Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Later, prodding a publisher to rush it out, Beethoven complained, “Do send my septet into the world a little more quickly—because the rabble is waiting for it.”3 Asked for a piece by impresario Johann Salomon in London, he sent off the Septet as his British debut.4 In his effort to please and to make a few florins, though, Beethoven succeeded too well. Published as op. 20, the Septet became, to his eternal annoyance, the biggest success of his life. From then on, conservative critics would use it as a cudgel with which to belabor his more adventurous pieces. The C Major Symphony would serve a similar function. Which is to say that Beethoven was subject to a classic dilemma of the artist with early success: as a young composer, he had to put up with being compared unfavorably to Haydn and Mozart; as a mature composer, he would have to endure unfavorable comparisons to his younger self.

  Symphony No. 1 in C Major, op. 21, is larger and in theory more ambitious than his chamber works, at the same time geared to appeal to an audience reared on Haydn and Mozart. For years Beethoven had been sketching at a symphony in that key. Now, wanting a big finish for his concert, he brushed aside his uncertainty and pulled the piece together quickly. He took what had been some ideas for a first movement and gave them to the finale, then composed three new movements. Because of the weight of those transferred ideas, this symphony points in the direction Beethoven was to pursue: the finale became the heaviest and most serious, rather than the first movement carrying the main weight as in symphonies of the past.5

  In tone, the First Symphony recalls Haydn more than Mozart. The beginning of the Adagio molto introduction is a series of wind chords that bend a couple of rules, if gently: it commences on a dissonance and in the wrong key. Only in the fourth measure does the music arrive at a chord that reveals the piece is in C major. As the AMZ critic noted, it is overrich in tuttis from beginning to end, which makes for an orchestral sound tending to monochromatic—a mistake Haydn and Mozart did not make, and Beethoven never made again.

  The main motif of the symphony is the ascending half step heard over and over in the beginning of the introduction. After that Beethoven runs up and down a scale, foreshadowing the introductory scale figure in the last movement (for which he already had the leading ideas). Then follows a vigorous, military-toned Allegro con brio, its phrasing foursquare, its modulations modest, its development and coda not excessively long. Much of the movement is forte or fortissimo, most of it scored for the whole band. Whether or not the material itself has great impact, he wanted to make some noise with it. C major had a reputation as a key for sentiments from the moderate to the elevated and grand, not bold or passionate, and so it is here. As for the second movement (in a slightly unusual sonata form), Beethoven would never get closer to the elegantly precious mood of the eighteenth-century galant, still current in those years. However far from his own temperament, the galant was a tone he could wield when he wanted to.

  The third movement he called “Minuetto,” but its tempo of Allegro molto e vivace reveals it as a scherzo. This one is dashing, as scherzos are supposed to be; in practice, it’s one of the least distinctive he ever wrote. The tone of gaiety-in-moderation is maintained in the finale, which begins like the first movement, with an Adagio introduction. There is a clear family resemblance in the opening themes of all the movements; by now those kinds of intermovement relations were old habit to Beethoven.

  The C Major Symphony was fresh enough for the first reviewer to call it “novel,” without putting too fine a point on it. How novel could it be if the critic found nothing but its scoring to complain about? It was one of the most overtly crowd pleasing, most resolutely eighteenth century of Beethoven’s works in this period, crafted with his usual skill but less personal in material than some of the early piano sonatas, piano trios, and string trios. When he wrote it he was not far from having composed the Pathétique, a harbinger of his mature voice. But with this symphony, the Septet, and the other works on the program, he stepped gently before the Viennese public. For the moment, as a composer of symphonies and concertos he would rest patiently in the shadow of Haydn and Mozart and experiment with voices while he waited for his muse to show him a more adventurous path.

  Beyond that cautiousness, by this point a pattern had emerged: Beethoven tended to follow more aggressive and challenging works with milder, more attractive, more “pleasing” ones. As with the Septet, there would also be a steady sprinkling of manifestly commercial items. When it came to the symphony, he made his debut with a work of modest scale and ambition. Having entered the fray, his ambitions for the genre would mount precipitously.

