The run-up to the program had witnessed more Beethovenian sound and fury. In the charity program of the previous month at the Theater an der Wien he managed to offend the house orchestra. Concertmaster Franz Clement and conductor Ignaz Seyfried took his side, but in December the rank and file at first refused to play under his baton. Striding up and down in rage and anxiety, Beethoven “listened” to the rehearsals from an anteroom (given his hearing, he heard very little). He had also somehow alienated the brilliant young soprano Anna Milder, his first Leonore, who declined to sing the aria. Her replacement in Ah! perfido was the inexperienced Josephine Killitschgy, sister-in-law of concertmaster Ignaz Schuppanzigh.
At the last minute the orchestra relented and allowed Beethoven onstage for the concert. It was a stressful evening for all. Unnerved by the difficult and unvocal solo part, Killitschgy succumbed to stage fright and muffed the performance. During the Choral Fantasy Beethoven realized some players had miscounted rests and a crash was imminent. He stopped the music, shouting angrily, “Quiet, quiet, this isn’t working! Once again!”2 He probably had no choice, but the orchestra was once again furious. (This time he took the political route and apologized to the players.)
Those not used to Beethoven’s singular conducting style had much to enjoy outside the music, what with his leaping and crouching and wild gesticulations on the podium. The month before, conducting one of his concertos from the keyboard, to mark a sforzando in the orchestra he swept his arms wide and knocked off the candles that were lighting his music stand. The audience was much amused. To forestall that sort of thing two choirboys were sent to stand at the sides of the piano and hold the candles. The orchestra started again. In the same spot Beethoven made the same gesture and smacked one of the boys in the face while the other one ducked. This inspired general hilarity. Beethoven was so furious that when he tried to start again at the piano, he broke several strings on the first chord.3
At the December concert visiting composer Johann Reichardt was marooned in Prince Lobkowitz’s box. While many of the audience trickled away, neither of them could decently leave even if they wanted to, because the box was in front of the hall, in view of the audience. The performing forces were heterogeneous, he noted, all the pieces difficult and unusual, and there had never been a complete rehearsal. Reichardt experienced, he wrote, “that one can easily have too much of a good thing—and still more of a loud.”4
On December 22 the program began with the Pastoral Symphony and finished with the Choral Fantasy, the latter cobbled together in one of Beethoven’s last-minute marathons. At the first rehearsal the ink was barely dry on the vocal parts. The fantasy has a kind of ingenuous charm. The text, by a local poet, was written to fit the tune of an old unpublished song of Beethoven’s called Gegenliebe. The lyrics, an ode to music, set forth a train of unions that bestow gifts on humanity. It begins—
Flatteringly lovely and fair are the sounds
of our life’s harmonies,
and from our sense of beauty there arise
flowers that blossom eternally.
In the next stanzas, “peace” and “joy” are wedded to bring exaltation, “music” and “words” wedded to turn the storms of life into light (once more that echt-Aufklärung image). “Outward repose” and “inward rapture” engender yet more light. The last stanza calls on enlightened humanity to embrace the final union:
And so, noble souls, accept
gladly the gifts of beautiful art.
When love and strength are wedded,
the favor of the gods rewards mankind.
The Choral Fantasy takes shape as an ad hoc form, an accumulation: long piano solo, orchestra brought in bit by bit, soloists brought in bit by bit, then a rapturous coda with full choir. The opening solo is a solemn C-minor fantasia—not at all a tragic C minor. Beethoven improvised it at the 1808 performance and in the published version likely recreated and touched up what he remembered of it. In the piece the piano soloist perhaps represents the spirit of music itself. It begins with massive handfuls of chords striding up and down the keyboard: “lovely and fair are the sounds / of our life’s harmonies.” Finally after a stretch of quasi-improvisation, the piano issues a glittering deluge of notes rising from bottom to top, the strings commence a dialogue, and that coaxes the leading theme from the piano. It is a forthright, declamatory kind of tune that since his teens (as in the song Who Is a Free Man?) Beethoven had associated with high-Aufklärung humanism. For him that humanistic style had been broadened and intensified by the example of the populistic music of the French Revolution. No less, the theme’s folklike style and stein-thumping rhythm evoke a geselliges Lied, the kind of exalted drinking song exemplified by Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.”
