Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  After a gentle closing theme starting over a rustic drone, connoisseurs would hear the expected repeat of the exposition, returning to the cello theme. But it’s a feint, a false return; there will be no conventional repeat.16 From that point the development spins through a winding course involving some dozen keys, coming to rest for a moment on a section of double fugue in his old admired key of E-flat minor—here not in its usual poignant-unto-tragic vein but rather driving and intense.17

  The recapitulation is as singular as the false repeat of the exposition. It arrives back in F major not with the expansive cello theme but with the first subtheme, then wanders off harmonically. At length, a grand C-major scale brings in the recapitulation proper but overlaps the return of the cello theme. All this is done to blur the moment of recapitulation. Beethoven wanted the form of the movement fluid, suppressing the formal landmarks to make a more continuous, fantasia-like effect. Finally in the coda of (for Beethoven) modest length, the main theme returns in glory, pealed out in the high violin over droning fifths in the bass, and so finds a stable harmonic foundation at last. At the end there is a quiet touch of modal cadence on the primal D–C before the official fortissimo cadence to F major.

  All the movements are in sonata form. The following Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando (“vivacious and always playful”) was for its time the most scandalous movement of all, its personality and leading idea so eccentric that many never grasped how playful it is. (He never wrote another movement like it.)18 It occupies the place of a scherzo but has little to do with conventional scherzo style or form. It starts, like the first movement, with the cello, this time alone with a bouncing rhythm on the note B-flat, followed by a little dancing figure in the violin; call them the drumbeat and the pirouette.19 They will be nearly the entire melodic subjects of the movement, taken through a variegated course of keys and moods echoing the development of the first movement. (There are a couple of flowing ideas for contrast.)

  To use a one-note rhythmic figure as a theme defines what critics of the time decried as “bizarre.” On first playing over the movement in Moscow, cellist Bernhard Romberg, Beethoven’s old Bonn friend, was so outraged by it that he threw the music to the floor and stamped on it, calling it an undignified joke.20 In fact the idea is simple in conception, if singular in effect: a naked rhythm treated as a theme, first presented as if it were drummed out, then redefined during a long, romping, kaleidoscopic journey. Already by this point in op. 59, Beethoven seems to be reveling in his emancipation from Haydn, his freedom to bend melody and harmony and form any way he wants, his confidence that Schuppanzigh and his men could handle anything he asked of them.

  Nothing quite prepares listeners for the F-minor Adagio molto e mesto third movement, mesto meaning “mournful.” It begins in medias res, with its twisting, anguished mesto aria. On a sketch, Beethoven wrote, “A Weeping Willow or Acacia Tree over my Brother’s Grave.”21 That is a poetically apt evocation of the mood, if a mystery in terms of his life: both his brothers were still alive.22 The second theme is a sorrowfully arching melody that begins in a spidery texture of violin and cello. Unlike his earlier mesto in op. 10, hopefulness lingers amid the sadness, the cello turning its theme to A-flat major. In the development comes a poignant, whispering D-flat arioso, like a tentative answer to pathos, a wounded consolation.23

  The last movement’s Russian folk tune is dutifully titled Thème russe on the page, in case we might miss it. The music is jaunty and ironic, verging on monothematic, like the first movement, beginning with its vaguely modal tune on the cello—also like the first movement. If there is no overt lingering of the sorrows of the mesto, repeated notes in a segment near the end of the exposition recall the second movement. The main concern of the short development is a sustained march toward an expansive D-minor treatment of the chattering second theme; there, the starring pitch, D, having hung around in the background, finds its moment of glory. As another example of redefinition, the recapitulation begins in the wrong key, B-flat major (with a flat sixth). The Thème russe has to start with its first notes harmonized in B-flat until the music rights itself into F major.24 As in all the movements, the form is fluid. A racing and raucous fortissimo final page is interrupted by a gently chromatic adagio that recalls the atmosphere of the slow movement; then high spirits bubble up. So ends a quartet fresh, fascinating, galvanizing to the future of the medium, at the same time emotionally elusive, with little of the transparent beginning-to-end narrative arc that Beethoven was usually given to.25

  Again, as it had been with Haydn and Mozart and his own earlier procedure, in issuing sets of pieces Beethoven provided a variety of keys and moods. No. 2 of the Razumovsky set is normal in being a contrasting piece in E minor. What surprises in this generally surprising opus is the intensity of the contrast. There are also some tonal connections that suggest these three quartets may have been intended as a complete concert program.

