Ludwig van
Beethoven
By PITTS SANBORN
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NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1939 and 1951 by
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Editor’s Note
The late Pitts Sanborn wrote this booklet under the title Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies and stated in a short preface that it made “no claim to originality and no secret of its indebtedness to the masterly treatises on the same subject.” I have left Mr. Sanborn’s pages on the symphonies virtually intact and have only expanded the work a little by incorporating here and there matter about other major works of Beethoven’s, especially some of the concertos, overtures, piano and vocal works, besides certain of the greater specimens of his chamber music. Even if this procedure probably lends the booklet a patchy character, I have followed it in order to supply a rather fuller picture of the composer’s creative achievements. No more than my predecessor do I make the slightest claim to originality of matter or treatment, or deny my indebtedness to Thayer and Paul Bekker.
Herbert F. Peyser
Printed in the United States of America
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770, at Bonn, then one of the most important cities on the lower Rhine. Though Bonn was German and Beethoven’s mother and his father’s mother were both Germans, he was of Flemish descent through his father’s father, a native of the country that eventually became Belgium, whence the “van” in the name. Louis van Beethoven, a tenor singer, went to Bonn in his youth and promptly became a court musician to the resident archbishop-elector. His son Johann, Beethoven’s father, was also a singer in the Elector’s employ, but he was a worthless fellow, who was fortunate, however, in having as wife a woman of character. Realizing that his son Ludwig had been born with uncommon musical talent, he had the child begin to study violin and piano very early with the idea of putting him forward as a prodigy, as Mozart’s father had done. But the young Ludwig was less precocious than Mozart and rebelled strenuously against the enforced training. However, he did appear at a concert on March 26, 1778.
So strong was the boy’s musical gift that it triumphed over every obstacle, including his own childish reluctance, and the Elector thought it worth while to send him to Vienna, then the musical capital of Europe. He had now been composing for several years, and Haydn accepted him as a pupil in counterpoint, an arrangement that did not turn out altogether to Beethoven’s satisfaction. He studied with other teachers in Vienna and in March 1795, made his first public appearance in that city, playing his own piano concerto in B flat major. This date marks the beginning of a kind of recognition that could only spur the young composer on to the activity that in a nature so vigorous and energetic meant enthusiastic creation. Of course he wanted to write a symphony. Mozart, dead in 1791, had left a legacy of forty-nine symphonies. Haydn, the author of many more, was in full career at 63. They were the world’s foremost symphonists.
Symphony No. 1, in C Major, Op. 21
Beethoven’s First Symphony was brought out at a concert which he gave in Vienna on April 2, 1800. It was immediately successful and within a few months carried its composer’s fame all over Germany. In the musical city of Leipzig it was described as “intellectual, powerful, original, and difficult.” That was in 1802. Today it is no longer difficult for our accomplished orchestras, but, as in the case of other works that have come to seem simple through the passage of time and changes in fashions, it is no easy matter now for a conductor to catch and express the frank joyousness of its youthful speech.
The symphony is in the customary four sections or movements. The key is C major. Yet it does not begin in that key, but with a discord in F major which shocked some pedants at the time. The slow introduction of twelve measures leads to the first movement proper (“Allegro con brio”). Its pages have spirit, gaiety, elegance, for this symphony has well been termed a symphony of comedy, though here and there a cloud may for the moment obscure its sunny brightness. The eighteenth century was not over when Beethoven composed it, and he was still looking at music through the eyes of Haydn and Mozart, in spite of the fact that the student may readily discover Beethovenish characteristics that are not derived from either Haydn or Mozart and distinct intimations of the moods and manners of the nineteenth century to come. However, comedy itself is not all compact of sunshine and, as the German proverb has it, laughter and weeping dwell in the same bag.
This brisk Allegro is followed in the then-prevailing order by the slow movement (“Andante cantabile con moto,” in F major and consequently not too slow). It is mainly built up on a tricksy tune that no less an authority than Professor Tovey described as “kittenish.”
The attentive listener should observe in this movement the recurrent passage of dotted notes for drums on G and then on C, the drums being tuned not in the tonic, but in the dominant. Yet bold though this device might have seemed, it was not wholly original. Mozart had anticipated Beethoven in his “Linz” Symphony.
The third movement in name is the minuet usual in symphonies of the eighteenth century (“Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace,” in C major), but in reality Beethoven was already looking forward to the scherzo (Italian, joke) with which he was presently to replace the minuet. This movement, then, is much less the stately dance in triple rhythm than a scherzo of generous proportions, rich in modulations and glowing color. The scherzo, like the minuet, always includes a trio section. Listen in this trio to the delicious dialogue between wind instruments and strings and to the rousing crescendo that ends it just before the repetition of the minuet.
The Finale, in C major, opens with seven measures of Adagio devoted to the gradual release of a scale passage. So much accomplished, the music plunges into an “Allegro molto e vivace,” beginning with this sprightly theme which races along to the conclusion in a whirl of merriment and humorous sallies.
Beethoven as a young man.
From a painting by W. J. Mahler, 1808.
Beethoven’s birthplace in Bonn from the garden and from the street.
First Three Piano Concertos
Beethoven had settled permanently in Vienna in the autumn of 1792 and the body of his work originated, of course, in the Austrian capital. We cannot, however, dismiss the compositions preceding the First Symphony as wholly negligible. The creations of this period are to a large extent relatively small in scale. There is a quantity of piano music largely in the form of variations, a number of songs and several arias, odds and ends of chamber music, dances, marches, and such. Some of the variations for piano and strings are based on melodies of Handel, Mozart, and a number of lesser lights. During his Bonn days Beethoven had composed a score for a “knightly ballet” (Ritterballet), performed by members of the Bonn aristocracy and ascribed at first to Count Waldstein. It was Beethoven’s first ballet score and preceded by some years his far more pretentious Creatures of Prometheus, written in Vienna to a scenario by the noted dancer, Salvatore Vigano.
The vocal compositions of this early period are not, perhaps, of conspicuous quality. Beethoven’s best-known song and, indeed, his most famous (though not the best) is the setting of Matthisson’s Adelaide—more a cantate than what we have come to classify as a genuine Lied. Considerably later he was to write the cycle An die ferne Geliebte, which together with some of his settings of Goethe poems and the stark but majestic Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur, may pass as Beethoven’s most memorable achievements in the province of the solo song. To his Bonn days, however, belongs a genuine cantata, the one composed in 1790 on the death of the Emperor Joseph II. This work survives chiefly because one of its finest pages was later utilized in the last scene of Fidelio, into which it fits admirably.
Three years before the First Symphony Beethoven began the first orchestral score he decided to publish. This was the B-flat Piano Concerto, which though we know it as No. 2, opus 19, actually preceded the one in C major, opus 15. It was performed for the first time by the composer March 29, 1795, on the occasion of his first appearance “as virtuoso and composer” before the Viennese public. It had been announced that he would play “an entirely new concerto” on this occasion of the first two annual concerts given for the benefit of the widows of the TonkÜnstler Society. Thayer, following the lead of Nottebohm, felt certain that this “new” concerto was the one in B flat. Beethoven was tardy in completing it, and we are told that two days before the concert the Rondo was not yet on paper. In spite of illness he wrote it out at the eleventh hour, while four copyists sat in the next room and were handed the piece, sheet by sheet, as soon as the music was set down.
We know as good as nothing of the public reaction to the work. We do know, however, that the composer was far from satisfied with it and revised the score before playing it in Prague in 1798. At that, he confided to the publisher, Franz Hoffmeister, that he “did not consider it one of his best.” The first movement has a vigorous and arresting first theme, followed by a tranquil, songful one. Some of the cantabile phrases that follow have a rather Mozartean character. The Adagio begins with a devout, rather hymnlike melody, on which the piano subsequently embroiders. The Finale, a rondo with a playful recurrent theme suggestive of Haydn, contains a second lilting melody and another, partly syncopated, which, though in minor, does not lessen at all the high spirits of the movement.
Just as the composer considered the B-flat Concerto “not one of his best works,” so he also questioned the value of the subsequent C major Concerto, written in 1797 and not published (like the First Symphony) until 1801. Yet this concerto is a great advance over its predecessor; it contains a beautifully expressive Largo and a deliciously brisk and zestful “Allegro scherzando” Rondo, marked by jocose sforzandi on weak beats and various striking rhythmic displacements. Taken as a whole, there is far more of what we recognize as a true Beethoven quality in this misnamed First Concerto than there is in the so-called Second.
The Third Piano Concerto (C minor, opus 37), composed in 1800 but not played publicly till about three years later, is a great advance on its two predecessors from every standpoint. The proximity of the more “heroic” Beethoven is immediately evident. Indeed, it probably possessed more of the unmistakably heroic quality than any other concerto written before its time. The solo part is different and more striking in originality than anything in the concertos in B-flat and C major; and a symphonic breadth pervades the work, notably the opening movement. The second movement—a Largo in E—begins in the piano and is then sung by muted strings. There is a passage that, strangely enough, sounds like a prophecy of the melody of the tenor air Salut demeure in Gounod’s opera Faust and may easily have suggested it to the French composer. Before the close of the Largo there is a cadenza “con gran espressione.” The Rondo brings back the key of C minor and is, in a variety of ways, a most remarkable movement. Curiously enough, the coda appears to have been inspired by the closing page of Mozart’s C minor Concerto which, some time earlier, had so struck Beethoven that he remarked to another musician: “None of us will ever write anything like that!” And the composer was not to occupy himself further with piano concertos for several years till in 1806 he created his most deeply poetic (the Fourth, in G major, opus 56), and again till 1809, when he wrote his most spacious and lavish, the E-flat (“Emperor”), by which time he had behind him several of his monumental productions.
Symphony No. 2, in D Major, Opus 36
Beethoven composed the Second Symphony in very different circumstances from the first. The deafness that had first manifested itself several years previously and was in time to become complete had reached such a point that on the advice of his doctor he decided to spend the summer of 1802 in the village of Heiligenstadt, which, though near Vienna, was then deep in the country. It was a tragic summer for Beethoven, as he himself has testified in that infinitely pathetic document known as the “Heiligenstadt Will.” He would probably have taken his own life but for his determination to consecrate himself with new courage to his art. His life was further complicated by a love affair with the youthful Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. Whether or not this love affair was as serious as some have maintained, the Countess preferred Count Gallenberg to the turbulent composer and accordingly married him.
In such a setting Beethoven undertook his Second Symphony. This work, however, reflects his tragedy only here and there and in a richer romanticism than his music had previously expressed—a romanticism of the nineteenth century. As in the case of the First Symphony, the Second, in D major, has a slow introduction (“Adagio molto”), but this introduction is much longer and, though based in style on Haydn’s symphonic introductions, is instilled with the new romantic freedom and contains a surprising prediction of the Ninth Symphony in a descending octave passage.
The “Allegro con brio” that follows starts off with a buoyant theme which sets the pace for an energetic and generally cheerful movement. It is in the ensuing Larghetto in A major that we hear in full proclamation the individual voice of Beethoven as we have not heard it before. This has been aptly called one of the most luxurious slow movements in the world, and its richness in melodies has been set down as “reckless.” Here are two of them:
The next movement, again in D major, is this time called frankly a “Scherzo,” not a “Menuetto.” This concise Allegro is particularly noteworthy for the prophecy in its Trio of the Trio of the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony.
The Finale, “Allegro molto” in D, is a forthright, humorous rondo. In view of the tragedy of that summer, this symphony, at once romantic and exuberant, might perhaps best be looked upon as an escape. Brought out on April 5, 1803, at a concert of Beethoven’s works given by the composer at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, it was coolly received, being regarded by many listeners as extravagant or enigmatic.
Symphony No. 3, in E-flat Major (“Eroica”), Opus 55
Beethoven’s next symphony, though begun in the summer of 1803, was not completed till the following year. As long before as 1802 Beethoven had declared his dissatisfaction with his works up to that time: “From today I mean to take a new road.” This symphony boldly takes that road. The Second Symphony still belongs largely to the eighteenth century. The Third embodies the developments with which Beethoven revolutionized the symphony. In amplitude and opulence no previous symphonic movement had ever equalled or even approached the initial “Allegro con brio,” and it may be doubted whether any has subsequently surpassed it. Sensitive listeners hearing it for the first time may well have cried out with Miranda: “O brave new world!”
There ensues a Funeral March that is one of the most tremendous lamentations conceived in any art. The Scherzo is not only the first but one of Beethoven’s symphonic scherzos, it is also among the greatest. For the Finale Beethoven provides a theme and variations of astonishing diversity and splendor.
The first and dominating theme of the “Allegro con brio”
Beethoven very likely remembered from Mozart’s little Bastien und Bastienne overture, but he uses it here in the grand manner. The Funeral March begins with a striking phrase in C minor. A tender lyric passage in C major introduces an elegiac element into the sternness of the dirge. The Scherzo (“Allegro vivace” in E-flat major) is an enormously energetic movement and is interrupted by a Trio, prophetic in its turn of the Ninth Symphony and including a particularly brilliant and difficult passage for the horns.
The theme of the concluding variations (“Allegro molto” in E flat major) Beethoven had previously employed in his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus. This theme, simple as it appears, contains the germ of one of the most remarkable sets of variations ever put down on paper.
The Third Symphony is universally known today less by its number and its key than by the title “Eroica” (“Heroic”). Everybody is familiar with the story of the relation of this symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven, sympathetic toward the republican ideals of the French Revolution, originally hailed General Bonaparte as the Great Liberator, but when in May 1804 he accepted the imperial crown of France, Beethoven saw him in an entirely different light. Such was his rage that he was on the point of destroying this symphony, which he had intended to dedicate to Bonaparte as a tribute to his services to mankind. Fortunately he desisted, tore Bonaparte’s name from the inscription, and entitled the work “Eroica.” It should not be forgotten, though, that when seventeen years later he heard of the death of Napoleon at St. Helena, he remarked, “I have already composed the proper music for that catastrophe,” which was an allusion to the Funeral March.
The meaning of the symphony as a heroic work is clear enough to anyone who hears the first movement and the Funeral March. Perhaps only Anton Rubinstein has ever questioned the heroic quality of the first movement and nobody has or could doubt the heroism of the mighty threnody that follows. But to fit the brilliant Scherzo and the dazzling set of variations into the picture has occasioned any amount of controversy. To go at length into the various theories is impossible here, but one might point out that the Scherzo has been interpreted as a scene in the hero’s camp, as an excited crowd waiting for the hero’s return and his triumphant address in the Trio, and as a picture of funeral games at the grave of the hero, such as one finds in the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, this last theory being that of Berlioz. The variations of the Finale have been plausibly explained as the nations of the earth bringing each its tribute of flowers to deck the hero’s monument. The first performance of this transcendent symphony took place in Vienna on April 7, 1805.
Symphony No. 4, in B-flat Major, Opus 60
Three years elapsed between the completion of the “Eroica” Symphony and the emergence of the Fourth Symphony. The latter was brought out in Vienna at a special subscription concert organized for Beethoven’s benefit in the middle of the latter part of March 1807. Little is known about the origin and composition of this work and its relation to the other circumstances of Beethoven’s life. Apparently he had been busy with his C minor Symphony (the Fifth) when in 1805 he laid that aside to write a symphony in B flat. This act of his is in line with his general procedure with regard to his symphonies, a lighter work following one of deep import. Robert Schumann, a distinguished critic as well as a great composer, likened the Fourth Symphony as related to the “Eroica” and the Fifth to “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” This comparison, however, lays too much emphasis on youthful ingenuousness, for humor and the joy of living have their place here, and romance as well, with touches of passion and of mystery. One of its admirers has called it a “symphony of love.”
Mystery and romance are evoked in the elaborate introduction (Adagio), which this symphony like the Second possesses, but the mood turns to merriment when the “Allegro vivace” enters with this skipping tune:
The second movement (Adagio in E-flat major) is related in its luxuriance and melodic richness to the Larghetto of the Second Symphony, establishing another bond between the two works. A hint of the beauty of this movement may be gathered from the first theme:
The fervor that breathes through its measures has been attributed to Beethoven’s contemporaneous engagement to the Countess Therese von Brunswick, to whom many believe he addressed the famous “Immortal Beloved” letter. Berlioz, like Schumann eminent not only as composer but as critic, accounts for this Adagio in a still loftier vein: “The being who wrote such a marvel of inspiration as this movement was not a man. Such must be the song of the Archangel Michael as he contemplates the world’s uprising to the threshold of the empyrean.”
For the third movement Beethoven returns to the name “menuetto” (“Allegro vivace” in B-flat major; Trio, “un poco meno Allegro,” in B-flat major), though “scherzo” would do quite as well. This minuet is planned on a particularly large scale and is further remarkable for the fact that, as in the Scherzo of the Seventh Symphony, the Trio is played twice and the Minuet proper repeated each time. The attentive listener should also heed the striking change of key to B-flat minor at the fifth bar. The exuberant Finale (“Allegro ma non troppo” in B-flat major) is perpetual motion in music, flashing and glittering with tunefulness and fun.
Sonatas
“Beethoven’s work,” says Paul Bekker, “is based on the pianoforte; therein lie its roots and there it first bore perfect fruit.” Yet it is a curious paradox that he abandoned this phase of composition relatively early, producing the majority of his works for the keyboard before he was forty. A number of reasons might be cited for this—his growing deafness, the consequent impossibility of his public appearances as performing virtuoso, the circumstance that his intellect outgrew the expressive capacity of the piano, and the immense broadening and deepening of his creative faculties which demanded subtler and more ramified channels of expression. “The pianoforte is and always will be a disappointing instrument,” he said at one stage of his career. And he was distressed that his compositions for the piano exclusively always produced on him the most regrettable impression. “Oh! Beethoven, what an ass you were!” he exclaimed on one occasion when someone played him his own Variations in C minor.
Nevertheless, the tremendous series of thirty-two sonatas, which began, roughly speaking, in 1795 and continued more or less intermittently till 1822, are among his most moving, gracious, original, adventurous, and completely extraordinary achievements. They range all the way from the so-called “PathÉtique,” “Pastoral,” and “Moonlight” to the “Waldstein,” the “Appassionata,” and the programmatic “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour,” to the mighty series beginning in 1816 with the A major, opus 101, and culminating in the gigantic B flat, opus 106 (universally known as “for the Hammerklavier”), the extraordinarily imaginative ones in E major and A flat, opera 109 and 110, and the transcendent, Promethean C minor, opus 111. Within the cosmic limits of this stupendous succession there stretches a whole world of emotional experience and an incalculable diversity of invention. And we may as well mention here (though it was not composed till 1823) that prodigious set of Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by the publisher Diabelli, which has not its like in the whole range of Beethoven’s output. Looking back over the immense panorama of the composer’s piano works (including variations, bagatelles, and solo sonatas) stretching, let us say, from the awesome summits of the “Hammerklavier,” the C minor, and the “Diabelli” Variations backward to the comparative simplicities of the sonatas Opera 2, 22, 26, and 27 leaves one with the dizzy impression of surveying a whole Alpine panorama.
Symphony No. 5, in C Minor, Opus 67
As we have seen, Beethoven interrupted work on a symphony in C minor to write his Fourth Symphony. That done, he returned to the C minor Symphony, finishing it late in 1807 or early in 1808. Both this Fifth Symphony and its successor, the Sixth, were brought out in Vienna at the same concert on December 22, 1808. The Fifth Symphony has turned out to be the most unreservedly admired, the most generally beloved, and the most frequently performed of all Beethoven’s nine, in fact, of all symphonies. It is the drama in tone of man’s victorious struggle with destiny and it was largely composed at Heiligenstadt, Beethoven’s own spiritual battlefield. In 1801 Beethoven had made himself this promise: “I will take Fate by the throat; it shall not wholly overcome me.” The C minor Symphony opens with an intensely dramatic figure of four notes which Beethoven explains as “Fate knocking at the door”:
This rhythmic group not only dominates the concise first movement, but appears in every succeeding movement. The second movement (“Andante con moto” in A-flat major) consists of a graceful, flowing set of variations on a brave and lovely theme:
The uncanny Scherzo (Allegro in C minor), introduced merely by the common chord of C minor in arpeggio, is the musical embodiment of the terror that walketh by night. Berlioz said of the opening, “It is as fascinating as the gaze of a mesmerizer.” An extraordinary bridge passage, a supreme example of musical suspense, leads from the nightmare of the Scherzo finally in a breathtaking crescendo to the triumphant proclamation of the C major Finale. The effect produced by this symphony on a contemporary composer is indicated in the frenetic outburst of the veteran composer Lesueur to the youthful Berlioz: “Ouf! Let me get out; I must have air. It is unbelievable! Marvellous! It has so upset and bewildered me that when I wanted to put on my hat, I could not find my head!”
Symphony No. 6, in F Major, “Pastoral”, Opus 68
In the three symphonies that successively precede the Sixth, Beethoven, as we have seen, is concerned with man as lover or as hero, for the spiritual conflict of the Fifth Symphony is no less heroic than are the exploits and lamentations of the Third. The Sixth Symphony, however, though quite as personal, treats of man from a totally different angle. This symphony, which the composer himself called “Pastoral,” is Beethoven’s monument to Nature. It expresses his personal devotion to the country and to what life in the country meant to him. He spent a great deal of time in the lovely Viennese countryside, especially at Heiligenstadt, but here the country is no battlefield as it had been in the summer of 1802, the summer of the “Heiligenstadt Will”; it is rather the cheerful, sunlit province of Nature’s healing power.
Copious and quaint is the verbal testimony to Beethoven’s pleasure in Nature. A lodging had once been bespoken for him at the coppersmith’s at Baden (near Vienna). When he saw there were no trees around the house, he exclaimed, “This house won’t do for me. I love a tree more than a man.” According to the Countess Therese von Brunswick, his one-time betrothed, “he loved to be alone with Nature, to make her his only confidante. When his brain was seething with confused ideas, Nature at all times comforted him. Often when his friends visited him in the country in summer, he would rush away from them.” Charles Neate, one of the founders of the London Philharmonic Society, who was on intimate terms with Beethoven in Vienna in 1815, assures us that he had “never met anyone who so delighted in Nature, or so thoroughly enjoyed flowers or clouds or other natural objects. Nature was almost meat and drink to him; he seemed positively to exist upon it.” Michael Krenn, Beethoven’s body-servant during the last summer of his life when he was staying at his brother’s house at Gneixendorf, relates that Beethoven spent most of his time in the open air from six in the morning till ten at night, ranging over the fields, often hatless, shouting (he had long been completely deaf), gesticulating, and in general quite beside himself from the torrent of ideas in his mind.
The character of the Sixth Symphony Beethoven immediately makes plain on the dedicatory page. “Pastoral Symphony,” he calls it, “or a recollection of country life. More an expression of feeling than a painting.” The word “more” is important, for actually the symphony is in part a painting in tone, even if not for the greater part. Instead of keeping to the traditional four movements, this symphony rejoices in five, each carrying an identifying title. The first, “Allegro ma non troppo” in F major, explains itself thus: “The cheerful impressions excited on arriving in the country.” It begins immediately with this theme:
which really holds the germ of the entire movement and, as Beethoven develops it, becomes as the whole countryside in Maytime bloom.
The second movement, “Andante molto moto” in B-flat major, is more definite in its treatment of Nature. Beethoven calls it “Scene by the brookside,” and from the very first note you hear the purling of the water in the lower strings.
Against this murmurous background lovely melodies bud and flower and the whole orchestra seems filled with the tiny, numberless noises of summer. Near the end occurs a specific imitation of the call of birds, nightingale, cuckoo, and quail. Beethoven himself said that he meant these measures as a joke, and others have termed them parody or caricature. But, joke or parody, the unconquerable artist in Beethoven has made them of one substance with the heavenly summer light and shade that pervade this interlude of leisure by the brook.
Though not entitled Scherzo, the third movement, Allegro in F major, is one in fact. Here the human beings that people this countryside possess the picture. Beethoven labels the movement “Jolly gathering of country folk.” Its downright gayety brings in its train an amusing takeoff on a village band, especially the befuddled bassoon. The middle part of the movement, “In tempo d’allegro,” corresponding to the usual trio, has been construed by some as a quarrel among the dancers, by others as just a rude episode in the dance. The jolly character of the movement is evident in these consecutive tunes, in the contrasting keys of F and D, that start it off:
The last three movements of the symphony are continuous. A dominant seventh of F ends the “Jolly Gathering,” but, instead of its resolving, an ominous drum roll on D flat immediately ushers in the fourth movement, “Thunderstorm; Tempest” (Allegro in D minor), the storm without which no country scene is perfect. In spite of the formidable title, this is by no means a devastating outburst, though quite sufficient to postpone festivities. Memorable is the feeling of tension in the opening measures, the distant grumbling of the thunder, the first staccato raindrops. The disappearing tempest is followed directly by the last movement: “Shepherd’s Song; joyous and thankful feelings after the storm.” Happiness settles on the landscape once more, as this light-hearted tune abundantly proves:
Some of the melodies in this symphony are said to be derived from Carinthian or Styrian folk songs. As we have observed, the work was originally brought out at the same concert in Vienna (December 22, 1808) with the Fifth Symphony. Since it had an earlier place on the program, it was known for a while as the Fifth and the Fifth as the Sixth, but the mistake was soon rectified.
Fidelio and the “Leonore” Overtures
The period of Beethoven’s Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies covers, roughly speaking, a number of other compositions, some of them relatively trifling, others of greater moment, still others of altogether sovereign importance. Among the first type we can mention the Romances in G and F for violin and orchestra, composed in 1802; the oratorio “Christ on the Mount of Olives,” from the same year; and the Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello, which dates from 1805. The two Romances are fluent, lyrical movements, but without special depth or originality. The “Mount of Olives,” a sort of dramatic cantata which at first enjoyed an almost incredible popularity, for which it has paid with speedy and wholesale neglect, is a score of extremely uneven value, which handles a religious subject in a superficial, operatic fashion scarcely in keeping. Here and there it is possible to find in it interesting details but the chances for a revival of this work (which Beethoven’s intelligent contemporary, Rochlitz, criticized in spots as “comic”) are remote. The Triple Concerto, though not a masterwork of the first order, has been somewhat too harshly dismissed by many and therefore seldom visits our concert halls.
Otherwise the principal productions of these years include a quantity of the brightest jewels in Beethoven’s crown. Leaving aside the chamber music, which we prefer to consider by itself, they comprise the opera Fidelio and the three “Leonore” Overtures written in connection with it; the Violin Concerto (which the composer also arranged as a sort of piano concerto); and the “Coriolanus” Overture.
Fidelio, which Beethoven originally called Leonore, was begun in 1804. A child of sorrow to its composer, it was not to achieve the form in which we now know it till 1814. In the odd century and a half of its existence it has been attacked for countless reasons in spite of which it lives on with an incredible tenacity and obstinately refuses to die. It has been reproached for being poor theater, undramatic, unvocal, patchy, and countless other things. The book, originally adapted from Leonore, ou l’amour conjugale, by the Frenchman, Bouilly, and translated into German by Joseph Sonnleithner, was cast into its definitive form by Friedrich Treitschke. For a variety of reasons the work failed when it was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in November 1805. A bold attempt at revision the following season did not manage to keep it afloat and it was not till eight years later that the composer, with the clever dramatic surgery of Treitschke, made a final attempt to salvage it. Just how drastic were the alterations that the composer and librettist made in the piece can best be appreciated by those who have had the opportunity to examine the reconstruction of the original version which Erich Prieger published in 1905 on the occasion of the centenary of the work. From this it can be seen that not only have entirely new musical numbers supplanted the old but the opera (or rather Singspiel) has been reduced from its original three acts to two and that the dramaturgy betrays a vastly more experienced hand. The musical changes and condensations of Beethoven have, in their way, been no less thorough.
Far from being bad theater or unoperatic as sometimes charged, Fidelio is basically one of the most dramatic and profoundly moving masterpieces the lyric theater can show. The 1805 version lacked a number of its most striking musical features. The original, for example, shows no trace of the great outburst, Abscheulicher, which introduces Leonore’s tremendous scena in the first act; and in the second, Florestan’s dungeon air lacks its present “Und spÜr ich nicht holde, sanft sÄuselnde Duft,” which took the place of the long-winded bravura phrases the composer originally gave the presumably starving prisoner to sing. Even the present touching close of the dungeon episode was originally quite different.
It has often been claimed that the previous “failure” of the work so discouraged the composer that his operatic achievements ended then and there. As a matter of fact, Beethoven to the end of his days never gave up his search for another libretto. That he never found it was due to the very special slant of his requirements. As for the “unvocal” character of his writing for voices, it is necessary to remember that, for all the opera’s undeniable exactions, generations of great dramatic singers have repeatedly triumphed in the chief roles of Fidelio.
Beethoven composed four overtures to his opera—the three so-called “Leonore” Overtures in C and the one in E major, known as the “Fidelio” Overture. The last-named was written in 1814 for Treitschke’s new version of the piece. It is the slightest of them all and is the one that invariably prefaces performances of the opera. For years controversies have raged as to the order in which the “Leonore” Overtures were written and for what reason one supplanted the other. The Second Leonore was the first used to preface the drama at its 1805 hearing; the Third introduced the 1806 revision. Theories have been bandied about for generations to account for the First Overture, which was issued as Opus 138 only some years after the composer’s death. The researches of Dr. Joseph Braunstein in his exhaustive study Beethovens Leonore-OuvertÜren, eine historischstilkritische Untersuchung have settled the problem for us. The overtures were composed in the order of their numbering. “Leonore” No. 1 was found too light for its purpose and, after a private try-out, was discarded before being publicly performed. “Leonore” No. 2, less polished and formally perfect than the more structural and popular No. 3, ranks if anything as more dramatic, modern, and powerful, even if it does lack the brilliantly jubilant coda that is the particular glory of No. 3. Neither of these two, however, is a wholly well-conceived introduction to Fidelio, for the reason that both overpower the opera as a whole and might almost be said to render the drama superfluous. Actually, a Fidelio representation profits by the omission of all the “Leonore” Overtures, though practically every audience these days expects the “Leonore” No. 3 quite as a matter of course and ordinarily gets it as a sort of interlude between the dungeon and the concluding scenes.
A word as to the “Fidelio” Overture of 1814, which has none of the features of the “Leonore” tone poems, either thematically or otherwise. It is more in the character of a Singspiel overture and has as good as no dramatic connection with the opera itself—no reference to Florestan’s dungeon song nor to the off-stage fanfare of the rescue scene; yet it leads quite properly into the light moods of the opening episodes of the chattering Marzelline and Jacquino in the first scene and does not, like the Second and Third “Leonore,” completely overweight the remainder of the score. At that, it is structurally and otherwise fully worthy of its composer and is a more logical adjunct to Fidelio than any one of the “Leonore” Overtures. Actually, it is a good deal more interesting in its own right than the average person imagines and merits far closer study than it ordinarily receives.
The “Coriolanus” Overture virtually coincides, in point of time, with the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies. One of its creator’s most striking, yet economically fashioned works, it is in no way related to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as has frequently been imagined, but was derived from a Coriolanus tragedy by Heinrich von Collin. Yet many (including Richard Wagner) have interpreted it in terms of Shakespeare’s drama, the basic emotional pattern of which it can suggest.
Symphony No. 7, in A Major, Opus 92
After the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Beethoven let several years pass without giving the world another, though he continued to compose diligently in spite of uncertain health and ever-increasing deafness. At length, in 1812, he finished two symphonies, which were probably played in private for the first time at the house of the Archduke Rudolph in Vienna on April 20, 1813. He was unable, however, to obtain a public performance for either of them till the Seventh Symphony was given in the great hall of the University of Vienna on December 8 of the same year.
Beethoven himself spoke of this work as his “most excellent” symphony, an opinion that not a few have echoed. He composed it in all the exuberance of his creative maturity, and each of its four movements brims over with the fiery essence of his inspiration. The listener is overpowered by the very lavishness of its beauty. In this symphony you feel Beethoven’s genius as something inexhaustible, glorying in its own titanic power, as of a high god ignoring lesser breeds, proud in the knowledge of invincible strength, unfettered, carefree, save where the Allegretto acknowledges a divine melancholy.
Coming after the “Pastoral” with its avowed meaning, does this symphony “mean” anything in the sense in which that work and the “Eroica” do? Beethoven has not helped us with the clue of a title. However, there are students of the Seventh to whom it has yielded a quite definite meaning. Two of the most eminent are Richard Wagner and the French composer Vincent d’Indy. To Wagner the Seventh Symphony is the “apotheosis of the dance.” To d’Indy it is a second “Pastoral” Symphony, full of bird-calls and other country sounds. Of course Wagner’s definition recognizes the great part played in it by rhythm.
The Seventh Symphony begins in its title key of A major with a long introduction (“Poco sostenuto”), which almost has the importance of a separate movement. The second theme of this introduction—a capricious, tripping melody, first given out by a solo oboe—is not only one of the most captivating that Beethoven ever invented, but might very well be taken for an invitation to the dance or, perhaps equally well, for the caroling of a bird:
