13. Music of the early Vienna period.

During his first year or so in Vienna Beethoven appears to have composed considerably less than in the years just preceding and following. There are signs that he spent some time revising or recasting an amount of his Bonn music to reflect Viennese standards and taste. The Wind Octet has already been mentioned; sketches show that he also started reworking his violin and oboe concertos. Fragments of the juvenile piano quartets were incorporated into some of the first sonatas composed in Vienna, op.2 nos.1 and 3.

By the time opp.1 and 2 were published (July 1795, March 1796) Beethoven certainly had the musical wherewithal to make Vienna sit up and listen. Probably the best-known movement from this impressive group of six pieces is the opening Allegro of the Piano Sonata in F minor op.2 no.1, a remarkable precursor of Beethovenian concentration and intensity (and the more remarkable in that the sketches go back to Bonn). In 1795, however, this movement was an exception. Most of the early music is scaled very broadly, weighty and discursive, even overblown. Thus for many years Beethoven most often wrote sonatas in four movements, rather than three, as was common with Haydn and Mozart, and it seems indicative that his op.3 was a string trio in six movements, modelled on the large Divertimento k563 by Mozart. There is inconclusive evidence that op.3 goes back to a Bonn original, but in its final form it was certainly written in Vienna, like the Wind Octet.

Opp.1 and 2 provide examples of the rather ponderous slow movements characteristic of the first Vienna period, and also of that famous innovation the scherzo. Beethoven’s early scherzos move no faster than most Haydn minuets and sound no more humorous, but they last considerably longer and tend to be constructed out of more symmetrical periods. As for movements in sonata form, most of them contain a great deal of musical material – and a great many modulations in the second group. Though Beethoven’s still emerging powers of organization were sometimes overtaxed, sometimes they were not and there are passages of authentic Beethovenian power, especially in the matter of long-range control over bold harmonic action. Cases in point are the passing modulations in the first movement of the A major Sonata op.2 no.2, and the expanded recapitulation in the Adagio of the G major Trio op.1 no.2.

In these early years Beethoven made his name as a pianist and improviser and as a composer primarily for piano. Some ideas of his improvising style can be formed from his published piano variations, from copious notations on his early sketchleaves, and from certain incomplete piano scores which are perhaps better viewed as aides-mémoires than as unachieved compositions. The well-known Rondo a capriccio was completed probably by Diabelli after Beethoven’s death and published as op.129 under the irresponsible title ‘Rage over a Lost Penny’, and an interesting cyclic ‘Fantasia’ in three movements has come to light in the so-called ‘Kafka sketchbook’ (British Library). In later years he improvised less, of course, but evidence of his improvising style is still to be found in the Fantasias opp.77 and 80, the cadenzas to piano concertos, and shorter cadenza-like passages in a very large number of other pieces.

Beethoven was naturally open to the influence of other pianist-composers at a time when the technique of the instrument was expanding significantly. Too much can be made, however, of similar themes and pianistic textures in Beethoven and Clementi, Dussek and other such composers. From the start, and even at his most discursive, Beethoven had a commitment to the total structure that makes Clementi seem very lax. His well-known insistence on making transitional and cadential matter sound individual is already in evidence; he had little use for the debased coin of the style galant which was still in circulation in the 1790s. And in his ‘serious’ compositions piano virtuosity is always used in the service of a musical idea, never for its own sake. These compositions may sound pompous or gauche, sometimes, but they never sound meretricious and they never lack a certain intellectual and imaginative quality.

As has been mentioned above, when Haydn heard the op.1 trios he praised them but thought the public would not understand or accept the third, in C minor. One suspects that Haydn himself may have been put off by the extremes of tempo, dynamics, texture and local chromatic action in this piece, and still more by the resulting emotional aura. He would not have been the last listener to find something callow and stagey, which is to say essentially impersonal, in these insistent gestures of pathos and high drama. Beethoven of course paid no attention to his advice and published increasingly sophisticated C minor items in nearly every one of his composite sets of works over the next eight years (opp.9, 10, 18, 30). In these years C minor was practically the only minor key he used for full-length pieces (though D minor is used for the impressive slow movements of op.10 no.3 and op.18 no.1, as well as for the ‘Tempest’ Sonata op.31 no.2). The most successful early embodiments of Beethoven’s ‘C minor mood’ are no doubt the Sonate pathétique op.13 (1797–8) and the Third Piano Concerto (?1800–03). Still to come were the 32 Variations on an Original Theme, for piano, the Coriolan Overture, the Fifth Symphony and the last piano sonata.

The first movements, in sonata form, of the C minor Trio and the F minor Sonata have quiet main themes which are designed to return fortissimo at the point of recapitulation. This is a characteristic Beethoven fingerprint. In the early works it often makes for a rather blustery effect. Yet it adumbrates a new view of the form whereby the recapitulation is conceived less as a symmetrical return or a climax than as a transformation or triumph. The sonata style is always inherently ‘dramatic’, in the special sense expounded and illuminated by Tovey. Tovey also pointed out that at their most characteristic Haydn and Mozart use the style to project high comedy, the musical equivalent of a comedy of manners. Beethoven was already groping for ways of using it for tragedy, melodrama or his own special brand of inspirational theatre of ideas.

This radical approach to sonata form (which encompasses all its aspects, of course, not only the enhanced recapitulation) becomes clearer in the piano sonatas of 1796–9: op.7, op.10 nos.1–3 and op.13. In op.13 and in the fine Sonata in D op.10 no.3, although the main theme does not return loudly, there is still a compelling impression that something urgent is at stake in the musical dialectic. Broadly speaking, it was this sense of urgency in dealing with what became known as the Classical style that Viennese aristocratic circles found most novel and impressive in the ‘grand Mogul’, as Haydn called him, from the provinces.

A deliberate campaign to annex all current musical genres can be read into Beethoven’s activities in these years. He wrote an effective concert aria – a scena and rondò – to a text adapted from Metastasio, Ah! perfido, some deft little songs to lyrics by Goethe, and an interesting extended lied, the once-popular Adelaide. He produced two rather Mozartian piano concertos, one of them (the B , op.19) evidently revised several times from a Bonn original, and a good deal of miscellaneous wind music, including a Quintet for Piano and Wind op.16 which incautiously invites comparison with a similar work by Mozart (k452). In 1795–6 he sketched long and hard at a symphony in C. As it was turning out to be too big, he wisely shelved it, though he returned to some of its musical ideas when he wrote the First Symphony (also in C) in 1799–1800.

The three Violin Sonatas op.12 are not as impressive as the contemporary piano sonatas; the two Cello Sonatas op.5 are also lesser works but interesting in their bold virtuoso stance, looking ahead to the Kreutzer Sonata of 1802–3. After completing the three String Trios op.9 Beethoven launched into his most ambitious project yet, the set of six String Quartets op.18 (1798–1800). All the while he was contributing copiously to the ephemera of Viennese musical life: easy piano variations, ballroom dances by the dozen, patriotic marching songs, arias to be inserted into a Singspiel, pieces for mechanical clock-organ and a Sonatina for mandolin and piano.

There is no single work that demarcates the second sub-period within the early Vienna years, the time when Beethoven began to show signs of dissatisfaction with some of the more formal aspects of the Classical style and reached towards something new. In a way the signs were present from the beginning. Novelties of conception can be detected all along. They are multiplied in the Sonate pathétique of 1798 – the integration of the introduction into the first movement proper, the perfectly managed bold modulations in the second group, the prophetic breakdown on the dominant in the middle of the rondo; not to speak of the overall coherence of mood which has made the Pathétique the most famous piece in Beethoven’s early output. Another famous early piece, the first movement of the Quartet in F op.18 no.1, is his first exhaustive study in motivic saturation. The turn-motif of bars 1–2 forces its way into every available nook and cranny of the second group, the transitions, the development and coda. (When Beethoven revised op.18 no.1, after having given a fair copy of it to Amenda, he reduced the appearances of the turn-motif by nearly a quarter.)

The last two quartets of op.18, composed around 1800, show a rather new treatment of the traditional four-movement form (one that had recently been essayed by Haydn in several of his op.76 quartets). The first movements are not extensive and decisive but instead swift, bland and symmetrical, so that the later movements all seem (and were surely meant to seem) weightier or more arresting. The most visionary of these later movements is the composite finale of the Quartet in B op.18 no.6, where a slow, strange-sounding chromatic labyrinth entitled ‘La malinconia’ alternates with a swift, limpid little dance evocative of the Viennese ballrooms.

More far-reaching experiments with the weight, character and balance of the various movements in a work were made within the impressive series of about a dozen piano sonatas composed in 1800–02. These included op.26 in A with its ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe’ (cf the ‘Eroica’ Symphony), op.27 no.1 in E , op.27 no.2 in C minor (each marked ‘quasi una fantasia’) and op.31 no.3 in E . Some of the movements are run together, and there is a significant shift in weight away from the first movement and towards the last. Experiments of this kind with multi-movement works slowed down during the next period, when under the sway of his developing ‘symphonic’ ideal Beethoven found fresh resources in the traditional four-movement dynamic. But they played an important part in the growing flexibility of his art, and after 1812 they were resumed with much greater force and consciousness.

Greater flexibility already allowed for the incorporation of movements of widely different characters and forms. It is perhaps at this time that one first begins to be aware of the striking individuality of all Beethoven’s pieces, a characteristic that has often been noted. Prime examples are the so-called ‘Pastoral’ Sonata in D op.28 (also the locus classicus for successive thematic fragmentation in a development section), the Sonata in E op.31 no.3, and those great and deserving favourites of the Romantic era, the Pathétique, the ‘Moonlight’ and the D minor op.31 no.2.

The opening reverie of the ‘Moonlight’ is such a startling conception, even today, that Beethoven’s very careful plotting of the sequence of the movements in this sonata seems to pale by comparison. Unprecedented for a sonata opening is the half-improvisatory texture, the unity of mood, and especially the mood itself – that romantic mestizia which will have overwhelmed all but the stoniest of listeners by the end of the melody’s first phrase. An equally bold and emotional, but also more intellectual, experiment marks the opening of op.31 no.2. Here the first theme in a sonata form movement consists of antecedent and consequent phrases of radically different characters: a slow improvisatory arpeggio and a fast, highly motivic agitato. Both of these ideas can be heard echoing in the later movements of the sonata.

The inner pressure of his developing musical thought drove Beethoven on to more and more novelty, no doubt; and mixed in with this was a measure of artistic vanity. About 1801–2 he appeared much concerned with being original, even advising a publisher to point out the innovations in his Piano Variations on Original Themes opp.34 and 35 by means of a special advertisement. And that would certainly have been justified. Op.34 has its six variations in six different keys. Op.35 abstracts the ludicrous bare bass line of the contredanse theme from Prometheus and builds up from it fantastically in 15 variations and a full-length fugue. The finale of the ‘Eroica’ is a second building exercise on the same bass, this time involving variations in different keys and two fugato sections.

According to Czerny, his young pupil in those years, Beethoven spoke of a ‘new path’ he was following, a path which later Czerny associated with the important op.31 sonatas of 1802. Mention has already been made of op.31 no.2. Another novelty of conception was the key plan of the first movement of the Sonata in G op.31 no.1, which has the second group not in the dominant but in the mediant key (major and minor; cf the String Quintet op.29 of 1801). This looks ahead to Beethoven’s thorough exploration and extension of the tonal range of Classical music, a process that was to run parallel with his expansion of all aspects of Classical form in the next years. In the late period it is the exception rather than the rule to have the second group in the dominant.

Other important, but more conservative, works of 1799–1801 are the music for the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Beethoven’s introduction to the Viennese stage; the amiable but rather mindless Septet, whose great popularity soon came to irritate the composer; and the slender First Symphony, which can seem almost to wilt when commentators examine it for clues to future symphonic greatness. The Second Symphony of 1802 must also be counted among the more conservative works – this in spite of its great advance in assurance over the First and its inspired play with the notes F and G as a means of unifying the whole. Although one would not easily mistake this for a work by Haydn, the Second Symphony stands as a final realization of the concept of a large concert piece which he had developed. This impression is confirmed by Beethoven’s quotation of a sensational modulatory passage from The Creation, as Tovey observed.

One feels that in the Second Symphony Beethoven for the first time really engaged with the symphony orchestra and began to understand how it could serve his own emerging purpose. He had taken its true measure. In the middle period, from 1803 to 1812, he wrote most of his famous works for orchestra, evolving through them a new ‘symphonic ideal’ that also inspired most of his non-orchestral music.

Beethoven, Ludwig van