16. Late-period style.

For a considerable time after 1812, Beethoven’s production of important works fell off strikingly. These were difficult years for him, encompassing deep emotional turmoil and endless lesser distractions. In addition, he was probably suffering from something like exhaustion after the truly immense labours of the previous period. To speak only of the decade from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony to the Eighth, he had composed some 30 major works which in most cases involved serious rethinking of musical essentials. He had composed nearly as many slighter works and he had seen about 80 items through the press. Long or short, great or slight, they all required negotiations with publishers, correction of copyists’ scores, and proofreading – unfortunately an activity that Beethoven never fully mastered.

But more generally, these were difficult years for any serious composer of Beethoven’s generation. One can perhaps appreciate the growing sense of uncertainty that he must have felt as to artistic ends and means. On some level he was responding to powerful musical currents, which were soon to come flooding to the surface; the last works of Weber and Schubert and the first works of Berlioz, Chopin and Bellini all appeared during the 1820s. Like other great composers whose lives bridged a time of deep stylistic change – such as Josquin, Monteverdi and Schoenberg – Beethoven was facing a major intellectual challenge, whether or not he formulated it in intellectual terms. He had already met one such challenge, or one part of the challenge, by his reinterpretation of the sonata principle in his ‘symphonic’ works of 1803–12. Now the very basis of the sonata style was thrown in doubt. Beethoven had no easy answer. There is something private and problematic about the corpus of late-period works, and it is hardly accidental that their deep influence on the course of music came only much later, past the time of Beethoven’s own younger contemporaries who learnt so much from the middle period.

Beethoven’s concern for lyricism deepened throughout the late period. He has sometimes been criticized as an inept melodist, and it will be granted that when he was 23 he could not, like Rossini at a like age, produce the deathless melodies of a Barbiere. Yet some of his early Bonn songs make impressive lyric statements, and in the mid-1800s he developed a very effective type of slow hymn-like melody. This is continued, intensified and much refined in the late period; the melodic outline of Leonore’s ‘Komm, Hoffnung’ (1805) recurs in the Adagio of the Quartet op.127 (1824–5). A new feature is the intimacy and delicacy already apparent in the Violin Sonata in G op.96 (1812), the Piano Sonatas in E minor op.90 (1814) and A op.101 (1816) and the Cello Sonata in C op.102 no.1 (1815).

There is also a growing interest in folklike melody, hardly surprising in one who made arrangements of over 150 folksongs for Thomson in these years. The song cycle An die ferne Geliebte op.98 (1816) marks Beethoven’s closest approach to Goethe’s ideal of the Volksweise as a basis for song composition (closest except for the tiny Ruf vom Berge woo147, 1816, which adapts an actual folksong melody). Simple little tunes evocative of folksong and folkdance are constantly turning up in the late quartets and other music.

In all this Beethoven appears to have been reaching for a more direct and intimate mode of communication. Two verbal adjuncts to such folklike essays can be regarded as symbolic: in the song cycle, the line ‘ohne Kunstgepräng, erklungen’ (‘sounding without the adornments of Art’), set to music of rock-like simplicity, and in the Ninth Symphony, Schiller’s famous apostrophe to universal brotherhood. In the best early Romantic spirit, Beethoven was seeking a new basic level of human contact through basic song, as though without sophistication or artifice. Another manifestation of this powerful – and sometimes disruptive – urge is the now rather frequent use of instrumental recitative and arioso, such as the ‘beklemmt’ (‘constricted’) passage in the Cavatina of the Quartet in B op.130. Here instrumental music seems painfully to strive for articulate communication.

Several of the late works contain variation movements of a new kind. Earlier Beethoven had written many brilliant piano variations, from the precocious ‘Venni amore’ set of 1790–91 to the C minor Variations of 1806 – a series now to be capped by the encyclopedic Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli. In his first Vienna period, however, important variation movements within larger works are not frequent. More of these occur in the middle period. Generally the variations are of the progressively decorative variety (opp.57, 61, 67, 74, 97), a type that also continues into the late years (opp.111, 125). But in the Sonata in E op.109 and the late quartets, as well as in the Diabelli set, Beethoven evolved a new type of variation in which the members take a much more individual and profoundly reinterpreted view of the original theme. The theme seems transformed or probed to its fundamentals, rather than merely varied. All this suggests a changing concept of musical unity, now seen as an evolution from within rather than as a conciliation of contrasting forces: a Darwinian concept, perhaps, rather than a Hegelian one.

In the most general sense, variation may also be said to inspire the transcendent fugal finales of the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Quartet in B (the ‘Grosse Fuge’). The fugatos that occur in not a few of Beethoven’s earlier pieces hardly prepare one for his preoccupation with contrapuntal forms in the late years; scarcely a significant work now lacks an impressive fugal section or even a full-scale fugue bristling with learned devices. Evidently he was looking for some other means of musical movement than that provided by the style he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart; fugue is a more dense, even style which places harmonic action in a very different light. In Beethoven’s hands fugue became a means of flattening out the dramatic aspects of tonality. (It was not the only means that he devised, as witness the second and third movements of the Quartet in A minor.) Related to this general tendency is Beethoven’s frequent avoidance in the late music of obvious dominant effects, his characteristic undercutting of tonic triads by 6-4 chords, and his somewhat wayward experiments with the church modes. As noted above, his early plans for a ninth symphony include a ‘pious song … in the ancient modes’.

There is in fact a persistent retrospective current in Beethoven’s late period. He published or considered publishing several of his old songs (Bundeslied, Der Kuss, Mit Mädeln sich vertragen), reworked the Opferlied of 1794, resuscitated some old piano bagatelles for op.119 and reworked another in the second movement of the A minor Quartet. He finally set Schiller’s Ode to Joy – a project first considered about 1790 – to a tune adumbrated in works of 1795 and 1808 (woo118, op.80). An archaizing urge is manifest in his interest in strict counterpoint and modality, even if the resulting pieces hardly sound archaic; over and above this, some of them look back to certain specific academic exercises recommended by Beethoven’s old teacher Albrechtsberger. It was only in his late years that Beethoven developed his well-known penchant for writing canons d’occasion. Whereas in the 1800s he had spoken well of Cherubini, now his interest settled on Palestrina, Bach – he sketched an overture on the notes B–A–C–H – and especially Handel. Handel’s influence on the overture Die Weihe des Hauses (1822) is startling.

Yet ultimately Beethoven’s real concern with fugue, as with variation and lyricism, was to mould these elements so that they could be embedded integrally into the global concerns of the sonata style. The presentation, development and return of musical material within a finely controlled tonal field remained central to his artistic endeavour. Fugues perform the function of development sections in opp.101, 106, 111 and less directly in op.110 and the Ninth Symphony finale. Then the fugue at the beginning of the C minor Quartet acts as an exposition, presenting the basic tonal and thematic material that is worked out in the rest of the piece. The variation movements of opp.127 and 135 have a powerful tonal dynamic built in. So does the Diabelli Variations – thanks to another fugue, which precedes the final, recapitulatory variation. Even An die ferne Geliebte arranges its cycle of six artless melodies in a purposeful order of keys and features a recapitulation followed by a miniature ‘symphonic’ coda.

Beethoven, Ludwig van