Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  It was in summer of 1802, in Heiligenstadt before his crisis, around the same time as he worked on the Prometheus Variations, that on a couple of pages Beethoven made exploratory sketches for the first three movements of a new symphony, probing for a sense of its character and leading ideas. Most of the sketches are toward the exposition section of a first movement. None of them ended up in the finished piece.

  Though it does not appear in those first sketches, the implicit galvanizing element was the Prometheus theme. He kept its E-flat major as the key of the symphony. In his time this was called a noble, heroic, humanistic, echt-Aufklärung tonality: as said before, the main key of Mozart’s Masonic pieces and of Die Zauberflöte. For the beginning of the piece, at this point Beethoven imagined a solemn, slow introduction based on another simple idea, an ascent on a triad. A few bars labeled seconda were a try at a slow movement in C major and 6/8 meter. Toward a third movement were a couple of lines he labeled Minuetto serioso. He wrote down nothing specific for the finale; he already knew it would be based on the Prometheus material, in a similar direction as the piano variations.1

  Around June of 1803, he rented three rooms in what had been a winegrower’s house in Oberdöbling, a village up the hill from Heiligenstadt. It was the kind of simple place he liked, in the countryside. The house was surrounded by gardens and vineyards and sat beside the solitary Krottenbach gorge that separates Döbling from Heiligenstadt.2 It was a countryside to beckon the wanderer. In that setting he returned to the symphony in a new sketchbook.

  For Beethoven a big work was a dramatic and emotional narrative, also a moral and ethical one. At the same time, for him and his age music was called a kind of rational discourse on stated themes, a wordless rhetoric like an oration, or like a sermon founded on its verse of scripture.3 At some point since the previous year’s sketches, he had done significant work on the new symphony. Among other things, he had found das Thema, the all-important leading theme.

  He had also settled on the symphony’s subject. It was to be what he and his time called a “characteristic” piece and what the future would call a “program” piece, based on some sort of story or image usually conveyed by a title. The subject of this symphony inspired by the Prometheus music was to be another Promethean figure, the only man in Europe who appeared to deserve that description as a benefactor of humanity: Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun his self-willed ascent as “the little corporal” and now was the conqueror and benevolent despot who proposed to bring Europe peace, republican governments, the rule of law, and an end to ancient tyrannies. Hegel declared him a “world spirit on horseback.”4 One Prometheus suggested another. The Third Symphony was to be called Bonaparte.

  A composer asks of a conception, What can I do with this? What sort of ideas express it? Where do these ideas want to go? The answers to these questions are sequences of sounds. Chains of ideas and associations gathered in his mind, rising from the intersection of the Prometheus dance and the French conqueror. The symphony would be not only dedicated to Napoleon but also in some way modeled on his character and career and on the larger image of a hero who has the vision and capacity to create a new order, a just and harmonious society: as Schiller said, free and respecting freedom.

  As usual, the project was not all abstractions and ideals. Self-promotion was woven into all of it. If Beethoven was going to make his long-planned move to Paris, a Bonaparte symphony could be a calling card to the French government, even to Napoleon himself. The political atmosphere made that scheme workable. The 1802 Treaty of Lunéville ended the War of the Second Coalition and inaugurated a hiatus in hostilities between France and its prime antagonist, Austria. For the moment, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II was staying neutral, resisting Russian and English pressure for a new alliance. There was actually talk of a pact between Austria and the French republic. After all, the effects of the Lunéville treaty had been bearable, losing Austria only distant territories and the left bank of the Rhine. To the delight of liberal and anticlerical circles, the treaty also abolished the ecclesiastical states, including Bonn.5 Now in Austria Napoleon was called a peacemaker, even a bastion against radical Jacobinism.

  In August 1802, the French Senate proclaimed Napoleon First Consul for life. At this point he was in all but title an absolute monarch, a dictator—just like Holy Roman Emperor Franz II. A German journal of the time declared that Napoleon “had subdued the warring peoples of Europe and Asia, and by his laws made himself loved by those he had conquered.”6 Napoleon declared that he intended to deliver Europe from “the terrible pictures of chaos, devastation and carnage” that war—lately his wars—had brought.7 Millions in the occupied territories were jubilant over their liberation from Austrian rule. In practice, Napoleon was managing another of his balancing acts: keeping progressives around Europe convinced that he was a liberator and the fulfillment of the Revolution while convincing the reactionary rulers in Vienna that he had put revolution to rest.

  In the Bonaparte Symphony Beethoven wanted to evoke the character and story of a conqueror and the moral dimension of what the French were creating across Europe. Napoleon appeared to have achieved in war and diplomacy the kind of transformations that had escaped Joseph II in Vienna and Maximilian Franz in Bonn.8 At this critical moment in Beethoven’s career, to go to France, perhaps to charm the First Consul in person, was to attach himself to the most powerful and dynamic figure alive, the incarnate spirit of the age. In the process he placed himself alongside Napoleon as an embodiment of the age. This would be his means of stepping out of the role of servant in court and parlor and attaching himself to history as an actor rather than an entertainer. In an ideal sense, Beethoven might imagine becoming the kind of ethical and spiritual leader he recognized in poets and philosophers like Goethe and Schiller. Bonaparte was aimed toward lifting him to such heights. In the process, it would show the world what a sinfonia grande could truly be and do. Here was a conception worthy of the Aufklärung and of his gifts and ambitions.

