Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  So in Beethoven’s mind there was presumably some dramatic scenario behind the Fifth Symphony, but he decided that, like most of his works, this one did not need to be nailed to a stated narrative. For those equipped to understand it, the gist would be clear enough in the notes. That story would be as direct as the rest of the symphony: a movement from darkness to light, from C minor to C major, from the battering of fate to joyous triumph.

  The compaction of material flows from the first gesture, that unforgettable explosion of three Gs and an E-flat. Once again, for Beethoven the opening idea, das Thema, is the embryo of a work. Here he boils down das Thema to just four notes that still function like a Thema: they are the symphony in essence.

  In the symphony’s first moment, in that percussive da-da-da-dum, we hear the primal rhythmic figure that will dominate the first movement and persist as motif and rhythmic scaffolding to the end. We sense the force-of-nature energy of the movement. We hear the bluntness of effect, the simplest harmonies proclaimed as if discovered for the first time. We hear the muscular quality that will mark the orchestral sound. We are misled by the key; it seems to be E-flat major but is actually C minor; that ambiguity creates tension.14 The propulsive effect of the primal “&-2-& 1” rhythmic tattoo comes from its beginning on a void, a charged rest on the beginning of the 2/4 measure, then three eighth notes driving into the next measure, in which a new start of the figure is usually overlapped to drive forward again. Call the effect of this tattoo dominating the movement a monorhythm.

  At the same time, besides that dominating rhythmic motif, we are presented with a more subtle undercurrent: the opening pitches G–E-flat–F–D form an S shape, down-up-down, that will serve as scaffolding for all the themes in the symphony.15

  A rhythm, a shape, a dynamism moving from darkness to light, from C minor to C major, a determination to knit the piece tightly from beginning to end—these are essential conceptions of the Fifth Symphony. They are not different in kind from what Beethoven had done before. For that matter, they are not different in kind from Haydn and Mozart. They are different in intensity and concentration, in force and fury, in how thoroughly they permeate the music. Now instead of using a rhythmic motif as a background device for moving the music forward, Beethoven places the motif in the foreground as the substance of the music. To the ears of the time the result was strange and breathtaking in a way that later listeners, for whom the Fifth became ubiquitous in the repertoire, a kind of sacred monster, would hardly be able to reclaim.

  The blunt simplification of gesture and sound, the monorhythm, and the simple, stripped-down sonata form of the first movement are shaped to convey something ferocious, inescapable: a force of nature, a relentless drumming of fate. Once again Beethoven shows off his incomparable skill at creating and sustaining tension, one of the hardest things to do in music that has to be worked out over months and sometimes years, penned one note at a time.

  The singing second theme is bound to the basic ideas. It is introduced by a pealing horn call on B-flat–E-flat–F–B-flat—the S shape, the intervals expanded from the beginning. Those notes in turn are used as scaffolding for the second theme:

  As has been noted, the phrasing of that theme is 2-3-4 1, augmenting the primal rhythmic tattoo. The basses under the second theme inject the original tattoo. The primal figure gets into everything: the rhythms on the surface and the phrasings under the surface.

  To say it again: For Beethoven the elements of a piece are not just abstractly logical, they are also expressive, full of feeling and meaning from the level of the individual gesture to the whole of the form.16 In the first movement he intensifies the effect of something inescapable by a simplification of form: only the primal motif for first theme; the short, contrasting second theme in the usual key, the relative major; in the development not a wide range of keys (mostly G minor). No subthemes, no formal ambiguities, a regular recapitulation. (The whole of the symphony is one of his shortest, some thirty-four minutes, but its impact makes it feel much longer.) The simplification of outline is part of its fatalism. It is as if there were no way out of the dictates of the form.

