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 A-Minor Violin Sonata dates from 1800, by which time Beethoven already had three sonatas for violin, two for cello, and more than a dozen for piano under his belt. This extraordinary 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 three Op. 12 violin sonatas of 1797–1798, although tame by comparison with his later chamber music, grated on the ears of one contemporary listener, who professed to hear in them “a striving for strange modulations, an objection to customary associations, a heaping up of difficulties on difficulties till one loses all patience and enjoyment.”
One wonders what this listener would have made of the Violin Sonata in A Minor, with its brooding turbulence, explosive dynamic contrasts, and concentrated motivic construction. Beethoven’s disregard for the customary niceties is apparent in the opening Presto, which plunges the listener into a maelstrom of roiling triplets. Only after a minute or so does he introduce a smoothly flowing theme that gives the music a countervailing semblance of repose. Beethoven dispenses with the traditional pair of middle movements; in their place, he gives us a kind of hybrid Andante and Scherzo in A major, fleshed out with recurring fugal passages. Most unconventional of all is the finale, which combines three sharply contrasting themes in an episodic structure that is tightly knit yet full of unexpected twists and turns.
Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano span the two decades in which he evolved from a young tyro to a mature master. The two Op. 5 sonatas, written in 1796 for French virtuoso Jean-Louis Duport, are notable for their exuberant but understated brilliance. The two Op. 102 sonatas of 1815 stand on the threshold between the “heroic” style of his middle period and the more introspective, convoluted language of his later works. The Op. 69 Sonata, completed in 1808, falls squarely in the middle of this period of dynamic stylistic development. Roughly contemporary with such works as the “Pastoral” Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the two Op. 70 piano trios, it shows the composer testing the limits of both cello technique and the duo sonata form. Although Beethoven had already composed nine of his 10 violin-piano sonatas, the relatively novel combination of cello and piano posed new challenges of ensemble and balance.
Only one of Beethoven’s five sonatas—Op. 102, No. 2—features a full-scale slow movement, suggesting that he was concerned about the cello’s ability to hold its own alongside the piano as a lyrical solo instrument. (The autograph score of the Op. 69 Sonata shows him still experimenting with various ways of allocating thematic material between the two instruments.) His solution to the problem was to exploit the full range of the cello’s sonority. The Allegro ma non tanto opens with a richly baritonal cello solo, but quickly climbs high as the music picks up momentum. Similar contrasts of register and tempo are explored in the sparkling A-minor Scherzo, with its halting, syncopated theme bandied back and forth between the players. A meltingly beautiful but oddly truncated Adagio cantabile serves as a preamble to the bravura finale, in which the piano and cello share equally in the brilliant figuration.
Beethoven sketched the B-flat–Major Trio in 1810 and completed the score early the following year, shortly before starting work on his Seventh Symphony. Dedicated to his patron and pupil Archduke Rudolf, second in line to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the last and most overtly symphonic of Beethoven’s seven canonic piano trios points the way to the trios of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. In the spring of 1814, Beethoven played the “Archduke” Trio on a benefit concert for a military charity in Vienna. According to composer Ludwig Spohr, the performance “was not a treat, for, in the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which Beethoven minded little, since he did not hear it, and secondly, on account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys till the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of tones were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part.” Pianist Ignaz Moscheles gave a more forgiving account of the concert: “In the case of how many compositions is the word new misapplied! But never in Beethoven’s, and least of all in this, which again is full of originality. His playing, aside from its intellectual element, satisfied me less, being wanting in clarity and precision; but I observed many traces of the grand style of playing which I had long recognized in his compositions.”
The opening bars of the Allegro moderato—with its broadly arching piano melody, piquant intensifications of harmony, and ecstatic violin and cello outbursts—sets the stage for a movement charged with dynamic drama and tender lyricism in equal parts. After such boldly striding music, the delicate, mincing tread of the Scherzo is all the more delightfully startling. Yet here too Beethoven works on an expansive scale, deftly transforming the cello’s bouncy staccato theme first into a flowing legato melody and then into a slithering, chromatic fugue. An even sharper contrast lies in store in the luminous Andante, which Beethoven marks “cantabile, ma però con moto” (“songlike, but with movement”). A softly pulsing melody limned in block chords gives way to a pearly cascade of triplets in the piano part, the two hands in contrary motion, accompanied by unison sighing figures in the strings. This is the first of four richly imaginative variations that Beethoven weaves upon his simple D-major theme, topped off with a coda that pivots adroitly back to the home key before striking off in a new and totally unforeseen direction. Like the first movement, the finale is marked Allegro moderato, but its antic spirit and ingenious rhythmic repartee might almost come from a different world.
—Harry Haskell
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