  Where no. 1 was expansive and extroverted, the beginning of no. 2 in E minor paints a character inward and unpredictable: two slashing chords by way of introduction, then keening wisps of melody and silences to start a compact exposition. The beginning is as curiously fragmentary as the previous quartet’s was curiously sustained. The opening E–B fifth in the violin is one primal motif, the cello’s ­E–D-sharp another. On the second line a passionate theme breaks out only to go up in smoke, starts again only to be erased by a fortissimo outburst. The feeling of the minor mode here is not tragic but mysterious, with startling harmonic jumps. The opening whispered E-minor figure moves, after a rest, to the same figure a half step higher, on F major, the Neapolitan—the key of the previous quartet. So we start with a jump from E minor to F with only silence as transition. That half-step harmonic motion will mark the whole piece. So will silences.26 Beethoven remains as completely a master of the expressive pause as of expressive notes.27 The rests here are fraught and questioning. And the overall progress of the quartet, as in no. 1, is not a clear dramatic narrative but something more intangible, abstract, even esoteric.

  The G-major second theme is contrasting, gracious, sustained, the exposition’s closing theme a burst of ebullience. Here as he did in the F Major Quartet’s first movement, he introduces the second theme in the conventional key, as if to provide a lifeline in the larger tonal turbulence. After a brief development, the music reaches the home key of E minor several bars before the recapitulation proper, so the development flows unbroken into the recapitulation (he blurred the formal lines similarly in the F Major). The compact development is answered by a highly uncommon repeat back to its beginning, making the movement expansive after all. In the coda, the attempts at a sustained theme heard on the first page flower into a passionate stretch of melody that rises to a fortissimo peak and sinks back to quietness.

  Carl Czerny recalled Beethoven saying that the E-major second movement fell into his mind “when contemplating the starry sky and thinking about the music of the spheres”—for Beethoven the Aufklärer, an evocation of the divine. It is a sonata-form movement of tender, long-breathed melodies in a poignant E major.28 Inevitably the future would see this stretching for the ethereal and sublime as a prophecy of his late music.29 The droll and quirky scherzo is again in E minor. Its theme smacks the second beat, giving the music a gimpy tread, and it plays with ideas from the quartet’s opening including the E–B fifth, the B–C, and E–D-sharp figures. The second period makes the quartet’s trademark jump from E minor to F major. A jovial and fugal E-major trio gives this quartet’s Russian tune a whirl. There have been various foreshadowings of this tune from the beginning (its first two notes, for example, are E–B), but on the whole this Russian theme sounds as if it were in ironic quotation marks. Beethoven offers it without all that much attempt to integrate it.30

  In tonal terms, call the sonata-rondo finale ironically perverse: the rondo theme is in the wrong key, C major (so a prophecy of the key of the next quartet in the set). It is a romping and raucous march with s
ome sort of exotic overtone—Turkish, or Gypsyish. Against that C major the proper key, E minor, struggles to assert itself. In the developmental middle section a fugue pops up, its quick entries and mock-scholarly inversions of the theme reinforcing the comic mood. The overall tonal point is going to be, in the coda, a grand resolution of C down to B and D up to D-sharp and so finally, belatedly, to E minor. Yet at the beginning of the coda, the rondo theme turns up yet again in its C-major effrontery until, with a più presto, the theme settles on the right key in a frenetic E-minor peroration—with a last whiff of F major. In a way, the games with keys in the E Minor Quartet amount to comedy for connoisseurs, who know a peculiar tonal leap when they hear one, and who know that a rondo theme is supposed to be in the home key.

