Upon arriving in Vienna from his native Bonn in 1792, Beethoven wasted no time in establishing his reputation as both a composer and a pianist of the first rank. Boundlessly energetic and self-confident to a fault, the young tyro made no secret of his impatience to emerge from the deep shadow cast by his esteemed mentor, Joseph Haydn. By 1800, his 30th year, Beethoven had an impressive clutch of masterpieces to his credit, including his first symphony, three piano concertos, a septet for winds and strings, and six string quartets. Modesty was not Beethoven’s strong suit. Upon completing his Op. 18 quartets, he told a friend that he had “only just learned to write quartets properly,” implicitly setting them on a plane with the works of Haydn’s maturity.
The “Spring” Sonata dates from 1800–1801, by which time Beethoven already had four sonatas for violin, two for cello, and more than a dozen for piano under his belt. His almost superhuman productivity may have been fueled by an awareness of his incipient deafness. It was around this time that he wrote to a friend, “I live entirely in my music; and hardly have I completed one composition than I have already begun another. At my present rate of composing, I often produce three or four works at a time.” Beethoven’s earlier violin sonatas received a mixed reception in Vienna’s hidebound musical circles; one reviewer complained that he felt “like a man who had wandered through an alluring forest and at last emerged tired and worn out.” For once, Beethoven may have taken the criticism to heart, for the “Spring” Sonata, true to its name, has a fresh, uncomplicated beauty that instantly won audiences over.
The Allegro opens with a limpid, soaring tune that alights on a series of sustained notes, like a bird darting from branch to branch. It soon gives way to a perkier, more excitable theme, characterized by surging crescendos and insistently repeated eighth notes. Beethoven playfully weaves these two ideas together, with many an unexpected—and occasionally unsettling—harmonic twist and turn. The Adagio molto espressivo—in radiant B-flat major—casts a softer, more introspective glow. The tender melody—set against a gently rocking accompaniment—is one of Beethoven’s loveliest lyrical creations. The short, mincing Scherzo—in which the two instruments play a lively game of cat and mouse—flows seamlessly into the rondo-form finale, whose recurring subject evokes the simple, carefree mood of the first movement. Beethoven gives the theme a different setting each time it appears, alternating it with episodes that themselves vary in character and fullness of development.
“Strange forms begin a joyous dance as they gently fade toward a luminous point, then separate from each other flashing and sparkling, and hunt and pursue each other in myriad groupings. In the midst of the spirit kingdom thus revealed, the enraptured soul listens to the unknown language, and understands all the most secret allusions by which it has been aroused.” Thus did early–19th-century critic and novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann describe Beethoven’s chamber music in general, and the two Op. 70 piano trios in particular. To listeners steeped in the genial classicism of Mozart and Haydn, the muscular romanticism of Beethoven’s middle period seemed a strange and wondrously allusive language—almost, indeed, the “air of another planet” that bewildered audiences would encounter a century later in the work of another musical revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg.
Beethoven’s early piano trios, charming and inventive as they are, give few hints of the energy and audacity that burst forth in the D-Major Trio. Composed in the summer of 1808, it followed close on the heels of such exuberantly expansive works as the Fifth and Sixth symphonies and the A-Major Sonata for cello and piano. Beethoven sketched some incidental music for an opera on Macbeth around the same time, a coincidence that led suggestible commentators to detect Shakespearean overtones in the trio’s darkly mysterious slow movement. It was not Banquo’s ghost, however, but that of Hamlet’s father who gave the trio its nickname, thanks to a fanciful association made in later years by pianist Carl Czerny.
“Ghost” is a fitting epithet for the central Largo, though it must be said that Hoffmann discerned in its D-minor brooding merely a note of “gentle melancholy.” The expressive heart of the trio, the Largo contrasts sharply with the bright, extroverted athleticism of the two outer movements. Yet there, too, Beethoven injects elements of strangeness and surprise. At the outset of the opening Allegro, the briskly ascending D-major theme announced by the three instruments in unison scarcely gets off the ground before coming to rest on a harmonically “foreign” F natural. A quick change of gears introduces a lyrical countersubject, whereupon the two themes “hunt and pursue each other” in myriad permutations, as Hoffmann so acutely observed. Light and shadow, turbulence and calm, alternate in quick succession. To borrow a favorite metaphor of the Romantics, storm clouds billow ominously on the horizon, then disperse in a flash. The ghost is exorcised and the dance ends, as it began, in pure joy.
In his first eight violin sonatas, Beethoven gradually moved away from the 18th-century sonata style, in which the violin was subordinate to the piano. With the “Kreutzer” Sonata of 1802–1803, number nine in the series, there is no longer any question that the two players are equal partners. In this case, the players were Beethoven himself and English violinist George Bridgetower, who met the composer in Vienna in the spring of 1803. Beethoven had already sketched the first two movements of the sonata, and when a concert with Bridgetower was arranged for late May, he hastily combined them with a ready-made finale he had written for another sonata in the same key. Both the work’s popular success and the exuberance of its violin writing owed much to Bridgetower’s virtuosity, as Beethoven freely acknowledged. Unfortunately, the two men later quarreled, prompting Beethoven to award the dedication and naming rights of the sonata to French virtuoso Rodolphe Kreutzer—who, ungratefully, refused to perform it.
Beethoven described the “Kreutzer” Sonata as having been written “almost in the manner of a concerto,” and a formidably difficult work it is indeed for violinist and pianist alike. As if in recognition of their equal status, the Adagio sostenuto introduction opens with a chordal phrase for the violin alone. The piano answers in kind, and together the two instruments insinuate a little two-note motif that we soon recognize as the germ of the Presto. The main part of the first movement is a tour de force that proceeds by fits and starts, moving between A minor and A major, with frequent lyrical interludes and a majestic second theme in Beethoven’s best heroic mode. The second movement—a genial set of variations on a lilting, syncopated theme in F major—is no less dazzling in its intricate, finger-twisting passagework. The final Presto, this time solidly in A major, bursts out of the gate in helter-skelter triple time. Its athletic rhythms, lively repartee, and explosive outbursts encapsulate the bravura spirit of the entire sonata.
—Harry Haskell
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