Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music

Stephen Hefling

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135887612
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Música

Nineteenth Century Chamber Music proceeds chronologically by composer, beginning with the majestic works of Beethoven, and continuing through Schubert, Spohr and Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, the French composers, Smetana and Dvorák, and the end-of-the-century pre-modernists. Each chapter is written by a noted authority in the field. The book serves as a general introduction to Romantic chamber music, and would be ideal for a seminar course on the subject or as an adjunct text for Introduction to Romantic Music courses. Plus, musicologists and students of 19th century music will find this to be an invaluable resource.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Chamber Music of Beethoven

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Kofi Agawu

The core of Beethoven's chamber music consists of string quartets, the first of which dates from 1798, the last from the penultimate year of his life, 1826. Like the piano sonatas, the quartets span a considerable portion of his entire composing career and encompass a wide range of compositional techniques and aesthetic choices. Yet the idea of a core repertory is by no means value-free, as if all the chamber music works were submerged in water and the best ones automatically rose to the top. Rather, the core is constructed by the historian or analyst according to specific agenda. For in addition to string quartets, Beethoven wrote string trios, piano trios, a string quintet, another for winds and piano, a septet, an octet, violin sonatas, and cello sonatas. The histories of these works are linked, and there are further linkages to the symphonies, piano concertos, and vocal music. There is, then, no firm chamber music manner, attitude, or stance in Beethoven, one that might ensure that a different “language” was “spoken” in the medium of, say, the string trio from that spoken in the piano sonatas. Beethoven's choice of theme and topic, his layout of periodicity in form, and his construction of tonal narratives: these are ever-present compositional challenges that render the boundaries between genres fluid.

The customary division of Beethoven's development into style periods or manners has proven indispensable to any survey of his works; the present essay is no exception. By the conventional account, a first or early period encompasses the works composed until 1802 and includes sub-periods distinguishing the Bonn years (up to 1792) from the Vienna years. Works written between 1803 and 1812 belong to a middle period, while the third or late period lasts roughly from 1813 to Beethoven's death in 1827. Any periodization is bound to distort historical reality, for lines of influence and affiliation are complexly drawn, while periods of transition are never as fixed as our bald dates suggest. Yet the three-style scheme, promulgated by such nineteenth-century writers as Johann Aloys Schlosser, François-Joseph Fétis, Wilhelm von Lenz, and Alexandre Oulibicheff, and (with some modifications) by such recent writers as Joseph Kerman and Maynard Solomon, has endured in Beethoven criticism. While lending support to the view that Beethoven's composing career is inscribed in his biography, the scheme highlights the different registers that distinguish Beethoven's styles, styles that cannot be conflated into a single homogenous compositional manner without doing considerable violence to the very notions of sameness and difference.¹

One concrete consequence of the division into style periods is an imbalance in the pattern of distribution of chamber works through Beethoven's career. Consider the violin sonatas. Only one, the four-movement work in G major, Op. 96, composed in 1812, approaches the late period; similarly, only the “Kreutzer” Sonata, Op. 47, composed in 1802–3, belongs to the middle period. The eight other works in this genre are all first-period works. One could of course refine the stylistic grid to capture the different tone in works that mark the transition from the first to the middle period. In that case the “Spring” Sonata, Op. 24, composed 1800–01 and the highly original C Minor Sonata, Op. 30, No.2, composed in 1801–2 and published as part of a set of three, may be seen to lie at the juncture of two contiguous style periods. The point is that with the exception of Op. 96, Beethoven was more or less done with the genre of violin sonata by the time he embarked on the larger projects that encapsulate a middle manner.

A similar imbalance may be observed in the chronology of the string trios, all of which date from before 1800. Again, the Quintet for Piano and Winds, Op. 16, is from 1796, while the String Quintet, Op. 29, was composed in 1801. The balance is only slightly better in the piano trios, in which the “Archduke,” Op. 97, Beethoven's final word in that genre, was composed toward the end of the middle period, 1810–11, not during the third period. However, the adumbration of late-period techniques in this work, as well as in the String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, should not be underplayed. Only slightly earlier are the two Op. 70 piano trios, both of them unmistakably characteristic of the middle period: powerful, eccentric, and challenging their genre to the limits. All the other piano trios belong to the early period, including several works without opus numbers.

The balance is happiest in what one might be tempted to call the weightiest genres: cello sonata and string quartet. Beethoven wrote two cello sonatas, published as Op. 5 in 1796, but waited a full decade before returning to the genre. The A Major Cello Sonata, Op. 69, composed in 1807–8, is the genre's centerpiece, yet its middle-period categorization is undermined by the heightened lyricism that points ahead to the late style. Finally, two more cello sonatas, one in C, the other in D, were composed in 1815 and published as Op. 102. The overall symmetrical 2–1–2 distribution of these sonatas signals Beethoven's periodic: return to the cello sonata genre every ten years or so.

The string quartets, the first nine of which were published in sets, show the clearest stylistic breaks and provide the happiest balance in distribution. First comes the set of six published in Vienna in 1801, numbered Op. 18, that consolidates a Viennese aesthetic, complete with traces of Haydn and especially Mozart. (The A Major Quartet, Op. 18, No. 5, is said to be modeled on Mozart's K. 464).² It is a major stylistic jump from Op. 18 to Op. 59, a set of three composed in 1805–6 and nicknamed the “Razumovsky.” As we will see, the heroic impetus that found its most characteristic representation in the middle-period symphonies—notably the Third, Fifth, and Sixth—also left traces on the string quartets. Certainly the extraordinary expansiveness of range, texture, color, and form in the first movement of Op. 59, No. 1, marks a new level of intensity in Beethoven'scompositional habits. Even the Quartet in E

, Op. 74, composed in 1809, and the quirky Op. 95 in F Minor, composed the following year, although they reveal a new tone of modesty, concentration, and introspection, actively challenge but do not ultimately invalidate our broad stylistic division. While they may be said to point to the late works, they are finally middle-period works in the same way that the Eighth Symphony, although something of a throwback to an earlier period, remains a middle-period work.

Finally, the last five quartets occupied Beethoven from 1823 to 1826. In fact, apart from Op. 127 in E

, which was composed in 1823–24, the other four (including the Grosse Fuge) were composed in 1825–26 and published during Beethoven's last year. The overall 5–5–6 distribution of the quartets across the early, middle, and late periods respectively, reinforces the view that quartet composition remained central to his creative concerns throughout his life. This is only one of several reasons for building a narrative of Beethoven'schamber music around the quartets.

The Early Chamber Music

If we imagine Beethoven as a child “speaking” a musical language, we can be certain that it was not a “pure” language but a syncretic one, a kind of Creole reflecting German, French, and Italian influences in intonation, syntax, and idiomatic construction. Beethoven's early musical environment included music of earlier eighteenth-century composers (J. S. Bach, Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart), parceled out in a variety of forms and genres, ranging from the public sphere of the symphony, concerto, and opera to the more private sphere of chamber music. His musical influences also included a great many minor composers, whose work he emulated not only as a young composer in Bonn but as an ambitious performer and composer in Vienna. A fuller account of his musical development would acknowledge the traces of these influences, in particular of various national styles, and supplement these with an assessment of the impact of the self-consciously acquired musical knowledge (such as the contrapuntal models and techniques transmitted by Albrechtsberger and Haydn) on his personal musical language. Our task here, however, is not to discuss the formation of this language, information about which is readily available elsewhere,³ but to identify a few salient features of the early violin sonatas and string quartets that exemplify it. And rather than attempt to deal with the works comprehensively, I shall select aspects of periodicity and topic for comment.⁴

Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano provide a good lens for observing some of the routines of his early style. Briefly, the Op. 12 and Op. 23 sonatas exemplify a more or less normative adherence to Classical convention. By the time of the “Spring” Sonata, Op. 24, however, disruptive and original features become more apparent. The transitional features of Op. 24 and the works composed around 1800–1802 are consolidated in the Op. 30 sonatas.

One obvious sign of conventional usage is a regular four- or eight-bar phrase structure, in which successive phrases unfold additively. The rondo theme that inaugurates the finale of Op. 12, No. 1, exemplifies this regularity (Example 1.1). Its eight-bar structure is divided into 4 + 4 and incipiently into 2 + 2 + 4. This theme is offered by the pianist to the violinist, who repeats it without modification. Subsequent returns at measures 52 and 119 are free of additional embellishment. The result is a characteristic pattern of balanced, predictable, and ultimately unproblematic exchange between the two instrumental protagonists.

EXAMPLE 1.1. Ludwig van Beethoven, Violin Sonata in D, Op. 12, No. 1, finale theme.

The closed, eight-bar phrase is, of course, part of the unmarked ordinary syntax of the Classical style. What is noticeable in early Beethoven, however, is the closed nature of some of the basic building blocks, a feature that resists the ongoing, forward dynamism so often associated with his music. In the finale of Op. 12. No. 1, phrase succession generally follows an additive rather than a divisive or organic manner. While this tendency may be put to the rondo form itself—the rondo principle prescribes sectionalization—we are a long way yet from the organic and proselike periodicity of later Beethoven.

A similar exposure of seams is evident in the rondo of Op. 12, No. 3, whose theme, quoted in Example 1.2, is an eight-bar folklike tune divided into four-bar halves, the first open, the second closed. Although the rondo theme trades motives with some of the episodic material, it is finally not integrated into a single, prevailing melodic discourse, for all its subsequent appearances have the character of additions, interruptions, or interpolations; they lack the generative capacity of other building blocks.

EXAMPLE...