Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The second movement of the F Major is one of the most compelling movements in op. 18. This is the music that Beethoven told Amenda was based on Romeo and Juliet. It is in D minor, the same as the Largo e mesto movement of op. 10, no. 3, so in a key in which Beethoven found a kind of singing, tragic quality. Here it is marked Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato: slow and warmly impassioned, the main theme a long-breathed, sorrowful song. In the middle of the movement a new figure intrudes, like the whirling of fate that swells relentlessly to a deathly end. There follow a brilliant and delightful scherzo and a briskly racing, perhaps a bit wispy finale that leaves listeners pleased, if perhaps puzzled as to how all this adds up.

  The next quartet in the set, no. 2 in G Major, is jaunty and ironic from beginning to end, starting with the three distinct gestures of its opening, each like a smiling tip of the hat to the eighteenth century. Its slow movement starts elegantly galant, in 3/4, but that tone is punctured by an eruption of mocking 2/4 serving as trio. No. 3 in D Major was the first to be written—in other words, the first full string quartet of Beethoven’s life. If the opening movement seems featureless to a degree, the finale manages to be an effervescent romp full of Haydnesque rhythmic quirks.29 Its slow movement, in a dark-toned B-flat major, branches into deep-flat keys including E-flat minor. That movement shows off Beethoven’s sensitivity to the contrast between keys involving open strings and keys that avoid open strings; to great effect, he juxtaposes dark and bright string keys throughout. No. 4 in C Minor is the only minor-key work in the opus, this one more aspiring to than attaining the dynamism of his C-minor mood.30 The first movement has some apprentice echoes, awkward harmonic and phrasing jumps rare in his music.31 Its gypsy rondo of a finale is the (relative) glory of this number. No. 5 in A Major has its quirky pleasures, including a dashing, as if opera buffa, finale.

  No. 6 in B-flat Major was written last. Here more overtly and eloquently than in any of its neighbors in op. 18, Beethoven showed his hand in wanting to say something beyond music. To that end, he shaped a narrative both personal and universal. Its subject is the encroachment of depression.

  When Beethoven was his student in Bonn, Christian Neefe had written that a composer must be a student not just of notes but of humanity. You need “a meticulous acquaintance with the various characters [of men] . . . with the passions . . . One observes the nuances of feelings, or the point where one passion changes into another.”32 So Beethoven had been taught. In himself he had watched the nuances of feeling. Now he began putting that knowledge to use in ways that took him, in a work on the surface not notably “Beethovenian,” closer to his full maturity.

  The quartet begins on a striding, muscular theme, buffa in tone, even a touch generic and foursquare. It is a Haydnesque theme, and Beethoven is going to play a Haydnesque game with it: set up the listener’s expectations, then subvert them.

  Whereas Haydn usually pursued that game with a wink for the connoisseurs who would get it, Beethoven plays it in fierce earnest. What the listener expects after the beginning of the B-flat Quartet is for the music to remain in uncomplicated, eighteenth-century high spirits. The second theme starts off in the expected second-theme key of F major, the tone elegant and refined, the rhythm with a touch of marching tread.

  Then something intrudes, a shadow. The elegant march strays into unexpected keys, arriving with a bump on the chromatic chord called the Neapolitan, a harmonic effect that often has something unsettling about it.

  After a few seconds, the shadow seems to pass, the music shakes itself back into F major, all is well again. Nothing really troubles the movement further until the recap, except that in the development the jolly tone gets sometimes a touch harsh, and in a couple of places the music trails off strangely into silence, like it has lost its train of thought. In the recap of the second theme, the harmony veers into B-flat minor and E-flat minor, then shakes off the shadow again.

  The second movement begins in a blithe and galant mode, but that is a mood made to be spoiled. In the middle part, the music slips again into E-flat minor, one of Beethoven’s most fraught keys, usually implying inward sorrow. Here it is, an eerie, spidery, keening whisper, all of it based on a twisting motif:

  Then, as in the first movement, there is a sudden clearing back to the elegant mood of the opening. Near the end, preceded by explosive chords, the eerie whispering returns. The galant theme rises again, tentatively, and the music collapses into silence.

  With its intricate cross-accents that defy the listener to find the meter or even the beat, the scherzo plays another Haydn game, his fool-the-ear rhythms. Yet as the music goes on, the tone begins to feel excessive unto obsessive: not innocent gaiety but manic gaiety. So it is not entirely an intrusion when, at the end of the trio, the music suddenly falls for a moment into a strange, shouting B-flat minor before the repeat back into the scherzo and its madcap (too madcap) fun.

  Then comes the most arresting and significant page in op. 18, a slow passage serving as extended introduction to the last movement. Over it Beethoven placed an Italian title: La Malinconia, or “Melancholy.” More than a small movement, striking in itself, this is the heart of a story that began with a few passing shadows in movement 1, expanded to a mysterious, spidery whispering in movement 2, and sent the scherzo reeling nearly out of control.

  His portrait of melancholy’s devious onset begins mildly, in B-flat major:

  It is an echo of the second theme in movement 1, with a smoothing out of the same marching figure, the mood again elegant, like a gesture with a lace handkerchief at an aristocratic ball. The phrase ends with a little galant turn. It is repeated. As it repeats, the cello begins to sink chromatically; as in the second theme of movement 1, there is a sudden darkening. This time the darkness lingers. The music falls into a slow, steady tread. The little turn comes back, repeating. The key drifts aimlessly. A new section begins, its theme a slow, lugubrious version of the twisting motif in the middle of movement 2.

  The once-elegant little turn comes back, whispering and crying over and over like some inescapable bête noire, the harmony oozing around it (touching on E-flat minor and B-flat minor).33

  In rhythm, harmony, and melody, La Malinconia had been foreshadowed from the beginning, starting with a darkness that shadows the second theme of the first movement. After the scherzo, when we are expecting an allegro finale, melancholy seems to arise suddenly. But it had been lurking even in the blithe moments, as melancholy does in life. In the music it is present in strange diversions in harmony, in thoughts trailing off, things manically exaggerated. Again and again in the piece, an elegant and conventional surface slips to reveal a darkness beneath, until the melancholy reveals itself in its full malevolence. The Malinconia movement ends with a high cry and a dying sigh.

  The finale breaks out attacca subito, with a driving, dancing gaiety that we take for an escape from melancholy. The music is in the mode of a spirited German dance called the alla Tedesca or Deutsche. Yet something is subtly off. The color and the rhythm are wrong. The main theme is carried in the first violin mostly on the darker and milder middle strings rather than on the bright and brilliant E string. The rhythm is at odds: the violin starts off dividing the measure equally in two, while the accompaniment, rather than flowing with the meter, has lurching accents on the offbeats. Eventually, the music does dash up into high, bright regions, but only briefly before falling back into the low register.

  Suddenly, a crashing halt. La Malinconia returns with its deathly tread, its nasty little turn figure, its convulsive cries. It sinks, the dance tries to start up again, fails. Melancholy takes another step, pauses, waits. Tentatively, searching for the right key, the dance tries again until it finds its proper key. It will not be stopped this time, or not quite: before the end there is a slowing, a few turns quiet and hesitant, inward. Then a fierce rush to the cadence, fortissimo. Melancholy is banished for the moment, but only for the moment.

  Melancholy was an old, familiar companion to Bee
thoven. After his mother died when he was sixteen, he wrote in a letter that he had asthma, but also that “I have been suffering from melancholia, which in my case is almost as great a torture as my illness.” He knew the demon of melancholy like he knew the arcana of harmony and counterpoint. He knew that in the midst of dancing and gaiety, the demon can always come back.

  For Beethoven, the Quartet in B-flat, op. 18, no. 6, is in both technical and psychological dimensions a manifestly mature work and a gathering of prophecies musical, dramatic, and expressive. Its prophecies will play out in the way a middle movement returns to trouble the triumphant finale of the Fifth Symphony, in more explorations of despair and tragedy unprecedented in style, including the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony. The long-range psychological unfolding in the B-flat Quartet will be repeated in works to the end of his life, in steadily more profound and subtle ways. The prophecy will play out in his life too: a slowly insinuating shadow that suddenly descends overwhelmingly, all at once, and the world goes dark.

  All the same, on the whole, op. 18 was not intended to challenge anything or anybody. If as of 1800 Beethoven had known where he wanted to take the genres of symphony and string quartet, he would have taken them there. But he did not know yet where he wanted to go with the two genres he took most seriously—and took seriously because Haydn and Mozart had made them serious. So he proceeded warily.

  As he finished the quartets and turned thirty in December 1800, Beethoven had to wonder when he would come into his own, find out who he was. In retrospect the clues were there, especially in the Pathétique and some slow movements in the first dozen opuses. But that is retrospective. His perspective on the ground was far less broad, far less certain. He was trying one thing and another, one voice and another, and biding his time.

  If Beethoven was not yet exactly a darling of publishers (he was a difficult darling in any situation), he was still in demand. In 1800, publisher and composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister moved from Vienna to Leipzig as a base for his operations. This entrepreneur knew Beethoven personally; Hoffmeister & Kühnel had put out the first edition of the Pathétique.34 Beethoven was fond of Hoffmeister, and they had friendly business relations for a while before the inevitable break. When he was settled in Leipzig, Hoffmeister wrote Beethoven asking for pieces. Beethoven replied in December, apologizing for a delay: “I am dreadfully lazy about writing letters.” There follows a gentle rebuke:

  I am very sorry that you, my beloved and worthy brother in the art of music, did not let me know something about this sooner, for I could have brought to your market my quartets [op. 18] and also many other works which I have already disposed of. But if our worthy brother is as conscientious as many other honorable engravers who hound us poor composers into our graves, no doubt you too will know what advantage to draw from these works when they appear.—Hence I will jot down briefly what works my worthy b[rother] can have from me.

