Chapter 8
The act of artistic creation of any kind is a process shrouded in mystery, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of purely instrumental music, the kind on which Beethoven’s reputation has always rested. A composer setting a text to music—as in a song or an opera—begins with something definite, a text that suggests a certain kind of mood and perhaps even certain rhythms. A composer writing a sonata, string quartet, or symphony, by contrast, begins with nothing. To all outward appearances the music comes from nowhere, which is to say, from within.
We nevertheless have a good sense of how Beethoven went about composing, thanks to the many sketchbooks he left behind. He began by jotting down musical ideas as they came into his head. These were sometimes little more than a few intervals and rhythms, but if they passed muster he would begin to explore their possibilities and develop them. Thinking and writing went hand in hand, and what in the end might seem like the simplest of melodies were often those that required the greatest labor. He tried out some nineteen different versions of what would become the “Ode to Joy” melody of the Ninth Symphony before settling on just the right one. As ideas for a movement or work began to accumulate, he would create what scholars have come to call a continuity draft, a rudimentary roadmap, as it were, of the movement or piece as a whole. When things had gotten far enough, he would transfer this skeletal outline onto proper full-sized music paper and expand the material into a complete score with all its parts. He would then hand the score over to a copyist, who would prepare a clean version, which in turn was subjected to further review and revisions by the composer before going off to a publisher to be engraved.
6. Beethoven’s study, sketched shortly after his death by J. N. Hoechle. Manuscripts cover the piano and the books are in disarray on the shelves.
Beethoven used two different kinds of sketchbooks. The desk sketchbooks stayed at home: these are mostly in oblong format, and he wrote in them in ink. The pocket sketchbooks, by contrast, were small enough to take on walks, and he would typically write in these in pencil. Paper was relatively expensive, and although he sometimes bought ready-made gatherings of lined music paper, he often assembled sketchbooks himself by sewing together individual leaves of roughly the same size. He took enormous care to preserve them, more care in fact than he took with his finished scores once they had been published. He presumably referred to these sketches from time to time, though to what extent he actually did so remains unclear.
From the middle of the nineteenth century down to the present, scholars have devoted countless hours to transcribing and interpreting these sketches. This has been a daunting task, given the composer’s notoriously difficult scrawl, compounded by the fact that these sketches were never intended for any eyes other than his own. Through these transcriptions, we can now reconstruct in remarkable detail the genesis and growth of a good many works and watch their creation unfold, sometimes smoothly, more often not. The sketchbooks preserve many false starts, with perhaps as many as fifty symphonies begun but soon abandoned. The toils so evident in these volumes have certainly reinforced the perception of Beethoven’s art as a reflection of his life. They are, as one scholar has observed, “artifacts of the struggle.”
7. Sketches for the fourth movement of the Piano Sonata in B-flat, op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”). A single, simple rising figure dominates the entire page.
Yet something vital is missing from these sketches, what might be called the aha! moment. We have a record of the before and after but not of the moment of inspiration itself, the shift from something perfectly correct to something remarkable, from something inchoate to something formed. The sketches thus remind us of that fuzzy line that divides inspiration from reflection, imagination from the technical craft of composition.
It is not enough, after all, to come up with a good melody or a catchy motif: these have to be sustained and developed in some way, for the ear tolerates only so much repetition before a theme outstays its welcome. (This is one of the reasons why the typical popular song is so much shorter than the typical movement of instrumental music.) How, then, to sustain and develop an initial idea? Like his immediate models Mozart and Haydn, and like countless other composers before them, Beethoven drew on two basic techniques over and over again: variation and counterpoint.
To vary a melody or motif is to alter it in such a way that it retains some vestige of the original idea and yet is distinctly different from it. The opening of the Fifth Symphony is a paradigm of variation technique. The first four notes are instantly recognizable because of their rhythm and their pitches: three quick iterations of the note G followed by a longer E-flat. This creates the distinctive short-short-short-LONG rhythm we will hear so often in this movement. There is no harmony here at first, for all the instruments play in unison. This is the idea to be varied.
