Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The three sonatas of opp. 26–27 were the most stunning items of 1801, but there was more. Among other works of that year came the only string quintet Beethoven completed as such, published as op. 29 in C Major. From his years of listening to chamber music in aristocratic parlors and the readings he mounted in his own rooms, Beethoven knew intimately the Mozart string quintets, the greatest ones in that sonorous medium, some of the few quintets ever to challenge the string-quartet repertoire. It is indicative of Beethoven’s burgeoning confidence that his Quintet is not particularly beholden to Mozart. It is a warmly songful work that for all its lightness of spirit has a singular voice and some startling experiments—it amounts to a covertly radical outing. Its broadly flowing opening theme modulates three times in the first eight measures, beginning a piece marked by restless modulations and prophetic tonal patterns—a second theme in A major, a moment in the recapitulation in which the music modulates stepwise, C major–D minor–E minor–F major–G major–A minor: six keys in eight bars.

  After a rather galant nocturnal slow movement in F major and a frantic C-major scherzo, the Quintet’s finale begins on a main theme that amounts to a tremolo shiver plus falling swoops in the violins. Twice in the course of the finale a new piece of music turns up like an unknown guest at a wedding: a jaunty minuettish tune in 3/4 marked andante con moto e scherzoso, the last word indicating “jokingly.”31 A striking work that attracted comparatively little attention in its time or later, the Quintet in the next year was to bring Beethoven a monumental amount of annoyance.

  If the Quintet is marked by playfulness of material, key, and form, another work of 1801 is a world away: the cycle of six Gellert lieder, on poems of the pious Leipzig pastor and professor who was one of the beloved voices of the German Aufklärung. The score is dated March 8, 1802, but ideas for the songs went back several years.32 Beethoven’s settings match the earnest simplicity of the lyrics: mostly simple, short, syllabic, the accompaniments restrained until the climactic last song. That Beethoven turned to the artless North German piety of these poems, and set them in a style more interested in declaiming the words than in waxing lyrical, is another indication of his state of mind. If doctors could not help him, maybe God could, at least in giving him consolation. These songs come from the heart of his anguish and incipient depression:

  O God, look also upon my lamentation.

  My supplication, my sighing are not concealed from You,

  and my tears are laid before You.

  Oh, God, my God, how long must I be careworn?

  How long will You withdraw Yourself from me?

  At the end of 1802, a journal called the Historic Pocketbook looked back at the year in music, revealing where Beethoven’s First Symphony had ended up in the repertoire. It was “a masterpiece that does equal honor to his inventiveness and his musical knowledge . . . there prevails in it such a clear and lucid order, such a flow of the most pleasant melodies, and such a rich . . . instrumentation that this symphony can justly be placed next to Mozart’s and Haydn’s.” As usual, the newer pieces would have to make their way against a resisting tide: “Impartial connoisseurs were not as pleased with Beethoven’s most recent forte­piano works that . . . conspicuously strove to be unusual and original, only too often at the cost of beauty.” “Pleasing,” for this reviewer, was still the highest praise. Excessive originality earned the terms “peculiarity, which verges on the fantastic.”

  The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, however, had now put more progressive critics on Beethoven’s case. The review of the three sonatas of opp. 26 and 27 in June says,

  They are a true enrichment and belong among the few products of the present year that will hardly ever become obsolete; certainly [the Moonlight] can never become obsolete . . . This fantasia is one solid whole from beginning to end; it arises all at once from an undivided, profound, and intimately excited heart and is cut, as it were, from one block of marble. It is probably not possible that any human being to whom nature has not denied inner music should not be stirred by the first Adagio . . . and be guided higher and higher, and then as intimately moved and as highly elevated by the Presto agitato as free-composed keyboard music can elevate him. These two principal movements are written in the terrifying key of C♯ minor with consummate reason.