  The introduction of the last of the op. 59 quartets, no. 3 in C major, seems to announce the strangest, most chromatic piece of the set: wandering harmonies starting with a diminished-seventh chord and suggesting no key at all—a little harmonic labyrinth.31 Yet that introduces an Allegro vivace that could serve as a definition of vivace, lively, and of C major in its most ebullient mood. Connoisseurs would immediately identify where this paradoxical juxtaposition came from: Mozart’s famous quartet nicknamed the “Dissonant” because it has the same effect of a chromatic and gnarly introduction to a largely carefree C-major movement. In the context of the Razumovsky set, it is as if with this high-spirited and ingratiating personage Beethoven offered a panacea for players and listeners boggled by the first two quartets. Sure enough, no. 3 was the first to catch on, as its first reviewer implied: “[B]y virtue of its individuality, melody, and harmonic power [it] must win over every educated friend of music.”32

  This was another of the 1806 works written at a gallop. Like the Violin Concerto and Fourth Symphony, it is absolutely of a piece and a splendid piece, but more compact in material than its colleagues in the set, with less complex interrelations than the others. Its conservative elements, however, do not imply a retreat to the eighteenth century. All the Razumovskys are distinctive pilgrims on Beethoven’s New Path.

  After the introduction, the Allegro vivace starts with a sharp little pickup away from the tonic to a downbeat dominant-seventh chord, creating much energy with a flick of the pen. Upbeat figures mark most of the themes in this quartet—with steady variations on the idea. Another abiding motif from the first-violin solo is a zigzag shape, figures that tend to go up, down, up, down, in chains. The long solo for the first violin presages a piece with concerto-like overtones, bravura solos handed around generously. The first theme proper has the same key as the rondo theme in the finale of no. 2 and starts with the same notes in the same register. It’s as rambunctious as its predecessor, in a more loping rhythm. The rippling second theme presents its own version of the upbeat and the zigzag. As in all the Razumovsky first movements, the second theme debuts in the conventional key, here G major:

  All this is to say that this is the least searching, least eccentric member of op. 59. The development mainly concerns itself with the Allegro’s opening violin solo, its pickup figure and dotted rhythms. The recapitulation plunges into the dancing first theme proper, refurbished with scintillating rhythms in gorgeous sonorities. The coda starts with a section of nothing but pickup figures in one form and another.

  There appears to be no quote of a Russian tune in no. 3. For the second movement, there is what Beethoven may have conceived as an evocation of a slow Russian song or dance. Marked Andante con moto quasi allegretto and in sonata form, it is one of those sui generis pieces he pulled out of the air now and then, haunting and beautiful in its quiet obsessiveness, its rocking barcarole rhythm, its key of A minor rare and special for Beethoven.33 The flavor is hard to trace because it sounds not all that Russian. If there is a nameable overtone, call it Jewish soulfulness, or a lament of some imaginary tribe. The tone is muted and brooding rather than tragic, with a suddenly gay C-major second theme.

  In the third movement Beethoven looks back to the past in terms of his own present with a Minuetto grazioso that once again defines its heading. It is a minuet without lace, with only a distant echo of the galant tone, its mellow and unassuming gracefulness nearly as singular as in the previous movement. Then, having started with an Allegro much like the previous quartet’s finale, for the Allegro molto finale in C major, he leaps into a madcap quasi-fugue, continual variations of its quirky and comical opening theme dashing through keys in company with a series of countersubjects. It is one of his less substantial but most effervescent finales, the kind of thing he could write in a burst of compositional virtuosity, a movement skating headlong on its own constantly renewing energy:

  With his commission, Count Razumovsky surely got more than he expected, certainly far more than he paid for. He got in many ways the three most original, most idiosyncratic, most expansive and ambitious string quartets ever written to that time—in their brilliance and in their eccentricities the only ones among the hundreds of that era that stand up to Haydn and Mozart. After they settled in, they would prove to be inescapable influences on virtually every future string quartet by every future composer. For Beethoven’s part, having cleared his throat with op. 18, with op. 59 he was ready to stand up to his predecessors and models, ready to prove he was their equal on their home ground. In his bargain, Count Razumovsky also commissioned immortality for himself. He became one more of those great and glorious noblemen whom history remembers only for their connection to the commoner Ludwig van (not von) Beethoven.

