Beethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792, he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for several days. 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 Cello Sonata in G Minor opens with a slow, spacious introduction that combines intense pathos and high drama in equal measure. The soaring, long-breathed melodic line finally comes to rest on a series of harmonically unstable chords preceded by a short, sharp upbeat. Beethoven thereupon takes this “ta-DA” figure, smooths it out, and incorporates it in the theme of the ensuing triple-time Allegro, which breezes along at a clip of one beat to a bar, propelled by rippling passagework and stabbing syncopations. The final Rondo unexpectedly transports the listener into the sunny realm of G major as the cello and piano take turns presenting the three main themes—the first crisp and somewhat martial in character, the second flowing and sweetly lyrical, the third bouncy and exuberant.
Beethoven composed his three Op. 30 violin sonatas in 1801–1802, just after the sunny, crowd-pleasing “Spring” Sonata, Op. 24, and just before the stylistic breakthrough represented by the monumental, concerto-like “Kreutzer” Sonata, Op. 47. He dedicated the set to the young, reform-minded Alexander I of Russia—not one of his principal patrons, but worth cultivating nonetheless. Although the title page of the first edition specified that the sonatas were written for piano “with the accompaniment of a violin,” Beethoven clearly had a more egalitarian partnership in mind. In fact, the brilliant finale of the “Kreutzer” was originally intended for this sonata.
The first of the Op. 30 sonatas blends lyricism and drama in ways that must have seemed novel and perplexing to many of Beethoven’s listeners. He treats the themes of the first-movement Allegro—such as the little turning figure that the piano plays at the very beginning—less as melodies to be developed in the conventional way than as lodes of intervals and rhythms to be mined and manipulated. Even the lacy filigree that festoons the luminous Adagio in D major is more than purely ornamental, serving as it does to intensify the harmony at key points. In the final Allegretto, a simple triadic theme spawns a set of six technically demanding variations of strikingly diverse characters.
“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 plant” 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, barely hint at the energy and audacity that burst forth in the Trio in E-flat Major and its companion in D major, the so-called “Ghost” Trio.
The E-flat–Major Trio abounds in ingenious and often idiosyncratic delights. For instance, the slow, quietly introspective introduction returns near the end of the opening Allegro ma non troppo, paving the way for a breezy coda that features the recurring trill motif that generates so much of the first movement’s dynamic energy. Beethoven displays his formidable variation technique in the second-movement Allegretto (in place of the conventional slow movement): It features not one but two themes (in sunny C major and sultry C minor) that serve as the basis for a series of interlocking double-variations. The first movement’s brisk, free-flowing 6/8 meter is echoed in the waltz-like lilt of the third movement, whose warm A-flat–major tonality—the third key the listener has encountered in as many movements—marks a further departure from the sound world of Haydn and Mozart. Here again, Beethoven plots his transitions cunningly: The center section of the A-B-A–form structure circles back by way of a hauntingly ethereal and harmonically searching bridge passage. The home key is resoundingly reestablished in the swashbuckling Finale, with its propulsive rhythms and vigorously striding themes in Beethoven’s best “heroic” manner.
—Harry Haskell
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