Chapter 9
Critics and historians have long divided Beethoven’s music into three stylistic periods—early, middle, and late—in an attempt to trace the trajectory of his output in its broadest terms. This tripartite scheme has its advantages and limitations, for it shapes how we hear the music in ways that are sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
The dividing lines that separate the three periods have varied considerably over the years. This in itself is a good reminder of their inherently arbitrary nature. The consensus nowadays aligns them with two major moments of crisis in the composer’s life, the first coinciding with the Heiligenstadt Testament (late 1802), the second with the end of the affair with the Immortal Beloved (late 1812), which led to a temporary decline in both the quantity and quality of music produced over the next two years. It was around 1815 that Beethoven seems to have found renewed energy and began to write in what is now considered his “late” style.
In the world of the arts, a tripartite division of this kind is scarcely unique to Beethoven, for it reflects a stock progression from youth (learning) to maturity (full powers) to old age (transcendence or decline). In terms of style, commentators generally delineate Beethoven’s three periods as follows:
Early: The works of the early period are often characterized as following in the tradition of Haydn and Mozart. This is true, but only up to a point. Like any aspiring composer, Beethoven looked to acknowledged masters for his models, and he cultivated the formal and harmonic language of what is often called the “Classical style.” But audiences recognized Haydn and Mozart in their own time as brilliantly original and unpredictable, sometimes too much so. Some of Mozart’s string quartets, as one critic complained in the 1780s, were “too highly seasoned.” This tradition of novelty was an important part of what Beethoven assimilated in his early years in Vienna. It would be grossly mistaken to regard such works as the Piano Sonata op. 13 (“Pathétique”) or the Sonatas op. 27, nos. 1 and 2 (“Moonlight”), or the Second Symphony as mere imitations of earlier composers’ styles. We hear already in these works an original voice that is unquestionably different from that of any predecessor.
Middle: Critics typically regard the works of the middle period as quintessentially Beethovenian, for they reflect the composer’s move beyond the “early” style but do not yet bear the distinctive (and for some, problematic) elements of the “late” style. Many of the best-known works of this period are characterized as “heroic” on the grounds that they are monumental in both scale and tone and often convey a sense of struggle and resolution, as in the Fifth Symphony, whose stormy C-minor opening movement culminates in a triumphant C-major finale. The “Eroica” Symphony is longer than even the longest works in the same genre by Haydn or Mozart (or even by Beethoven himself) by a ratio of almost 2:1. The same holds for the first of the three String Quartets of op. 59 and the Fifth Piano Concerto, op. 73 (“Emperor”).
Late: The “late” works are often perceived to reflect Beethoven’s increasing isolation from society during the last decade of his life. Critics hear a heightened degree of introspection in this music, particularly when compared against the “heroic” works of the previous decade. (The Ninth Symphony is a notable exception.) Works of the late style adopt radically new forms and explore extremes of dimensions: the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131, for example, opens with an extended fugue instead of the expected movement in sonata form and consists of seven movements rather than the usual four. Two of these movements, moreover, are extremely brief. Beyond this, Beethoven calls for all seven movements to be played in one continuous sequence, without any breaks between them. Here and in other late works, the tone is also different: at times it is difficult to tell whether Beethoven intends for us to take particular passages seriously or as a joke—or as both at once. The fifth-movement scherzo of op. 131, for example, features moments at which the unsuspecting listener would swear the cellist has entered too early, though this is in fact not the case. The music sounds “wrong” on purpose.