In several ways, Beethoven later remembered this grandiose if middleweight excursion when he came to compose his last symphony and returned to An die Freude. For one example, from the beginning of the Choral Fantasy there is a sense of searching for something. That destination turns out to be the main theme, its contours suggested in veiled form in the prefatory music. In his last symphony as here, the instruments would find the staunch main theme before the voices enter, and extend it into a series of variations. In the Choral Fantasy there is a “Turkish”-style variation; in his last symphony Beethoven remembered that idea too. Meanwhile the second variation is fronted by a dancing flute solo that operagoers at the time would have recognized as an echo of Mozart’s eponymous magic flute. In Mozart’s Zauberflöte and its echo here in Beethoven, the flute represents the magical power of music.
The voices enter piecemeal: a trio of women then a trio of men race through five stanzas until the chorus arrives to drive home the final verse, the one Beethoven most cared about. He extends that text for page after page, homing in on key words and the key idea: the marriage of “love” and “strength,” through whose union in art “the favor of the gods rewards mankind.” There is a hair-raising moment when the choir falls from G major to a brilliant E-flat chord on the word strength. Beethoven most especially would remember that chord change in his second mass and in his last symphony, where it proclaims the love and strength of God. That magical chord change echoes Haydn’s “Let there be light!” in The Creation.
The end of the Choral Fantasy, like the endings of Leonore and the Eroica, rises to unbounded joy: “Götter-Gunst!” (“the favor of the gods!”). Clearly, the text had been put together with the composer whispering in the ear of the poet, because the final stanza amounts to a description of Beethoven’s art. In the Choral Fantasy that ideal was set forth in a thin vessel turned out in a hurry. It would prove a model for the greater but fundamentally similar work to come. The Ninth Symphony also involves unions and marriages, but on a universal scale: music about things far beyond music.
The Third Piano Concerto had not entirely freed itself of Mozart and the eighteenth century, and it was still the vehicle of a virtuoso. The Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major, op. 58, was entirely Beethoven’s concerto, in the sense that the Razumovskys had declared his mature voice with quartets. The premiere of the Fourth in the concert of December 1808 marked the last time Beethoven played a concerto in public. Maybe in part for that reason, since concertos were no longer a practical part of his portfolio, in this piece he felt unconstrained in remaking the genre, as he had done with other genres, by intensifying its singularity, sharpening its profile as an individual.
The Fourth Concerto begins with the piano unaccompanied. The soloist is discovered brooding and soliloquizing alone, like a Romantic hero, in a phrase of inward and reverberant simplicity:5
Its thunder stolen, the orchestra enters quietly but in a very wrong key, distant B major, and not even with the soloist’s theme but with a variation of it. Soon the orchestra finds its way back to G major and something closer to the soloist’s theme, but from those opening gestures a divide is established that will mark the whole of the Fourth Concerto: soloist and orchestra are on different planes, sometimes complementa
ry, sometimes opposing, sometimes mutually oblivious. Here is the essential gambit of the Fourth Concerto.6 The solo has its version of das Thema, the orchestra has its version, and the two never quite agree on it. In fact, the soloist’s version will be heard only once more. So which version of the theme is the “real” one? There is no answer to that question.
Meanwhile the air of brooding nobility that the soloist establishes in the beginning is not otherwise his mood in the first movement, where he is playful, flighty, even mocking. The beginning foreshadows his inner voice, his mood in the second movement, where he and the orchestra will be at odds to a degree that threatens to shatter the integrity of the music.
