(This essay was originally published as two programme notes for concerts given at the 2018 Salzburg Festival by Daniel Barenboim, Michael Barenboim, and Kian Soltani.)
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| MS, Piano Trio in D major, op.70 no.1 |
As
with so many genres – symphony, string quartet, piano sonata – Beethoven seems
to have come to the piano trio at just the right time. So, at any rate, our
understanding of musical history, inconceivable without him and his music,
informs us. Growing out of later Baroque chamber music – solo instrument and
obbligato keyboard, probably harpsichord, in two parts, with or without formal
cello doubling of the bass line – the piano trios of Haydn and, later, Mozart
paved the way (which is not to understand them only as having paved the way).
As the early sonata ‘for piano with violin accompaniment’ gave way to a true
chamber partnership, a ‘violin sonata’ in the modern sense, so did a relationship
of equals emerge between violin, cello and piano and, in a few cases, between
alternative ‘piano trio’ formations, for instance viola, clarinet and piano, as
in Mozart’s ‘Kegelstatt’ Trio KV 498.
Haydn
proved the true emancipator of the cello, so much so that, by the time of his
later and Beethoven’s first trios, the violin-cello-piano formation was both
favoured and standard – Beethoven even arranged his Second Symphony thus. He also
used the formation in other, relatively ‘minor’ works: an early, short
three-movement work in E flat major WoO 38, found and published after his
death: the Variations on ‘Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu’ op.121a, most of which
was probably written in 1793–4, although published much later; the B flat major
Allegretto WoO 39, written as a gift for Maximiliane Brentano in 1812, again
only published posthumously; and the Variations
on an original theme in E-flat major op.44 (an early work whose opus number is
again misleading). The 1797 Trio for
piano, clarinet and cello, op.11, may also be performed with violin instead of
clarinet. Beethoven’s most important contributions, however, are generally held
to lie in the six ‘official’ piano trios.
Compositional Milestone
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Carl Alois, Fürst von
Lichnowsky-Woschütz
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We
start at the beginning, with the first trio from Beethoven’s official op.1,
that is, the set of three works Beethoven considered important enough, in 1795,
to designate with that number. The Nine Variations on a March by Dressler for
piano, published earlier, were not afforded that honour; nor were a number of
intervening works. There is something undeniably special, debts to Mozart and
Haydn notwithstanding, to this epiphany. All three op.1 works were first
publicly performed in 1793 or 1794 in the house of Prince Lichnowsky, to whom
the set is dedicated, although much of their music had likely been conceived,
and some of it written, in Bonn, prior to the composer’s move to Vienna. Like
the first set of piano sonatas, op. 2, the trios are all written in four rather
than three movements, as would prove the pattern for all but one of Beethoven’s
subsequent essays in the genre. They garnered their young composer significant
attention, both as composer and pianist – even if, as Marten Noorduin has
pointed out, the first official review seems to have appeared more than a
decade after publication – and a handsome profit from sales.
Reckoning with Haydn
and Mozart
The
Piano Trio no. 1 in E-flat major, op. 1 no.1, bears that typical early – and not
only early – Beethoven language of Mozart neoclassicised, textures slightly
fuller, perhaps closer to later Haydn, with an approach to structure that
certainly owes more to Beethoven’s acknowledged teacher. The key had been a
favourite for Mozart in all manner of genres, the aforementioned ‘Kegelstatt’
Trio included. Here, in the first movement’s sonata form and beyond, we hear
(and feel) Beethoven confidently playing with the inheritance from his two
masters, such play never capable of mere reduction to ‘influence’. Subdominant
colouring following the first bar’s ‘Mannheim rocket’ announces a composer
confident in his mastery of the Classical tonal universe – and already in
possession of many elements of personal musical style. Sforzando accents in the
hymn-like second subject, while hardly unprecedented, are intensely personal.
Much the same might be said of the
lyrical second movement. Again, its theme bears kinship to Mozart as melodist, while
sounding slightly ‘later’, referential perhaps as well as reverential. Melodic
turns seem conscious of their neoclassical distance from their Classical
master, perhaps even longing to bridge a historical gap that belies mere
chronological proximity. Further subdominant colouring proves frequent, this
rondo already having moved to the subdominant,
A flat major, of the work as a whole. The sprightly, even skittish scherzo and
its relatively more relaxed and intimate trio again play with the tonal
relationship between E -lat major and A-flat major. Such play is all the more
apparent given the genuine tonal ambiguity of the scherzo’s opening, which we
seem to hear as a modulatory passage from the slow movement. When are we certain
that the movement is actually ‘in’ E-flat major? Not for some time.
If the finale’s conception of
sonata form has roots in Haydn, the developmental nature of the recapitulation
works on a scale lying beyond, looking forward even to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Likewise,
the surprise of its tonal upward shift of a semitone, to E major, the return to
E-flat major accomplished not without a touch of authentic Beethovenian violence.
The invention implied and unleashed by the almost bizarre opening phrase –
bizarre until we appreciate, if only retrospectively, what it musically
suggests – will never be normalised.
Annuity and
Integration
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| Countess Anna Maria von Erdődy’ |
Beethoven
wrote the two op.70 trios while staying on Countess Anna Maria von Erdődy’s estate
in 1808. He would express his gratitude for her role in helping negotiate him
an ‘annuity agreement’ with three patrons the following year by offering her
the dedication of this set. The second of these trios opens in a fashion it is
difficult not to consider ‘symphonic’ – if only with hindsight. There is a slow
introduction, the relationship of whose material to the exposition proper is
both clear and complex for players and listeners alike, neither section quite
making full sense without the other. As Charles Rosen observed in Sonata Forms, once slow introductions had
become more common in symphonies around 1780, ‘it was perhaps inevitable that
they would be more closely integrated with the allegros that followed, not only
thematically but also by their reappearance later in the faster tempo’. That
happened in opera too, for instance in Haydn’s Armida. It also worked its way back into instrumental and chamber
music, whether at the original, slow tempo, such as in Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’
Sonata, or, as here – and in Haydn’s ‘Drumroll’ Symphony – at the new tempo and
rhythm. The cello, following on from the ‘Ghost’ Trio, op.70 no.1, often takes
the lead, not least as initiator of contrapuntal discussion. If ever it had
been a junior partner in Beethoven’s trios, it certainly is not now. A
preoccupation with trills seems to hint at the composer’s late style. So too
does the blurring or, better, witty complication of sectional boundaries. A
further instance of that is offered by the recapitulation’s creeping up on us,
most likely without our having realized, the piano this time ‘correcting’ the
cello’s bold assertion of the ‘wrong’ key of D-flat major with the tonic of E-flat
major.
The slow movement’s double
variation form, in C major and minor, once again takes its leave from Haydn,
although surely by now more in homage than influence, should it be conscious at
all. One would expect the minuet – even if, by now, one did not expect a
scherzo – to return to E-flat major; instead, Beethoven moves to the
subdominant, A-flat major; its trio shifts again, to C major. This is the first
comparable instance in Beethoven’s oeuvre of movements in three different keys.
It would seem that meant something to him, for he would use precisely the same
three keys the following year in the String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major
‘Harp’, op.74, albeit in a different order. G major and C major, both a third
apart from the tonic, play important roles in the finale, whose playful and, to
employ the inevitable cliché, genial spirit again suggests that Beethoven, the
impetuous, often difficult pupil, had made his final peace with the frail
Haydn, who would die little more than a couple of months after the 1809 ‘annuity
agreement’ was concluded.
Profoundly Human
The
Piano Trio in D major, ‘Ghost’, op.70/1, is burdened with a singularly unhelpful
nickname, still more so than the ‘Emperor’ Concerto – for which, at least, the English-speaking
world may be held solely responsible. There is, alas, little we can do about
either. Crucially, this is a different Beethoven from that heard earlier:
master of all he surveys, and yet more profoundly human. Sublimity – a musical
idea essentially, historically defined by Beethoven’s music – is immediately
apparent. So too is the increasingly prominent role played by the cello, as
foreshadowed in the ‘Razumovsky’ Quartets, op.59. It is the cello that sounds a
high F natural, following the unison opening, having us wonder whether we are
in D minor rather than major and preparing the dramatic terrain. The second
group offers lyrical contrast, not for ‘balance’, but out of what the Romantics
would consider inner necessity. Intense developmental concision contributes to
the thrill. Brilliant passagework is, like everything else, generative; not a
single note is wasted.
Rapt and, again, sublime, the slow
movement offers the in-itself-dialectical contradiction of a ‘perfect
dialectic’, mediated between simple and complex. Its opening theme may be found
among Beethoven’s sketches for an opera on Macbeth. Whatever might have become impossible
after Mozart’s death, for a few minutes sounds not only once again possible but
close to realization, even if the opera itself were but a dream. Arioso or scena? Ultimately the movement remains sui generis. In ‘sonata-like density’,
Theodor Adorno likened it to the slow movements of the first two ‘Razumovsky’
Quartets and the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata.
Uniquely among Beethoven’s piano
trios, there is no minuet or scherzo. The finale offers release after the slow
movement, yet tension aplenty of its own too, playful in its disjunctures,
disjoint even in its play. Yet, in the necessity of its contrast with the slow
movement, the dialectical nature of Beethoven’s writing is not only
comprehensible but, crucially, felt. As Adorno wrote: ‘In isolation, the start
of the Presto might not sound very striking; but after the close of the Largo,
which is darkened beyond any classicist measure […] has something of the palely
comforting dawn of a day which promises to put right all the havoc that has
gone before’. Out of the depths of Beethoven’s Romanticism, something of the
spirit as well as the invention of Haydn lives – or, rather, is once again reborn.
Turning Point(s)
It
has long been customary to understand Beethoven as a turning-point, perhaps the turning-point, in the history of
Western art music: at least from the standpoint of late modernity, late
modernism, late capitalism, call them what we will. Consider his teacher
Haydn’s 1761 contract with Prince Paul Anton Esterházy: we see a liveried
servant, who must ‘appear daily (whether here in Vienna or on the estates) in
the antichambre before and after
midday, and inquire whether a high princely ordre
for a musical performance has been given’. Moreover:
The said Vice-Kapellmeister shall
be under permanent obligation to compose such pieces of music as his Serene
Princely Highness may command, and neither to communicate such new compositions
to anyone, nor to allow them to be copied, but to retain them wholly for the
exclusive use of his Highness; nor shall he compose for any other person
without the knowledge and gracious permission.
In
his later years, Haydn was freer from such obligations, more widely feted;
indeed, his instruction of Beethoven was cut short – most likely to the relief
of both – by his second, 1794 visit to London, for which he would write a
further six ‘London’ symphonies, making considerable money from both
composition and performance. Perhaps he, then, was the ‘turning-point’, or was
it Mozart, in his not entirely successful attempt of the 1780s to live as
something akin to a ‘freelance’ pianist-composer in Vienna?
Perhaps – or perhaps we should rid
ourselves of the idea of a turning-point, even of multiple turning-points. For
whatever reasons, we seem unable to do so. The symphony seems, the ‘Jupiter’ or
‘London’ symphonies notwithstanding,
to make a quantum if not necessarily qualitative leap with Beethoven and his ‘Eroica’.
So do the ‘standing’ of the string quartet, and of the piano sonata; so too
does that of the piano trio. And if we return to the matter of the composer’s own
standing, far from unrelated to that of his music, we see Beethoven, also in
Vienna, in 1809, the year the op.70 piano trios were published, as beneficiary
of a very different contract.
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Joseph Franz Maximilian,
7th Prince Lobkowitz |
Part negotiated by Countess Erdődy
– herself a pianist, separated from her husband and an ally to Beethoven in his
battles with fickle Viennese taste – two princes, Lobkowitz and Kinsky, and the
Archduke Rudolph, brother to Emperor Francis I, countered an offer from Kassel
of Kapellmeister to Jerome Bonaparte, short-lived King of Westphalia, with a
quite extraordinary ‘annuity agreement’. They offered 4,000 florins a year,
against Kassel’s 3,400, with no duties other than that Beethoven must remain in
Austria and give up this salary in the event of a similarly remunerated
agreement. Essentially, Beethoven was to be paid by royalty not to do their
bidding but simply to be Beethoven.
There was, moreover, no doubting
whatsoever that that is what his patrons – if one may even call them that any
more – were receiving. Haydn and Mozart would always remain important to
Beethoven, but they had by now been so thoroughly absorbed into his
compositional bloodstream and remade in his singular image that ‘influence’ no
longer really seems the right word. Emancipation from patronage and influence
as commonly understood went hand in hand – in a way that challenges us to
re-examine our conceptions of both. Is that not, however, what Beethoven always
demands of us?
Haydn’s Pupil
The
op.1 piano trios were dedicated to one of Beethoven’s earliest patron, Prince
Karl Lichnowsky, a former pupil and patron of Mozart. They were first performed
in Lichnowsky’s house in Vienna, where the Prince had also offered Beethoven
accommodation, the composer having responded with a typical mixture of
gratitude and something more Romantically ‘difficult’, suspicious both of
slights and of preference vis-à-vis the rest of the household. In 1800,
Lichnowsky granted Beethoven an annuity: a precursor to the 1809 agreement.
The second is perhaps the closest
in the op.1 set to Haydn, from the first movement’s Adagio introduction,
already hinting at the first subject, through the transition to that material,
which arrives – as Denis Matthews noted (like Haydn’s ‘Oxford’ Symphony, also
in G major) – ‘as though in mid-flight, poised on the dominant’, at the very
close. The wit of the Allegro vivace, already playing with our preconceptions
of form and tonality – just when will that theme come to rest in the tonic? –
also has much in common with Haydn, as symphonist and chamber music composer.
The move to the relatively distant key of E major for the Largo con espressione
is more typical of Haydn than Mozart, although the profundity in siciliano
rhythm and style is perhaps reminiscent of the slow movement in the latter’s Piano
Concerto no.23 in A major, KV 488. If the tightness of its thematic organization
stands in Haydn’s line, it is increasingly clear that, in character, this music
owes most of all to Beethoven.
The scherzo jests with material,
perhaps more gruffly yet no less humorously than Haydn; the move to B minor for
its trio is slightly surprising, if hardly idiosyncratic. So too is its
self-conscious ‘popular’ quality, surely a little wry in its affection – and
its Affekt. The coda following the Scherzo’s
reprise also plays with expectations. Bumptious sforzandos continue to
distinguish Beethoven’s humour from that of Haydn in the finale, which
nevertheless evinces much of the latter’s spirit and formal dynamism. It is
surely no coincidence that E major plays an important role here too, Beethoven
already showing himself aware of tonal relationships between as well as within
movements.
The C minor Daemon
The
third of the op.1 trios has generally, not without reason, been heard as the
most personal, even the most fortward-looking of the three. Is the quiet
opening a premonition of that to the Third Piano Concerto, also in C minor? It
is certainly simpler than the similarly subdued opening to Mozart’s, in the
same key, whose complex chromaticism necessitates a forte outburst sooner than
either Beethoven work. The elemental is already enthroned here in a manner
typically Beethovenian, insistence upon tonic and dominant chords again and
again at the close of the first movement not entirely unlike the composer’s
practice in his Fifth Symphony, if without its breath-taking concision. Haydn
certainly seems to have feared potential public incomprehension – remember,
this was Beethoven’s official op. 1 – advising, in vain, his pupil to withhold
publication, a reaction Beethoven ascribed to jealousy. For the second
movement, a simple, hymnal melody is treated to a series of variations, the
shift to the relative major, E-flat, indicative of a need for relative
relaxation of mood as well as tempo. The richness of the coda proves prophetic
for Beethoven’s later variation writing, almost a development in itself.
No more than any other history does
the history of musical genres move in one single direction. Here, Beethoven
nominally returns from a scherzo to the very eighteenth-century minuet. Rustic,
perhaps Haydnesque charm characterizes the trio’s cello melody; the piano’s
syncopated jesting could only be Beethoven. And yet, the ‘Quasi allegro’ indication
adds ambiguity, as well as typical urgency. The finale’s tempo marking,
‘Prestissimo’, sets the scene for a boldness of utterance that encompasses C
minor fury and, in the second subject, similarly extreme lyrical repose. A
closing turn to C major seems a grim nod to convention rather than a blaze of
triumph. If the Fifth Symphony would later offer the quintessential
barnstorming journey from darkness to light, this is perhaps a rage quieted rather
than vanquished, a resigned ‘late’ twilight astonishing in so young a composer.
Haydn’s fears proved unfounded;
popular and musical success were as one. Beethoven spoke dismissively of his
instruction from Haydn; he seems to have wanted something more formal, more
disciplined. Whatever the truth of that, it is clear that he learned far more
from Haydn the composer than from Haydn the teacher. Not the least of his
lessons learned was that it would often involve a great deal of work to be and
to speak as oneself, to address the world as such.
Final Mastery
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| (Cardinal) Archduke Rudolph |
In
the Piano Trio in B-flat major, op.97, its nickname ‘the Archduke’ a reference
to its Habsburg dedicatee, there can be no doubt that Beethoven addresses his
own world and indeed posterity in just such fashion. This final essay in the
genre stands on the threshold of the composer’s ‘late’ period. Another turning
point or at least staging post suggests itself, almost irrespective of whether
we like it or not.
Archduke Rudolph was not only a
signatory and contributor to that agreement of 1809, he was also Beethoven’s
pupil, both in piano and composition, a genuine friend to the composer and
dedicatee of a number of works, as far as the Missa solemnis, originally intended for Rudolph’s installation as
Archbishop of Olmütz (Olomouc). Perhaps appropriately, it is the largest in
scale of Beethoven’s piano trios. As William Kinderman has observed, its
spacious lyricism looks back to the Fourth Piano Concerto and yet it also looks
forward, not least in the inversion of its inner movement, Scherzo placed
before slow movement variations, to the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and beyond
That breadth is certainly to be
felt in the opening Allegro moderato, inherent, in Kinderman’s words, in ‘the
poise and inner strength of the [opening] theme itself’. At thirty-three bars in length,
it is indeed ‘one of the broadest in the entire Classical repertoire’. The
composer’s increasing interest in key relationships of a third is once again
signalled by the move to G major – the ‘true’ dominant, F major, having been
voiced yet not settled upon – for the second subject, also lyrical in quality.
There is no ‘textbook’ sonata form, itself an invention of a later generation,
for Beethoven now, if indeed ever there were. Trills again suggest ‘late’
serenity, development in dialectically ‘strong fragility’.
The scherzo’s sprung, impulsive
rhythms likewise result in no loss to its undeniable lyricism. Beethoven
rarely, if ever, indulges in zero-sum games: in such dialectical composition,
the one impels the other. Its Trio’s chromaticism, contrapuntal preoccupations,
and, most surprising of all, larger scale likewise emerge as both continuation
and contrast. The Andante cantabile, in D major, a third above B flat,
continues the association of thirds and stands tonally, perhaps also
temperamentally, close to the first movement’s second subject. Liszt, one of
the work’s most celebrated proselytizers as pianist, would arrange it for piano
and orchestra as the slow introduction to both of his Beethoven cantata
tributes (1845 and 1870); Daniel Barenboim has also performed it as such. If
the spaciousness of the Rondo Finale offers kinship to the first movement, and
indeed takes its part in the character of the work as a whole, its Presto coda
reminds us that form – that is, structure in time – will always for Beethoven
be dynamic, as should be the case in performance.
One Beethoven
Beethoven
wrote to Lichnowsky, in 1806, in perhaps the quintessential verbalization of
his human dignity and irascibility: ‘Prince, what you are, you are through
accident and birth, what I am, I am through myself; there are and will be
thousands of princes; there is only one Beethoven’. Or, as Hans Werner Henze
would write in his essay ‘Does Music have to be Political?’, ‘Beethoven
regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress’. The claims are not so different. There has
indeed only been one Beethoven in the history of the piano trio and those trios
are not the least of his contributions to what we might still just think of as
human progress. Even if, the state of the world being what it is, we cannot quite
think in those terms right now, Beethoven’s music and his spirit hold out the
hope that, one day, we might do so again.