For all the necessary caveats, there is ample musical evidence to support this broad construct of three periods. The string quartets, represented roughly equally in each of the three periods (six early, five middle, five late), provide a good basis of comparison. If we begin with the extremes, we can see obvious differences between the early and late works of this genre. The six quartets of op. 18 follow the standard four-movement format inherited from Haydn and Mozart and stay squarely within the conventional harmonic idiom of the day. Indeed, there is nothing in opus 18 as harmonically daring as the slow introduction to Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet in C Major, K. 465, though Beethoven makes an attempt in that direction in the finale of op. 18, no. 6, marked “La malinconia” (“Melancholy”). In terms of the formal design of individual movements, moreover, Haydn’s op. 76 quartets (published 1799) are on the whole far more unconventional than Beethoven’s op. 18 quartets. The first movement of op. 76, no. 5, defies all formal categories, and its deeply moving slow movement, marked “Largo: Cantabile e mesto” (“Extremely slow: lyrical and sad”) is in the remarkable key of F-sharp major. The second-movement “Fantasia” of op. 76, no. 6, in turn, includes daring modulations, and the first movement of the same work presents a set of variations in which the theme itself scarcely changes, only the voices around it.
Beethoven’s op. 59 string quartets of 1808, on the other hand, occupy a very different musical world. The first of the three in this set is the chamber-music counterpart to the “Eroica” Symphony, with a first movement of unprecedented dimension and textural complexity. Like the “Eroica,” it incorporates a fugato—an extended section with thematic imitation between the voices, in the manner of a fugue—and an overarching sense of struggle that culminates in a triumphal restatement of what at first had seemed to be a relatively modest opening theme. The middle-period quartets also make technical demands of a kind string players had rarely if ever encountered. Opus 74 (known as the “Harp” because of the repeated plucking figures in the first movement) includes devilishly difficult passages not only for the first violinist but for the three other players as well. And musicians who follow the composer’s metronome marking for the fugue that concludes op. 59, no. 3, face considerable challenges indeed.
If the middle-period string quartets occupy a different musical world, the late ones—opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 135—take us to the edge of a different universe. Two of them (opp. 127 and 135) conform to the standard four-movement pattern but the other three follow trajectories that are completely sui generis. And even the four-movement works are unconventional in their own way. Critics have often described the opening movement of op. 127, for example, as “floating”: the music moves back and forth between a bold, fanfare-like figure and a lyrical theme, and the movement as a whole lacks the forward drive so typical of middle-period works. The texture is also profoundly polyphonic, with an unprecedented independence among the voices: this, too, is a typical feature of late-style works. In one of the conversation books, Beethoven’s brother Johann tells the composer after one performance of the work that the “interweaving” of the four instruments “is so rich that one is fully occupied just observing a single voice; therefore each [listener] wished that he could hear the quartet four times.”
The six-movement String Quartet, op. 130, is even more unconventional. Its opening movement has a start-and-stop quality still more pronounced than in its counterpart in op. 127, and when the music first moves away from the tonic of B-flat major for the first time, it overshoots the expected key of F and lands instead on G-flat. Even those who think they might not be able to discern such an unconventional move will sense that something is slightly “off” at this point. The second-movement scherzo goes by so quickly—it typically runs under two minutes in performance—that its abrupt ending comes as a surprise. More extraordinary still is the fifth movement, marked “Cavatina,” a term that up to this point had been reserved for small-scale arias of an introspective character. Introspective, indeed: in simulating a soprano overcome by tears, the first violin seems to gasp for breath at one point. Beethoven marks the passage beklemmt, literally “caught in a vise,” and the melody, when performed this way, sounds very much like that of an operatic heroine who is so emotionally devastated that she is gasping for breath, unable to project her voice in all its fullness. Here the composer asks for dramatic realism in place of beauty; violinists, trained to create beautiful tone, often struggle to make the moment sound as labored as it should. This kind of raw, realistic emotion was something new in instrumental music. Beauty was no longer the primary consideration.
And then we come to the finale, which is perhaps the essence of the late style. Instead of the sense of inevitability so often perceived in the “heroic” works of the middle period, the performers have a choice of two entirely different endings. The original finale is an enormous fugue, substantially longer than any of the quartet’s previous movements. Critics have likened it to J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue because of its almost encyclopedic application of contrapuntal devices, some of them quite arcane. Beethoven called it tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée, at times free, at times recherchée in the full sense of that word: “researched,” artificial, arcane, obscure. This movement (later published separately as the Grosse Fuge or “Great Fugue,” op. 133) can be as exhausting to listen to as it is to perform. When the publisher Artaria suggested that Beethoven write a different finale—and offered him an additional sum—the composer agreed, in part because he too must have recognized that the fugal finale threatened to overwhelm the rest of the work. But he had known full well what he was doing when he had written the original finale, and the publisher’s offer gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that two completely different endings to the same work could be equally satisfying, each in its own way. The substitute finale is a light, lively, and much shorter movement, one filled with the rhythms of a country dance. Which is better? Fortunately, we do not have to decide: quartets today perform the work both ways, sometimes with the original fugue, sometimes with the substitute finale.
In short, the late style is characterized by an exploration of musical extremes of dimension and proportion (very long and very short movements juxtaposed), of texture (with a particular emphasis on counterpoint and especially fugue), of harmony (both local and long-range), and of tone (serious or playful or both at the same time).
The early—middle—late division is not without its problems, however. Each of these periods is a construct, an imagined category that does not always align with the works of the period in question. Critics have from time to time modified these lines of demarcation, proposing additional style-periods or subdivisions of the standard three. But even these modifications cannot explain away a late work like the Ninth Symphony, in which Beethoven reverts to the “heroic” tone of his middle period, in which struggle leads to a moment of crisis (at the beginning of the finale) and resolution (with the introduction of voices and the “Ode to Joy” theme). Yet to say that it “reverts” is to suggest that the work represents a backward step, which in a hundred other ways it most assuredly does not.
The tripartite scheme also shapes the way we hear the music, and not always to its (or our) advantage. In the case of the early period in particular, we are inclined to listen—probably unconsciously—to what these works are not: not yet the fate-by-the-throat-grabbing Beethoven, not yet the product of a composer determined to go his own way, convention be damned. His contemporaries heard this music quite differently. One early reviewer of the Piano Trios op. 1 (1795) expressed regret that “out of an evident desire to be entirely new, Beethoven is not infrequently incomprehensible, incoherent, and opaque.” Another critic, reviewing the Violin Sonatas op. 12 (1798), decried the composer’s “bizarre,” “overly learned,” and “arduous” manner of writing. These are works written supposedly in the shadow of Mozart and Haydn, yet the vocabulary used to describe them when they first appeared is no different from that which critics would be using a quarter century later in talking about works of the late period. Ears change.
The construct of the middle period, in turn, implicitly encourages the idea that there is a “real” Beethoven, a central core to the body of his work. This reinforces the inclination to hear the early works as not yet fully developed and the late ones as deviations from a supposed standard. The image of the “heroic Beethoven” rests on a remarkably small number of works from the middle period: the Third and Fifth Symphonies, the third Leonore overture, Fidelio, the Piano Concertos 4 and 5, and a handful of sonatas. Works like the Fourth and Eighth Symphonies and the Piano Sonatas opp. 54, 78, and 79 are often described in the same misleading terms as the Ninth, as “reversions.” But these supposed reversions are more than sufficient to undermine the validity of an imagined teleological trajectory.
To regard Beethoven’s output as the manifestation of some enormous Hegelian dialectic, with each previous work canceled out and absorbed into the next, is to imagine the composer’s life as moving in a straight and inexorable line. This ignores Beethoven’s enduring and fundamental tendency to adopt multiple perspectives toward whatever task lay at hand. When Karl Holz asked him which of the three “Galitzin” String Quartets (opp. 127, 130, 132) was the greatest, he reported Beethoven’s response thus: “Each in its own way! Art demands of us that we not stand still.” But not standing still is not the same as always moving forward in a single direction. For Beethoven, it more typically meant circling around an object—music—to assume an ever-widening series of perspectives.
Beethoven’s Three Style Periods and the Major Genres
