Summermusic 2014: String Trios, Part Two - Beethoven & Schubert

 (This is a continuation of an introduction to the first program of for this year's Summermusic. You can read Part One here.)

As I mentioned in my introductory post (which you can read here), Beethoven had planned on going to Vienna, leaving his provincial hometown of Bonn behind, to study with Mozart. He had been to Vienna briefly, may have met Mozart, even may have played for him (the remark Mozart was supposed to have made about hearing him play is probably apocryphal, that “this youth may some day make a noise in the world” – Beethoven himself never mentioned having met Mozart).

Fanciful Painting of Beethoven playing for Mozart (pub. 1919)

Still, for many young musicians who knew what was going on in the greater musical world, Mozart was a name to reckon with even if Haydn was more famous and, on the whole, more successful.

Unfortunately, Beethoven couldn't stay in Vienna. He would be only 16 then, called back to Bonn after barely two weeks there once news arrived that his mother was dying.

Family obligations and a lack of financial backing delayed a return to Vienna, and Beethoven, who was developing more as both pianist and composer. One of the works he composed, the E-flat Major Piano Quartet (on of those “WoO” Pieces – never published and known by this abbreviation for “Work without Opus”) was clearly modeled on Mozart's G Major Violin Sonata K.379 – this is the one famous for Mozart's not having had time to write out the piano part in time for the scheduled performance, playing from a score which included the violin part and blank measures for the piano: no, he did not “make it up on the spot” as I've heard people say – he was merely remembering what he'd composed in his head before he'd gotten to the mundane process of writing it down, in itself no small feat). Published in 1781, it became the inspiration for several of Beethoven's themes for this piano quartet in 1785 – at least, his way of writing them – and though he never published it (perhaps because he felt it too imitative of Mozart's style), he did use certain ideas from it in no less than four of his Viennese piano sonatas, including the famous Pathétique. As many young composers have done before and since, Beethoven learned compositional details by imitating what he admired. It is quite possible other sonatas from this set of Mozart's supplied inspiration for the other two piano quartets Beethoven composed at the same time.

By now, things looked good to plan a return trip to Vienna for the following year – 1792. Unfortunately, Mozart had died in December of 1791.

But the pull of going to Vienna to prove himself and to find his career was too great to put aside: so instead, he went to Vienna to study with the next-best-thing – the great and more widely acclaimed Franz Josef Haydn.

And so that is how Count Waldstein's words came true: that he “might yet receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands.” Beethoven arrived in Vienna within a year of Mozart's death. Unfortunately, Haydn turned out to be a not very good match for the young man from Bonn. It was doubtful if Haydn was really all that good a teacher in the technical sense: he seemed to miss many mistakes in Beethoven's counterpoint assignments, a fact much tittered about by Albrechtsberger who later took up Beethoven's lessons when Haydn took off for his second trip to London.

So Beethoven did was he could to “learn” from Mozart – by hearing his music, studying his scores and playing his concertos (he was well known for his performance of Mozart's C Minor Concerto which, presumably, influenced his own C Minor concerto a few years later).

Did he “imitate” Mozart's E-flat Divertimento when he came to write his own string trios?

It's unlikely he was unaware of it. There are four other trios before the C Minor one on this program, and it might be more effective to listen to them in chronological order to see how similar these earlier ones are to their possible model.

Here is the opening movement of the first string trio, Op. 3, with the autograph score!

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Even here, this is obviously already Beethoven, not a slavish imitation of Mozart's style.

And while we don't know exactly what order the Op. 9 trios were written, it's quite possible the C Minor, like the third of the piano trios in the same key, was not the last to be completed.

While Beethoven might have “imitated” Mozart by taking his Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat, K.452 of 1784 and “doing likewise” in what became his quintet for the same instruments in the same key (Op. 16 of 1796-97), he might by now have assimilated enough of Mozart's style into his own not to need direct models.

Beethoven, perhaps before 1800

All of Beethoven's string trios were composed between 1796 and 1798 – the first two published as Op. 3 and Op. 8 (notice the Quintet of 1796 is Op. 16: opus numbers are never a source of chronology in Beethoven's works) and the last three as Op. 9. Even the first of Op. 9 still sounds like “entertainment” music, the divertimento style of the courtly classical composer typical of the 18th Century. It is the C Minor trio that steps beyond this and becomes a work more recognizable as the “mature” Beethoven. Indeed, this is the most “advanced” work Beethoven had so far composed – but that would change.

The first movement of the C Minor String Trio - like Mozart's E-flat Divertimento - opens with a brief unison statement. But from there, it goes off in a direction clearly Beethoven's. But there's much more Mozart beneath the surface than may seem obvious to the casual listener.

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The following year, he would begin work on his first six string quartets which would mark the high-point of “Early Beethoven” and point the way forward into the new century.

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Though the last in chronological order, Schubert's one movement String Trio in B-flat, D.471 (to distinguish it from another String Trio also in B-flat Major, D.581, a complete, four-movement trio written the next year) is second on the program and perhaps it's better that way. You can hear the more direct influence of Mozart on Schubert rather than Beethoven's intervening take on Mozart (written almost two decades earlier) which would have little or no influence on Schubert at this time.

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Franz Schubert at 17

Compared to Mozart (and even Mendelssohn, later on), Schubert got a late start, though anyone who could compose “Gretchen am Spinnrade” at the age of 17 and the famous “Erlking” the next year, is no slouch in the prodigy department.

Like Mozart's early works, Schubert's are derivative of the age he lived in – barring Beethoven – and while many do not seem terribly innovative, even those two songs are enough to make us realize that here is a true and (already) original talent.

As a boy, Franz Schubert won a chance to sing in what became known as the Vienna Boys Choir – yes, that Vienna Boys Choir – in 1808. He had already “auditioned” for Antonio Salieri, the court composer – yes, that Antonio Salieri, the one “accused” of murdering Mozart – the year before. He already sang well (he was first in the auditions that year) and played the violin and piano. He had also begun composing, apparently had been as soon as he could read music: none of these compositions have survived – the first work in the catalogue, a piano duet, was written in 1811.

In the years leading up to 1816, young Schubert had written four masses, four symphonies (a fifth would be written in the weeks following this string trio), maybe a dozen or more string quartets (not all completed) for the family quartet to play – amateurs making their own music, what people did before the invention of TVs and sound systems – and some 248 songs.

One could hardly think these masses and symphonies and especially the quartets belong to the same years Beethoven was composing his 7th and 8th Symphonies and his last violin sonata which preceded a horrendously dry period which didn't seem to lift until he had regained some self-confidence with the popularity of Wellington's Victory in 1815 and eventually beginning what we call his “Late Period” with the Hammerklavier Sonata of 1818.

Salieri, as a teacher, was probably even more conservative than he was as a composer. Even during Mozart's day, he was considered a reactionary and the 25 years after Mozart's death didn't seem to change Salieri's viewpoint. He was a proponent of Italian lyricism and was genuinely not interested in Schubert's settings of German poems – which may be one reason many of the songs sound so completely different from most of his instrumental and choral works, especially those that he showed to his teacher.

In June of 1816, Salieri was celebrating the 50th Anniversary of his arrival in Vienna as a 16-year-old boy tagging along with his teacher Florian Gassmann, a student of the famed Padre Martini (who would also figure in the training of the teen-aged Mozart very briefly and who, incidentally, also figures in the list of those teachers I mentioned in Jennifer Higdon's compositional legacy in the previous post, here). Gassmann, by the way, had come to Vienna to produce his operas – which Mozart thought were so terrible, some of them not even making it as far as three performances, he wondered if Gassmann's goal wasn't to kill off German opera before it had even begun.

Nonetheless, in 1816, Salieri was in an expansive and reflective mood and for a celebratory gathering of his pupils, Schubert – just another of his students, though the only one whose name we'd recognize – wrote a small cantata (D.407) which they were to perform for their master at a “jubilee dinner.”

This brings to mind two diary entries. Now, Schubert was not a regular journal-keeper, but at this particular time, he made several entries over a period of a few days.

