Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Still, as with Viennese piano makers, violinists in Vienna were slow to adopt new trends. Beethoven’s string players in those days probably used a mixture of old- and new-style instruments and bows. Clement himself was an old-fashioned player who played on a traditional fingerboard with a traditional bow. He was noted more for his elegance and delicacy, and his sureness in the difficult high register, than for flash and power.76 So the concerto Beethoven wrote for him had little of the dramatic cross-string chords and virtuosic bow work of the more French-style Kreutzer Sonata. Inspired by Clement, the concerto did involve a great many passages in the high reaches of the E string (which Beethoven had avoided in the early violin sonatas). The stratospheric violin writing was perhaps a progressive element in the Violin Concerto, but otherwise the piece was largely devoted to a lyrical style, which Beethoven, writing as fast as he could get the notes down, pushed into a new dimension in concertos.

  The Violin Concerto is unique from the first sound: it begins unprecedentedly with a timpani solo marking the four beats of the first measure and the downbeat of the second, where the winds enter on a quietly soaring theme marked dolce, “sweet.”77 The opening gesture says two important things about the music to come: first, that timpani rhythm is going to be a leading motif of the first movement; second, its simplicity heralds a piece that is going to be made of radically simple elements: rhythms largely in quarters and eighths, most of the phrasing in four bars, flowing melodies made largely out of scales. Many of Beethoven’s themes had always been fashioned from bits of scales; here that is carried to a transcendent extreme. In keeping, the harmony is simple but with touches of striking color, unexpected shifts of key, excursions into minor keys that arrive not like dark clouds but as colorations and intensifications. The lucidity and simplicity of the material contribute to the singular tone, serene and sublime, marked by the soloist singing on top of the orchestra in the highest range of the instrument.

  All that is to say, this is not a heroic or a particularly virtuosic or dramatic concerto. The opening timpani stride might imply a military atmosphere like the openings of his piano concertos, but the music does not go in that direction. And there is no readily discernible dramatic narrative of the kind in which the contemporary Fourth Piano Concerto is so rich. Call the main topic of the Violin Concerto beauty in the visceral and spiritual sense that the time understood it.

  When things are stripped down to the simple and direct, every detail takes on great significance. So it is in the enormous first movement, with its sure-handed proportions, its subtle touches of color and contrast that keep the music riveting and moving. The orchestral exposition unveils three rather similar themes, all of them flowing up and down a D-major scale. The quarter-note tattoo introduced by the timpani underlies everything, including patterns that speed it up to eighths and sixteenths.

  An out-of-nowhere D-sharp intruding on the placid D major creates more color than drama. That pitch will summon later harmonies and keys (mainly B-flat) in the movement. In the orchestral exposition, the main contrasting keys are B-flat and F, surrounding the home key not with the expected dominant but rather with thirds above and below—an increasingly common Beethoven pattern. Here they are placid mediants in the flat direction, generating warmth rather than tension. The unusual element is the lack of tonal movement, each theme first heard in D major, the second one feeling more like the Thema proper of the movement.

  The violin enters on bravura octaves that soar from the bottom of the instrument up into the high range, where the soloist will live much of the time, devoted more to spinning out lace than thematic work. This is a symphonic concerto in which the soloist is not a heroic or even distinctive personality so much as a kind of ethereal presence floating through and above the orchestra. After an improvisatory quasi-cadenza, the violin seems to improvise on the first theme high in the clouds while the winds play it straight. The development section is striking mainly in its placidity and its melodiousness, in contrast to the usual fragmentation and drama of developments. The first movement, like the others, requires a cadenza; Beethoven supplied none of them.

  If it is possible, the gentle second movement is even more exquisitely lyrical than the first. Its form takes shape both simply and unusually as a serene theme over a repeating bass pattern, variations that are largely rescorings of the theme to which the soloist adds quasi-improvisatory filigree. After three variations, two new themelets, call them B and C, stand in for a couple of variations, and an extension of C serves as coda.78

  An old Viennese legend says that the leaping 6/8 “hunting” theme of the rondo finale was written by violinist Clement. That makes sense for two reasons: Beethoven had to write the finale in a tremendous hurry and may have seized the nearest thing to work with; and in style, the tune seems a throwback to the gay and slight rondo finales of his youth. Still, his treatment of the theme is fresh despite its conventions (including a hunting episode for horns). The total length is only about a third that of the first movement.79 Its vigorous joyousness is the payoff of a work of serene beauties.

  The enormous program in Vienna, where the concerto premiered, had the time’s usual mixture of genres and media. It included overtures by Méhul and Cherubini, a Mozart aria, a Cherubini vocal quartet, and vocal pieces by Handel. In the middle of the Beethoven concerto Clement performed one of his trademark tricks, playing a piece on a violin with one string, upside down. A review in the Wiener Zeitung said, “The superb violin player Klement [sic] also played, among other exquisite pieces, a violin concerto by Beethhofen [sic], which was received with exceptional applause due to its originality and abundance of beautiful passages. In particular, Klement’s proven artistry and grace . . . were received with loud bravos.” That said, the reviewer turned the back of his hand:

  The educated world was struck by the way that Klement could debase himself with so much nonsense and so many tricks . . . Regarding Beethhofen’s concerto, the judgment of connoisseurs is undivided; they concede that it contains many beautiful qualities, but admit that the context often seems completely disjointed and that the endless repetition of several commonplace passages can easily become tiring. They maintain that Beethhofen should use his avowedly great talent more appropriately and give us works that resemble his first two Symphonies in C and D, his graceful Septet in E♭, the spirited Quintet in D major, and various others of his earlier compositions, which will place him forever in the ranks of the foremost composers.80

  Beethoven was very tired of the Septet, the Quintet, and the first two symphonies being held over him as the unsurpassable masterpieces of his life. After all, he had once said to a publisher in regard to the Septet, “The rabble are waiting for it.” The “commonplaces” cited in the review of the concerto probably referred mostly to the finale, also to the violin figuration and other ideas borrowed from the concertos of Viotti, Kreutzer, and Clement himself.81 The reviews did not mention how awkward and unviolinistic was much of the solo writing. Beethoven had once played violin and viola, but hardly at a soloist’s level. The speed of the concerto’s composition carried over into a muddle in the publication, when advice from Clement about the violin writing, which may have been included in the performance, did not get into the published score. In general, the score as the world would know it remained riddled with mistakes and ambiguities.82 Poorly received in its time, the concerto did not become part of the repertoire until decades later.

  Over the years Beethoven produced a number of works that amounted to last-minute, back-to-the-wall professionalism, and in one way and another all those pieces left traces of their haste. When composing at top speed you have to follow your instincts fearlessly on the fly. Beethoven had incomparable instincts and no fear. The miracle is that a few of those pieces, among them the Kreutzer Sonata and the Violin Concerto, turned out to be among his most inspired works. On the face of it the Violin Concerto had no reason to be what it was to become well after Beethoven was gone: one of the most beautiful and beloved
of all concertos. Its greatness, said a later champion, lay not in its technique but in its cantabile, its singing.83

  For Beethoven, 1806 had been a marvel of a year. In a rush of inspiration scarcely equaled in the history of human creativity, while struggling with crushing physical and emotional pain, he wrote or completed the epochal three Razumovsky Quartets, the Fourth Symphony and much of the Fourth Piano ­Concerto, the second and third Leonore overtures and the revised Fidelio, and the Violin Concerto. History would confirm each of those works as standing among the supreme examples of their genres in the entire chronicle of music.

  20

  That Haughty Beauty

  BY THE BEGINNING of 1807, Beethoven had a backlog of works he was desperate to put before the public. That remained no simple matter in Vienna, where the limited space for concerts was controlled by an obdurate and omnipresent bureaucracy. His published chamber and orchestral music turned up in concerts regularly in Vienna and elsewhere, but there were no royalties for those performances. Public programs were not only his preferred medium for premieres, they were also his most direct way to raise cash.