Beethoven begins to manipulate this idea at once. He repeats it right away with the same rhythm, the same orchestration, and the same dynamics (loud), but now down a step: instead of three Gs going to E-flat we hear three Fs going to D. And now the changes begin to come faster and faster. After a long pause on D, the music becomes very soft, and the simple unison texture gives way to a rapid-fire dialogue among the stringed instruments, which toss the basic idea back and forth, altering the pitches and intervals slightly each time. But the rhythm remains constant. It is this kind of intense variation that makes the opening of the Fifth Symphony so gripping. The music is at once both simple and complex, straightforward and subtle. And it all goes by in just a few seconds.
Counterpoint is the other basic technique by which to sustain and elaborate a theme. It involves juxtaposing an additional line or lines against a given idea. Counterpoint always involves multiple layers of forward motion: ideally, each line is substantive in its own right and able to stand on its own even as it blends seamlessly with all the others. A demanding art, counterpoint was for centuries the touchstone of compositional ability. Harmony, by contrast, was considered not nearly so difficult. Anyone with a bit of training, so the thinking went, could provide a series of underlying chords to a given line of melody. But to create multiple pleasing lines of equal weight that could function independently and at the same time complement each other was a challenge of an altogether different magnitude.
Beethoven learned counterpoint the way it had been taught for centuries, which happens to be the way it is still taught today. His exercises with Haydn, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and Antonio Salieri (of Amadeus fame) thus look very familiar to the trained eye: the instructor gives a cantus firmus—a “firm” or “fixed” melodic line—and the pupil writes additional lines above it, below it, or both. The exercise progresses from simple note-against-note counterpoint in two voices to more elaborate and rhythmically complicated layers of three, four, or even five additional voices. The challenge is to create new lines around the cantus firmus that carry their own distinctive melodic profiles and do not merely shadow the contour of any other voice, all the while avoiding unwanted dissonance, parallel motion at the interval of a fifth between voices, and a host of other technical no-nos.
When Beethoven’s teachers corrected these exercises in counterpoint, they were not addressing mistakes so much as suggesting better alternatives. These usually involved creating more interesting melodic lines or more contrast between the directions of different voices. And while these exercises give the appearance of being just that—dry exercises, not real music—they in fact instilled techniques that would become second nature to Beethoven and that surface constantly in his finished works. We can hear one particularly clear example of this in the finale of the Ninth Symphony when the “Ode to Joy” theme returns and is juxtaposed against the contrasting theme associated with the words “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” (“Be embraced, ye millions!”). This is counterpoint at its finest, with two distinctly different melodies running in tandem. To make things even more intricate, Beethoven has each of these themes enter against itself at staggered temporal intervals in other voices. This latter device, known as imitative counterpoint, is basic to canons and fugues. Each voice is more or less the same as the others, but they enter in succession: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Frère Jacques,” for example, are canons, the strictest form of imitative counterpoint, because all the voices are exactly the same. In a fugue, the individual voices are very similar but not identical, and the imitation can give way at times to passages that are free of imitation altogether.
Having invented and elaborated a musical idea using the techniques of variation and counterpoint, Beethoven’s next task was to expand and integrate the constructed passage into a larger whole. The principles of musical form are really quite simple. Having stated an idea of any length—call it “A”—a composer has only three choices as to what to do next: repeat it (A), vary it (Aʹ ), or contrast it against a different idea (B). All musical forms are based on some combination of these three moves.
Beethoven drew on a number of inherited large-scale formal conventions. The simplest of these was theme and variations, in which a theme is varied in a series of discrete, modular units (Theme, Variation 1, Variation 2, etc.). Beethoven wrote variation sets throughout his life, either as stand-alone works or as movements within a larger cycle such as a sonata, string quartet, or symphony. He cultivated the form with particular intensity in his early years, in part because variations sold well in the sheet music marketplace, in part because the form allowed him to hone his craft within a clearly structured framework.
Another conventional form of Beethoven’s time was the rondo, so called because it derived from the “round” dance of that name. Here, variation (A Aʹ ) and contrast (A B) work in tandem. The opening theme—typically short and catchy—keeps returning in a slightly varied form, but only after we have heard contrasting ideas. The pattern, then, could manifest itself as something like A B Aʹ C Aʹʹ Bʹ Aʹʹʹ . The rondo was a favorite form for finales, as in the Violin Concerto, the Triple Concerto (for violin, cello, and piano), or the “Pathétique” Sonata for Piano, op. 13.