On June 13th (1816), he noted a visit to a musical salon where he was one of the performers. He doesn't say where this was or how much he was paid (if at all), but he heard a Mozart string quintet, “so to speak one of his greatest minor works.” As Elizabeth McKay writes in her biography,

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“[h]e enthused over the beauties of the music and the unforgettable impression it made and praised the playing of the leader of the quartet [sic]. In the context of his aesthetic approach to music, he wrote of its power to raise the spirits, to lighten darkness with hope and confidence, bringing 'comforting images of a brighter and better life...'. For Schubert this was, as he began his entry: 'A clear, bright, fine day' which 'will remain [with me] throughout my whole life... O Mozart, immortal Mozart...'.”
(– Elizabeth McKay, “Franz Schubert: a Biography,” (p.61) Clarendon Press (Oxford) 1996.)
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Schubert then performed a set of variations by Beethoven (presumably Op. 34 of 1802) and sang two of his own songs.

More telling is the entry he jotted down after returning home from Salieri's party and the performance of his cantata three days later:

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It must be fine and enlivening for an artist to see all his pupils gathered around him, each one striving to give of his best for the master's jubilee, and to hear in all these compositions the expression of pure nature, free from all the eccentricity that is common among most composers nowadays, and is due almost wholly to one of our greatest German artists; that eccentricity which combines and confuses the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howling and that which is most holy with harlequinades, without distinction, so as to goad people to madness instead of soothing them with love, to incite them to laughter instead of lifting them up to God. To see such eccentricity banished from the circle of his pupils and instead to look upon pure, holy nature, must be the greatest pleasure for an artist who, guided by such a one as Gluck [who had been one of Salieri's mentors], learned to know nature and to uphold it in spite of the most unnatural conditions of our age.
(quoted in McKay, ibid, p.63.)
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The reference to “one of our greatest German artists” is a way of introducing Beethoven into the conversation without mentioning his name. Aside from the fact Schubert had just been celebrating the music of Salieri (and the influence of Gluck, long out of fashion in modern Vienna), remember the “craze” for Beethoven had fairly much petered out after his 7th Symphony: dealing with renewed symptoms of his deafness, Beethoven wrote no major works (counting Wellington's Victory as a “not major work”) since the end of 1812. When he would start producing new and what we consider “great” works again would not be until 1818, and even then, this Late Period style left more people confused than enthusiastic.

(While it might be only as a suggestion for light summer reading, I have my own purely fictional account of Beethoven's troubles at this time of his life in an excerpt from my novel, The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, dealing with “The Tale of the Master and His Belovèd” which, I repeat, is entirely fictional.)

Incidentally, it's interesting to note that the next day, June 17th, 1816, Schubert wrote in his journal “today I composed for money for the first time... a cantata for the name-day of Professor Watteroth,” a highly respected law professor in Vienna. This cantata, Prometheus, unfortunately, has become lost, but imagine that Schubert, having already composed 450 works, has finally earned some money from his compositions!

That September, Schubert began writing a string trio, D.471, what is considered a one-movement work. However, there is also the start of a second movement which was abandoned after a few measures, so the work was neither a one-movement assignment or a work complete in one movement. Like many pieces he would begin – most of his operas, more than one symphony, as well as the “Quartetsatz” in C Minor – it would remain incomplete.

This was followed by his second commission, a cantata for a family “sponsor,” Joseph Spendou, who was the administrator of a charity to distribute money to the widows of school elementary schoolteachers which, that fall, was celebrating its 20th anniversary. Then there were some short choral pieces for his church choir, some piano pieces (including a sonata), some songs on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister poems, plus a new symphony – his 5th, the one “without trumpets and drums” – for his friends in an amateur society who frequently got together to read through orchestral music (Schubert led the viola section).

All of this during the month of September, 1816. And all of which espouse the ideals he heard in the music of Mozart, if not those championed directly by his teacher, Salieri.

However, Schubert's attitude toward Beethoven would change considerably as he also matured into his own “late period.” More of that when we hear the E-flat Piano Trio on Sunday's program and the incredible C Major String Quintet on the last program on Wednesday evening.

– Dick Strawser

Climbing Mount Everest: Beethoven's Op. 130 & the Grosse Fuge

The Daedalus Quartet (photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco)

When the Daedalus Quartet ends the final concert of Market Square Concerts' current season Tuesday night at 8pm at Market Square Church - you can read more about the rest of the program here - with Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat, Op.130 (with the original finale), what exactly does that mean?

Life-long classical music aficionados bandy about terms like “Late Beethoven” or “The Late Quartets” (without mentioning the composer's name but automatically implying it's Beethoven) and especially “Grosse Fuge” with such reverence it seems we're intent on mystifying a whole new generation of concert-goers (what is a “foo-geh” and why is it gross?).

(Quickly, Grosse Fuge means "Grand Fugue" in the sense of its expansiveness. A fugue is a procedure in which musical ideas unfold linearly with imitation between the... uhm... you know what? Just listen to it...)

On the other hand, how many of us who know only how to stick the key in the ignition understand what a mechanic is telling us when our car is making a noise that sounds like this (followed by a poor, onomatopoeic impersonation of something heard from under the hood)? Or have had to suffer through your child's explanation of how to cut-and-paste something into an e-mail and find yourself as befogged as before?

Beethoven's last quartets, all composed within a two-year period, have long had a reputation of being “difficult” – not just to play, but to listen to. At the first performance of the first of them, a critic wrote it was an “incomprehensible, incoherent, vague, over-extended series of fantasias – chaos, from which flashes of genius emerged from time to time like lightening bolts from a black thunder cloud.”

When a critic in the mid-1950s or so was reviewing a new quartet by Milton Babbitt which he found utterly indecipherable, he wrote “This must be what Late Beethoven Quartets sound like to a dog.” (Much to my delight, in the mid-1970s, a friend sent me this photo (see right) on a post card from Tanglewood with the inscription on the back, “Listening to Late Beethoven Quartets.”)

While it is impossible to demystify something like Beethoven's last five string quartets, it should be said they need not be so frightening to the first time listener. Many people know them by their reputation and see that they're long, dense and pretty intense and therefore only accessible to the initiated (and even then, maybe only for a 32nd-degree concert-goer).

Yet these same would-be listeners have no problem sitting through movies lasting hours with their convoluted plots, their own intrinsic language and history (comprehensible only to the initiated), and a philosophical and perhaps allegorical theme that can provide hours of discussion (think Tolkien).

Granted, the “Late Quartets of Beethoven” are, like, this monolithic Everest of classical music – more like a single mountain with five separate peaks which, inevitably, every string quartet eventually feels compelled to scale (no pun intended).

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Ever since Caesar divided Gaul into three parts, writers about music have talked of a composer's output in terms of Early, Middle and Late – especially Beethoven, but even Schubert who, after all, died at the age of 31 (had he lived longer, would we call his Late Quartets and Sonatas “Late” or merely “the first mature works of his Middle Period”? Elliott Carter, who didn't find his voice until he was 50, was writing what were called “Late works” when he was in his 70s: the fact he was still composing when he died just shy of 104 gives rise to the idea of calling the pieces he wrote after he turned 90 the “Post-Late Works,” but I digress...)

This is something that many “novice” music-lovers and even avid concert-goers sometimes do not realize: that not all Beethoven sounds the same. In fact, few composers do, usually going through “style changes” from their “youthful apprenticeship” to their “maturity” to the “wisdom of old-age” (especially confusing when applied to a 30-year-old Schubert). Even Beethoven, after all, was only 56 when he died, which is not, even today, something we would consider “old” (unless you're still under 30).

Now, I'll be getting into some of the details of this – how Beethoven's “late style” came about – at my pre-concert talk (which begins at 7:15 in the church sanctuary) – but for the blog, here are some video posts of the quartet-in-question with a few background comments.

Suffice it to say Beethoven's “Late Period” grew out of a difficult time in his life: in 1809, the deafness which had been threatening since before he was 30 finally kicked in with more increasing pain and frustration; in 1812, around the time he composed his joyous 7th Symphony, he was apparently in love, given the single letter addressed to a woman known only as “The Immortal Belovéd” but the following year it became obvious such happiness was not to be his. Then in 1815 began the long drawn-out crisis over the custody of his nephew. Between 1813 and 1818, he practically ceased composing.

