12. Music of the Bonn period.

Ten compositions by Beethoven are known from the years 1782–5, when efforts were being made to promote him as a prodigy. Publication was gained for most of these works. Another 30 or so from the years 1787–92 are extant; of these, few appear to pre-date 1790 and only one was published at the time. As a good many of the others are known only from later sources, scholars have always suspected that they may be known in considerably revised versions. It was a pet theory of Thayer, the great 19th-century Beethoven biographer, that the young composer brought a thick portfolio of music from Bonn to Vienna and drew on it liberally for compositions of the next decade and even later. Rather more than most composers, as Thayer had observed, Beethoven was inclined to publish his juvenilia in later life and also to incorporate parts of them into mature pieces. And this in turn suggests a special motive for studying the unassuming music of Beethoven’s Bonn years.

The most substantial of the earliest compositions are sets of three piano sonatas and three piano quartets. The main musical influences on the boy have been seen as, first, Neefe and Sterkel, and then Mozart; each of the piano quartets is modelled on a specific work by Mozart, from the set of violin sonatas published in 1781 (k379/373a, 380/374f, 296). Beethoven looked to Mozart again and again during his first decade in Vienna (see opp.3, 16, 18 no.5).

During the second Bonn sub-period Beethoven produced about a dozen lieder of considerable interest. He published some of them later in op.52 (1805), but only the simpler ones; the more elaborate and intense Bonn songs are not well known because they were discovered relatively late and buried in the 1888 supplement to the Gesamtausgabe. In 1790, the important commission to prepare official cantatas on the death of Emperor Joseph II and the accession of Leopold II spurred Beethoven on to the most ambitious of his youthful projects. The funeral cantata gave him the opportunity for some admirably expressive writing in the pathetic C minor chorus which frames the work and in the serene soprano aria with chorus. He was to use this again with superb effect at the dénouement of Leonore, 15 years later. In addition to the five large arias within these cantatas, he also composed three accomplished concert arias: Prüfung des Küssens, Mit Mädeln sich vertragen (his first Goethe setting) and Primo amore.

A genre in which any budding virtuoso had to excel was the variation set. In 1790–92 Beethoven wrote out two brilliant sets for piano, on Righini’s ‘Venni amore’ and Dittersdorf’s ‘Es war einmal ein alter Mann’; one set for piano duet on a theme by Count Waldstein; and one for violin and piano on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ (completed in Vienna). While many of the variations are of the insipid decorative variety, others deal with the theme in a more interesting, substantive fashion. It is in these ‘analytical’ variations, perhaps, more than in the other Bonn music, that the Beethoven to come can be glimpsed.

Less impressive, in these years, is the instrumental music in the sonata style. There is an incomplete draft for a passionate symphony movement in C minor; fragments of a big violin concerto and of some sort of concertante for piano, flute and bassoon; a complete trio for the same three instruments; a piano trio (woo38) and what looks like part of a movement from another, and a few rather colourless sonata movements for piano. There are also many sketches. (Is it accidental that so much of this music has been transmitted in an incomplete form? An oboe concerto and the original version of the B Piano Concerto, both dating from this period, have vanished with barely a trace.) Where Beethoven departed from formula in these works he seems to have straggled helplessly, as in the violin concerto fragment. Although there are some bold strokes, they are seldom integrated convincingly into the total musical discourse.

Greater sophistication is shown by the Wind Octet op.103, but here there is reason to believe that Beethoven rewrote what was originally a Bonn score during his first years in Vienna, with an eye to publication. Leaving this work out of consideration, one is bound to conclude that Beethoven at Bonn was a less interesting composer of works in the sonata style than of music in other genres – variations, lieder and large vocal-orchestral pieces. In view of his later output, this conclusion may seem surprising. Yet the sonata style as it is generally known was very much a Viennese speciality. The Bonn works in the sonata style make clear how important and right it was for Beethoven to have gone back to Vienna in late 1792, and how large a part Vienna was to play in the formation and nurture of his musical personality.

Beethoven, Ludwig van