  He could have made a good income touring as a soloist, but his hearing hobbled his playing now, and his health made tours risky. Besides, public performance hardly interested him anymore. He preferred to improvise in private for himself and a few listeners. He still had piano students, still participated in charity benefits, still could rely on his patrons’ private soirees to air new chamber pieces. But when it came to ready money, he needed concerts for his own benefit. Securing the best halls, especially the Theater an der Wien, required months if not years of scheming and wheedling the bureaucracy. It was as if he were carrying his works on his back, begging in the street.

  Baron Braun had recently resigned from a long tenure as head of the two court theaters. That could only have been gratifying for Beethoven, who considered the baron a nemesis. Braun was replaced by a consortium of nine aristocrats who included Beethoven’s old patron Prince Lobkowitz. This group leased the two court theaters and the Theater an der Wien and rented them out for concerts and operas.1 Beethoven surely expected that the new regime would open its arms to him, but in the spring, yet another initiative for a benefit fell through.2 He snarled about the “princely rabble” he had to deal with. Early in 1807, he added to his orchestral backlog a new overture called Coriolan, used for the revival of the play of that name by his friend Heinrich von Collin. After a single performance in April, Collin’s once-popular play sank out of sight, but the overture took off on its own.

  In March a brief review appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: “Three new, very long and difficult violin quartets by Beethoven, dedicated to the Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky, also attract the attention of all connoisseurs. They are deep in conception and marvelously worked out, but not universally comprehensible, with the possible exception of the third one, in C major, which by virtue of its individuality, melody, and harmonic power must win over every educated friend of music.”3 At some point the new quartets had premiered in Vienna, likely in Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s short-lived public quartet series. The pieces were shaped not just with history in mind but with that virtuoso ensemble in particular. With these quartets, a historic turn in chamber music had begun, away from private amateur performance and toward programs played by professionals for the broad public.

  In some six years, between the completion of the op. 18 and the op. 59 Razumovsky Quartets, Beethoven had gone from a young composer trying on voices and attempting to escape from the shadow of Haydn and Mozart, to an artist in his prime widely called their peer. With those two men as models, in op. 59 he made another medium his own.

  Throughout his journey with quartets, Beethoven’s partner, champion, and inspiration remained violinist, conductor, and entrepreneur Schuppanzigh, the first musician in history to make his main reputation as a chamber-music specialist.4 One of the notable things about Schuppanzigh was how little he looked like an artist. Czerny described him as “a short, fat, pleasure-loving young man . . . one of the best violin-players of that time . . . unrivaled in quartet playing, a very good concert artist and the best orchestra conductor of his day . . . No one knew how to enter into the spirit of this music better than he.” The visiting composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt praised Schuppanzigh’s clarity and his “truly singing and moving” cantabile playing, at the same time groaning over his “damnable habit . . . of beating time with his foot.”5 Beethoven teased Schuppanzigh endlessly about his weight and his love of a good time. In 1801, Beethoven presented Schuppanzigh with a piece entitled Lob auf den Dicken (Praise to the Fat Man), and he wrote equally tongue in cheek to Ries that “Mylord Falstaff” “ought to be grateful if all my insults have caused him to lose a little weight.”6 It is recorded that once, Schuppanzigh coaxed his composer to try some Falstaffian entertainment and accompany him to a whorehouse. It did not go well. Schuppanzigh had to avoid the wrathful Beethoven for months afterward.7

  If there had been no leader like Schuppanzigh and no professional quartet at the level of his group, the Razumovsky Quartets would have been different pieces—which is to say that Beethoven’s evolution and the later history of the string quartet would have been different. This portly, silly-looking violinist was the indispensable partner in Beethoven’s remaking of the medium.

  Another way to put it is that the presence of Schuppanzigh and his men allowed Beethoven to take quartets wherever he wanted to go with them. He wrote the op. 59 Razumovskys in a rush of inspiration and enthusiasm, probably between April and November of 1806, interrupted by the Fourth Symphony and maybe the Violin Concerto. With the quartets he intended to repeat what he had done with the symphony in the Eroica: to make a familiar medium bigger, more ambitious, more varied, more individual, more personal.8 Once, at Czerny’s flat he had picked up the Mozart A Major Quartet, K. 464, and exclaimed, “That’s what I call a work! In it, Mozart was telling the world: ‘Look what I could do, if you were ready for it!’”9 Now, Beethoven was going to show the world what he could do with the quartet, and he did not particularly care whether the world was ready for it.

  The most immediate revolution in op. 59 had to do with the scope of the difficulties. In scale and ambition they are the most symphonic quartets to that time, harder on both players and listeners than any quartet before, even in a medium traditionally meant for connoisseurs. Their progress in the world would be tenuous for years, more so than many of Beethoven’s major works of that period. In comparison, it took the Eroica only a couple of years to make its point. But there is no mystery in the slow reception of these quartets. The electricity, aggressiveness, and in some ways sheer strangeness of the Razumovskys are collectively breathtaking. Even some of their beauties are strange. If in his heart Beethoven remained not a revolutionary but a radical evolutionary, these pieces were still an unprecedented challenge to the public.

  But revolutionary does not always equal loud. The beginning of no. 1 in F major is a quiet pulsation in the upper strings while the cello sings a spacious, flowing, gently beautiful tune rather like a folk song. There is a breezy, outdoorsy quality that will be amplified in the “horn fifths” idea that follows, and later in bass drones in open fifths.10 At the time, an extended lyric line for the cello under barely moving harmony was simply outlandish. As he had already been doing in his piano sonatas, from here on Beethoven began each string quartet with a distinctive color and texture. Theme and harmony and rhythm are no longer the exclusive subjects of a work; now its very sound is distinctive, as if with each quartet he set out to reinvent the medium from the ground up.11 The three numbers of op. 59 are a collection of unforgettable characters: one singing, one mysterious, one ebullient.

  As he had done in the Eroica, then, in the F Major he takes an unprecedented step in giving the opening Thema to the cello. He continues his campaign to free the instrument from a life mainly toiling on the bass line. Meanwhile, placing the leading theme in the lowest instrument
of the quartet pulls the rug from under the harmony, creating a shifting foundation that destabilizes everything. A melodic cello will be a steady feature of this quartet.12

  As Beethoven began work on the F Major, he pored over his collection of Russian folk songs in order to comply with Razumovsky’s commission requirement, picking a tuneful one to use as the theme for the finale. So as in the Eroica, he wrote this piece in some degree back to front, basing the opening Thema, with its vaguely folk-song quality, on the Russian tune of the finale. That tune is a touch modal, suggesting natural minor on D. What Beethoven picked up to use in the Thème russe was mainly its beginning: the first four notes of the Russian tune, C–D–E–F, became the opening notes of his first-movement theme. The first two notes of the Thème russe, the falling step D–C, linger throughout as a primal motif.13 The note D plays a pivotal role throughout the quartet.

  The opening presents three distinct, contrasting ideas. But in practice most of the first movement, like the finale, will be involved with the flowing Thema, mainly its rising-fourth figure and its 1234 1 rhythmic motif.14 The second theme, by now rather unusually for Beethoven, is in the conventional dominant key, C major. It extends the rising-fourth scale line to an octave in another flowing theme, the cello again waxing melodic rather than anchoring the bass. Here might be a fundamental conception of this quartet, and not a new one for Beethoven: the idea of redefinition, placing the opening idea in a variety of tonal and emotional contexts.15 (He had played that game with the obsessive little theme in the first movement of the String Quartet op. 18, no. 1, also in F major.)