Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  There was more inspiration. Back in Bonn, Christian Neefe had given his student J. G. Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. Now Beethoven returned to it. He read again these meditations on the symphony:

  The allegros of all the best . . . symphonies contain profound and clever ideas, a somewhat free treatment of the parts, an apparent disorder in the melody and harmony, strongly marked themes of different types, robust melodies and unison passages . . . free imitations of a theme (often in fugal style), sudden modulations and digressions from one key to another that are all the more striking the more distant their relation, distinct gradations of loud and soft, and especially the crescendo . . . Such an allegro is to the symphony what a Pindaric ode is to poetry; it elevates the soul of the listener.22

  Reading these words as a teenager, Beethoven could hardly have imagined where these ideas could take him, how music could become like elevated poetry. Now he could imagine. Planning a third symphony but diverted in early 1803 by his impending concert and opera project, these perorations could have seemed like a call to produce the symphony he had already conceived and to make it as bold, as free, as mischievous and frightful and elevated as he wanted. As for unity within diversity, which is the primacy of form over content, he struggled for greater unity and at the same time for greater diversity than any composer had aspired to before. He could only have felt the time was right. After the darkest night of the soul he had experienced in Heiligenstadt, the world of music seemed to be holding out its arms and beckoning him to the future.

  As of early 1803, lying between Beethoven and his New Path was the April 5 benefit concert, the program constituting premieres of the Second Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto, another airing of the First Symphony, and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge that he had somehow to finish in February and March.

  Inevitably, by the time April arrived things were frantic. In Vienna in those days, assembling orchestras and choruses and rehearsing them was a catch-as-catch-can affair, the available forces a mélange of professionals and amateurs. In this case, as often, the single rehearsal for Beethoven’s concert started the morning of the performance day. They began at 8 a.m. The vocal soloists would have studied their parts and the chorus probably rehearsed ahead, but there was a long struggle to get the pieces ready. After hours of coping with the Christus oratorio, the First and Second Symphonies, and the Third Concerto, most of the music new to the players, the troops were exhausted by what Ries recalled as a “dreadful” ordeal. Prince Karl Lichnowsky hovered over the rehearsal, in midafternoon producing great baskets of bread and butter, cold meat, and wine for everybody. This restored spirits and the rehearsal went forward, even including the prince’s request for another run-through of the oratorio. When rehearsal ended shortly before the doors opened for the 6 p.m. concert, the singers and players had been rehearsing for nearly ten hours.

  A day or so before the concert Ries had arrived at Beethoven’s flat at dawn to assist him and found him in bed scribbling on sheets of paper. “What is it?” Ries asked. “Trombones,” Beethoven said. The trombones played from those parts in the premiere of Christus.23 Beethoven had doubled and tripled the usual ticket prices but still got a full house for a long and variegated program. The performers trudged through the two symphonies and the concerto, Beethoven soloing, and only after some hour and a half started the eventful Christus, itself more than an hour long.

  Based on later response, the music was decently represented and no audience or later critical outrage reported. There was, in fact, as in Beethoven’s previous concert in Vienna, nothing terribly provocative on this program, though the big new symphony in D major had to have been a challenge on first hearing. The First Symphony had by then become an audience favorite. The Third Piano Concerto is audibly in Mozart’s orbit and safely in his shadow (but with prophecies of concertos to come).

  The Second Symphony is an extravagantly comic piece, but there had been one private joke in the course of the program. Beethoven had not had time to write down the piano part of the Third Concerto before the concert—only the orchestral parts. So the solo music existed only in his head, to be fleshed out with improvisation en route. No one in those days publicly played from memory. Beethoven arrived onstage, took his bow, sat down at the piano, and placed a sheaf of music on the stand. Young conductor Ignaz von Seyfried, who had helped out through the marathon rehearsal, was the designated page-turner. When Beethoven opened the solo part, Seyfried discovered that the pages were largely full of empty measures, with only a few “Egyptian hieroglyphs” to remind the composer of passages. Seyfried spent the concerto riveted in fear, watching Beethoven for his nodded cues to turn the pages of invisible music. At dinner afterward Beethoven had a large helping of laughter over Seyfried’s anxiety.24

  Reports of the audience response varied, likewise the review in the local Zeitung für die Elegante Welt: “The pieces performed consisted of two symphonies of which the first [the by-then-popular C Major] had more worth than the second [the new D Major] because . . . in the second [there was] a striving for novel and striking effects . . . It goes without saying that neither was lacking striking and brilliant qualities of beauty. Less successful was the next concerto, in C minor, which Mr. v B., who otherwise is known as a first-rate fortepianist, also performed not to the complete satisfaction of the public.” Besides the unenthusiastic welcome for the Third Concerto, this was one of the most critical reviews a Beethoven keyboard performance had ever received. Whether his skills were on the wane at that point can’t be said. What can be said is that thereafter he never again played the C Minor Concerto in public, or any other concerto except the premiere of his G Major, No. 4.

  The reviewer of the concert went on to declare that Christus am Ölberge “was good and contains a few first-rate passages . . . A number of ideas from Haydn’s Creation seem to have found their way into the final chorus.” Beethoven would not have been pleased about that comparison, though it was manifestly true. The last chorus was not the only bit of Haydn lifted for the oratorio, and Mozart had been plundered as well. The reviewer sardonically quoted some lines from the weakest among the oratorio’s weak suits, its libretto: “‘We have seen him. / Go toward that mountain, / Just take a left, / He must be quite near!’ And the rest is also written in this poetic spirit.”25

  Beethoven later claimed that Christus was thrown together in some two weeks, on a text hurried out by a local opera librettist, Franz Huber. (Earlier, Huber’s anticlericalism and enthusiasm for the French Revolution got him in trouble with the police—and probably earned him Beethoven’s approval.)26 Huber seems to have written the libretto on Beethoven’s scenario and with the composer at his elbow. The story is centered unusually not on the crucifixion but on Christ’s anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is likely that after his Heiligenstadt crisis of the previous autumn, Beethoven felt a personal relationship to the suffering he was depicting, starting with Christ’s first words: “Jehovah! Thou my father! O send me consolation and strength and steadfastness.” His first aria ends, “Take this cup of sorrow from me.”27

  Regardless of how much of his own cup of sorrows Beethoven poured into the libretto of Christus, the result showed more professionalism than inspiration. To compose an hour-long work for major forces at headlong speed generally involves compromises, shortcuts, having to make do with the first ideas that come to mind. (Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven succeeded splendidly at that sometimes, but not always.) Though Christus has its striking moments and is nothing but skillful, it was then and would remain one of the most misconceived, inauthentic, undigested large works Beethoven ever wrote.

  The conventionality of most of the music is matched by the boilerplate pieties of the text: “Woe to those who dishonor the blood that flowed for them. The curse of the Judge will strike them; damnation is their lot.” Beethoven was not conventionally religious, not a churchgoer, not interested in judgment and damnation. As to the music, in his haste he made a fundamen
tal decision that put the work on the wrong foot, where it remained: he cast much of it in the kind of eighteenth-century operatic style he had studied with Salieri, with ample and not always apt contributions from Haydn and Mozart.

  It begins well enough. The long introduction in his high-tragic key of E-flat minor is an effective stretch of scene setting that calls to mind the opening of another of the oratorio’s predecessors—the Joseph Cantata from Bonn. Then Jesus Christ, a bravura tenor, takes the stage. His first recitative and C-minor aria depicting his anguish at imminent crucifixion are the sort of thing one would expect from an operatic hero lamenting frustrated love or lost honor, complete with high-range pyrotechnics. At a reference to “the world that burst forth from chaos” at God’s command, there is a C-major blaze of light straight from Chaos in Haydn’s Creation. A seraph (coloratura soprano) appears to succor Christ in his sorrow. She and the Son of God have a duet that resembles all too much a pair of lovers commiserating—say, cousins of Pamina and Tamino in the fraught stretches of Die Zauberflöte. There are fugues. There are fervent Heils. In the choruses of soldiers coming to arrest Christ, there are unfortunate echoes of the “Turkish” choruses in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. At the conclusion there is a solemn hallelujah chorus owing more to Haydn than Handel.

  None of this is to say that Christus am Ölberge was a failure with the public. Mounted in Vienna in 1803 and again in 1804 with some revisions (not the last ones), it found considerable popularity in the next decades. For Beethoven’s audiences, its operatic style was simply normal. It was the usual mode for second-rate religious works, for that matter not so far from the sacred style of Haydn and Mozart. A critic of the AMZ wrote, “[I]t confirms my long-held opinion that Beethoven in time can effect a revolution in music like Mozart’s. He is hastening toward this goal with great strides.”28

  Beethoven himself never had any illusions about Christus. His admissions and excuses were issued piecemeal over the next decade before it was published: I was rushed, my brother was sick, the libretto is bad. All true. But he was quite prepared to make money from the piece, if a publisher would take it on. In any case, Christus did him a great service in at least two directions. For one thing it was a step, however faltering, in the direction of opera. At the same time, if he did not yet know what he wanted for a sacred style, now he knew what he did not want. Once and for all, he swore off writing a religious work in conventional operatic mode: “What is certain,” he wrote later, “is that now I should compose an absolutely different oratorio from what I composed then.”29 Which left the question: if not operatic, what? That question would occupy him for much of the next two decades.

  The Second Symphony in D Major, op. 36, was a different matter: ambitious, carefully crafted, well digested. If when he began it in 1800 Beethoven did not quite know what he wanted a symphony to be, he leaped into this one with both feet. The First Symphony had been something of a rush job like Christus, to provide a big finish to a concert, but in that case he had been tinkering for years with ideas for a C-major symphony—in other words, grappling with the genre. The First Symphony amounted to a clearing of the throat, if still more satisfying than Christus. The Second has a much richer and fresher treatment of the orchestra, adding up to high comedy on a grand canvas. The D Major may be, in fact, the longest symphony written to that date.

  More specifically, as the expansive and kaleidoscopic introduction lays out, the tone of the work is of an operatic comedy. Christus was a kind of trial run at opera seria, the Second Symphony perhaps a warm-up for buffa. Call it Mozart intensified: more brash, rollicking, and youthfully raw than Mozart’s time would have found decorous. The introduction lays out a series of contrasting ideas like a collection of characters: a pouncing fortissimo unison, a tender moment, a comic tripping figure, and so on. There is a sense of breadth in the ideas and in the orchestral sound quite different from the rather generically eighteenth-century character and orchestra of the First Symphony. In the introduction we seem to hear a story being laid out, the essential character jovial but with hints of intrigue and romance, in a palette of offbeat accents and subito eruptions that will mark the whole symphony. An Allegro con brio breaks out with a dashing theme that gathers energy toward a racing climax. The second theme strikes an ironic military note, say, Beethoven’s version of Mozart’s Cherubino, off to war. The whole of the movement is muscular, leaping, explosive, brillante, its engine less melodic than rhythmic.

  Grace and charm were not constant qualities with Beethoven as they had been with Mozart. In his earlier opuses, when he was aiming for charm he often resorted, as in the First Symphony, to the galant mode of the previous century. But in this second movement he was beginning to discover his own kind of charm. It is a long movement in full-scale sonata form, wistful and nostalgic, lyrically lovely despite a moment of operatic tristesse and hand-wringing in the development—when, say, our heroine does not find her lover at the masked ball. All ends well, if with a final sigh.

  Once again, for the third movement Beethoven takes up the scherzo form. This time he labeled it as such and made it driving and pouncing, with nimble banter between the orchestral choirs. Its trio alternates a phrase of warmly eighteenth-century elegance with faux-furioso interruptions.

  The finale begins with an absurd giant hiccup that dissolves into skittering comedy. Before long, astute listeners would have realized that, believe it or not, this is actually the rondo theme; the hiccup is developed diligently. The second part of the opening section is flowing, more of an A theme proper, but the hiccup cannot be forsworn. The qualms and shadows that have turned up periodically in this summery romp make a final appearance in the coda, which begins with a tone of whispering intrigue. Here as in Mozart and Shakespeare, comedy and sorrow are close companions. But the spirit of fun wins the day, and the curtain comes down on a scene of laughter with troubles resolved and glasses raised.30

  And that was the end of that train of thought. Beethoven never wrote another piece that much resembles the Second Symphony, not even in his theater music, where he had to find a way to escape from Mozart. For him the D Major was a way station en route to somewhere he did not know when he began it, but perhaps had begun to understand by the time he finished it.

  Ferdinand Ries, watching Beethoven at work, was always astonished at how his mentor’s compositions reached the heights they did, given what he knew of their inception. “This Larghetto,” Ries recalled of the second movement, “is so beautifully, so purely and happily conceived and the melodic line so natural that one can hardly imagine anything in it was ever changed.” But Ries had seen the manuscript with the accompaniment revised so heavily that the final version could hardly be made out in the splotch of notes. Hoping for a lesson in craft, Ries asked about the changes. “It’s better this way,” was all Beethoven had to say about it.31 “Better” was all he or anyone needed to know.

  If the premiere of the Concerto No. 3 in C Minor got mixed reviews, that was in part because, in contrast to the relatively conventional first two concertos, this one summarized the past in the stream of Beethoven’s music while no less pointing to the future. If he began extricating himself from the looming shadow of Mozart in the violin sonatas of op. 30, here is where he made a broad step toward the same with concertos.

  He had been thinking about the piece since at least 1796, when during his Berlin stay he jotted on a sketch, “For the Concerto in C minor kettledrum at the cadenza.” At that point he had been near the height of his piano career, and for him concertos were as much a matter of practicality as of aesthetics: a repertoire of concertos by oneself and by others was required to establish a reputation as a virtuoso. Now his virtuoso career was winding down. He began working on the C Minor intensively perhaps in 1800, perhaps sometime in the next two years.32 It was still in flux at its premiere, as one observes from the absence of a written solo part.

  Beethoven’s only minor-key concerto does not exactly have the driving and demonic tone o
f the Pathétique and other examples of his C-minor mood; neither is it the full-blown “heroic” style of the coming New Path. The quiet stride of the beginning sets a tone stern and dramatic. Its military-march aspect was familiar in concertos by Mozart and many others, including Beethoven. The atmosphere, scoring, and opening emphasis on a rising figure involving C, E-flat, and A-flat all suggest Mozart’s C Minor Concerto hovering in the background. At the same time, the concerto is full of fresh ideas.33

  He made the music taut and the material tight, beginning with a rising figure in the first measure, a down-striding scale in the second. The third measure introduces a dotted drumbeat figure; the concerto will turn steadily around that essential rhythmic idea, as well as the melodic and harmonic ones from the previous two measures.34 The most important motif, as it turns out, is the drumbeat. The opening string phrase is echoed a step higher by the winds, which add another fundamental idea with their line rising up to a piercing dissonance on A-flat. In various guises, that A-flat (and its equivalent G-sharp) will resonate throughout the concerto.

  The second theme of the orchestral exposition is the expected lyrical contrast to the sternly militant opening. After a couple of subthemes, we arrive at the end of the first exposition and the piano’s first entrance on an explosive, uprushing scale (an idea that marks the solo voice throughout). Rather than entering with a new and distinctive theme as Mozart tended to, the soloist takes up the main theme, establishing a commanding personality in the dialogue with the orchestra. It is as if the music has found its leader. With piano and orchestra in close dialogue, the effect is as much symphonic as concerto-like.