Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (30 page)

 

In August Haydn arrived back in town from his second visit to England, which had been a still-greater triumph than his first. He had premiered six new symphonies of the total of eleven he wrote for his two visits. British music lovers had found their greatest hero since Handel. Once there had been a mutual influence between Haydn and the younger Mozart. Now maybe the old master was looking to keep up with the new man on the scene, to show that he could still learn and change and show the Great Mogul a thing or two.

Beethoven would have been quick to study Haydn's new symphonies. With these and Mozart's later ones, the symphony had effectively become the king of musical genres. It needed only a few more fresh and ambitious examples to secure it on the throne. As of 1795, it seemed likely that Haydn was about to make that happen. But he never wrote another symphony. Instead, he turned to genres traditionally considered more important: mass and oratorio. The reasons for that turn were simple: Haydn wrote only on commission, and from the later 1790s on, his commissions were for choral music. He looked at those masses and oratorios as the crown of his work. In the domain of the symphony, now the road was open for Beethoven to pick up where Haydn left off.

The month after Beethoven's concerto performance, another notice appeared in the paper: local publisher Artaria invited the public to buy advance subscriptions to Herr van Beethoven's new piano trios. Beethoven made sure that in the future, the published “Se vuol ballare” Variations were demoted to “No. 1” on the title page, so the Artaria edition of the trios would have the honor of being op. 1.

After airings of the piano trios at the Lichnowsky musicales, in musical Vienna there was a buzz of excitement over the publication. The price for a subscription to the trios was steep, yet when they came out in July there were 123 subscribers, including much of the cream of Viennese nobility. Karl Lichnowsky claimed twenty copies for himself and his wife. In fact, without telling his proud protégé (who would have been furious), Lichnowsky quietly slipped publisher Artaria 212 florins to cover the cost of engraving the plates. Other aristocratic subscribers made their debuts as important Beethoven patrons: Count and Countess Browne, Haydn's employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, Prince Lobkowitz, Count and Countess Razumovsky, Countess Thun.
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Beethoven had made an unprecedented deal with Artaria, saying that he could keep most of the profits of the first four hundred copies of the trios sold. From the subscriptions and sales, he pocketed some 800 florins, the better part of a year's living. That coup, however, gave him an unrealistic impression of his prospects: he would not make that much on a publication again for thirty years.
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As Mozart had discovered, when you were no longer the hot new virtuoso in Vienna, you found your affairs becoming more difficult.

Soon after Haydn got back to Vienna, he came to one of the Friday-morning musicales at the Lichnowskys', to be hailed as conquering hero by the cream of Viennese cognoscenti. There the just-published Beethoven trios were played for him. Later Beethoven told his student Ferdinand Ries that Haydn “said many fine things about the trios, but also cautioned that he would not have advised his pupil to publish No. 3, the C minor.” The public, Haydn declared with the weight of his experience and fame, would not understand or accept that work.
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Beethoven was stunned and outraged. He knew the C Minor was the best of the three, the boldest and most personal. Given the way Beethoven thought, Haydn's response could mean only one thing: his teacher was another rival, jealous and conniving, who wished him ill, who wanted to suppress the very work that could put Beethoven on the map.

The public response proved Beethoven right and Haydn wrong, but that the C Minor was the sensation of the trios did not calm Beethoven's resentment. Soon appeared another matter equally galling. Having written the most ambitious of his symphonies for England, Haydn in the next years produced an oratorio of Handelian dimensions on a suitably epic subject: the Creation. His magnum opus,
The Creation
, would be received rapturously by the musical world.

When it came to his few keyboard rivals, Beethoven could be generous and friendly. But having an unassailable old-master composer as a rival ate at him. The struggle between the artistic debt and the veneration he owed Haydn and his uncontrollable jealousy would never be resolved. Until this rival was in his grave, after the affair of the C Minor Trio Beethoven had very little good to say about Haydn or his music. One element inspiring his works to the end of his life (among many other elements) would be the rankling drive to challenge and outdo Haydn.

In the event, Beethoven for once bit his tongue. There was no blowup over the C Minor Trio; relations between the two men remained polite, if strained. Soon they were collaborating in concerts—only there was more distance than before. Haydn had expected Beethoven to put “pupil of Haydn” on the cover of his first published opus. Most of his students, after all, were proud to name their teacher publicly. Beethoven refused. As far as he was concerned, he told people, he had learned nothing from Haydn.
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Op. 1 was dedicated to Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven's most generous patron. Op. 2 would have a dedication to Haydn, but there would be nothing about his “pupil.”

 

If in those years Beethoven plotted his career like a generalissimo, if he composed with reference to the past, present, and future, he still composed with fierce attention to the shaping of the work at hand. So it was with the op. 1 Trios. Two are ingratiating, one aggressive, though to the ears of the time the first two sounded up-to-date enough. From a broader perspective, the word for op. 1 is
uneven
. There is a precocious sophistication of structure and tonal organization, and Beethoven had learned much about proportion, but all is inconsistent.
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In these trios Beethoven wanted to be expansive, both within the movements and in the pieces as a whole, and he made them rich and brilliant in sound. He wanted, in other words, to write the most ambitious piano trios to that time. They are the first to have four movements. Two have a scherzo, meaning “joke,” a genre Haydn invented, a three-beat form modeled on the stately minuet but sped up into a dashing and often witty movement (though like a minuet, a scherzo can have many moods). Trio No. 3 has a minuet, but it is closer to a scherzo in tempo.

Beethoven composed the trios in order, learning and growing as he went. Sketches for no. 1 may have gone back to Bonn.
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Call its tone stately and high-Classical, Haydnesque in its nimble dancing rhythms, its coy flourishes recalling Mozart. It is the kind of piece listeners and critics of the eighteenth century called “pleasing.” For many in those days, pleasing was the main thing music was supposed to be. Changing that aesthetic would be one of Beethoven's essential tasks, but that came later.

In op. 1, Beethoven already shows tremendous thematic discipline. There would be no apprentice works in any of the opus numbers. In the E-flat Trio, the first theme of the first movement, which Beethoven and his time called
das Thema
,
the
theme, lays out the leading ideas of the piece melodically, rhythmically, harmonically, gesturally, and expressively. The first idea in a work is
das Thema
of the whole in the same way that the first passage of an essay expresses the theme of the essay, though in music the theme is worked out in ways that are not expected to be perceived so much as sensed by listeners, conveying a sense of rightness and wholeness.
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Whether or not a work possessed “unity” was a leading motif of the time among connoisseurs, critics, and aestheticians. Much of the critical debate over Beethoven's music would turn on judgments relating to questions of organic unity versus caprice, whether he was provoking for the sake of provocation.

In the E-flat Trio the opening upward-dancing arpeggio returns in varied forms in every movement. (The gesture would have been familiar to Beethoven as the traditional “Mannheim rocket” theme also used by Mozart.)
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At the same time, showing a pattern Beethoven would follow for the rest of his life, an equally significant motif is rhythmic: the Haydnesque
rum-tum-TUM
of bars 2 and 3 is as important to the music as any melodic motif. Augmented (slowed), it is the rhythm of the second theme; the first bar of movement 2 varies it; it is echoed in the repeated chords of the scherzo; it turns up in the second theme of the finale.
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Beethoven improvised on the page as he improvised in performance, but in all cases he improvised on specific ideas. In the first movement, one echt-Beethoven touch is the expansive coda, lingering far longer than most codas in Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven would write the longest codas of any music to his time (he would prove equally given to the abrupt, before-you-know-it ending). Already he was beginning to reconfigure the weights and balances of the formal models he inherited from Haydn and Mozart.

His youth and inexperience show in material that is lively and ingratiating while at the same time amorphous and generically eighteenth century. Beethoven had already found elements of his mature voice, but he was not yet settled into that voice—which is to say, he had not yet picked out his essential voice from the competing ones in his music. To Beethoven at twenty-three and twenty-four, what the future would recognize as “Beethovenian” was simply one direction of his work, the part that escaped the safe and conventional, the part that more and more he would be drawn to.

There are other signs of immaturity and caution in the trios. Like piano trios of the past, the first two are heavily weighted to the piano, the cello much of the time anchored to the bass line and only occasionally soaring on its own. The violin is mostly written down in the staff, as if Beethoven were uncertain about taking it high on the E string.

In the E-flat, after a pleasing if passionless first movement comes a slow movement of stunning depth, the music singing and inward, strangely shadowed for a major-key movement. From a poignant but simple beginning, with a touch of the
galant
style, the movement finds its way to a place haunting and fresh.
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The middle lands on the deep-flat minor keys that, for Beethoven, were touched with brooding and sorrow—A-flat and E-flat minor—with a surging, yearning expression that a later time would call Romantic. That freshness carries into the scherzo, with its blend of dancing merriment and quietly pensive long notes. The sonata-form last movement is mainly devoted to Haydnesque whimsy, and also recalls Haydn's freedom in treating form: the recapitulation is much recomposed, more than Beethoven would tend to do in the future.

Trio No. 2 in G Major begins with an extended Adagio introduction that prefigures two things: the violin presents a slow version of the coming Allegro theme, and the introduction as a whole foreshadows the poignant atmosphere of the second movement. Otherwise, the outer movements of the G Major are nimble and witty and large scale; but, in his drive to expand the material, Beethoven did not notice that he expanded it further than it deserved. He would rarely commit the sin of padding, but in these two fast movements he padded lavishly. The slow movement is as fresh and inwardly expressive as the previous trio's, once again strangely affecting for a piece in a major key.

No. 3 in C Minor is the first work to demonstrate how that key galvanized him: a repertoire of effects in the direction of fierce and implacable, what would come to be called his “C-minor mood.” It begins tentatively, with quiet sighs recalling some of Mozart's soft beginnings of intense pieces—say, the C Minor Concerto, K. 491. Then a searing theme in a relentlessly repeating rhythm breaks out to define the dynamic, driven, and obsessive core of the work. In every way, this last of the op. 1 trios outdoes the others: in focus, in intensity, in the growing liberation of the cello from the bass line and the violin from the staff line.

But the main effect of the C Minor Trio is visceral. Having rambled and padded and pleased to various degrees in the first two trios, here Beethoven reached out and seized his listeners by the throat. He shows a mature skill in the difficult art of sustaining high intensity from the beginning to end of a movement, providing a few calm passages for the listener to catch a breath.
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His dark key of E-flat minor makes an appearance on the second page. As a sign of its demonic provenance, the first movement and the whole trio return again and again to the tritone, an interval so ambiguous and fraught that its traditional name was
diabolus in musica
, “the devil in music.”
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With the slow movement's variations on an Andante cantabile theme, Beethoven took up the genre with which at that point he had more experience than with any other, his row of keyboard variations going back to his first published work. Like the slow movements of the previous trios, this one is in a shadowed major key. The shadow lingers through the variety of texture and mood of the first three variations and deepens in the E-flat-minor fourth variation. The main theme of the third-movement minuet is in a driving C minor, its quiet intensity broken by
fortissimo
chords and offbeat accents.

The finale does not so much begin as pounce on the listener. We are off in another fierce and obsessive C-minor movement that stops only for charged silences that are shattered by new explosions of energy. The feeling of the finale is like an echo of the first movement, with a similarly gentle E-flat-major second theme that briefly quiets the whirlwind. The coda seems almost to unravel, ending on vacantly repeated notes
pp
in the strings, the piano slithering upward in C-major scales that sound not hopeful and resolving but exhausted and defeated.