Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (57 page)

 

The new, integrative double theme soars away from the development's climax, its quiet song of triumph somehow encompassing the crisis that engendered it. The next phrases develop the new theme, emphasizing its upper and lower voices in alternation (the upper voice foreshadowing the theme of the second movement). Finally he arrives at the next attack on his listeners' ears with the horn, the sounding image of the Hero, jumping in early over the wrong chord and forcing the recapitulation.

 

The recapitulation Beethoven keeps fairly regular but still unresolved. The coda is fashioned as an enormous, slowly gathering, five-part conclusion nearly as long as the exposition. In the coda he knows the cognoscenti among his listeners will expect a resolution of the movement's conflicts and uncertainties. But that is not his intention. Already in the decade before, Beethoven had begun to rearrange the proportions of the first-movement form he inherited from Haydn and Mozart, mainly by extending the length and intensity of the development section and of the coda. Long or short, a coda can do several things. First and most traditionally, it is there to make a decisive final assertion of the home key, especially if there is thematic material that was never resolved to the tonic key. In that regard it can have a sense of thematic fulfillment or completion, as when he proclaims
das Thema
in glory. Second, a coda can pick up ideas and issues from the development and carry them further, functioning like a second development. Third, a coda can in one way and another prepare the next movement.
³⁰
The coda of
Bonaparte
's first movement does all three, yet it still eludes a sense of completion.

He makes several small sketches and three extended drafts for the coda, none of them entirely like the final version.
³¹
There after a grandly sonorous D-flat chord, the music falls into a lilting new themelet placed over the first bars of the Hero theme, which rises step by step as it did in the development. A central point is that he wants the coda to return to the flowing new development theme and weave it fully into the fabric of the movement, resolving it into the home key of E-flat (though E-flat minor, not major). Again, that theme foreshadows the theme of the
Funeral March
.

Then he shapes a long windup to a final peroration of the Hero theme, beginning not with a triumphant blaze but rather quietly. It arrives in E-flat major, the home key, for the first time extended into something like a real theme in two regular four-bar phrases, played by its destined avatar the horn. What comes then is his most graphic representation of the Hero as leader. The music swells in a rising wave, at first around a trio of horns on the Hero theme, instruments joining in until all is
tutti fortissimo
. The effect is like a throng of people gathering behind the leader and moving toward some great act, some final victory. But the climactic
fortissimo
collapses after only two bars.
³²
For the last time the music drifts off, going suddenly quiet with a return of the second theme. Once again, he pulls back from finality. The end of the first movement leaves a sense of final victory incomplete, unfulfilled. A giant-striding hemiola challenges the bar line to the last, until with two
fortissimo
yet oddly inconclusive chords the movement ends with an echo of its beginning. The rest of
Bonaparte
will constitute a search for the E-flat-major certainty of its opening chords.

In terms of the symphony's narrative,
the hero has come into his own, but his task is unfinished
.
³³
At some point Beethoven decides that the paying off of the ideas and energies of the first movement, the completion of the Hero's task, will not happen until the finale. In fact, the final triumph and true conclusion will not take place until the last pages of the
Bonaparte
Symphony.

 

When it is time to realize the sketches in score, Beethoven finds a new richness in his handling of the orchestra. The scoring of the symphony needs to be as kaleidoscopic as the notes, from tender passages to brassy perorations. He begins work on this, like other pieces, by doing some groundwork. He studies an
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
article about the natural horn, taking pages of notes.
³⁴
His encounter with the horn virtuoso Giovanni Punto plays its part. The scale and sophistication of the symphony's horn writing are beyond anything he has done, and he adds a third horn to the usual two of the eighteenth-century orchestra. He conceives more elaborate clarinet parts than before. He gives the cellos an unprecedented independence, starting on the first page, where perhaps for the first time in a symphony they alone present the
Thema
. Again and again the cellos rise from their traditional place on the bass line to become a leading voice.

Besides giving a distinctive orchestral color to every theme and section in the first movement, he makes each succeeding movement distinctive in sound: the often-monolithic effect of the first movement spaced with lyrical moments, ideas restlessly passing from voice to voice in the orchestra; the shadow and light of the second movement, with imitations of drums and cannons; the darting, quicksilver sound of the scherzo and its hunting-horn trio; the sometimes chamberlike scoring of the finale, but including massive, brilliant tuttis. Meanwhile, if the horn is the protagonist of the first movement, of the trio of the scherzo, and of much of the finale, the voice of the oboe, from plaintive to incisive, is the first of the woodwinds, a second orchestral protagonist.

He finishes the first movement knowing it is the longest, most ambitious, most complex first movement of any symphony: a movement in the image of a great and unbridled hero.
³⁵
The second movement will be no less remarkable.

 

The dramatic point of a second movement titled
Marcia funèbre
in a symphony called
Bonaparte
is plain enough: after the battle, in victory or defeat, the first task is the burial of the dead, with the requisite mourning and commemoration. Beethoven may have considered this a funeral for the masses of dead, or one for the martyred hero himself.

In the background of this solemn and elegiac C-minor second movement is the one Beethoven wrote for the op. 26 Piano Sonata titled “Funeral March for the Death of a Hero.” Further in the background are funeral marches written in France in the wake of the Revolution, some of them well known in Vienna. For revolutionary festivals, French composers developed a grand popular style, simple and songful, often using massive sonorities featuring the military instruments of brass and drums.
³⁶
For listeners of the day, this was the sounding image of revolution. Rodolphe Kreutzer had shown Beethoven collections of this music in 1798, at the residence of the French minister; Beethoven registered it with his steel-trap mind for what might suit his purposes. Now in composing the whole of
Bonaparte
but most overtly in the second movement, he takes the revolutionary style and carries it far beyond his models.

