Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (48 page)

 

In the first weeks the sun and serenity of Heiligenstadt seemed to have a vitalizing effect on Beethoven. Between March and May he drafted the three violin sonatas of op. 30. All are relatively good-natured pieces, even no. 2, in C minor, only modestly fiery compared to the storms that that key usually roused in him. All in all, these are the freshest of his violin sonatas so far. Here he stands at the point of making his escape from Mozart in a medium in which he had always kept his audacity under wraps.

Nonetheless, once again, violin sonatas provoked him to wide-ranging tonal excursions. The development of the C Minor, no. 2, first movement touches on nine keys before making its way back to the tonic. Perhaps the glory of the set is the slow movement of no. 2, a touching Adagio cantabile with no lingering hints of the eighteenth-century
galant
but rather an inward and spiritual atmosphere of wonderful beauty. This movement owes little to the expressive rhetoric of the past; there is a sense of a powerful, fresh, and authentic music emerging that Beethoven was still learning to manage. If not that movement, the crown of the set might be the opening of no. 3, in G major, which begins with a swirling unison followed by a lilting (and a touch tipsy) theme, complete with hiccup in the violin.
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The rondo of the G Major is one of the most deliciously whimsical finales he ever wrote, its theme a spinning folk tune over a bagpipe drone, starting a brilliant and smile-inducing movement unlike anything else in his work. Call it Haydnesque wit and folksiness gone deliriously over the top.

For the first sonata, in A Major, Beethoven drafted a finale he concluded was too long and obstreperous for the piece. He replaced it with a theme and variations, and put the rejected finale on the shelf in hopes it might serve something sometime. It certainly did. He dedicated op. 30 to the newly crowned tsar Alexander I. Reared by his grandmother Catherine the Great, Russia's own benevolent despot, Alexander was a sovereign of liberalizing ambitions and at that point a professed admirer of Napoleon. Beethoven's dedication, then, was deliberately to a figure famously allied to enlightened ideals—who might also be moved to do something for a composer now and then.

Then Beethoven returned to keyboard works. The three piano sonatas of op. 31 that he wrote that summer would all be historic, each innovative in a distinctive way, the outer ones vivacious and the middle one tragic.

Each begins with a gesture unprecedented in the literature. No. 1 in G Major starts with a ripping downward scale followed by two-fisted chords that seem to be a joke about pianists who can't get their hands together. Myriad variants of ripping scales and arpeggios and out-of-sync chords constitute much of the material of a jovial first movement. The following Adagio grazioso seems retrospective, gracefully spinning out into a long, mellifluous nocturne whose main theme recalls Mozart at his more decorative, but the rest is Beethovenian in its far-ranging moods, rich harmonies, and dazzling pianistic colors. The warmth of the slow movement seems to merge into a gracious finale, alternately flowing lazily and dashing spiritedly, sometimes uniting those qualities. A few pensive moments drift by, but it ends with gleeful shouts and whispers.

In forging op. 31, no. 2 in D Minor, Beethoven had to have known he was playing with fire. For all its fury and fatefulness, he made sure it was nonetheless taut. This was to be one of the works that cemented his reputation for the dark, the unique in voice, the incomparably dramatic. It provided for listeners, critics, perhaps for Beethoven himself an unmistakable signpost toward the New Path he was setting out on. Later dubbed
The Tempest
, more for its stormy atmosphere than for a connection to Shakespeare's romantic drama (though a story lingered that he related it to the play), the sonata is an unforgettable human document.
⁴²

With a disquieting quietness,
The
Tempest
begins on a whispering arpeggio of uncertain tonality that erupts into a driving Allegro. Quiet descends abruptly again, then the pattern repeats with insistent but still more ambiguous harmonies. From the beginning Beethoven does violence to the formal traditions of an eighteenth-century first movement, with its expected clear first and second themes and unequivocal tonal outline. Instead, here the form asks questions: Is the first harmony here the tonic chord? (No, it is a V6.) Are the opening arpeggio and first Allegro a theme or an introduction? (They are either or both.) What is the first theme proper? (It is probably the whirling, driving theme of measure 21, which starts with the first clear D-minor cadence in the piece.)
⁴³
The indistinct form amplifies the uncertainties of the nervous rhythms and themes. This is
expressive form
. The movement takes an enigmatic course that includes a constant background of driving, demonic energy, with the development section a period of comparative calm. The recapitulation falls into moments of mournful quasi-recitative, as if the music were struggling for words that cannot be spoken.