At the same time the soloist’s opening soliloquy establishes a melodic and also a rhythmic motif that will rarely be absent from the first movement. That conception was there from what may have been the first idea for the concerto, in the 1803 sketchbook largely devoted to the Eroica. In the wake of his breakthrough symphony, Beethoven’s imagination had been racing toward the future. As of 1803 he had found the leading idea for what became the Fifth Symphony, not only its leading motif but the central conception that it would rage on relentlessly. In a sketch he takes the motif down a chain of descending thirds:
From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks
Then something struck him. On the opposite page from that sketch he jotted down an idea in G major:
From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks
There is the melodic line, virtually intact, of the opening piano soliloquy of the Fourth Piano Concerto. The sketch continues with a passage for orchestra, not immediately in B major, like the final score, but including a jump to B major. Already he had conceived the harmonic dissonance between solo and orchestra.
What unites these sketches for a symphony and a concerto is a contrasting interpretation of the same rhythmic motif. The three-note upbeat to a longer note had been a favorite of Beethoven’s for a long time, a motif that served him well. There is something innately propulsive about it, the strength of the propulsion depending on how it is presented. In the Fifth Symphony that motif, sped up, is driving and ferocious. Slowed in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto, it creates a gentle lilt, strung along and ending with a sigh:
The commission for the Fourth Symphony and the other rush of works of 1806 broke off work on both the C Minor Symphony and the Fourth Concerto. He picked up the concerto again and had it finished by spring 1807, then returned to the Fifth Symphony. Before the premiere of December 1808, the concerto likely had a private reading or two, hosted by Prince Lobkowitz.7
Czerny recalled that in the premiere of the concerto Beethoven handled the solo part freely, with a good deal more embellishment than ended up in the published score. That was fitting to the personality of the concerto soloist: when he is expected to echo or to lead the orchestra, he is apt instead to break into glittering roulades. Most especially, this notably flighty soloist is not interested in the military direction the orchestra takes in the A-minor second theme and its lead-in. All this foreshadows the calls and nonresponses that will mark the second movement. Solo and orchestra are on two different tacks, if in the first movement in the same general direction.
The second entrance of the soloist, in the normal concerto position beginning the second exposition, hints at his attitude in a series of tritones, C–F-sharp, the old diabolus in musica Beethoven had singled out as early as the op. 1 Trio in C Minor. The implication here is not tragic or demonic but contrarian: at his second entrance in the piece the piano declares neither his own version of das Thema nor the orchestra’s but rather offers up a bouquet of flowers. From that point on, their interaction is a series of frustrated expectations, the soloist remaining neither a follower nor a leader—though he does manage a more embroidered version of the orchestral Thema:
Soon after, while the bassoon plays a lyrical line, the piano surrounds him in mocking dissonances:
Throughout this game the overall tone is stately, lyrical, only occasionally military. The orchestra’s exposition does fall into a tranquil and lovely interlude in B-flat that the piano succumbs to later. During the development there is no particular hostility between the forces, but suddenly at the recapitulation the soloist bursts out fortissimo with his original version of das Thema, which has not been heard since the opening soliloquy. It is as if he were shouting, No! This is the way it goes! This is my idea that you stole and never got right!8 Then the piano retreats to pianissimo, the tension ebbs, the combatants return to their places, and the exact solo version of the Thema disappears again. In the cadenza the soloist must work hard to outdo all the virtuosity that has preceded it.9 The coda builds to a grand fortissimo finish, the soloist joining the massive chords of the close.
