Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The Hammerklavier begins with a fanfare marked impetuoso that spans most of the keyboard; then comes an intimate contrapuntal answer that is in fact a flowing variation of the fanfare:

  That fanfare seems to have begun as a sketch for a choral salute to Archduke Rudolph; proclaiming “Vivat Rudolphus!,” it resembles the sonata’s opening:

  The phrase does not survive in the music, but the vivat quality does. From the outset the sonata was intended to be dedicated to Rudolph and presented to him on his name day—but like most promised Beethoven works now, it was not finished in time.38 The dialogue of the first movement is between those initial gestures: full, heroic, and declamatory versus sparse, flowing, and contrapuntal. In the development section, the counterpoint blossoms into a stamping and pealing fugue. Here as in all his last sonatas he folds Baroque fugue into the modern structure of sonata form.

  The particular tone of this movement and the Hammerklavier in general has little to do with the kind of implied narrative in instrumental music that was once a Beethoven staple. The first movement is not “expressive” in the usual sense, more a matter of indefatigable energy (all of it seriously fatiguing for the pianist), sometimes hard-edged and sometimes soaring. The singular world of the piece comes from its particular obsession, its way of joining content and form, microcosm and macrocosm. The opening vivat rhythm will be varied and fragmented throughout, as usual in Beethoven. In measures 2 and 4, the two sharp strokes of descending thirds, D–B-flat and F–D, will have their consequences, as also expected. It is the breadth and depth of those consequences that were new in Beethoven and new in music. This time those little melodic thirds are going to resonate at every level of the piece, governing the construction of themes, the harmonic sequences small and large, the sequences of keys, the keys of sections and movements. Instead of narrative in the outer movements, there is a depth of unity that goes beyond older conceptions and brushes aside centuries of tradition concerning key relations.39 To a degree, in this sonata Beethoven obliterated the old dichotomy between melody and harmony: melody traditionally based mainly on scales, harmony on larger intervals that form chords. Here melody and harmony merge.

  More than ever for him, from now on each major piece will be founded not on a novel formal or dramatic idea but on a rethinking of the nature of music and its genres, a search for fresh qualities and meanings that in turn reshapes the old formal models in more and more radical ways—without ever entirely departing from those models.40 In this case, technique spills over into metaphysics. One ancient and abiding theory of the universe is that the smallest structures expand, level by level, into the largest. That is how the Hammerklavier works. Every melody in the piece is based on a scaffolding of descending thirds. The keys of the large sections in the first movement trace a descent in thirds: B-flat first theme, flowing second theme in G major, development beginning in E-flat. The fugue in the development section, its subject based in the vivat figure, marches downward athletically in thirds, sometimes in parallel-third lines:

  Meanwhile, a modulatory scheme based on chains of thirds is theoretically endless. In contrast to the usual tonic–dominant–tonic closed system of diatonic music, it creates an open system that can conjure either gentle wandering or irresolvable tension. In the Hammerklavier, Beethoven exploits both those possibilities.

  In the central part of the first movement, the Baroque procedure of fugue is wedded with the Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven idea of development. The counterpoint of the development flows on into the vivat recapitulation and its answer, decorating them both. The end of the movement adds another element in the form of sustained trills; in the finale, trills are going to add a steady sparkle to the texture. The last moments form a giant stride of the vivat figure from nearly the top of the keyboard down to nearly the bottom.

  Following the massive landscape of the first movement, a succinct scherzo, also in B-flat, takes up the vivat idea of that movement and turns it into light, lilting comedy. The form is entirely regular, on the old model of the minuet-scherzo. Its trio is a rolling B-flat-minor episode, Romantic unto bardic in tone, that foreshadows the next movement. With a scale that sweeps across the keyboard from bottom to top and a little giggle, we return to the scherzo proper.

  After the comedy comes the tragedy, the longest slow movement Beethoven ever wrote, marked Appassionato e con molto sentimento, impassioned and with great feeling. The movement is in F-sharp minor (a third down from B-flat) and sonata form, but it feels like an endless song that encompasses the whole of a person’s feeling life.41 The music is constantly in evolution, like drifting through an endless dreamscape of sound and emotion. At the beginning it is marked una corda, meaning the muted effect of the hammers on one string, done with the soft pedal.42 The second half of the first theme returns to tre corde, marked con grand’ espressione, “with great expression.” If it had been written for the stage it would be called one of the great tragic arias—except it is an aria only the piano can sing. In its course there are magical moments of G major that appear like sunlight breaking through clouds.

  In Beethoven’s work the harbinger of this movement is another minor-key slow movement he wrote in a piano sonata, the D-minor lament in op. 10, no. 3—a work that like the Hammerklavier juxtaposes a comic movement with a tragic. As man and composer Beethoven had learned a great deal since op. 10, much of the human wisdom having to do with suffering. This movement laments and transcends the lamentation in the singing, above all at the recapitulation, where the theme is ornamented into spinning roulades like streams of tears. The slow movement of op. 10 sounds like sorrow itself; the slow movement of the Hammerklavier sounds like a sublime performance of sorrow and transcendence by a singer who has known every shade of grief and hope.

  After Beethoven mailed the Hammerklavier to Ferdinand Ries in London, he sent an addition to the slow movement, a simple rising third, A–C-sharp, in octaves for the beginning, a one-bar introduction. Looking at it, Ries recalled, he wondered whether his old master had finally gone around the bend. Then he played it and discovered how those two notes color the whole of the gigantic movement. Like all great Beethoven, here are technique and expression joined: the added introduction is there partly to remind our ears of the primal significance of thirds in the sonata. The slow movement now begins with a simple gesture that is the distilled essence of the whole piece.

  Like most of his late works, the Hammerklavier is aimed toward the finale, which is a prodigious fugue. But there needed to be a transition from the mournful canvas of the slow movement to a finale that takes up and pays off the dynamic energy of the first movement. For a solution Beethoven turned to tradition and in the process wrote one of the most striking pages of his life. The introduction takes up the old practice of preluding, in which an improviser plays free, drifting music figuratively or literally in search of an idea. To evoke that sense of protean exploring, Beethoven largely leaves out bar lines and erases any sense of beat—like some Baroque preludes. Within that freedom, a chain of thirds slowly wends its way downward through harmonies and keys until it reaches F, preparing the B-flat-major finale.

  In the middle, when the chain reaches B major, there is a Bachlike eruption of imitative counterpoint that just as suddenly vanishes. Here is another feature of Beethoven’s late music: music about itself, a querying and questing evoking its process of being composed. Now a question is posed: “How shall I write the fugue?” The prelude to the finale is an evocation of a composer searching for material, seizing on something and dropping it almost with a shake of the head, continuing the search until the solution is found (the finale of the Ninth Symphony will return to that notion). Much of the Hammerklavier has that quality of self-reflection, music observing and commenting on itself in the process of its unfolding.

  So one of those as-if comments in the introduction is on the idea of fugue, which turns out to be what the prelude was searching for—prefigured by its abortive burst of Bachlike counterpoint. (For models, B
eethoven copied out bits of fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier alongside sketches for the finale.)43 What is rejected at that point by the symbolic composer is not Bach or counterpoint but old-style counterpoint.44 “The imagination, too, asserts its privileges,” friends reported Beethoven saying, “and today a different, truly poetic element must be manifested in conventional form.”45 Form informed by poetry. He had begun thinking of his music in poetic terms. He wanted more feeling and evocation than drama and narrative. In keeping, he took to calling himself a Tondichter, tone poet, rather than a Komponist. In his always laconic comments on his music he spoke less of Aufklärung reason, more of Romantic imagination, reverie, and the like.46 As his words to and about Goethe show, he believed poets to be the most significant of artists.

  So for this fugal finale, involving that familiar Baroque genre, he intended to make something new, poetic, both Bach and not-Bach, starting with its long, amorphous, quite outlandish subject. Its primal features are a giant leap up of an octave and a third, a trill, and a babbling chain of sixteenths:

  What happens to that theme in the course of the movement is going to spin out in two virtually contradictory directions. The fugue subject is treated to the old contrapuntal procedures of augmentation (stretching it out), inversion (turning it upside down), retrograde (backward), and stretto (theme entering on top of itself), all carried forth within the traditional outlines of fugal exposition and episode, subject and countersubject(s). At the same time, motifs from the subject are spun off as material for thematic variation and development, those sonata-like elements subsumed within the fugal texture. He pursues, in other words, a melding of apparently mutually exclusive genres, fugue and sonata. That serving of two masters at once is what creates some of the overheated quality of the music.

  The keys of the finale’s seven large sections form another descending chain of thirds: B-flat major–G-flat major–E-flat minor–B minor–G major–E-flat major. At that point, the music moves down a step to D major, from there falling a third to B-flat major in the return to the opening theme. This kind of complex and systematic modulation defining the sections of a piece is something sonatas can do that Baroque-style fugues do not. In other words, the fugal treatment is obsessively technical at the same time that the audible effect is of rhapsodic freedom.

  So this is a fugue that unfolds like no other, in the large view also subsuming something like a combination of rondo (a traditional finale model) and variations.47 As Beethoven admits above the opening measures (in Italian, despite his vow to use German terms), it is a fuga a tre voci con alcune licenze, “fugue in three voices with some license.” (As he presumably knew, con alcune licenze was used as an indication in improvisatory pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) License, indeed. He sets forth a gigantic, manic fugue, or rather a teeming sonata/rondo/variation/fantasia on the idea of a fugue—again, Baroque fugue plus Aufklärung forms, including the thematic development that pervades the movement. Moments of comedy, pathos, and lyricism pass through the music like mists in wind. Often there are huge spaces between the hands, creating a singular sonority between the resonant bass and silvery and percussive high register.

  Few listeners can follow all the twists and turns of the finale; most only try to take in what sounds like a churning dynamism glittering with trills, at the same time a kind of epic athletic contest for a performer struggling with piano keys and hammers and the limits of human endurance. What is difficult is good, and what is difficult is woven into the sounding impact of the Hammerklavier: a certain desperate quality in the performance is not only in some degree inevitable but necessary. This is a descendant of the end of the Appassionata, in which the assault on the player and instrument is part of the effect. The music seems to be tearing piano and performer apart.

