The Beethoven Sonatas and the Creative Experience

Kenneth Drake

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780253213822
• eBook ISBN: 9780253011534
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The definitive study of Beethoven's piano sonatas is "remarkable as an insider's account of the works in an individual perspective." ( European Music Teacher)
 
In "one of the most interesting, useful and even exciting books on the process of musical creation" ( American Music Teacher), Kenneth O. Drake groups the Beethoven piano sonatas according to their musical qualities, rather than their chronology. He explores the interpretive implications of rhythm, dynamics, slurs, harmonic effects, and melodic development and identifies specific measures where Beethoven skillfully employs these compositional devices.
 
An interpreter searching for meaning, Drake begins with Beethoven's expressive treatment of the keyboard—the variations of touch, articulation, line, color, use of silence, and the pacing of musical ideas. He then analyzes individual sonatas, exploring motivic development, philosophic overtones, and technical demands. Hundreds of musical examples illustrate this exploration of emotional and interpretive implications of "the 32." Here musicians are encouraged to exercise intuition and independence of thought, complementing their performance skills with logical conclusions about ideas and relationships within the score.

The Sonatas

A piece of music is a meaningful construction, at once sensuous and logical, fashioned and sustained by the need of the mind to explain itself to itself. Lacking a fixed physical dimension but existing in time on a tangible instrument, the playing of a piece is the embodiment of subjectivity. In this meeting of self and ideal in which the support of tradition and reputation is insufficient, the player is forced to look for musical meaning. If that search is successful, the result is a oneness with the music that confers upon the player a new, spiritual identity.

To achieve this oneness, the sole reliable, if sometimes perplexing, guide is the composer’s score. Through the discipline of analysis, perceptions compared become judgments made, as a result of which a larger and more complex piece emerges, requiring new perceptions and judgments. Thus the playing of a piece presupposes, within fulfillment, the possibility of unfulfillment, as it was for the composer in the moment of creation.

The listener’s understanding of the depth and richness of a piece depends upon the player’s perceptions and judgments. Nevertheless, just as the player, in attempting to define the indefinable, may never fully comprehend the composer’s own concept of the music, the listener may be only dimly aware of what the player comprehends during performance. Ultimately, all that can be communicated is an awareness of a spiritual presence. That the conjuring up of this presence should be effected by an insecure human being in a state of unfulfillment remains the mysterious irony of our profession.

VII Descriptive Music

OP. 81A, OP. 13

If a music appreciation class were to listen to the Sonata Op. 81a, without being aware of the programmatic titles, and another class were to listen to the same sonata but after being told the titles of the three movements, the second group would almost certainly remember the piece in greater detail. The historical background alone is like a fabric of fantasy woven of threads of a variety of colors—the Archduke who later became an Archbishop, Beethoven’s gifted student and patron, the relationship of a Hapsburg royal to a composer who once felt the need to insist that the “van” in his name indicated nobility, the approach of the French armies, the flight of the Archduke—making a pattern we know as the Les Adieux Sonata. Descriptive or programmatic music will be taken seriously or not according to the associations established in the mind. If they are too literal, the piece will seem more entertaining than serious. However, imagining the sentiments that were exchanged between these two flesh-and-blood human beings coming from two widely separated levels of society and meeting in a kind of temple of the spirit, musician and nonmusician alike will hear the music as an “immortal sign” of a human experience. Life does lend significance to the act of making music.

Since Beethoven rigorously subjected everything he created to the test of musical reason before it reached final form, he would not have capriciously added a descriptive title to a piece of music without having in mind a purpose of which he himself was convinced. When studying Opp. 81a and 13, the only sonatas to which Beethoven gave titles, one should ask why he used titles at all and what they have to do with the music.

OP. 81A

Another time, walking in the fields near Baden, Neate spoke of the “Pastoral” Symphony and of Beethoven’s power of painting pictures in music. Beethoven said: “I have always a picture in my mind, when I am composing, and work up to it.”¹

The following anecdote in Wiedemann’s Musikalische Effectmittel und Tonmalerei was told by Beethoven’s friend Karl Amenda: “After Beethoven had composed his well-known String Quartet in F major he played for his friend [Amenda, on the pianoforte?] the glorious Adagio [D minor, 9/8 time] and asked him what thought had been awakened by it. “It pictured for me the parting of two lovers,” was the answer. “Good!” remarked Beethoven, “I thought of the scene in the burial vault in Romeo and Juliet.”²

A remark of Ries . . . will bear repetition: “Beethoven in composing his pieces often thought of a particular thing, although he frequently laughed at musical paintings and scolded particularly about trivialities of this sort. Haydn’s ‘Creation’ and ‘The Seasons’ were frequently ridiculed, though Beethoven never failed to recognize Haydn’s high deserts. . . .”³

Among the sketches to the [Pastoral] Symphony are to be found several remarks that in part are directed toward comprehending the titles, in part of a general nature. We do not learn much more from these than what is said in the printed titles. These [the remarks] always prove that Beethoven, in the writing of the titles, approached [his] work with deliberation. The remarks are as follows.

one permits the listener to discover the situations

Sinfonia característica—or recollections of life in the country

a recollection of life in the country

Every sort of painting, after it has been pushed too far in instrumental music, suffers loss—

Sinfonia pastorella. He who has ever obtained an idea of life in the country can imagine for

himself what the composer intended without lots of titles— Also without description one will recognize the whole more as feeling than tone painting.⁴

Plainly, extramusical stimulus played an important role in Beethoven’s creative process. Nevertheless, as Nottebohm remarked, “Tones learned by listening to nature and those that flow forth from the human soul are fundamentally different things.”⁵ As for the reason for the titles for the separate movements of Op. 81a, the only sonata among the “32” to be “explained” in such a manner, the most credible answer is that the sonata was an acknowledgment of personal affection on the occasion of the Archduke’s enforced departure. (In a letter to Breitkopf & Härtel dated October 9, 1811, Beethoven asks why the publisher had brought out the sonata with both French and German titles; Lebewohl, he insisted, would be said “in a warm-hearted manner to one person,” Les Adieux “to entire towns—,”⁶) Perhaps Beethoven felt that the work had such a clear ring, such a directness and brilliance, that the listener would miss the sentiment that gave it birth—that it was a soul-painting, as Nottebohm described it. Or, he may have thought that the one-line and two-line voice parts would sound merely thin and strange if the title Das Lebewohl were not added above the motive. As a matter of fact, the stretto that produces a superimposition of tonic and dominant (Ex. 7.1) in which the farewells overlap was misunderstood, as Marx points out:

Fétis, the learned director of the conservatory in Brussels, expressed it accurately: “If that is called music, it is not what I call music.” It is not the music of Fétis and the French nor of the majority of musicians; it is poetry, or, more precisely, the transcending of music that naturally always lives only in a very few and is understood only by a very few.

If the player ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I The First Raptus, and All Subsequent Ones
• The Sounds of Involvement
• The Sonatas
• Notes
• Index