Another quiet arpeggio opens a time-stopping slow movement, dark and fateful despite its major key, troubled by distant drums, its moments of hope fraught and inconclusive. The end of the movement is a chilling evocation of emptiness. Later Carl Czerny said the finale was inspired by a horse galloping past Beethoven's window. If so, in this music horse and rider are spreading alarm. The finale is relentless, obsessive, virtually monothematic, with a churning intensity like some unstoppable machinery of fate. There ends a sonata as intense as any ever written to that time, as bold and innovative as any, yet executed with the most luminous clarity of means and purpose. From this point forward, that joining of passion and lucidity would mark most of Beethoven's highest achievements.

Then, the opposite. Beethoven begins op. 31, no. 3 in E-flat, with a harmony so strange that it would have earned him more cries of
bizarre
from critics if it did not commence a work of surpassing warmth, wit, and winsomeness.
⁴⁴
The beginning is an invitation, like a hand extended in friendship or love. That drifts into a blithe and whimsical first theme, a recall of the invitation, and a flowing and almost childlike second theme whose rippling delight simply wants to keep going. The coda seems to reflect contentedly on the invitation figure and the cheery second theme.

What amounts to a scherzo for the second movement is in a bouncy two-beat instead of the usual quick three-beat, its main theme a lurching and comical tune with Beethoven's trademark offbeat accents. Following the scherzo, most unexpectedly, comes a graceful and lyrical minuet—he wanted no slow movement to trouble the warm weather of this sonata. For conclusion, a tarantella marked Presto con fuoco, with the fire appropriate to that old whirling dance in which, once upon a time, you hoped to survive the bite of the tarantula by dancing to exhaustion.
⁴⁵
Its tireless churning is the equivalent of the same in the D Minor Sonata, but here to ebullient ends.

 

At the same time that Beethoven worked on the opp. 30 and 31 sonatas, he wrote two deliberately groundbreaking sets of piano variations, opp. 34 and 35. The first, in F major, is a smaller work on a delicately wistful theme of his own. The tone of the whole is lighthearted, but in its way it fractures the decorum of its formal model as decisively as did
The Tempest
. Traditionally a set of variations sticks to the key of the theme, with perhaps an excursion to the parallel minor. Here Beethoven presents each variation in its own key, and those keys form a descending chain of thirds: F–D–B-flat–G–E-flat–C minor, then back to F for a joyous and nostalgic close.
⁴⁶
Changing keys in a set of variations was, for Beethoven, necessarily a matter of changing characters as well, or rather reinforcing the traditional changes of character in variations. Each key had its distinctive tuning on the keyboard and an allied expressive feel, for example, the G-major variation racing and gay, the E-flat stately, the C-minor fateful (though here detectably ironic, faux fateful).

In the op. 35 Variations, Beethoven took up the bass line and
englische
melody from the end of the
Prometheus
ballet (by then also used as a theme in a set of contredanses). The unique idea here, as he labeled the first sections in the score, is to start the piece with only the naked bass line of the theme:
Introduzione col Basso del Tema
. Then follow a series of variations adding a voice at a time, labeled
a due
,
a tre
,
a quattro
, until we arrive in variation 4 at music under the heading
Thema (aus dem Ballet “Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus”)
.