  In quality and in quantity, the standard of work Beethoven established in 1806 could hardly be matched by any mortal, including himself. By that standard, 1807 was a calmer year in creative terms, at the same time richer in incident on both sides of the ledger. He and Lichnowsky had more or less made up after their battle royal of the previous year, though they were never as intimate again. In April, Beethoven came near to losing another important friend, this time because of carelessness more than pride.

  He had become close to pianist Marie Bigot and her husband Paul Bigot de Morogues, Count Razumovsky’s librarian.34 This couple was not rich and powerful, like his aristocratic patrons, but simply people he liked and appreciated. Marie he admired for her playing, which she had showed off in reading through the water-stained Appassionata manuscript at sight. As a performer Marie is recorded as being not only technically brilliant but also imaginative and individual. In 1805, when she first played for Haydn, the old man threw his arms around her and exclaimed, “Oh, my dear child, I did not write this music—it is you who have composed it!” In the same spirit, Beethoven said after listening to her render a sonata of his, “That’s not exactly the character I wanted to give this piece, but go right ahead. If it isn’t entirely mine, it’s something better.”35 As musicians sometimes say of a conductor or a coach, Beethoven let his performers play, gave them the reins if they were artists he respected. When he said to Marie Bigot, “[I]t’s something better,” he meant better for you, because it’s yours.

  He much admired Marie’s person, beyond her talent. Soon, maybe too soon, Beethoven fell into an affectionate relationship with the Bigots, and with Marie a flirtatious one. “Kiss your wife very often,” he wrote Paul. “I could not blame you for it.” Probably Paul got less and less amused by this sort of thing. That he was more than twenty years older than Marie would not have increased his patience with younger men’s attentions to her.36

  Maybe a blowup was inevitable. It was sparked by an invitation. “My dear and much admired Marie!” Beethoven wrote her at the beginning of April. “The weather is so divinely beautiful . . . So I propose to fetch you about noon today and take you for a drive—As Bigot has presumably gone out already, we cannot take him with us, of course . . . Why not seize the moment, seeing that it flies so quickly?”37 And so on. An anxious Marie declined the invitation and showed the letter to her husband, who was duly outraged.

  There was a face-to-face confrontation that Beethoven did not handle well—it seems in fact th
at he was speechless. What Paul Bigot said is not recorded, but Beethoven’s chagrin when he got home produced two of his longest and most convoluted letters of apology. Even if he had no improper designs on Marie, he realized he had stepped over the line. Still, he felt the need to explain himself:

  I can well believe that my strange behavior has startled you . . . At the same time you would be wrong to think that my behavior was prompted to any extent by my displeasure at the refusal of my request to Marie—True enough, I cannot deny it, I felt very much hurt; and the reason why I did not speak to you was in order not to display my feelings . . . I am so very fond of you all, and why should I not confess it; indeed you are the dearest people I have met since I left my native town . . . I still cannot understand why it would have been improper if Marie and Caroline [her sister] had come out driving with me—But we shall talk about this . . . You cannot conceive the pain it causes me merely to think that I have given you an unpleasant moment.

  Directly after, in a letter addressed to both Marie and Paul, he has become more embarrassed, but still not abject:

  Not without experiencing the deepest regret have I been made to realize that the purest and most innocent feelings can often be misunderstood . . . dear M, I never dreamed of reading anything more into your behavior than the gift of your friendship . . . Besides, it is one of my chief principles never to be in any other relationship than that of friendship with the wife of another man . . . Possibly once or twice I did indulge with Bigot in some jokes which were not quite refined. But I myself told you that sometimes I am very naughty—I am extremely natural with all my friends and I hate any kind of constraint.