Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph
Page 115
4. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 43n2.
5. Solomon, Beethoven, 165.
6. Senner, Critical Reception, vol. 1, no. 47.
7. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 53.
8. Senner, Critical Reception, vol. 1, no. 48.
9. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 50. As per no. 52, Carl at this point was also handling pieces for Anton Reicha. There is no record of the fate of Carl’s dog.
10. Wegeler/Ries, 107.
11. Jones, Beethoven, 62. Forbes questions Ries’s memory of the Quintet imbroglio.
12. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 49 and n3.
13. Wegeler/Ries, 77–78. The translation reads, “Where the devil . . . ,” but I surmise that Beethoven, who swore lustily, would not have been so polite at that moment. Despite all this, Beethoven, who was somehow remarkably patient and forgiving with publishers, had later dealings with Nägeli.
14. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 127–28.
15. Thayer/Forbes, 1:326–27.
16. Moore, “Beethoven and Inflation,” 202–4.
17. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 123.
18. Quoted in Thayer/Forbes, 1:324–25. Kotzebue also gives a nod to Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, who “plays with amazing precision, clearness, and delicacy.”
19. Senner, Critical Reception, vol. 1, nos. 180–81.
20. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 155–57. This is a more considered, if less forceful, translation than the one in Lippman, History, 134: “In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything . . . Therefore the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilation of the material by means of the form.” I submit that the effect of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, especially in sonata form and variation movements, is indeed to suppress the moment for the whole, to make the listener involved in the totality of the piece as if it were an experience in life. A work, that is to say, can be like a little life, every part of it dependent on the whole for its impact and “meaning.” A theme and variations, for example, is involved with the moment, on what is happening to the theme, but there is still the cumulative effect (as Haydn regularly demonstrates) of an often-simple piece of material as foundation for a deepening unfolding of ideas.
21. Senner, Critical Reception, vol. 1, no. 29. One would like to ask this critic how a valley can be “laughing.”
22. J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, quoted in Brinkmann, “Time of the Eroica,” 12–13.
23. Wegeler/Ries, 65.
24. Thayer/Forbes, 1:329–30.
25. Senner, Critical Reception, vol. 1, no. 165. Tyson, in “1803 Version,” 79, notes that the “just take a left” line was revised for the published score.
26. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 171.
27. Barry Cooper makes this point about Beethoven’s personal relation to the text in Beethoven, 126, and he is generally positive about Christus. On the whole, I am less so. Certainly the oratorio has its virtues, including a strong introduction and final chorus. To my ears the orchestration is highly interesting: rich, varied, and colorful without being overscored like the Joseph Cantata and, arguably, the First Symphony. In general effect its scoring is distinct from the style of Beethoven’s symphonies or his theater music. The treatment of trombones in particular is striking, more elaborate than in any work of his at least until the Fifth Symphony. After the premiere Beethoven added a chorus and did various tinkering over the years, but, as he admitted later, “I know that the text is extremely bad. But once one has thought out a whole work which is based even on a bad text, it is difficult to prevent this whole from being destroyed if individual alterations are made here and there. And although it may only be the case of a single word to which sometimes great significance has been attached, well then, that word must stand. And he is a poor composer who is neither able nor anxious to extract as much good as possible even from an inferior text.” It would also be a poor composer who made revisions that were not consistent with the work’s style, however unfortunate that style. To repeat what is said in the text, Beethoven had no illusions about Christus, but he did the best he could with it and hoped to profit from selling it. Moreover, when I call it his most misconceived and undigested large work, that is by no means to call it his worst.
28. Thayer/Forbes, 1:330.
29. Quoted in Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 270.
30. Since much of the Second Symphony appears to be concerned more with color, mass, and kinetic energy than with the usual kind of themes, its material seems more kaleidoscopic and diffuse than usual in Beethoven—in contrast, for example, to the motivically tight-woven C Minor Piano Concerto. Still, much of the thematic work draws on the three-note bit of scale from the second bar, and the startling diversion into B-flat on the second page finds many echoes. That note keeps turning up as part of various harmonies and keys (rather like A-flat in the C Minor Concerto). His sense of large-scale tonal dynamics can be seen in the finale: the “hiccup” opening figure repeatedly lands on the dominant in the A theme, but in the coda it is shifted to the tonic to make a large-scale resolution. Meanwhile, in calling the Second “operatic” in style, I am placing it with two other symphonies that seem similar, less in sound than in quasi-scenic effect: the Fourth and Eighth Symphonies (both of them also having buffa overtones). While the overall style of the Second is, I think, unique in Beethoven, there are certainly prophecies, one being the second, E-major theme of the second movement: for a moment in its expansive lyricism and elegant ornamentation, it looks forward to the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony.
31. Wegeler/Ries, 66–67.
32. The dates of composition of the C Minor Concerto are a matter of long debate. Kinderman (Beethoven, 65) votes for the traditional beginning date of 1800. In Beethoven’s Concertos, Plantinga spends a chapter on the topic, “On the Origins of Piano Concerto No. 3,” and concludes it was written ca. May 1802–March 1803, completed just before the benefit concert. In any case there was further refinement of the concerto after the premiere. For one thing, Beethoven did not write down the solo part until Ries played the concerto in 1804.
33. Some have questioned the connection of the Mozart and Beethoven C-minor concertos, but it seems manifest to me, and Plantinga, in Beethoven’s Concertos, after noting the questions, concludes, “There may yet be hope for the argument from/for the Mozart connection” (158).
34. To repeat a point made earlier, in most Beethoven works, there is a pervading rhythmic motif. Some are overt, as in the Third Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and the Fifth Symphony; more often, the rhythmic motif is covert but still important. Just as he develops melodic motifs by devices such as inversion, extension, ornamentation, and foreshortening, and uses them as a scaffolding to build new themes, he develops rhythmic motifs by augmentation, diminution, extension, and decoration, and in essence uses them as scaffolding—as with the implied dotted-half and -quarter phrasing of the violins in m. 9, an augmentation of the dotted rhythmic motif of mm. 2 and 3. An abiding gestural element in the C Minor Concerto is that its themes have internal repeats, starting with the opening figure repeated up a step in a call-and-response of strings and winds. Other cases of internal repeat are the double descent from G-sharp to E in m. 2 of the second movement, and the figure that repeats on different degrees in mm. 3 and 5. The rondo theme in the finale is a pattern of repeated figures. Call-and-response episodes between strings, winds, and soloist are another unifying idea.
35. The magical jump into G major in the second line of the second movement, and its pianistic scintillation on a C-major chord, refers us back to the tonic key of the concerto and helps integrate this highly stretched key scheme. As Czerny noted in relation to Beethoven’s keeping the pedal down through the first theme, that is no longer practical on pianos of a decade and more later because their sustain is longer. This is another version of the Moonlight Sonata problem: how to get the effect of a long-held pedal on a modern piano.
36. Quoted in Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, 146.
38. F. G. E., “George P. Bridgetower,” 305. Also see Jander, “‘Kreutzer’ Sonata.”
39. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 74.
40. Wegeler/Ries, 72.
41. Thayer/Forbes, 1:333.
42. The presence of F major as an important second key in this A-major work is one of the ideas that Beethoven picked up from the finale and transferred to the new movements. (As is noted before, in the Second Period he would be much interested in mediant relationships as substitutes for conventional tonic-dominant relations.) Another connection that has been noted in the literature is how the pounding theme at the beginning of the Presto relates to the 3–4-sharp–5 pattern over A in the opening theme of the finale. There is also the primal move E–F in the first movement (a dynamic gesture in itself, but also foreshadowing F major) and the resolving D-sharp–E in the finale, in both cases emphasizing a note a half step from the dominant. A deeper element, which as far as I know no one has noticed, is the rising chain of thirds Beethoven uses as a scaffolding for the first section of the finale, then uses to compose the beginning of the sonata. In the finale, it starts with the A and C-sharp between violin and piano in the first bars, adds E in bar 4, then moves on to G-natural and B in the piano, D and F-sharp in m. 11, A in the next measure, C-sharp in the violin, E and G in mm. 15–16, then B-flat to D in the piano, and F-sharp in the piano starting at m. 22. This F-sharp, the penultimate member in the chain, is prolonged and intensified in the next measures until the climactic arrival on A at m. 28. I think part of the exhilarating effect of that A is that it has been arrived at by a covert but still audible process of rising thirds: A–C-sharp–E–G–B–D–F-sharp–A–C–E–G–B-flat–D–F-sharp–A! In turn, Beethoven built the first movement’s opening violin solo and answering piano phrases on a descending chain of thirds: A–F-sharp–D–B–G-sharp–E–C-sharp–A; that last violin A is picked up by the piano, which continues down the chain: A–F–D–B–G-sharp–E. From there, the chain starts to dissolve. Beethoven tends to be reliable about these matters, so the chain of thirds turns up in the slow movement, too: the top-voice E in m. 1, top-voice C in m. 2, then more directly A–F–D–B-flat–G–E–C in mm. 5–8. A worthwhile study waits to be written on Beethoven’s interest in chains of thirds, already in evidence in his childhood Piano Quartets, which climaxed in the Hammerklavier Sonata.
43. The connection of sexuality and the Kreutzer reached a climax in Tolstoy’s 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata, in which playing the piece incites a woman pianist and a male violinist to a fatal adulterous liaison. In turn, the novella inspired the kitschy but famous 1901 painting Kreutzer Sonata, by René François Xavier Prinet, which shows a male violinist impulsively seizing a young female from the piano in an embrace.
44. F. G. E., “George P. Bridgetower,” 306.
45. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 99.
46. Schwartz, “French Violin School,” 440.
47. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 73.
48. Wegeler/Ries, 81–82.
49. Skowroneck, “Keyboard Instruments,” 177, and “Beethoven’s Erard Piano,” 523–27. Beethoven’s Érard (which still exists) has four pedals: una corda, dampers, and the extra stops known as a lute and a moderator. Its action was similar to the British Broadwood. Newman, in “Beethoven’s Pianos,” 488, notes that Beethoven was eventually dissatisfied with the heavier British-style action of the Érard. In 1805, piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher reported in a letter, “Beethoven certainly is a strong pianist, yet up to now he still is not able properly to manage his fortepiano received from Érard in Paris [based on English models], and has already had [the action] changed twice without making it the least bit better, since the construction of the same does not allow a different mechanism” (quoted in Newman, 498). Skowroneck, in Beethoven the Pianist, 86 (more recent than his articles), says there is evidence that the Érard was not a gift but Beethoven simply never paid for it. However, later Beethoven described the Érard in a letter as “a souvenir such as no one here has so far honored me with,” which does imply it was a gift. Skowroneck says that the British and French pianos of the time were so close in sound that he considers them one tradition. I have referred to the “evolution” of the piano in this era, but Michael Frederick of the Frederick Collection noted in an interview that the reality in Beethoven’s day was no unified evolution but a welter of makers and regions, each with its own style and innovations. The dominance in the modern era of one maker and style, Steinway, is a recent development in the history of the piano, and one some people are not happy with.
50. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 67.
51. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 81.
52. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 70. Carl’s term is Mist, which is essentially “dung.”
53. Ibid., no. 65.
54. Dalhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 22.
55. Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies, 135.
17. Heaven and Earth Will Tremble
1. Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies, 135–43. The sketchbook with work on opp. 34 and 35 and sketches toward the Eroica is called the “Wielhorsky.” The sketchbook with most of the work on the symphony is called “Landesberg 6” or Eroica.
2. Thayer/Forbes, 1:335.
3. The eighteenth-century view of music as a kind of rational discourse is the main subject of Mark Evan Bonds’s Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration.
4. Hegel, quoted in Lockwood, “Beethoven’s Leonore and Fidelio,” 479.
5. Sipe, Beethoven, 44.
6. Ibid., 46.
7. Napoleon Bonaparte, quoted in Marek, Beethoven, 190.
8. The idea that Napoleon was a product of the Enlightenment was not a myth. He had studied Rousseau, Voltaire, and the other philosophes. But his ambition and his cynicism far outrode his commitment to progressive philosophy.
9. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 67.
10. See B. Cooper, Creative Process, 99. To summarize Beethoven’s terminology, as seen in sketches, for the parts of what was later named “sonata form”: first part, exposition; second part, development and recapitulation; Durchführung, development; Thema, first theme; mitte Gedanke (“middle ideas”), second/subsidiary theme(s); da capo, recapitulation; Schluss or coda, coda. (I translate some terms and not others because the terms Thema [“the theme”] and Durchführung [“working-out”] have broader implications.) In recent times there has been a long debate as to whether sonata form is “really” binary or ternary. Clearly Beethoven saw it as binary: first part and second part. I am in the camp that sees the form as a joining of binary and ternary: exposition repeated, development, recapitulation (and in earlier sonata forms and a few of Beethoven’s, the development and recapitulation are repeated as well).
11. My ongoing point is that while Beethoven and his time composed in terms of what we call sonata form and the other received formal outlines, the fundamental conception of a work was something other than that, beyond the intention of writing one more piece in sonata form. The conception was a dramatic or characteristic or metaphorical idea, or a broader musical one, to which the received form had to be shaped. The conception, the idea, comes first, then is mapped into a form as one composes the exposition, then the development, and so on. In the process the idea inflects the form, sometimes bending it almost beyond recognition. Now and then, as in three movements of the Eroica and in the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was driven by the nature of his ideas to create virtually new, ad hoc forms.
12. In relation to Beethoven’s creative process, I’m echoing some ideas of David Galenson, who proposes that geniuses (I would suggest most creative artists, genius or not) are what I call either planners or flounderers. Galenson’s models are Picasso, a planner who started with a strong conception of what he was after in a painting, and Matisse, who floundered until he found a path. Both types can produce splendid work, but the planners tend to work faster and more confidently, and to mature earlier. (See Gladwell, “Late Bloomers.”) I consider Beethoven the model
of a planner, more of a conscious craftsman than most artists, and it is in those terms that I analyze his creative process. This is not to say, however, that there was not a good measure of floundering in his process, in some works more floundering and in some less. Some things simply take longer to ferment than others.
13. Some variations, including Bach’s Goldbergs, are founded on the bass line of the theme, but it is not put forth nakedly, as Beethoven does in the Prometheus Variations and Eroica. As is reflected in the labels on the piano variations, Beethoven probably considered the englische tune the Thema proper of the finale. But in practice the bass line serves as the theme of the finale and underlies the whole symphony, so here I call it the main theme.
14. The pages are cited in Lockwood, “Earliest Sketches,” 138–39, a classic sketch study.
15. To summarize the leading motifs of the Eroica, all exposed on its first page and more or less in order of importance: a triad, a chromatic slide, a C-sharp/D-flat “sore note,” the G–A-flat pair. An important element is the contrast of the metrically regular “Hero” theme in mm. 3–6 and the pulse- and meter-erasing violin syncopations of mm. 7–8. The meter does not regain its footing until mm. 11–12. Clear meter and challenged meter will be a theme throughout the movement.
16. The harmony above the “sore” C-sharp on the first page is designed to be as ambiguous as a chord can get. It is spelled C-sharp–G–B-flat, constituting either an incomplete C-sharp 07 chord or a German sixth of iii without a root. In fact it functions as the latter, resolving to a iii 6/4 chord, G minor. In the recapitulation, the same ambiguous chord will resolve differently, more as if the C-sharp were D-flat, but still not conventionally: to a C7 moving to F major. It’s worth noting that there is a similar effect, with the same pitch, in the beginning of Haydn’s late Sonata No. 62 in E-flat: a D-flat in the first bar that, as in the Eroica, throws the harmony into a tizzy and resonates throughout the piece. The “sore note” is one more device that Beethoven may have learned from Haydn, in person or through his music. Remarkably often, the sore note is D-flat/C-sharp—see the Eighth Symphony.