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Beethoven’s Symphonic Masterpiece

The work of a madman.

Carl Maria von Weber

We’ve already heard Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Sixth. The Ninth is still to come, but today’s selection, his Seventh Symphony, is my personal favorite.  I’m not alone.  Berlioz declared it to be Beethoven’s “masterpiece.”  Wagner wrote rhapsodic essays about it.  And it was extremely popular with Viennese audiences from the get-go.  While audiences needed time to warm up to many of Beethoven’s prior works, the Seventh was insanely popular upon its premiere, especially the second movement, which the audience applauded until the orchestra agreed to immediately encore it at the premiere. I can’t disagree: I’ve probably listened to that second movement more times than any other work of music, full stop.

I was fortunate to take a Master Class with Leonard Bernstein on this piece, so I’m cribbing from what I remember about his analysis combined with some acquired insights of my own. If you really want to understand what Beethoven was doing here, listen to AC/DC or The Rolling Stones. Because at the beating heart of those two bands lie the greatest rhythm guitarists of all time, Malcolm Young and Keith Richards–and their obsession with rhythmic motifs (or riffs)–finds its root in the symphonies of Beethoven’s heroic period. Let’s start there, with one of the most obsessive riffs in rock history:

AC/DC, Hells Bells

Now, let’s see how a real master does it. In his most proto-rock symphony, Beethoven simply tears the roof off. To help walk through this remarkable work, I’m including references to points in the Carlos Kleiber recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. You can use the YouTube clip below, but the time markings after the first movement need the separate tracks from the CD or streamed versions available on Spotify or Apple Music.

The first movement (A Major) opens with an introduction that is one of if not the longest that Beethoven ever wrote–bringing us to about the 3:15 mark when the music, which had been grand and soaring up until that point, appears to break, settling on an E. This resolution is deeply satisfying, since E is the resolving note to A Major. Beethoven hammers this idea home by repeating this E–varying only the rhythm. And for what must be the first time since early medieval music, the same note repeats more than 30 times in a row, taking us to about 3:50. Where this will go? Beethoven speeds up the pace to vivace–building our anticipation–but what we get is just more Es, repeating the same exact note for a total of 61 times, before the theme finally breaks out at 3:55. And these Es set out Beethoven’s great galloping riff, which figures in nearly every bar of the movement.

Once the theme enters, the momentum begins to build–and you can feel the power of the music straining the break free, which it finally does, like a great wave crashing over the audience, at around 4:21. If there is more joyous music in this world, I don’t know what it is. And yet, like a great Rolling Stones song, Beethoven’s accompanying rhythm is persistent. The harmony barely changes. Just by controlling the dynamics, Beethoven creates music where no music should really exist.

Then, just when you’ve surrendered the power of that riff, Beethoven starts ripping everything apart–we don’t get a true second theme here, just a reexamination of the dominant theme from different perspectives. All with that persistent rhythm driving the score forward to the end of the exposition. The exposition ends with scales (starting around 5:57) that recalls the introduction. First we get the customary repeat of the exposition with those endless Es, but, the second time through, Beethoven changes the tonality, which takes us into the development (around 8:20). The end of the exposition features two jarring pauses, breaking the rhythm and hence the momentum of the movement. This will need to be resolved. Thankfully, that’s what the development is for–and for what may be the first time in history, the development is going to be primarily about rhythmic development, not harmonic development. The profound satisfaction achieved through rhythmic development and resolution was not lost on rock bands either, although few can pull it off convincingly. Here’s one good example:

Rush, Jacob’s Ladder

Back to Beethoven: The development begins in pianissimo, with that persistent rhythmic motif in the strings: Of the 101 measures of the development, only two do not feature this omnipresent rhythm. Beethoven sets winds, brass and strings against each other, each trying outplay each other on the same rhythm. Those two measures without the rhythmic motif appear at around 9:05–leading to Beethoven changing the rhythm in the string section, while the winds retain the original. This polyrhythmic dissonance, surely the first in symphonic music, must be resolved. And resolve it Beethoven does, with heapings of brass and timpani (starting around 9:40). As the various components of the orchestra begin to get into sync, the music arrives . . . yes, no surprise here, on that dotted E rhythmic motif (10:03). And, just like that, we are in the recapitulation, with the main, joyous theme breaking out in the strings (10:07). Then those scales come back at the end (12:12), leading us into the coda this time after two bars of silence. The coda starts with what can only be described as a music shrug (12:20). The violins take up those persistent Es, while the lower strings play the chromatic scales from the introduction, melding the two great ideas of the movement–all supported by the omnipresent rhythm–before breaking into another moment of pure joy (12:59) to wrap everything up in a bow. The first movement is all about balance. The introduction and the coda are each 62 measures. The exposition and recapitulation are 115 measures each, bookending a development section of 97 measures. It is a triumph in A Major.

Which is why the next movement, starting in the parallel key of A Minor, is so jarring emotionally. After an A Minor chord in the winds and brass, the strings enter with some of Beethoven’s most iconic music. Naturally, it’s another rhythmic motif on an E:

While Beethoven surely didn’t know this while composing the symphony, its premiere would be at a benefit concert for wounded soldiers. It’s hard not to think of the horror of war during this opening march, but the music invites the imagination to run wild here. Beethoven’s music isn’t bound by any formal structure I can determine–at times it seems like a theme and variation or alternatively as a rondo. And, in another break from tradition, it isn’t a traditional slow movement (although some conductors reprehensibly slow it down to nearly an adagio)–it is allegretto.

Everything in this movement again revolves around this rhythmic motif. And even more than the first movement, the motif dominates. As Bernstein said, there is little remarkable about this music if you break it down into its constituent elements. It’s barely a melody. The harmonics are compressed into no more than a 4th. Even the rhythm is pretty basic (and much, much easier to play than that dotted E rhythm in the first movement). But everything is just perfect. From the proportions of line to the dynamics. And as I recall Bernstein saying, Beethoven more than any other composer in history knew the perfect next note. Even though he struggled with composition, the end result was beyond anything even Mozart or Bach could put forth, because of his singular genius of knowing the next right note, even when the music is at its most unexpected. This singular genius is on no greater display than during THAT MOMENT, where the brass finally enters in full (2:10), which is unquestionably my favorite moment in all of music history. Everything in this movement is music at its most basic, and yet the effect that Beethoven produces is truly transcendent.

The movement takes a detour back into A Major (listen for the clarinet), before the serenity of A Major is abruptly and forcefully resolved (again) on a series of Es (4:22). The rhythmic motif reappears in the winds, supported by a nervous accompaniment in the strings. The 16th notes in this accompaniment mutates into a fugue on the main theme (5:20), before returning in full (6:10). Eventually, the music will die away–the rhythmic motif been passed by diminishing winds, brass, and strings playing pizzicato before concluding on the same A Minor chord on which it opened.

The third movement is a rollicking Scherzo. Beethoven invented the idea of a scherzo (joke in Italian) to replace the traditional minuet movement pioneered by Haydn. This Scherzo has it all–an addictive theme that retains much of the dance ethic of Haydn’s minuet (albeit faster and much less courtly), as well as a lovely trio that was based on an Austrian folk song. The movement is in the key of F Major, as the opening chord announces. F is the diatonic mediant of A minor, which enables Beethoven to seamlessly modulate from the final chord of the second movement (A Minor (A-C-E)) to the opening chord of the third movement (F Major (A-C-F)). This is a very thickly textured movement, which recalls the opening movement from the Sixth Symphony, as Beethoven uses multiple rhythmic motifs to build his dance. The result is infectious. If I have one complaint with Kleiber’s account it is that the trio (starting at 2:12) is taken too slowly. The effect is to transform a languid passage into something of a slow dance. Beethoven ends the movement with a joke. The A theme returns three times in the movement, but as the B theme returns for a third time, Beethoven rudely cuts it off at the knees with a series of jarring chords.

So, how to resolve such a monumental work? Beethoven’s solution was to present a movement of unprecedented propulsion and joy. There is barely any theme here, and virtually no melody to speak of. Beethoven has, to borrow a phrase, completely surrendered to the rhythm–and music would never be the same again. This is all riff, no fluff. In fact, the same music appears in Beethoven’s setting of a contemporary Irish folks song. Listen to the piano, starting at 1:50 in the below:

Ludwig van Beethoven, 12 Irish Songs: 8 “Save me from the grave and wise:

Beethoven uses the same music for both an Irish folk song and the conclusion of what is arguably his best symphony. I began this blog with a quote from the composer Alban Berg, who told George Gershwin that it didn’t matter that Gershwin’s music wasn’t as complex or elevated–“Music is music,” Berg said. Yes–but that’s only because Beethoven deemed it so. After Beethoven, the lines between formal music and popular music become blurry–who writes the more “elevated” music today, Philip Glass or Radiohead? Does that question even matter?

The “bacchanalia” of this final movement is created intentionally, with sforzandi coming on the off beats of each measure, as well as more dotted rhythms that recall the theme of the first movement. So much of this movement is just pure rhythm, which strikes us as perfectly natural after a century plus of rhythmically-driven music. But think about what has led up to this point, as catalogued here–is there anything remotely like this? Even the Romantics, with all of their wild and wondrous inventions, would never dedicate an entire major work to an examination of rhythm. The elevation of rhythm over melody was uniquely Beethovian and the secret of his enduring appeal.

But that’s not all what’s going on in this remarkable movement. Entire essays could (and likely do) examine what Beethoven is doing harmonically, as the music runs far afield of the tonic A Major. And Beethoven seems to blend the sonata and rondo forms, especially in the development sections where the theme repeatedly emerges before returning triumphantly at the start of the recapitulation (5:15). The coda is more of the same. As the music builds frenetically, with the rhythmic motif of the movement being handed off like a baton around the various sections of the orchestra, the key becomes totally lost (at least to my ear). Tonally adrift in raucous celebration, final resolution emerges in the lower strings, which find, what else, but an E. And this is the point: The Seventh Symphony may be in the key of A, but it is all about movement to the dominant E. That’s what the rhythms are driving us to. We know this intuitively by now–Beethoven has spent the better part of 40 minutes training our ears to expect that E. And when it arrives, it is like the gates of heaven open before us. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Beethoven notates fff–triple forte–for the first time in music history. At the time, fortissimo–ff— was understood to be “as loud as possible,” so here, in 1812, Beethoven is quite literally dialing up his orchestra to 11.

In the 1960s, The Who would smash their instruments at the end of their set, while Jimmy Hendrix set his on fire. In the 1980s, AC/DC would fire off cannons during their final encore. But nothing–NOTHING–compares with this: Quite simply the greatest mic drop in music history.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92:

The Friday Symposium: A Cocktail for the End of Time

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire … and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth …. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished …

Revelation 10:1-2, 5-7 (KJV)

Our good friend Luke!!! has suffered through some sleepless nights of late, worried about the potential atomic consequences of events unfolding in the Ukraine. This one is for him.

Stalag VIII-A was as far from paradise as one could get in 1940, a dark and dreary German prisoner-of-war camp. By 1940, the better part of 50,000 French and Belgian prisoners were being housed in barracks originally intended to hold only 15,000. The prisoners were malnourished and unprotected from the cold, having been stripped of their clothing by their Nazi captors.

Into this hell on earth arrived a 30-something French conscript named Olivier Messiaen, already a noted composer and whose deep Catholic faith animated his music to a degree not seen since J.S. Bach sought to express his own Lutheran ideals in tones. Messiaen was not unknown to the cultured German officers, who provided the composer with pencils and music paper. So Messiaen, cold and starving, began to pray. The result was one of the more remarkable compositions in music history.

Inspired by the above quote from the Book of Revelation, Messiaen dedicated his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) to the Angel of the Apocalypse. Born amidst the horrors of war, the immediacy of famine and frost, Messiaen’s music is the antithesis of what we would anticipate. No bombast here. Messiaen is instead concerned with moving rhythm out of time and space itself. And what emerges from his music isn’t despair, but rather transcendence.

Messiaen’s time in this blog will come in due course and I will have a lot to say about this remarkable composition. But not today: For this Friday–with Armageddon ever present in our news cycle–I can think of no more appropriate music.

Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps:

Is there a cocktail for the end of time? Well, sort of. The Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster is the stuff of legend. As reported by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the cocktail was invented by Zaphod Beeblebrox, one-time President of the Galaxy. The Guide states: “The best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.” If the Apocalypse is truly upon us, this is the cocktail I want.

There is only one small catch. The ingredients are a bit tough to come by. Ol’ Janx Spirit, water from the seas of Santraginus V, Arcturan Mega-gin, Fallian marsh gas, etc. are just not exactly available in my local liquor store (or, in fact, exactly real). So to recreate this recipe in the real world, I will take inspiration from the Guide liberally.

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (as adapted for Earth)

  • 1oz clarified lemon juice
  • 2oz Beefeater gin (chilled in freezer)
  • 1/2oz Goldschlager
  • 1/2oz Everclear
  • splash tonic water
  • 2 dashes mint bitters
  • olive to garnish

Combine clarified lemon juice, gin, Goldschlager, Everclear, bitters and shake well. Pour into glass with one large ice cube. Top with a splash of tonic water with a single olive to garnish. Do not consume more than one of these, unless you are a thirty ton mega elephant with bronchial pneumonia. (Don’t look at me, I didn’t make the rules.)

Bonus Recipe:

After creating the above, I consulted with The Godfather who is responsible for the “clarified” instruction above. After saying that was the only thing he would change, he set about changing virtually everything else. So, for the first time, an “improved” version:

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (as adapted for Earth, improved version)

  • 1oz clarified lemon juice
  • 2oz Beefeater gin
  • 1/2oz Buffalo Trace White Dog Mash moonshine
  • 1/2oz Yellow Chartreuse
  • 1/2 tab Alka Seltzer
  • 2 dashes mint bitters
  • dash of edible gold leaf flakes
  • lemon peel stuffed olive

Combine clarified lemon juice, gin, moonshine, chartreuse, bitters and shake well. Pour into a cocktail glass and add Alka Seltzer. Sprinkle gold leaf on top and add single olive to garnish. Do not consume more than one of these (see above).

Under Siege: Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto

In 1809, Vienna was under siege by Napoleon and Beethoven, now more or less completely deaf, was hiding in his brother’s basement.  Terrified and feeling, perhaps more than others, the constant percussive effect of war, Beethoven produced one of his best compositions, the Emperor concerto.  It would prove to be his final statement on the genre.

The Emperor is in many ways different from the four that preceded it. In each prior case, Beethoven had been booked to perform with an orchestra and required a new concerto for the occasion. By 1809, that was no longer the case and the Emperor appears to have been composed without thought of a premiere. It is likely that Beethoven realized that he could no longer perform with a full orchestra.

The concerto is composed in the now familiar “heroic” style that defined Beethoven’s middle period. But what about that name? Surely, not a reference to Napoleon; then, what? My view, which you should immediately discount, is that this is Beethoven’s declaration of the piano as the Emperor of all musical instruments.

Consider the first movement. As he did in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, he opens with three power chords: E-Flat (the tonic), A-Flat (the subdominant) and B-Flat (the dominant). Over this tonally anchored orchestral accompaniment, the piano presents a chromatic contrast, while matching the dynamic range of the full orchestra, from piano to fortissimo. Deploying a technique pioneered in his Violin Concerto, the piano comments around the edges of the orchestral themes, presenting dizzying runs of scales and arpeggios, to the point that a final grand cadenza was deemed superfluous–Beethoven notes in the score “Non si fa una Cadenza, ma s’attaco subito il seguento”. (“Do not make a cadenza here but attack the following immediately.”). Beethoven’s decision changed the genre of the concerto forever–while cadenzas had traditionally been written (or improvised on the spot) by the soloist, future composers would leave nothing to chance, scoring their own cadenzas in their published scores.

There can be no doubt anymore. Here, at the threshold of the 19th century, the piano had assumed its primacy among instruments–one which it would never fully surrender through to the present day despite the robust challenge from the guitar.

Nearly every great pianist has recorded the Emperor Concerto, including my father’s (and my) favorite, Emil Gilels.

But, as great as Gilels’ version is, and as great as some of the others are, the choice here is Vladimir Horowitz. Long considered to be the greatest pianist of his generation and a musical superstar equal to that of the greatest pop stars of today, Horowitz suffered a mental breakdown at the peak of his career and stopped performing. After a decade away from the stage, Horowitz made his return at Carnegie Hall in May 1965. The Beatles aside, this was the musical event of the decade in NYC. Nearly half the population of New York attended that concert (or so they would have you believe). My father, who loved reminding me that he had seen everyone from Callas to Heifetz to Bird in their prime, was downright giddy at having attended this. There are recordings out there, but, much like the Beatles at Shea, they are largely terrible. His Emperor with Fritz Reiner and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra is anything but. The Emperor playing the Emperor–what could be better?

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat, Op. 73 “Emperor”:

Conversation:

Leonard Bernstein looms large in my understanding of Beethoven, as will be revealed next week. He was, by all accounts, one of the greatest conductors in history–a singular musical genius whose interests were unfortunately too widely dispersed to leave as profound a legacy as he should have. Lenny will be forever linked with the legacy of Gustav Mahler and his restoration of Mahler’s symphonies to the world stage is his greatest achievement in music. But Lenny was also a Beethovian and, a wonderful pianist in his own right, likely dipped into the Emperor when scoring one of the singular tunes from West Side Story. Listen to the opening of the second movement and then to this:

Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story: Somewhere

The Friday Symposium: Collapse the Light Into Earth

At some point in the 1980s or early 1990s, rock musicians began to abandon functional harmony–the idea of building music around a tonic chord or key. Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana is a good example of this. Drawing on a wide range of inspirations, such as The Pixies and Sonic Youth, Niravana began charting a decidedly atonal future for rock music in which harmonic tension and resolution would be abandoned. Of course, classical composers got there first, nearly 100 years earlier, but it would be a fool’s errand to argue that Cobain and his grungy peers were studying scores by Debussy, Bartok, Schoenberg or other 20th century composers. Most of them were barely music literate and were simply writing what sounded angsty and non-commercial to them.

Around the time that Nirvana was blowing up, in England, a young progressive guitarist and songwriter was beginning to chart his own path. Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree began life solidly in the space-progressive world first charted by Pink Floyd. Wilson wears his influences–Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, Yes, most prominently among others–on his sleeve, often leading critics to declare his music to be derivative. That’s unfair. Brahms’ First Symphony sounds so much like Beethoven that it is routinely referred to still as Beethoven’s 10th. Today, Porcupine Tree inhabits a space best described as progressive-metal, which if you are imagining Metallica performing albums like Selling England by the Pound, you are not too far off from the truth.

As it happens, Porcupine Tree is one of the Professor’s favorite bands, so when the opportunity arose to see them live with him, I jumped at the chance. Porcupine Tree are a hard band to connect to, especially if you jump around their catalogue instead of listening to complete albums. I had a hunch that a live show might help me find their groove a bit more efficiently. It did, which isn’t to say that I came away entirely sold on the band–especially in its current prog-metal phase.

Having immersed myself in Beethoven over the last several weeks, it was easy to pick up on Porcupine Tree’s obsessively repeating rhythms and riffs. I even heard what I thought were polyrhythmic sections, but listening again to the studio versions I determined that I was wrong–instead of two truly independent rhythms, the band is quite skilled at disguising variations of a rhythm over a 4-5 bars, after which you get what appears to be rhythmic resolution, but in fact was never truly clashing to begin with. Wilson also veers into atonal composition at times, producing strange chord progressions that bend your ear while, as a singer, using chromatic progressions that further distance his music from any sort of obvious tonal center.

That said, I think the band is at their best when they mix things up, either by retreating back to Meddle-like space-prog (The Moon Touches Your Shoulder) or by incorporating pseudo-polyrhythms to break up the ever-repeating riffs that sometimes can border on monotony. Personally, I welcome Wilson’s rare returns to a more functional harmony in his singing (Piano Lesson–an homage of sorts to late 90s Brit Pop).

While Wilson’s jazz and classical influences permeate his solo efforts (for example, Deform to Form a Star), his efforts to do so within the confines of Porcupine Tree appear to be more limited. That said, from time to time a few of these interesting Conversations peak out from the gloom, most notably this Philip Glass-inspired piano introduction.

Porcupine Tree, Sentimental

Philip Glass, String Quartet No. 2, IV. Quarter Note = 160

Philip Glass, Mad Rush:

At the close of the concert, Wilson remarked that Porcupine Tree isn’t the sort of band that has that one song that they have to play at every concert. And then they played the one song they have to play at every concert (Trains). It’s a good tune and clearly one of their very best, but I actually prefer another song on that album, which they also played last Friday night. For a band that embraces the dark and morose side of life, the lyrics are almost uplifting, as is the spare music that backs Wilson’s line.

I won’t shiver in the cold

I won’t let the shadows take their toll

I won’t cover my head in the dark

And I wont forget you when we part.

I won’t heal given time

I won’t try to change your mind

I won’t feel better in the cold light of day

But I wouldn’t stop you if you wanted to stay

Collapse the light into earth.

Steven Wilson

As autumn approaches, here is a cocktail worthy of that song, along with a playlist of some of the Porcupine Tree songs that I’ve come to appreciated over the last week.

Collapse the Light Into Earth

  • 1oz Laird’s Apple Brandy Bottled-in-Bond
  • 3/4oz lemon juice
  • 1/2oz honey simple syrup (1:1 ratio)
  • Champagne
  • Grated nutmeg

Combine brandy, lemon juice and syrup and shake well to combine. Strain into a coupe, top with Champagne and grate fresh nutmeg over the top.

A Mass Made Operatic: Fidelio

When I look back across my entire life, I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me.

Richard Wagner, on Fidelio

In 1950, one of the greatest conductors of all-time, Wilhelm Furtwängler led a production of Beethoven’s lone operatic effort, Fidelio, in Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg. And what a cast too, led by Kirsten Flagstad as the heroine Leonora and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as the jailkeeper’s daughter who falls in love with her. Say what?

Yes, that’s not a typo. The plot of Fidelio is among the silliest this genre has to offer–and that’s saying quite a lot. The opera centers on a heroine, Leonora, whose husband, Florestan, is being held prisoner by his political enemy, the despotic Don Pizarro. Leonora disgues herself as a young man named Fidelio and obtains a job at the prison, determined to rescue her husband. The prison warden, Rocco, has a young daughter, Marcellina, who throws over her suitor, Jaquino, because she has fallen in love with Leonora. Rocco, despite being a pretty decent guy, is starving Florestan on the orders of Don Pizarro. But when Don Pizarro learns that his prison is to be inspected, he decides to kill Florestan himself and gives the order to dig a grave. Leonora, disguised as Fidelio, overhears the plan and asks Rocco to accompany him to Florestan’s cell. The second act opens in Florestan’s cell. Although Florestan has just sung an aria about Leonora coming to save him, he does not recognize his wife when she in fact arrives to save him. Rocco and “Fidelio” begin digging the grave. When Pizarro enters to do the deed, Leonora springs forward, pulls out a pistol and reveals her true identity. At that moment, the governor arrives and Rocco confesses everything. Pizarro is arrested, the prisoners are freed, and they join Florestan and Leonora in a joyful celebration as the curtain falls. (Somewhere along the way, Marcellina learns that her Fidelio is acutally a woman, but for the life of me I can’t recall how that works out.)

Again, say what? The greatest composer in Europe, the composer of six mighty symphonies to date that changed the musical landscape forever, the composer of piano sonatas of such emotional depth they have inspired composers nearly 200 years after his death, the composer who would go on to write music of such transcendental beauty that we have only begun to really wrestle with them . . . this is the opera he produced? What was he thinking?

Well, in the first instance, let’s take a look at Beethoven’s operatic history. As a young man, Beethoven played viola in the Bonn opera company, so he was very familiar with the genre. His favorite opera composer was, surprisingly, not Mozart or Rossini, but rather Cherubini. Despite the fact that Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Brahams all held Cherubini to be among the first rank of opera composers (if not the “greatest living composer” as Beethoven wrote to him), his 35(!) operas are rarely performed today. That said, the Metropolitan Opera is putting on a production of Medea this fall, which will give New York audiences a rare opportunity to hear, firsthand, the man Wagner called the “greatest of musical architects.”

Beethoven admired Cherubini as much for the music in his operas as the morals of his librettos. That’s clue number one. Beethoven’s perference for The Magic Flute over either Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro is another. Dismissing Don Giovanni and Figaro as frivolous, Beethoven embraced what for many is the silliest of Mozart’s operatic output. Beethoven didn’t really care about the plot–he cared only about the theme, the triumph of true love against all odds. He was a cuddly romantic after all.

So why this story? We know that the libretto was based on a French “rescue” play by Jean Nicholas Bouilly called Léonore ou L’amour congugal, which the author claimed was based on actual historical events during the Reign of Terror. French composer Pierre Gaveaux had turned the play into an opera, which had apparently made its way into Beethoven’s hands. Not only did Beethoven take the plot from Gaveaux’s opera, he also cribbed many of the themes and details from Gaveaux’s instrumentation. Beethoven also liberally borrowed from the various operatic traditions, melding the dialogue of German singspiel with the dramatic arias of opera seria and the grand finale of opera buffa. Which is to say, the resulting opera is a bit of a mess.

Much has been read into this opera. Beethoven was clearly attracted to the theme of a rescue from political tyranny, as we find that inspiration dotted throughout his work of his second period. Others suggest that Beethoven connected with Florestan’s plight–the prison serving as a metaphor for Beethoven’s deafness. Others suggest that Florestan’s dreams of being rescued by Leonora (a somewhat preposterous notion) reflected Beethoven’s own fruitless search for love. And yet I focus on a different element–Florestan’s rescue after taking communion in the form of bread and wine. Is this an allegory for salvation? Well, I’m not alone in thinking so. Very much still in the shadow of WWII and Nazi Germany, Furthwängler wrote:

Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. That which disturbs us is not a material effect, nor the fact of the ‘imprisonment’; any film could create the same effect. No, it is the music, it is Beethoven himself. It is this ‘nostalgia of liberty’ he feels, or better, makes us feel; this is what moves us to tears. His Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a ‘religion of humanity’, which we never found so beautiful, or necessary as we do today, after all we have lived through. Herein lies the singular power of this unique opera…. Independent of any historical consideration … the flaming message of Fidelio touches deeply. We realize that for us Europeans, as for all men, this music will always represent an appeal to our conscience.

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Why does Fidelio stirs such emotions in us? Well, it certainly isn’t the plot: When Gaveaux turned the play into an opera, he chose to make it a comedy. Furtwängler hits the nail on the head–it’s Beethoven, always Beethoven and his incomparable music.

So let’s turn to the music. The first act is largely forgettable. There is a much admired quartet (Leonora, Jacquino, Marcellina and Rooco) and a good aria or two, but the real meat comes in Act II. In the last production I saw at the Metropolitan Opera, the second act opens in absolute darkness–I have never seen the Met stage so completely black. The prelude that introduces the scene is some of the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. This is a composer who can effortlessly pull on your emotional strings at will; here, he pulls on all of them at once. All of those innovations we heard in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are present here–Beethoven’s use of repetitive use of rhythmic motifs, dramatic dynanimsm, powerful brass, and perhaps most notably, music that turns on a tritone (A-E flat). We feel it all. Despair as well as hope; anguish as well as elation. Before Florestan even opens his mouth, we’ve been transported into Florestan’s soul–his aria confirms what we already know: This is a man at the literal end of his rope. There are other great moments as well. The Leonora-Florestan-Rocco scene in which Rocco realizes the great injustice he is helping to facilitate. And the moment just after Leonora pulls her gun on Pizarro — “one more step and you’re dead” — the music suddenly falls away, as if Leonora was threatening the orchestra too. Silence, as ever in Beethoven, provides much of the dramatic tension.

But then we get the finale–a pedantic oratorio on the joys of matrital fidelity. Sure, the music is great and Beethoven cranks up the emotion-machine to 11 here, but the messaging is all wrong. In many ways, Beethoven finally found the finale he was looking for at the end of his Ninth Symphony.

Contemporary audiences hated the opera. And Beethoven, supremely frustrated by the process of composing opera, never finished another. Interestingly, Fidelio was neither Beethoven’s first attempt at writing an opera–an abandoned effort called Vestas Feuer was abandoned in 1803 (some of the music found its way into Fidelio)–nor his last. Beethoven tantalizing planned to write an opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but his librettist Joseph von Collin died in 1811 before completing the libretto and Beethoven never found a substitute.

Over the centuries, Fidelio has tapped into our need to express our desire for liberty, perhaps like no other work of art. In 1814, a much revised version was premiered to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat. In 1933, the great Arturo Toscanni left Nazi-occupied Baytheuth to conduct Fidelio in Salzburg to protest Hitler and his regime. In 1941, a cast of European refugees again turned to Fidelio to mount a protest performance, this time at the Metropolitan Opera. And when the Vienna State Opera reopened, it was Fidelio on the bill. More recently, a small opera company in New York used Fidelio to examine the injustices that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Fidelio isn’t an opera–it is the greatest hymn to liberty that we have.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio, Op. 72:

The Friday Symposium: Chianti and Rossini

As Beethoven entered his Late Period, he was facing intense competition for his audience. While Beethoven was placing ever increasing demands on his audience, requiring them to accept novel harmonics, extreme dissonances, and uncertain forms, a young composer from Italy was giving Viennese audiences exactly what they wanted–timeless, easy melodies and a rollicking good time at the opera house. That composer was, of course, Gioachino Rossini and the immense popularity of Rossini’s music frustrated Beethoven.

Starting around this time, Beethoven took to carrying with him notebooks, where he made people write out their questions to him. Since Beethoven was able to answer orally, these “Conversation Books” only have the questions, not Beethoven’s answers. So many questions that we have about the great composer and his music were posed by his contemporaries, but all history left for us are the questions. Questions about other composers–Haydn, Handel, Bach, and Rossini, among others–pop up in these Conversation Books and we are left to wonder what exactly Beethoven’s response might have been. I’d like to think the Beethoven’s opinion of Rossini’s operas would be much the same as the Baron’s view: A big meatball, in the best sense of the word.

Today’s music selection are Rossini’s greatest hits for tenors, sung by the incomparable Juan Diego Florez. Recorded in the flush of his youth, Florez’s voice is truly like none other.

What to pair with Rossini? The choice is easy: Chianti. Long considered a cheap wine served in straw-covered bottles, Chianti has emerged as one of Italy’s great wines, and one of the world’s great values. The best wines of Chianti easily hold their own against their more distinguished neighbor to the South, Brunello di Montalcino, and make the case that sangiovese is the greatest of all Italian grapes.

Having spent time in the Chianti region this summer, I can attest to the singular beauty of the region, the richness of its soils, and the high quality of its wines–especially from the central Chianti Classico region. Picking up a great Chianti has never been easier. Just follow these basic rules:

  • Ensure that the label says “Chianti Classico”–look for the black rooster on the bottle, which is the symbol of the region.
  • Opt for a “Riserva”, which spends an extra year in cask, which helps considerably to mellow out the famously harsh edges of sangiovese.
  • Get a bottle with some age. The 2015s and 2016s are drinking perfectly now and the 2017s are coming into their own.
  • Do not spend more than $35. Great Chianti Classico Riservas can be had at this price point.
  • Some producers of note: Querciabella, Fontodi, Felsina, Castello di Ama, Badia a Coltibuono, Castello di Rampola, Monsanto.

It helps to be in Chianti, but for the foreseeable future, I will need to make do with my memories of a place that is quite literally heaven on earth:

Inclyti sed victi

He loved to be alone with Nature, to make her his only confidante. When his brain was reeling with confused ideas, Nature at all times comforted him.

Countess Theresa of Brunswick

How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do. … In the country every tree seems to speak to me, saying, ‘Holy! Holy!’ In the woods there is enchantment which expresses all things!

Ludwig van Beethoven

No work of Beethoven’s is so misunderstood as his serene sixth symphony. Dismissed at the time and critiqued in the present as Beethoven’s attempt to paint a landscape in sound, nothing could be further from the truth. Composed contemporaneously with the bomastic Fifth Symphony, nothing about the Sixth makes sense. If Beethoven’s torment was reflected in bombastic and thrusting score of the Fifth, how can we make sense of this gentler, kinder Beethoven?

Perhaps we should not try and find Beethoven’s soul lurking in his music. Beethoven’s music, and the secret to its enduring popularity, is that he perfectly captures OUR emotions in sound. In the many Conversations an audience member can have with a composer, none is stronger, or clearer, than the emotional bond between Beethoven, through his music, and us. In the Fifth, Beethoven connects to our need to be free, feeding our sense of victory as the C Minor of totalitariansim is defeated by the C Major of liberty. In the Sixth, he connects to our need for peace and harmony–bringing us to the countryside where Beethoven felt those emotions most keenly. He’s not painting a landscape. No, in his brilliant Sixth Symphony, