Tag Archives: Ludwig van Beethoven

Routes to Beethoven – Clementi

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by Ben Hogwood

“Clementi plays well, with regard to right-hand technique. His speciality is passages in thirds. Otherwise he hasn’t a trace of feeling, or taste, in a word, he is a mere mechanic.”

This withering assessment of the virtuoso 18th century pianist Muzio Clementi came from none other than Mozart, who had engaged in a keyboard competition with the Roman composer at the request of Haydn on Christmas Eve in 1781. Mozart was writing to his father Leopold, as Daniel Heartz reports the duo in his superb book Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven. Perhaps not surprisingly Haydn, who organised the duel, was more independent in his views, describing a set of Clementi’s Piano Sonatas as ‘very beautiful’ a year or so later.

Clementi was a nimble-fingered virtuoso. Born in Italy but settling in London, he is not mentioned a great deal in books of the time. Heartz reports a number of lukewarm reactions to his symphonies in England, though again this is not surprising given he was being compared with the visiting Haydn.

It was then in the field of piano music where Clementi really made his mark, and not just as a musician but as a publisher too. Beethoven recognised his influence in both disciplines, recommending his music for the use of piano students. Jan Swafford writes of how Beethoven and Clementi finally cemented a friendship in 1807. “As a pioneering composer for the piano, he had been a formative influence on the young Beethoven, because Clementi was among the best available models for how to write idiomatically for the instrument. Now retired from performing, Clementi lived in England and prowled the continent looking for music to publish and customers for his pianos.” He made several visits to Vienna. After an initial misunderstanding in Vienna in 1804, the pair struck a publishing deal and a friendship on a subsequent visit three years later.

Charles Rosen, writing in The Classical Style, recognises his influence. “In his (Beethoven’s) youthful works, the imitation of his two great precursors is largely exterior: in technique and even in spirit, he is at the beginning of his career often closer to Hummel, Weber, and to the later works of Clementi than to Haydn and Mozart.”

Harold Truscott, writing in The Beethoven Companion about Beethoven’s piano music, goes further. “I think it is true that Beethoven absorbed so much of this music of Clementi and Dussek that many times themes crop up in his work which go right back to themes in their work and that it seems probable he was unconscious of any origin; they had become part of him. We should be careful to distinguish between such unconscious connections and real influence, although the mere fact that these themes penetrated so deeply into his musical make-up seems to show that they had a great impact upon him.”

He observes many characteristics in the make-up of Beethoven’s themes and their treatment that have their common points with equivalent Clementi works. Looking at the Op.2 sonatas in particular, Truscott says, “Throughout his career the essentials of Beethoven’s piano writing changed little from what is displayed in these three sonatas. It was the writing of a virtuoso, using the basic techniques of Clementi and Dussek, but gradually developing their potential in his own way to meet new expressive demands as they arose.”

We will encounter the Op.2 sonatas early on in the Beethoven listening project…but for now we can enjoy Clementi’s own writing, when at its best is full of dramatic contrast, taking minimal melodic material and growing it substantially. The Sonata in G minor is perhaps the best example of his craft, and showing these qualities with the reminder that its date of composition, 1795, is before all of Beethoven’s early published work. It is included in the Spotify playlist below.

About the F minor work, also included in the playlist, Anselm Gerhard writes in his booklet notes how “the whirl of the final movement proclaims the definitive end of music’s historical dependence on traditional dance forms: here purely instrumental music reveals its determination to stand on its own two feet. It was not long before this idea was put into practice by Beethoven”, he continues, “albeit using completely different, characteristically revolutionary means: by consistently dramatising his music, he set out to transfer the prestige of the age’s most celebrated literary genre to instrumental music, and in the highly charged atmosphere of works like the Op.26 and Tempest sonatas, the medium’s new artistic ambitions were plain for all to hear.”

There is humour in Clementi’s thought process too, nowhere more so than in the brilliant pastiche of the Preludes in the style of Haydn and Mozart. Beginning the playlist is the Piano Concerto in C major, and there are two symphonies that illustrate how the composer’s prowess was not as stilted as some might have claimed. They may of course have seen him as a rival.

Clementi’s standing proves him to be more than that – and his influence on Beethoven will become clear in due course.

Routes to Beethoven – Mozart

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by Ben Hogwood

It has often been speculated that Beethoven met Mozart in Vienna when he was 17. What a meeting that would have been, with a musician and composer at the peak of his powers and the man seen by many as his successor-in-waiting.

There were many contacts to link the two – not least Archduke Maximilian, elector and archbishop of Cologne. Mozart enjoyed good relations with him, and Beethoven was sent out with his strong recommendation. However not much is known about the outcome of their proposed meeting, nor even if it took place at all, given the conflicting tales afterwards. Yet what cannot be doubted is that the music of Mozart exerted a considerable influence on Beethoven for years – more so even than Haydn.

