In the five years from 1798 to 1802 Beethoven transformed his style; in the next four he transformed music. Like Bach in Cöthen from 1717 to 1723, Haydn at Esterházy in the early 1770s, and Mozart in his first five years in Vienna, Beethoven now came fully of age, working imaginatively along new pathways while drawing organically on his earlier achievements. The consequences are writ large over all his major works between 1803 and 1806, and, in other ways, in those that followed up to about 1812. This long “second period” has been accepted as a unit—and as a unity—since Wilhelm von Lenz coined the idea of “Beethoven and his three styles” in 1852. It is the central phase of Beethoven’s career, the time of origin of many of his most famous compositions. Among these are major orchestral works for the broadest possible public, above all the Third through the Eighth Symphonies and the three principal concertos—the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos and the Violin Concerto. This phase also witnessed his main theater music, including his opera, Leonore, the Coriolanus Overture, and the incidental music for Goethe’s Egmont. In 1807 he wrote the Mass in C, his first true sacred work; and he published several important song collections on poems by Gellert, Goethe, and others. The principal second-period piano sonatas are the “Waldstein,” Opus 53, the “Appassionata,” Opus 57, and Lebewohl, Opus 81a, written for Archduke Rudolph. From his first phase as a quartet composer in Opus 18 he now moved on to the formidable “Razumovsky” Quartets, followed a few years later by the “Harp” Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 74, and the F-minor Quartet, Opus 95. He also produced important keyboard chamber music: the pair of Opus 70 Trios, the Opus 69 Cello Sonata, the Violin Sonata in G major, Opus 96, and the “Archduke” Piano Trio, Opus 97.
For many listeners this series forms the central experience of Beethoven. Launching one major artistic achievement after another, something like contemporary Napoleonic victories, he took command of the musical world and aroused an immense response. Once these works were in place, it was clear that he had found a range of voices that enlarged musical expression, pointed to the future, and reframed understanding of what had come before, both in his own earlier work and in that of his predecessors. With these compositions Haydn and Mozart became “classics.” With these works, Beethoven’s boldness and innovation in the 1790s almost began to look like a genial apprenticeship, although the best works of the first period stand up very well and are not displaced by anything that came later. Still, there is no doubt that what Beethoven achieved in the second period overwhelmed the musical world and established a new standard of emotional and intellectual completeness that has never been lost.
Mid-nineteenth-century listeners, for whom the works of the second period became an essential canon, found that they could not identify the same qualities in the more arcane and difficult works of his third period, above all the late piano sonatas and quartets, which even in the early twentieth century struck many as the products of a deaf genius buried in an inaccessible world. Although in later times we have come to entirely different assessments of the two outer periods, seeing in the first the seeds of much that came later and in the third glimpses of earlier ways of thought, the second-period Beethoven still holds the center of what could be called the ordinary experience of concert music. As Donald Francis Tovey put it in the early twentieth century:
The distinguishing features of Beethoven’s second style [using von Lenz’s term] are the result of a condition of art in which enormous new possibilities have become so well known that there is no need for stating them abruptly, paradoxically, or emphatically, but also no need for working them out to remote conclusions. Hence these works have become for most people the best-known and best loved type of classical music. In their perfect fusion of untranslatable dramatic emotion with every beauty of musical design and tone they have never been equaled.1
The point is well taken. A number of works after Opus 30—the Piano Sonatas Opus 31, the Opus 34 and Opus 35 piano variation sets, the Second Symphony, and above all the Third Piano Concerto—are studded with moments and passages that split them off sharply from their late-eighteenth-century antecedents, including Beethoven’s own early works, almost defining them as wayward and quixotic children of normal and tidy parents. They abound in sudden and abrupt shifts of tone, key, and character of the musical material—witness the juxtaposition of keys in the Third Concerto, with its E-major slow movement flanked by C minor in the first and last, and, as noted earlier, with a deliberate play on the pitch equivalent G
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as the slow movement ends and the finale begins. Similarly intense contrasts appear in the Second Symphony, where the most boisterous of first and last movements are able to contain a slow movement of unsurpassed smoothness and beauty. In the later, mainstream compositions of the second period, however, these traits have largely disappeared, having been assimilated into more balanced, mature, richly developed artworks.
As early as the summer of 1802, while finishing his sketches for the E-flat Piano Variations, Opus 35—the “Prometheus” Variations, as he called them—Beethoven jotted down some ideas for a possible third symphony in E-flat.2 That these first ideas for a cyclic work in the same key directly follow his final sketches for Opus 35, in the same sketchbook, gives the strong impression that the new plan is an immediate outgrowth of the Variations. The sketches show a plan for the first three movements of a cyclic work, but no finale. They begin with a patch of an idea for a slow introduction; then an Allegro first movement, worked out to the end of the exposition; then an Adagio sketch in C major marked “seconda” (second movement); then ideas for a “Menuetto serioso” in the tonic with a Trio in G minor. We can reasonably assume that Beethoven had no need to write in an idea for the finale because the material of the “Prometheus” Variations was intended from the beginning to be used for the finale of the new work, and that is in fact what later happened.
Accordingly, we can regard the finale as the springboard for the plan of the symphony, the fixed point against which Beethoven elaborated the other movements.4 It has long been obvious that the Eroica finale is in fact closely derived from the Opus 35 Variations.3 It is also well understood that the last movement abandons the more rigid form of the classical variation set (which is still present though expanded in Opus 35) and becomes a blended form for which we have no name. The Eroica finale consists of a large introduction (labeled as such in Opus 35) that builds up the basic thematic material of the movement in stages. First, as in the piano variations, Beethoven establishes the bass of the theme—he literally calls it “Basso del Tema”—creating an expectation that must be fulfilled; then he handsomely fulfills it by adding the upper-line melody itself. The whole process is something like a mirror of Beethoven’s compositional process in small, laid out for the world to see, in its gradual assemblage of an intelligible bass and melody in a simple song form. It could well have derived from an improvisation in which he first presented a bass, elaborated it as a bass with other voices, and then combined it with a main theme. The introduction also anticipates those other instances in which a great theme arrives as the culmination of a gradual process of preparation—two later examples are the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony and the long and complex preparation for the arrival of the “Ode to Joy” in the finale of the Ninth.
In the Eroica finale, this thematic preparation is followed by a set of variations on the theme and bass that include two fugato sections and a G-minor Alla marcia, then at length a large-scale Poco andante in the tonic E-flat major that serves as a special kind of formal and harmonic return. The Andante leads to remarkable excursions into remote harmonic regions, evoking memories of the most distant wanderings of the first movement and the coda of the massive slow movement. The later sketches show that Beethoven embarked on the final stages of working out the symphony’s finale only after he had laid out his plans for the earlier movements in some detail, but always with Opus 35 in the background of the whole project.
In the winter of 1803–4 Beethoven plunged into full-time work on the symphony. It now grew to a length that dwarfed any previous symphony by him or anyone else. The first movement alone is almost the length of an entire early Haydn symphony, nearly seven hundred measures in Allegro con brio 3/4 (not counting the repeat of the exposition), during which it spans vast arches of musical space and traverses a wide range of keys. The first edition actually carried the composer’s warning that, since “this symphony having been written to be longer than is usual, it should be performed closer to the beginning than near the end of a concert, because, if it is heard too late, after an overture, an aria, and a concerto, it may lose for audiences something of its own proper effect.”5 It is not only the first movement that is unusually long. Each movement is developed on a grand scale and each has its own contrasts and byways, producing the impression that four monumental pillars create the whole. The work expanded the time space of the symphony as never before, demanding an unprecedented degree of patience and concentration from concert audiences.
But what marks the Eroica as pathbreaking is not only its epic length. At least equally important is the unity of musical ideas that marks the first movement. Here Beethoven intensifies the relationships among the themes and motives of the first movement by placing at the beginning a small vocabulary of melodic intervals that present the main ideas of the movement (*W 19). He then draws on the same vocabulary to construct all the other themes, motives, and even transitions in the movement, including a new theme that appears in the development section. What results is a chain of subtly related ideas, giving this long work a unity that could not have been achieved by traditional means. In a larger sense, he has also greatly increased the developmental potential of the symphonic sonata form.
The exposition divides into six well-defined segments, five of them closing with an emphatic cadential passage that lands firmly on the tonic (*W 20). The exception, the third segment, is launched by a transition figure that lands on an unstable chord.6 In the recapitulation, the same transition figure and segment reappear as a normal part of the return in the tonic of all the material that had been presented in the exposition in the dominant key. The coup de théâtre is reserved for much later.7 The coda, as culmination, encompasses five segments of its own, building up from restatements of the first theme with new counterpoint through the return of the “new theme” from the development section, still more returns of other figures from the exposition, and finally, a peroration on the opening triadic theme that begins in the solo horn, traverses the first violins and the lower strings, and finally appears in full grandeur in the winds and trumpets as the music moves to what is expected to be the great cadence that ends the movement.8 But one more stroke remains to be accomplished: in sudden piano, the third segment returns, in contrary motion, virtually the same as in the exposition and recapitulation, but now instead of leading to a diminished seventh, as always before, it lands squarely on a full-range dominant seventh, an arrival that serves as a long-range “resolution” of the moments of instability heard much earlier (*W 21). That this resolution comes so late, near the very end of the movement, shows the magnitude of the time span over which this connection is extended. Beethoven uses this connection to hold the fate of this passage at maximum tension, like a coiled spring, before releasing it at the last possible moment.
Another significant factor in the first movement, besides its motivic density, is its harmonic range, above all in the development section, by far the longest of any symphony written up to this time. This section also has room for another formal anomaly—the introduction of the new theme, which appears first in E minor and then in E-flat minor en route to the long dominant preparation that precedes the recapitulation. And just before that moment of formal return, we encounter a long preparation as the retransition prolongs the extended dominant harmony, gradually building up anticipation of the long-awaited tonic. While the strings are still playing a dominant seventh chord, the second horn enters with the first theme in the tonic. The resulting dissonance has us believe that the horn came in two bars too soon. That is exactly what Ries thought, and at the first rehearsal he burst out with the remark, “The damned horn player! Can’t he count?”9 Whereupon, as Ries recalls, Beethoven very nearly slapped him in the face. In fact, the horn entrance is not wrong but right, as it rubs a dissonant touch of the tonic into the prevailing dominant, seemingly breaking the tension but actually prolonging it, as if the hornist must break out of the dominant because the suspense is too great. Beethoven’s sketches show that he worked out this passage in many different ways, but they also show that the idea of a tonic harmony inserted into the prevailing dominant was part of his conception from early on. Many other details are intelligible as part of a broad scheme in which elements in conflict arouse expectations of resolution that are then dramatized or postponed. This essential aspect of Beethovenian second-period formal design reaches its first great height in the Eroica first movement.
The slow movement shifts the perspective from heroic epic to tragedy and to the portrayal of heroism. The 1802 sketch models the slow movement as an Adagio in C major, but by the time of the “Eroica Sketchbook” of 1803–4 a lengthy Funeral March had taken its place. This change of plan clearly coincided with Beethoven’s enlarging the “heroic” concept of the whole work, and in the sketchbook, the funeral music has become integral to the whole. The final result is a “Marcia funebre” of the highest seriousness, in C minor. No textbook formal scheme fits this expansive movement, yet its large-scale statement, counterstatement, and return, fit the current patterns of Beethoven’s larger slow movements well enough.
1. First section, C minor, mm. 1–68 (Funeral March)
2. Second section, C major, mm. 69–104 (“Maggiore”)
3. Partial return of first theme, C minor, with new fugal extensions and elaborations, mm. 105–172
4. Shortened recapitulation of first section, C minor, theme in oboe and clarinet, over ostinato in strings, mm. 173–209
5. Coda, beginning in A-flat, closing into C minor; at the end, the fragmentation of the first theme
Though various sequential and metaphorical narratives for the whole symphony have been proposed, none truly satisfy. The most grotesque is Paul Bekker’s idea that since Beethoven in effect mourned the dead hero in the slow movement and then brought him back into action in the third, performers might reverse the order of the two inner movements!10 Berlioz said about the whole work, “I know few examples in music of a style in which grief has been so consistently able to retain such pure form and such nobility of expression.”11 That representing grief in this way was Beethoven’s aim emerges clearly enough from a predecessor to the slow movement, his A-flat minor “Marcia funebre per la morte d’un eroe” (“Funeral March for the Death of a Hero”), in the Piano Sonata Opus 26, written in 1800. As we saw earlier, it has often been claimed that the Eroica slow movement may have been drawn from Paer’s funeral march, also in C minor, from his opera Achille, which had been performed in Vienna in 1801.12 The parallel is visible but too limited to be of value, as Paer’s march is so much simpler than Beethoven’s visionary movement, even when we allow for the difference between journeyman and master and between an operatic march and this grand symphonic Adagio.
At all events, if Beethoven had a “picture” in his mind as a guiding concept when writing this movement, it was that of a slow processional march for a fallen hero being taken to his grave—that much is clear from the triplet drumbeats simulated in the basses at the beginning and end. The disintegration of the theme at the end signifies not the literal death of the hero, as it does a few years later at the end of Coriolanus, but that mourning and grief have reached a stage at which the theme itself can no longer be uttered in full but is reduced to broken whispers.
Of all Beethoven’s works, the Third Symphony, by virtue of its final title, its character, and its magnitude, has been the mainspring behind the notion of a “heroic style” and the labeling of the years from 1803 to 1812 as a “heroic period.”13 As a result, the whole period is named for one of its conspicuous parts, at the expense of a higher valuation of works that do not fit the mold and are clearly not heroic, yet are essential products of the same period. Accordingly, to regard the heroic as a primary but not wholly dominating aesthetic term for Beethoven’s work from this time frees us to see the heroic as only one among various models that Beethoven was pursuing in instrumental music and even in opera.14
Inevitably, “hero” and “heroic” have undergone drastic changes in meaning over the centuries. In our pessimistic, self-consciously postmodern and certainly nonheroic age, we can hardly imagine what it meant to nineteenth-century artists and writers to portray the “hero” as the self-reliant male warrior, the brave man whose virtue consists in overcoming all obstacles and, if need be, dying for the cause to which he has pledged his being. Occasionally, a creative artist breaks with tradition and casts a woman in the role of hero. Leonore, on a subject Beethoven accepted because of its moral seriousness, realism, and lack of the usual operatic artificiality, actually has two heroes. One is the courageous title character, who risks her life by disguising herself in order to save Florestan, her imprisoned husband. The other is Florestan himself, the victim of political oppression, who exhibits the heroism of endurance and bears up stoically under the ordeal of torture and starvation, kept alive by his hope for salvation. It is fitting to his time that most of Beethoven’s personified “heroes” (and all of them in second-period works) are men, and specifically, men who endure suffering: Jesus in Christus am Ölberge, Florestan, Coriolanus, Egmont. The unnamed figure whose death is mourned in Beethoven’s funeral marches and glorified in the Eroica is “a great man,” one who has conceivably battled for noble ideals; the symphony, as its published title tells us, “celebrates the memory” of such a hero. The image of the masculine hero as the embodiment of virtue pervaded the social culture of Beethoven’s time, and a serious attempt to see the work in anything like its true historical context must accept the relevance of that image. Since this symphony is at the root of Beethoven’s “heroic” style and, even more, of “Beethoven hero,” we need to grapple with the term as Beethoven would have understood it.
First, there is no evidence that the term Eroica was known or used for this symphony before its publication in October 1806.15 Second, Beethoven used the term Eroica in 1806 in this way: “Sinfonia eroica . . . composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo . . .” (“Heroic Symphony . . . composed to celebrate the memory of a great man”). In brief terms, the known facts about the symphony’s title and dedication are as follows:
• October 22, 1803. Ries writes to Simrock in Bonn, “He will sell the symphony to you for 100 ducats. In his own testimony it is the greatest work he has yet written. Beethoven played it for me recently, and I believe heaven and earth will tremble at its performance. He is very anxious to dedicate it to Bonaparte; if not, if Lobkowitz wants it for half a year and will give 400 ducats for it, he will [dedicate it to Lobkowitz and] entitle it ‘Bonaparte.’”16
• May 18, 1804. First public announcement by the hand-picked French Senate that the government of the French Republic is to be entrusted to Napoleon as hereditary emperor, free to establish an imperial court.17
• August 26, 1804. Beethoven offers the symphony to Breitkopf & Härtel, writing that “the title of the symphony is actually Bonaparte.”18
• December 2, 1804. In Nôtre-Dame de Paris, Napoleon takes the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and sets it firmly on his own head, after which he swears an oath to uphold liberty and equality. A close observer in France wrote later, “In those days the history of the Revolution was as remote for us as the history of the Greeks and Romans.”19
• Sometime after December 2, 1804. Beethoven crosses out the words “titled Bonaparte” in his own copy of the score. However, he leaves intact the message “written on [the subject of] Bonaparte” in pencil at the bottom of the title page.20
The trail between August 1804 and October 1806 runs cold; despite many hypotheses, some of them political, some more nearly psychological, we have neither letters nor documents to show us how Beethoven reached the final wording. All we have is the final title “Sinfonia eroica” in the published parts of 1806. The dedicatee is Prince Lobkowitz; no individual’s name is included in the title, certainly not Bonaparte’s, and the subtitle says that the symphony is “composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” So the final title leaves all identities open. Perhaps deliberately, it is open to more than one interpretation. On the one hand, in the political context of the time it could be taken to refer to Napoleon as he had been before he crowned himself emperor. But the wording also raises the title to a more abstract level, at which the subject is not any specific individual but the idea of “the memory of a great man.” We are invited to see the work as elegiac, as symbolizing what it means to commemorate a hero. So the final title indicates the breadth, grandeur, and expressive nobility of the whole symphony, while the subtitle’s reference to celebrating “the memory of a great man” alludes directly to the funeral march. The implication is that, rather than presenting scenes from the life of a hero, the work offers an elaborated set of perspectives on the idea of the heroic, including the hero’s death.21
This explanation fits well with the classicizing viewpoint embodied in so much of the art and symbolism that were created around Napoleon as the dominating figure of the age. The embrace of the classical both glorified the upstart Corsican and gave him a mythic stature borrowed from Caesar and Augustus. Napoleon was thus aping and continuing the quest for legitimacy pursued for centuries by the Holy Roman emperors, who could imagine themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire. In fact, when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, his action directly threatened the Austrian emperor’s claim to the same title, and for this reason Francis II immediately demanded recognition of his own legal status as emperor of Austria, to counter Napoleon’s move.22 Liberal hopes for a more democratic age, in the spirit of the American and French revolutions, were dealt a double blow.
The emergence of this new French potentate, with his universal claims to power and authority, fostered an imperial style in art, architecture, sculpture, and the domestic arts, including furniture and clothing, as artists and intellectuals fell under the Napoleonic spell. The principal image maker was Napoleon’s “First Painter,” Jacques-Louis David, who began as a revolutionary and a friend of Robespierre’s. He later joined Napoleon’s entourage and gave the world vivid images of the emperor as ruler, along with scenes from antiquity that were understood as analogues to contemporary life.23 The neoclassic strain in David had originated before the Revolutionary period, but in the heyday of the Revolution the imitation of the ancients in manners and dress flowed directly into the work of the major French painters. David had turned in this classicizing direction even before such allegorical works as The Grief of Andromache, The Oath of the Horatii, The Death of Socrates, and Brutus, all dating from the 1780s. Later, while in Napoleon’s service, he painted The Rape of the Sabines and Leonidas at Thermopylae. The sculptor Antonio Canova brought many of the same themes to his figural works, emulating the classics in his Amor and Psyche and feeding at the trough of Napoleonic patronage in his erotic representation of Pauline Bonaparte as Venus on her bed. Canova even had the idea of a sculptured Washington, dressed in a toga, giving a speech to Congress.24
This broad wave of enthusiasm for classical models informs the ideological background of Beethoven’s concept of the heroic. It is as significant as his deafness in providing Beethoven with the impetus for certain works, despite the true sense in which he could feel his career threatened by his affliction, and resolve to overcome it—as in fact he could and did. In the “heroic” he finds an aesthetic model that resonates perfectly with one of the dominant cultural strains of the time, thus enabling him to be both a highly individual artist and at the same time a representative one, in tune with the aesthetic sensibilities that were sweeping Europe. Thus the Eroica Symphony can be seen not only as a personal testament to his own capacity to overcome but as a work devoted to the “heroic” as a partly classical idea, in which the protagonists are the Greek or Roman heroes. These are exactly the figures who had been described by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, the book Beethoven said taught him resignation.
The “hero” of the Eroica is not a single figure but a composite of heroes of different types and different situations. In the first movement the heroic is felt in musical images that evoke grandeur, conflict, and nobility of spirit; in the slow movement a fallen hero is mourned and brought to final rest; in the Scherzo and above all the Trio, we hear horn calls to battle, along with “a strange voice” at the end, a return to the chromatic mystery of the symphony’s opening ideas.25 And the finale evokes a “Promethean” hero who (in the ballet, its direct antecedent) brought wisdom and the arts and sciences to the world. To rigorous music theorists such as Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven is the hero. Later contextual discussions of the work have run the gamut, from the Eroica as Beethoven’s personal statement of his own response to deafness to the work as a depiction of the life and death of a single individual.
When Ries said that Beethoven admired Napoleon as First Consul, we should remember that he added, “[Beethoven] held him in the highest regard and compared him to the greatest Roman consuls (my italics).”26 Beethoven’s love of classical literature included Homer, whom he placed alongside Goethe and Schiller as his favorites and lamented that he could read Homer only in German.27 Homer reappears in other letters written by Beethoven and in his Conversation Books; he copied passages from the Odyssey and from the Iliad in his diary. As to Plutarch, his references are always cast in terms of admiration for what he has learned from the Parallel Lives, and when he turned to this monumental collection of biographies it was undoubtedly to dwell on the attitudes to life he found in distinguished figures of antiquity. When J. R. Schultz wrote in 1824 about his visit to Beethoven, he said, “He is a great admirer of the ancients. Homer, particularly his Odyssey, and Plutarch he prefers to all the rest; and, of the native poets, he studies Schiller and Goethe, in preference to any other.”28
Though many writers and listeners regard the Fourth Symphony as a regression, they could hardly be more mistaken. Once the Eroica had enlarged the landscape of the symphony, Beethoven’s next four-movement symphony was inevitably compared with it, and connoisseurs looked long and hard to see whether the composer had tried to match it or had shifted his ground. His decision to return to a smaller scale, to reduce length and density but also to invest a smaller framework with subtlety, action, and lyricism, showed that, paradoxically, he was aiming to broaden his new symphonic framework still further by showing that the epic, heroic model was only one of a number of potential aesthetic alternatives. The Fourth showed that less could be as much, perhaps more.
The first difference is one of scale. All four movements are shorter than their counterparts in the Eroica. As in the Second Symphony the first movement opens with a harmonically adventurous, but now deliberate and slow-moving Adagio introduction that mingles B-flat major and B-flat minor, then packs a far-flung modulatory scheme—entailing the transformation of the flat-sixth 
into F, its pitch equivalent, with varied consequences—into its second half before slipping back to the home dominant and clearing the way for the Allegro main section.29 The intervallic relationship of 
to plays a role throughout the entire work, emerging in different ways in each movement. The first movement exposition spins out a set of vigorous contrasting themes, a sequence in which one rhythmically profiled theme after another sweeps across the landscape. After remarkable elaborations of its motivic material in the development, one of the movement’s most striking passages comes at the long preparation for the recapitulation. Instead of a lengthy stay on the dominant, the harmony settles down to the tonic, B-flat major, well before the actual start of the recapitulation. The tonic harmony is anchored by having the tympani hold the tonic pitch, , in a long steady roll while the strings slowly build up a crescendo based on the upbeat figures that have been prominent from the beginning. The whole gradually grows in volume to its climax, tonic harmony giving way to louder tonic, and all at once the moment of recapitulation has arrived as part of a vast sweep of events, all of which took place over the single tonic harmony.
In this work the basic condition is that of direct gestural action at various speeds, much more than of the pensive, logical, developmental side of symphonic thought, as in the Eroica. A key to this aspect of the Fourth, when compared with the Third, is the work’s complete avoidance of fugal writing, for which it literally has no time as it moves forward to new, rhythmically well-defined ideas in each movement rather than making room for a contrapuntal exegesis built on just one of them. As it turns out, the same absence of fugal writing characterizes each of the even-numbered symphonies (4, 6, and 8) as opposed to the odd-numbered (3, 5, 7, and, ultimately, 9). The aesthetic dualism of the even- and odd-numbered symphonies starts here.
A second difference is in the instrumentation. In the Fourth, Beethoven reverts to the orchestra of late Mozart or Haydn: one flute, the other winds in the usual pairs, two horns (instead of three as in the Eroica), trumpets, tympani, and strings. The wind writing brings new orchestral colors as early as a bassoon solo in the Adagio introduction, a canon between clarinet and bassoon in the first movement, gorgeous wind writing in the slow movement foreshadowing Schumann and Brahms, and virtuosic passage work for the bassoon again in the finale. The emergence of the tympani as a dramatic factor in the first movement has already been noted, but the tympani play an equally important role in the slow movement and Scherzo.
The Fourth stands out for its grace, energy, and lightness, for its feeling of godlike play among delicately poised forces. Schumann, whose affinity for it seems so natural in the light of his own instrumental style, called it “the Greek-like slender one” among the Beethoven symphonies.30 Rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic features of high subtlety inhabit every movement. Occasionally we sense what Theodor W. Adorno called a virtual suspension of time in certain passages—“as they swing back and forth, the passages become the pendulum of time itself.”31 Different speeds and energies of motion dominate the first movement, the Scherzo, and the finale; contemplative beauty governs the Adagio. The slow movement, a sensuous slow rondo, inaugurates the Romantic type of expressive major-mode orchestral Adagio, replete with contrasts between sharply defined rhythmic figures and sweeping, beautiful melodic lines. Its progeny include the triple-meter slow movements of Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony and of Brahms’s First.
The Scherzo breaks a new formal path that Beethoven later followed in a number of middle-period works. It is made up of five parts instead of three, with a second return of the Scherzo and Trio following the normal Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo da capo form. Syncopation in the Scherzo theme immediately recalls the Scherzo of Opus 18 No. 6, another B-flat major work, and the gentle contrast of wind-dominated Trio to string-dominated Scherzo evokes late Haydn, whose own last symphonies in this key, Nos. 98 and 102, could not have been far from Beethoven’s mind. But the work remains wholly Beethovenian, never more so than in the surprising gestures that conclude the slow movement and the Scherzo: both end not with quiet cadences but with powerful fortissimo strokes.
The finale, a perpetuum mobile in running sixteenth notes almost from start to finish, brings back humor and wit to Beethoven’s symphonic finales, surpassing the First Symphony’s 2/4 finale in this and other respects. That the opening four-note figure can be a subject for development comes as no surprise in itself, but the lights and shadows in which it is later seen are an unsurpassed source of wonder. A pair of sketches for the finale, entered as early as 1804 in leaves that originally belonged to the main sketchbook for Leonore, show what are probably the earliest ideas sketched for the symphony.32 That Beethoven may have been thinking about it while working on Leonore is suggestive, in view of the dominating importance in the symphony of pace and tempo and in light of the focus on contrasting speeds in the Allegros and on lyricism in the Adagio, as if it picked up hints from Beethoven’s heightened awareness of stage time during his work on the opera.33 Because a sketchbook from about this time is lost, we are not well informed about the genesis of the Fourth, but Beethoven probably held off full concentration on the symphony until he had finished his labor on the opera from autumn 1805 to the middle of 1806. By early September of that year he was offering the symphony to Breitkopf along with the Opus 59 Quartets and the Fourth Piano Concerto.
The Fifth and Sixth (“Pastoral”) Symphonies
By 1807–8, when Beethoven returned to work on new symphonic projects, the Fourth was being engraved and the Eroica had appeared in print quite recently, in October 1806. During this long period of sustained creative energy Beethoven continued his practice of starting work on a new symphony within one to two years after completing the last one, aware that by the time the previous work was actually published and gradually getting to be known and performed across Europe, he would have a new one under way.
Beethoven’s autograph score of the Fifth Symphony, showing the opening page. (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin)
Since the Eroica he had turned out new works in various categories. The most time-consuming had been Leonore, in its two versions of 1805 and 1806 and its two versions of the C-major overture later known as Nos. 2 and 3. But he had also completed three piano sonatas, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Opus 59 Quartets, as well as the Coriolanus Overture, a work that bridges the Eroica and the Fifth symphonies. In 1807 and 1808 he determined not to plan one symphony at a time but to embark on two. Despite their strongly profiled individuality the Fifth and Sixth were paired in various ways from the start, and their similarities, which now command more attention than their manifest differences, “relate to aspects of the narrative design, as well as to style and character,” in the words of one writer. “Like the ‘Waldstein’ and ‘Appassionata’ sonatas, the Fifth and Sixth symphonies represent disparate musical worlds that . . . complement one another.”34 To which I would add that these two worlds, despite their affinities, belong to systems that move at different speeds. Their relationships to musical time are entirely different.
As to chronology and genesis, it looks as if Beethoven began the main work on the Fifth before he embarked on the Sixth. He sketched an embryonic plan for it in the later pages of the Eroica sketchbook as early as 1804, so the gestation period for the Fifth in broad terms took as long as four years. This idea made its way into the Beethoven literature after Nottebohm published extracts from the sketchbook and has since become part of popular lore.35
But the bulk of his work on the Fifth took place in 1807 and early 1808, followed by his composition of the Sixth in the spring and summer of 1808. Both symphonies (with their numbering reversed) were premiered at a benefit concert that Beethoven presented on December 22, 1808, at the Theater an der Wien, the only time Beethoven premiered two symphonies together, directly exposing their contrasts.
Their similarities include the use of cumulative instrumentation. The Fifth adds three trombones, piccolo, and contrabassoon in the Finale, widening the span of volume and pitch in the winds. In the Sixth, the first two movements use only the orchestral winds, strings, and horns but no trumpets or tympani; the Scherzo adds two trumpets, and the fourth movement (the Storm) adds a piccolo, two trombones, and tympani, keeping the trombones (though not the piccolo and tympani) for the quiet finale. In both works the final movements (two in the Fifth, three in the Sixth) are contiguous, moving without pause from one to the next. Both first movements employ 2/4 meter (the only two symphonies till now to do so), and both open with a short phrase that leads to a fermata on the dominant. The tempo of the slow movement in the Fifth is Andante con moto in 3/8 meter, that of the Sixth (“Scene by the brook”) is Andante molto moto in 12/8. Incidentally, after the expressive Adagio of the Fourth Symphony, no later symphony until the Ninth has a slow movement that is really slow—they are all Andante or faster. As Beethoven increased the proportions and complexity of the symphonic slow movement, he apparently wished to ensure that its greater length would in some degree be compensated by its more active, faster tempo.
