Beethoven was a force of nature who seemed incapable of abiding by the rules of polite society. The 22-year-old composer-pianist who arrived in Vienna in late 1792, a few months after Mozart’s untimely death, was a cocky tyro bursting with talent, confidence, and ambition. In performances of his early piano trios, sonatas, concertos, and other works, he dazzled audiences with his no-holds-barred approach to the keyboard, which wreaked havoc on the light-framed Viennese fortepianos of the day. Yet there was a tender, poetic side to Beethoven’s pianism as well. Comparing him to another celebrated pyrotechnician, a fellow composer wrote that Beethoven had “greater eloquence, weightier ideas, and is more expressive—in short, he is more for the heart.”
Pianist Carl Czerny, who studied with Beethoven as a boy and later became a noted interpreter of his works, left a vivid description of the master’s prowess in his memoirs: “Nobody equaled him in the rapidity of his scales, double trills, skips, etc.—not even Hummel. His bearing while playing was masterfully quiet, noble, and beautiful, without the slightest grimace (only bent forward low, as his deafness grew upon him); his fingers were very powerful, not long, and broad-ended at the tips by much playing, for he told me very often indeed that he generally had to practice until after midnight in his youth. … Extraordinary as his playing was when he improvised, it was frequently less successful when he played his printed compositions, for, as he never had patience or time to practice, the result would generally depend on accident or his mood; and as his playing, like his compositions, was far ahead of his time, the pianofortes of the period, still extremely weak and imperfect, could not endure his gigantic style of performance.”
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is a rare exception in the output of a composer for whom almost every work is a rare exception. In the case of the “Pastoral” Symphony, the most obvious anomaly is the revelation of Beethoven’s sources of inspiration. He was reluctant to give his compositions descriptive titles—most of his works’ “nicknames” were appended by others—and although his music often conveys a sense of narrative, he preferred to keep the story abstract. But Beethoven was also an idealist, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the detailed program present in this work focuses on the idyllic.
What’s become known as the “pastoral style” wasn’t new in Beethoven’s day, and he had used it in earlier works, but what’s striking about the Sixth Symphony is how he manages to have it both ways: You hear the familiar, folksy gestures and imagery, but they have an elevated, almost philosophical aura. It’s not a theatrical effect that he is after so much as an “effect on the soul,” as he wrote in his sketches.
Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford notes that instead of the more conventional “four seasons” trajectory, Beethoven opts for a series of vignette movements, depicting a single day in the country. The first is “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country” (from the perspective of the city-dwelling Beethoven). In “Scene by the brook,” aside from the watery, burbling figurations in the accompaniment, the movement also suggests a deeper meditation on the glories of daydreaming—an idle idyll. “Merry gathering of the country folk” serves as the scherzo of this more loosely structured symphony. “Thunder, storm” abruptly follows the scherzo, breaking up the party. But then, it all clears, and we hear the “Shepherd’s song: Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm,” one of Beethoven’s most unusual finales. It is more expansive than driving, and Beethoven seems to achieve the impossible: The entire movement is almost devoid of tension, yet he builds up climaxes that are some of the most exhilarating and uplifting moments in music.
Approaching the symphony from a chamber music angle may seem counterintuitive, but Beethoven himself might have disagreed. After all, he arranged his Second Symphony for piano trio. At the time, it was very common to have multiple versions of great and popular works. One reason for this was the lack of recording technology and the rarity of orchestral performances. Another is the view that the core ideas in the music can be experienced across multiple formats. A chamber version of a symphony doesn’t ask three people to play the same number of notes as an orchestra of 65, but rather highlights the dialogue in the music and conveys Beethoven’s ingenious transformation of themes through the conversational mode of chamber music.
The folk-like style that Beethoven emulates—his era’s idealization of country life—may seem naive to us today, but for the audience in the crowded Viennese theater in 1808, the “pastoral” connected instinctively to lilting rhythms and blissful tunes. For us, the word “nature” poignantly evokes what we stand to lose. That alone makes Beethoven’s musical idealism all the more relevant and meaningful. The “pastoral” quality of the symphony is less an outright depiction than it is a mindset of looking at and experiencing the world—an “effect on the soul.” Rather than a country fair, the version for trio, in its intimacy, is a picnic for three.
—Shai Wosner
The Piano Trio in B-flat Major was originally scored for clarinet plus piano and cello, but is just as often played on the violin. Written in 1797 and published a year later, it is more or less contemporary with the three sparkling Op. 9 string trios—which Beethoven at one time considered “the best of my works”—and bears a strong family resemblance to the three Op. 10 piano sonatas, the two Op. 5 cello sonatas, and the Quintet in E-flat Major for Piano and Winds, Op. 16. It is sometimes called the “Gassenhauer” (“Street Song”) Trio after a popular terzetto from Joseph Weigl’s long-forgotten comic opera L’amor marinario (Sailors’ Loves). “Before I begin work, I must have something to eat,” the three basses sing in this light-hearted ditty, which supplied the spunky theme for Beethoven’s final variations movement.
The opening of the Allegro con brio surges upward by half-steps before falling back on itself in mock exhaustion. Off-kilter accents, trills, melodic curlicues, and fleet-fingered passagework accentuate the movement’s playfully outgoing character. A more sedate second subject in F major is soon introduced, and these contrasting ideas provide fodder for an ingenious development section that wears its sophistication lightly. The radiant Adagio in E-flat major is notable for its rich, somewhat wayward harmonies and elaborate figurations. In the finale, Beethoven spins dross into pure gold: He puts Weigl’s bouncy, jovial tune through a series of eight compact variations—the first for piano alone, the second for strings, and so forth—each more imaginative than the last. After a rippling piano cadenza, the trio ends with a spitfire coda.
“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. 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 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 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. 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.
—Harry Haskell
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