Part 3
Beethoven himself called the Eighth his “little symphony in F” in contrast to the “great” symphony in A (Seventh). Yet the indifference of the audience at the Redoutensaal annoyed him and he testily remarked that the Eighth was “much better” than the Seventh, perhaps saying more than he really meant. There have been attempts to interpret this symphony, to provide it with a specific program. One such would make of it a “military trilogy” and d’Indy, still under the spell of the “Pastoral,” detects in it the impression made by Nature on Beethoven’s soul. He also hears a peasant band burlesqued in the Trio of the Menuetto, and the Hungarian theme employed in the Finale suggests to him the presence of gypsy musicians amid the festivities.
Be all that as it may, this is the symphony of laughter—not the laughter of childlike glee or of a reckless or despairing levity. Rather it is the “vast and inextinguishable laughter” that Shelley speaks of in _Prometheus Unbound_. It is the laughter of a man who has lived and suffered and, scaling the heights, has achieved the summit. So he has fashioned his own humor and dares survey the very stars in their appointed courses as integrals of a cosmic comedy. Only here and there does a note of rebellion momentarily obtrude itself, and here and there, in brief lyrical repose, we have, remembering Sir Thomas Browne, an intimation of Divinity more than the ear discovers.
The first movement (“Allegro vivace e con brio” in F major) begins at once with a sprightly tune which tells right away the nature of the work. The second subject of the rollicking movement is one of Beethoven’s most delicious inspirations:
The second movement (“Allegretto scherzando” in B-flat major) is unique in symphonic literature. The persistent staccato ticking that runs through it has lent credibility to the story that the movement is based on a canon or round, “Ta, ta, ta, lieber Maelzel,” sung as a tribute to Maelzel—the inventor of that invaluable mechanical timebeater, the metronome—at a dinner given for Beethoven before he left Vienna for the country in July 1812. Thayer, who investigated the story carefully, says: “That Maelzel’s ‘ta, ta, ta’ suggested the Allegretto to Beethoven, and that at a parting meal the canon on this theme was sung, are doubtless true; but it is by no means sure that the canon preceded the symphony.” There is a story that Beethoven himself set the date of the dinner late in December 1817. In any event, the irrepressible sixteenth notes tick away metronomically, and here is the airy theme that leads them on:
Berlioz says of this movement: “It is one of those productions for which neither model nor pendant can be found. This sort of thing falls entire from heaven into the composer’s brain. He writes it at a single sitting, and we are amazed at hearing it.” This would be all very well but for the fact that Beethoven’s sketches show how mightily he labored over the wholly spontaneous-seeming movement. When that eminent pessimist, the philosopher Schopenhauer, heard it, he declared it could make one forget that the world is filled with nothing but misery!
Instead of a scherzo Beethoven proceeds with a stately Minuet (“Tempo di Menuetto” in F major), which is not the symphonic minuet of the First and the Fourth symphonies, but a minuet in the noble manner of the eighteenth-century dance and perhaps not untinged with irony. Here is its courtly opening melody:
In the Finale (“Allegro vivace” in F major) the joy is truly unconfined and the music roars and billows with the impact of Olympian laughter.
Mass in C Major and the Missa Solemnis
Aside from the above-mentioned oratorio _Christ on the Mount of Olives_, Beethoven’s major religious compositions consist of the Mass in C major, written in 1807, and the stupendous one in D—the overpowering _Missa Solemnis_—begun in 1817 but not completed till 1825. The C major Mass must not be thought of as an early creation or a thing in the manner of the _Mount of Olives_. Actually, it is a work of the composer’s maturity, virtually contemporaneous with the great “Leonore” Overture and the Fifth Symphony. It was written at the instance of one of the Esterhazy princes who, when he heard the mass, infuriated Beethoven by asking: “Well, my dear Beethoven, what is it you have gone and done now?” Strangely enough, the C major Mass for all its unquestionable beauties is treated in rather stepchildly fashion. No greater mistake could be made than to compare it with the _Missa Solemnis_ of a much later date and of basically different premises. “It expresses in the region of sacred music the joyful and victorious mood of the overture and the Symphony,” says Paul Bekker. “An atmosphere of simple piety pervades the Mass; no inner disunion, no brooding doubt, no unsatisfied thirst for knowledge finds expression here. The Mass in C is a confession of the composer’s faith and is at the same time liturgically practicable; it expresses a great artist’s confident belief, at a time when he was one in thought and feeling with the ‘spiritual powers that be’ of his period.”
