Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (76 page)

 

Despite the ongoing deterioration of his hearing, Beethoven still stood before the public. In a charity concert of April 1808, he conducted—rather than soloed in—the Third Piano Concerto, the
Coriolan
Overture, and the Fourth Symphony. The next month saw what appears to have been the public premiere of the four-year-old Triple Concerto, which had already been published (in parts, not score) the previous year.
¹³
The Fourth Symphony and
Coriolan
had been privately premiered in March 1807, at the Lobkowitz Palace.
¹⁴

The three works in this charity concert form a rich pattern of relationships to the future and the past in Beethoven's music. The Third Concerto sits on the divide between the old way and the New Path. The others lay out his future.

In the summer and fall of 1806, he had written the Fourth Symphony in B-flat Major, op. 60, virtually in one breath, hard on the heels of finishing the revised version of
Leonore
. For the Fourth Symphony he put aside work on the Fifth. As with the Second, an operatic quality hovers over the Fourth. (The first sketches appear in the middle of ones for
Leonore
.)
¹⁵
If it is less mercurial and buffa than the Second, it is no less vivacious. Meanwhile its opening melodic gambit traces the same motif as the opening of the Fifth Symphony, in a dramatically different atmosphere. Both symphonies begin with two falling thirds joined by a rising step, but where the Fifth is driving and dynamic out of the gate, in the Fourth that motif begins a darkly
misterioso
introduction.
¹⁶
Call it a nocturnal scene as prelude to a romantic-comic opera.

The Fourth conjures a series of atmospheres, from nocturnal to romantic to rambunctious. Two elements of its opening will abide: one is the falling third from B-flat to an out-of-key G-flat. Both notes turn up in various situations and guises, memorably as F-sharp and A-sharp toward the end of the development, bringing the music to distant B major. The other element is falling thirds joined by a step, the motif of the first bars. That motif is going to be sped up and otherwise played with rhythmically, used as a seed to grow new themes.

The darkness of the introduction sinks into silence. Then in a flash the music takes a turn to gaiety with a series of driving up-rips, as if a door were thrown open to a brightly lit ballroom. And from the opening up-rips, echoing ones Mozart used in the
Jupiter
Symphony and elsewhere, to the bouncing comic gait of the first allegro, the rhythmic quality is Mozartian—operatically Mozartian.
¹⁷
Like the Violin Concerto, written equally fast just after this symphony, the thematic material is generally simple and without contrapuntal elaboration. There was not much time for complexities. Like the Violin Concerto's opening on a timpani pulse, as in the Third Piano Concerto's thematic timpani figure, in the Fourth the timpani sometimes steps into the foreground as a kind of protagonist, transcending its old association with military and festive music. At the end of the development, as a joke for connoisseurs, the music ends up in B major, but the fixed-tuning timpani insists that the A-sharp is really B-flat and so prepares the recapitulation.

A long, drifting melody of ineffable tenderness begins the second movement. For its accompaniment Beethoven mobilizes one of his first symphonic monorhythmic stretches: a lilting dotted figure that a future time would call a tango rhythm. The figure goes on and on, gentle and then insistent, an accompaniment developed like a theme. At the end of the movement the tango motif comes to rest in the timpani, playing quietly unaccompanied, like a dancer taking a few wistful turns alone at the end of the evening. At the close of the first movement of the
Eroica
, the Hero theme finds its rightful place in the home key, in its proper instrument, the horn. In the Fourth Symphony, the second movement's rhythm finally arrives in the timpani alone. In both cases it is as if an idea were searching through the course of a movement not only for its home key but also for its true instrumental avatar, and finds it at the end as another kind of homecoming. This is a kind of musical and psychological logic that Beethoven surely invented. The Fourth's third movement is a romping scherzo, its two-beat theme kicking against the three-beat meter. The finale is a breathless, madcap
moto perpetuo
, like the gayest of final tableaux in a comic opera.

With the Fourth Symphony Beethoven confirmed his pattern of maximal contrast in pairs of symphonies: dramatic unto tragic in the odd-numbered, joyful unto comic in the even-numbered; muscular and bold scoring in the odd-numbered, warm and rich scoring in the even (though each of the symphonies has its distinctive orchestral sound). In other words, the Fourth Symphony is virtually the anti-Third. It would be the same with the Fifth and Sixth.

As stunning as any of the dichotomies of the Third and Fourth is the simplification of form, texture, and material represented by the new symphony. One might think that the Fourth is more transparent in form and material than the Third mainly because it was written fast. But the Fifth and Sixth have the same quality. Starting with the
Eroica
's enormous, multithemed opening, all the movements of that symphony are complex and unusual in form. Now Beethoven turned from a radical complexity to a radical simplicity, but with a defining new element: simplicity plus a new driving energy. This will be one of the thumbprints of the heroic style. Once he had written on a sketch, “simple and always more simple.” He aspired to the directness of voice he admired in Handel, which Haydn also possessed: the ability to get big effects with the most direct means. Not until his last symphony would he return to movements as complex in form as the
Eroica
's.

Beethoven inherited a tradition that said a symphony ought to be a more public, more populist, less complex genre than chamber music, which is more for connoisseurs. After the
Eroica
, Beethoven submitted to that tradition but reimagined it from within, as he had done before in genre after genre. After the Fourth, the next four symphonies would be, each in its own way, largely lucid and transparent in form, the material emotionally direct, the whole broadly communicative whether bringing a sob or standing the hair on end, whether conveying a dig in the ribs or a strike at the jugular.

 

When Beethoven took up his friend Heinrich von Collin's play
Coriolan
in 1807 and agreed to write an overture for its revival, he was working with a story he already knew from two sources: Shakespeare's
Coriolanus
, and Shakespeare's source in Plutarch's
Parallel Lives
, where the Greek historian examines celebrated or notorious Roman and Greek figures and draws conclusions about character and morality. Collin used the same plot outline as Shakespeare. After experiencing insults to his pride in Rome, the leading general Coriolan goes over to the enemy Volscians. Then, on the eve of battle, in a confrontation with his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, he is dissuaded from leading an attack on Rome. He pays for that second change of heart with his life. Beethoven, feeling daily insults from the Viennese and yearning to be somewhere else, had to have resonated with this story.

Collin's play is more introspective than Shakespeare's version, concerned with the interior struggle of Coriolan, who finally falls on his sword in despair. That intimate moral and ethical debate also appealed to Beethoven, perennially concerned with those matters. At the same time, his overture suggests he was also thinking of Shakespeare's more dynamic, more theatrical version of the story.

Collin's play vanished from the boards after the revival, but the
Coriolan
Overture soon became a favorite on orchestral programs. With this piece Beethoven more or less invented what came to be called the “concert overture,” and no less what was to be called the “symphonic poem.” Since the overture needed to evoke the story somehow, and since it was intended to have its own life outside the play, Beethoven could indulge in program music with less risk of being condemned for it. As in the
Leonore
overtures, he does not so much preface the story as embody it in the music.

Coriolan
was in his current theatrical style, modeled on Cherubini rather than Mozart, lucid and colorful in orchestration, simple in material and structure but starkly powerful in effect. It begins with low-C unisons answered by crashing high chords, each followed by a violent silence. Charged silence is one of the leading motifs of the piece. The music's cries and silences echo two other evocations of death in his music: the dungeon scene in
Leonore
and before that the beginning of the
Joseph
Cantata. Meanwhile we are in Beethoven's heroic and darkly dynamic C-minor mood, defined earlier in the
Pathétique
Sonata and other works.

The introduction gives way to a restless figure that surges on for pages, at once portraying the implacable spirit of Coriolan and foreshadowing his doom. Like the other Beethoven overtures, this one is laid out in sonata form. The lyrical second theme in E-flat major stands for the pleading Volumnia. Their debate grows progressively more heated and never resolves. After a short but tumultuous development section suggesting Coriolan's inner battle, Beethoven manages a dramatic and psychological masterstroke with the recapitulation. Coriolan's theme is truncated, harmonically unstable, out of balance: he has lost himself. Volumnia's theme is extended, more and more urgent as it drives into a coda reprising the fateful introduction, with its glowering low Cs and crashing chords and electric silences. His mother's anguish is now inside Coriolan, creating a fatal inner conflict.