  Less than a year old, the Moonlight Sonata was ascending toward ubiquity and legend. And now “terrifying” could be a term of approval. Necessary to Beethoven’s triumph was a new generation that expected more from music than the “innocent luxury” Charles Burney had called it a quarter century before. One voice of the new generation, Wilhelm Wackenroder, wrote in a novel about his hero’s feeling for music: “Many passages were so vivid and engaging that the notes seemed to speak to him. At other times the notes would evoke a mysterious blend of joy and sorrow in his heart, so that he could have either laughed or cried. This is a feeling that we experience so often on our path through life and that no art can express more skillfully than music . . . That is the marvelous gift of music, which affects us the more powerfully and stirs all our vital forces the more deeply, the vaguer and more mysterious its language is.”33 There is no record of whether Beethoven read these words or what he knew at this point about the Romantic sensibility. If he did read them, they must have reassured him that there were people out there ready to understand him.

  Around April 1802, on the advice of his new favored doctor, Johann Adam Schmidt, Beethoven retired for a planned stay of six months to quiet and beautiful Heiligenstadt, one of the villages amid the trees and vineyards of the Vienna woods, a few miles from the city. He took rooms upstairs off the courtyard of a peasant-style house at 13 Herrengasse (later Probusgasse), his outside windows looking to hills and fields and the Danube, in the distance the Carpathian Mountains. The mineral baths of the spa were a few minutes’ walk away.34 His doctor wanted him to rest his ears and regain some health and strength, but he was planning no vacation. Heiligenstadt was close enough for friends and family to visit; among those who came were Ferdinand Ries and brother Carl. Beethoven arrived eager and full of hope that this cure amid the beauty of nature would restore his health and his spirit, maybe even arrest the decline of his hearing.

  His ongoing creative fury burned even brighter during this nominal vacation that climaxed in one of the devastating moments of his life. The Heiligenstadt summer of 1802 was blisteringly productive. With him he had brought sketchbooks filling up with ideas and drafts and the nearly finished Second Symphony, a work that, for all its laughter, is far weightier, bolder, and more mature than the First. As he got down to work, his daily walks were not around the battlements of Vienna but through woods and vineyards and alongside brooks.

  Trying to gain more time to write and to free himself from selling his notes, he handed off some of his dealings to an agent, writing Breit­kopf & Härtel in March 1802, “I propose, sir, to write to you myself very soon—a good deal of business—and also a great many worries—have rendered me for a time quite useless for some things—Meanwhile you can rely entirely on my brother—who, in general, attends to all my affairs.”35 As an agent, Caspar Carl van Beethoven, now working as a minor tax official in Vienna, proved a slowly unfolding disaster. Carl had the family impatience and quick temper with little of Ludwig’s intelligence and still less of his talent. Chipping in, Carl wrote Härtel, “At present we have three sonatas for the piano and violin, and if they please you, then we shall send them. My brother would have written to you himself, but he is not inclined to do anything just now, because the Theater Director Baron von Braun, who is known to be a stupid and crude fellow, has refused him the Theater for his concert and has rented it to the most mediocre artists.”36

  One of Carl’s initiatives was nearly to double the asking prices for Ludwig’s pieces, and he had success in some quarters—though at the same time Carl’s initiatives largely quashed the interest of Breitkopf & Härtel, who wanted things as cheap as possible. Ludwig had sold the First Symphony and the Sept
et for 90 florins each; Carl demanded and got some 170 florins for the String Quintet. On his own initiative, he tried to persuade Härtel to pay for a series of arrangements of pieces certified by Ludwig but not written by him. Härtel rejected the idea, and Ludwig actually wrote Härtel commending his judgment: “Concerning the arrangements of the pieces, I am heartily glad that you rejected them. The unnatural rage now prevalent to transplant even pianoforte pieces to stringed instruments, instruments so utterly opposite to each other in all respects, ought to come to an end. I insist stoutly that only Mozart could arrange his pianoforte pieces for other instruments, and also Haydn.”37 All the same, in coming years Beethoven would follow the fashion of the time in issuing multiple versions of many of his works, often advertised as arrangé par l’auteur même, when in fact that was true of only a few. Earlier ones included an arrangement of the Septet for piano trio and the Piano Quintet with winds turned into a piano quartet with strings. His student Ferdinand Ries recalled that many pieces “were arranged by me, revised by Beethoven, and then sold as Beethoven’s by his brother.”38

  Carl apparently got into the habit of rummaging in Ludwig’s manuscripts and sending stray items to publishers on his own; some of those pieces Ludwig had no desire to let see the light of day. There were other wrangles over practical matters. When Ludwig finished the piano sonatas of eventually op. 31 that summer of 1802, the brothers had an ongoing argument about which publisher to give them to. Beethoven had promised them to Nägeli in Zürich, and was outraged when he found Carl had offered them to Breitkopf & Härtel in hopes of more money.

