Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  20. Structurally speaking, what I’m calling the “fog” in the first three movements is an unusual kind of transition section. In the first movement it is the retransition to the recapitulation; in the second movement it marks the end of an A–B cycle in the double variations; in the third movement it is the transition to the finale, and the transition to the recapitulation after the return of the scherzo.

  21. A. Peter Brown, Symphonic Repertoire, 489.

  22. As of the turn of the nineteenth century, trombones were most familiar in church music and in opera and oratorio. Since they carried that association with the sacred, they also served to suggest the opposite: thus Mozart’s demonic trombones at the end of Don Giovanni, and many similar effects since (see the “Witch’s Round” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique). Remember that until the perfection of valves later in the century, trombones were the only chromatic brass instrument, and because of the slide they still retain the throaty quality of open horns. I am a former trombonist and have long considered the instrument a kind of muscular, working-class bloke in comparison to the more elegant and distinguished French horns, or the svelte and swashbuckling trumpets.

  23. To reinforce a point made before: For clarity I sometimes present thematic relationships in place as they turn up in the music, but it is not really accurate to talk about relationships and echoes of themes as a looking backward. It is better to see them as the composer does, as a matter of the progression of ideas, of ongoing variation: taking a piece of material and making it into new things. So for Beethoven as for most composers, a thematic relation is not usually a matter of citing things backward but of the material at hand moving forward—though sometimes one will go back and rework something to make it more relevant to the leading ideas.

  24. I am paraphrasing E. M. Forster on the Fifth Symphony in Howards End. Forster found the third movement more unequivocally demonic than I do; he calls it a “goblin.” I find its import ambiguous, somewhere between comic and unsettling; thus my term nonscherzo.

  25. Remarkably enough, the second performance of the Fifth Symphony was in Vienna on the night after its premiere, in a benefit for violinist Franz Clement (Wyn Jones, Symphony, 132).

  26. Wyn Jones, Beethoven, 14–15. See also Kirby, “Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.” Kirby defines the Beethovenian sense of a “characteristic” piece as “a composition possessing certain typical features that mark it as belonging to a particular genre or type.” Among the familiar types were the passionate Sturm und Drang, the pathetic, the melancholy, the military, the hunt, and the pastoral-idyllic.

  27. Solomon points out in Beethoven, 266, that Beethoven seems to have adapted his movement titles in the Pastoral (not necessarily consciously, I add) from a symphony he heard in Bonn called Le portrait musical de la nature, by J. H. Knecht.

  28. The development of the Pastoral’s first movement is an example of the way Beethoven turns the conventions of sonata form inside out. The Fifth is the distillation of the drama inherent in the form; the Sixth is its negation, with the usually searching and dramatic development section the most placid part of the movement.

  29. Thayer/Forbes, 1:438.

  30. Botstein, “Beethoven’s Orchestral Music,” 172.

  31. Wyn Jones, Beethoven, 38. In his Fifth Symphony edition, Jonathan Del Mar notes that the Sixth’s familiar finale title was created by the publisher, so he restores the title on Beethoven’s manuscript: “Shepherd Song / Benevolent feelings with thanks to the Divinity after the storm.”

  32. Kirby, in “Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony,” 112, says the opening theme of the finale is a ranz des vaches, calling it a Swiss yodeling tune. It is more properly an alpenhorn call.

  33. This evocation of the creative process of the Pastoral is from a compendium of sources, including the sketchbooks. See also Wyn Jones, Beethoven, 10–11. Wyn Jones details some echoes of Haydn’s nature painting in the Pastoral.

  34. Landon, Beethoven, 157.

  35. Sturm, Reflections, passim.

  36. Will begins his article “Time” citing Tovey’s “peculiar claim”: “Not a bar of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony would be otherwise if its ‘programme’ had never been thought of.” Obviously I find Tovey’s claim more than peculiar—it is absurd. Meanwhile to see this, as most of the literature does, as a symphony that happens to have a pastoral atmosphere is to get it backward. As is detailed in the text, the idea for the symphony began with the program, which was then mapped into conventional forms that had to be bent and reshaped for the purpose. Every detail of the melody, harmony, rhythm, color, and form rose from the idea of the pastoral. But there are still familiar elements, among them the usual Beethovenian motivic relationships that enfold even the storm. Will gives a list of the “storm” motifs on p. 284, followed by the end of the scherzo. Note that his “storm” motif b echoes the theme of the scherzo on the next page. His motif e, the “lightning” figure from the storm, is prepared by the darting upward arpeggios in mm. 257–62 of the scherzo. Most intriguing is motif d, a rushing figure from the storm, which echoes the step up and sixth descent of, for example, mm. 240–44 of the scherzo (G–A–G–F–E–D–C). Augmented, that line will also be a leading idea in the finale.

  37. Wyn Jones, Beethoven, 33–34.

  38. Ibid., 36–37.

  39. Senner, Critical Reception, 2:49.

  40. Ibid., 2:50.

  41. Basil Deane, in Arnold, Beethoven Reader, 297.

  42. Knight, Beethoven, 73.

  23. Thus Be Enabled to Create

  1. Thayer/Forbes, 1:458.

  2. Kagan, Archduke Rudolph, 12.

  3. Wyn Jones, Life of Beethoven, 109.

  4. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 295.

  5. Kagan, Archduke Rudolph, 29.

  6. Landon, Beethoven, 133–34.

  7. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 183.

  8. Solomon, Beethoven, 201. That Beethoven suspected Erdödy was paying the servant for sexual favors is a speculation of Solomon’s.

  9. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 208.

  10. Ibid., no. 207.

  11. Thayer/Forbes, 1:464. The date of the fracas between Breuning and Carl is not certain, but the leading guess is 1809.

  12. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 216.

  13. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 103. Anton Schindler was not a generous judge of Beethoven performers, but he admired Ertmann.

  14. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 78n1.

  15. Thayer/Forbes, 1:412–13.

  16. Ibid., 1:413.

  17. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 202.

  18. Brion, Daily Life, 149–50.

  19. Herriot, Life and Times, 174.

  20. Marek, Beethoven, 402.

  21. Geiringer, Haydn, 189.

  22. Knight, Beethoven, 76.

  23. Marek, Beethoven, 402.

  24. Sonneck, Beethoven, 68–75.

  25. Marek, Beethoven, 407.

  26. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 220.

  27. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 144.

  28. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 20.

  29. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 145.

  30. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 189–90.

  31. Ibid., 192.

  32. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 243.

  33. Ibid., no. 235.

  34. Kagan, Archduke Rudolph, 54.

  35. Thayer/Forbes, 1:464.

  36. Skowroneck, Beethoven the Pianist, 93. Skowroneck, 98, quotes a letter from Andreas Streicher saying that while he liked the sound of English and French pianos more than any others, he believed the action was “completely at odds with the structure of the hand” and so most people would not be able to play them. His goal was “to combine this [English/French] tone with our usual [Viennese] action.” One should note that while his firm’s pianos were usually formally attributed to Andreas, in fact his wife, Nannette, built them—as most musicians knew. Meanwhile, Skowroneck tentatively suggests that Reichardt overstated Beethoven’s influence on Streicher. On the basis of existing letters, that could be said, but Beetho
ven also had plenty of personal contact with both Andreas and Nannette Streicher, which probably included much back-and-forth sharing of ideas, and Beethoven was never shy about expressing his opinions.

  37. Rosen, in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, 197, calls the beginning of the F-sharp Major Sonata “not an introduction at all, but a fragment of an independent slow movement . . . There are no models or precedents for these opening bars.” Meanwhile, if the personality of op. 78 is gentle and charming, its key of F-sharp major makes it very hard for the fingers to get around. Surely this is one of the reasons this sonata is less well known than it might be. Drake in Beethoven Sonatas notes the prevailing B-sharp–C-sharp idea that underlies much of the material. The other leading motif is the three-note ascending (or descending) bit of scale heard in the introduction—the same motif as in the Lebewohl and any number of other Beethoven works.

  38. Dahlhaus writes of the Lebewohl Sonata, in Ludwig van Beethoven, “The meaning expressed . . . does not lie in the extra-musical reality reflected in the work’s themes, nor exclusively in the intra-musical structural coherence, but in the transformation of the one into the other” (41).

  39. The introduction of the Lebewohl first movement is a prime example of Beethoven’s way of suspending harmony: the Lebewohl motif is clearly in E-flat major, but the first full chord is C minor and there is no cadence to the tonic until the fifth bar of the Allegro. There is a general tendency to aim for the dominant, and the Allegro begins strikingly on a subdominant sixth chord that slithers downward in chromatic thirds.

  40. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 325.

  41. Steinberg, “Late Quartets,” 199.

  42. The scherzo of the Harp Quartet clearly made a great impression on Mendelssohn; it is a virtual prototype of his “fairy” scherzos.

  43. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 251–52.

  44. Ibid., no. 253.

  45. Ibid., no. 258.

  46. Some have questioned whether Für Elise was really written for Therese Malfatti. For one thing, of course, there is the name. As Barry Cooper points out in Beethoven, however, it was probably a pet name for Therese. Also the date of the composition is right, and when she died Therese had it in her possession, among other Beethoven manuscripts.

  47. Thayer/Forbes, 1:490–91.

  48. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 254. Anderson’s dates of this letter and no. 265 are approximate; I have arranged them in what seems to be the correct order, showing the unraveling of Beethoven’s hopes for Therese.

  49. This is a supposition from Beethoven’s note to Gleichenstein. A niece of Therese Malfatti later said of the proposal, “[H]er parents would never have given their consent” (Thayer/Forbes, 1:491).

  50. Ibid., 1:490.

  51. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 265.

  52. Ibid., no. 256.

  53. Kerman, Beethoven Quartets, 158.

  54. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 263.

  55. Senner, Critical Reception, 2:95–97, paragraph breaks added. I’m guessing that the Senner phrase “various simpletons make every drink” is a mistranslation for the archaic “various simples,” which I’ve rendered as “various mysterious ingredients” in my third paragraph. I’ve also changed this translation’s “interminable longing” at the end to the more familiar “infinite longing,” because “interminable” has an inappropriate pejorative connotation.

  24. Myths and Men

  1. Sonneck, Beethoven, 85.

  2. Friedenthal, Goethe, 131.

  3. Helps and Howard, Bettina, 13–14.

  4. Ibid., 76.

  5. Wolf, “Your Next Life.”

  6. Helps and Howard, Bettina, 213.

  7. Ibid., 28–30.

  8. Ibid., 33.

  9. Ibid., 80–81.

  10. Wolf, “Your Next Life,” 39.

  11. Bettina Brentano, quoted in Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 42.

  12. Friedenthal, Goethe, 410.

  13. Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 30–31.

  14. Marek, Beethoven, 277–78. The quotation is from Varnhagen von Ense.

  15. Helps and Howard, Bettina, 204–5.

  16. Ibid., 150.

  17. Sonneck, Beethoven, 79–82.

  18. If I am right that Beethoven in some unknowable degree allowed Bettina Brentano to put words in his mouth in her letters to Goethe, there are two possible and interlocking reasons for it. The obvious one is that he wanted to reach Goethe, and Bettina could write a more compelling letter than he could. The second reason is that, while Beethoven spoke very little about his music, he appreciated other people’s rhapsodies inspired by his work, whether they came from critics like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Adolph Marx or from imaginative enthusiasts like Bettina.

  19. Walden, in Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 95–100, details the changes Bettina made in her published letters from Goethe by comparing them to the ones that still exist (nine of the sixteen in her book). He shows her changes to be relatively minor and most often the kind of political statements that would have been unwritable at the time, because they would have been censored. In regard to Goethe’s letters to Bettina that are missing, Walden speculates on what additions may have been made. He also notes that she never claimed to have published his letters exactly as written, and that she likely took more liberties with her side of the correspondence. Bettina’s defenders say that her collections of letters are actually epistolary novels, like Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.

  20. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 20–21.

  21. Thayer/Forbes, 1:490.

  22. As an element in his thesis that Bettina Brentano was the “Immortal Beloved,” whom Beethoven in a later conversation implied he met around 1810, Walden (Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved) promotes a theory that Beethoven had known Antonie and her family since the 1790s. Walden’s main source for that idea is Anton Schindler, a completely unreliable source. None of that is to say, however, that Beethoven did not know Antonie earlier, only that there is no clear record of it.

  23. Solomon, Beethoven, 234–35.

  24. Ibid., 235.

  25. The portraits of Antonie are reproduced in ibid., 208.

  26. Ibid., 233.

  27. Ibid., 229.

  28. Part of the tightly knit quality of the Serioso is the interrelationships of its key structure from beginning to end. The essence of that structure is the “sore” note D-flat in the beginning, part of the primal motif D-flat–C. (That in turn reveals the Serioso as the most important ancestor of Brahms’s F Minor Quintet, which has, among other things, the same emphasis on D-flat, the same influence of D-flat on the harmonic structure, the same important D-flat–C motif, and a similar tragic tone throughout.) In the Serioso the keys of D-flat and G-flat turn up in later movements. For one example, the D-flat becomes C-sharp, the leading tone, in the D-major second movement. As Kerman and Ratner note, the quartet’s abrupt opening move from I to N echoes the same harmonic move in the Appassionata and the E Minor Razumovsky Quartet.

  29. The effect of the second theme, which I call unreal and evanescent, has to do not only with its startling contrast to the first theme but also with the highly unusual harmonic move to the flat side, the subdominant direction, in a second theme. Even in the C-major Waldstein Sonata, in which nearly every tonal move starting from the opening bars is in the flat/subdominant direction, the second theme is in E, a dominant substitute.

  30. The keys of the strange uprushing scales in the first movement form a pattern of rising fourths: A major, D major, G major. Each one is a violent jump from the key at hand (though D and A have an N relation to I and V in D-flat major). Meanwhile, note that A, D, and G are V, I, and IV of D major, the key of the second movement. To say again, part of the conception of this quartet is tightly interlocking keys among the movements.

  31. The striking B-flat that inflects the D major of the second-movement theme is part of a flat-sixth motif in the piece, also part of its moll-Dur tendencies, such as the heart-tugging moment in mm. 40–41 of the first movement.

/>   32. Wyn Jones, Life of Beethoven, 128.

  33. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 283.

  34. Solomon, Beethoven, 182.

  35. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 294.

  36. Ibid., no. 306.

  37. Kinsky and Halm, Das Werk Beethovens, 773. Breitkopf & Härtel brought out Christus am Ölberge and the Mass in C as opp. 85 and 86.

  38. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 308.

  39. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 300 and 301.

  40. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 157.

  41. Some of Beethoven’s on-the-surface-less-bold pieces have, like the Archduke, some of his more striking formal and tonal excursions. The scherzo is an example. It’s based in B-flat major; the enormous, multipart trio begins in B-flat minor and goes on to D-flat major and E major, and arrives at B-flat major well before the return of the opening theme. Then comes the slow movement in D major. The harmonic peregrinations of the gentle Archduke rival those of the furious Serioso, and both are planned in terms of close tonal relationships among the movements.

  42. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 295.

  43. Marek, Beethoven, 258–59.

  44. Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 133–34.

  45. For Walden (ibid.), the du and “with pain”—three words—in Beethoven’s surviving letter to Bettina are central elements in his argument that she was the Immortal Beloved. The two letters from Beethoven that Bettina published, and which do not survive, are more unequivocally passionate. Yet others saw those missing letters and testified to their existence, and there is no doubt that Beethoven wrote Bettina more letters than the single one that survives—he refers to them. Meanwhile there is no evidence that Bettina destroyed his letters or any of Goethe’s. For all she knew, in other words, the originals of Beethoven’s letters would still be around to compare to her published versions. And so the speculations and ambiguities continue their rounds.