In another sketch he finds the hemiola figure that will be a steady feature of the movement: superimposing two-beat patterns over the three-beat meter, generating energy by striding across the bar line.17 In a further sketch, Beethoven discovers another idea for the first page that will have great import: the unsettling syncopations of the violins moving from G to A-flat and back. That pair of notes will have a long career in the symphony.
Already, then, he has one of the central conceptions: he wants his exposition restless and searching, so its themes need to be fragmentary, incomplete, constantly in flux. From the first airing of the Hero theme forward, each idea will start decisively and then drift, avoiding a sense of closure or clear formal articulation. Everything points forward rather than feeling like an arrival. He wants that incessant nervous energy as an evocation of a military campaign or a battle: great forces on the move not only across a landscape but across the mind and across history. At the head of those forces, their driving energy: the Hero.
Which is all to say that he fashions the exposition as if it were a development.18 This will be music about a process of becoming. Here is another element both abstract and symbolic: the Hero striving toward something. Call it victory; call it coming into his own.19
In the sketchbook, the second extended concept sketch is longer, a try at the whole exposition. Now he is up to five themes and has realized that if he wants that many ideas in an exposition, he needs to give each of them a distinctive character, rhythmic profile, and orchestral color. Eventually, there will be effectively six themes in the exposition, all of them less themes in the usual sense than protean gestures. The second concept sketch:
From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks
He will throw out the last of those themes as irrelevant. In this continuity sketch also appears a hint of the loping scale figures he will use to link sections. And generally, from here on, each theme will be characterized not only by a distinctive rhythm but also by the way it interacts with or against the meter. Most of the themes (except, significantly, the Hero theme) break free of the bar line in one way and another.
He is well into the opening movement now, forging symbol and narrative into notes and form.20 In his primal-triad theme and its avatars in all the other themes, the Hero is a galvanizing presence, able to bring freedom because he has freed himself. As a self-created man, the Hero transcends convention, shatters barriers, electrifies every soldier and citoyen with the force of his will. This is the image of an enlightened leader Beethoven learned in Bonn: to remake the world, you must remake yourself first. It is the figure he celebrated in the Joseph Cantata and in his song from that period Who Is a Free Man?: “The man to whom only his own will, and not any whim of an overlord, can give laws.”21
In sketching the exposition, he has kept his proliferating themes fluid, like the arrival of the second theme proper (measure 57). It feels tender and breathless after the perorations of the Hero theme. But the arrival of that leading secondary idea is veiled; he is more interested in flow than in eighteenth-century formal clarity. So rather than the usual clear contrast of a first and second theme, there is a welter of contrasts, flowing, pulsing, and declaiming, moving restlessly around in the meter, every moment swallowed by the relentless onwardness, the constant sense of becoming.
By the time he writes down a fourth continuity sketch of the exposition, he is close to what he is looking for.22 As transitions the loping scales are in place. Another transition in the middle features wide leaps, which will flower later in the movement. The Hero theme is always present, either overtly in its opening triadic horn call or in the triadic scaffolding of themes that seem independent but are avatars of the Hero theme. Sections of the long drafts that are not working he takes up and revises through page after page. The end of the exposition gives him trouble. A series of sketches probes how to end the first part and usher in the Durchführung, the development section’s quasi-improvisation on themes from the exposition.23
Like any mature artist, Beethoven understands that a splendid conception and an effective realization are different things. The struggle to realize a conception on the page is an attempt to turn productive ideas into compelling material and self-generating form: the organic, coherent, gripping play of parts and whole. In the sketchbook, he began with a narrative conception on the order of the nature and character of the hero Napoleon, and his journey. He has turned that idea into themes, rhythms, phrasing, orchestral colors, a singular extension of the usual sonata-form model of a first movement. In this symphony, the guidelines and signposts of that model are expanded, blurred, subverted by the working out of the conception at hand. Bonaparte is to be new from top to bottom, in its material and in its form, the sounding image of the free man.
As was said earlier, for a craftsman of Beethoven’s level, not only melodies and harmonies are expressive and meaningful; the whole of the form is expressive and meaningful. Here ideas form and dissolve, searching for stability and completion, everything becoming. A characteristic gesture in the first movement is its heavy-striding hemiola passages, their two-beats contradicting the three-beat meter, breaking the bar line. The strings respond to the disorienting C-sharp on the first page with a flurry of syncopations, unsettling the rhythm; harmony and rhythm regain their footing only to drift again. All the subsidiary themes, which are variegated avatars of the Hero, break out of the boundary of the meter in one way and another, most of them by way of displaced downbeats.
Music and symbol feed on one another. In the struggle to come into his own, the Hero shatters boundaries and conventions and makes things anew. The exposition is as unpredictable, searching, dynamic, unstable as a development, as dynamic as a hero. In the exposition the Hero is still uncertain, not fully formed.24 The task of the development proper will be to portray his struggle for completion, his triumph, his coming into his own.
With the exposition largely settled, Beethoven begins to hammer out his development. One of the first ideas he writes down for it is not the beginning but the aftermath of its climax: a flowing line in the distant key of E minor, a new theme that will stand as the most sustained melody, the most themelike passage in the movement. Before he begins detailed work on the development, then, he already has in hand its goal, what will become one of the most startling and striking episodes in the movement.25
Another early idea for the development will become the most notorious moment of all, what for more than a century will often be called an oversight, a mistake, even evidence of incipient madness. But Beethoven works out this idea through a dozen sketches, all on the same conception: while a string harmony in whispering tremolos prepares the recapitulation on a dissonance, a solo horn enters early on the Hero theme in E-flat, making an outlandish clash of harmonies:
From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks
So before he starts working out the development in detail, he knows that its climax is going to be followed by a new theme in E minor. He also knows that the Hero theme will burst into the recapitulation prematurely, in the home key of E-flat, in its essential voice in the horn, over the wrong chord.26 The premature Thema shatters the arrival of the recapitulation, as if the Hero has escaped the shackles of form and forces the music to sanction his transgression. The Hero is a free man; it is his nature to break out of boundaries.
As Beethoven gropes his way forward he faces a quandary: he has developed his themes from the beginning, made his exposition like a development. What, then, should he do in the development section itself? By the time he begins grappling with that problem, he has in hand the new E-minor theme and the recapitulation as targets to aim for. He settles on the idea of shaping the development as a series of waves surging toward the new theme, like armies surging toward the crux of a battle. The main element is the triadic head motif of the Hero theme rising implacably step by step in the bass, dragging the harmony upward from C minor to C-sharp, D, E, then G and A minor, and finally back to C minor. This generates a relentless, c
all it fateful, momentum different from the kaleidoscopic exposition.
For the second part of the development he feints at a fugue on a wide-striding subject that batters against the meter. But the fugue breaks down under hammer-blow hemiola chords. Those chords rise to a shattering harmony, horrifying to the ears of the time—an evil chord, not just a climax but a catastrophe:27
Following a crunching stride of dissonance in low strings, the crisis gives birth to the new theme in E minor, at the furthest remove from the home key of E-flat. This theme amounts to a new avatar of the Hero, built on his primal triad and the chromatic slide—the latter on the same pitches but in a new context. It is the moment of triumph, when the Hero comes into his own.
In using the Hero theme as scaffolding for this new development theme, the most sustained melodic passage in the movement, Beethoven makes the theme integrative. It represents coming into one’s own not as a cry of victory but as a matter of grace under pressure; the new theme is inward in tone, and it flows with the meter as smoothly as a waltz. It seems almost to dance away from the crisis. All the same, this theme, like all the others, is not complete. Like everything in the movement, it also drifts off, swept up in the flux.
Beethoven’s sketches for the new development theme all concern what ends up as its lower voice, derived from the Hero theme. In the final version he adds a counterpoint above it. In the end the new idea becomes a double theme. If its lower voice is built on the scaffolding of the Hero theme, the upper voice is integrative in a different way, looking forward more than backward. In the first pages of sketching the opening movement, he has already made a first attempt at a leading idea for the second movement, which is to be a funeral dirge.28 The opening phrase of the Funeral March theme is settled from the first sketch, because he bases it on bars 5–7 of the Prometheus bass. The upper voice of the new development theme in the first movement is also based on that figure. So besides being integrative in relation to the first movement, the upper line of the new development theme foreshadows the Thema of the Funeral March. And it is played by the oboe, which will be its main avatar in the Funeral March.29
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
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 41
