17. Late-period works.

In some ways the few compositions finished between 1814 and 1816 – the song cycle and the sonatas op.90, op.102 nos.1 and 2, and op.101 – stand closer to Romantic music of the 1830s than any other Beethoven pieces. The opening movement of op.101, a genuine miniature sonata form in an unbroken lyrical sweep, begins quietly on the dominant as though the music was already in progress: an almost Schumannesque effect. The returns of the first-movement themes (marked ‘mit der innigsten Empfindung’ and ‘teneramente’) later in the course of this sonata and in op.102 no.1 do not sound like characteristic Beethovenian recapitulations. They are nostalgic recollections which again suggest Schumann and his generation. All four sonatas carry on much further than before Beethoven’s search for more fluid solutions to the problem of the form of the total sonata, in terms of the weight, balance and mood of the various movements.

The Sonata in B op.106, arbitrarily, but not inappropriately called the ‘Hammerklavier’ (both op.101 and op.109 are also subtitled ‘für das Hammerklavier’), occupied Beethoven from late 1817 to late 1818; it was his first really large project in five years. Like the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, it occupies a pivotal position in his output, though the differences between the two works are striking. The ‘Eroica’ is one of the most popular and ‘available’ of his compositions, while the Hammerklavier is probably the most arcane. In different ways each represented a breakthrough for Beethoven, one like the crest of a great wave and the other like the breaking of a dam. And while both were works of revolutionary novelty, the Hammerklavier also paradoxically represents a reaction, in that Beethoven reverted to the traditional four-movement pattern in place of the fluid formal experiments of the sonatas of 1814–16, and turned away from their tone of lyrical intimacy.

One feature Beethoven did pick up from them was the idea of an abrasive fugal finale, present in the Cello Sonata in D op.102 no.2. The Hammerklavier fugue with its famous cancrizans section is integrated into the total conception with astonishing care and rigour. An improvisatory introduction to the finale seems to grope for the fugue or, perhaps, to will it into existence (something of the kind happens in other late finales: opp.110, 125, 133, 135). Then the shape of the subject and the modulation plan both follow a pattern that has been established firmly (not to say exhaustively) in each of the previous movements. This is construction by means of descending 3rds, acting to a large extent as a substitute for the traditional dominant relation, and creating large-scale conflict between the tonic B and B that is arrestingly resolved.

Beethoven had never written a work that depended so thoroughly, in all its aspects, on a single musical idea. The extremity of its conception, and of its demands on the performer, are as much a part of the character of this piece as are ideas of heroism in the ‘Eroica’.

In the three sonatas of 1820–22 Beethoven returned to the proportions and preoccupations of the sonatas of 1814–16. Of all his works, the Sonata in E op.109 is perhaps the most original in form, in respect both to its first movement and to the total aggregate. The first movement is another sonata form in an unbroken lyrical sweep, like the first movement of op.101, but much more complex and shadowy in quality, thanks first of all to the change from Vivace, ma non troppo to Adagio espressivo at the second group – after a mere eight bars. The next movement, an explosive Prestissimo, combines the functions of a more lucid sonata-form statement and a scherzo. A slow theme and variations follows, concluding with an extraordinarily serene da capo of the original hymn-like theme.

Under the lyrical spell of the Sonata in A op.110, even the fugue in the finale is tuneful and positively smooth in counterpoint. And in the Sonata in C minor op.111, after the first movement has recalled in a spiritualized way all the ‘C minor’ gestures of the early Vienna years, the variations of the second (and last) movement create a visionary aura that had never been known in music before. This mood is recaptured at the end of the Diabelli Variations.

Between October 1822 and February 1824 Beethoven completed three works which are in one way or another as gigantic as the Hammerklavier Sonata: the Diabelli Variations, the Mass in D (Missa solemnis) and the Ninth Symphony. Work on the variations and the mass had been in progress since early 1819. Beethoven’s slowness in composing the mass can be explained in part by his inevitable resolve to approach the text in the highest seriousness and treat the setting as a personal testament. Indeed, the religious impetus spilled over into his next composition, the Ninth Symphony, with its setting of stanzas from Schiller’s half-bacchanalian, half-religious Ode to Joy. Mass and symphony stand together as the crowning statement about non-musical ideas in Beethoven’s later life – a ‘religious’ statement to match or, rather, to supplant the ‘heroic’ statement made in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and Leonore nearly 20 years earlier. Between the two late works there are many parallels of musical gesture and language.

But whereas the Ninth Symphony, despite grumblings that are heard from time to time about the finale, has always been and remains one of Beethoven’s most successful and influential compositions, the same cannot be said of the Mass. It is perhaps unfortunate for the dissemination and appreciation of this work that the relaxed concert conventions of Beethoven’s day – at the première only three separate movements were ventured – no longer obtain. If they did, the musical public might well come to appreciate and love the simpler movements, at least: the restrained and lyrical Kyrie, one of the composer’s loveliest inventions; the Sanctus, with its organ-like interlude and ethereal violin solo in the Benedictus; and the Agnus, whose touching plea for what Beethoven described as ‘inner and outer peace’ is twice interrupted by exciting military fanfares and melodramatic recitatives, not to speak of one giddy modulating fugue.

Even the few statements made above are enough to suggest how much of this mass is unorthodox, both musically and liturgically. Unorthodoxies are multiplied in the Gloria and Credo (always the problematic movements for composers of masses). It is particularly in these two central movements that the traditions of the Viennese mass are made to accommodate older traditions deliberately resuscitated; Beethoven rubs shoulders with Haydn (the Haydn of the masses), Palestrina, Handel and Bach. Sublimity, awe and pathos are evoked unforgettably, but they are perhaps evoked too frequently and in too rapid a succession to leave a satisfactory total impression. One can feel this even while acknowledging Beethoven’s strenuous efforts at organization: the use of recurring themes for ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ and ‘Credo, credo’, the powerful tonal dynamic, and the weighting effect of the tremendous fugues ‘In gloria Dei Patris’ and ‘Et vitam venturi’.

In the Mass Beethoven was obviously constrained by the pre-set text; in the symphony he chose his own text. He also chose the context for it: not within an intellectual liturgical structure, but in the real world of experience – for paradoxically or not, that is what the three opening instrumental movements seems to have meant to Beethoven. Ultimately, in the introduction to the finale, this world is rejected in favour of Schiller’s transcendent vision of the joys of brotherhood, set ‘without the adornments of Art’ as an unaccompanied melody of universal folklike simplicity. From his experience of oneness with his fellows and with nature, says Schiller, man receives his intimation of a loving Father dwelling above the stars. This passage of the poem Beethoven set in a solemn religious style recalling that used in parts of the Mass in D.

As the one late-period Beethoven symphony, the Ninth is in a sense retrospective in resuming the ‘symphonic’ ideal which for a decade had inspired little music. Retrospective, too, is the frank echo of revolutionary French cantatas in the choral finale. Yet as a gesture, this finale shows once again Beethoven’s uncanny grasp of essences below ‘the adornments of Art’. As Wagner always insisted, words and a choir with soloists to sing them seem to force their way into the symphony in order to make instrumental music fully articulate, to resolve the conflict of the earlier movements with a consummation of unexampled ecstasy.

In the late period Beethoven’s treatment of sonata form grows more and more subtle and even equivocal. For example, he now tended to minimize the formal development section and place a major climax after, not at, the point of recapitulation (see opp.106, 130, 132). In the face of this, the first movement of the Ninth provides a magnificent reassertion of the traditional dynamic – though with a difference. During the famous and much imitated introduction, the main theme (another ‘evolving’ theme, one which seems to evolve out of timeless infinity) grows up over a hollow dominant 5th, A–E; then at the recapitulation this returns fortissimo as a tonic D–A with F in the bass: an enhanced recapitulation from which all sense of bluster has been filtered away and replaced by what Tovey called catastrophe, and others brutishness. The subsidiary tonal areas of this movement, B and a momentary B , are ‘composed out’ in memorable fashion throughout the rest of the symphony, as is the basic D minor/major tropism of the first-movement recapitulation.

After completing the Ninth Symphony in early 1824, Beethoven spent the two and a half years that remained to him writing with increasing ease, it seems, and exclusively in the medium of the string quartet. The five late string quartets contain Beethoven’s greatest music, or so at least many listeners in the 20th century came to feel. The first of the five, op.127 in E of 1824–5, shows all the important characteristics of this unique body of music. It opens with another lyrical sonata form containing themes in two different tempos (as in op.109); the Maestoso theme melts into a faster one, wonderfully intimate and tender – even though it is constructed in three-part species counterpoint over a cantus firmus. The slow variation movement is of the new, more integral kind and the scherzo takes its impetus from a fugato. The finale burgeons with country-dance tunes, of a kind associated in the other late quartets with the interior dance movements (which one can scarcely call scherzos; certainly Beethoven no longer did so). In a brilliant coda, this finale submits to a sort of spirtualized dissolution, an effect prefigured in the Quartet in F minor op.95 and repeated in the next quartet, the A minor op.132.

The composition of op.132 was interrupted by a serious illness in April 1825, and an extraordinary ‘Hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity, from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode’ forms the central movement (of five). Beethoven’s intimations of mortality take the form of modal cantus firmus variations dimly recalled from Albrechtsberger; they alternate movingly with a purely tonal section entitled ‘Feeling new strength’. Cantus firmus writing is also in evidence in the first movement, as the themes in different tempos are now closely woven together. Extreme rhythmic fluidity combines with extreme concentration of detail. Beethoven had never before written such a deeply anguished composition.

In the Quartet in B op.130, the confrontation of themes in different tempos gives the opening movement an elusive, even whimsical feeling. A deliberate sense of dissociation is intensified by the succession of five more movements, often in remote keys, with something of the effect of ‘character pieces’ in a Baroque suite. The feverish little Presto is followed by movements labelled by Beethoven Poco scherzando, Alla danza tedesca and Cavatina – and then by the ‘Grosse Fuge’, which seems to bear on its convulsive shoulders the responsibility for asserting order after so much disruption earlier in the piece. Its sections, built on various transformations of a cantus firmus subject almost have the weight of separate movements, as in the Ninth Symphony finale. The lyric beauty of the slow G section and the Gemüthlichkeit of the recurring section in 6/8 metre sometimes go unappreciated, it seems, by listeners awed by the determined dissonant fury of the others. A closed book to the 19th century, to Stravinsky the ‘Grosse Fuge’ was ‘this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary for ever’.

Years before, Beethoven had begun to extend the underlying principles of the sonata style to embrace the entire aggregate of movements in a piece. Now he found his largest movements breaking down into ‘sub-movements’ with a subsidiary integrity of their own. In the event, the Quartet in B proved to be quite literally disruptive. Beethoven sanctioned the removal of the fugal finale after the first performance, had it issued separately as op.133 and provided the quartet with a new, less radical (and less splendid) finale.

As though in reaction to this study in musical dissociation, Beethoven next wrote the most closely integrated of all his large compositions. From this point of view, the Quartet of C minor op.131 may be seen as the culmination of his significant effort as a composer ever since going to Vienna. The seven movements run continuously into one another, and for the first time in Beethoven’s music there is an emphatic and unmistakable thematic connection between the first movement and the last – not a reminiscence, but a functional parallel which helps bind the whole work together. A work of the deepest subtlety and beauty, at the end this quartet still seems to hinge on a stroke of the most elemental nature, as rushing D major scales in the finale recall the Neapolitan relationship set up between the opening fugue in C minor and the following Allegro in D. Charles Rosen has remarked on Beethoven’s continual

attempt to strip away, at some point in each large work, all decorative and even expressive elements from the musical material so that part of the structure of tonality is made to appear for a moment naked and immediate, and its presence in the rest of the work as a dynamic and temporal force suddenly becomes radiant.

A comparison with the analogous Neapolitan articulation at the end of the Quartet op.59 no.2 of 1806 shows how Beethoven could make such effects tell at the end of his lifetime.

The last quartet, op.135 in F, is a brilliant study in Classical nostalgia, though it does not lack a vision of the abyss in the second movement and a characteristic response through hymnody in the third. (A highly compressed variation set in the key of D , marked ‘Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo’, this piece was originally drafted as a postscript to the finale of op.131.) In the finale of op.135, when the main theme (marked with the words ‘Es muss sein!’) appears as a simple-minded inversion of the motif of the slow introduction (marked ‘Muss es sein?’), a strong suspicion arises of parody – a self-parody of the familiar evolutionary slow introductions of these late years (cf op.111). The thematic tag itself was taken over from a contemporary humorous canon (woo196).

Like the Eighth Symphony, op.135 seems to mark the composer’s farewell to a fully realized episode in his artistic journey. The writing of the late quartets was stimulated by external factors – Prince Golitsïn’s commission and the return of the Schuppanzigh Quartet to Vienna – but it continued under its own impetus after the commission was fulfilled. The cohesiveness of this crowning episode of Beethoven’s compositional activity is underlined by the observation made by various critics that three (or more) of the late quartets share melodic material. Even without this, they share some special stylistic characteristics; but even with all that, it is hard to accept the further implication that the individual works are aesthetically incomplete unless viewed as some sort of ‘triptych’ or ‘cycle’. This may be true of the poems by T.S. Eliot which they inspired but not of the original quartets, any more than it is of other clearly associated works in Beethoven’s output, such as the Mass in D and the Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven, Ludwig van