  It was over the op. 31 Sonatas that Heiligenstadt was entertained one day by the sight of the Beethoven brothers slugging it out on the street. The next day Ludwig, nursing his bruises, ordered Ferdinand Ries to send the sonatas to Nägeli. He also gave Ries a letter for Carl with a “beautiful sermon” about Carl’s behavior: “First he showed him the true, despicable character of his conduct, then forgave him completely, but also predicted a miserable future for him if he did not radically change his life and behavior.”39 At least so recalled Ries, who despised both Beethoven’s brothers. The following year Ries wrote to Simrock back in Bonn, “Charl [sic] Beethoven is the biggest skinflint in the world—for a single ducat he would take back 50 words of promise, and his good brother makes the greatest enemies because of him.” In any case, Carl continued his efforts as before. When questioned or criticized about it, Beethoven was quick to defend him, explaining, “After all, he is my brother.”40

  In the first weeks the sun and serenity of Heiligenstadt seemed to have a vitalizing effect on Beethoven. Between March and May he drafted the three violin sonatas of op. 30. All are relatively good-natured pieces, even no. 2, in C minor, only modestly fiery compared to the storms that that key usually roused in him. All in all, these are the freshest of his violin sonatas so far. Here he stands at the point of making his escape from Mozart in a medium in which he had always kept his audacity under wraps.

  Nonetheless, once again, violin sonatas provoked him to wide-ranging tonal excursions. The development of the C Minor, no. 2, first movement touches on nine keys before making its way back to the tonic. Perhaps the glory of the set is the slow movement of no. 2, a touching Adagio cantabile with no lingering hints of the eighteenth-century galant but rather an inward and spiritual atmosphere of wonderful beauty. This movement owes little to the expressive rhetoric of the past; there is a sense of a powerful, fresh, and authentic music emerging that Beethoven was still learning to manage. If not that movement, the crown of the set might be the opening of no. 3, in G major, which begins with a swirling unison followed by a lilting (and a touch tipsy) theme, complete with hiccup in the violin.41 The rondo of the G Major is one of the most deliciously whimsical finales he ever wrote, its theme a spinning folk tune over a bagpipe drone, starting a brilliant and smile-inducing movement unlike anything else in his work. Call it Haydnesque wit and folksiness gone deliriously over the top.

  For the first sonata, in A Major, Beethoven drafted a finale he concluded was too long and obstreperous for the piece. He replaced it with a theme and variations, and put the rejected finale on the shelf in hopes it might serve something sometime. It certainly did. He dedicated op. 30 to the newly crowned tsar Alexander I. Reared by his grandmother Catherine the Great, Russia’s own benevolent despot, Alexander was a sovereign of liberalizing ambitions and at that point a professed admirer of Napoleon. Beethoven’s dedication, then, was deliberately to a figure famously allied to enlightened ideals—who might also be moved to do something for a composer now and then.

  Then Beethoven returned to keyboard works. The three piano sonatas of op. 31 that he wrote that summer would all be historic, each innovative in a distinctive way, the outer ones vivacious and the middle one tragic.

  Each begins with a gesture unprecedented in the literature. No. 1 in G Major starts with a ripping downward scale followed by two-fisted chords that seem to be a joke about pianists who can’t get their hands together. Myriad variants of ripping scales and arpeggios and out-of-sync chords constitute much of the material of a jovial first movement. The following Adagio grazioso seems retrospective, gracefully spinning out into a long, mellifluous nocturne whose main theme recalls Mozart at his more decorative, but the rest is Beethovenian in its far-ranging moods, rich harmonies, and dazzling pianistic colors. The warmth of the slow movement seems to merge into a gracious finale, alternately flowing lazily and dashing spiritedly, sometimes uniting those qualities. A few pensive moments drift by, but it ends with gleeful shouts and whispers.