  In these months he had to have felt himself imbued with a sense of possibility, discovery, inevitability. Perhaps he felt (he had reason to feel) that this was meant to be, that a new humanistic spirit had given birth to this music. Napoleon revitalized the Aufklärung ideals Beethoven had grown up with. Now he understood how to attach those ideals to his music. His teacher Christian Neefe wrote, “A meticulous acquaintance with the various characters [of men], with the physical and moral aspects of mankind, with the passions . . . [is required] if music is to be no empty cling-clang.” Beethoven remembered the Aufklärung dream of happiness and brotherhood that the Freemasons and Illuminati proclaimed, that Schiller called Elysium. (It appears that in this period he returned to an old ambition and made a setting of “An die Freude”—or a second setting—but he held it back.)9 These and more threads reaching from the present back to his childhood gathered to make the fabric of Bonaparte.

  In a winegrower’s cottage in Oberdöbling in summer of 1803, he settles down to work. As epic dreams unroll before his imagination, he rushes to realize them on the keyboard, in his head, in notes scratched onto the page. He spends hours lost in his raptus, improvising at the keyboard, ideas flowing from his fingers into sound, sketchbook on a table beside him to fix the sounds before they are gone. As he writes out the sketches he drums the beat with his hands and feet, cursing the notes for their recalcitrance. For Beethoven composing is a process physical as well as mental; his whole body is involved in it. Every day in all weathers he walks in hills and woods and country lanes, growling and howling and waving his arms conducting the music in his head, stopping to pencil ideas in the pocket sketchbooks he carries with him.

  The dots quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies, heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. Since then Vienna has been full of armies in parades a
nd exercises, preparing to fight the French. After the battles the city streets filled with soldiers wounded and dying, with funerals and mournful music. These scenes will find a place in the symphony. At the same time his sense of heroes and battles is founded on the ancients, on Plutarch and his exemplary men, Homer and the battle for Troy. So his larger subject will be heroes contemporary and ancient: Napoleon and his fellow benevolent despots Joseph II and Frederick the Great, Hector and Achilles and Odysseus—not only a hero but the Hero as archetype: Napoleon as man and myth.

  The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, he conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. For the first movement he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the mitte Gedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section, then a transition to the da capo, the recapitulation.10 His forms are not molds to be filled with notes but general guidelines to help organize a conception. This time the conception has a name: Bonaparte. Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject.11

  He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook. The conception will not be complete in his mind, not completely grasped, until the end is in place or at least in sight. But as usual, by the time sketches are seriously under way, he already has a sense of what the thing is about, what the leading ideas are, a plan for where das Thema is headed and why.

  But finding material is not a mechanical or mathematical process. Musical ideas, when they come, are like characters in a novel; each appears to the writer with a face and a personality and begins to speak. Beethoven keeps the reins tighter on his ideas than most artists, but he still has to wait for what the Muse, the unconscious, the angels, God—whatever it is—bestows on him.12 Sometimes the ideas come fast, sometimes they have to be courted at length. For Beethoven the process is harder than for most creators, because he demands that every idea has to submit to the plan, to leading motives of pitch and rhythm, the character, flow, key scheme, harmony. It is no easy job to make the wild horses of imagination run on a narrow track. Nonetheless, work on the Bonaparte proceeds fast.

  What does Beethoven know about Bonaparte in these early stages? Mainly he knows that it will be in E-flat major and it will end with a variation movement, based on the dance from the Prometheus ballet—like the Prometheus piano variations but recomposed for orchestra. Though using a naked bass line as a theme for variations is unheard of, a variation movement in a large work is nothing new.13 Haydn and Mozart did it—but as a middle movement in a quartet or sonata or symphony, or more rarely as a first movement. In the Bonaparte Symphony the variations on the englische are to be the finale, and a symphonic finale has to be pointed and climactic in a way that variations ordinarily are not. For the finale, then, he will have to fashion a new kind of form, a hybrid variation movement.

  The finale and its heroic key are the first elements he sees more or less clearly. So in a way he composes the symphony back to front, as he did with the Kreutzer Sonata. But finalizing the last movement has to wait. He needs to write the beginning before he writes the ending. For the listener, the finale can’t be a beginning, can’t be das Thema. That has to be the leading theme of the first movement, which sets up the primal sense of the work, its affect, tone, motifs, harmonies. The opening Thema begins the story. It needs to be compelling in itself, rich in potential for development and for growing subsidiary themes. At the same time this particular beginning has to contain the germ of the ending already settled on: variations on the basso and the englische tune.

