Twelve Contredanses, WoO 14
Twelve Minuets, WoO 7
Twelve German Dances, WoO 8
Gratulations-Menuett, WoO 3
Musik zu einem Ritterballett (Music for a Knight’s Ballet), WoO 1
The Creatures of Prometheus, ballet, op. 43
Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard (spread around Complete Beethoven Orchestral Music series)
Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields/Neville Marriner (WoO 7, 8, and 14)
Tapiola Sinfonietta/John Storgards (includes Knight’s Ballet)
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Charles Mackerras
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (no conductor)
Orchestra of the 18th Century/Franz Brüggen
Turku Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam
Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard
Staatskapelle Berlin/Günther Herbig (with Knight’s Ballet)
All of Beethoven’s dance music is early, with the exception of the Gratulations-Menuett (Congratulations Minuet) of 1822. Indeed, the Knight’s Ballet of 1791 is the earliest piece of orchestral music by him that we have. Lasting about twelve minutes, and interestingly scored for an orchestra of strings, timpani, piccolo, pairs of clarinets, horns, and trumpets, but no oboes or bassoons, the piece contains eight tiny numbers: a march, German song, hunting song, a romance (touchingly scored exclusively for pizzicato strings), war song, drinking song, German dance, and a coda. Typically for Beethoven, even at this early date, the coda is one of the largest numbers in the piece.
As you might expect, the music won’t win any awards for profundity, but it is charming, energetic, and tuneful. It also may be difficult to find—there aren’t too many recordings and they tend to come and go in the catalog, so there’s no need to make a special effort. However, I have pointed out a few in the discography above. If you find it coupled to something you want more, consider it a bonus.
All of the great Viennese composers wrote ballroom dance music. It was part of their “bread-and-butter” work, and most of it, being composed for specific occasions or onetime use, was considered disposable. Very little of the total survives. Dances for the public are mostly short—lasting one or two minutes in total—formally simple (usually ABA), rhythmically predictable to keep the dancers from tripping over themselves as they execute the prescribed steps, and usually written in sets of six or twelve. Some of Beethoven’s, not included here, were composed for two violins and bass, which could be enlarged to orchestral proportions as the size of the room (and noise level) demanded. Those for full orchestra often make up for their limited formal resources by being very inventively scored.
Each piece in a larger set often has its own distinctive color. The use of the piccolo in addition to flutes in Beethoven’s dances is almost standard. No. 10 of the Twelve Minuets adds an extra pair of muted horns to create echo effects. Percussion instruments, such as bass drum, cymbals, and triangle, appear in no. 10 of the Twelve German Dances, and that set contains a coda to round things off that not only brings back the bass drum, but throws in a posthorn solo (cornet) for good measure. We find a tambourine in no. 8 of the Twelve Contredanses, and no. 7 is the most famous of all: Beethoven’s first use of the tune that would conclude the Prometheus ballet, feature in the Eroica Variations for piano solo, and turn up as the finale of the Eroica Symphony.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider why this tune might have fascinated its composer to such a degree.
One of Beethoven’s most noteworthy characteristics as a composer is his use of musical materials that can only be called “populist.” This was a deliberate choice, one that undoubtedly was related to his revolutionary egalitarian and republican political sentiments. It cost him a tremendous amount of effort. His sketches reveal version after version of his most famous tunes, the process being not so much one of elaboration but of simplification—of finding the most essential, most natural, and most directly expressive final form of his ideas. The iconic example of this process must be the “joy” theme from the finale of the Ninth Symphony, a tune of such primal inevitability that it hardly sounds deliberately composed as much as borrowed intact from some deep well of our collective subconscious. The Eroica theme, as we’ll call it, is a melody of similar type.
What makes these ideas so special isn’t just the fact that they exist, but that Beethoven uses them to express his most powerful, even sublime and transcendental musical thoughts. They embody for him the grandeur and greatness of the ordinary, the mundane, and ultimately, the human. These are the qualities that made Beethoven everyman’s composer and that give so much of his music its universal appeal, even to listeners otherwise uninterested in “the classics” as such. They allowed his art to be absorbed into the very fabric of Western culture (and beyond), so it’s typical that one of the most telling examples of this phenomenon has its roots here, as no. 7 of the Twelve Contredanses.
As to the dance types themselves, the minuet (however it’s spelled) was the dance of the eighteenth-century aristocracy. In its ballroom version, it’s a stately piece—so the men’s dress swords and women’s massive skirts don’t get tangled—with three beats to the measure, in 3/4 time. None of the beats is stressed very firmly, again to provide for a smooth, elegant, gliding motion through the steps.
A German dance, by contrast, has the same meter and moderate tempo as the minuet but is more rhythmic, with a hard accent on the first beat and often a clear secondary stress on the latter two. Many barrel organ and carousel tunes, such as the famous “Ach! Du lieber Augustin,” are German dances, and they are closely related to the Austrian Ländler and other precursors of the waltz. In fact, Beethoven calls the final German dance in the Knight’s Ballet “Walzer.”
Finally, a contredanse is a quick piece “in two”; that is, 2/4 time, often with a folklike or open-air feeling about it. Often spelled “contradance” in English, its character is even more clearly defined by its alternative English name: country dance. Sets of these pieces in succession became organized into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quadrille, and as a kind of group dance featuring multiple couples following an alternating succession of step patterns, it is related to the American square dance.
The Gratulations-Menuett is Beethoven’s only other significant, stand-alone dance piece. It was offered as a good-natured tribute for the name day of Karl Hensler, the theater impresario who commissioned Beethoven to revise his Ruins of Athens incidental music for rededication of the Josephstadt Theater in Vienna. The same event produced The Consecration of the House Overture. This is a symphonic minuet, longer and more highly developed than a true work meant for actual dancing, and some scholars suggest that it might have been intended originally for the planned Tenth Symphony, although for that purpose the music, which lasts only about four minutes, sounds distinctly unambitious.
Finally, we have Beethoven’s only full-length ballet: The Creatures of Prometheus. As mentioned in the previous chapter in considering its popular overture, we don’t really know what the individual dances described. We can be sure that the plot is very allegorical and very enlightened and leave it at that. Dating from 1801, the same time as the First Symphony, the music of the complete work always has had its detractors, but of its kind it’s undoubtedly a masterpiece. Just consider the fact that no one cares about any other ballet by any other composer of the classical period but this one. Also, at the premiere the work was only a modest success because its individual numbers were considered “too learned,” which is always a good thing in the ballet world if you want to listen to the music alone.
The complete piece, as it stands, contains sixteen dances (not counting the overture) and plays for between sixty and seventy minutes, on average. That makes it Beethoven’s largest purely orchestral work in any form. Aside from the joyous overture and the finale featuring the famous Eroica theme, you also get a terrific thunderstorm, a gorgeous adagio for harp and solo cello that sounds almost like proto-Tchaikovsky (no. 5), a delicious pastorale (no. 10), and a wonderfully evocative number (no. 14) featuring solo Bassett horn—a rare member of the clarinet family with a range slightly lower than the standard model. Neither harp nor Bassett horn is used in any other major work by Beethoven. In short, the ballet is chock-full of beautiful, rewarding music, and he obviously lavished much care on its composition.
As you can see, many recordings are available on both modern and period instruments. The outstanding versions probably are those by Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but if you want a delightfully anachronistic, uber-romantic view, try the Segerstam on Naxos. The music accepts this treatment surprisingly well, and like almost everything by Beethoven, you really can’t fail by “going big.” Taken as a whole his dance music isn’t all that voluminous and, in strictly musical terms, perhaps not that important (whatever that means), but it’s unquestionably worth sampling. Certainly, Prometheus is essential.