Predictability is an important feature of all conventional forms and especially in purely instrumental music, where listeners have no text by which to follow the course of the music. The two most widely used large-scale formal conventions in Beethoven’s time were binary form and sonata form.
Like the rondo, binary form—so called because it consists of two sections—originated in the world of dance. Dance music of all kinds is typically full of large-scale repetitions, and in binary form the first section is normally repeated before moving on to the second section, which also repeats. In sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and the like, binary forms could be used as modular building blocks. This is especially common in minuet or scherzo movements. The first binary form is followed by a contrasting binary form, known as the trio, after which the first binary form is repeated da capo—literally “from the head,” or as we would say more colloquially, “from the top.” We find this pattern repeatedly in Beethoven’s minuets and scherzos, sometimes with additional trios, as in the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies. The structural principle in each case is modular. And not everything is completely predictable: toward the end of the scherzos in both the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, what sounds like yet another return of the trio section is abruptly cut off shortly after it begins. Beethoven knew how to play with listeners’ expectations.
What would later come to be called sonata form—the most common form for the first movement of any large-scale instrumental work in Beethoven’s time—is in effect an extension of binary form. It, too, consists of two halves. The first is the exposition, in which the movement’s principal melodic ideas are introduced (“exposed”) in the tonic or “home” key. One or more contrasting themes are then introduced in a different but closely related key. This move to a new key area, known as modulation, keeps the music fresh. (This is why church organists often modulate just before the last verse of a hymn, lifting the music up a notch. If everything remained in the same key throughout, it would all begin to sound just a bit tired.)
The second half of a sonata-form movement falls into two subsections. The first is the development, in which the themes heard in the exposition are varied, often in fragmented form. This section scrupulously avoids the tonic so that when we return to the home key, we feel a strong sense of return, a sense that we have been here before—which in fact we have. The reiteration of the tonic is typically reinforced by a simultaneous return to the opening theme. This moment marks the beginning of the recapitulation, the second subsection of the movement’s second half. Here, the themes we had heard in the related key in the exposition are now transposed to the tonic. Sonata-form movements could open with a slow introduction before the beginning of the exposition, and they could conclude with a coda (Italian for “tail”) after the end of the recapitulation, but these are optional elements that stand outside the basic structure of sonata form itself.
Sonata form was a template, not a mold, and composers were free to take liberties within this very broad outline. This scheme worked to the benefit of composers and listeners alike. It gave composers a framework for the large-scale presentation and elaboration of multiple ideas, and it gave listeners a framework of expectations about how a movement’s musical events would unfold. In this sense, sonata form is a way of telling a musical story in which the themes are analogous to characters, while the key areas can be thought of as locations. We get to know the characters (themes) on their home turf in the exposition, they experience things away from home in the development, and there is a resolution of some kind when they return home in the recapitulation. This pattern—home, away from home, back home—is basic to a great many stories, both verbal and musical.
We can think of The Wizard of Oz, for example, in terms of sonata form. We meet all the characters in the exposition either on the farm (Dorothy, Hunk, Hickory, Zeke, Miss Gulch) or not too far away from the farm soon after Dorothy runs away (Professor Marvel). Transported to Oz—the development section—the characters take on new but still recognizable forms: the farmhands morph into the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion; Miss Gulch becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Professor Marvel becomes the Wizard. Back in Kansas at the end—the recapitulation—all the characters (save Miss Gulch) reappear in their original form. Even Professor Marvel, whom we had not seen on the farm (the tonic) when we first met him but only away from it (in the related key area), is now incorporated into the “home” key. As in a sonata-form movement, we see the characters—or hear the themes—in a new light when we encounter them again in the recapitulation. They are the same but not the same.
Sonata form allows for countless permutations even while remaining recognizable in its general outlines. In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example, we hear something quite startling and unexpected about two-thirds of the way through the first movement. The return of the opening theme in the tonic tells us that the recapitulation has begun, but the music suddenly comes to a halt and we hear a solo oboe playing a new, mournful theme entirely by itself. The rest of the orchestra falls silent for a brief and highly dramatic moment. This goes against all conventions of sonata form and makes its effect in part for just this reason: we simply do not expect this sort of thing to happen. At the same time, we can still apprehend the larger shape of the movement when the orchestra interrupts the oboe and the recapitulation resumes its expected course. Our experience with the conventions of sonata form enhances the sense of surprise even while confirming a larger sense of structure once the recapitulation resumes its expected course.