  The way he does that is to base the beginning on the ending. A work feeds on itself. To get to the next step, you stand on what you have. So he derives his first-movement Thema from the last-movement Prometheus ideas. This is no great trick, a familiar process for him: taking a piece of material and making something new out of it. Once he has his opening Thema he can compose forward, working out the finale in detail at the end of the process.

  To do that, he has to consider, What sort of Thema for the beginning? In the sketch with ideas for the first three movements that he jotted down in summer 1802, he makes what appear to be two attempts to fashion a new theme out of the bass:14

  From Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process

  With these perhaps first attempts to turn the end into a beginning, he has already come to a surprising decision about the first movement. This evocation of a military hero, of campaigns and battles, will be in 3/4 time rather than in the 2/4 or 4/4 march time of military music. The music of the opening movement will have no literal evocation of marches or pageantry at all. It will be in a meter and in a lilting triple rhythm suggesting a dance—say, a waltz—rather than the military tread that marks the openings of his concertos. The symphony’s first movement is to be a kind of abstraction of heroism in the meter and rhythm of dance: a dance of destruction and creation in 3/4 time.

  To make his Thema he squeezes the Prometheus scraps for everything they hold. Since for Beethoven what comes first is usually most important, the first four notes of the basso are the prime issue: the move from tonic to dominant and back, the octave outline of the two B-flats. The rising chromatic slide in the middle of the basso will also serve.

  Finally, to make the opening theme he adds the note G to the scaffolding of the basso and inverts the direction of the two B-flats. To that he appends the three-note chromatic slide, this time going not up but down: E-flat–D–C-sharp. The first three notes of the resulting Thema, a major third up and back down, E-flat–G–E-flat, are the same as the first three notes of the englische tune. The new theme and the englische share a trochaic rhythm, long–short, long–short, and a wavelike shape:

  In other words, the new opening starts by outlining an E-flat-major chord, a triad, filling in the outline of the bass theme and forming the familiar figure of a horn call. A triadic horn call, then, is the essence of das Thema. Taking the most common chord in music as the leading motif is an utterly Beethovenian way to proceed. Surely from Haydn he had learned that he could start with something nearly meaningless and fill it with meaning through the course of a work.

  At some point before summer 1803, he has fashioned that triadic opening Thema. When he has settled on his theme, in a new sketchbook he begins to shape all the themes of the movement on or around a triad. As it turns out, his leading idea is not really a theme in the usual sense but simply a triad followed by a chromatic figure. Those motifs will turn up separately and together in evolving forms and permutations.

  While Beethoven improvises at the keyboard—and scribbles and walks, howls, conducts, stamps his feet and pounds the table—technique, story, symbol, and expression take shape together. Call the symphony’s opening theme “the Hero.” It is hardly a melody, less a theme in the usual sense than (like the basso) a kind of primal gesture. And this protean scrap of material has not just an abstract but a symbolic dimension: in the same way that the Hero theme generates the subsidiary themes of the first movement, the spirit of the Hero imbues his soldiers and his campaigns.15

  With his Thema in hand, Beethoven can go forward from the opening movement’s first part to Durchführung to da capo and coda—in the terms of a later time, exposition, development, recapitulation, coda. Amid the ragged tumult of ideas spilling into the sketchbook, he begins to make longer continuity drafts of the exposition. As in all his sketches, a single line of melody or figuration stands in for the full ensemble he hears in his mind.

  Feeling his way into the exposition section, he is already working with quite particular concepts. The first continuity sketch looks like this:

  From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks

  Much of that sketch will fall by the wayside, but already it has elements that will endure: (1) an opening on two monumental chords slashed onto silence, similar to the beginning of the Prometheus Overture (but not the same c
hords or the two downbeats he finally settles on); (2) the Hero theme fully formed in its dancelike 3/4, with a chromatic slide down to an out-of-key C-sharp that throws the harmony into uncertainty;16 (3) several variants of that chromatic slide; (4) a flowing second theme in B-flat built on the triadic motif of the Hero theme; (5) a skittering theme built on a descending triad (the theme will remain, but the harmony will change); and (6) a modulation to the distant key of D-flat, an enharmonic echo of the C-sharp in measure 7 (but the key of D-flat not in its final position in the movement). This continuity sketch spawns variants of some of its segments, some of those side sketches representing discoveries, some of them dead ends.

  In this first attempt at the exposition, he is already creating a sense of restless flux: in the middle of the first continuity sketch (marked X), the Hero theme climbs stepwise through a row of keys, B-flat to C to D-flat to E-flat. He will end up placing that idea later, in the development. Already, subsidiary themes are proliferating beyond the conventional one or two or three.

  In an addendum to the first continuity sketch, he arrives at another significant idea, another resonance that will start on the first pages: the idea of drifting. The quiet first statement of the Hero theme drifts off into uncertainty (the C-sharp) before righting itself back in E-flat. The second statement of the theme starting in the solo horn drifts, with an upward chromatic slide, into F minor in the violins. Eventually the third statement of the theme will be a fortissimo eruption in E-flat for full orchestra—which quickly drifts into piano. No point of arrival holds steady. Already, this drifting conjures the image of a protagonist in motion, advancing but not yet arriving.