  So the form is simple and regular—except for one giant peculiarity: the retransition to the recapitulation. Ordinarily for Beethoven that is a point of high anticipation. Instead, here at that point the music drifts into a fog, vague pulsations of strings and winds calling to one another. The shouting horns that herald the recapitulation burst out of that fog. The haze will return in the movements to come. Another unusual element in an otherwise straightforward recapitulation is a brief, poignant oboe soliloquy that interrupts the flow. The oboe appears like an individual standing frail and alone, singing in the midst of a storm. Here again logic and emotion work together: the oboe retraces the descent from G to D in the first four bars of the movement; at the same time, in its flowing descents the soliloquy foreshadows the themes of the second movement.

  The final novelty is an immense coda, equal in length to the exposition and to the development. As he had done in the Waldstein and the Appassionata, here again Beethoven manages the feat of ratcheting enormous tension still higher; the music becomes an all-consuming rampage. The climax, strings and winds again calling to one another, is a sweeping downward scale tracing a sixth. That downward sixth, from E-flat to G, will become a refrain in the second movement. So the coda is at once an intensification of the drama, a thematic completion, a continuation of the development, and a foreshadowing of the slow movement.17 Yet the coda generates so much energy that the curt final chords cannot resolve the tension. As in the Eroica and the Waldstein, resolution and completion will have to wait until the finale.

  After the tempest of the first movement and its climax in the coda, the second movement arrives suddenly, in medias res, its lilting theme in the cellos like an oasis and a solace. (Its key of A-flat major served the same function of release from C-minor tension in the Pathètique.) Beethoven labeled the first sketch of the main theme Andante quasi minuetto. For all its gentle charm, the cello line has a strangely angular configuration, partly because it is built in several ways on the scaffolding of the S shape, the intervals expanded (see earlier example). In the second movement the driving tattoo from the opening bars is tamed. On the first page of the symphony it is a driving upbeat figure: &-2-& 1. In the second movement it often forms a more flowing figure starting on a downbeat: 1-2-3 1. In bars 14–16 of the second movement we hear the figure in both forms at four speeds, underlying a phrase of ineffable tenderness that echoes the descent from E-flat to G in the coda of the first movement:

  In its form the Andante con moto is lucid but singular: alternating double variations, first on the cello theme with its tender refrain, then a B theme that begins quietly in A-flat and then flares into a pealing, brassy C major. Eventually that C-major fanfare will be transformed into the first blaze of the finale. (In sketches Beethoven first made it quite close to the opening of the last movement, then tempered the resemblance to a premonition.)18 The fog of the first-movement retransition turns up again; at the end of each pair of variations, the music retreats into a mist, as if it has lost its thought. The first variation on theme A is drifting and beautiful, like a fair-weather cloud in summer. But near the end, after more exchanges of the two themes, the final variation of theme A is a strange staccato march of woodwinds, in affect somewhere between parodistic and ominous. Both those qualities foreshadow the next movement.

  That movement, in C minor, is a scherzo in meter and tempo and form (scherzo-and-trio), but in tone hardly the usual playful outing; it is tinged with Beethoven’s C-minor mood. There is a whispering bass oration, then a peal of horns and answering winds on a sternly aggressive theme:

  That theme is another expression of the 1-2-3 1 version of the primal rhythmic motif, and its C minor returns the music to something like the fateful tone of the first movement. But now the moods drift, there is no monorhythm, no sense of something inescapable. So the first part is capable of giving
way to a jovial C-major trio whose main theme strides continually down in thirds:

  There is a farcical moment when the basses set out on a racing line and stumble, stop, try it again, stumble again, and finally get it right. Besides providing a comic interlude in the expressive narrative, there may be a private joke here: Beethoven retaliating against perennial grumbles over the difficulties of his bass parts. The trio also previews leading melodic ideas of the finale, so it amounts to a prophecy of the triumph of C major.

