Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (158 page)

1. When I say Beethoven intended to write the first important piano “repertoire,” I am using a modern conception. As I have noted before, the idea of a standing repertoire was only beginning to take shape in Beethoven's lifetime. But he would have been aware of a body of work in each of the various media by Haydn and Mozart.

2. Johnson, “Decisive Years,” 17.

3. Wyn Jones,
Life of Beethoven
, 38.

4. Formed in 1792, the First Coalition against France included most of the German states, some Italian territories, Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands.

5. Thayer/Forbes, 1:168.

6. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 10. In 1793, Simrock had published Beethoven's Bonn-written variations on a theme from Dittersdorf's
Das rote Käppchen
(Little Red Riding Hood). In his spring 1794 letter, Beethoven chides him for sloppy proofreading and for giving him only one free copy.

7. Wegeler/Ries, 32. They say it was
sul G
(on the G string), but in the score it's
sul C
.

8. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 106.

9. Landon,
Beethoven
, 46.

10. Solomon,
Late Beethoven
, 136.

11. Knight,
Beethoven
, 33.

12. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 12.

13. Wetzstein/Fischer, 123nn453, 455.

14. Gutzmer,
Chronik der Stadt Bonn
, 83–87.

15. “Französische Ouvertüre,” 17. The only recorded communication between Beethoven and Neefe after Beethoven left Bonn is the letter of thanks Beethoven wrote shortly after leaving.

16. Clive,
Beethoven and His World
, 389.

17. Wegeler/Ries, 24–25.

18. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 15.

19. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 53.

20. Senner,
Critical Reception
, vol. 2, no. 171n2.

21. Wyn Jones,
Symphony
, 43–44, 51, 58.

22. Clive,
Beethoven and His World
, 212–13.

23. Landon,
Beethoven
, 94.

24. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 86.

25. Thayer/Forbes, 1:156.

26. Wegeler/Ries, 38. Beethoven had been planning and sketching the C Major Concerto before the day he wrote out the score.

27. Thayer/Forbes, 1:175.

28. At some point, Beethoven wrote out cadenzas for the Mozart D Minor Concerto.

29. Landon,
Beethoven
, 44.

30. That concertos were practical items is the gist of Plantinga's view of the piano concertos in
Beethoven's Concertos
.

31. Ibid., 67. The early versions of the B-flat Concerto are lost, but the rondo that appeared as WoO 6 seems to have been the original finale (61).

32. The second theme of the B-flat Concerto's first movement is in D-flat, then G-flat in the recap; in the C Major, the second theme is in E-flat, and the recap drifts briefly into A-flat. So in both cases Beethoven surrounds the tonic of the work with flat submediant keys—prophetic of his later interest in mediant relationships.

33. Landon,
Beethoven
unabridged, 64–65.

34. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 55–56; Wyn Jones,
Life of Beethoven
, 43–44. Various sources cite a different sum as Beethoven's profit on op. 1.

35. Wegeler/Ries, 74. Ferdinand Ries was not yet in Vienna when the op. 1 Trios were first played and published, and his memoir was written decades later. As a result, it's not clear when Haydn actually first heard the trios—in earlier versions before he left for England, or the published versions after he returned. (At some point he may well have critiqued one or more of the trios as Beethoven worked on them.) Thus it's also unclear when Haydn gave Beethoven the advice about holding back the C Minor. Ries would have heard the story from Beethoven (not a particularly reliable source). Afterward, Ries asked Haydn personally about the matter. Haydn replied that “he had not imagined that this trio would be so quickly and easily understood nor so favorably received by the public.”

36. Thayer/Forbes, 1:139.

37. Douglas Johnson, in “Decisive Years”: “What the new works show . . . is a conflict between ambitious compositional technique . . . and not altogether suitable material, some of it borrowed from earlier works and some of it beefed up to approximate symphonic proportions” (26).

38. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 94.