Here again in pieces of summer 1802, the nature of the form poses a fundamental question: what actually
is
the theme—the bass line, or the treble
englische
melody that does not turn up until the fourth variation? Or to put it another way, this is a singular set of variations that amounts, in the beginning, to a bass line searching for its melody as a kind of fulfillment. The rest of the piece proceeds with a sense that the abiding, generating presence is the
basso
that flaunts its elemental simplicity. For Beethoven, that blunt and ingenuous little bass theme already seemed to possess an iconic significance, not just in its structure but in its character—not just a dance but some kind of ethos.

The next variations spin Bachian counterpoint around the bass theme, which rises an octave on each iteration. A neo-Bachian flavor turns up again in the canonic variation 7.
⁴⁷
When the
englische
melody turns up it is presented straightforwardly, as a lilting dance with oompah accompaniment. As with op. 34, the tone of the set is generally cheerful; Beethoven gets some high comedy out of the thumping B-flats in the theme's refrain. The pianism is as brilliant and imaginative as anything he had done. It ends with a grand Bachian fugue on the
Prometheus
theme. In the middle of the last section, the unadorned
englische
theme puts in a final, nostalgic appearance before the bravura finish.

When he first sent the new variations to Breitkopf & Härtel, Beethoven included some uncharacteristic but not exaggerated boasting about their innovations:

 

As my brother is writing to you, I am just adding the following information—I have composed two sets of variations . . . Both sets are worked out in quite a
new manner
, and each in a
separate and different way
. I would infinitely prefer to have them engraved by you,
but on no other condition than for a fee of 50 ducats
[ca. 250 florins]
for both sets
— . . . Usually I have to wait for other people to tell me when I have new ideas, because I never know this myself. But this time—I myself can assure you that in both these works the
method is quite new so far as I am concerned
—

 

This was perhaps the worst way to pitch the piece to this publisher. Härtel had already revealed himself as uninterested in taking risks, and his offers had been low. Much as Beethoven wanted the Breitkopf & Härtel logo on his music, however, he was having none of that: “What you wrote to me once about the
endeavor to sell my works I cannot endorse
. Surely it is an outstanding proof of
the excellent sale of my works
that nearly all
foreign publishers
are continually writing to me for compositions, and that even
those who pirate engraved works
, about whom you rightly complain,
are to be found among this number.
”
⁴⁸

 

In the midst of all this work, a letter arrived from publisher Hoffmeister in Leipzig. An aristocratic lady had offered to commission the famous composer to write a “revolutionary sonata.” Clearly the musical world had come to associate Beethoven with that spirit. In his high-ironic, figuratively or literally intoxicated reply to Hoffmeister, full of dashes like hiccups, Beethoven first scoffs at the lady's offer, then accepts it:

 

Has the devil got hold of you all, gentlemen?—that you suggest that
I should compose such a sonata
—Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever—such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope—to write a sonata of that kind?—If it were even a Missa pro Sancta Maria a tre voci, or a Vesper or something of that kind—In that case I would instantly take up my paintbrush—and with fat pound notes dash off a Credo in unum. But, good heavens, such a sonata—in these newly developing Christian times—Ho ho—there you must leave me out—you won't get anything from me—Well, here is my reply in the fastest tempo—The lady can have a sonata from me, and, moreover, from an
aesthetic
point of view I will in general adopt her plan—but without adopting—her keys—The price would be about [250 florins].
⁴⁹

 

When his reply including the asking price was relayed to the lady, a Countess von Kielmansegge, she took back the offer indignantly, writing to Hoffmeister's partner, “You yourself will see, dear Herr Kühnel, how much Herr Beethoven has demanded and how unreasonable this is.”
⁵⁰

Beethoven's puckish letter about the proposed sonata is remarkable on the face of it and, in some immeasurable degree, historic in its aftermath. As far as he was concerned, the revolutionary period was dead; that was the 1780s, his youth, climaxed by the French Revolution. Now it seemed to him pointless to write a piece of music on a social or political theme that was old news—and that also might draw the attention of the police in Vienna. If he was going to write a politically inspired piece, he wanted the political import to be current.