  Unlike some of his work of the previous decade, then, this is not music exalting a hero but rather music heroic in its essence. To a large extent, the hero in question is the performer, and after that the listener. Again, the piece exists on the other side of the eighteenth-century notion of piano sonatas and its notion of music in general as an elegant pleasure largely within the reach of amateur performers and listeners. The outer movements of the Hammerklavier are excessive beyond ease and beyond pleasure, sometimes nearly beyond human, though they enfold moments of wonderful beauty. The superhuman and the intimately human are both part of the Hammerklavier. Perhaps, given Beethoven’s literary passions, is it relevant that the same can be said of Homer.

  The listener experiences the whole of op. 106 as one takes in storms in the mountains and other forces of nature. For the strong of heart, what is difficult is beautiful and good.48 “Now,” Beethoven said, “I know how to compose.” In fact, though the Hammerklavier informed virtually every piece he wrote afterward, he never wrote another one that sounds or works quite like this sonata. It was an experiment and an extreme. The works that followed, some even more gigantic, played out the sonata’s implications in their own mostly gentler ways. Still, there would be a further enormous fugal finale to come, one that would set a new mark for excess and obsession not only in fugues but in the entirety of music. Beethoven would name that one the Grosse Fuge, the “Great Fugue.”

  As of 1818, Beethoven was not stone deaf and he never quite reached that point, but by then when he finished the most monumental of piano sonatas he was functionally deaf. How did he do his work? A professional composer can read and create music in his or her head without a piano, just as one reads and writes prose. Cultivating that inner ear is a basic skill for any trained musician, though some have a better inner ear than others. (It helps to have perfect pitch; there is no evidence as to whether or not Beethoven had it.) That was the foundation of how he worked in his deafness: he could compose away from the keyboard. All the same, in practice he had always done much of his work at the piano, making use of his facility as an improviser. Improvisation, again, was key to his process. What went down in his sketchbooks was shorthand for a great deal of work done at the piano and in his head, playing and revising. As his deafness shut him off from sound, he went to great lengths to hear the piano as well as he could—getting the louder Broadwood and the ear trumpets and the metal sound amplifier he attached to the piano. Apparently sometimes he held up an ear trumpet to the amplifier. (Neither that contraption nor a detailed description of it survives.)

  The third means was more direct. He still spent a great deal of time improvising at the keyboard, even when he could hear nothing of what he played. When he improvised publicly in later life, the reported results ranged from splendid to pathetic; sometimes his hands got onto the wrong keys, and usually his pianos were out of tune. But after all his years as a virtuoso he had a sense of virtual hearing through his fingers. Maybe of the collection of stratagems he used to overcome his deafness, finger-pitch memory was the most useful. With it he could still draw on improvisation as his engine, his creative consciousness functioning through his fingers. Perhaps in the throes of improvisation it felt to him like he heard every note and nuance.

  Did his deafness change his music? Of course it did, but how it did, how much of the late style had to do with his hearing, is not easy to discern. There are miscalculations, particularly in the late orchestration, but they are far outweighed by fresh and remarkable effects of spacing and color, in orchestra and piano and string quartet. Continuity is another matter. Czerny reported, secondhand, that Beethoven told a friend his deafness “prevented him from adhering, in his later works, to the consistent flow and unity of his earlier ones, for he had been accustomed to composing everything at the piano.”49 None of that is entirely accurate. Much of the late music has an unbroken flow and long-sustained arcs. Maybe here Czerny’s own skepticism about the late period is speaking. Still, in one way and another Beethoven had to adapt his composing to his disability, mostly in ways only he would know.

  Maybe the obsessive concentration on unity of material in the Hammerklavier was a way of attacking his disability.
Having done it, he did not need that kind of obsession anymore. With the Hammerklavier he not only proved to the musical world that he was still capable of supremely ambitious works (even if some of the world considered this piece quite mad); he also proved it to himself. Now, seeing his new path clearly before him, there were no bounds to what he intended to do. But the fact that now he could hear music only in his head is surely what gave some of the late music an inward, ethereal, uncanny aura like nothing else. Some of the late music is like a memory of music sounding in the mind, with an ineffable beauty and poignancy. All his late music is pervaded with both loss and transcendence.

  As Beethoven worked on the Hammerklavier in 1817–18, the Karl-and-Johanna troubles were in abeyance. With Karl living with him, sometimes in the country, there was less opportunity for Johanna to get at her son. But when they returned to Vienna, the struggle heated up again, toward its coming climax. Johanna had surely expected more access to Karl as a reward for contributing to his support. When Karl was back in Vienna that autumn of 1818, Johanna struck through the courts. She submitted to the Landrecht a petition to get the boy back. When that was rejected she applied to have Karl taken from the Gymnasium day school and placed in the Royal Imperial Convict, a boarding school—where she might be able to reach him. That too was rejected by the court. Meanwhile, probably to put pressure on Beethoven, she stopped paying support.