39. An introduction to a work, especially a long and slow introduction to a first-movement Allegro, is a kind of exception to my rule that the beginning lays out the leading ideas of a piece, because a long, slow introduction is usually not the real
Thema
. Instead, the introduction tends, one way or another, to suggest the leading theme or themes of the following Allegro, as if it were the seedbed of the leading ideas. The theme following the introduction is treated in practice as
das Thema
. As for
das Thema
in music, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorist H. C. Koch wrote, “Just as in speech the principal idea, or theme, provides the essential content of the same, and must contain the material for the development of principal and subsidiary ideas, so it is in music, with respect to the modifying of an emotion that is possible through the principal subject, and just as an orator moves on from his principal subject to subsidiary subjects, antitheses, dissections etc. . . . so the composer will act in the same manner in the treatment of a principal subject” (quoted in Dahlhaus,
Ludwig van Beethoven
, 121).

40. At various speeds and in various forms, the E-flat Trio's arpeggio motif turns up in Alberti-like figures through the first movement, in the B theme of movement 2, in the end of the A theme and the trio section of the scherzo, and in the finale from the main theme on.

41. From m. 299 of the finale, Beethoven provides, perhaps with tongue in cheek, a précis of his short–short–long rhythmic motif and, for that matter, his way of handling rhythmic motifs: first we hear it in quarters, then diminished in eighths, then in sixteenths. Then he neatly links the motif to the wry two-eighth-octave hiccup that opens the main theme.

42. The beginning of the slow movement takes a detour to the subdominant, just as the first movement did. Here Beethoven makes a recurring motif out of a modulation—but then, he eventually makes any recurring element a motif, including rests and single pitches.

43. Already in the C Minor Trio, Beethoven can wield the harmonic effect known as the “Neapolitan sixth” (N6) in dazzling ways. It feels not just like a fresh color in the harmony but like something breathtaking, almost vertiginous.

44. In the C Minor Trio, the tritone first shows up in the top piano line in mm. 7 and 9, followed by the violin solo emphasizing the same C–F-sharp tritone. Most of the tritones in the trio resolve normally, but there is an unusual interest in them throughout. On the third page, all three instruments come to a weird,
pianissimo
pause on E-flat–A, which finally and furiously resolves
fortissimo
. Meanwhile, I think the first movement demonstrates that one of the ear-dazzling effects of the N6 chord is that its root forms a tritone with the dominant note to which it resolves. So, the Neapolitans in the C Minor Trio are another manifestation of the tritone motif.

45. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 101.

 

12. Virtuoso

 

1. Thayer/Forbes, 1:177; Landon,
Beethoven
, 49. The dances are WoO 7–8. Also this year, Beethoven wrote two other sets of six minuets. In
Beethoven
, 60, Barry Cooper details the striking sequence of tonalities in Beethoven's pension-fund-ball dances, the keys forming a chain of descending thirds and upward fourths, and compares them to the similar, if less exploratory, sequence in Haydn's dances for the 1792 ball. This is another case of Beethoven taking a model and elaborating on it.

2. Landon,
Beethoven
, 49. The headline dances for the November balls were by Franz Süssmayer, a prominent Mozart pupil best known for completing Mozart's unfinished Requiem.

3. Thayer/Forbes, 1:180–81.

4. Braubach, “Von den Menschen,” 73.

5. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 16.

6. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 63–64. There is little documentation of these concerts or how they were received. Countess Clary was a well-known amateur singer.

7. The difficulties of
Ah! perfido
for the singer, probably coming no more from expressive intentions than from Beethoven's lack of experience writing for voice, are so fierce that there is no surprise in the report that one soprano “almost suffered a heart attack” from stage fright during the piece (Scherman and Biancolli, 367).

8. Thayer/Forbes, 1:183.

9. Important generating motifs of the F Minor Sonata include three elements of the beginning: the sixth from C to A-flat of the “rocket” motif (spread through two octaves), the turn figure of m. 2, and the first left-hand “&-2-&” rhythm. In mm. 7–8, the sixth motif is filled in to make a descending-sixth pattern that Kenneth Drake (
Beethoven Sonatas
, 88) calls the leading thematic idea in the sonata. Drake's examples showing how the descending-sixth idea is used are an excellent summary of the way Beethoven develops a motif: sometimes putting it on the surface, sometimes decorating it, sometimes making it a scaffolding on which to build a phrase or a new theme. Drake does not mention the main rhythmic motif (&-2-&) of the F Minor, but by and large nobody mentions Beethoven's steady use of rhythmic motifs (or Haydn's, or Mozart's).

10. The second theme of the A Major provides a good demonstration of the subtlety and discipline of Beethoven's handling of rhythmic motifs. The first gesture in the movement establishes the basic rhythmic idea, dotted rhythms creating
upbeats:
short upbeats like the beginning eighth, which is immediately decorated into a four-thirty-seconds upbeat, and in m. 11 extended into a three-eighths upbeat. In m. 58, the beginning of the second theme, the articulation implies a dotted quarter and then an eighth upbeat; two bars later, that idea is diminished into a dotted eighth and two thirty-seconds; the articulation of mm. 60 and 61 implies a dotted half and quarter. In other words, the second theme is saturated with one dotted rhythmic figure expressed in three speeds. The main theme of the scherzo features a four-sixteenths upbeat; the main theme of the finale starts with a four-beat upbeat to the second bar. This kind of meticulous thematic work, in which an idea is expressed in a constant variety of ways both overt and covert, is common in Beethoven, even in the early opuses. He did not invent this kind of thematic work, but as with all his models, Beethoven took up ideas from the past and broadened and intensified them.

11. The rising fourth of bar 2 is an important motif in the Sonata in C Major, but the subtlest motif from the beginning is the implied turn figure D–E–F–E–(D) in the upper voice. It becomes a real turn in the beginning of the second theme, in m. 27, and starts the main theme of both middle movements. (A motif will routinely be inverted and/or retrograded, as in the second- and third-movement themes.) Spread out over two octaves, the opening theme of movement 1 is the scaffolding on which the scampering theme of the finale is constructed.

12. Skowroneck,
Beethoven the Pianist
, 68.

13. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 17. Johann Streicher was from childhood a friend of Schiller's, and would have spoken of him to Beethoven.

14. Ibid., no. 18. Note 4 identifies the young pianist as a Fräulein von Kissov, the trio movement she played probably the Adagio cantabile of op. 1, no. 1. Note 6 points out that, so far in letters, Beethoven uses both the terms
fortepiano
and
Klavier
referring to the instrument. Later he tended to use
Klavier
, but occasionally
Piano
.

15. While Beethoven was perennially dissatisfied with the pianos of his day, he also composed skillfully and idiomatically for them. A prime example is the first movement of the
Moonlight
Sonata, which works beautifully on period pianos but on modern instruments can't be played as written, with the sustain pedal held down throughout, because modern instruments sustain notes much longer.

16. Gutman,
Mozart
, 695. Mozart's tour of 1789 was his longest separation from his wife, Constanze. It was during the trip that he wrote the famous yearning and graphic letters to his wife back home. There was eventually a break between Mozart and Lichnowsky, who two years later sued Mozart over a loan made during the trip.

17. Thayer/Forbes, 1:187.

18. Ibid., 1:185.

19. In the next decade, Jean-Louis Duport would publish what became one of the most influential cello methods of the time, showing influences of the French school and using a new fingering system.

20. Landon,
Beethoven
unabridged, 91.

21. The Berlin stay is described in Thayer/Forbes, 1:184–87.

22. Kinderman, in
Beethoven
, 45, calls the introduction of the G Major prophetic of the beginning of the
Pathétique
and of
La Malinconia
in op. 18, no. 6.

23. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 19.

24. Wegeler/Ries, 156.

25. The full Schönfeld article is in Sisman,
Haydn
. History would not agree in the least with Schönfeld's skepticism about Haydn's late symphonies. That he called the symphonies Haydn's greatest works shows the current status of the genre.

26. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 22.

27. Thayer/Forbes, 1:190.

28. Wegeler/Ries, 107–8.

29. B. Cooper (
Beethoven
, 60) points out how little
Adelaide
resembles other lieder of the time.

30. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 40. Other composers set “Adelaide,” but in 1811, Matthisson belatedly named Beethoven's as his favorite. Schubert did several Matthisson settings. To later sensibilities, the poem “Adelaide” would seem sentimental and dated, but Matthisson's admirers of the time included Friedrich Schiller.