At the end we hear the spiritual and physical death of the hero in the dissolution, the bleeding away of his theme, until it sinks to emptiness. The essence of the drama is captured in the journey from the violent silences of the beginning to the deathly silences of the end.
¹⁸
With
Coriolan
under his belt, one of the most searingly intense things he had written yet, in his next symphony Beethoven would return to C minor on a larger canvas.

An
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
review of a Leipzig performance is warmer and more astute than many early reviews of his pieces: “Beethoven's overture to Collin's
Coriolan
. . . is once again a very significant work, written more in the manner of Cherubini than that of B's previous orchestral works. The character of this overture is grand and serious, to the point of gloominess. It is strictly and learnedly written . . . and is calculated besides to produce much more of a profound than a radiant effect.”
¹⁹

 

The belated premiere of the Triple Concerto in 1808 might imply several things about it, including ambivalence on the part of the composer. Beethoven was an unsentimental and unforgiving judge of his own work, though always ready to make some florins on nearly anything he had in stock. He sold the concerto sometime before getting it played in public (there had been private readings). He had to have known, though, that besides its surprising style, the Triple Concerto was an expensive and impractical number to put on, given that it required three times the usual soloists.

The first movement, marked Allegro, deals out an intriguing hand in the expression: the opening theme is declaimed quietly in unaccompanied basses, giving it a fateful cast despite the C major. The music brightens and gathers momentum to the first solo entrance, on cello alone. The cello is the main protagonist of the solo trio; its gift for poignant lyricism will be central to the piece. Each soloist enters dutifully on the main theme, and so begins a movement long, rambling, and elegantly beautiful. Beethoven explores solos, duets, and trios with the group, avoiding cadenzas and other soloistic heroics. There is an operatic quality that perhaps spilled over from
Leonore
.

Where the first movement's touches of expressive ambiguity were headed becomes manifest in the second movement, in A-flat major, surely one of the saddest major-key movements ever written. The solo cello sings eloquently throughout. The movement is almost choked off by a quick transition to a finale headed Rondo alla Polacca. The title implies an energetic outing recalling the Polish polonaise. It arrives at the kind of games audiences expected from a rondo finale, including a loping middle section like a parody of a polonaise.

The
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
reviewer knew something was puzzling about this piece, and he didn't much care for it: “In our judgment . . . this concerto is the least of those by Beethoven in print. In it the composer has loosed the reins of his rich imagination, all too ready to luxuriate exuberantly in its richness.”
²⁰
Listeners were used to mainstream Beethoven now, and resistant to anything else. The Triple Concerto never caught on in his lifetime, and scarcely later.

Of the four large orchestral pieces written between 1804 and 1807, in the wake of the
Eroica
—Fourth Symphony, Violin Concerto, Triple Concerto,
Coriolan
—only the last is in the heroic style, with that effect of dynamism and struggle on an epic canvas. Of the three equally significant chamber works Beethoven finished in 1807, none is heroic, but all are close to the level of the
Razumovskys
in boldness, freshness, and scope. All of them trace more complex emotional arcs than much of his earlier work. In contrast to the symphonies, it becomes harder in the chamber pieces of these years to find a clear expressive line from beginning to end. The narrative becomes more mysterious, more like poetry than storytelling.

With the Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Major, op. 69, Beethoven returned for the first time since op. 5 to a genre he more or less invented and still more or less owned. The A Major has an air of something settled and incontrovertible. With a quiet, epigrammatic opening theme starting with cello alone, he establishes the central elements. The opening cello line contains in embryo all the themes of the sonata. The piano supplies the second phrase of the theme, setting up a partnership of equals who complete one another's thoughts. For all its impact, much of the work will be subdued and introspective in tone. Cello and piano inject small cadenzas into the music, as if reflecting on its course. The straightforward A major of the first page is compromised by a turn to a passionate A minor, and that change echoes through the first movement: the expected E major of the second theme is prepared by E minor, and the E major is oddly unsunny. So the essential dynamic of the sonata unfolds as a dialogue of bright and dark, inward and outward.