  Here ambiguity creeps in. The C-minor nonscherzo comes back altered, the bass theme turned into a staccato parody—the same thing that happened to the main theme in the previous movement. Then, as in both earlier movements, fog rolls in, truncating the varied repeat.19 The music falls into a mysterious texture of strings and thrumming timpani.20 Its ancestor is Haydn’s “Chaos,” which prepares the emergence of light.21

  From that quiet chaos bursts the C-major blaze of the finale, whose essence lies in the brass. Its style recalls the simple and straightforward manner of French revolutionary music, the feeling like a cry of freedom and release. Enhancing the weight and flexibility of the brass, to the horns and trumpets Beethoven adds trombones for one of the first times in a symphony.22 Their throaty blare gives the finale not only weight but a distinctive coloration. To extend the orchestra’s compass upward, he adds a piccolo.

  Call the finale a triumphant recomposition of the first movement, without the fateful monorhythm but with the same kind of relentless intensity—now a joyful intensity. The materials of first and last movements are the same. The primal rhythmic tattoo is first enfolded in scales dashing upward. The main motif of the movement itself is a three-note up-striding figure, prophesied in the brass theme of the second movement:

  The &-2-& 1 and 1-2-3 1 motifs turn up in various avatars, likewise the S shape (see earlier example).23

  Like the first movement the layout is straightforward sonata form, but with more variety of themes and keys. The development starts loud, calms down, builds with mounting excitement toward the recapitulation. But at the moment of return, when we expect the brass to break into their heroic shout, abruptly the music pulls back into a shrouded place, as it did several times in the earlier movements. What happens then is beyond anticipation: the comic/ominous theme of the third movement returns in a staccato tread. The effect is much like something Beethoven had done years before: the racing finale of the op. 18 B-flat Major Quartet invaded by La Malinconia. This time there is no label on the page, and the effect of the nonscherzo invading the finale is ambiguous. But in both pieces the gist is the same: The joy and the triumph will not be unsullied, not be complete. Beethoven knew that triumph is never final. The demon can always come back.24

  After a truncated recall of the foggy transition to the finale the recapitulation erupts in full force, as if the interruption had never happened. In the coda, Beethoven wanted, as he had done in the first movement, to raise the intensity even higher. There the intensity of fate, here the intensity of joy. He returns to the monorhythm of the first movement, in a steadily ascending figure. Here is the final transformation of the primal rhythm: in the beginning of the symphony it was a fatefully falling figure, here a triumphantly rising one:

  The effect is similar to the end of the Eroica, but the implications are quite otherwise. The Eroica adumbrated a story of a hero’s victory and the blessings he brings the world; it conveyed that narrative in complex forms and a welter of ideas. The Fifth tells a story of personal victory and inner heroism, painted in broad strokes on an epic canvas. The ecstasy at the Eroica’s end is humanity rejoicing. The ecstasy at the end of the Fifth Symphony is a personal cry of victory.

  That journey from despair to victory was Beethoven’s own. As his mother taught him: without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown. But Beethoven was not a Romantic, and he was not mainly concerned with “expressing himself.” As in all his music, even if there were echoes of his own life the goal was not autobiography but a larger human statement. The Eroica exalts a benevolent despot as a human ideal. The Fifth Symphony makes that heroic ideal individual, inward, but no less universal. The Eroica exalts the conquering hero as bringer of a just and peaceful society. The Fifth proclaims every person’s capacity for heroism under the buffeting of life, a victory open to all humanity as individuals. The later course of Beethoven’s music amplified that journey inward. As he would put it one day: through suffering to joy.25

  The Fifth would stand as a thunderclap in musical history. With the Sixth Symphony in F Major, op. 68, Beethoven took a turn equally drastic, as drastic as any in his career. On the face of it, the Sixth echoed something he had done before: follow an aggressively challenging work with a gentler and more popularistic one. The Fifth is ferocious and has no stated program. The Sixth is a sunny walk in the fields, equipped with a title: Pastoral, each movement with a subtitle relating to a day in the country. But again it is a matter of degree, of the intensity of the contrast: the Sixth Symphony is the anti-Fifth.