  At the turn of the new century, piano performing held its place in Beethoven’s income and identity. He had worked hard and long to become the virtuoso he was, spending much of his teens practicing deep into the night. He liked the immediacy of performance and of applause, so different from the lonely business of scribbling notes on paper in hopes, someday, of gaining something from it. But the racket in his ears, his declining ability to hear soft passages and nuances of color, could only erode his playing.

  His performing was receding now, though there was still the occasional public appearance. In April 1800, he gave a program at the Burgtheater with visiting Bohemian horn virtuoso Wenzel Stich, who called himself Giovanni Punto (both last names mean “engraving,” respectively, in German and Italian). Call Punto the Dragonetti of the horn: he had reached a new level of virtuosity on what by the later eighteenth century had become a workaday instrument. Among his admirers had been Mozart, who raved in a letter, “Punto blows ma­gnifique.”6 His instrument was still essentially the old Waldhorn, or hunting horn, which had no valves and so ordinarily could play only a restricted range of notes, like a bugle. Besides mastering the usual elements of virtuoso horn playing—accuracy of pitch, rapid tonguing, a beautiful singing tone—Punto had developed unprecedented skill in hand stopping, a technique of shoving the hand in the bell to change the pitch, thereby producing a greater range of notes.

  Delighted to meet another virtuoso who was expanding the possibilities of an instrument, Beethoven dashed off a horn and piano sonata in F major, published the next year as op. 17, for their concert. Later he claimed to have written the whole piece the day before the performance (possible, but only just). The sonata is largely devoted to enjoying Punto’s playing in styles from singing to bravura. The second movement is in F minor, requiring steady hand stopping. Besides changing the pitch, stopped notes have muted sound, veiled when soft, metallic and piercing when loud. These are qualities to be exploited by a composer who knows the instrument. At the premiere, the audience response to the sonata was so enthusiastic that they played the whole thing again (movements or even entire pieces were often encored in those days).

  The next month Beethoven and Punto performed in Budapest and planned to continue traveling and concertizing together. But there was a squabble, as often happened when dealing with Beethoven. Punto went on alone while Beethoven stayed in Budapest for a while.7 The next year they reunited to put on a charity concert in Vienna.8 What Beethoven retained from this encounter, as with Dragonetti and the bass, was a sense of how the capabilities of an instrument could be extended beyond the norm. As with his new respect for the bass, that experience led him to strain the capacities and the patience of his orchestral horn players.

  Around this period, the visit of another virtuoso became the occasion for an unplanned piano duel. This was not, like the Wölffl evening, a duel of respectful rivals but a thoroughly unpleasant business. Pianist and composer Daniel Steibelt, a handsome and canny showman, had developed a fervent following. He concertized with his wife, a virtuosa of the tambourine, for whom he wrote showpieces that were wildly applauded. (After a performance, he would auction off the tambourine.)9 Beethoven’s admirers worried that this glamorous soloist might eclipse their hero.

  When he arrived in Vienna, Steibelt did not deign to pay his respects to Beethoven. That was his first mistake. At an evening concert in the music room of a C
ount Fries, with Steibelt in the audience, Beethoven presented his op. 11 Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello.10 Steibelt listened distractedly and made a few airy compliments. Another mistake. Then the visitor presented a quintet of his own, followed by an improvisation featuring his trademark tremolando, a fluttering effect new to most listeners of that time.11 Listening to this new idol, Beethoven concluded that the man was a charlatan.

  A week later, at another Count Fries evening with Beethoven attending, a Steibelt piece garnered much applause. He went on to play a showy “improvisation,” clearly prepared ahead, on a theme Beethoven had used for variations in the Trio. That was a calculated challenge, and his last mistake with Beethoven. Naturally when Steibelt was done the crowd demanded a response. Beethoven resisted as usual but finally rose, provoked in the extreme. On the way to the piano he picked up the cello part of Steibelt’s piece. Slumping down at the keyboard, he made a show of turning the part upside down on the music stand. With one finger, he plunked out a few upside-down notes at random. With those notes as a theme, he began to improvise.

