11. The ‘three periods’.

The division of Beethoven’s life and works into three periods was proposed as early as 1828 by Schlosser, taken up by Fétis in 1837, and then elaborated and popularized by Lenz in his influential Beethoven et ses trois styles of 1852. Though each of these critics grouped Beethoven's works differently, the three-period schema took hold and settled into something like a concensus: a first formative period ending around 1802, a second period lasting until around 1812 and a third period from 1813 to 1827. This schema has been attacked, not without reason, as simplistic and suspiciously consonant with evolutionary preconceptions (some of which are discussed below in §19). Yet it refuses to die, because in spite of all it obviously does accommodate the bluntest style distinctions to be observed in Beethoven’s output, and also because the breaks between the periods correspond with the major turning-points in Beethoven’s biography. There can be no doubt that with Beethoven – not to speak of other composers – a very close relationship existed between his creative energies and his emotional life.

The three-period framework should not be scrapped, then, but it is certainly in need of some refining. The following takes account of a number of suggestions made in the more recent literature. First, a fourth period should be added, or rather, divided off from the traditional first period: the music composed at Bonn, about which the 19th century knew little and probably cared less. Second, examination shows that each of the four periods breaks naturally into two sub-periods, and so they are best conceived of in this way. Third, allowance must be made not only for the general development of a composer’s style, but also for the inner necessities of certain genres and the effects of his experience with them. For example, works in genres which he was attacking for the first time may have less ‘advanced’ stylistic features than works of the same date in familiar, much used genres.

It is also necessary to understand that in each of the four periods the nature of the two sub-periods and their relation to each other differ considerably. In the Bonn period the first sub-period (1782–5) contains juvenilia of small importance. Then there seems to be a pause; it is known that the years 1786–9 were very eventful ones for Beethoven but little is known of any music he composed in this period. From 1790–92 a group of much more mature works survives – a rather impressive corpus, indeed, which could reasonably support the young composer’s ambitious plan of study in Vienna.

In the early Vienna period, Beethoven first had to gain control over the Viennese style and assert his individuality within it (1793–9). Then from 1800 to 1802 he produced at high speed a series of increasingly experimental pieces which must be seen in retrospect as a transition to the middle period. It is in this sub-period that the relative effects of genre and familiarity are especially clear. In 1798 and 1799 the piano sonatas are fluid and visionary but the earliest string quartets are relatively stiff. By 1800 the quartet writing moves more easily but the first of his symphonies is still decidedly conservative.

The middle period begins with a famous series of compositions in the heroic vein (1803–8): the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Leonore (Fidelio) and others. The music of the sub-period 1809–12 follows the same general stylistic impetus, but becomes rather less radical and turbulent as it becomes more and more effortless in technique. Most of Beethoven’s orchestral music dates from the middle period.

The late period is in every way the most complex. In 1813–18, years marked by emotional upheavals, Beethoven’s output fell off sharply. Naturally enough, most attention has been directed to the few compositions in this sub-period of a more serious nature; increasingly intimate and even ‘private’, they convey unmistakable hints of a new style. But the years 1813–16 also saw many ‘public’ works, such as the ‘Battle Symphony’, Der glorreiche Augenblick and the Chor auf die verbündeten Fürsten for the Congress of Vienna. These, as Maynard Solomon has observed, ‘regressed to a pastiche of the heroic style’ and show just as unmistakably that the style change was now being worked out slowly and with great difficulty – not at all like the earlier transition in 1800–02. The Hammerklavier Sonata of 1818 represented a kind of breakthrough, but only after the matter of his nephew’s guardianship was settled by the courts did Beethoven’s compositional energies flow easily again, in the unbroken series of late-period masterpieces written from 1820 to 1826.

Beethoven, Ludwig van