Chapter 10
Beethoven wrote in virtually every genre of his time: symphonies, concertos, overtures, sonatas of all kinds, trios, quartets, quintets, and larger chamber ensembles, songs, oratorio, opera, and sacred music. Listeners today enjoy easy access to program notes that describe individual works in detail.
Broader perspectives that transcend specific works can help us understand the music at a still deeper level. Even something as seemingly simple as the way in which Beethoven numbered his own works, for example, has much to tell us about the composer’s perception of what he wrote. Although he had published a fair number of pieces by the middle of the 1790s, he waited quite deliberately before conferring the portentous designation “Opus 1” on anything he had written. The label “opus” (Latin for “work,” abbreviated as “op.”) carried real weight, and the three piano trios of op. 1, issued in July 1795, are easily his most substantial pieces to that point, large four-movement works dedicated to his principal patron at the time, Prince Lichnowsky. Beethoven then waited another nine months before releasing anything he considered worthy of bearing the label op. 2. This was an equally weighty collection of three piano sonatas dedicated to his teacher Joseph Haydn. In the meantime, he had continued to issue further small-scale works without opus numbers, mostly piano variations and orchestral dances. This pattern would continue throughout his life: works designated by opus numbers interspersed with what he considered lesser ones, to which scholars have since assigned arbitrary “WoO” numbers, short for Werke ohne Opuszahl (“Works without Opus Numbers”).
These works without opus numbers are by no means necessarily of lesser quality, however. The set of Twelve Variations for Piano and Cello, WoO 45, on the chorus “See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes” from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, for example, is every bit the equal of later variations issued with opus numbers, in terms both of scale and of the demands it makes on performers. Published by Artaria of Vienna in 1797, it is dedicated to Princess Maria Christiane von Lichnowsky, the wife of the same patron to whom Beethoven had dedicated the Piano Trios op. 1. Why no opus number, then? Variations were regarded as a genre of lesser prestige than sonatas or piano trios. Not until 1803, with the piano variations op. 34 and op. 35, did Beethoven issue a set of variations with an opus number. These were on themes of his own invention, and in a letter to Breitkopf of December 1802 he called attention to his desire to release each of these two sets with a “proper number within my greater musical works.” Beethoven was in fact one of the first composers to exert a reasonable control over the numbering of his own works, so that with occasional exceptions an opus number reflects a given composition’s date of publication.
But what did these works mean? Did they in fact mean anything at all? Or as one anonymous critic asked in the summer of 1827, just a few months after Beethoven’s death, “Should one think about something while listening to instrumental music?” These are age-old questions, and they still resonate today. Listeners have always been able to relate a work of vocal music to the text being sung, but hearing music that has no words of any sort and whose title is literally generic (Symphony no. 2, Sonata in C Major, etc.) creates a different kind of challenge.
Beethoven himself had to walk a fine line on this point. On the one hand, he gave descriptive titles to at least some of his instrumental works, such as the “Eroica” and the “Pastoral” symphonies, the “Pathétique” and “Les Adieux” piano sonatas. At times he even went so far as to give individual movements their own titles, as in the “Funeral March” (the second movement of the “Eroica” Symphony), the “Funeral March on the Death of a Hero” (the second movement of the Piano Sonata op. 26), and “The Awakening of Happy Feelings upon Arriving in the Countryside” (the first movement of the “Pastoral” Symphony). On the other hand, he felt it necessary to point out that the “Pastoral” was “more the expression of feeling than tone-painting.” He knew that critics had long regarded tone-painting—the depiction of real-world sounds through music, such as battles, frogs croaking, or birds singing—as music of a lower order, but oddly enough, and in the “Pastoral” no less, he took pains to identify the species of bird calls presented toward the end of its second movement: nightingale, cuckoo, and quail. Listeners were sometimes forgiving in such instances, sometimes not. They greeted Wellington’s Victory enthusiastically at first, no doubt because of the wave of patriotism sweeping Austria at the time, but many of them later found the same work embarrassing, precisely because the depictions of cannon and musket fire left so little to the imagination.
Still, clues to what works might be “about” were always welcome, even if they were secondhand. The composer’s alleged description of the opening of the Fifth Symphony as “fate pounding at the portal,” for example, came from the unreliable Anton Schindler long after the fact. Schindler also reported that the composer had connected the Piano Sonata in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2, with Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. We cannot dismiss such testimony out of hand. The more reliable Ferdinand Ries recalled that his teacher “frequently had a certain subject in mind when he composed,” and his fellow pupil Czerny suggested as much as well. The sketches occasionally confirm such an approach. An early draft for the String Quartet in F Major, op. 18, no. 1, for example, shows that Beethoven was thinking of the tomb scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet while composing the slow movement, which he marked “Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato” (“Slowly, with loving feeling and passionately”). In the end, however, Beethoven rarely gave clues about what images or stories might have inspired him.