  The letter is written in what was becoming a characteristic tone of Beethoven’s with publishers, at once imperious and friendly (his address to Hoffmeister as “brother in the art” is both a compliment and a take on the way a Freemason would address a brother). He proffers the Septet, “which has been very popular”; the First Symphony; “a grand solo sonata” for piano, in B-flat; and a piano concerto, “which, it is true, I do not make out to be one of my best [the B-flat]; and also another [the C Major Concerto].” As a sign of favor to Hoffmeister, he finishes, “You yourself when replying may fix the prices as well; and as you are neither a Jew nor an Italian and since I too am neither, no doubt we shall come to some agreement.”35 (The anti-Semitic and anti-Italian touches at the end of the letter are rare for Beethoven, but this is not his last ethnic snipe.) Hoffmeister took all the pieces. The Piano Sonata in B-flat, published as op. 22, is a big, four-movement work of which Beethoven was fond, even though its style is more contemporary than forward-looking—his last one of which that could be said.36

  Beethoven’s procedure toward publishing his works amounted to this: he gave everything he had, heart mind and soul, to the creation of anything he considered serious. Once done, it became stock-in-trade, for which he wanted the best price and the most favorable terms he could find. Of the hundreds of letters of his that survive, the majority would be to publishers: stroking, pitching, complaining, correcting proofs. No composer before Beethoven published as continuously from the beginning as he did, and few if any before depended so much on income from publishing.37 As soon as he was through with a piece and contractually able to, he would offer it to one or more publishers. Before that point there had to be an intermediary, a copyist. For some twenty years his favored copyist was one Wenzel Schlemmer, who was adept at tracking Beethoven’s notes through the sometimes battlefield conditions of the manuscripts.38 When the piece was accepted by a publisher, the real misery began. Proofreading the invariably faulty engravings and dealing with corrections would consume a crushing amount of Beethoven’s time, an endless necessity and an endless frustration.

  For better and for worse, a freelance composer of that era was subject to the market. Unless he had one of the increasingly hard-to-find positions as Kapellmeister in court or church, he had to cobble together a living from a grab bag of sources: commissions, publishing, part-time jobs in church or court, teaching, performing, patronage from the nobility.39 Like most of his brothers in art, Beethoven pursued all those avenues. (In his mix of incomes, only the guaranteed 600-florin stipend from Prince Lichnowsky was unusual—a stipend with no stated duties.)

  If one had talent in music and resourcefulness in business, this was a workable way to live. If one built a reputation and a demand, publishing could be a steady source of income and also a spur to creativity. Beethoven would prove a generally sharp and competent businessman, the sales dimension being, for him, another part of the job that he was determined to master. This was in contrast to his general incapacity with everything else having to do with money, including his inability to divide or multiply sums.

  Music publishing gathered momentum in the later eighteenth century. As the middle class expanded, the market for music grew along with the market for every other leisure endeavor. The growth continued through the next century, tracking the burgeoning number of amateurs and professionals demanding new pieces to play. Another reason was the development of engraving on pewter and copper plates, which made publishing faster and cheaper. Music was incised on the plates backward by skilled (and wretchedly paid) craftsmen, and run off on a handpress.40

  There were no royalties for composers; you sold your work to a publisher for a flat fee. For his part, the publisher put out a pile of copies of a new piece, hoping to sell as many as possible as soon as possible because, since there was also no copyright, any successful composer’s work would immediately be pirated. The first pirates of your work might be your own copyists, who would secretly make a second copy and run to a publisher with it. If you were not careful, the pirated edition might come out before the legitimate one. Mozart dealt with that problem by making his copyists work in his apartment, so he could keep an eye on them.41 Once Haydn had begun publishing, a thriving trade in fake Haydn sprang up. That at least was considered reprehensible, likewise plagiarism. But musical forgery, plagiarism, and piracy were none of them against the law. Beethoven was aggressive in fighting back against his pirates, but lacking legal means, he had to use threats to publishers and notices in the papers.

  Payments were small, so one had to turn out a good deal of music to get by. Haydn discovered a clever and profitable way to market his work: he would contract a piece or an opus simultaneously to two or more publishers in different countries, giving each limited but exclusive territory. That meant he could be paid for a given piece more than once (all this was done openly). Beethoven eventually took up that procedure and found himself bedeviled with its innate problem: to keep pirates at bay as long as possible, a given piece had to come out in every country at the same time. But in an era of slow mail and slo
wer travel, coordinating publishing dates across Europe and England was a dicey affair. Beethoven made use of another kind of contractual arrangement with patrons who commissioned from him: on delivering the piece to the person who commissioned it and collecting his fee, Beethoven would put off publication and give the person exclusive rights to the work in manuscript for a stated time (usually six months to a year); then he would be free to sell it at will.

  Years before, Beethoven had written his brother that for anything he wrote he had his pick of publishers, who paid whatever he asked (though he did not usually demand extravagant prices). Even though he changed publishers often, he would rarely have much trouble getting things in print, if not always with the houses he wanted. Which is to say that as of the new century he remained in pleasant professional circumstances; he would remain so for the next decade. The counters to the rosy prospects were his declining hearing and his health. He was miserably ill through much of the winter of 1800–1801 with what he described as “frightful attacks” of vomiting on top of his old chronic diarrhea; and at the same time, he wrote, “my ears hum and buzz day and night.”42