He has kept the thematic ideas of the first movement fragmentary, protean, like voices rising and disappearing in the flux. Now as he sketches toward the main theme of the
Marcia funèbre
, he is looking for a piercing tragic lament, a dirge that will be the touchstone of the movement, never far away. With that kind of ambition weighing on it, the melody does not come easily. He decides to start without introduction. The dotted pickup and first two bars, the melodic shape extracted from the
Prometheus
bass and foreshadowed in the first movement's E-minor development theme, are settled right away. After that he wrestles with the dirge bar by bar, sketch after sketch, until it has found the depth and tragic scope he requires for
das Thema
of a movement about burial, sorrow, mourning, and apoth­eosis:
³⁷

 

 

The beginning of the movement he shapes as an archetypal funeral march from the Revolution, from all wars: a mournful dirge in the darkest register of the violins, the basses evoking muffled drums. In the mind's eye, troops slowly march behind the catafalque, the masses gathered to watch the procession and to grieve. The dirge rises to a piercing dissonance on A-flat, falling to G, which captures the pathos of the scene (as falling half steps did in the
Pathétique
). Those two pitches, singled out on the first page of the symphony, will play a steady role in the movement. The opening dead march is answered by a consoling E-flat-major theme in richly scored strings, echoing (whether or not he realized it) the well-known
Marche lugubre
of François-Joseph Gossec, who had been in the vanguard of French revolutionary composers.
³⁸

Once again Beethoven has to be a psychologist in tones. He wants this music to enfold the whole process of mourning, which is not one event and one emotion but a mingling of events and emotions: formal public mourning and inchoate private sorrow, and the exaltation of the dead as martyrs patriotic and transcendent. Meanwhile the end of burial and elegy is to honor the dead and also to give completion. In those terms humanity endures tragedy and lays it to rest. The hope of mourning is to reclaim joy. All those things he enfolds in this music that is based on French models but still sounds sui generis.

From beginning to end there is a missing element in this funeral service: there is no hymn to God. It is a secular humanist ceremony, as it would have been in revolutionary France.
³⁹

To encompass the stages of burial and mourning, Beethoven again has to bend formal traditions, this time nearly beyond recognition. The basic form is on the order of a march with trio, ABA. But he needs more perspectives than ABA can give him. To that pattern he adds interludes, constant variations of the material, internal repeats that evolve into a complex and unprecedented form dominated by the rondo-like return of the dirge—six returns, four of them varied, moving between C minor and F minor.

After the flowing beginning of the middle section in C major (with perhaps representations of cannon shots) and the return of the dirge in C minor, he takes up a solemn and majestic double fugue. It rises to a transcendent climax in the high-humanistic key of E-flat: horns soar upward accompanied by strings striding up and down. It is a moment of heart-filling grandeur that Beethoven will never surpass and hardly equal. It is not a paean to God but a hymn to humanity.
⁴⁰
Then the music falls back to earth, to the burial of the dead: a crashing low A-flat chord, drums and cannons, lacerating bugle calls. It dies away to a return of the dirge over an ominously surging bass; that resolves to the consolation of the B theme, but the bass and dirge return, and the drums and bugles.
⁴¹

He begins the coda in D-flat, as he did the coda of the first movement, here with a fragile but hopeful new theme like the sun breaking out over a scene of mourning. It does not last. The anguish returns, cadencing back to C minor with the snarl of a low stopped horn and wind figures like distant wails. Composing the end takes him hours, perhaps days of improvising at the keyboard and singing and walking, some eight drafts on the page to discover what he wants.
⁴²
The result is extraordinary, unprecedented. The music is no longer the picture of a march or a funeral cortege. It is inside now, in the heart, and there the dirge falls into sighs and fragments. The movement ends with a distant cry, sinks again to deathly silence.

 

In summer 1803, Beethoven begins work on the third movement with an idea for its ending. At the head of the sketch is “M.,” meaning “minuetto.” The summer before, he had made an initial sketch for the movement labeled Minuetto serioso. But in these years he is apt to be vague in what he calls a “minuet” and a “scherzo.” It is not clear when he begins seeing these ideas in fast scherzo tempo rather than slower minuet. He continues with a peculiar note: “M[inuetto] at the end of the Coda a strange vo[ice]”—
eine fremde St[imme]
.
⁴³
The “strange” (meaning foreign-to-the-movement) voice in question involves a rising three-note chromatic line, the chromatic slide that he established in the first movement as a central motif. That
fremde Stimme
will indeed end up in the coda of the movement.

Soon, he finds the dashing, folklike melody of the scherzo, whether he sees it yet as scherzo or minuet. A long continuity sketch adds an introduction to the E-flat theme and makes some stabs at the trio. Then something takes hold. He sketches a rushing figure leading up to the folk theme and notes the tempo as
presto
. Whether or not he had been before, now he is composing not a minuet but a scherzo. Now he has the ideas that will dominate the movement: a rushing figure of indecipherable meter sounding like a teeming host (the hemiolas of the first movement becoming manic) and his bit of piping folk tune: