Beethoven explored
‘O Providence — grant me some time a pure day of joy. For so long now the heartfelt echo of true joy has been strange to me. Oh when — oh when, oh Divine One — can I feel it again in the temple of nature and of mankind?’
Thus wrote Ludwig van Beethoven at the end of his Heiligenstadt Testament of October 1802, a tortured outpouring of his emotional state as he came to terms with the onset of deafness. For any musician in mid-career, the development of such a disability would be daunting, even terrifying. For Beethoven, prone to misanthropy and depression, deafness not only jeopardised his performing career but also threatened him with the prospect of social isolation. Yet amid such despondency he retained the belief that ‘true joy’ could be attained, and that it was worth battling through his present suffering in search of happiness. This sense of striving for happiness was not just a motif of Beethoven’s biography; it is also felt in much of his music, with many pieces tracing an emotional trajectory from painful tension to ecstatic joy.
For previous generations of musicians, the expression of despondency or joy was best achieved in vocal music. Opera could express the ravishing emotional swings of love; church music could voice the grandeur and majesty of the divine. By Beethoven’s time, however, instrumental music was also aspiring to capture the full gamut of emotions. No longer was instrumental music merely the accompaniment for socialising, dancing and meals; it was increasingly seen as a vehicle for ideas and feelings that transcended words. And Beethoven went further than any previous composer to capture a sense of emotional striving and of ultimate joyful resolution in instrumental music. Although he did not forsake operatic and sacred genres — this concert includes two fine examples of his operatic style — his output is dominated by instrumental pieces whose emotional scope and compositional inventiveness were unprecedented. Just as his inner life often seemed to be a constant struggle, Beethoven consistently strove in his compositional output to extend the bounds of instrumental music.
Overture to Coriolan Op.62
The power that Beethoven invested in instrumental music is
evident in the Coriolan Overture. This was inspired by a
play by Heinrich von Collin, a Viennese poet and civil
servant, on the same theme (and with the same title) as
Shakespeare’s better-known tragedy. Yet there is little
evidence that Beethoven intended the overture to be
performed in the theatre as a prelude to the play; instead
its first performances were in private concerts, where it
stood on its own, evoking the passions of Collin’s play
through solely musical means.
Coriolan is a story of defiance that leads to a tragic dilemma. Coriolanus seeks vengeance on Rome by attacking the city, but is begged repeatedly by his mother to be merciful. Torn between his mother’s pleas and his military success, he can resolve this dilemma only by choosing to die. Beethoven’s overture captures the tension and burning emotions of this dilemma. It starts with defiant chords that are flung away into silence; these dramatic gestures suggest Coriolanus’s emotional turbulence but also the tragic scale of the scenario. The subsequent theme is little more than insistent figuration, but its repetition drives us inexorably towards the tragic conclusion. The two themes are so sharply contrasted that no easy resolution is possible, and the overture ends with an unsettling fragmentation rather than a joyous cadence. Beethoven has distilled the tragic gestures of Collin’s play into an equally intense and passionate orchestral work.
Aria ‘O wär’ ich schon mit dir vereint’ from Fidelio Op.72
Although Beethoven’s compositional achievement was primarily
in instrumental music, he long cherished the ambition to
make a name in opera. Yet his operatic endeavours were
hampered by numerous factors. His opera Leonore was
painfully slow in its gestation, and its performances in
1800s Vienna were overshadowed by the Napoleonic invasion,
over-zealous censors, and financial disputes between
Beethoven and the box office. In May 1814 Leonore was
revived under the new title of Fidelio and at last achieved
a modest success in Vienna, buoyed no doubt by the euphoria
surrounding the defeat of Napoleon.
Fidelio tells the story of Florestan, imprisoned for shadowy political reasons, and his wife Leonore, who enters the prison disguised as the gaoler’s new assistant Fidelio. A sub-plot concerns Marzelline, daughter of the gaoler, who falls in love with Fidelio. Tonight we hear Marzelline’s aria as she fantasizes about married life with Fidelio. The opening section in C minor expresses her desire to be united with Fidelio; she then turns to the major key for a refrain of swelling hope and joy. The C minor verse is repeated, with new words imagining the bliss of everyday home life with Fidelio, and the aria is brought to a close with the joyful major-key refrain. Although Marzelline’s romance is little more than a fantasy based on mistaken identity, there is nothing capping the happiness it gives her; and the refrain of the aria surely also spoke to Beethoven, in his constant search for ‘the heartfelt echo of true joy’.
Scena and aria ‘Ah perfido!’ Op.65 A much earlier vocal work is the scena and aria ‘Ah perfido!’. This dates from a period of Beethoven’s career when he was trying to master all the important compositional genres; it was finished in February 1796 in Prague, during his first major concert tour outside Vienna, and was first performed in the autumn of that year in Leipzig by Josepha Dussek. Compared to Fidelio, Beethoven here uses a much older type of text, an Italian libretto of Pietro Metastasio that harks back to the Baroque style in its demarcated and stylised emotions. The dramatic context is that the soprano, Deidamia, has been abandoned by Achilles, and her feelings oscillate between anger and longing. In the introductory scena she expresses scorn, underpinned by furious semiquavers in the strings, yet she also laments the sudden coldness of Achilles’ heart. A similar alternation of emotions occurs in the subsequent aria, which starts with pleading (‘I cannot live with you’) but then turns to anger at the cruelty of Achilles; eventually she asks the audience rhetorically if she deserves our pity. Although the depiction of emotions is more stylized and less naturalistic than in Fidelio, the piece is no less effective, both as a showpiece for the singer and also demonstrating the composer’s ability to manipulate contrasting moods.
Symphonies No.1 in C major Op.21 and No.8 in F major Op.93
Despite Beethoven’s efforts in the field of
operatic music, his career and achievements remained rooted
in instrumental genres such as the piano sonata, string
quartet and piano concerto. The most prestigious of all
instrumental genres was, of course, the symphony,
particularly since Haydn and Mozart had crowned their output
with a series of grand symphonies. As Beethoven established
his career in the 1790s, the expectation was that he would
write a symphony, perhaps following the example of Haydn
with whom he had studied in 1792–3. Yet as with many of his
first ventures in a genre, Beethoven found that a symphony
did not come easily. In 1795–6 he began sketching a Symphony
in C major but then abandoned work. He returned to some of
this material, though, in his eventual Symphony No.1 in C
major, completed in 1800.
Several features of this symphony were consciously innovative. The piece starts provocatively in the wrong key, with a cadence in F major; only after a series of slow cadences do we finally reach the tonic. Then in the ensuing Allegro there are prominent passages for wind instruments; indeed a reviewer of the first performance considered that ‘the only flaw’ in the piece ‘was that the wind instruments were used too much, so that it was more Harmoniemusik than orchestral music’. The minuet is also bold, with its skittish tempo and outlandish crescendos undermining any sense of a polite courtly dance, while several phrases push audaciously into D flat major. Closer to the model of Haydn, though, are the poised second movement and the cheeky finale, with its stuttering start.
The concluding piece in tonight’s concert, Symphony No.8 in F major, comes from much later in Beethoven’s symphonic journey, being written in 1812 as part of a burst of creativity that also included his Symphony No.7. Yet despite its position in his output, this symphony looks back to the eighteenth century in several ways. Its key of F major seems to have suggested a light-hearted, even pastoral mood to Beethoven, particularly in the first movement with its dance-like opening. In his initial sketches Beethoven conceived the first movement as a piano concerto, which might explain the airy texture and expectant tone of the opening bars; but as he developed these sketches into a symphony, he introduced more forceful features that add tension, such as the dotted rhythms that often assert a distant key. Both the inner movements inject doses of humour, with the Allegretto scherzando being dominated by a chugging accompaniment that is sometimes said to have been inspired by a predecessor of the metronome, while the Minuet is subverted by repeated sforzando markings. The finale, by contrast, is a breathless romp, with a cheeky diversion into F sharp minor near the end. We might be surprised that a composer so prone to despondency could write such a genial piece; but the joyfulness evoked by Beethoven is made all the more powerful by the constant musical undercurrents of tragedy and tension.