Much of the music from the solo entrance on, especially the development section, is dominated by the drumbeat figure in constantly new forms. After the piano’s concluding cadenza, the rhythmic motif turns up in the timpani, as if emerging in its true guise as a drumbeat, in a duet with the piano. As Beethoven jotted down in 1796, “For the Concerto in C minor kettledrum at the cadenza.” That striking moment involving timpani was one of the germs from which the concerto grew.
The second-movement Largo arrives with a sense of something otherworldly, both because of its exquisite theme and because it is in E major, about as distant from C minor as a key can be. The unforgettable first E-major chord in the rich lower register of the piano arrives magically out of nowhere and lingers for two slow beats. The main connection between C minor and E major is A-flat/G-sharp, the note singled out by the winds at the beginning of the concerto. Beethoven had been experimenting with extended key relations for years, but rarely so strikingly as here. These sorts of forays into wide-ranging key relations were to be a thumbprint of much of his music to come.35
The form of the middle movement is a simple ABA, the piano still the commanding presence, now with an air of rapturous improvisation. Carl Czerny recalled that Beethoven played the entire opening with the sustain pedal down, giving it a kind of acoustic halo. The piano figures are like breezes, garlands, butterfly wings. From his memory of Beethoven’s playing, Czerny said the slow movement should evoke “a holy, distant, and celestial harmony.” Here was a moment when in a stretch of sublime beauty Beethoven floated free of the past in one more genre. His trajectory as a composer coming fully into his own was still sharply rising in those months of early 1803. And with his most innovative music, he was beginning to earn extraordinary critical superlatives. Already in 1805, a critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung called the concerto’s second movement “one of the most expressive and richly sensitive instrumental pieces ever written.”36
The final chord of the second movement places G-sharp on the top in strings. The piano picks up that note and turns it back into A-flat to begin what will be a lilting and playful rondo, despite the C minor. Again the piano leads the symphonic dialogue; we hear echoes of the first movement in dotted rhythms, down-striding figures, uprushing scales from the soloist. A couple of times, the piano interrupts with mini-cadenzas before the middle section in A-flat major—the starring note now with its own key. As a kind of musical pun, Beethoven turns the A-flat back into G-sharp and on that pivot thrusts us for a moment into E major, the key of the slow movement, and for that moment the music recalls that movement. In the expansive coda, the 2/4 main theme is transformed into a presto 6/8, driving to the end in C-major high spirits. The main feature of this new incarnation of the rondo theme is a wry flip on G-sharp–A, the last disguise of the leading pitch, finally resolving into C major.
In the aftermath of his benefit concert, Beethoven had much to be pleased about. The music had gone well enough, and after expenses were settled he pocketed the inspiring sum of 1,800 florins. Publications were steady, and Prince Lichnowsky added his annual stipend of 600 florins. In the year after the worst crisis of his life, this was a most gratifying kind of success. Beethoven probably understood what his audience of April 1803 could not know, that with this slate of pieces he had cleared the decks, drawn a line in his life and art between the old, wandering paths and the New Path.
After those exhausting months of production around the beginning of 1803, Beethoven’s energy did not flag. A couple of weeks after the concert, Prague physician Johann Held met him on the street and was invited to a soiree at the flat of violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. They were rehearsing string-quartet arrangements of Beethoven’s piano music. “His piquant conceits,” the doctor recalled of Beethoven, “modified the gloominess, I might say, the lugubriousness, of his countenance. His criticisms were very keen.”37 There Dr. Held met Beethoven’s violinist disciple Wenzel Krumpholz and a visiting violinist and composer named George Polgreen Bridgetower.