  From older sketchbooks Beethoven picked up some sketches toward the Pastoral and finished it in spring 1808, directly after the Fifth, in the middle of trying to extract another benefit concert from the court bureaucracy. In the Pastoral we see one of the more transparent demonstrations of how he turned an idea into sound: the idea inflecting melody, harmony, rhythm, and color. His inherited formal outlines he cut and shaped and sometimes broke to fit the idea.

  The Sixth’s first germ was perhaps a sketch conjuring the sound of a brook. His thought process evolved toward the idea of an orchestral work about a visit to the country. It was not to be an overture or a single movement or some kind of free-form orchestral fantasia. It was to be a real symphony: a “pastoral” symphony. The pastoral mode had been done many, many times before. Like the popular pieces picturing battles, pastorals were largely a trivial genre. Handel, however, had placed a lovely interlude called “Pastoral Symphony” in his Messiah. More to the point, Haydn had woven natural scenes and sounds into his Creation and Seasons. History had accumulated a repertoire of conventional pastoral gestures, such as bagpipe drones, folk tunes, simple harmonies, lilting music in 6/8 or 12/8, country dances, birdsongs, placid keys like B-flat major and F major, an air of gentleness and artless simplicity.26 How, Beethoven reflected, can you map these kinds of effects and moods into the forms and the movements of a symphony? How can you set down the necessary clichés and not have them add up to a cliché?

  The idea he settled on was this: Each movement will be a vignette from a day in the country. The symphony would depict one midsummer day, morning to sunset. No conventional “four seasons,” no clever incidents, no pictures. Only vignettes and feelings. He jotted on a sketch, “effect on the soul.” He searched for corollary ideas to fill out the overriding idea. He called the first movement “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country.”27 The city gives way to fields and woods; the feelings are rapturous. The listener is, say, riding in a cart, flowing into the beauty and the warmth, the timelessness, the holiness. The key would be F major, the same that Haydn used for pastoral movements in his oratorios. But the 2/4 tempo would not race—not like the Fifth. Everything the Fifth was, this would be the opposite.

  The first movement will follow the usual outline with its themes, Durchführung, and so on. But no drama, no feverish excitement this time. No fate. Glorious sunshine, not even a passing cloud. No suffering, no triumph, but fulfillment. Themes like folk tunes, a shepherd’s pipe, flowing rhythms. Minor keys all but banished (only three bars in minor), scarcely even a minor chord. Most of it soft. A peaceful development.28 Waves of exaltation passing over the soul. As Beethoven said: every tree and hill shouting, Holy! Holy! Ultimately it is to be about stepping into holiness, about beholding God.

  For the slow movement he returns to the sketch from years before, trying to capture the sound of a brook in notes. He calls it “Scene by the brook.” Flowing, babb
ling. A sense of endlessness: the first movement the arrival; the second movement the being there, the trance, the drifting ecstasy. Not a contrast to the first movement but a fulfillment of it. The warmth of low strings with divided cellos.

  A symphony needs a scherzo or a minuet. Call this one a country dance in the outdoors, “Merry gathering of the countryfolk.” A dance in the late afternoon, after work in the fields. He remembered an idea in 2/4, a quote or imitation of a country dance jotted in the sketchbook of the Eroica. That serves as a trio. He remembered a country band he saw at a dance, the oboist who couldn’t find the downbeat, the sozzled bassoonist who kept dozing off and awoke now and then to blat out a few notes. They go into the scherzo.29

  He had vowed to avoid pictures and events, but all the same there had to be a storm, a staple of the pastoral genres. This would be a good one for a change. He’d show them how violence was done, not like the polite primal “Chaos” in Haydn’s Creation but rain and lightning and thunder. (Still, the storm in the “Summer” of Haydn’s Seasons would be a model.)30 Kant said that the works of God in the world are the visible sublime, but that we can conceive them only inside ourselves, as feeling. Effect on the soul. A real storm. All the harmonies unsettled. Bring in trombones!