  In forging op. 31, no. 2 in D Minor, Beethoven had to have known he was playing with fire. For all its fury and fatefulness, he made sure it was nonetheless taut. This was to be one of the works that cemented his reputation for the dark, the unique in voice, the incomparably dramatic. It provided for listeners, critics, perhaps for Beethoven himself an unmistakable signpost toward the New Path he was setting out on. Later dubbed The Tempest, more for its stormy atmosphere than for a connection to Shakespeare’s romantic drama (though a story lingered that he related it to the play), the sonata is an unforgettable human document.42

  With a disquieting quietness, The Tempest begins on a whispering arpeggio of uncertain tonality that erupts into a driving Allegro. Quiet descends abruptly again, then the pattern repeats with insistent but still more ambiguous harmonies. From the beginning Beethoven does violence to the formal traditions of an eighteenth-century first movement, with its expected clear first and second themes and unequivocal tonal outline. Instead, here the form asks questions: Is the first harmony here the tonic chord? (No, it is a V6.) Are the opening arpeggio and first Allegro a theme or an introduction? (They are either or both.) What is the first theme proper? (It is probably the whirling, driving theme of measure 21, which starts with the first clear D-minor cadence in the piece.)43 The indistinct form amplifies the uncertainties of the nervous rhythms and themes. This is expressive form. The movement takes an enigmatic course that includes a constant background of driving, demonic energy, with the development section a period of comparative calm. The recapitulation falls into moments of mournful quasi-recitative, as if the music were struggling for words that cannot be spoken.

  Another quiet arpeggio opens a time-stopping slow movement, dark and fateful despite its major key, troubled by distant drums, its moments of hope fraught and inconclusive. The end of the movement is a chilling evocation of emptiness. Later Carl Czerny said the finale was inspired by a horse galloping past Beethoven’s window. If so, in this music horse and rider are spreading alarm. The finale is relentless, obsessive, virtually monothematic, with a churning intensity like some unstoppable machinery of fate. There ends a sonata as intense as any ever written to that time, as bold and innovative as any, yet executed with the most luminous clarity of means and purpose. From this point forward, that joining of passion and lucidity would mark most of Beethoven’s highest achievements.

  Then, the opposite. B
eethoven begins op. 31, no. 3 in E-flat, with a harmony so strange that it would have earned him more cries of bizarre from critics if it did not commence a work of surpassing warmth, wit, and winsomeness.44 The beginning is an invitation, like a hand extended in friendship or love. That drifts into a blithe and whimsical first theme, a recall of the invitation, and a flowing and almost childlike second theme whose rippling delight simply wants to keep going. The coda seems to reflect contentedly on the invitation figure and the cheery second theme.

  What amounts to a scherzo for the second movement is in a bouncy two-beat instead of the usual quick three-beat, its main theme a lurching and comical tune with Beethoven’s trademark offbeat accents. Following the scherzo, most unexpectedly, comes a graceful and lyrical minuet—he wanted no slow movement to trouble the warm weather of this sonata. For conclusion, a tarantella marked Presto con fuoco, with the fire appropriate to that old whirling dance in which, once upon a time, you hoped to survive the bite of the tarantula by dancing to exhaustion.45 Its tireless churning is the equivalent of the same in the D Minor Sonata, but here to ebullient ends.

  At the same time that Beethoven worked on the opp. 30 and 31 sonatas, he wrote two deliberately groundbreaking sets of piano variations, opp. 34 and 35. The first, in F major, is a smaller work on a delicately wistful theme of his own. The tone of the whole is lighthearted, but in its way it fractures the decorum of its formal model as decisively as did The Tempest. Traditionally a set of variations sticks to the key of the theme, with perhaps an excursion to the parallel minor. Here Beethoven presents each variation in its own key, and those keys form a descending chain of thirds: F–D–B-flat–G–E-flat–C minor, then back to F for a joyous and nostalgic close.46 Changing keys in a set of variations was, for Beethoven, necessarily a matter of changing characters as well, or rather reinforcing the traditional changes of character in variations. Each key had its distinctive tuning on the keyboard and an allied expressive feel, for example, the G-major variation racing and gay, the E-flat stately, the C-minor fateful (though here detectably ironic, faux fateful).