25. Kerman, in Beethoven Quartets, 102, contrasts the F Major Quartet with the Eroica Symphony, saying the quartet “resists programmatic imaginings . . . breathes an abstract quality that sets it in a different emotional sphere from the symphony.” At some point I wrote in the margin of that page “don’t agree!,” but now, as the text reflects, I rather do agree. Kerman also notes, “Does not the piece as a whole tend towards a loose modality?” (103). As is noted in the text, I agree but don’t see why he cites Lydian mode; the beginning actually has a Mixolydian feel, the finale’s Thème russe tending to natural minor.
26. As is said in the text, the opening fifth in the violin and the cello’s simultaneous E–D-sharp appear to be the primal motifs in the E Minor Quartet. Three measures later that B will rise a half step to C, then, in the turn to the Neapolitan, the E will rise to F. What seems to me to be the essential idea behind all this is a fifth or other larger interval with a half step on each side. The prime form of that motif is D-sharp–E–B–C, but its echoes are myriad throughout, and D-sharp/E-flat is the starring pitch. I think the presence of C major periodically in the piece and its sustained threat to E minor in the finale are partly explained by the figure D-sharp–E, the leading tone of the quartet’s E minor rising to the third of C major. In its guise as E-flat, the starring pitch tends to relate to D, as in the cello in the beginning of the first-movement development. In other words, the D-sharp/E-flat is continually swinging one way or the other, relating to the keys E or D as the tonality goes—and thereby serves as a generating element of the tonal structure. So as D was the highlighted pitch in the F Major Quartet, in the E Minor it’s D-sharp/E-flat—spelled out at the beginning of the development when E-flat–B-flat is respelled D-sharp–A-sharp, taking E-flat major into the beginning of a stepwise modulation scheme (echoing the first measures): B minor to C minor, A-flat major to B-flat minor, B minor to C major—and with that latter key another burst of ebullience. (C major will turn up in the same mood, same key, and same notes in the finale’s Thema.) Meanwhile the presence of F major harks back to the first quartet in the set, the presence of C major to the next member of the set.
27. On the expressive effects of rests in music, see Swafford, “Silence Is Golden.”
28. Both main themes of the E-minor second movement feature the primal E–D-sharp motif, the first theme beginning E–D-sharp and the second theme B–D-sharp–E (so also including the B–E fifth motif).
29. In the second movement of the E Minor, a marcato idea in horn fifths outlines the shape of the Russian theme to come in the scherzo, and the coda recalls the arpeggio themes of the beginning of the quartet.
30. The most famous use of the op. 56, no. 2, Russian folk song is the mighty coronation scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Beethoven’s treatment of it is joking, Mussorgsky’s grand.
31. The shocking first chord of the C Major is a diminished seventh. Beethoven often does not resolve those kind of chords conventionally, and sometimes simply moves freely from one diminished seventh to another. This treatment is intended to erase a sense of tonality for a while; it is Beethoven’s form of atonality.
32. Senner, Critical Reception, 2:172.
33. Ratner, in Beethoven String Quartets, 151, identifies the barcarole rhythm of the C Major Quartet’s second movement.
34. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 31.
35. Thayer/Forbes, 1:413.
36. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 31.
37. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 138.
38. Ibid., nos. 138a and 139.
39. Thayer/Forbes, 1:416. It is possible these concerts were held in the Lichnowsky palace, but Thayer votes for Lobkowitz. There may have been a separate concert at Lichnowsky’s, as Barry Cooper notes in Beethoven Compendium, 18–19.
40. Wegeler/Ries, 88–89.
41. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 119.
42. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 167.
43. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 76.
44. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 143.
45. Ibid., no. 148.
46. Thayer/Forbes, 1:421–22.
47. Ibid., 1:423.
48. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 150; Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 122.
49. Gordon, “Franz Grillparzer,” 555.
50. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 124. This is noted in a letter from Prince Nikolaus to his vice-Kapellmeister Fuchs demanding to know why the altos were not at the rehearsal and saying that if Fuchs could not keep his singers in line, it would be on his head.
51. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 150. Here is one of the few cases of Beethoven saying something nice about Haydn during the old man’s lifetime, though it is more a case of his being conventionally humble and deferential toward the prince.
52. Kinderman, Beethoven, 122.
53. Scherman and Biancolli, 495.
54. Kinderman, Beethoven, 122.
55. Hummel himself had provided a couple of masses for the princess’s name day, so there actually may have been a little schadenfreude involved, but he was probably not gloating so much as tickled by his employer’s response. On the whole, he and Beethoven got along well.
56. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 124n4.
57. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 167.
58. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 127.
59. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 151.
60. Ibid., nos. 154 and 156.
61. Solomon, Beethoven, 203. The report of Beethoven’s suicide attempt comes not only from Schindler, who cannot be trusted, but also from tenor Joseph August Röckel, who is reasonably reliable. Schindler’s account is quite specific as to the place and events, which adds some credence. Both are vague about the time, but Solomon suspects it was in the aftermath of the Josephine affair, and I agree.
62. Klapproth, Beethoven’s Only Beloved, 84.
63. Quoted in ibid., 89. Klapproth assigns dates of 1809 to Beethoven’s and Josephine’s final surviving letters, without explanation. Albrecht and Anderson place them in 1807, the currently accepted dates (some of the extant parts of her side of their correspondence are things she wrote down as drafts—they are dated in relation to the Beethoven letters they seem to have responded to or inspired). It is suspicious of Klapproth not to have given reasons for his dates, yet more suspicious that in the case of Josephine’s letter translated as no. 127 in Albrecht, Klapproth translates mein Freund Beethoven as “my boyfriend Beethoven” rather than the usual and far more likely “my friend Beethoven” (which I believe was intended to convey “my friend but not my lover”). I will leave these hairsplittings at this point, because they are endless, but this kind of thing gives one pause about Klapproth’s methods. At the same time, I am using some of his translations of material directly from Josephine and Therese. I also have to demur about Klapproth citing me in his acknowledgments, as if I somehow contributed to his book. I did nothing except to say I’d like to see it, thanks for sending it, and good luck. His fudging, meanwhile, does not mean Klapproth cannot be right about Josephine being the “Immortal Beloved.” If nothing else, he fleshes out the fascinating story of Josephine’s life and loves for English readers.
21. Schemes
1. Thayer/Forbes, 1:426.
2. From the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “genius”: “This sense [of genius], which belongs also to F. génie, Ger. genie, appears to have been developed in the 18th c. (It is not recognized in Johnson’s Dictionary.) . . . The word had come to be applied with especial frequency to the kind of intellectual power manifested by poets and artists; and when in this application ‘genius,’ as native endowment, came to be contrasted with the aptitudes that can be acquired by study, the approach to the modern sense was often very close. [In] the further development of meaning . . . the word had an especial fitness to denote that particular kind of intellectual power which has the appearance of proceeding from a supernatural inspiration or possession, and which seems to arrive at its results in an inexplicable and miraculous manner. This use . . . came into great prominence in Germany, and gave the designation of Genieperio
de to the epoch in German literature otherwise known as the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period. Owing to the influence of Ger. literature in the present century, this is now the most familiar sense of the Eng. word, and usually colours the other senses.” See Peter Kivy’s The Possessor and the Possessed, a study of the philosophy of genius.
3. Thayer/Forbes, 1:426.
4. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 164.
5. Wyn Jones, Life of Beethoven, 97.
6. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 128.
7. Wyn Jones, Beethoven, 5.
8. Ibid., 9–10.
9. Thayer/Forbes, 1:444.
10. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 165.
11. Quoted in Geiringer, Haydn, 184.
12. Ibid., 185–86.
13. Kinsky and Halm, Das Werk Beethovens, 132.
14. The concert where the Fourth Symphony and Coriolan were first heard in Vienna comes from a review that mentions only the palace of “L.,” which could represent either Lobkowitz or Lichnowsky. The balance of evidence points to Lobkowitz.
15. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 216.
16. A. Peter Brown calls the beginning of the Fourth one of Beethoven’s several echoes of Haydn’s “Chaos” in The Creation (Symphonic Repertoire, 476).
17. Tovey writes of the Fourth Symphony’s “mastery of movement . . . Mozart’s freedom of movement reappears as one of the most striking qualities of the whole” (Scherman and Biancolli, 565).
18. Concerning the various expressive effects of pauses in music, see Swafford, “Silence Is Golden.”
19. Senner, Critical Reception, 2:69.
20. Ibid., 2:43. The text has “the last of those,” which I presume is a typo for “least.”
21. See Lockwood, “Autograph.” Most of the changes in the development have to do with redistributing material back and forth between cello and piano.
22. The D Major Trio is another work of ingenious unities. The stunning emotional turn of the second movement is prepared by the coda of the first. Each movement begins with an introductory gesture involving some kind of halt followed by a more sustained theme. Its world is also marked by a developmental approach, the ideas varying and metamorphosing constantly—which in the second movement is geared to an effect of something obsessive or inescapable.
23. Lockwood, Beethoven: Studies, 191–97.
24. Thayer/Forbes, 1:441–42.
25. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 167.
26. Ibid., no. 169; B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 19, which reports 100 ducats, which is over 400 florins.
27. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 170.
28. Marek, Beethoven, 261–64; Clive, Beethoven and His World, 101–2.
29. Nicholls, Napoleon, 31–32; Clive, ibid., 39–40. The grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte’s American wife, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, was secretary of the navy and attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt.
30. Donakowski, Muse, 91.
31. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 166.
32. Ibid., no. 178.
33. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 252–53.
34. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 180–81.
35. Landon, Beethoven, 124–25.
36. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Reichardt, Johann Friedrich.”
37. Landon, Beethoven unabridged, 215.
22. Darkness to Light
1. Thayer/Forbes, 1:446.
2. Senner, Critcal Reception, 2:49. This account of what Beethoven said at the breakdown of the Choral Fantasy is from the newspaper report. Thayer/Forbes, 1:448–49, has a series of vaguely similar accounts of what happened and why. As conductor Seyfried recalled it, Beethoven forgot that he had told the orchestra not to make a repeat of the second variation, and they went on while he repeated.
3. Landon, Beethoven, 128.
4. Thayer/Forbes, 1:446–48.
5. To start a concerto with the soloist alone turns the classical concerto model upside down. Ordinarily the orchestra gives an exposition of the leading ideas, followed by the soloist entering to start the second part of the “double exposition.” To begin with, the soloist creates formidable formal problems, in terms of the presentation of the main theme. Beethoven solves the problem with something that is also the dramatic essence of the Fourth Concerto: the soloist and orchestra never agree on how the main theme goes. The piano has its version, the orchestra its version. Still, the orchestra’s startling first entrance in B major is prepared in a characteristically Beethovenian way: B is the melody note the piano soliloquy begins on. (Similarly, in the Waldstein first movement, the E major of the second theme is prepared by the top-voice E of the first bar.)
6. There has been a great deal of commentary on the unusual opposition of solo and orchestra in the second movement of the Fourth Concerto. I have found no notice of the way the first page of the concerto and the whole first movement foreshadow that opposition. It is my position that Beethoven does not pull a new structural or dramatic idea out of a hat in the middle of a piece, but prepares all the important ideas from early on. (The rare exceptions are works like the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies, in which he deliberately breaks his own formal rules for realistic or expressive effect.) Which is to say, a major conception in a Beethoven second movement is going to be part of the conception and presentation from the beginning. The three movements of the Fourth Concerto present three kinds of bifurcation between solo and orchestra: in the first movement the soloist simply refuses to buy, and sometimes mocks, most of the orchestra’s ideas; in the second movement the two are at loggerheads but come to a tentative reconciliation; in the third movement the same division is played as comedy and resolved harmoniously.
7. Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, 211.
8. Plantinga details Joseph Kerman’s dissatisfaction with the piano’s recapitulation: “I don’t come up with any association to ‘explain’ it” (ibid., 200). My explanation makes sense to me, but it’s more a dramatic than a “musical” explanation.
9. That the solo part in the first movement of the Fourth has been virtuosic, brilliant, and cadenza-like all along is my surmise for why the first of Beethoven’s two cadenzas published a few years later, which is the one most often used, is so massive and elaborate: it has to be, to outdo what came before. My apologies for using “he” for the soloist. It’s partly for the sake of simplicity, partly because I imagine the soloist as masculine but not at all aggressive. At times I find him Hamletlike, sunk in thought but not entirely oblivious to what is around him. Plantinga observes how Beethoven “luxuriates” in the new high notes available in the newest instruments. His old concertos went up to F above the treble staff; the Fourth reaches to C above that.
10. Jander has famously championed the idea that the second movement of the Fourth represents Orpheus taming the Furies. There is no evidence for Beethoven having had that in mind. At the same time, the few stories we know that lie behind his music, mainly ones he supplied himself, as in the Lebewohl Sonata and the Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies, are those kinds of narratives more often than ones from his own life (the Lebewohl turns an incident from his life into a larger human story). Note that all those stated programs apply to a whole piece, however, not just to a single movement.
11. The sudden interludes in flat keys in the finale of the Fourth—B-flat and E-flat—echo similar moments in the same keys in the first movement.
12. What I am saying about Beethoven’s relationship to keys is that he had a core association of a given key with an expressive quality: the C-minor mood, the C-major mood, the E-flat-major mood, the E-flat-minor mood, and so on. At the same time, he liked to probe other qualities of a key. His works in E-flat major, for example, are by no means all heroic. A pointed example is with the Waldstein: C major is usually a key implying a certain equanimity, but the C major of the Waldstein is searching and dynamic. To put it another way: never interested in repeating himself, when Beethoven picked up a key he had used before, he wanted to find a fresh angle on it.
13. Critic and theorist A. B. Marx, well before Schindler’s line
about fate appeared, portrayed the Fifth Symphony as an individual’s struggle with fate. If Schindler fabricated Beethoven’s observation, he could have gotten the idea from Marx.
14. As is said in the text, I think in the first five bars of the Fifth Symphony Beethoven intended to misdirect listeners about the key, expecting that we would hear the first four pitches, G–E-flat–F–D, in E-flat major. But I think the effect is lost with familiarity: anyone who knows the Fifth hears the first notes in C minor. It’s a good question how many deliberate ambiguities intended by composers vanish with familiarity.
15. Beyond the rhythm and the S shape of the opening tattoo, every other element of it will be mined: the descending third of the first two notes is an important motif on its own (it becomes chains of descending minor thirds forming the 07 chords that mark structural junctions). The rising E-flat–F of notes 2 and 3 become the rising-step figure in the fog at the retransition. In addition, the A-flat–G in the violas at mm. 7 and 8 establish a falling-half-step motif that will have an important place.
16. The meter of the Fifth’s first movement is a fast 2/4 conducted in one. Most of the phrases in the movement are four bars long, so it could have been written in 4/4. But Beethoven, a master of the psychology of notation, knew that for musicians a fast 2/4 has a nervous energy that 4/4 does not.
17. Kerman, in “Notes on Beethoven’s Codas,” 151, writes, “Thematic ‘completion’ . . . should be regarded as the centrally important feature in Beethoven’s codas of the second period.”
18. Kinderman, Beethoven, 126. He calls the brassy C-major perorations of the second movement “the distant premonition of a goal that cannot yet be attained” until the finale, and the third movement an “advance parody” of the finale.
19. Beethoven tinkered with the new pieces during rehearsals for the premiere and sent revisions to Breitkopf & Härtel afterward. In the process his intentions about the scherzo of the Fifth may have gotten lost in the shuffle. In the versions published first and afterward, there is only one round of the trio and no repeat of the original A section, only the varied, parodistic version of it. So what survived is a relatively conventional three-part scherzo form, A–B (trio)–A1 (the repeat varied and finally disappearing in fog). But it is possible that Beethoven, after much indecision, finally wanted the usual repeat back to the beginning and two rounds of the trio, making a five-part scherzo form: A–B–A–B–A1 (see Brandenburg, “Once Again”). The three-part version became established, but I argue that the five-part is preferable on musical grounds. For me the short version, even after decades of familiarity, does not leave the third movement expansive enough to balance the other movements. (In his notes to his Fifth Symphony edition, Jonathan Del Mar makes a meticulous case in favor of the three-part scherzo.)
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 119