The great Mass in D is a totally different proposition. It was the slow and gradual outgrowth of one of the periods of Beethoven’s life where soul-shaking problems crowded ceaselessly upon him. He began to work upon it with the idea of producing it at the enthronement of his friend and pupil, the Archduke Rudolph, as Archbishop of Olmütz. But as it slowly expanded the composer forgot more and more why he had originally conceived it. It became in the grandest and deepest sense an expression of its creator’s profoundest philosophies. Barring three movements of the work, none of the _Missa Solemnis_ was ever performed during the composer’s lifetime. And, singularly enough, those three movements were presented at the concert on May 7, 1824, at which the Ninth Symphony was heard for the first time. They had one other performance before Beethoven died—in St. Petersburg at the instigation of the Prince Galitzin.
The Mass in D, stupendous creation that it is, is far from a practical church work. It lacks all pretense of ritualistic use. For one thing, its vast proportions, the length of the individual sections, and the duration of the score as a whole would completely unfit it for ecclesiastical ceremony. The Mass is “unchurchly” in the highest degree. According to Bekker, Beethoven “breaks through the walls which divide the church from the world; his church extends to the limits of his vision; his altar is the heart of the universe, and he will suffer no dogmatic limitations.” Above the Kyrie the composer inscribed the words: “From the heart—may it go to the heart.” He intended the work “for the democratic concert hall rather than for polite social circles.”
The peak of the _Missa Solemnis_ is undoubtedly the great fugue “Et vitam venturi” of the Credo. And here, incidentally, the demands on the singing voices are perhaps more cruel than anywhere in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony or in the most arduous pages of _Fidelio_. Only now and then is there a wholly satisfying performance of the Mass in D. Be this as it may, there are two pages so extraordinary that no listener can ever fail to be stirred to the depths by them. One is the “Benedictus,” with its transfigured violin solo and a prefatory orchestral movement so spiritualized that it takes rank by the side of the loftiest slow movements the composer ever wrote; the other is the “Agnus Dei” and its “Prayer for inner and outer peace,” in which Beethoven causes the drums and trumpet calls of war to alternate with agonized supplications for peace.
All the same, despite the sublimities of the work and the vaunted “morality” of the composer, Beethoven did not hesitate to offer the score to at least three different publishing houses at practically the same time! Small wonder that, before long, a London concert agent was writing: “For heavens’ sake, don’t have any dealings with Beethoven!” If the master was not above attempting a little business skulduggery now and then he did not go about it cleverly!
Symphony No. 9, in D Minor, with Final Chorus on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” Opus 125
More than ten years passed after the initial performance of the Eighth Symphony before Beethoven brought out its successor, his ninth and last, on May 7, 1824. The earlier part of this period was comparatively unproductive. Beethoven was profoundly disturbed by quarrels over his guardianship of his nephew Karl, which eventually were taken to court. His health and spirits suffered and, meantime, his deafness became complete. Nevertheless his creative impulse found expression in two works of the grandest dimensions, the Mass in D and the Ninth Symphony. Sketches for the symphony were made as early as 1815—perhaps even earlier—and he went to work on it in earnest in 1817.
The première took place at the Kaerthnerthor Theater, Vienna, on May 7, 1824. The problems of performance were complicated by the composer’s using in the final movement a chorus and a quartet of soloists. Michael Umlauf conducted and the solo singers were Henriette Sontag (one of the most famous sopranos of her day), Karolina Unger, Anton Haitzinger, and J. Seipelt. The difficulty of Beethoven’s voice parts gave trouble at rehearsals. Mmes. Sontag and Unger begged him to alter their music, but in vain. Mme. Unger declared in his presence that he was a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” Still, at the first performance it was she who led the composer from where he had been sitting in the midst of the orchestra to the edge of the stage to see the excited waving of the audience and to bow.
These solo parts have lost none of their difficulty for singers, and from the sopranos of the chorus Beethoven well-nigh demands the superhuman. With a view to helping matters some conductors have transposed the Finale down a whole tone, thus dimming its brilliance and upsetting Beethoven’s scheme of keys. Wagner believed that Beethoven by having words and singers in the Finale had closed the cycle of purely orchestral music. Others, however, regard the singers as a mistake and maintain that Beethoven recognized his error. So devout and searching a student of Beethoven as Professor Tovey, while dismissing as absurd the theory of Beethoven’s discontent with instrumental music, holds that every part of the Ninth Symphony becomes clearer when we assume that the choral Finale is right, and that hardly a point in the work but becomes difficult and obscure when we assume that the choral Finale is wrong. Though he admits that Beethoven, long after the production of the symphony, told some friends that the choral inclusion was a mistake and that perhaps some day he might write an instrumental Finale, he sets this down to a fit of depression. At any rate, the Finale stands as written and there is no choice but to grapple with its problems.
For three movements the symphony is of course, purely instrumental. Of the first movement (“Allegro, ma non troppo, un poco maestoso,” in D minor) Ricciotto Canudo has written: “In the beginning was space; and all possibilities were in space; and life was space.” It begins pianissimo in empty fifths. A descending figure of two notes, from the heights to the depths, is reiterated while a tremendous crescendo leads to the theme that dominates the movement, given out fortissimo in unison and octaves:
The entire movement, which is well stocked with other themes, has the majesty and impetus of a titanic tragedy, and its propulsive drama ends with a defiant proclamation of the chief theme.
Now Beethoven reverses his usual procedure by postponing the slow movement and introducing a “Molto vivace” (in F minor), which has been called at once the greatest and the longest of his scherzos. A phrase of three notes, repeated on each interval of the chord of D minor, begins it, followed immediately by this fugal subject:
The enormous vitality and rhythmic drive of the Scherzo have deafened some hearers to the bitter strain in the jest. Joy unalloyed has not yet burst upon the scene.
And meanwhile Beethoven gives us the slow movement, a combination of an “Adagio molto e cantabile” (in B-flat major) and an “Andante moderato” (in D major), which as a whole has been described conveniently and with reasonable accuracy as a set of variations on two alternating themes:
Language has been ransacked for words to express the beauty and elevation of this Adagio-Andante. Its seraphic song is dying away when the initial D minor of the Finale, presto and fortissimo, roughly smites our ears.
A series of orchestral sections, in contrast and conflict, occupy the battleground of the earlier pages before the baritone soloist, first using words by Beethoven himself, introduces the human voices and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Two of the themes brought in here the listener should keep carefully in mind: the first is employed later by the baritone in demanding sounds of gladness, and the second is the so-called theme of joy:
Now chorus and soloists join valiantly in the good fight for “mirth and rapture blended” till the symphony ends in the victorious D major paeans, vocal and at the very last instrumental, of universal rejoicing. The burden of Schiller’s praise of Joy is held in these two lines:
“All mankind are brothers plighted Where thy gentle wings abide.”
And universal brotherhood is thus voiced by the tenors and the basses in unison.
Chamber Music
If Beethoven’s best-known and most widely performed works are the nine symphonies, his chamber music represents the most far-reaching, diversified, profound, original, spiritualized, and at the same time the most problematic manifestations of his genius. It is through his quartets, when all’s said, that his influence has been most felt. In these dwell the germs of more or less everything out of which subsequent music has, in one way or another, developed. If Beethoven may be called a “musician of the future” it is by reason of his sixteen string quartets more than by anything else. More than all else he composed they continue, in great measure, to be in advance not only of the master’s own time but even of our own.
It may be said that his chamber music spanned his life. The earliest specimens of it date from his Bonn days, from around his fifteenth year. From then on they continued (intermittently, it is true) almost up to the time of his death—indeed, the last composition he completed was a new finale for the B-flat Quartet, opus 130, to replace the original one, the Great Fugue, now opus 133, which early audiences could not grasp and which, to this very day, is a stumbling block for most hearers although one of the most extraordinary and transcendent pages Beethoven ever produced. And though at his demise he left a quantity of sketches (including studies for a tenth symphony) there is every reason to assume that an even more copious quantity of chamber music might have come from his pen had he lived five or ten years longer.
The mass of such chamber music as he did bequeath us includes sonatas for piano and violin as well as for piano and cello; a Quintet in C major, opus 29, for two violins, two violas, and cello, dating from 1801; a quintet fugue in D, written in 1817 but published as opus 137; a number of trios for a variety of instrumental combinations, several duets and serenades, and other miscellany for more or less intimate performance. Lastly, the famous Septet in E flat, for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double-bass, opus 20. This septet was composed about 1800 and was at one time so immeasurably popular that Beethoven himself wearied of it. Despite the vogue it long enjoyed, it is far from one of its creator’s most inspired flights.
The series of trios for piano and strings constitute something of a counterpart to the great string quartets. Opus 1 consists of three such trios, and the composer’s friend Ries wrote that “when the three were first heard by the musical world at one of Prince Lichnowsky’s soirées nearly all the foremost artists and amateurs of Vienna were invited, among them Haydn, whose opinion was awaited with intense interest.” The trios caused a sensation. Haydn, who was enthusiastic about them on the whole, had reservations to make about the third, in C minor, and advised the composer not to publish it. Beethoven took this advice in bad part, the more so because he regarded this trio as the best, and imagined that his famous contemporary was actuated by envy. The truth of the matter was that Haydn, struck by the bold originality of the score, was honestly afraid that the public might not understand it. But it is precisely this quality that has lifted the C minor Trio far above the other two of opus 1.
The other trios for piano and strings are the pair in D major and E-flat, opus 70, and the supremely great one in B flat, opus 97, called the “Archduke” Trio because it was dedicated to the composer’s friend and pupil, the Archduke Rudolph. The Opus 70 creations are remarkable for the somewhat restless, indeed forbidding, quality that fills some of their pages. The first has been named the “Ghost” Trio on account of an eerie figure that pervades the slow movement and lends it a strangely weird and hollow sound. The “Archduke” Trio has a spaciousness and elevation, particularly in its Largo, which is a series of five variations on a theme in the character of a hymn. Wisely enough, Beethoven placed the Scherzo before the profound slow movement, as he was again to do in the “Hammerklavier” Sonata and the Ninth Symphony. But this scherzo utilizes in its middle part a curious, winding chromatic figure which ranks with the master’s most striking ideas at this stage of his progress.
Between 1799 and 1802 Beethoven wrote eight of his ten sonatas for violin and piano. The most famous of these eight are the fifth—the so-called “Spring” Sonata in F, opus 24, which opens with a theme of lovely grace and has an adorable serenity throughout its four movements—and the set in A major, C minor, and G major, opus 30, which was published with a dedication to Czar Alexander I of Russia. The C minor Sonata reveals a heroic quality which lends it something of the spirit of the “Eroica” Symphony, and the closing Presto of the finale has about it an element of dramatic grandeur. However, none of these sonatas quite reaches the level of the “Kreutzer” or the much later Sonata in G major, opus 96. The A major, opus 47, derived its name from the fact that it was dedicated to Rudolph Kreutzer. It was first played by a mulatto violinist named Bridgetower, while the composer performed the piano part. Despite the haste with which the work was composed (Czerny spoke of “four days”), the sonata, “written in a very concertante style,” has remained probably the best-known and most widely popular of all Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano. The music has an expansiveness and plenitude that surpass any other work Beethoven designed for this instrumental combination. The finale, a whirlwind Presto originally conceived for the first sonata of the opus 30 set, influenced Schubert when he composed the last movement of his D minor Quartet. Undoubtedly it is the most original, not to say the most exciting, part of the work—more so, indeed, than the Andante, with its series of variations so arranged that each artist is given his adroitly balanced share.
The G major Sonata, composed in 1812 and first performed by the French violinist Pierre Rode and the Archduke Rudolph, is unquestionably the most intellectual and the subtlest of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. In any case it has some of the unmistakable traits of the master’s later style about it.
The sonatas for cello and piano, in F major and G minor, were composed as early as 1796 and performed in Berlin before the King of Prussia by Beethoven and the Court cellist, Duport. But the memorable cello sonatas of Beethoven’s are the one in A major, opus 69, one of his most lavish and magnificent works; and the C major and D major, opus 102. The first named, like the “Kreutzer” Sonata or the “Appassionata” of the piano series, is a creation that needs no defense and no far-fetched explanations. On the other hand, the opus 102 pair, despite their indisputable profundities, are among Beethoven’s more unapproachable and recondite works. Indeed, they have about them a certain hard-shelled quality which scarcely lends them an especially intimate or endearing effect.
String Quartets
The great series of string quartets begins with the six of opus 18, published in 1801, and concludes, officially speaking, with the masterpiece in F major, opus 135, completed only in 1826, but not printed till something like half a year after his death. The half-dozen works constituting the earlier opus had been ripening in the form of sketches and experiments of one sort or another for several years. They were finally issued in two numbers, each consisting of three scores. It is not possible to determine precisely the order in which they were written, but that fact is unimportant because the lot do not exhibit any definite line of development. It seems that one version of the first quartet, in F, was completed in 1799. Beethoven gave it to his friend, the young ecclesiastical student Carl Amenda, but asked him to show it to nobody because “I have altered it considerably, having just learned to compose quartets aright.” Bekker finds that the revision “tends to a freer, more soloistic treatment of the accompanying parts, a clearer individualization of the cello part and a greater tonal delicacy in the ensemble effects.... The main idea of the composition, however, remained unchanged. This is no disadvantage, for the fresh naiveté of the content and the unassuming clarity of structure are great charms, and more would have been lost than gained by overmeticulous revision. As the work stands it is gratifying to the performer and offers pleasant, not over difficult problems to the listener.”
The finest part of the work is undoubtedly the second movement, an “Adagio affetuoso ed appassionato.” It is the richest in texture and certainly the most poetic and emotional of the four. When the composer played it to Amenda he is said to have inquired what the music suggested to him. “It suggests a lover’s parting,” replied Amenda; whereupon Beethoven replied, “Well, the tomb scene from _Romeo and Juliet_ was in my mind.” And Bekker insists that this Adagio is “a most moving song of sorrow such as only Beethoven could accomplish when he turned to the grave D minor key.”
The second quartet, in G major, has been christened in some German countries the “Compliment Quartet.” It is graceful and rather courtly but it reaches none of the depths of the more moving pages of the preceding work, The Finale, however, is an instance of that “unbuttoned humor” that Beethoven was to exhibit on later occasions and of which he gave us supreme instances in the last movement of the Seventh Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, and moments in the last quartets, the “Diabelli Variations,” and several of the final piano sonatas. Opus 18, No. 3, in D, is likewise marked by a quality of gaiety, though hardly of the “unbuttoned” kind.