This twenty-four-year-old former prodigy had made a sensation in Vienna. Prince Lichnowsky introduced him to Beethoven, who was suitably impressed. In childhood, Bridgetower may have lived in the Esterházy Palace, and he claimed to have studied there with Haydn. Years later, as a rising young virtuoso living in England, he appeared in Haydn’s London concerts. Among his mentors and admirers was Giovanni Battista Viotti, which connects Bridgetower with the heart of the French violin school and its kaleidoscopic effects based on the new “Viotti” bow.38 Besides the brilliance of his playing, Bridgetower came with a multicultural and mixed-race background that gave him an exotic cachet. His father was West Indian, his mother European. Happy to exploit his background for publicity, he billed himself as “son of the African Prince” (probably not strictly true). A triumph in Dresden, where he was visiting his mother, gained Bridgetower connections to the musical aristocracy in Vienna, thus to Lichnowsky, thereby to Beethoven.
The two struck up a friendship. On one of their first evenings Beethoven brought the violinist along for a dinner at Countess Guicciardi’s, and he helped introduce the younger man to useful patrons.39 In their time away from the piano the two men seem to have caroused vigorously. At some point the violinist asked his new friend if they could mount a joint concert, perhaps premiere a piece. Though there was little time, Beethoven did not need persuading. Apparently he had been sketching some ideas for a violin sonata, with the notion that its finale would be the one discarded from the A Major Violin Sonata, op. 30. Since Beethoven was not given to throwing movements together casually, that meant that he based the new movements on material from the existing finale—so, in a way, composed the piece back to front.
The concert date in Vienna was set for May 22, 1803, but it was postponed to the twenty-fourth, likely because the new movements of the sonata, which Beethoven had been writing at top speed with Bridgetower prodding him, were not finished. By the hour of the concert, the first movement had only a sketchy piano part on the page, and the slow movement had to be read from the manuscript with the ink barely dry.40
No matter. The recital, in the big pavilion of the Augarten, seems to have been a grand occasion for both men. Their easy camaraderie was demonstrated when, on a soaring C-major arpeggio in the first-movement Presto, Bridgetower answered the piano’s figure with an improvised arpeggio of his own. Ordinarily that sort of thing would have brought an explosion of wrath from Beethoven. This time he jumped up from the piano in delight, embraced Bridgetower, and cried, “Once again, my dear boy!” Bridgetower recalled Beethoven’s playing of the slow movement as “so chaste, which always characterized the performance of all his slow movements, that it was unanimously hailed to be repeated twice.”41
Despite the haste of its creation, what came to be called the Kreutzer Sonata amounted to a defining, even galvanizing work of the New Path: another leap in maturity and confidence, a moment where in one more genre he escaped his model Mozart. Beethoven was in a remarkable creative ferment that year, but part of the sonata’s hot-blooded nature surely had to do with the circumstances of its creation: his encounter with this professedly “exotic” virtuoso of impulsive personality in his playing and in his person.
This sonata was to become an obsession of the new Romantic generation. The whole is splendid, but its legend rests on the breathtaking first movement. There is a kind of improvisatory excitement and immediacy about it, a breadth and variety of ideas that surprise and dazzle at every turn. At the same time, it is an exercise in sustained intensity of which few composers other than Beethoven were capable. Which is to say, it is in the category of works to come like the Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas.
In a subtitle Beethoven notes that the A Major Sonata was written in a style “like that of a concerto.” It begins Adagio sostenuto with an impassioned and virile violin solo in A major, slashing across the strings. The piano answers the violin with a pensively ambiguous and minorish phrase, setting up an essential counterforce
. The Presto breaks out in A minor with a seething dynamism that never flags, though for contrast there is a meltingly lovely second theme. The opening gesture of the Presto in the violin is a surge from E to F; that stroke from consonant to dissonant touches off the high tension of the music to come—and also foreshadows the significance of the key of F (and that “sore” pitch) in the course of the first movement, in the entire second movement, and in the middle of the finale. The development manages to ratchet the excitement still higher as it rages through keys and brilliant figures. Near the end, there is a quiet adagio moment that will be echoed in the following movements.42
Next, a set of decorative F-major variations on a gently pulsing theme. Trills near the end of the theme are one of the main ideas to be developed, subsumed into florid figuration. The tone of the variations shifts slowly from playful to more serious, the last one quietly reflective. The finale erupts as a 6/8 tarantella in A major, in which the driving intensity of the first movement is transformed into an exhilarating frolic. As in the first movement there is a suddenly slow and lyrical second theme and a retrospective moment near the end (in practice, these being ideas on which the preceding movements were built).