  It may well have been a phenomenal performance. His later student Ferdinand Ries noted that Beethoven played best when he was either in an especially good mood or when he was angry.12 This was the latter sort of occasion. Czerny said Beethoven used to emphasize the leading motifs when he played; in this case the motif was a pure insult.13 And as usual with both composing and improvising, Beethoven would have stuck closely to his random Thema. Thereby he indicated to this would-be rival, At any moment I can take any idea, any damned thing at all, and make more out of it than anything you’ve ever done.

  Steibelt got the point. When Beethoven was finished, his rival had vanished from the hall. In the future Steibelt would demand that anyone who desired his presence would not invite Beethoven. Shortly before, in Prague, Steibelt had made the dazzling sum of 1,800 florins for a single concert. Then, reported pianist Wenzel Tomaschek with relish, “[h]e went to Vienna, his purse filled with ducats, where he was knocked in the head by the pianist Beethoven.”14

  At the beginning of August 1800, Beethoven wrote his letter to Friedrich von Matthisson, enclosing his setting of “Adelaide” dedicated to the poet, with thanks for the inspiration. The song had become one of his best-selling items. Beethoven had an abiding respect for poets, their words, and their wisdom. To this fellow artist he unburdened himself a little, by way of almost apologizing for the song: “You yourself are aware what changes a few years may produce in an artist who is constantly progressing. The greater the strides he makes in his art, the less he is satisfied with his earlier works.”15

  He felt more and more restless, searching for a way forward. Beyond that, his hearing and health kept him on edge, anxious for the future. So far he had found extraordinary success in everything he had done. Inevitably there were plenty of people who did not like his work, but plenty of others were buying his music, and that was not lost on publishers. Another pleasant sign of success turned up this year when his most powerful patron, Prince Lichnowsky, granted him an annuity of 600 florins, to be renewed until he had found a permanent position (most likely as a Kapellmeister, most likely in Vienna).16 That was more or less half a year’s workable income. Lichnowsky gave Beethoven another gift that in terms of a later time would be incredible: a quartet of string instruments, including a violin and a cello made by the legendary Guarneri, another violin by the legendary Amati.17 Since this gift was not made to a true string player, it amounted to a token of respect in anticipation of string quartets to come.

  Still, Beethoven had not yet settled on the kind of music he imagined writing, that reached beyond the confines of patrons’ music rooms, that mattered the way Handel and J. S. Bach and Haydn and Mozart mattered. The dissatisfaction he expressed in the letter to Matthisson followed directly on the completion of the most sustained and ambitious project of his life, the six string quartets commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz. They had been Beethoven’s major project for some two years; there is nothing comparable to their scope in the sketches of middle 1798 to late 1799.18 Aware of the looming presence of the Haydn and Mozart quartets, painfully aware that Haydn had recently written some of his greatest ones, Beethoven composed the set with the most meticulous care. Having drafted them to the end, he returned to the F Major and G Major and possibly D Major and revised them with the advice of Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster, a respected old hand with quartets.19 (In the 1790s, Beethoven was a regular at Förster’s twice-weekly quartet parties.)20 Having given the manuscript of the first version of the F Major to Karl Amenda, Beethoven dispatched a letter to his distant friend, saying, “Be sure not to hand on to anybody your quartet, in which I have made some drastic alterations. For only now have I learned how to write quartets.”21

  All the op. 18 quartets turned out strong and listenable. As was second nature to him, each is knit together by patterns of keys, melodic and rhythmic motifs, gestural shapes. If they tend to be reminiscent of Haydn and Mozart, and well within the tradition of quartets written for amateurs, none of them are blandly conventional and all of them have probing ideas, even if sometimes the impact of the ideas does not rise to the level of the craftsmanship.