The dramatic nature of so many of the composer’s best-known works has certainly tempted many listeners to create narratives of their own that match the music. The wordless marital spat between Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray in a December 1954 airing of the television variety show Caesar’s Hour, played against the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, is both hilarious and revealing. Gestures, facial expressions, and body language suffice; no words are needed. At the very beginning, we see a close-up of opposing accusatory hands thrust forward against the famous opening motif: first his, then hers. The camera pans out and the pace picks up: we see a brief moment of reconciliation with the entrance of the lyrical theme in E-flat major; recriminations resume with the development; energy flags toward the end of the development, followed by the most vehement recriminations of all at the beginning of the recapitulation. One last, futile effort at forgiveness is mimed against the plaintive, unexpected oboe solo but then abandoned when the orchestra resumes full-throttle. The skit concludes with a final resolution to the sound of the march-like theme that closes out the movement. The two comedians have tapped brilliantly into the essentially dramatic nature of the music. Is this movement about a marital spat? Of course not. But it is about conflict of some kind.
The sticking point is always the degree of specificity. In a widely discussed essay first published in 1985, the music historian Owen Jander proposed that the middle movement of the Fourth Piano Concerto depicts Orpheus in the Underworld pleading his case before Pluto and Proserpina for the return of his beloved Eurydice. In Jander’s reading, the harsh, angular outbursts of the orchestra represent the gods of the Underworld, while Orpheus makes his case with the piano, a simulacrum of the mythic figure’s lyre. The two engage in dialogue, and the orchestra’s wrath gradually subsides, mirroring (Jander argues) the process by which the gods fall into a trance. After a passage of high tension—repeated trills and runs in the piano—we hear a moment of miraculous transformation as Orpheus, still alive, passes into the realm of the dead. Beethoven’s own representation of himself as Orpheus in Mähler’s portrait of him gives further support to this reading.
Even those who reject the specificity of Jander’s scenario concede that the orchestra and piano are engaged in a dialogue of some sort and that the piano, in its own pleading way, eventually wins out by subduing the orchestra. But is the music really “about” this specific situation? Or is it only about itself, which is to say the play of opposing musical forces? Reasonable minds continue to disagree on this point.
Titles can tell us something even when they are literally generic (symphony, string quartet, sonata, etc.). They identify and allow us to anticipate not only the performance forces of the work at hand but also its general formal outline. A symphony, for example, is a work for full orchestra and typically consists of four movements: a fast first movement in sonata form, a slow movement in a different key, a lively minuet or scherzo movement in the tonic in triple meter (three beats to the measure), and a fast finale, most often in rondo or sonata form. The same pattern holds for many genres of chamber music (with only one player per part) and piano sonatas, though the minuet/scherzo movement is sometimes absent from these. These conventions are by no means immutable: the “Pastoral” Symphony consists of five movements, and the Ninth incorporates vocal soloists and a chorus into its finale.
Yet even these exceptions operate within a still broader convention of what might be called a genre’s tone. For Beethoven’s generation and well beyond, the symphony was the most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the one in which composers could most readily demonstrate their command of orchestration and large-scale form. It was also among the least commercially attractive. Consumers who would readily buy piano and chamber music were not in the market for works that required an ensemble of forty or more players. They might purchase arrangements of symphonies, most commonly for piano, piano duo (four-hands), or piano trio (piano, violin, and cello), but not the original works themselves.
8. W. J. Mähler’s portrait from 1804–05 depicts Beethoven as an Orpheus-like figure, moving from darkness to light, perhaps in the process of turning around to see if his Eurydice is indeed behind him. The instrument he holds is a lyre-guitar, a fashionable instrument of the time that reinforces the image of a modern-day Orpheus.
That Beethoven wrote as many symphonies as he did is in itself remarkable, given the changing nature of the musical scene in Vienna at the time. Whereas Haydn had written more than a hundred of them, mostly for his orchestra at the Esterházy court, and then later for Paris and London, Beethoven had no orchestra readily at his disposal. In 1800, the year of his First Symphony, Vienna could offer very few truly public concerts, that is, concerts open to anyone who could afford a ticket of admission. Even these were mostly ad hoc affairs: there was no standing civic orchestra, and regular concert series would not appear on the scene for another decade or more. (In a revealing coincidence, the Vienna Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic were both founded in the same year, 1842.)