Beethoven’s affection for George Bridgetower is reflected in a joking inscription in improvised Italian that he scrawled on the sonata’s manuscript, maybe during an evening of carousing. Roughly translated, it reads, “Mulattic sonata written for the mulatto Brischdauer, a complete lunatic and mulattic composer.” Bridgetower seems to have been an exciting violinist and a brash and lusty personality, and so was his sonata. Who knows to what degree Beethoven was galvanized by some fanciful association of the violinist’s African heritage and carnality. If Beethoven’s music encompasses the range of human characters and feelings, one category of feeling he usually left out was the sexual. He was powerfully drawn to women but at the same time prudish. He did not consider the erotic a proper subject for art and criticized Mozart for the racy plots of his comic operas. Perhaps the surging passions of the Kreutzer constitute the exception to the rule.43
In the end Beethoven and Bridgetower broke up for a time as friends and colleagues over what the violinist recalled as “some silly quarrel about a girl.”44 So the dedication of the A Major Sonata went to another violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer, whom Beethoven had met and come to admire in 1798, when Kreutzer was in the entourage of the French minister, General Bernadotte. In regard to the publication and dedication, Beethoven wrote Nikolaus Simrock in 1804, “This Kreutzer is a dear kind fellow who during his stay in Vienna gave me a great deal of pleasure. I prefer his modesty and natural behavior to all the exterior without any interior, which is characteristic of most virtuosi—As the sonata was written for a competent violinist, the dedication to Kreutzer is all the more appropriate.”45 What Beethoven did not know was that Rodolphe Kreutzer had no use for Beethoven’s music and apparently never performed the work that made his name immortal. Kreutzer told Hector Berlioz that he found the sonata “outrageously unintelligible.”46
For Beethoven the following summer continued at an exuberant, breakneck creative pace hard to conceive for a man who a year before had been ready to kill himself. If his public performances on piano had begun to recede, as a composer he was juggling more schemes and projects than ever. He still had a flat in Schikaneder’s Theater an der Wien as nominal house composer (he spent the summer in Baden and Oberdöbling). Supposed to be supplying operas, he took up the impresario’s libretto of ancient Rome, Vestas Feuer, and began sketching at it, with little enthusiasm. His seven Bagatelles for piano, a mellifluous and delightful grab bag of miniatures, were published as op. 33. He received a letter from the Scottish publisher George Thomson wanting to commission six sonatas. Beethoven asked for more than 1,300 florins, Thomson offered half that, and there the matter rested.47
A story Ferdinand Ries recalled from 1803 shows the easy relations Beethoven enjoyed with the nobility. He and Ries were the evening’s entertainment at the home of his patron Count Browne. Ries missed a note playing the op. 23 Sonata and Beethoven tapped him on the head, only to show his pupil that he had noticed. At that, Princess Browne, leaning on the piano, smiled mischievously. Later when Beethoven was playing The Tempest he made a slip of the fingers that sounded, Ries remembered, “like a piano being cleaned.” The princess rapped him several times on the head, saying, “If the pupil received one tap of the finger for one missed note, then the Master must be punished with a full hand for worse mistakes.” On that occasion, Beethoven chose to laugh, started the sonata again, and “performed marvelously. The Adagio in particular was incomparably played.”48
In August the piano maker Érard of Paris sent Beethoven a gift of a piano, state of the art, part of that being more notes at the top—its range was five and a half octaves, stretching beyond the usual top F above the staff up to C—and with a heavier action and more robust British-style sound in comparison to the delicate Viennese pianos. Beethoven was reported to be “enchanted” with the Érard. Soon with its help he produced epochal works. Later, perhaps inevitably, he became disgruntled with the heavy action and tried to have it lightened. Still, the Érard would be his main instrument for years.49
Carl van Beethoven was nearing the end of his usefulness as an agent and go-between. Ries wrote publisher Simrock a sarcastic warning: “The second Beethoven will soon do you the honor of visiting you. You can very much look forward to this, for all the publishers in Vienna fear him worse than fire, because he is so terribly rude.” Relations with Breitkopf & Härtel had cooled because of Carl’s style.50
The difference between Ludwig’s dealings with publishers, with which he was perennially annoyed but patient, and Carl’s style is seen in the difference between letters each wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel in the autumn of 1803. Beethoven was seething at the firm’s house journal for its lukewarm review of his concert. In ironic mode, he wrote Gottfried Härtel, “Please convey my most respectful thanks to the editor of the [Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung] for his kindness in allowing such a flattering report on my oratorio to be inserted, which contains such blatant lies about the prices I fixed and treats me in such a degrading manner . . . What nobility of character is expected of a true artist, and certainly not entirely without good reason! On the other hand, how detestably, how meanly people proceed to attack us without the slightest hesitation.”
Härtel already knew that Beethoven was going to return fire when he got bad reviews in the AMZ. Nonetheless, Beethoven was offering the house his new piano variations on God Save the King and Rule Britannia and some smaller works—which Härtel turned down.51 In October 1803, Carl, while offering Härtel major works including a triple concerto (probably not even begun at that point), demanded ominously to know the name of the AMZ reviewer: “The reason for this has nothing to do with whether my brother is disgraced in your Zeitung or not, because the greatest proof that the opposite is the case comes from the quantity of orders that we receive from everywhere. But I find it very remarkable that you accept such crap in your Zeitung. My brother does not know that I want to learn the identity of the reviewer; therefore be so kind as to enclose a little note to me in your reply.”52 It is unlikely Härtel was so kind.
In late summer of 1803, Ries wrote Simrock the surprising news that Beethoven was settled on moving to Paris within a year and a half, “which I am extraordinarily sorry about.”53 It was a strange determination, and it is hard to conceive what might have come of it, but it was strong. Did Beethoven hope to meet Napoleon, did he imagine himself as one in the French conqueror’s stable of artists like composer Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and painter Jacques-Louis David?
In any case, a good deal of Beethoven’s effort was now devoted to a multifront campaign to prepare this relocation. One item was the dedication of the new violin sonata to a leading French virtuoso, Kreutzer. Another, perhaps, was the plan to compose a French-style triple concerto. Another was that he was about to put aside Schikaneder’s opera libretto in favor of a
French one; he knew that writing opera was the best route to fame in Paris.54 Still another, his main project of that summer and fall, was a work he had started sketching in summer 1802, before his Heiligenstadt crisis, directly after the pages devoted to the Prometheus Variations.55 It was a symphony dedicated to the most famous of Frenchmen.
17
Heaven and Earth Will Tremble
HOW DOES A composer forge a great symphony, with its span of nearly an hour and its myriad notes? Among human endeavors, shaping a long work of music is one of the hardest things to do well. Very few people have ever been consistently good at it. No matter how long the piece takes to write, every note has to be marshaled to the same purpose, and in performance it should unfold as effortlessly as an improvisation. From the outside, the job seems superhuman. As Beethoven saw it from the inside, it was done one quilled note, one theme, one phrase, one transition, one section, one movement at a time.
Often the creation of great things begins with small things: an itch in the mind, a scrap of material, a train of thought that seems on its own to leap into motion. This time, an epic work began with a bit of dance tune.
The englische bass and theme from Prometheus obsessed him:
There was the protean quality of the Basso del Tema, anchoring the simplest harmonies but with a hint of something beyond—a little chromatic slide of three notes, the smallest touch of seasoning. The bass line was something next to nothing that could be the foundation of anything. Yet its implications reached far. Bass and tune formed the image of a dance that for Beethoven had come to represent something in the direction of Schiller’s “most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.” An image, in other words, of an ideal society.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 39