There was, however, one important genre during Beethoven’s lifetime for which listeners could entertain no expectations of any kind: the fantasia. Often improvised at the keyboard and only occasionally committed to paper, fantasias were perceived as the unmediated product of the imagination or “fantasy” of the performer-composer, produced spontaneously and without reflection in what we today would call a stream-of-consciousness fashion. When critics of Beethoven’s time described the fantasia as a genre with “no theme,” they meant that it had no central theme that listeners could reasonably expect to be manipulated and then brought back at some point. The title “fantasia” was in effect a warning label: abandon all expectations, ye who listen here.
Beethoven was renowned for his abilities to fantasize at the keyboard. Indeed, the occasional concerts he organized typically included an extended solo improvisation. He committed only two of these fantasias to paper, one for piano (the Fantasia, op. 77), the other for an ensemble of piano, orchestra, vocal soloists, and chorus (the Choral Fantasy, op. 80). Neither adheres to any formal convention. Both open with broad flourishes on the piano and move through a variety of moods and fragmentary ideas before landing on a theme that becomes the basis of further variation and improvisation. About midway through the Choral Fantasy, Beethoven brings in an orchestra that together with the piano elaborates the “discovered” melody still further. The piece concludes with solo voices and chorus declaiming a text on the power of art.
Fantasy was equated with inspiration, that magical moment of invention. And Beethoven’s contemporaries, including even his detractors, consistently lauded his fantasy. But his detractors accused him of putting it on display to excess: they regarded too much fantasy as detrimental to any composition not labeled as such. Critics recognized the free play of imagination as a necessary starting point for the invention of ideas but always hastened to add that subjective fantasy needed to be tempered by objective circumspection. Otherwise, a composer’s spontaneous ideas ran the risk of becoming incomprehensible. When an early critic called the “Eroica” Symphony an extended fantasy for orchestra, it was not meant as a compliment.
We have much to learn from critics like this. They remind us that Beethoven challenged the listeners of his time, and that listeners were not used to being challenged. Music criticism would take a new turn in the generation that followed, with the benefit of the doubt going to composers. But this was a new way of listening that had not yet established itself in Beethoven’s day.
Regardless of genre, the next step in the composition of any new work was to supervise the process of publication. This was a time-consuming and vexatious task, one Beethoven loathed but accepted as a necessary evil. He reviewed and corrected proofs of the publisher’s score, often berating engravers for their mistakes.
Nor was the process necessarily over once a publisher had issued a work. Beethoven lived at a time when new technologies were beginning to allow composers to indicate exactly how fast their music should be performed. Generations of his predecessors had made do with fairly broad designations, usually in Italian, that designated a mood as much as a speed, such as Allegro (lively, fast), Presto (very fast), Andante (a walking pace), Adagio (slow), or Lento (very slow). But how fast is fast? How slow is slow? Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a personal friend of the composer, helped perfect the metronome, a new device that could measure beats per minute with a fair degree of exactitude. Beethoven liked the idea and proceeded to add metronome markings to at least some of his works already in circulation, including his first eight symphonies and a number of string quartets. Oddly, he provided markings for only one of his piano sonatas, op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”), and these strike many performers today as impossibly fast. Other metronome indications have come down through the memory of his pupil and associate Carl Czerny.
But original editions, even those approved and revised by the composer, are still not the last word. Mistakes, ambiguities, inconsistencies, and conflicting readings among relevant sources have generated the need for carefully edited modern editions. Scholars today are now in the process of producing a complete set of Beethoven’s works that reconciles such discrepancies. The most recent edition of the Fifth Symphony, for example, is based on a variety of different and often conflicting sources, the most important of which are the composer’s autograph score (itself full of Beethoven’s own corrections and additions); the set of parts used for the first performance, also with Beethoven’s corrections and changes; a copyist’s manuscript of the score, again with similar changes in the composer’s hand; correspondence with Breitkopf & Härtel, the original publisher; and the first publication itself, issued in orchestral parts in April 1809. Weighing all these sources against each other is a painstaking process, but the end result is a score that reflects the composer’s intentions as can best be determined. Beethoven would no doubt be amazed—and gratified—by the care with which such editions are made today.