There is no quintessential Beethoven symphony: each has its own distinct profile, especially from the Third onward. The “Eroica” is truly revolutionary, not only because of its sheer size but also because of its structural complexity, its sonorities, the weight of its finale, and what might be called its ethical dimension: it wrestles with the ideas of heroism, struggle, death, and victory. Even without the subtitle (“Heroic Symphony”) and the (canceled) dedication to Napoleon, listeners of the time would have readily recognized the first movement’s opening theme as a military-style horn call and the second movement as a funeral march. The latter raises issues of life and death in a genre that until then had been perceived largely as a vehicle of entertainment, not of moral or philosophical ideas. But the simulated sound of muffled drums at the beginning of the march and the gradual slowing-down of the clock-like rhythm toward the end combine to remind us of human mortality. With the “Eroica,” instrumental music in general and the symphony in particular began to move beyond the realm of mere pleasure.
From a more technical perspective, Beethoven’s innovations in the formal design of his symphonies extend from the level of the individual movement to the cycle as a whole. His addition of vocal soloists and chorus in the finale of the Ninth Symphony is merely the most striking of the many ways in which he explored fundamentally new approaches to the genre. Again, he liked to look at a single object—in this case, the genre of the symphony—from multiple perspectives. The Fourth features a slow introduction of unprecedented gravity and length, offset by a rollicking first movement that gives extraordinary prominence to the tympani. In this work, Beethoven also began to explore in depth the possibility of linking all four movements through a particular intervallic motive (B-flat to G-flat). He would take up this same challenge in a different way in the Fifth Symphony, which explores ways of linking all four movements through the transformation of a prominent rhythmic motive (short-short-short-LONG) and through the return of one movement (the third) within the course of another (the fourth).
The Sixth (“Pastoral”) Symphony is an example of what has come to be known as “program music,” instrumental music that seeks to convey ideas, images, or events through sound with the aid of a descriptive title, movement titles, or a more elaborate prose “program.” The Seventh, perhaps the most popular of all Beethoven’s symphonies during the nineteenth century, eschews programmatic headings but explores the element of rhythm with unparalleled intensity: Richard Wagner would later call it the “Apotheosis of Dance.” The Eighth, often overshadowed by its larger siblings, is a biting essay in humor and irony. The Ninth, in turn, raised symphonic monumentality to unprecedented heights, both in its length and in its incorporation of sung text in its finale. This was a move that would spark tremendous controversy in the decades that followed, but even detractors agreed that after Beethoven, the symphony was a fundamentally new genre. Composers could now, in effect, philosophize in music.
In addition to symphonies, Beethoven wrote about a dozen single-movement works for orchestra. Some of these (Egmont, King Stephen, Ruins of Athens, Consecration of the House) were overtures to spoken dramas for which he wrote incidental music as well. Others (Coriolanus, Name-Day) were written expressly for the concert hall, with no opera or drama to follow. Beethoven ultimately rejected the three overtures to the opera Leonore in favor of the one for the renamed Fidelio; the third of the Leonore overtures (op. 72b) would become a standalone favorite in the concert hall. With the exception of the Name-Day overture, op. 115 (originally conceived as “an overture for any occasion or for use in a concert”), all of these works reflect in some way the emotional worlds of the dramas with which they are connected. In this way, they are important forerunners of the “symphonic poems” or “tone poems” by such later composers as Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss.
But it was through the piano that Beethoven established his reputation, and the piano concerto was the ideal vehicle for him to showcase his talents both as a composer and performer. By the premiere of the last of the five in 1811, however, growing deafness had forced him to cede the role of soloist to his student, Archduke Rudolph. In this same work (later nicknamed the “Emperor” Concerto because of its size and grandeur), Beethoven broke with convention in the first movement by instructing the soloist to play a written-out cadenza rather than the expected improvisation of the performer’s own making. The Violin Concerto, in turn, remains a staple of the repertory, as does the Triple Concerto for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra.
The thirty-two piano sonatas are central to the solo repertory of that instrument and span the whole of Beethoven’s career. Like the symphonies, they explore an astonishing variety of styles. Most are in three or four movements, some in only two. With only a few exceptions, all are far more technically demanding than what was customary at the time; this undoubtedly cut into sales and helped foster Beethoven’s reputation as a “difficult” composer. The “late” sonatas (opp. 101, 106, 109, 110, 111) are especially challenging. Opus 106 (nicknamed the “Hammerklavier”) has been called the “Mount Everest of the Piano” because of its size and technical difficulty, particularly its fugal finale.
Although overshadowed by the piano sonatas to some extent, the ten sonatas for violin and piano and the five sonatas for cello and piano are every bit as ambitious and wide-ranging. The “Kreutzer” Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 47, known by its dedication to a virtuoso of that name, has won particular renown. The last two cello sonatas, op. 102, in turn, are important examples of the composer’s “late” style. Beethoven also wrote six piano trios (for piano, violin, and cello), five string trios (violin, viola, cello), and various other chamber works in a variety of combinations for strings, winds, and piano.
Beethoven cultivated the genre of variations throughout his life. His first published work, in fact, was a set of keyboard variations on a march tune, issued in 1782 (WoO 63). The themes he varied in these early years were sometimes of his own invention but more often taken from other composers, including several by Mozart and one by his Bonn patron Count Waldstein. Later in life he preferred to create variations on his own themes, as in the Variations for Piano, op. 35, which would later become the basis for the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony. Some of his variations are independent works, while others function as individual movements within larger works (such as the middle movement of the “Appassionata” Sonata for Piano, op. 57). The monumental “Diabelli” Variations, op. 120 (1823), constitute a veritable encyclopedia of variation techniques. In 1819, Anton Diabelli, a Viennese composer and publisher, had invited a number of his contemporaries (including Schubert, Czerny, and Archduke Rudolph, as well as Beethoven) to contribute one variation for piano on a brief waltz melody of Diabelli’s own invention. In his characteristic way, Beethoven turned the simple melody inside out and upside down, showing its potential in multiple ways through no fewer than thirty-three variations, the penultimate one an enormous fugue. Beethoven also wrote variations for various chamber combinations as well, including cello and piano, violin and piano, and piano trio.
Like the piano sonatas, the sixteen string quartets—for two violins, viola, and cello—span the composer’s entire creative career. This was the most prestigious of all chamber music genres, in part because of the remarkable repertory of string quartets by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven must have been particularly self-conscious about his place within this lineage when he issued his set of six string quartets op. 18 in 1801. He modeled his quartet op. 18, no. 5, in A major, on Mozart’s quartet K. 464 in the same key, an unusual act of homage that is at the same time competitive, in that it openly invites comparison of the two works. The next three quartets, published in 1808 as op. 59, are altogether different: larger, more difficult, and full of the “heroic” style we associate with the Beethoven of the Third and Fifth Symphonies. The three works of op. 59 as a whole are known as the “Razumofsky Quartets” by virtue of their dedicatee, the Russian ambassador to the Austrian empire, who at the time was one of Beethoven’s more important patrons. All of the subsequent quartets were substantial enough to be issued individually.
The group of five “late” quartets (opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135) constitute some of the most demanding music of the nineteenth century, both technically and aesthetically. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century and for some time into the twentieth, these works were more respected than loved. Many critics regarded them as unfortunate manifestations of Beethoven’s extreme sense of isolation from the external world. These works have since come to be valued as probing explorations of the human psyche and have proven an inexhaustible source of inspiration for any number of later composers, including such diverse figures as Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Elliott Carter, and George Rochberg.
Beethoven wrote a great deal more vocal music than most people realize: two settings of the Mass ordinary, an oratorio (Christ on the Mount of Olives), an opera (Fidelio), several secular cantatas and miscellaneous works for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, more than a hundred songs and individual arias, some 180 folk song arrangements, and almost fifty canons for various numbers of voices. Given this vast quantity of music, it must have galled him to read his contemporaries consistently stipulate their praise for him as the greatest living composer of instrumental music. In fairness to those contemporaries, this was not so much a criticism of his vocal writing as a recognition of his unique genius for instrumental works. Setting a text to music, as one anonymous critic of the op. 75 songs argued in 1811, actually “inhibited” Beethoven because it deprived him of the “broad, free field of play” he needed to display his creative gifts to the fullest.
Beethoven would have gladly written more operas under the right circumstances—which is to say, a commission from an opera house—and given the right libretto. He was constantly on the search for a good text and dreamed of setting Goethe’s Faust to music. One can only imagine what a partnership of two of the greatest artists of the time might have produced. In the end, however, he completed only one, Fidelio (1814), which began life as Leonore (1805). The libretto is an adaptation of a French drama that tells the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man and secures employment in a prison in order to free her husband, Florestan, who has been unjustly incarcerated because of his political beliefs. The so-called Third Leonore Overture is a brilliant encapsulation of the plot for instruments alone; it was so powerful, in fact, that it effectively overwhelmed the stage action that followed, and Beethoven wisely wrote a more concise overture and published the earlier one separately. With its theme of personal liberty and freedom of thought, Fidelio features many moving passages, most notably the “Contemplative Quartet” of Act I, in which the four characters on stage sing their own monologues simultaneously, the kind of thing that is simply not possible in spoken drama.
Beethoven was also constantly on the lookout for poems to set as songs for voice and piano. His poets included such leading figures as Goethe, Schiller, and Herder but also many lesser-known ones as well. Subjects range from the comical, as in Urians Reise um die Welt (“Urian’s Journey around the World”) to the serious, as in Gegenliebe (“Reciprocal Love”), whose melody provided the basis for the conclusion of the Choral Fantasy and in many ways adumbrated the “Ode to Joy” melody of the Ninth Symphony. He created the first true song cycle with An die ferne Geliebte, op. 98, a series of six songs that flow seamlessly, without interruption.
In 1809 Beethoven began a decade-long engagement with the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson to make a series of arrangements for voice, violin, cello, and piano of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh folk songs. Thomson specified that each setting was to open with a brief instrumental introduction, and the composer obliged by developing some portion of the melody put before him. Quite aside from the good income these settings brought in, Beethoven must have enjoyed the challenge of harmonizing melodies that do not always conform to the standard system of major and minor. “There is not one that does not bear the stamp of genius, knowledge and taste,” Thomson wrote to Beethoven of one set of songs. “What delightful little conversations between the violin and violoncello.” He grumbled on more than one occasion, however, that the instrumental parts, particularly for the piano, were too technically difficult for most amateurs.
The only completed liturgical works are the two settings of the Mass Ordinary, op. 86 (commissioned by Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy), and the Missa solemnis, op. 123, written for the installation of Archduke Rudolph as archbishop of Olmütz in 1820 but not completed until 1823. In both works, especially the latter one, Beethoven went to extraordinary lengths to inform himself of the exact diction of the Latin words and the liturgical traditions of the Mass. Indeed, he declared that his “primary goal” in writing the Missa solemnis had been to “arouse religious feelings and make them lasting in singers and listeners alike.” The sketchbooks preserve a number of other attempts at sacred works for which no immediate demand is known.
And finally, the canons, the briefest of all Beethoven’s works: many of them are known only through letters to friends, where they are appended as gifts or mementos. The texts are often humorous and involve some sort of word-play. The three-voice canon Kühl, nicht lau (“Cool, not lukewarm”), WoO 191, for example, puns on the name of its recipient, the Danish composer Friedrich Kuhlau. Canons are rather like self-made crossword puzzles: the challenge is to create a theme that can be sung or played against itself, with voices entering in succession.
Beethoven’s works are preserved in written scores, but they live in performance. And although every realization of those scores is necessarily different, traditions of performance have changed markedly over time. Nineteenth-century conductors like Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler felt free to adjust the orchestration of the symphonies to accommodate the much larger concert halls of their day, even going so far as to add a tuba to the finale of the Ninth Symphony. This practice continued well into the twentieth century.
The historically informed performance-practice movement that rose to prominence in the 1970s has taken precisely the opposite approach. Groups like Roger Norrington’s London Classical Players (1978–97) and John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (since 1989) use period instruments that differ markedly from those of today’s modern orchestras. All the instruments of Beethoven’s time have been modified to varying degrees, and orchestras and concert halls were in any case much smaller, so the experience of hearing familiar works like the symphonies played by ensembles that more nearly resemble those of earlier times can be revelatory. Textures are typically far more transparent, with individual lines standing out in greater relief. Tempos also tend to be far livelier, sometimes radically so. Norrington’s 1987 recording of the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, for example, runs just over eleven minutes, whereas the legendary 1954 Bayreuth recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler clocks in at nineteen and a half minutes. Such extreme contrasts have led scholars to question whether it is in fact the same piece.
Pianos have changed as well. The modern instrument is far larger and louder; its counterparts in Beethoven’s time produced a sound that was more focused, less “mushy,” as its proponents would say. The mechanisms of the two instruments also differ significantly. This compels pianists to use a lighter touch on the fortepiano, as the older instrument was known. But even these earlier instruments vary widely in size, tone, and range, and in the end there is no one “correct” instrument, new or old, for Beethoven’s keyboard works. Each can help us hear these works in new ways. And the artistry of the performer remains paramount, for in the end, a score is a script waiting to be brought to life.