15. Middle-period works.

Soon after the ‘Eroica’ Symphony the Fifth Symphony was conceived, but somehow work got deflected into certain other C major and minor projects, and things did not come together until late 1807 and 1808. More than any other piece of music, the Fifth Symphony has come to typify the thematic unification, or ‘organicism’, as the 19th century viewed it, that Beethoven developed to such a high degree in these years. The famous opening motif is to be heard in almost every bar of the first movement – and, allowing for modifications, in the other movements. The opening theme expands into the horn-call before the second subject, and the second subject employs the same note pattern as the horn-call. Then, in the development section, the horn-call is fragmented successively down to a single minim, alternating between strings and woodwind in a passage of extraordinary tension achieved primarily by harmonic means. As in many other works of the time, the last two movements are run together without a break; this device, obviously, contributes to the continuity and to a feeling of necessary sequence. But more than this: here the long transition passage between the movements, and the recurrence of a theme from the third movement in the retransition before the recapitulation of the fourth, give the sense that one movement is triumphantly resolved by the other – a sense confirmed by the enormously emphatic last-movement coda.

Such codas now become very common. They tend to assume the important function of finally resolving some melodic, harmonic or rhythmic instability in the first theme – an instability that has infused the movement with much of its energy up to the coda. This new weighting of sonata form towards the coda is associated, and sometimes coordinated, with another tendency, that of withholding full rhythmic or even harmonic resolution at the moment of recapitulation. Thus in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, as Robert Simpson has observed, solid dominant–tonic resolution waits in the recapitulation until the appearance of the second theme (compare the first movements of two other works in the same key, B , the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Quartet op.130). The Fourth Symphony, said Tovey, ‘is perhaps the work in which Beethoven first fully reveals his mastery of movement’.

Hardly less original than the Fifth Symphony is the Sixth (‘Pastoral’, 1808), though here for once the first movement is made as quiet as possible. This is done with the help of a development section devoid of tensions, a recapitulation approached hymn-like from the subdominant, and countless pedal points throughout. In compensation, a passage of fury comes elsewhere in the piece, as an extra movement (trombones and piccolo enter for the first time in the symphony to enforce this ‘Storm’). Each of the five movements bears a programmatic inscription, and one of these is frankly pictorial in nature – the ‘Scene by the brook’ inscribed over the slow movement, which includes a series of stylized birdcalls at the end, in a sort of woodwind cadenza (Beethoven was careful to identify the quail, nightingale and cuckoo – see fig.12). On the other hand, he stressed the word ‘Gefühle’ (‘feeling’) in two other inscriptions and so could quite properly observe that his reference was less to musical ‘Malerei’ (‘painting’) than to emotions aroused by the countryside. A sequence of such feelings guides the listener through the familiar therapeutic progress of a Beethoven symphony, in a somewhat gentler version.

The symphonic ideal inspires most of the non-symphonic pieces written between 1803 and 1808. That is true to an extent even of the Kreutzer Sonata, composed in early 1803, just before the ‘Eroica’. The Waldstein Sonata, composed just after the ‘Eroica’, adopts an idea for the groundplan of its opening paragraph from an earlier piano sonata, op.31 no.1 in G. But there is all the difference in ambition, scale and mood; what served in the earlier piece as a witty constructive device becomes in the later one an earth-shaking, or at least a piano-shaking, declaration. The slow movement was originally going to be the somewhat bovine piece now known as the ‘Andante favori’ (compare the Kreutzer and op.31 no.1). When Beethoven replaced this by the adagio ‘Introduzione’ which makes momentous preparations for the finale, he gave the sonata the characteristic ‘symphonic’ sweep even while shortening it, and also motivated (or validated) the grandiose coda of the finale. Planned on broader lines still, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata (1804–5) is an even more imaginative work, a work of the greatest extremes – as witness the fortissimo chord handfuls that shatter the brooding quiet of the very first page.

This and other equally violent effects were hardly thinkable on the Walter fortepiano owned by Beethoven before 1803, when he got his Erard (now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum). Yet even when dealing with instruments that were not in a state of radical development, he acted as if they were. The string quartets of op.59 so strained the medium, as it was understood in 1806, that they met with resistance from players and audiences alike. The first movement of the F major Quartet op.59 no.1, though in mood very different from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, resembles it in its unexampled scope and also, rather surprisingly, in a number of technical features. The second movement is Beethoven’s largest, most fantastic scherzando – not a true scherzo, but a free essay in the tradition of the sonatas op.31 no.3 and op.54. All three quartet slow movements, surely, cry out for evocative titles, and the last two finales are all but orchestral in conception.

Each quartet was supposed to include a Russian melody, for the benefit of the dedicatee Count Rasumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. Here for the first time may be seen Beethoven’s interest in folksong, which was to grow in later years. Folksongs did not much help the first two quartets, but Rasumovsky’s notion came to superb fruition in the third, where Beethoven gave up the idea of incorporating pre-existing tunes and instead wrote the haunting A minor Andante in what he must have conceived to be a Russian idiom.

In some ways the 1805 Leonore stands apart from other major works of these years. In local musical terms, the innovations and expanded horizons of the instrumental works are not deeply reflected in the separate operatic numbers, and probably could not have been. Apart from the overtures, there is a certain stiffness about many numbers which is understandable in a first opera. This quality is also discernible in Beethoven’s first oratorio and mass, Christus am Oelberge (1803) and the Mass in C (1807).

