In
the span of 10 days, I’ve listened to one of the United States’ best
orchestras, my own hometown Atlanta Symphony, tackle two periodic archetypes of
Ludwig van Beethoven’s work. I have heard them play the definitive archetype of
his late period, but I have so much to say about that hour-long composition
that, well… you’ll just have to wait until I release a book about it.
Historians
of Beethoven typically subdivide the work of Beethoven into three periods:
early, heroic, and late. The early period features (generally) simpler, shorter
compositions, many of them for piano that are very closely stylistically linked
to his teachers Haydn and Salieri, beginning when the young pianist moved to Vienna
in 1792 (permanently, that is; he’d been in Vienna a short time before but was
recalled to Bonn when his mother fell ill in 1789-90). Not very many published
works with Opus numbers came out of this period during which Beethoven’s main
focus was establishing himself as one of Vienna’s great concert pianists, and,
particularly, as one of its great improvisers, a fact that will become
massively important in the two later periods. One of the most famous works to
come out of this period was the First Symphony, written between 1795 and 1800,
premiered in 1801, and published in 1802.
There’s
no set date at which the early period ends, but I tend to peg it at around the summer/fall
of 1802, when, while Beethoven retreated to the vineyard resort town of Heiligenstadt,
Beethoven wrote to close relatives to tell them just how desperate he was: his
music, and the effect that art had on others, was the only thing holding him
back from suicide. This period, though it was clearly dark (it involved gradual
hearing loss, chronic illness, lots of drinking, financial struggles, and custody
battles with siblings and cousins over the care of Beethoven’s minor relatives,
all of which he lost), was an incredibly fruitful one. Many of Beethoven’s
great works, like his Third through Eighth Symphonies, three of his five piano
concertos, and several others came out of this incredibly busy period. Despite how
dark and traumatic the experiences of this period are, it was indeed at this
time when Beethoven wrote some of his most tender music.
After
the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, Beethoven essentially fell away from the
Viennese concert scene for about a decade, from 1813 to 1824. The premiere of
the Eighth marks the end of the heroic period and the beginning of the late
period; one of the most iconic melodies ever written came out of this period,
in the 1824 Ninth Symphony. This was, of course, the Ode to Joy, a theme in the
works since the early period. I won’t go into much more detail about it here
because if I did, I kid you not, this blog post would approach 200 pages.
However, I will mention that there is a marked shift in the character,
instrumentation, and ensemble size of this period that completes the revolutions
begun in the two earlier periods so that, by Beethoven’s death in 1827, the
Romantic era was in full swing, and the likes of Schubert, Schumann, and
Medelssohn were laying out the Germanic Romantic foundation.
Now
that we have the necessary context, we can discuss the concerts themselves. The
first of the two concerts, though anachronistically, was the presentation of
the 1805-06 Violin Concerto, which, together with the Brahms, Tchaikovsky,
Mendelssohn, and Bruch form the core of the essentials of the Romantic solo
violin repertoire. Any one of these concerti would be a Mount Everest to
conquer in their own rights, but the Beethoven presents itself to be
particularly difficult now. First, for me, particularly, any Beethoven is an
Everest with massively high expectations which were all blown out of the water
by the recent concert. From his beginnings as prodigious teenage organist and
violinist in the court of the Elector of Bonn, Ludwig van Beethoven was always
a deeply emotionally and intellectually complex musician, and the many colors
of his personality all shine through at some point in the Violin Concerto,
right around the middle of his published creative output, labelled Op 61.
Today, the Violin Concerto is universally acclaimed as one of Beethoven’s
masterpieces and one of the finest Romantic concerti ever written, but that was
certainly not always the case. The premiere came on December 23, 1806, almost
two years to the day before the concert in the winter of 1808 that featured the
public premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Choral Fantasy
(essentially a piano concerto with an added vocal component), the Fourth Piano
Concerto, and many other works today held as masterworks, all in a four- to
five-hour concert. After that 1806 premiere, it is unlikely that Beethoven ever
heard his Concerto in public again, for two reasons. First, his increasing (and
eventually total) deafness by the end of his career prevented from hearing
anything—so much so that Carolina Unger, a 21-year-old soprano, who would have
been 3 years old when the Concerto premiered, apparently walked over to the
composer and literally turned his body around so he could at least see the
applause at the end of his final symphony’s premiere. I will admit that this
story may not necessarily be true though, even if the person who did this was
not Unger, it’s very likely that someone did at least give him some indication
of the audience’s reaction on that May night in 1824. Granted, his deafness in
1806 was certainly not as complete in 1806 as it was by 1824; however, the
Heiligenstadt Testament predates the Concerto, so we know he was already
struggling with (and struggling to come to terms with) his increasing deafness.
Though his deafness provides a literal reason why he could not hear future
performances, there is perhaps another. In research I have done, I have not
been able to find any evidence of performances of the Concerto after the 1806
premiere and the 1844 “re-premiere” by Mendelssohn and a very young (12- almost
13-year-old) Josef Joachim at the Royal Philharmonic Society, an organization
intimately linked with the commissioning of many of Beethoven’s masterworks. I
call the 1844 performance the “re-premiere” because, after the 1806 “actual”
premiere, which was hardly a success, the work effectively fell off the face of
the planet until this 1844 performance. This performance not only catapulted
Joachim’s stardom further than it had ever been, it returned the Beethoven
Concerto to the limelight and, in the first public performance since the
premiere (38 years prior) and the composer’s death (17 years prior), enshrined
it as one of the 19th century’s greatest concertos and Joachim as
one of the era’s greatest instrumentalists forever. Quite literally, a pre-teen
made possible that concert and so many others, and because of him, millions of
people have come to know, cherish, and love the Beethoven Concerto, especially
us violinists. Unlike the pianists, who have five excellent concerti by
Beethoven from which to choose, we only have this one, so we hold it particularly
dear to our hearts.
The
following concert, just this past weekend, was in a small, intimate concert
hall not too far from campus, in downtown Covington. I always find it
beneficial to hear music in small spaces like that one because the smaller
spaces allow the more extreme frequencies to be more easily heard because those
frequencies need only be carried over a shorter distance to the listener.
Further, the size of the concert hall gave this concert a much more intimate
feeling than the others I’ve been to—which were stellar in their own right—and
made me feel an even deeper personal connection with Beethoven than I already
did before because I was hearing his music in a place much like where he would
have heard his music.
Director
James Gaffigan did a wonderful job of explaining when this archetypal selection
was from. The First Symphony was written sometime between 1795 and 1801,
premiered in 1801, and was published in 1802. 1802 roughly denotes the end of
Beethoven’s first period of output—his early period. The music of this period
is very reminiscent of that of the earlier Classical masters Mozart, Haydn, and
Salieri. Of that list, we know for sure Beethoven met and studied with the
latter two, but we have no idea if Beethoven and Mozart met. It is possible,
since Beethoven was about to turn 21, well-known, and already in Vienna in
December 1791 when Mozart died. This work tends to be called one of Beethoven’s
more conservative works, but the revolution that becomes desperately apparent
in the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies is already hinted at in this early
work.
From
the very beginning, this is a symphony of ambiguity. It sets a precedent
followed later by three of the following eight symphonies (4, 5, and 9) of
either starting in the “wrong” key (i.e., not the declared key) or opeining
with a chord structure that makes it impossible to tell what key the
composition is actually in. Until about 1:30, we don’t hear a root position I
chord (the strongest form of the strongest chord, that tells us exactly where
“home” is) at all, and it’s not until after 1:50 into the first movement that
it becomes obvious that, indeed, that chord that arrived so late is the I
chord, by the introduction of what I call the “heroic theme” in measure 33.
Having to go through an introduction in two parts, the first 12 bars of which
are completely tonally ambiguous and the next 20 of which are only slightly
clearer, before establishing the main theme and key of the movement only in the
33rd bar would have been unthinkable to Mozart or Haydn, and
therefore also to the average Viennese listener. Since the first theme doesn’t
really come in until bar 33, we can begin our analysis of sonata form there;
what follows the initial heroic theme is the often-paired “lyrical theme,” in
this case, in the dominant. Introducing the heroic theme first and then the
lyric theme is one of the few conventions Beethoven keeps in his sonata form
writing throughout his symphonic oeuvre.
The
second movement in a Mozart or Haydn symphony would have typically been a slow
movement, but Beethoven breaks this convention twice over. First, the movement
is marked at 120 eighth notes per minute, quite fast for a “slow” movement.
This notion that not every symphony needs a proper lyrical adagio movement that,
as my friends say, “hits the feels,” is one he’ll come back to in his Eighth,
where his slowest movement (which isn’t actually slow, when you think about it)
is an homage to the work his friend Johann Maelzel, the recent inventor of the
metronome.
The
third movement, until now ordinarily a minuet, a courtly French dance from the
18th century, is still a triple-time dance like the minuet, only
it’s much longer, more difficult, and grander than Mozartian symphonic minuets.
Some people will argue this is still a symphonic minuet. Others argue it’s what
they call a protoscherzo—larger in scale than a minuet, but not quite as
involved or dramatic as a later scherzo. Still others, pointing to the grandeur
of the material, the relatively long composition (about 6 minutes, up to 50%
longer than most other symphonic minuets of Mozart and Haydn), and,
particularly, to the prominence of the wind instruments, will argue that in
fact, this was already Beethoven’s first full-fledged orchestral symphonic
scherzo. I find myself decidedly in the third group.
The
finale (well, the whole work, but particularly the finale) is notable for its
decidedly comedic approach to life. This is not only revolutionary, it is
clearly indicative of the much happier times the composer was experiencing at
this time compared to what his future would very soon have in store for him.
None of the anguish of custody battles over nephews, deafness, rodents in
apartments (true story), how he would pay his rent or get his food of his later
years is in any way evident in this finale. The comedic nature of this work
that so engages the listener is evident from the opening bars: Beethoven hints
at the construction of the mixolydian mode in the “family” of C (so, therefore,
G mixolydian), only revealing the scale one degree at a time, keeping things
deliberately and playfully piano through this entire captivating revelation.
However, once the scale, which forms a great portion of the material of the
movement is unveiled, it’s off to the races in a comedic perpetuo
mobile—“constant motion”—to the end of the symphony, which, unlike its
beginning, is firm and decisively in the home key, bringing listeners back to
where they always wanted to be and finally resolving the pervasive tension of
the dominant seventh chord (which the already-mentioned mixolydian mode
contained, and was outlined by) to the indisputable and comfortable tonic of C
major. Even despite this return to conventionality in the finale, the floodgates
of change had already opened, and indeed, the European gentry certainly would
not be ready for anything this titan of the West would produce for them through
the rest of his career.
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