Instead, he was writing trifles, publishing works previously unpublished (wreaking havoc with the relationship between chronology and opus numbers) and studying the music of Bach and Handel, two composers from a hundred years earlier whose music had largely been forgotten. From them, he learned more about counterpoint (especially the writing of fugues) than he ever did as a student in the 1790s. Fugue-writing became a new feature of the music he would compose from 1818 on.

It was a Piano Sonata that unlocked the creative block he'd been suffering – the Hammerklavier with its grander dimensions through expanding both the sense of traditional form and harmony, its renewed vigor and virtuosity and especially its complex fugal writing in the finale. Almost everything he wrote took on these same characteristics (if not always the fugues) – more sonatas, the immense Missa solemnis, the 9th Symphony (the famous “Choral” Symphony) and finally, these last five string quartets, all written between 1818 and 1826.

Beethoven (1823)

Most people wonder at the image of the Deaf Beethoven writing music at all – and many would disparage these last works (which many of his contemporaries found incomprehensible) as the result of his deafness (since he couldn't hear what he was writing, how could he tell what made sense and what were mistakes?). On the other hand, while many composers do not need to “hear” their music externally to hear it inside their head and transcribe it from there, one could argue that his deafness turned his creativity inward and he found a whole new way of expressing himself that was unlike anything being written by anybody else – and for a long time after him.

So, now – these quartets.

After the “middle” quartets – the three Op.59 quartets dedicated to Count Razumovsky, and the two separate works called the “Harp” from 1809 and the “Serioso” from the following year (though it wasn't published until 1815) – Beethoven did not think about writing more quartets until May of 1822 when he started sketching a new work which, unfortunately, his publisher showed little interest in.

That November, he heard from a Russian aristocrat, Prince Nikolai Golitsin who was a fine amateur cellist married to an accomplished pianist. Unlike his counterpart, Count Razumovsky, a music-lover who employed his own quartet, Golitsin played the cello in his. Golitsin wrote to Beethoven and asked him to write one, two or three quartets for him - and to name his fee.

Because of more pressing matters with the Missa solemnis and the 9th Symphony, Beethoven didn't return to his earlier sketches and couldn't begin writing the E-flat Major Quartet that became Op.127, the first of the last quartets, until the summer of 1824. He finished it the following February.

It was premiered the next month to a largely befuddled audience (not to mention players who admitted not knowing what to make of this piece). Subsequent performances fared little better.

Beethoven went ahead and wrote the next quartet – this was the A Minor Quartet which was later published as Op. 132. During this period of time, Beethoven had been quite ill, bedridden with an “intestinal inflammation” which interrupted its composition in the Spring of 1825. He celebrated his recovery with the famous Heiliger Dankgesang, the slow movement he called “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” that is the emotional core of the piece. He completed this quartet in July.

The next month he began work on a third quartet for Golitsin and finished it by November – this one in B-flat Major which would become Op. 130. This is the quartet the Daedalus Quartet will perform Tuesday night.

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If people had trouble comprehending what he was doing in these first two quartets he completed, even looking at the mass of this new one was enough to inspire fears and doubts. It was long, it had six movements and it ended with a monstrously difficult thing labeled “Grosse Fuge” or Grand Fugue ("somewhat free, somewhat academic" is one way of translating the subtitle) - by itself, it accounted for about one third of the quartet's entire length.

Keep in mind, since Haydn's day, a symphony or a string quartet might average about a half-hour long and was in four movements: the first movement was the main focus with its dramatic sonata form; followed by two shorter movements in contrasting slow and fast tempos, usually in a lighter mood; and then a finale that was originally almost an after-thought and generally (even in dramatic or minor-key works) a happy ending.

Beethoven had already started pushing the focus of the entire piece into the last movement, more of a summation than a curtain-closer. The last movements became longer, more dramatic and, in the case of the recently completed Ninth Symphony, not only the end-all but the be-all of a work now over an hour in length.

Here are clips of the individual movements (with different performers as I could find). First of all, my apologies if any of these start with loud blasting ads (please feel free to “skip,” under the circumstances).

1st Mvmt, Adagio ma non troppo / Allegro: Brentano Quartet


After a slow, searching and somewhat vague introduction, the fast main part of the movement begins with a flurry of notes, but keeps stopping and starting, going back to the introduction. This contrast takes on more and more significance (remember this when we get to the Grosse Fuge) as the movement develops so that that introduction isn't really a typical “intro” that just raises the curtain.

This is as good a place to point out that earlier, quartets were often works featuring the first violinist “accompanied” by three other string players, the cello playing the bass line and the 2nd violin and viola filling in the inner harmony. Haydn and Mozart had already begun changing this with their later works but it was Beethoven who began fully integrating the ensemble as a quartet-of-equals.

2nd Mvmt, Presto: Cypress Quartet


“Scherzo” is Italian for “joke” and they're usually fast, short and light. This one, after such an expansive first movement, is certainly short – two minutes as it rushes past. It's also very understated, hushed throughout except for the occasional outburst and the middle section with its rapid-fire work-out for the 1st violinist. Returning to the opening as the traditional form would have, Beethoven suddenly “kicks it off the stage.”

3rd Mvmt, Andante con moto ma non troppo: Quartet Casals


While Andante is technically not a slow tempo – it means, literally, “walking” – this is the required slower contrast following the whirlwind second movement, given one of Beethoven's more equivocating tempo indications: Walking tempo with motion (but not too much). It has a sense of “comfortableness” that would put the listener at ease.

Originally, at this point in the sketching process, Beethoven was considering various ideas for a finale, none of which seemed to involve a fugue. And there were ten possible ideas he jotted down. But instead of a finale – or perhaps because the idea of the great fugal finale came to him and was not suitably prepared by what he'd written so far – he added two more movements starting with this second scherzo: actually, the equivalent of an 18th Century minuet except more of a German folk-dance, not too rough but not smooth enough to be a minuet (or waltz).

4th Mvmt, Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai: Juilliard Quartet (please ignore the over-romanticized graphic...)


This German dance (alla tedesca, in the German style) is marked “rather fast” and with its little swells in volume and sudden shifts from slightly louder to slightly softer, gives an easy, swinging feeling, possibly a bit like a hurdy-gurdy. As Michael Steinberg notes, it can create “something close to seasickness, the kind you induce with delicious deliberateness on a merry-go-round at the fair.”

After two quite down-to-earth movements, Beethoven now adds this touching and seemingly simple-sounding slow movement which he called a cavatina, a short, uncomplicated song: 

5th Mvmt, Cavatina, Adagio molto espressivo: Guarneri Quartet


This becomes the real slow movement of the entire work, a “song” for the 1st Violin, supported by the other players. Keep in mind he had already written the “Heiliger Dankgesang” in the A Minor Quartet (which will appear later as Opus 132) so there is already a precedent for the personal emotions Beethoven expressed here, not unlike those times he would visit friends – ill or grieving – and, without ever saying a word to them, improvise at the piano for an hour and leave them comforted.

In this case, a friend of his (young Karl Holz who was 2nd Violinist in Schuppanzigh's quartet which first played these pieces) recalled the Cavatina “cost the composer tears in the writing and brought out the confession that nothing he had written [before] had so moved him.” In fact, merely recalling it, Holz added, “brought forth renewed tears.” The brief middle sections, marked beklemmt in the sense one could feel unsettled “by the air just before a thunderstorm, by a nightmare, by an agonizing wait” (again quoting Steinberg). This then returns to the opening of the Cavatina, drawing back from this brief glimpse at the edge of the abyss.

And now for the last movement. With four “middle movements” of a somewhat light, uncomplicated nature (the Cavatina taking on a more charged emotional quality), all Hell breaks loose with the start of this immense and super-intense finale. Again, like the first movement, it begins with a unison passage that now erupts into contrasting flashes ("lightening bolts," indeed) with frequent changes of mood and tempo.

The late Joseph Kerman thought this opening was like the composer hurling "all the thematic versions at the listener's head like a handful of rocks." Out of this chaos, Beethoven assembles one of the most amazing things he ever wrote.

6th Mvmt, Grosse Fuge: Brentano Quartet


Ultimately, it's as if Beethoven wasn't sure how to end it. Reversing the process that began the finale of the 9th Symphony (less the famous “terror fanfare” if the whole fugue itself isn't a “terror-fugue”), he tries a snippet of this – silence – no, maybe the slower idea – no, not that, either: then they all go back to the unison of the opening bur rather than starting (OMG) over again, it quickly works itself out into something both exalted and humorous – and ultimately resolving the drama with, at long last, a “happy” ending.

a page from Beethoven's manuscript: Grosse Fuge

But while the first audience encored the two easy-to-process scherzos (which annoyed Beethoven), most everyone was thoroughly confused by the finale and an immediate campaign began from his friends, from the performers and most of all from his publisher to replace the Fugue with something more manageable, more accessible. Six months later, after writing two more quartets - Op. 131 in C-sharp Minor (which begins with a long, slow fugue of its own) and Op. 135, the last one - he began sketching the totally new, much lighter conclusion that for generations would be the official finale of Op. 130, once he was guaranteed the Fugue would be published separately (he also provided his own piano four-hands version, mostly for study purposes). Even so, it didn't receive its next performance until 1859, thirty-three years later, the same year Wagner completed his Tristan und Isolde.

While Beethoven's colleague Ludwig Spohr considered it “indecipherable, uncorrected horrors,” Igor Stravinsky said the Grosse Fuge was “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”

In this Graphic Animation version of Grosse Fuge (no performers acknowledged), ignore the information about the impending performance in California – while it's a maze of images to follow (the music is complicated enough), it might help you keep track of what's happening in the texture not to mention differentiating between the different motives (like the longer, sustained notes from the opening and the wildly jumping, rhythmic figure). The instruments are color-coded: 1st Violin = orange (or brown), 2nd Violin = magenta; Viola = green; Cello = bluish-purple. Good luck!



It might be of interest, having heard the Fugue, to go back and listen to the opening few minutes of the first movement: you may notice some similarities between this and the two themes of the fugue: the slow introduction of the first movement has been transformed into the “long-note” theme or subject of the fugue; the jagged, leaping theme of the fugue has its roots in the first fast section of the opening movement. Notice how, in both of these movements, there is so much give-and-take between these two contrasting tempos. Even though he had no idea how he would end the piece when he started it, it was like the seeds of the finale were there, one thing that ties the quartet together.

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While selection of performances of the complete quartet on YouTube are somewhat limited, for those who now want to experience the whole quartet “in context” and performed by one ensemble, here's the Zemlinsky String Quartet recorded at Festival Wissembourg in September, 2013:



Now, having been tossed back and forth over the abyss, you may want to retire to some distant corner to contemplate what you've just experienced in this piece.

On the other hand, since Beethoven gave in to pressures from his publishers, friends and performers to replace the over-sized Grosse Fuge with something “more manageable,” knowing the Fugue could stand on its own, he wrote what is essentially the Haydn-esque happy ending most people were hoping for. Though it's only about four or five minutes shorter than the original finale, it is much less difficult to play and far less exhausting to both play and listen to.

However, the “alternate finale” can't stand on its own and now that most quartets would play Op. 130 as Beethoven originally intended (as they should), it's a shame to lose this delightful piece if for no other reason than it's the last piece of music Beethoven ever completed.

He added it in November of 1826. He died on March 26th the following year.

So, while it's unlikely you'll hear it in concert as an “encore” except by Quartetto Masochismo, here is your chance to hear it (as you can in most recent recordings) as an added “bonus” track, performed by the Takacs Quartet:



And there is so much more to say about this piece - well, I'll still have plenty to talk about at my pre-concert talk!

Dick Strawser

Beethoven, Kreutzer and Bridgetower: Together Again

This Wednesday's program with Market Square Concerts features violinist Ray Chen and pianist Julio Elizalde at Whitaker Center – concert-time, 8pm – with a sonata written by a 22-year-old Mozart and another written by Beethoven at 32 (he was, by comparison, a bit of a late-bloomer, genius-wise). In between there's Pablo de Sarasate, one of the great 19th-Century virtuosos represented by his gypsy showcase, Zigeunerweisen or “Gypsy Airs.”

On the previous post, here, you can hear clips of the Mozart and Sarasate played by Gil Shaham, plus hear Chen play the finale of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and some Paganini as well as talk about his “digital music stand” with its foot-powered page-turning device.

Beethoven in 1803

This post is about the Beethoven sonata on the program, as he called it on the manuscript's title page, “Sonata for Piano and Violin obligato in a very [brilliant] concertante style like a Concerto.” He soon crossed out the word “brilliant.”

It was published as the Violin Sonata in A Minor, Op.47. We know it as the “Kreutzer” Sonata.

When we think of “masterpieces,” we tend to imagine a composer taking his time with its creation – a great deal of forethought, careful planning, deep thoughts and considerable artistic concentration and conviction. Imagine Beethoven – with his wild hair, wilder expression, the Titan wrapped in Divine Inspiration. Think of “masterpieces” like his 5th Symphony, not to mention his 3rd or 9th...

Here's how it came down with this particular violin sonata.

First of all, there's the A Major Sonata, Op. 30, No. 1 – you can hear a classic performance with David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin, here  – composed between 1801 and 1802, shortly after he'd finished his first six string quartets and the 1st Symphony. It might not seem a very “great” work, compared to the one published as Op. 47, more in the tradition of Mozart and, to an extent, his teacher Josef Haydn.

The third movement is the key, in this connection.

Originally, Beethoven had composed a much larger, much more powerful and far less “classical” finale, a sonata-form movement of, by comparison, epic proportions, and it made the whole sonata lop-sided, so he put it aside and wrote the less assuming set of variations that now concludes this delightful work.

But what to do with this “rejected” movement? It needed a more powerful couple of movements to make sense of it and it clearly required a better class of performer when it came to that.

In early 1803, he met George Bridgetower, a “mulatto” violinist born in Poland but of English paternity.

Bridgetower in 1800

Bridgetower's father was of West Indian (possibly Barbadian) descent employed as a servant in the court of Prince Esterhàzy, the same Hungarian prince who employed Haydn. With a nod to “Fifty Shades of Downton Abbey,” Bridgetower's mother was a domestic servant in the household of a German princess who had married a Polish prince and it was at Prince Radziwill's estate in the fall of 1778 (some sources say 1779) that Bridgetower was born, most likely within the requisite time after a visit by the Radziwills to the estate of Esterhàza.

The term “mulatto” was a generic word for “mixed-race” and today, Bridgetower is usually referred to as an “African-English” violinist whose father was from England's American colonies, whose mother was German and who was born in Poland (borders being much more flexible politically than culturally in the 18th Century). Let's leave it at that.

He was already concertizing in 1789 – do the math – and by 1791 had gone to London where the Prince Regent (later King George IV) took an interest in his education. The Prince employed him as a violinist in his orchestra. Bridgetower gave 50 solo concerts in London during this decade. There is also mention of a performance given in Paris that was attended by the American, Thomas Jefferson (presumably without Sally Hemings in his entourage).

In 1802, young Bridgetower, now 24, visited his mother who now lived in Dresden with another son who was a cellist. While there, he traveled to Vienna to give some concerts and was introduced by one of his patrons, Prince Lichnowsky, to another artist the Prince supported, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

They apparently hit it off quite well.

They agreed to give a recital, scheduled for May 24, 1803, at Vienna's “Augarten,” a combination park and restaurant that often gave public concerts. This particular concert was set for 8:00am. That's “a.m.” as in morning. I can't imagine any self-respecting free-lance musician these days agreeing to play a concert at 8am even if it involved a free breakfast, but these were different times.

These were, however, quite popular concerts and were organized by no less a musician than Ignaz Schuppanzig, one of the best-known violinists in Vienna and leader of a quartet that would later premiere works by both Beethoven and Schubert. They were well attended and usually well received: performing at one of these concerts was a major public appearance.

Thank God that tradition has not survived, but I digress...

Anyway, how much time they had given themselves for this program seems to be lost to history – or for that matter, what else may have been on the program. But it remains famous because Beethoven decided to recycle that abandoned finale and write two new movements for a violinist as talented as Bridgetower, one who could match the virtuosity this discarded finale required.

Now, there are sketches for ideas that ended up in this sonata dating back to 1801 but that doesn't mean he began “writing” it then – that was not Beethoven's way. His piano student Carl Czerny said the first movement of this sonata was written in four days – very possible: we know Beethoven was on a tight deadline with Bridgetower's concert, but it might have been easier if he'd had some ideas already knocking around in his sketchbooks.

What he did with those ideas is where the creative process came into play.

But four days?

This would be called “white heat.” Listen to the first movement and imagine what it would have taken to get all this down on paper – long before the days of computer programs and the ability to cut-and-paste – in four days.

In this performance, Nathan Milstein is joined by pianist Georges Pludermacher:
= = = = =

= = = = =

Watching performers live is always a revelation: what did Pludermacher not like about the chord he played at 10:12?

This brings to mind the anecdote Bridgetower later relayed about that early-morning premiere. Near the beginning, Beethoven played a great wash of an arpeggio – at 1:48 in this performance. Though Milstein doesn't take the repeat, imagine that he played a big arpeggio the second-time-around at 1:38 instead of what's written, imitating what Beethoven would do a few measures later?

That's what Bridgetower did and, according to him, Beethoven looked up, rather surprised, but smiled his approval. (Notice, however, he didn't leave it in...)

So now he had a first movement and a last movement (the recycled finale from last year's Op. 30 No. 1 Sonata). All he had to do was finish a 2nd movement.

Given two sonata-form movements, the slow middle movement needed to be, for best contrast, a set of variations. Unfortunately, white-heat or not, the night before the recital, Beethoven had still not completed this movement.

In fact, it wasn't until 4:30am that Beethoven called in his student Ferdinand Ries and told him to get copying – Bridgetower needed his violin part for a concert scheduled to begin 3½ hours later.

Unfortunately, the part wasn't finished in time and so Bridgetower sight-read the part from Beethoven's hand-written score, standing behind him and looking over his shoulder.

Now, I've seen photos of Beethoven's original handwritten manuscripts and I can't imagine, writing at this speed, he was any neater than usual: here's the opening page of this sonata but whether it's the sketch or the later “fair copy” sent to the publisher isn't known. The original manuscript is reported as “lost” in other sources, so I'm guessing this is his “careful” hand-writing.

opening page of "Kreutzer" Sonata MS

Here's a manuscript of the Cello Sonata Op. 69 written a couple of years later which is more typical of Beethoven's calligraphy. Imagine trying to sight-read this?

Reportedly, Beethoven hadn't completely written out everything in the piano part, so whole measures were often blank (try following that!) but that didn't mean he was making it up on the spot: he knew how it would go, so he could just fill in the blanks.

Not so for the violinist...

Anyway, here's the 2nd Movement of the sonata, in this performance with Pinchas Zukerman (mispelled in the YouTube posting) with pianist Marc Neikrug:
= = = = =

= = = = =

Whatever we might imagine – the sight-reading, the calligraphy, the hour of the performance – the second movement went well enough.

The finale, of course, had been completed a year earlier and was already copied out and ready to go.

In this performance, it's Gidon Kremer and Marta Argerich:
= = = = =

= = = = =

Seeing that this is the Violin Sonata No. 9, it's easy to think it's a fairly late work – after all, he only wrote 10 violin sonatas, didn't he?

But it's actually a fairly early work, written when he was 32: composing it for this 1803 concert, he had just finished a large-scale oratorio in March, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and was at work on a new symphony, at this stage to be called the “Bonaparte” Symphony and which, after its completion, would be rechristened the Eroica.

Some sources call it the Sonata in A Minor and others, the Sonata in A Major. Truth is, the bulk of the first movement is in A Minor but it begins with a slow introduction where only the first four measures are clearly in A Major. So, technically, it should be the “Sonata in A Minor.”

More important might be the name we know this sonata by: the “Kreutzer” Sonata.

Admittedly, citing the low-level Austrian monetary unit at the time, the kreuzer which was the equivalent of 4 pennies, I nearly convinced a colleague that the sonata was written to repay a friend of Beethoven's who'd bought lunch.

There was also the famous catcall made at the premiere of the Eroica – “I'll give you another kreuzer if you'll make it stop!” Another time, I joked that remark had been made about this particular sonata and that's why it's called that - it's quite possible somebody would believe it.

And that was before the days of the Internet.

No, really, the sonata is known as “The Kreutzer Sonata” because Beethoven had a falling-out with Bridgetower not long after the premiere.

The original manuscript was not only dedicated to Bridgetower, he even light-heartedly inscribed on the score, “Sonata per un mulattico lunatico.”

But they were hanging out (perhaps right after this performance) when Bridgetower (himself a tall, handsome man) made an off-color remark about a woman it turns out was a friend of Beethoven's, and the composer, a man of conservative morals (witness his issues over his brothers' private-lives and especially the incident of the Sister-in-Law he nicknamed the “Queen of the Night”), took offense at this.

In fact, he was so offended, he asked to have the manuscript of his sonata back and threatened to withdraw the dedication when it would be published.

Despite all Bridgetower's protests and apologies, that's exactly what Beethoven did when he sent it to his publisher in 1805.

When dedications were often a way to “curry favor” among the aristocracy, the wealthy or the simply famous, “name-dropping” in the best (or worse) sense of networking, Beethoven apparently figured “Who was Bridgetower, after all?” and decided he would dedicate this grand sonata to the greatest violinist of the day – who happened to be Rodolphe Kreutzer.

Kreutzer

Now, Kreutzer lived in Paris and it seems, at this time, Beethoven, tired of the backwater that Vienna seemed to be becoming, was thinking he might pull up stakes and move to the French capital. He was writing a Bonaparte Symphony in honor of the French consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, and certainly an inside track with the city's foremost violinist wouldn't hurt.

Two things happened: Bonaparte became the Emperor Napoleon, the direct opposite of Beethoven's political inclinations, and the Symphony was recast as the Eroica instead.

Kreutzer, for his part, examined this odd piece sent to him and thought it unplayable (despite the fact it had already been played), claiming that Beethoven hadn't the least idea how to write for the violin. Consequently, he never performed it.

Today, Rodolphe Kreutzer is primarily known for having Beethoven's violin sonata dedicated to him. And George Bridgetower, who inspired at least the first two movements, died in poverty and completely forgotten, remembered today only in conjunction with this sonata's origins.

But of course, other sources indicate that when Bridgetower died, he left his rather considerable estate of ₤1,000 to his daughter, so who knows...?

(I'd give a kreuzer to know the facts...)

But hardly the stuff you'd expect would yield a masterpiece...

By the way, you can read my post about the novella written by Leo Tolstoy (a climactic moment in the plot takes place during a performance of this sonata, giving the book its title) and also the string quartet Leos Janáček composed inspired by it - at my blog Thoughts on a Train.

Dick Strawser

Beethoven & His Late Quartets: Part 1

Q&A with the Doric Quartet

Last night, at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, the Doric Quartet gave us a preview of tonight's concert with excerpts from each work on the program, ending with the conclusion of  Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131. The program also includes quartets by Robert Schumann and Ernest Chausson – and will open with excerpts from Britten's Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello played by Julia Rosenbaum whom some of you may have heard play with the Harrisburg Symphony last weekend (she’s the 16-year-old winner of the latest “Rising Star” Concerto Competition held at Messiah College).

You can read more about the concert here in this earlier post (which includes directions to Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front Street in Harrisburg). The concert begins at 8:00.

This post is about Beethoven’s Late Quartets, more or less in general. Part 2 of this post, Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience, continues at my other blog which will also give you more background on these works, often described as the Himalayas of the String Quartet Repertoire.

It’s difficult to find the best performances or recordings on YouTube, even when there are so many good ones available. I’ve chosen this clip for two reasons: it’s complete in one “video” and it’s the Juilliard Quartet, recorded in 1960. However, the sound, transferred from vinyl, is not the best. But it is the Juilliard Quartet.

= = = = =

= = = = =

The work is ostensibly in seven movements, though a few of them are little more than expanded introductions. The main difference between these movements and those in other works Beethoven composed, they’re played without interruption. It’s also interesting to realize how the composer balances the difficult movements (the opening fugue, for example) with a contrasting movement (at 6:47), a scherzo built on simpler phrase structures and dancelike rhythms that are more easily assimilated.

While the rhythmic design might give the whole work a more seamless flow, the frequent changes in tempo and mood might give it more discontinuity – rather than being closely organized around the tonal center of C-sharp Minor, there are six distinct “main” keys and thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than in the longer Op.132 Quartet).

At 9:40, a brief recitative-like dialogue sets up the heart of the quartet, a long, largely slow set of variations (beginning at 10:34) with its own sense of unity and contrast.

This easier-to-follow movement is followed by a wild scherzo (at 25:56) ending with the glassy sound of the strings being played near the bridge, before rising up to a dramatic conclusion (31:03) that sets up a slow, tragic passage that leads us into the dramatic and intensely rhythmic finale (at 33:22).

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Beethoven in 1823

It’s possible these five late string quartets of Beethoven’s might never have been composed.

In 1822, Beethoven had been sketching at a new quartet while he was working on the Missa Solemnis and had offered both works (the nearly completed Mass and the as yet unfinished if unbegun quartet) to one of his publishers, C.F. Peters, who accepted the Mass but turned down the quartet, saying they were more interested in, say, piano trios or piano quartets. Besides, they had enough “beautiful quartets” by Ludwig Spohr, Bernhard Romberg and Pierre Rodé (how many of you have heard any quartets by either of these composer recently? Anyone? Bueller?)

So Beethoven put the quartet aside and resumed work on the Mass (he had finished the first draft).

Then, in late November, 1822, a Russian prince from St. Petersburg who had lived in Vienna and was quite familiar with Beethoven’s music, sent him a letter hoping to commission from him one, two or three string quartets. Beethoven immediately sent off a letter to a student of his then in London to look around and see if there was the possibility of “selling quartets” there which, it turned out, was answered in the affirmative. He also pursued other arrangements with another publisher, meaning he could write something for Prince Galitsin who would pay for its being composed, and then make additional money from publishers in England, Germany and Vienna.

They argued about fees, the publishers feeling Beethoven’s asking price too steep, though the Prince was willing to pay whatever Beethoven wanted. The only problem was, in early 1823, Beethoven had other projects still in the fire that needed to be completed first: the Mass, the 9th Symphony, the Diabelli Variations – all vast works – and that only after the May 1824 concert which saw the symphony’s premiere would he be able to turn his attention to the new quartets.

This request from Galitsin almost didn’t come about.

Having heard Carl Maria von Weber’s new opera, Der Freischütz, he thought perhaps he would contact Weber for his newest commissioning project. Galitsin was then 27 years old, a talented amateur cellist married to a talented amateur pianist. He employed his own string quartet (of which he was the cellist). But when he announced he thought about commissioning Weber, the violist in his quartet, himself a composer, advised against it and said he should contact Beethoven instead.

Now, Beethoven may have already had a quartet on a back burner – he always had new works on numerous back burners but didn’t always complete them (an opera based on Macbeth at least provided some ideas for his “Ghost” Trio, for instance). Without a possible performance outlet, would Beethoven have spent the time and effort on a quartet for the sake of writing another quartet? And would he have written, as it turned out, five of them?

He picked up his discarded quartet sketches again before he completed the 9th Symphony, put them away again. He had initially proposed completing the first quartet by March of 1823 but then put Galitsin off with more delays and excuses that the prince probably feared he would never see his quartets.

Then, in May of 1825, after the premiere of the 9th, Beethoven settled down to work on the quartets. Originally there were going to be three for Galitsin. But he kept on writing them, perhaps keeping an eye to the other publishers and the lucrative deal he had made with them for those three. At one point, while working on the third of these quartets, he wrote to a publisher in Berlin that, ultimately, he planned on writing a total of six quartets – imagine, another Late Beethoven Quartet!

Beethoven’s friend, the violinist Karl Holz (recently, the new 2nd Violinist of Ignaz Schuppanzig’s quartet) had joked there was enough music in the Op.130 Quartet for two works – and then the decision to separate the difficult finale known as the Grosse Fuge resulted in at least an additional fee.

By February of 1825, over two years since Galitsin first wrote to him, Beethoven completed the first of these quartets, the E-flat Major, Op.127. Then in July, he had completed the A Minor which would be published as Op.132. Come November, the B-flat Major, Op.130, was finished.

But he just kept going.

In May of 1826, Beethoven informed his publisher Schott that a new quartet was ready – this was the C-sharp Minor, op.131 – though he didn’t send them the manuscript until mid-August. It was announced by the publisher in February of 1827 but didn’t go into print until June. By that time, Beethoven had died.

Immediately after sending off Op.131, then, Beethoven started work on the F Major, Op.135, which he finished in October.

Sometime during this span of months, there’s a fragment of a sketch for a Quartet in C Major, what might have become the sixth quartet from this set.

Between October and November, then, while visiting his brother in Gneixendorf, along with his nephew in what turned out to be a most unfortunate visit, Beethoven composed the new finale for the Op.130 quartet, replacing its original Grosse Fuge ending.

This would turn out to be Beethoven’s last completed composition. He and his nephew returned to Vienna. Beethoven’s health took a decided turn for the worse and he died on March 26th, 1827.

In April, 1825, while composing the A Minor Quartet, Op.132, Beethoven had suffered another relapse, this time with intestinal complications and spitting blood. A letter to his doctor ended “Doctor, close the door to Death! Music will also help in my hour of need.” In late May, he began to feel better: he composed the famous slow movement of the quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang with its prayer of Thanksgiving to God on his convalescence with a sense of renewed strength in the contrasting sections.

A few days later, his nephew wrote to him “God is my witness that my sole dream is to get away completely from you.” Karl was 18 at the time.

There followed a precarious truce. But it was a time filled with tension and several letters back and forth between Beethoven and Karl’s teacher who was not supposed to allow Karl out of the house at night under any circumstances.

Then, on July 31st, 1826, Karl attempted to commit suicide, shooting himself in the head with a pistol but succeeding only in wounding himself (apparently, a week later, they had not yet removed the bullet). Among other things, this caused the need to cover it up since attempting suicide was a state crime. Something had to be done to get Karl out of this state of mind – perhaps a military career would give him the necessary discipline and, also, get him out from under the obsessive watch of his Uncle Ludwig.

Beethoven was still working on the final version of Op.131 in July of 1826, only sending the score off a couple of weeks after his nephew’s attempted suicide. Originally, the score was to be dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer, a devoted friend of Beethoven’s, but instead he gave the dedication to General Baron von Stutterheim who had secured a place for Karl in his regiment: Karl joined the regiment in January of 1827 and never saw his uncle again. Wolfmayer, instead, received the dedication of the next quartet, Op.135. A wealthy textile merchant, Wolfmayer had advanced Beethoven a large sum for a Requiem that Beethoven promised he would write but never did. (Imagine the irony of both Mozart and Beethoven writing requiems at the times of their deaths?)

Alternating between depression and defiance, Karl’s life was not an easy one, kept in almost virtual imprisonment at his school and forbidden to see his mother. Whatever tensions led to Karl’s attempt to take his own life must not have been easy for the composer to bear, either.

For lack of space and time, we’ll have to leave the biographical details at that, but it’s enough of a headline to give you an idea Beethoven was not working on this quartet in an idyllic setting.

Click here for Part 2: Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience.

Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2012: Beethoven, Before He Became a God

The first program of Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2012 - Friday evening at 8pm, Market Square Church in Harrisburg - includes an early work by Ludwig van Beethoven, his Quintet for Piano & Winds, Op. 16.

Rehearsing Beethoven

Stuart Malina, conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, will be the pianist for this collaboration with oboist Gerard Reuter, a regular guest at Summermusic, clarinetist Christopher Grymes, familiar to fans of Concertante, bassoonist Peter Kolkay, who played in the Harrisburg Symphony a few seasons ago, and hornist Geoffrey Pilkington, a recent addition to the current Harrisburg Symphony (one of the four soloists in February’s Schumann Concert-Piece).

Beethoven – the “Divine” Beethoven, as he is often imagined – is one of the cornerstones of the repertoire of classical music, his symphonies, sonatas and string quartets forming the foundation on which everything else seems to rest.

So it is perhaps interesting to people used to the “Titanic” Beethoven, the “Larger-than-Life” Beethoven, to hear a few works he composed in the first years of his pre-1800 apprenticeship. It was not a sudden breaking away from his teacher’s traditions that would herald the New Century, replacing efficient formal Classicism with the messy emotional Romanticism.

Music, like history in general, is too prone to such black-and-white observations. Beethoven did not erupt on the scene with his “Eroica” Symphony.

The Quintet for Piano and Winds, from the more “human side” of Beethoven, is not that well known. In fact, it would probably never be mistaken for a “great” work unless Beethoven had never written anything beyond his 2nd Symphony. It was consciously patterned after a similar quintet by Mozart (which Mozart regarded as one of the best things he had ever written at a time he was in the midst of writing the string quartets dedicated to Haydn) but because Beethoven’s is “not so original,” in hindsight, it is considered something of a student work.

Back in March, after Stuart Malina played Mozart’s “Kegelstadt” Trio and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet as part of his annual “Stuart & Friends” concert with colleagues from the Harrisburg Symphony, I was thinking “wouldn’t it be great to do the Beethoven Quintet next year?” Not long afterwards, sitting in Stuart’s living room to record a pod-cast for an up-coming Masterworks Concert, I was delighted to see the score for the Beethoven Quintet on his piano’s music rack. At the time, I didn’t think it was for Market Square Concert’s Summermusic, but I was equally delighted to see it on the program. And there’s always the Mozart Quintet for Piano & Winds for the next time.

And this conjunction of the Mozart and Beethoven Quintets is not just accidental. Beethoven composed his around 1796 or so, about five years after Mozart’s death and only about a dozen years after Mozart had written his quintet.

This performance features another conductor at the piano – James Levine, best known as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera – with members of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics: oboist Hansjörg Schellenberger, clarinetist Karl Leister, hornist Günter Högner, and bassoonist Milan Turković.

= = = = =
1st Movement:

2nd & 3rd Movements:

= = = = =

The overall elegance and balance of the style and formal structure of the piece is evident in the first movement, from its regal slow introduction (something Beethoven would rarely use in the future) – especially with its harking back to the rhythm of the French Overture of Handel’s day leading to a very dramatic dialogue between the pianist and the winds – to the eloquence of the themes, not to mention an almost cursory development section (something Beethoven would later greatly expand) and avoiding the return to the home tonic without even a wink.

It might bring to mind some of the wonderful piano concertos Mozart had composed after he arrived in Vienna himself, back in 1781, where the wind players were so much better than the ones he worked with at home in Salzburg. But as chamber music, there is more interplay between the players than just juxtaposition of the piano against a small orchestra.

If the first movement reminded me of a piano concerto,the slow movement, the emotional core of the work, brings to mind many of the great arias Mozart composed for his best operas, several of which have prominent woodwind obligatos. There is a moment at 0:50-1:06, the closing fragment of woodwinds’ version of Theme 1, which sounded like… well, I couldn’t quite place it: was it a quote or a coincidence? It was one of those moments where you let the music that’s there go off in a slightly different direction when the light-bulb went off – the opening of the final duet, “Es ist ein Traum” (5:58-6:13, here) in the conclusion of Der Rosenkavalier which Richard Strauss composed in 1911!

Of course, Rosenkavalier is Strauss’ tribute to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, so the coincidence of this similarity would make sense. Both are invoking the spirit of Mozart, Beethoven from only a few years’ distance; Strauss, over a century later.

With the finale, we are back in the world of the concerto – as envisioned by Mozart. His themes often had an ebullient simplicity – child-like rather than childish – no matter how perfect the context was around it.

The story goes that at one performance with Beethoven at the piano and the great Friedrich Ramm playing the oboe (Mozart had written his Oboe Concerto for him), the composer took the liberty of taking off at what in a concerto would’ve been a soloist’s prerogative, improvising a short cadenza on a particular chord marked with a fermata. As the passage came around with each restatement, Beethoven would continue improvising: even though the wind-players began to anticipate this, it annoyed Ramm in particular.

Curiously, when the quintet was played in 1816 with Beethoven’s student, Carl Czerny, at the piano, Czerny did the same thing but Beethoven was so annoyed by this, he upbraided his student for his behavior - then sent him a letter of apology the next day.

Today, casual listeners might find Mozart and Haydn indistinguishable, both high points of the Classical Style (c.1750-1800) even if they couldn’t name another composer from the same era. But this is clearly a work inspired by Mozart right down to the turn of phrase and the smallest formal details. Haydn could never have written this piece: if the last movement makes you smile, it’s not the same sense of humor you would hear in a Haydn finale, lacking any overt jokes or musical puns. It is more the light-hearted spirit – that Viennese spirit that we call “joie de vivre” in French because “Wiener Blut” (“Vienna Blood”) sounds so ghastly – than outright humor, a smile rather than a chuckle.

The year after Mozart died and Beethoven was leaving Bonn to study with Haydn in Vienna, Beethoven’s friend and patron, Count Ferdinand Waldstein (for whom a later piano sonata would be named), wrote in his travel album, “With the help of assiduous labor, you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.”

By studying and imitating the best of Mozart – what even Mozart thought was “the best of Mozart” – was this how Beethoven received Mozart’s spirit?

Not long after completing the Quintet – and also the three string trios later published as Op. 9 which, at the time, he thought were among his best works to date – he began his first string quartets (which became the six quartets of Op. 18) and his first symphony, all of which were first heard in 1800.

In 1802, as he was working on his Second Symphony, he told his friend Wenzel Krumpholz (for whom he often played through some new pieces), “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works. From today on, I shall take a new path.”

One of the works he began working on at that time would soon become his Third Symphony, the Eroica.

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What was Beethoven’s life like at the time he was writing his homage to Mozart?

You can read a continuation of this post, here.

- Dick Strawser

Beethoven with Miriam Fried & Jonathan Biss

If it seems that spring will never get here, April showers aside, let me point out Market Square Concert’s last program of the season is Tuesday, April 12th, at Whitaker Center when violinist Miriam Fried and pianist Jonathan Biss will perform four Beethoven violin sonatas – including the “Spring” Sonata.

That concert begins at 6:00 pm, earlier than the traditional starting time, so let me stress that 6pm is not a typo.

Why? Well, every now and them someone wonders if it wouldn’t be a good idea to have something available earlier in the evening so people leaving work at 5:00 would have a concert they could go to after work but before they go home and get settled in for the evening, putting off the homeward-bound rush-hour traffic. We’ve tried it a couple of times for the SummerMusic series and it seemed to work.

But this is the first time with one of the subscription series and, in this case, the reason’s a little different.

Concert dates are determined by what artists the presenter wants to present, trying to find a date in the mutual calendars of the presenter’s series and the artist’s schedule. This can often be a tight fit, depending on availability (and this is why winter concerts are such a bear because we can’t just postpone it till next week because of snow because, quite possibly, the artist will be playing in California or England that night and so isn’t available).

Ellen Hughes really wanted to bring young pianist Jonathan Biss and one of the great violinists in the world today, Miriam Fried, to Harrisburg and the only time it could work out, wouldn’t you know, was in between other engagements. Mr. Biss is substituting for Murray Perahia in a Chicago Symphony-sponsored recital there on Monday and has to be in Boston for a rehearsal on Wednesday morning with the Boston Symphony, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto there – and in order to get there in time, he has to catch a flight from Harrisburg Tuesday evening, hence the earlier-than-usual start time. (I suspect this means there probably won’t be any time for an encore…)

This may be the first time Jonathan Biss appears in Harrisburg but it is not the first time Miriam Fried has been here: I last saw her in January of 1984 – speaking of snow dates. She played the Beethoven Violin Concerto on a very snowy night and it was one of those occasions where – aside from being unable to postpone the Tuesday night concert – two players in the orchestra were unable to make it. Unfortunately they were the bassoon section which meant the William Schuman Symphony No. 3 sounded a bit funky, especially in the long bassoon solo in the last movement’s fugue where we heard 8 measures of silence before the bass clarinet came in.

This presented a problem in the Beethoven concerto because not only are there some wonderful bassoon solos for the principal player, there’s a lot of wind section texture where the second bassoonist plays the all-important bass part. Lacking both of them would sound very strange and so I spent the first half of the concert conflating both bassoon parts into a single bass clarinet part – a solo here, the bass of the wind band there – and then Jim Dunn, our bass clarinetist at the time, sight read the part. It may have been the oddest sounding Beethoven Violin Concerto Miriam Fried ever played but it would’ve sounded odder with those missing bits… oh, well…

Jonathan Biss is Miriam Fried’s son, but this will also be a chance for me to hear the third generation of this musical family. In March of 1963, I attended my first Harrisburg Symphony concert when cellist Raya Gárbousova played the Dvořák Cello Concerto. She was the cellist for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto and an artist Pablo Casals once called “the best cellist I have ever heard.” Her son, violist Paul Biss married Miriam Fried.

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For their Market Square Concerts program (did I mention it begins at 6:00?), they will be performing a program of four violin sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven:

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op.23
Sonata No. 10 in G, Op. 96
Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 12, No. 2
Sonata No. 5 in F, Op. 24 (“Spring”)

Unfortunately for us, Beethoven’s interest in the violin sonata didn’t match his creative output throughout his career like his symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas. The first nine sonatas were all written in a four-year period early in his career and then one more came along as a “special occasion” during his Middle Period. His most famous (if not his greatest) sonata was for an African-English violinist named George Bridgetower – they gave it its premiere (the composition so hurried that Beethoven had to summon his copyist at 4:30am to have the violin part ready in time) but then later had a falling out (a disagreement over a woman, the story goes), so when it was published a few years later, it was dedicated to the great French violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer who, it turned out, never played the piece. Beethoven had been hoping for some exposure as a result of this dedication.

That sense of marketing is also behind the dedication of the first set of violin sonatas which appeared in 1799, composed over the two years before that, and dedicated to the highly esteemed composer Antonio Salieri, one of the most powerful musicians in Vienna’s very tight musical world. We think of Salieri today (wrongly) as Mozart’s Murderer (great theater, though it is) but in his day he was a leading court composer and his approval meant good things for young musicians, especially a young 28-year-old from the German provinces. Beethoven studied briefly with Salieri – the art of setting Italian words to music – and these sonatas (although nothing to do with what he learned from the man) could be seen logically as dedicated out of gratitude to his one-time teacher. And, after all, the first set of six string quartets, written around the same time, were dedicated to Franz Josef Haydn, his primary teacher but also a wise move, politically: it was as if, having accepted the dedication, these great artists were putting their stamp of approval on the young composer who was just beginning his career.

Unlike Mozart, who wrote spontaneously, Beethoven’s was a creative struggle, judging from his notebooks. Sketches for the Op. 12 Sonatas appear in some notebooks going back to 1795, meaning he was thinking about if not actually working on them a few years before they were completed and sent to the publisher.

The first and last sonatas on this program form one of Beethoven’s contrasting pairs – for instance, the dramatic 5th Symphony followed by the bucolic 6th, justifiably nicknamed the “Pastoral” which he worked on at the same time and which were premiered together (their numbers, reversed). These sonatas were intended to be Op.23, Nos. 1 & 2, but due to an engravers error were each given separate numbers.

The A Minor is the dramatic one, turbulent and dark at times with more lyrical contrasts that usually end up subsumed by the drama.

The F Major is the “bucolic,” more relaxed one, if not exactly Pastoral in mood. Its sense of lightness and benign qualities have earned it the nickname “Spring,” a reminder that Beethoven enjoyed his summer trips to the countryside in order to compose in peace.

Both of these works were written more or less simultaneously in 1801. It is interesting to note that a year later, Beethoven would spend much of the summer and fall in the Viennese suburb of Heiligenstadt which any reader of concert program notes would immediately recognize as the place where Beethoven wrote his heart-rending “Heiligenstadt Testament,” describing his fears of losing his hearing: the symptoms had been increasing over the past few years, yet this never seemed to affect his music.

The last sonata to be composed came 10 years after its predecessor, the “Kreutzer.” It is usually overlooked because it does not seem to be an advance on the magnitude of the concerto-like 9th Sonata but there may be a practical reason for this. For whatever reason Beethoven did not continue writing violin sonatas as he did piano sonatas, the 10th was written for another French violinist, Pierre Rode, who was visiting Vienna in 1812 – a fateful year for Beethoven as well as Napoleon – and who, apparently, requested a sonata from the now well-established Beethoven.

It was written at the end of the year Beethoven completed the 7th and wrote the 8th Symphonies, during which time he (we assume) wrote his letter to the Immortal Beloved (whoever she may have been), met her (we assume) at a spa in Bohemia that summer and (we assume) broke up with her before he returned to Vienna (stopping off, by the way, to annoy his brother who was living with his girl-friend without having married her: you can read more about how Beethoven’s personal life intertwined with his creative life that year in this post at my blog, Thoughts on a Train).The bust (see right) was made by Klein in 1812, the likeness taken from a "life mask."

He returned to Vienna in November, then wrote the G Major Sonata for a concert in late December with Rode, aware that Rode, though four years his junior, was somewhat past his prime (as the story goes). The composer Ludwig Spohr, a great violinist in his own right, indicated when he was in Vienna in 1812 that Rode was already past his prime, finding later that Rode’s technique had deteriorated substantially that the man put aside playing the violin to focus on teaching and composing.

This may explain the lack of bravura in Beethoven’s last violin sonata. He wrote to his patron and student, the Archduke Rudolph, that “I did not make great haste in the last movement [of the G Major Violin Sonata] for the sake of mere punctuality, the more because, in writing it, I had to consider the playing of Rode. In our finales we like rushing and resounding passages, but this does not please R and — this hinders me somewhat.”

However, Spohr, who was in Vienna at the same time – essentially competing with Rode for audience – did leave an account of his acquaintance with Beethoven that would also lead us to believe that, because of his deafness, the composer was past his prime as a performer: Spohr heard a private performance of Beethoven playing the “Ghost” Trio that was “by no means an enjoyment.”

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“…in the first place, the pianoforte was woefully out of tune which, however, troubled Beethoven little, since he could hear nothing of it, and, secondly, of the former so admired excellence of the virtuoso, scarcely anything was left, in consequence of his total deafness. In the forte, the poor deaf man hammered in such a way upon the keys that entire groups of notes were inaudible, so that one lost all intelligence of the subject unless the eye followed the score at the same time. I felt moved with deepest sorrow at so hard a destiny… Beethoven’s almost continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me now.” – Ludwig Spohr (Autobiography)
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Conversing with Beethoven, when they met at a restaurant, was unpleasant as Spohr had to speak “so loud as to be heard in the third room off.” They met frequently, both at Spohr’s home and at the restaurant. He found Beethoven “a little blunt, not to say uncouth; but a truthful eye beamed from under his bushy eyebrows.”

After Beethoven had been absent from the restaurant for several days, Spohr inquired if he had been ill? Beethoven replied, “My boot was and as I have only one pair, I had house-arrest.”

Such was Beethoven’s life at the time he composed this pleasant, genial violin sonata written for Rode – Spohr’s “rival” – but which, like the Piano Trio in B-flat Major written the year before, was dedicated instead to the Archduke Rudolph who, we should remember, was the only patron Beethoven had who always supplied him with funding even in difficult economic times like 1812.

- Dick Strawser