In broader musical terms, however, the importance of Leonore can scarcely be exaggerated. Faced by the task of matching music to an explicit narrative, and doubtless instructed by the Mozart operas which we know he consulted at the time, Beethoven here established a very large-scale dramatic continuity largely by tonal means. The Leonore overtures are famous for forecasting the opera’s turning-point by incorporating the trumpet signals for the arrival of the Minister who confounds the villain Pizarro. But the overtures also assert C major as the opera’s tonic key and A and E as subsidiary keys, and Leonore no.3 precedes its final triumphant tonic section with a recapitulation in G major; then the C minor/major of the first vocal number leads through many detours to moments central to the drama in E and A and then to G major, C minor and C major in the last two numbers. Even more than the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Leonore prefigures the more abstract (and of course more concise) tonal structures of the later instrumental works.

In terms of idea, furthermore, Leonore provides a shining prototype for the heroic progress implied in a less explicit way by the instrumental music. And what is remarkable is to see Beethoven gradually evolving a personal operatic style in the course of writing, and rewriting, Leonore. From the somewhat servile echoes of French and German light opera in the opening numbers, he moved on to find an increasingly individual and elevated voice – for example, in the Prisoners’ Chorus, the scena for Florestan, the duet ‘O namenlose Freude’ (revised from the Vestas Feuer fragments of 1803) and the long recitative before it which was the most regrettable of Beethoven’s cuts for the 1814 version. To say that Beethoven approached his libretto with utter seriousness and idealism may seem like a truism; but of how many other first operas of the time can as much be said?

Around 1808 the enthusiasm and high daring of Beethoven’s music begins to be tempered by ever-increasing technical virtuosity. Even when the pieces are still very powerful, as is often the case, they are smoother and a little safer than before. The stage work of this period is Egmont (1809–10), consisting not only of the well-known overture but also incidental music lasting 40 minutes, including a final ‘Siegessymphonie’ (‘Symphony of Victory’) in the face of disaster. Feelings that were turned inward in Leonore were turned outward in Egmont. Whereas the Leonore no.2 and no.3 overtures were involuted, explosive works dedicated to gigantic struggle, the Egmont overture is a tough, lucid one that comes by its Pyrrhic victories easily.

The change is clearest of all between the op.59 quartets and the ‘Harp’ Quartet of 1809 (a nickname deriving from its insistent functional pizzicatos). Nothing about this work is problematic. The climax of the first movement is a climax of sheer technical exhilaration, for in the coda Beethoven seems at last to have solved the problem of simulating orchestral idiom in a quartet. The second movement is serene and the third (in C minor) sounds like a speeded-up but smoothed-down version of the third movement of the Fifth Symphony. The finale is a set of simple variations on a suave 2/4 tune. This type of light finale recurs in the Violin Sonata op.96 (1812).

There are now no ‘symphonic’ sonatas, except perhaps the smaller-scaled ‘Lebewohl’ op.81a (1809–10). Beethoven’s new concern in the first movements of sonatas and chamber music is lyricism, which inspires works of such different character as the Piano Sonata in F op.78 (1809), the ‘Archduke’ Trio (1810–11) and the Violin Sonata op.96. Beethoven had never written such beautiful slow movements as he now wrote for the ‘Harp’ Quartet, the ‘Archduke’ Trio and the Fifth Piano Concerto (1809). The so-called ‘Emperor’ is by far the most ‘symphonic’ of his concertos and one of the strongest works he conceived. Yet in the very first bars, where the soloist and tutti join in a thunderous cadential celebration, the battle seems to be won even before the forces have been drawn up – as was certainly not the case in the introverted, searching Fourth Concerto first performed in 1807.

Writing his Seventh Symphony in 1811–12, Beethoven again reached for new horizons: the expanding introduction, the 6-4 chords spanning the Allegretto, the rolling ostinatos at the ends of the outer movements, the rhythmic preoccupation throughout. This work is perhaps less immediate in its emotional effect than the ‘Eroica’ or the Fifth, but its élan and its effortless control over musical processes at every level can make those earlier works seem more than a little hectic. The finale, all sinew, represents a particular advance, not only in elegance but also in sheer power.

Beethoven immediately capped this work with the delightful Eighth Symphony (1812), a salute to the symphonic ideal of the previous age. It has a comical slow movement and a slowish minuet in place of the now customary scherzo. Flashes of middle-period power occur only in the outer movements. Beethoven could hardly have planned a more genial gesture of farewell for a time to the symphony and to the decade of work produced under its aegis.

Another of the greatest works written between 1808 and 1812 refuses to fit any norms one may try to adduce for this period or, indeed, for any other – the Quartet in F minor op.95. The piece is unmatched in Beethoven’s output for compression, exaggerated articulation and a corresponding sense of extreme tension. The harmonic layout is radical. Like op.57 and op.59 no.2, the first movement treats Neapolitan relationships, both in the first group (F–G ) and in the second (D –E or D ). D is the key of the second movement, one of Beethoven’s most beautiful, as well as one of his most disturbed – D major shadowed by D minor, with a chromatic fugato plunging into enharmonic mysteries. The F minor scherzo has a trio ranging from G to D and B minor.

This quartetto serioso, as Beethoven called it, looks back to the impressive minor-mode compositions of the period 1803–8 and looks forward to the style and mood of the late quartets. It was some time, however, before this promise of a new style could be realized.

Beethoven, Ludwig van