Yet despite these similarities, their differences mattered much more to Beethoven’s contemporaries, as they still do to us. A basic generating idea behind the Fifth is that it should dramatize Beethoven’s by-now famous “C-minor mood” in a new way. It is as if Beethoven shut down an invisible roof on his material in this first movement, subjecting it to an unprecedented state of compression, using the celebrated “motto” of the first two measures to bind the continuity of the whole, then deploying this motif in different guises for later movements. The dominating motto and the rhythmic and harmonic compression create the force behind the first movement, which unleashes a tragic power in the symphonic domain that audiences had not known before. Just as audiences in 1787 had been shaken by Schiller’s Die Räuber, they were now shaken in somewhat the same way by Beethoven’s Fifth.
The Fifth Symphony
In an 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, the novelist and critic E. T. A. Hoffmann voiced the opinion, then current, that Beethoven’s instrumental music was built on that of his two great predecessors, Haydn and Mozart, who “were the first to show us the art in its full glory.”36 In the true Romantic spirit of Hoffmann’s writings, he now accepted Haydn as a “cheerful” classic, whose music is “full of love and . . . happiness . . . [but] there is no suffering, no pain.” Mozart “leads us into the inner depths of the realm of the spirits. Fear envelops us but does not torment us; it is more a premonition of the infinite.” And now comes Beethoven, whose instrumental music “opens the realm of the colossal and the immeasurable for us. Radiant beams shoot through the deep night of this region, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy all within us except the pain of endless longing. . . . Beethoven’s music evokes terror, fright, horror, and pain, and awakens that endless longing that is the essence of romanticism.”37 For Hoffmann in 1810 the Fifth Symphony “unfolds Beethoven’s romanticism more than any of his other works and tears the listener irresistibly away into the wonderful spiritual realm of the infinite.”
By recognizing connections between movements Hoffmann identified one of the most telling features of the Fifth Symphony. The connections occur in two ways: first, through the rhythmic recurrence of the opening motif in every movement, and second, through the partial amalgamation of the Scherzo and the Finale. The three-part Scherzo, instead of ending autonomously, leads into the Finale through a colossal dominant preparation that grows from pianississimo, the softest of Beethovenian dynamics, to pianissimo and then, through a powerful crescendo, to the blazing C-major fortissimo opening of the Finale, with its full orchestral triadic theme.38 But the transition directly from the Scherzo to the Finale is only half the story. At the end of the development section of the finale, the scene shifts back from the triumphal finale material to a return of the Scherzo version of the opening four-note motif, performed misterioso, that then gradually returns to the Finale and ushers in its recapitulation.
This attempt at integrating Scherzo and Finale by having one movement pass without a break into the next was one of Haydn’s innovations in handling cyclic form.39 It is possible that Beethoven knew Haydn’s Symphonies No. 45 (the “Farewell”) and No. 46, which has an explicit recall of the Minuet in the Finale. But whether or not he was making formal reference to Haydn, Beethoven appears to be invoking, to powerful effect, another tradition that had not previously appeared in the symphonic literature—the tradition of the fantasia.
Beethoven had written piano fantasias in his youth, emulating the masters and showing his improvisatory gifts in sample compositions.40 In 1801, in the flush of experimenting with new expressive works for keyboard, he had blended sonata and fantasia in Piano Sonatas Opus 27 Nos. 1 and 2, both called “sonata quasi una fantasia.”41 Both have run-on movements, and No. 1 features the return of earlier material. The Fifth Symphony shows the same combination of principles in the Scherzo and Finale; in the explicit motivic connection of all four movements, it reveals another way of integrating a symphony.42 It would not be wrong to call the Fifth a “sinfonia quasi una fantasia.” In fact, in an early sketched movement plan for the work, Beethoven considered making it a three-movement symphony (a movement plan he only used in keyboard chamber music), with slow movement and “Menuetto” combined in a single middle movement and with a C-minor finale. That his interest in the Fantasia was strong at this time is evident in the Choral Fantasy that he premiered in 1808 alongside the Fifth, and it continued in a few later works: his curious Fantasia for Piano, Opus 77, of 1809; the first of the two Cello Sonatas of Opus 102, written in 1815; and the Piano Sonata in A Major, Opus 101, of 1816. In the latter pair of works the return of opening material late in the piece recalls his Sonata Opus 27 No. 1, and in that sense they are also “quasi una fantasia.”
In even this brief appraisal, a few further points demand attention. One is the dramatic consistency of the first movement, arising not only from its incessant rhythmic motif but at least as much from its extremely limited harmonic range. The exposition leads in normal ways from the key of C minor to its relative major, E-flat, for the lyrical second theme (below which the opening motif continues). But in the development the basic harmonic range of the whole section is astonishingly restricted, and major-mode harmonies, even as chords, scarcely appear. The tension of the first movement emerges in part from the contrasting roles of two harmonic poles: C minor, the key of the movement, and F minor, its close neighbor. The first movement limits its harmonic content primarily to elements of these chords, making only the most sparing use of G major, the dominant of C minor. The primary harmonic scheme of the entire first movement can be summarized as follows:
That the harmonic plan of the development remains so rigorously in minor keys, and within a narrow band of these (witness the symmetry of the motion from F minor to C minor back to F minor) is new in Beethoven. G minor is reached as a midpoint in the cycle of minor keys moving by fifths, then returns to the more important F minor. The stress on F minor emerges in its use as the main tonality for the development and as part of the harmony from which the development springs back to C minor for the recapitulation and the return of the opening.
The Andante, consolation after tragedy, explores another range of feelings, just as it explores another range of tonal relationships. Choosing the key of A-flat major to follow a movement in C minor is a favorite scheme of Beethoven’s, one he had used in such earlier C-minor works as the “Pathétique” Sonata and the Violin Sonata Opus 30 No. 2. The movement begins by recalling a slow-movement model that Haydn had perfected: variations on two alternating subjects, as in his Symphony No. 103, the “Drumroll.” Beethoven starts as if he were going to proceed in the same way, and the dialectic of two basic themes soon emerges. The first is an intricate piano dolce in A-flat major that conceals a rising C-major triad within its coils and ends with extended cadential figures in strings and winds. This section is followed by a vigorous contrasting theme that rises from A-flat major to explode fortissimo in C major, setting the stage for a massive statement of the theme in C major and forcing us to realize that the basic rhythm of this theme, apart from its upbeats, is the 3 + 1 rhythm of the first movement.
From here on matters unfold in two ways: (1) through alternating variations of the first and second themes and then strangely altered extensions of both themes; and (2) through comparable extension of the second theme, leading to still another development of the first theme. A lengthy coda rounds out the whole and brings the traveler, the first theme, home to in A-flat major. The implicit conflict between the two themes has finally been resolved. As a whole, the slow movement picks up from the finale of the Eroica the idea of a variations movement that transforms its more rigid classical model (theme and chain of variations, each variation a closed total unit) into a more plastic form. Beethoven’s freedom of formal disposition would prove as significant for the history of the symphonic slow movement as the Eroica fourth movement had been for the history of the symphonic finale.
The Scherzo offers contrasts that are somewhat similar to those of the slow movement in that they derive from extreme differences in character between Scherzo and Trio, even more marked than in most of Beethoven’s earlier third movements.43 The pianissimo Scherzo theme, marked misterioso, explores the C-minor chord rising through an octave and a half, a shape we can trace as far back as the E-flat minor first movement of his youthful Piano Quartet of 1785. The Scherzo then contrasts this figure with the famous “motto” (3 + 1) from the first movement, which gradually takes command of the whole movement. The Trio brings a boisterous C-major fugato in the strings, develops it in its second section, then finds new means to articulate it in the reprise. The return of the Scherzo is no mere repetition: it is a mysterious echo of the Scherzo, another “strange voice” in a Scherzo movement, with the opening theme now in pizzicato. It sets the stage for the famous Coda that will lead through a crescendo to the powerful arrival at the Finale.
The Finale, solidly in C major, crowns the work. It epitomizes all that is exultant, powerful, and wide ranging, capturing a spirit that Beethoven might have heard in some French postrevolutionary works but surpassing them in every respect. The opening theme, with its square rhythms and its basic rising triad and descending scale shape, displays the purest middle-period Beethoven thematic design. The C major of the whole movement picks up the many references to this tonality that had been heard earlier—in the first movement at the recapitulation of the second theme; in the slow movement, at the big second theme; in the third movement, in the Trio—and gathers them all in with a feeling of ultimate resolution. The triumphant tone of this movement spoke to generations of composers after Beethoven as the essence of an optimism that they could associate with Enlightenment ideals, and its way of ending offered a metaphor for the whole work as “a passage from darkness to light,” as many have described it. What needs to be seen is that the “light,” C major, has been gleaming distantly in the work since the recapitulation of the first movement, and that the finale, flooding the whole work with its C-major emphasis, is the summation of a process that has been unfolding since the first movement. Beethoven’s decision here to end a minor-mode of work with a major-mode finale is in fact unusual, even for his C-minor works.44 His earlier four-movement cyclic works in minor mode had minor-mode finales, even if they ended with major harmonies (as in the third piano trio of Opus 1 and the String Quartet Opus 18 No. 4). After the Fifth Symphony the only works that have full major-mode finales after a minor-mode first movement are the two-movement Piano Sonatas Opus 90 and Opus 111, and the Ninth Symphony. Indeed, this key relationship is one of the ways in which the Fifth effectively foreshadows the Ninth and provides a first symphonic presentation of a darkened world that is at last relieved by triumph. A connection to Leonore also suggests itself, the more so because the dark F-minor tonality of Florestan in his dungeon is eventually illuminated by the broad daylight of C major, the key of his freeing by Leonore.
The Sixth Symphony (“Sinfonia Pastorale”)
After the psychological intensity of the Fifth comes a release into the tranquil world of nature. The daylight of the Pastoral Symphony is of quite another order than that of the finale of the Fifth, in that the work dwells on the softer experience of the countryside. As Beethoven put it in the subtitle that he finally chose for its published title page, the work is “more an expression of feelings than tone painting.” The symphony evokes the quiet exaltation we feel amid the fields, streams, trees and birds; it is impregnated with a sense of communion with all that is natural and God-given in the outdoors. There is a strong religious element in Beethoven’s feeling for nature. One of Beethoven’s favorite books—he annotated his own copy—bore the title Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature and Providence.45 That he loved the countryside and relished taking excursions into the woods and fields is clear from biographical evidence of all kinds. That he now seized on the great tradition of the musical “pastoral,” with its complex connections to the pastoral tradition in literature, implies a conjoining of his personal experience with familiar and traditional modes of representing the pastoral in music.
The idea of a “pastoral” symphony in the context of Beethoven’s pioneering work as a symphonic composer betokens his engagement with the popular genre of illustrative music, which was coming to be called “program music.” He was, of course, aware that the prestige of “absolute” music was rising as the Romantic writers pressed its advantages home. It looks, then, as if Beethoven wanted to have it both ways. He clearly intended the work to be a “programmatic” symphony that would explore the current taste for illustrative compositions, but at the same time he meant to elevate the literature of current program music, which did little more than mimic the sound effects of battles, landscapes, storms, sea voyages, and a host of similar subjects. Although he was certainly aware of “characteristic” symphonies and even pastoral symphonies by eighteenth-century composers such as Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Justus Heinrich Knecht (who had written a symphony called Portrait musical de la nature around 1784), none of these could stand up as authentic models at Beethoven’s level of musical thought and integration.46 He despised literal program music that lacked intrinsic qualities as pure music—that is clear from the various sketch entries he made for this work as he tried to find the right way to formulate and justify his use of specific titles for each of the movements. Thus his jottings include these remarks: “One leaves it to the listener to discover the situations”; “Each act of tone-painting, as soon as it is pushed too far in instrumental music, loses its force”; and “The whole will be understood even without a description, as it is more feeling than tone-painting.”47 The last words of this entry became the basis for the title of the work as found in an early violin part: “Sinfonia Pastorella/ Pastoral-Sinfonie/oder/ Erinnerung an das Landleben/ Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Mahlerei”; that is, “Pastoral Symphony or Memories of Country Life/ More the Expression of Feeling than Tone-Painting.”48
Yet all his seeming embarrassment about the use of titles and the risks of tone painting did not deter Beethoven from giving a specific title to each movement, from organizing the whole work into a loosely hung narrative of pastoral experience, or from including in it copious references to the sounds of natural and human elements in nature: birds (specifically named in the score in the slow movement); the storm that interrupts a peasant dance; and country musicians, whose presence is evoked in the first movement, the Scherzo, and the finale.
The larger organization of the work and the movement titles are as follows:
1. Allegro ma non troppo, 2/4, F major, “Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande” (“The awakening of joyous feelings on getting out into the countryside”);
2. Andante molto moto, 12/8, B-flat major, “Scene am Bach” (Scene by the brook”);
3. Allegro, 3/4 with Trio in 2/4, F major, “Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute” (“Merry gathering of country people”);
4. Allegro, 4/4, F minor, “Gewitter. Sturm” (“Thunderstorm”);
5. Allegretto, 6/8, F major, “Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm” (“Shepherd’s song. Happy and thankful feelings after the storm”).
The implicit narrative suggests the experience of an abstract protagonist or observer in nature. In the first movement, having been city bound, he gets out into the countryside and rejoices in its plenitude and wonder. As in the Fifth Symphony the first movement is the crucial basis for all that follows, and curiously it has almost the same length and formal proportional symmetry as the first movement of the Fifth: the exposition, development, and recapitulation are nearly identical in length, and they are followed by a substantial coda. More striking still is the harmonic plan. The principal contrast to the tonic key of F major is not its dominant, C major, but rather its subdominant, B-flat major, to which significant moves are made at several crucial points in the movement: in the development section (at both the beginning and end) and at the start of the recapitulation, a place for which Beethoven always reserves special treatment. Here the quiet approach to the return of the tonic is prepared by a powerful arrival on B-flat major, after which the first theme, in the tonic, slips in quietly in the second violins and violas while the first violins improvise a trill and arpeggio passage above.
Through the whole movement runs a curiously placid harmonic feeling, marked by very slow rates of harmonic change, prolonged harmonic “plateaus” on single chords, much use of repeated figures (especially in the development), and the prevalence of major-mode harmonies from start to finish. The first movement of the Fifth Symphony had been confined primarily to minor keys, above all in the development; here in the Sixth the restriction is just the opposite: there are hardly any minor harmonies in the whole movement, as Arnold Schoenberg discovered one day while listening to the symphony on the radio. The quality of the whole is carried not only by this seeming harmonic stasis, however, but by the wealth and quality of the thematic material and the motivic elements to which it gives rise. And in the coda one of the best of all Beethoven surprises turns up: after several interrupted cadences suggesting a closure that is still to come, the clarinet takes on a solo with a new thematic idea, bringing to mind a country wind player—a kind of pied piper, who is leading the orchestra to the end of the movement (*W 22). It is a touch of gentle humor, one of the varieties of the comic that abound in Beethoven and that appear at significant moments from now to the end of his life.
In the slow movement the stage shifts to a “scene by the brook.” The movement is famous for the imitations of birds that appear in the coda—the nightingale (flute), the quail (oboe), and the cuckoo (two clarinets)—all of which are named in the score, a point on which Beethoven wrote an emphatic note to his copyist in the autograph manuscript.49 These bird calls, equivalents in nature to little cadenzas by solo singers, are actually individualized representations of birds that have been evident in the movement from the very beginning. To listen to the entire slow movement and hear the trills in high register in the violin parts as the sound of birds is to gain a mental image of a pastoral scene by a brook. In doing so we realize that the triplet rocking motion of the lower strings at the beginning represents the motion of the brook; that the bird sounds appear just moments into the movement in the first violins as high trilled ’s; and that the combination implies a musical distance between the brook at ground level and the birds above, singing and trilling, flying in and out of the trees that stand along the sides of the brook. This spatial relationship between the ground-level brook and the birds above is not just a fanciful picture, it represents in nature the registral span that separates the low-register instruments (cellos and basses) from the high ones (violins).50 The elements chosen for depiction in this seemingly placid brookside scene form the same components for the dramatization of musical register and, more generally, musical space, that Beethoven regularly employs in many of his purely abstract, entirely nonprogrammatic works of this period. These procedures help to integrate the programmatic with the structural, just as we intuitively sense to be the case in this movement.51
All of this representation also correlates with the larger shape of the movement and the eventual achievement of a movement-length climax near the end. In his initial sketch of 1804 Beethoven may have anticipated the idea of correlating the growth of the brook with the registral growth of the whole movement. There he had written a 12/8 theme representing the motion of the brook, with the annotation “je grösser der Bach je tiefer der Ton—” (“the wider the brook, the deeper the tone”).52 This entry illustrates the connection between visual image and musical register: here “grösser” meaning “wider” must also mean “greater” and in a sense “deeper”—as the brook, gaining force and breadth as it runs its course and verges on becoming a river, also becomes deeper. Its greater depth is correlated with the achievement of a musical climax that is registrally wider, from bottom to top; is greater in volume; uses the full orchestra in all its panoply; and gives the movement climactic force near the end. The grand climax in this elaborated, quasi-sonata-form movement comes at the start of the recapitulation, where the tonic B-flat major returns after the modulatory excursions of the development section. Now the stream has become a river, and the birds cluster more thickly and trill more animatedly than before; the whole landscape has opened up to a four-octave span and will eventually open still further as the flutes join in.
The scene now shifts to a gathering of country people worthy of Breughel. The tone for the third movement is set by Beethoven’s use of the term lustig—this is a “merry” and lively crowd whose collective moods emerge in the metrical animation of the Scherzo.53 The opening F-major descending theme is immediately balanced by its countertheme in D major. The odd juxtaposition of the two major keys, F and D, continues the insistent focus on the major mode that has been running through the symphony from the start. In the middle section the oboe plays a new theme with strikingly different rhythmic features, an off-the-beat beginning and syncopation, while the bassoonist, as Tovey put it, never seems to know just how many notes to put in. To all this activity the Trio adds a violent foot-stamping dance, with powerful emphasis on the F major and B-flat major harmonies. By treating B-flat major, the subdominant, as an alternate tonic and shifting the sense of tonal balance away from the F-major–D-major harmonies of the Scherzo, Beethoven returns to the tonic-subdominant contrasts that had been postulated by the first movement, all in a powerful peasant-dance context that is fortissimo from start to finish.
Suddenly a storm approaches, piano in the cellos and basses, and quickly breaks out in a fortissimo fury that dominates the landscape. The storm brings the first extended use of the minor mode in the whole work, and we realize that Beethoven has been reserving the minor for the storm, along with a modulatory pattern that makes use of diminished-seventh harmonies as pivots in the chain of harmonic steps. At long last we arrive at a point of stability on C major, where we hear nothing less than a chorale phrase, suggesting a religious element both directly and intentionally—in a sketch Beethoven wrote, “Herr, wir danken Dir” (“Lord, we thank thee”).
And now emerges the most beautiful and peaceful of symphonic finales, the “Shepherd’s Song,” labeled “Joyous and grateful feelings after the storm.” “Grateful” describes the feeling of the supposed country folk but also of the ideal listener, who receives confirmation of what was implied in the first movement and thus witnesses a circular return to the tranquil conditions that initiated the entire excursion into nature. The enlarged sonata form of the Finale maintains the prominence of the tonic F major, its dominant C major, and once again the subdominant region B-flat major, thus forming a closing symmetry with the first movement. The world is set right.
The Seventh and Eighth Symphonies
With the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies Beethoven’s symphonic project of the middle years comes to an end. Not that he knew it at the time—he mentioned the idea of another symphony, one that might be in D minor, but did not bring such a work even to the sketch stage then. By 1812 the Fifth and Sixth had been followed not only by new chamber music and piano sonatas but also by new orchestral theater music, above all the incidental music to Egmont that he wrote in 1809–10 at the request of the Court Theater director. He also composed incidental music for two patriotic plays by the Viennese playwright August von Kotzebue, written for the opening of a new theater in Pest. One was The Ruins of Athens, for which Beethoven wrote an overture and eight dramatic numbers as his Opus 113; the other was King Stephen, Opus 117, an overture plus nine numbers. He managed to finish both during the summer of 1811 while staying in Teplitz for his health. Despite some exotic ideas and striking sonority effects in these works, neither is up to his higher standards. Still, theater music brought him again to the borders of opera, and since he continued to hunt for operatic subjects that might fire his imagination, he asked Kotzebue for one in January 1812 that could be
romantic, serious, heroic-comic, or sentimental, as you please; in short anything to your liking. . . . True, I should prefer a big subject from history and particularly one from the Dark Ages—Attila, for example—but I should accept with thanks anything and any subject from you, from your poetical spirit, that I could translate into my musical spirit.54
In 1809–12 Beethoven continued to turn out songs, long a sidelight but one that drew him in again and again as the growth of Romantic poetry challenged him and younger contemporaries to develop more imaginative ways of setting German lyric verse. In 1809 he chose poems by Friedrich von Matthison, whose “Adelaide” he had set to music years earlier, and Christian Ludwig Reissig, from whom he took as many as seven texts, most effectively Reissig’s “Sehnsucht,” in 1815.55 He also set six songs by Goethe and other poets that he published in 1810 as Opus 75. More Goethe songs followed as Opus 83.
In this period Beethoven also initiated an agreement with the ambitious Scottish publisher George Thomson to compose settings of folk songs—Scottish, Irish, English, and, later, Continental songs on texts in many languages, including German, Danish, Tyrolean, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, and Italian. These compositions add up to a very large body of works, and Beethoven took them much more seriously than later audiences have realized. Most are for solo voice, either soprano or tenor, with full-scale accompaniments for piano trio. Apart from their value in showing Beethoven’s interest in folk song, many are of real musical interest. Thomson, who had earlier received some similar arrangements from Haydn, first commissioned Beethoven for forty-three settings in 1809, sending Beethoven the melodies he needed. Their contacts resumed in February 1812, then again in 1813 and 1815, and, with some lapses, Beethoven continued to supply arrangements as late as 1820. That he exceeded Thomson’s expectations in the difficulty of the accompaniments is clear from their correspondence, but typically Beethoven refused to simplify his settings, except in nine cases.56 Filled with striking moments, these little pieces show Beethoven working with the special modal and regional inflections of folk song; conceivably, these inflections and odd tonal twists formed part of their attraction for him. One of them, the Irish song “Save me from the grave and wise,” to the tune of “Nora Creina” (WoO 154 No. 8) has a turn of phrase that strikingly resembles the main theme of the Seventh Symphony finale (*W 23).
The Seventh Symphony
Beethoven mentioned the Seventh Symphony in a letter of 1815 to Johann Peter Salomon in London, in which he asked for help in finding a British publisher. He told Salomon that he was ready to offer, among other works, “a grand symphony in A major (one of my most excellent works).” In contrast, he called the Eighth “a smaller symphony in F.”57 Needing no title such as “Eroica” or “Pastoral” to indicate its aesthetic category, the Seventh stands up to the Fifth in its strength and decisiveness. Unlike the Fifth it does not traverse a quasi-narrative journey from minor to major, nor does it have a cyclic return of material from one movement to another. It resembles the Fifth in that rhythmic action is of the essence in both. However, the unity of the Seventh stems not from the reappearance of a single essential rhythmic figure in all movements, but rather from the rhythmic consistency that governs each movement and the vitality, the élan, that drives the whole work.
Each movement is based on a small set of memorable rhythmic figures, with one of them singled out as the leading element. The persistence of each rhythmic set throughout each movement substantially shapes the aesthetic profile of the whole. Of course, the use of a small number of definite rhythmic cells, even of a single figure to dominate a first movement, had been a specialty of Beethoven’s from early in his career. Piano Sonata Opus 2 No. 3 and the first movement of the String Quartet Opus 18 No. 1 come to mind, not to mention the first movement of the Fifth, but there are many more examples. The same had been true of many of his slow movements and finales, while in the Scherzos of his quartets and symphonies the dynamic propulsive qualities of the movements often derive from the insistent repetitions of a basic figure in compound or simple triple-meter that is designed to carry the bulk of the musical material.
But in the Seventh Symphony the projection of rhythmic action into the foreground is even more fundamental. This is why Berlioz compared the first movement to a “peasant dance” (“ronde des paysans”) and why Wagner called the whole work the “apotheosis of the dance.” Duple meter, in various simple and compound forms that include triplet subdivisions of two main beats per measure, dominates the whole work. The first movement features a three-note dotted figure in almost every measure. In the second, a compound figure of a quarter plus two eighth notes fills the movement from beginning to end, interwoven with other material in a rich tapestry of counterstatements. The Scherzo is driven forward incessantly by its own initial figure and by the basic Scherzo rhythm of three even quarter notes that follows. And the finale is a manic expansion of the possibilities latent in the hammering four-note figure with which it opens. In each movement ostinato passages repeat a single figure over and over again, especially in the coda of the first movement, where the bass repetitions suggested to Carl Maria von Weber that Beethoven was now “ready for the madhouse.” The wide range of dynamics includes more instances of fortississimo and pianississimo than any other of his symphonic works.
As we know from the “Kreutzer” Sonata and the much later Quartet Opus 132, Beethoven liked to intermingle minor and major when his tonic was A, and he also liked to have one movement in F major. Since the first movement is in A major and the second is in A minor, the Scherzo offers contrast by shifting to F major; then its D-major Trio (with its own special rhythmic figures and character) stands in apposition to F major, somewhat in the same way that F and D major worked with one another at the opening of the Scherzo of the Sixth. Beethoven’s use of F major for the Scherzo also relates well to the harmonic layout of the grand “Poco sostenuto” that introduces the first movement, one of the longest and most elaborate introductions Beethoven ever wrote.58
The slow movement, which ranks with the most beautiful in formal and thematic conception of any middle-period work, is primarily a set of variations superimposed on a typical slow movement form. The formal layout is A1, B1, A2, B2, Coda, with strictly alternating keys of A minor and A major. The basic rhythmic figure of the introduction haunts the entire movement, an incessant presence against which the A-minor theme emerges as a countermelody. To the bleakness of the A sections, the B sections bring repose and consolation with even-flowing quarter-note motion in the winds and lower strings, while triplets brush against them. Meanwhile, far below in the bass register, the first unit of the basic rhythmic figure of A1 repeats throughout. Beyond all this, the entire A1 section works out a vast scheme of incrementation, from low to high registers and from two to four octaves.
The whole plan anticipates the incrementation from low to high registers, from piano to fortissimo, that Beethoven later uses in the introduction to the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. In the Seventh the slow and deliberate style feeling of the first part of this movement begins in a quiet lower terrain, then gradually rises and gains in strength until it fills the musical space. The clear dramatization of spatial form is essential to the psychological effect of the movement, as listeners have intuitively understood from its first performances, and it partly accounts for the fame of this movement beyond any other in the symphony.
The Scherzo uses the five-part form we encountered in the Fourth Symphony and in some other middle-period works. The Scherzo is fully presented three times and the Trio twice, with room for slight modifications of the Scherzo in its second appearance; then a coda grounds the form. And the Finale, the most propulsive 2/4 Allegro con brio Beethoven had written up to that time, is in a sprawling sonata form, this time with the exposition repeated (a feature not associated with all finales) and an enormous coda that is the longest section of the movement. With its unrestrained rhythmic energy and power of sonority, rising to fortississimo, the coda brings this colossal symphony to an end.
The Eighth Symphony
The Eighth Symphony surprises us with its diminutive proportions, its humor and playfulness, and its ostensible return to the world of late Haydn. The Eighth is actually the shortest of all Beethoven’s symphonies, and its instrumentation is on the same reduced scale as that of the First, Second, and Fourth, with no trumpets or drums in its second movement. When the public registered puzzlement about the Eighth after the spectacular energy of the Seventh, Beethoven said, according to Czerny, “That’s because it’s so much better.” Authentic or not, this remark catches the sense that the symphony’s delicate shadings and subtle balances may have been harder for him to achieve than the direct outpouring of action in the Seventh. Furthermore, precisely because it emulates the smaller symphonic scale of Beethoven’s predecessors, but from a modern perspective, this work stands in a stylistically distanced relationship to tradition and becomes an artful commentary on the historical development of the genre.59
As in the Seventh, the jewel in the setting is the slow movement, for many years thought to be based on a humorous canon by Beethoven, WoO 162, that refers to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, inventor of the metronome—until the canon was shown to be a falsification of Schindler’s. The movement combines two means of rhythmic motion: the steady, pulsating groups of sixteenth notes in groups of eight that establish the meter, and the anapest figure in the first violins that forms the basic theme, to which the cellos and basses provide an immediate answer that moves the harmony to the relative minor and gently propels the movement forward (*W 24).
Beethoven’s autograph manuscript of the Eighth Symphony, showing the last page of the slow movement. The word siml, which appears in the next-to-last measure in many of the instrumental parts, instructs the copyist to repeat the first figure in the measure. (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin)
Not to be overlooked in this delicately wrought fabric are the pizzicato figures in the second violins and violas. As in a comparable string-quartet texture, they lightly and percussively reinforce the rhythm of the first violin theme. This movement, in its tracery, anticipates later movements in which Beethoven cultivates the lightest touch: its great successor is the Andante scherzoso of the String Quartet Opus 130. In both he finds ways of working out echoes of short two-note figures between voices and registers.60
The other pièce de résistance is the Finale. Here we find a return to the rapid rhythmic action of the Seventh, but with generous hints from the finale of the “Ghost” Trio, Opus 70 No. 1. The opening theme of this Allegro vivace is in pianissimo. Its rapid pairs of triplets lead immediately to a three-note dactylic figure on the downbeat that is a rephrased variant of the main figure of the slow movement (where it was always on the upbeat) (*W 25). The reinforcement of this theme by violas and winds on its first appearance signals that the figure is to have a life of its own. We then witness a series of surprising events, in which the three-note dactyl figure, always in the same melodic form, seems to settle down on the dominant, C major, but then after three tries, suddenly erupts onto a fortissimo C that is left unresolved until much later in the movement.
Paradox heaps on paradox. The form is more or less that of a sonata form but with two codas.61 The first acts like a second development section, transforming the harmonic framework of the first theme and modulating through various keys. The second coda confirms the tonic, F major, but also supplies the longed-for resolution of that intrusive C heard way back near the beginning of the movement. Now the C becomes the basis for a stormy interlude in F-sharp minor, then slips back with ease into its home channel of F major and vigorously runs its course.
Touches of subtlety abound right to the end. In one passage, the winds in successive measures bring the interval of a third down through successive registers via pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons—and then right back up again through the same instruments. In fact Beethoven thought of this touch of comedy only at the final autograph stage of the symphony—we find him originally writing repeated chords for all the winds right through these measures; then, struck by a new idea, crossing out all the extra wind chords to leave just the falling and rising motions as they stand in the final version.62 An element at the very end of the movement, hardly noticed, if at all, is typical of the little ways in which this symphony, in its artlessness that conceals art, predicts a detail of the late style. The final measures hammer home the tonic harmony in the full orchestra, one chord to a measure, but the bass, not yet finished with its cadencing functions, at first alternates tonic and dominant under the tonic harmony above, until it too reiterates the tonic, but only in the very last two measures.