. The stuttering figure is relentless and steadily funnier; earlier movements are recalled in more sober moments that don’t impede the high spirits.

  What did Beethoven mean by these experiments in antithetical emotions? A number of things beyond a simple desire to intensify contrasts. In the world at large, this kind of juxtaposition was a leading topic of debate among German thinkers. It was an aspect of Shakespeare’s tragedies that, with the advent of new German translations, had troubled German eighteenth-century aesthetics: how can a mingling of tragedy and comedy be said to have unity when they are in the same work? For his part, Beethoven did not make contrasts for the sake of momentary effects, without reference to the whole. Already in op. 1, he was shaping his works as a single narrative, a coherent journey through a series of characters and emotional states. In the D Major Sonata, that paradoxical journey has particularly significant implications.

  Again, the very beginning of the D Major’s comic first movement sets up two motives that will dominate the piece. The theme of the tragic slow movement is made from those two motives:

  Who knows what Beethoven thought of the motivic connections among these contradictory worlds of first and second movements. But what the D Major Sonata suggests, in terms philosophical and psychological, is that the material of comedy and tragedy is the same, that joy and suffering are made of the same things. Here is something articulated in tones that reaches a far-sighted human wisdom.

  In the elegant and ingratiating (à la Mozart, in his light vein) op. 11 Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello, there is no attempt at wisdom or innovation. The clarinet serves in the usual position of the violin in a piano trio. (In hopes of better sales, Beethoven supplied an optional violin version of the clarinet part.) For a finale, he wrote variations on a well-known perky tune from an opera by Joseph Weigl, earning the piece the nickname Gassenhauertrio, or “Popular Melody Trio.”

  The presence of Mozart also hovers over the more substantial, yet nonetheless still cautious, three violin sonatas of op. 12. Here, as usual, Beethoven used what he considered the best models for a given medium and genre, and, as usual, they left traces in the music. Mozart was the main model, because his violin sonatas were supreme in the repertoire.7 There would be no record of a commission for these pieces. It appears Beethoven wrote them because he wanted to try his hand at the medium. They may also have been helped along by his acquaintance with the French virtuoso Kreutzer in Vienna in early 1798. Kreutzer and Beethoven gave a private concert at Prince Lobkowitz’s in April, and Beethoven was duly impressed with this celebrated exemplar of the French violin school.8 That violin tradition would remain another model for him. Around the time of the Kreutzer concert, he finished the second and third sonatas.

  To ears schooled in later Beethoven, op. 12 would sound like relatively light excursions in a current style. Beethoven was, in other words, still not ready to mount a challenge in a medium that Mozart dominated. All three violin sonatas are in major keys and in three movements, in tone ranging from lighthearted to playful, though no. 2 has a beautiful, melancholy slow movement and no. 3 is a degree more serious. As he had done in earlier, more backward-looking works like the first two piano concertos, Beethoven slipped into these pieces some startling harmonic excursions. In the first movement of Sonata No. 1 in D Major, he surrounds the main key with mediants, keys a third away in each direction: B-flat and F. In the fairly short course of the first-movement development section of No. 3 in E-flat, he ranges into the wilds of flat keys: C minor, G minor, B-flat minor, E-flat minor (his old favorite), even C-flat major.9 That was pushing things in those days, and he would get slapped for it in one of his first important reviews. The premiere of one or more of the sonatas probably came in a Vienna concert of March 1798, Beethoven and Ignaz Schuppanzigh presiding.10

  In one way and another, creatively and professionally, the ground was prepared for another piano sonata finished in 1798, the first work of Beethoven’s to bid for the term epochal. It was published the next year as op. 13, Grande Sonate Pathétique.

  From its glowering opening chords, the Pathétique paints pathos like no work before: naked and pers
onal. Here Beethoven found a kind of music that seems not like a depiction of sorrow but sorrow itself:

  Still, this music of great originality does not discard traditional form or even familiar modes of representing sadness. There are half steps everywhere in music, but the particular descending half step on the third beat of the Pathétique is unmistakably pathetic. The gesture has a tradition going back to Bach and beyond.11 It is the voice that is new in this sonata, the emotional immediacy. The Pathétique did not initiate so much as confirm that Beethoven was bringing to music a new immediacy and subjectivity. As a revelation of individual character and emotion (what a later age would call “expressing oneself”), it was a kind of democratic revolution in music. And as such, the kind of expression exemplified in the Pathétique became a founding element of the Romantic voice in music.12

  There had never been a more grave Grave in music than the one that opens this work about melancholy, resignation, and defiance. In an essay called “On the Pathetic,” Schiller wrote that when suffering is depicted in art, it must be resisted, transcended. As a matter of ethical necessity, pain and despair cannot win.13 Whether or not Beethoven knew that decree of Schiller’s, he conformed to it here—in his own way.

  In the Pathétique the full force of Beethoven’s C-minor mood is unleashed. Here is a shining prophecy of what he was to call a New Path, the direction that would bring him to his full maturity.14 While his earlier sonatas had been in some degree singular, the Pathétique is among the first of his works in any medium to stand from beginning to end as an unforgettable individual. Like the earlier sonatas, it has a singular sonority, an approach to the instrument special to the work and its emotional world, but now the sonority has a sharper and more distinctive profile than in the earlier ones.