  In other words, he composed the set cautiously, with Haydn and Mozart figuratively looking over his shoulder, knowing he was going to be submitting these pieces to Haydn’s judgment in person. Haydn was, of course, no ordinary judge of string quartets. He had virtually invented the modern idea of the genre: a four-movement piece for instruments treated more or less equally (superseding the older, first-violin-dominated pieces). Under Haydn’s nurturing, the string quartet had become the king of chamber-music genres, though still aimed toward skilled amateurs playing at home. As of 1800, there was no such thing as an established professional string quartet playing regular public concerts.

  Haydn described his six quartets of op. 33, published in 1782, as written “in a new and special manner.” Besides a more near equality of the instruments, central to that new manner was systematic thematic work—using a few small, recurring motifs to build themes—and a new wealth of expressive variety, integrating music in high style with folksy and comic material. Inspired mainly by op. 33, in the next years Mozart issued his splendid set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn. By then quartets were one of the most salable of genres, with enthusiasts everywhere and composers supplying those enthusiasts with hundreds of works. The quartet had become the chamber medium par excellence for connoisseurs and for fanatics, in a period when the favored amateur instruments were strings, not yet the piano. All over Europe, families and groups of friends played quartets together to entertain themselves and their circle. So quartets, like the other chamber genres, were private and social, in contrast to the more public and popularistic genres of symphony and opera.

  Again mainly because of Haydn, there was a sense that quartets were the ultimate test not only of a composer’s craft but of his heart and soul, his most refined and intimate voice. It was understood that in composing a quartet it was appropriate to be more subtle, idiosyncratic, and complex than in big public pieces. The strange, chromatic beginning of Mozart’s C Major Quartet, the last of the Haydn-dedicated set, earned it the nickname “Dissonant.” A beginning that, harmonically gnarly, would have been out of place in a symphony, even for Beethoven.

  As he began work, Beethoven knew that Haydn was working on his own set of six quartets also commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz.22 As it turned out, Haydn was able to finish only two of the quartets and part of a third (the latter op. 103).23 Age was unkind to Haydn. But as far as Beethoven knew, with his first quartets he would be competing with new Haydns written at the top of the old master’s form. For the moment, then, Beethoven conceded the field. At the same time, he did his preparatory work, studying Haydn quartets and copying out the whole E-flat Quartet from op. 20.24

  Thus the contemporary rather than prophetic tone of the op. 18 Quartets. In later years, it would be written of them that Beethoven wa
s “learning his craft,” “mastering form,” “finding his voice,” “looking backward.” None of that applies. The quartets show him as already a master craftsman, already with a mature understanding of form and proportion (though that understanding would greatly deepen and broaden), a composer who had already found much of his voice (though he had not fully settled into it).25 Still, for all their relative modesty and eighteenth-century tone, the op. 18 quartets are ambitious in their way: well written for the instruments, widely contrasting in mood and color, at least as varied as any set by Haydn or Mozart, and full of ideas particular to Beethoven.

  After reading through the quartets with his group, violinist Ignaz ­Schuppanzigh advised placing the F Major, the second composed, as no. 1 in the published set.26 Beethoven agreed. The F Major has the most arresting opening, perhaps is the most consistent throughout the set. It starts with a sober movement driven by an obsessive repetition of a single figure whose significance is rhythmic as much as melodic.

  In coming years Beethoven would return to similar monorhythmic movements, but later he tended to use repeated figures to sustain a sense of relentlessness, whether a mood of irresistible fate, or the spell of dance, or the blissful trance of a summer day. In the first measures of the F Major, the figure is presented blankly in quiet unison, then in a yearning phrase, then in a more aggressive forte. The obsessive theme is a blank slate on which changing feelings are projected. This being Beethoven, the opening idea also unveils the leading motif of the whole quartet, a turn figure. Between the published version of the F Major and the original version in Amenda’s copy, with advice from old hand Emanuel Förster, Beethoven went back and made dozens of large and small changes in details compositional, textural, thematic: extending thematic connections, tightening proportions and tonal relations (he transposed long stretches of the development).27 In the process he trimmed the appearances of the turn figure from 130 repetitions to 104.28