In his biography of the composer Lewis Lockwood writes of how Beethoven played Mozart piano concertos with the orchestra in Bonn. Beethoven’s good friend Reicha recounts of how, ‘after hearing an aria from Mozart’s Idomeneo (Electra’s passionate D minor aria), he talked of nothing else day and night for weeks thereafter.’ He also treasured Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.20, written in the same key, and wrote two cadenzas for it to be performed by his student Ferdinand Ries.

Lockwood goes on to examine the 14-year old Beethoven’s prodigious Piano Quartets, found after his death and posthumously published. So accomplished was the writing in these pieces that contemporaries doubted if Beethoven could have written them at all, but an autograph score survives to confirm their authenticity.

Lockwood notes them as ‘the first and clearest examples of the teenage Beethoven’s dependence on Mozart. They mark the beginning of a relationship to Mozart that remained a steady anchor for Beethoven over the next ten years as he moved into his first artistic maturity. Just as Mozart himself had once told his father that he was ‘soaked in music’ so Beethoven was soaked in Mozart. His invention of new ideas sometimes began with his asking himself if what he was writing was his own, or something he might have heard or seen in a work by Mozart, or partly both.

Several sources note that Beethoven copied out two of Mozart’s string quartets when the time came for his first forays into the form. Both form part of the set of six dedicated to Haydn – in G major (K387) and A major (K464), and the latter became a model for the fifth of the set published as Beethoven’s Op.18. He was also deeply impressed and affected by the otherworldly way in which Mozart begins another ‘Haydn’ quartet, the one known as the Dissonance in C major, K465. The introduction to this work is remarkable, removed almost completely from tonality and – at the time – regarded as deeply unattractive. Beethoven took it on board, however, and imitated it twice in subsequent slow introductions, the string quartets Op.18/6 and Op.59/3.

In his early work Beethoven used a number of titles and forms common to Mozart. A Serenade, a Quintet for piano and wind instruments, and he built several pieces of variations on Mozart themes. Some of Mozart’s forays into C minor – often seen as a ‘tragic’ key – are precedents for Beethoven’s own thoughts. The Piano Concerto no.24 is an especially vivid example, its mood and musical arguments emulated in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.3.

As I mentioned, Beethoven had to check a theme he had written was not a Mozart original, so concerned was he about marking his own path. As Lewis Lockwood writes, ‘Nothing could be more revealing of his anxiety about Mozart, his musical god and artistic father, whose music he knew and heard in his mind so well and clearly that he must have felt he had to work his way through the Mozartian landscape to find his own voice.’

The playlist includes all the works mentioned above and closes with Mozart’s crowning orchestral glory – the final Symphony no.41 in C major, known as the Jupiter:

Next we’ll briefly examine Beethoven’s relationship with the music of Clementi, one of the piano-playing stars of the time…and then it’s a look at the music of 1770, Beethoven’s birth year!

Igor Levit plays the Adagio from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata

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As part of the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Igor Levit has recorded the 32 piano sonatas, a highly acclaimed set released on Sony Classical late last year.

They are sure to form an integral part of our listening as Arcana navigates Beethoven’s complete output, but for now you can enjoy the timeless Adagio from the Piano Sonata no.8 in C minor, known as the Pathétique, which Sony have released today:

Routes to Beethoven – Joseph Haydn

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by Ben Hogwood

November, 1792. The 21-year old Beethoven was planning to leave his home town of Bonn for Vienna, and he left with a ringing endorsement from Count Waldstein, his most important patron. Mozart had died the previous year at the age of thirty-five, and Waldstein sensed the stage was clear. “Dear Beethoven!”, he wrote. “You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of a wish that has long been frustrated. Mozart’s genius is still in mourning and weeps for the death of its pupil. It found a refuge with the inexhaustible Haydn but no occupation; through him it wishes to form a union with another. With the help of unceasing diligence you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.”

This was of course rather fanciful. To suggest Haydn as a channel for Mozart’s inspiration did the older composer – now sixty and in the prime of his musical life – little recognition. Haydn was aware of Beethoven, the younger composer having sent him his ambitious choral Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II – and was willing to take him on. Thus Beethoven left Bonn in early November 1792 and travelled for ten days until arriving in Vienna.

All appeared to be going well for him there, but when Haydn sent a letter to Elector Maximilian dated just over a year later he included a clutch of works that Beethoven had already written in Bonn. Most were sadly lost – including an Oboe Concerto – but an Octet-Partita for wind ensemble has survived. The covering letter expressed the conviction that ‘On the basis of these pieces, expert and amateur alike must admit that Beethoven in time will attain the rank of one of the greatest musical artists in Europe, and I shall be proud to call myself his teacher. I only wish that he might remain with me for some time yet.’

The reply was curt, since Maximilian was receiving music he had already seen – and could not see any discernible progress to finance Beethoven further. As Lewis Lockwood points out in his Beethoven biography, Haydn’s priorities as a composer were stacked up. He had made a pioneering and highly successful visit to London in 1792, and a sequel was on the cards, for which he would need new string quartets and symphonies. Beethoven, too, given his ability and individuality, was not to be the perfect match. Lockwood talks of ‘the same stubborn personal resistance’…which ‘seems to have troubled his relationship to Haydn, though here it was mingled with reverence for authentic genius.’

With Haydn’s focus abroad, Beethoven looked elsewhere for his teaching and found counterpoint studies with Johann Schenk. Haydn returned to London and the brief relationship was at an end. Before he left Vienna, however, he was privy to Beethoven’s Op.1 – three trios for piano, violin and cello – and Op.2, a set of three piano sonatas dedicated to Haydn.

The trios contained a problem, in the explosive form of the third piece in C minor. Haydn advised withholding this from publication, calculating the impact on the Viennese audience might damage Beethoven’s reputation. It was, as Michael Steinberg in The Beethoven Quartet Companion points out, ‘a surprising attitude from a composer who was himself so bold. An observer went further, noting ‘a kind of apprehension, because he realised that he had struck out on a path for himself of which Haydn did not approve.

Jan Swafford holds the conviction that Beethoven took far more from Haydn than he himself declared at the time. ‘There is no record of what transpired in their lessons’, he writes. But it can be said that at least by his Op.2 Piano Sonatas, composed in 1794-5, Beethoven was showing the fruits of his studies in a startlingly mature way. After his months with Haydn, Beethoven emerged a far more sophisticated composer. To mention only one issue: Before Haydn, Beethoven had a shaky idea of proportion, might write an introduction to an aria that was a quarter of its length. After he finished the lessons with Haydn, he had one of the most refined senses of proportion of any composer – a sense of it, in other words, at the level of Haydn.’

Haydn’s influence on Beethoven can be gauged at this stage by listening to some of the works he was writing while teaching the younger composer. The three string quartets published as Op.74 are a case in point. The slow movement of no.3 in G minor finds the sort of spaciousness we became accustomed to from Beethoven in his equivalent slow movements. Meanwhile in the slow movement of no.1 in C major Haydn goes on all sorts of unusual tonal routes, seeming to travel far from home but only so he can show his dexterity as a composer, bringing the music ‘home’ with a single, deft switch. Beethoven was to acquire that quality too.

The Piano Sonatas offer some clues, too. The playful opening of the Sonata in C major has a wit Beethoven was only too keen to take forward. So too the grand gestures of the Sonata in E flat major, a key that was to assume great importance for Beethoven over the years. Haydn’s Masses were well known to Beethoven too, and the Nelson Mass – closely associated with Nelson’s victory over Napoleon – cast quite an influence on the younger composer’s Mass in C major.

The later symphonies acquire a dramatic instinct which must have appealed to Beethoven too. Like C.P.E. Bach, who we have already heard from, Haydn had a Sturm und Drang period that marked his music forever, and the last twelve symphonies, written for use in London, are even more vivid in their stories. The introduction to the relatively unsung Symphony no.98 in B flat major has a dark edge, and these works, now laden with timpani, have more emotive and dynamic contrasts, straining at the leash of the conventions of form and harmony. The final, London symphony – no.104 in D major – demonstrates best of all how far Haydn had taken the form. Its dramatic slow introduction reaching towards the 19th century and beyond, while the slightly rustic finale is brilliantly written.

There is much speculation on how Beethoven and Haydn’s relationship developed, if it did at all, beyond that of a prodigious pupil and a seasoned master of his craft in his early sixties. Certainly a healthy mutual respect existed, Haydn spotting the gifts Beethoven had in abundance, while Beethoven himself found his early works bearing clear influence of Haydn even more than Mozart. We will explore those in greater depth, as Beethoven takes on the forms of symphony, string quartet, piano trio and piano sonata and bears them into the 19th century.

You can listen to selections from Haydn’s enormous output, including the works discussed above, on the playlist below:

2020 Beethoven: The Story So Far

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As you may well know, Arcana is undertaking a Beethoven listening project this year, in celebration of the 250th year since his birth.

We are approaching Beethoven by way of composers and teachers that had an influence on his output – J.S. Bach, son C.P.E., Handel and teachers Albrechtsberger and Salieri. We have also had a quick look at the Mannheim school of composers who helped the forms of the symphony and sonata to spread their wings.

We will shortly hear from Haydn and Mozart, then a quick look at Clementi – who Beethoven held in very high regard – before a guide to the music of 1770, the year of Beethoven’s birth. Then – finally – we will start on the music of Beethoven himself.

Arcana have several exciting interviews in the bag to help us with our discovery of Beethoven. Pianist Angela Hewitt has given some pearls of wisdom on the Piano Sonatas, while this morning Cyprien Katsaris held court as he talked of his upcoming Beethoven Odyssey. Many discoveries were made! We will also hear from cellist Steven Isserlis, who has offered his thoughts on the Cello Sonatas.

It has been a relatively slow start – but expect the tempo to rise considerably over the coming months! Meanwhile here are clips from one of Hewitt’s discs for Hyperion on the Piano Sonatas, including the wonderful opening pages of the Pastoral: