Classics 2b: Beethoven!



Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Ludwig van Beethoven
Coriolan Overture, Op. 62

Plutarch, the Ancient Greek historian and biographer, tells the story of the Roman general Coriolanus, who defeated the Volscians in central Italy, southeast of Rome, and captured their city of Corioli in 493 B.C. According to the story, Coriolanus returned victorious to Rome, but soon had to flee the city when charged with tyrannical conduct and opposition to the distribution of grain to the starving plebs. He raised an army of Volscians against his own people but turned back after entreaties of his mother and his wife. The Volscians, however, regarding him as a traitor because of his indecisiveness, put him to death.

The inspiration for Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture came neither from Plutarch nor from Shakespeare, who made him the subject of his play Coriolanus, but from a play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin – poet, dramatist and functionary in the Austrian Finance Ministry (Austria’s way of supporting its artists). Von Collin’s play was a philosophical treatise on individual freedom and personal responsibility. It premiered in 1802 to great acclaim, using incidental music derived from Mozart’s opera Idomeneo.

Beethoven took just three weeks to compose the Coriolan Overture in January 1807. It was meant to stand on its own as a composition inspired by the play. The Overture was premiered in March at an all-Beethoven concert held in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz.

The stark, dramatic music of the overture is one of Beethoven’s more explosive and violent expressions, an apt portrayal of Coriolanus, who was known for his short fuse.

Even in the lyrical second subject, the music remains quiet for a moment only,

quickly reverting to a fortissimo outburst.

Scholars usually assume that the music, rather than telling the story of the play, was intended as a musical portrait of Coriolanus himself.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

When really pressed, Ludwig van Beethoven could work fast. In a letter to his publisher in mid-November 1806 there is no mention of the Violin Concerto as work in progress, but on December 23 it was premiered by Franz Clement, a friend of the composer and leader of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien. As was common with Beethoven, he made continual changes in the manuscript after the premiere until publication in 1808, but the changes were mostly in detail and not in the fundamental conception of the work.

Franz Clement was a formidable musician with a prodigious musical memory, lauded both for his technique and his impeccable intonation and musicianship. From manuscript sources it becomes clear that he tried to advise Beethoven on phrasing and the technical possibilities of the instrument, but that the composer took only some of his suggestions. In the Concerto Beethoven provided him with immense challenges, both technical and musical. In retrospect, it is clear that the Concerto was the first major violin concerto of the late Classical period, setting the tone for the subsequent works of Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and Max Bruch.

The premiere, however, was not a success, nor did the work fare much better the following year. The public simply did not get it. The turning point for the Concerto came in 1844, when 13-year-old Joseph Joachim performed it in London with the Philharmonic Society, Mendelssohn conducting. For the occasion, the Society set aside its rule against the appearance of child prodigies. Joachim at 13 was considered a fully mature artist.

It is an amusing – and often educational – exercise to take a time trip to put oneself in the shoes of an audience who rejected a work of art that subsequently went on to be haled as a masterpiece. So what did Beethoven’s audience object to in the Violin Concerto?

First there’s the opening; Beethoven was no newcomer to controversial openings. Was it the four repeated identical solo timpani beats that form part of the main theme that amazed Beethoven’s contemporaries? Haydn had done the same thing in the Symphony No. 103, the “Drum Roll,” but that was a symphony, not a violin concerto. At the fifth beat, the woodwinds, and particularly the oboe, chime in with a gentle melody,

but the four notes return immediately, now a motto that carries over in all the themes.

The Concerto contains cadenzas for all three movements, but it also contains many cadenza-like passages and a range surpassing even that of Vivaldi's concerti. While Mozart was a fine violinist, that instrument was not his forte, and his concerti were for his own use. But Beethoven wrote the Violin Concerto for a brilliant young violinist – and composer and conductor as well – Franz Clement, whose virtuosity and pinpoint accuracy of intonation inspired Beethoven to give special prominence to the E-string. The soloist's entrance in the first movement is a telling example.

The second movement, Larghetto, is a chorale-like theme and a set of four variations. Throughout his life, Beethoven had been an innovator in the ancient genre of theme and variations, the final movement of his Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") being but one example. In the Violin Concerto, the theme is not the standard sequence of two repeated strains. Rather, it is a long melody with no internal repeats.

Likewise, the soloist doesn't simply embellish the melody with increasingly acrobatic and elaborate decoration, but rather builds the emotional intensity. Near the end of the movement, Beethoven provides a section of new material following the fourth variation

and a short cadenza, leading without a break into the Rondo Finale.

This, a lively bravura movement based on a dancing folk-like theme as the refrain, is the technical counterbalance to the emotional intensity of the first two movements. Brahms and Max Bruch were to imitate the ebullient good humor in the finale of their own Violin Concertos.

One other reason for the initial rejection of Beethoven’s Concerto resides in the violin concerti of the Classical period. Like Mozart’s five concerti, these were modest – although elegant – in their requirements of the soloist. Unlike twentieth-century music lovers, who revere the music of centuries past more than contemporary music, the challenging Italian-style concerti of Vivaldi or Bach had long since become passé in nineteenth-century Vienna. Beethoven was virtually reinventing the genre, setting the stage for a rash of challenging virtuoso violin works by such performer-composers Niccoló Paganini that soon took Europe by storm.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in c Minor, Op. 67

The four most clichéd notes in classical music were once the most revolutionary. For the first time a rhythm, rather than a melody, became the main subject of a symphonic movement – and not merely as a first theme to be stated and picked up again for a while in the development and recapitulation sections. Beethoven wove the rhythm into the entire fabric of the first movement, and subsequently into the rest of the Symphony. The motive first appears as a repeated demand, subsequently expanded into a genuine melody in the first theme. It recurs as a throbbing accompaniment in bass and timpani in the second theme, all the way to the final cadence of the exposition.

Such an original symphonic structure did not come easily, especially to a composer who lacked the ever-ready melodic genius of a Mozart, Bach or Haydn, who all produced copiously on demand. A collection of the composer’s sketchbooks bears witness to the lengthy and often painful gestation of some of his greatest music. The Fifth Symphony took four years to complete, between 1804 and 1808. But Beethoven also had to eat, and during those four years he also produced the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Op. 59 String Quartets, the Mass in C and the Violin Concerto.

Although Beethoven had already been at work on what was to become the Fifth Symphony, he composed the Fourth in fairly short order in 1806 on commission from Count Franz von Oppersdorff. The Count eventually paid the 500 florins agreed upon for the work and in 1807 commissioned another symphony with a down payment of 200 florins. Beethoven notified Oppersdorff in March 1808 that the Fifth Symphony was ready and that he should send the remaining 300 florins. But the Count sent only another installment of 150 florins, and by November Beethoven, in one of his less than ethical moves, apparently felt justified in selling the score to the publisher Gottfried Härtel. Upon finally paying in full, Oppersdorff received a copy.

The Symphony No. 5 was premiered at one of those monster concerts common in the nineteenth century that included premiere of the Sixth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the aria "Ah! Perfido, the Choral Fantasy and several movements of the Mass in C. One can only imagine the bewilderment of the audience on their first encounter in a single evening with the "Pastoral" and the Fifth.

Because the Fifth Symphony is so familiar it is difficult to think of it as innovative, but it was not only the integration four-note rhythmic motif into the first movement that was new. It is the fact that this little rhythm becomes the motto that unifies the entire symphony.

In the first movement, the principal theme hammers away at the rhythm in almost every measure. Then, the second theme, which should provide a significant contrast, starts off with the motto in the solo horn, only afterwards becoming somewhat more gentle and legato – although that, too begins to ramp up the emotional tension as it continues.

The second movement, marked Andante con moto, involves its own kind of innovation. It is made up of two short juxtaposed, contrasting themes, the first in dotted rhythm,

the second a slow almost military theme in the brass. Beethoven produces from the two themes a double set of variations. And it should be noted that the second theme contains within it in augmentation the germinal four-note rhythm of the first movement.

After what has been called a "ghostly" opening of the scherzo, Beethoven takes up the motto again prominently in the horns, and it is this segment of the third movement that he chooses to repeat in the finale.

Symphony No. 5 has frequently been referred to as a struggle from darkness to light, but it is a commonplace that has palpable grounding in truth. Not only does the symphony begin in c minor and end in C major, but there is also the magnificent transition between the third and fourth movements, a kind of breaking through of sunlight clouds with violins stammering over timpani throbbing out the motto.

The eruption through to the triumphant finale paved the way for the symphonic writing of the future, including Beethoven's own Ninth,

Mendelssohn’s Third (The “Scottish”) and Brahms’s First.