The rift between solo and orchestra comes to a head in the E-minor second movement: alternating phrases, never together, the orchestra insistent, the soloist oblivious, inward, lost in some kind of raptus—but also calming and cajoling. While the basis of this dramatic tableau is simple enough, there had never been anything like it, because its fundamental conception negates the very idea of unity of affect and material. At the beginning the strings play a quiet, dotted military figure, ending on a harmonically open note: an invitation. Then, silence. The soloist responds quietly, molto cantabile, as if singing to himself. He has returned to the chordal texture and the brooding tone of his soliloquy that opened the piece. As in the first movement, he is not interested in the military tread that the strings try to force on him in phrases of mounting belligerence. The soloist sighs, retreats, breaks out in roulades, screams tritones (A–D-sharp) in a small cadenza. The strings retreat with a last marching tread, pianissimo, then slide into a sigh much like the soloist’s. He echoes it. With that the movement ends, if not in resolution, then in some kind of truce.10
In the beginning of the concerto, the strings first entered on the not-quite-right piano theme, in the wrong key. The strings kick off the Vivace finale with a dashing rondo theme again in the wrong key, C major. It also happens to be a tune that the soloist cannot play: a piano is not capable of comfortably executing those fast repeating notes that are natural for a bowed instrument. Echoing the theme, all he can do is turn it into a piano version:
In other words, topsy-turvy. In the first movement the strings can’t get the piano theme right; in the finale the piano can’t precisely play the string’s rondo theme at all. In the slow movement the two forces reach a tentative rapprochement only in the last bars. In the finale the original rivalry endures, the sense of call-and-unreliable-response, but now the game is played as comedy. By the third line the strings even present a coy little bit that the piano can play exactly. The piano is back to its glitter-and-be-gay mood, but now there is a sense that the two forces are completing one another’s thoughts rather than contradicting them. The piano presents a beautifully lyrical B theme that the strings gently second. Still, the music has a lot of trouble settling on the actual key, G major, until the final appearance of the flowing B theme, and that long-delayed resolution gives the moment a throat-grabbing poignancy. In the coda the A theme insists on coming back in C major but finally agrees to end in the proper key, G.
One of the striking qualities of the Fourth, eventually to be numbered among the finest of all concertos, is that its disputes, its debates, its mutual lacks of understanding, whatever one wants to call them, are carried on in the outer movements largely in a tone of play, most playfully in the finale. And the finale’s denouement comes well before the coda, in a sudden and sublime stretch of singing E-flat major, pianissimo, in divided violas, with gentle piano garlands above. It is as if piano and orchestra have decided together that wrong keys are a fine thing.11
It is hard to conceive what that first audience in 1808 made of the Fifth Symphony in C Minor, op. 67, as they sat shivering in the cold theater having already heard nearly two hours of scrambling performances of new and strenuous music. How many listeners heard an epoch beginning at the fir
st performance of the Eroica? Something of nearly that order was happening again. By comparison to the Fifth Symphony, the Third is almost esoteric. The Fifth reaches out and shakes you, then for solace presents you with the most exquisite beauties.
The Third Symphony is in E-flat major, to Beethoven most often meaning an echt-Aufklärung, humanistic, heroic piece (though he explored other moods of that key).12 The Fifth is in C minor, therefore driving, portentous, fateful. First conceived and sketched in the same burst of creative fire as the Eroica, the Fifth unfolds in a different world from that of the Third, but it has the same kind of dramatic narrative.
Only this time Beethoven did not give a name to the story. At some early point in the sketching, he decided on or sensed something like this: The C Minor Symphony will be more unified in its narrative and in its material than any symphony before, beyond anything I or anybody else has done. The essence of that unity will be conveyed by the simplest thing possible: a four-note tattoo, a primal rhythm. That rhythm will saturate the first movement and return in new guises to the end. How the motif is transformed will be the essence of the narrative. So the leading idea will be not a “theme” but a motif. And I will treat that tiny motif in the same way I treat any opening theme: everything will flow from it.
Later Beethoven’s amanuensis Anton Schindler told the world that Beethoven said of the symphony’s opening thunderclap, Thus fate knocks at the door. Beethoven was excruciatingly familiar with that knock. But Schindler was a chronic liar, and there is no way to know whether Beethoven truly said that (assuming that, now and then, Schindler uttered something true). At the same time, Schindler was an accomplished musician and what he said about Beethoven’s music was often astute, whether factual or not. Which is to say that here Schindler was right: the first movement implies a story about something on the order of the action of fate on the life of an individual, an assault that cannot be turned back but can only be borne, resisted, transcended from within.13
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 57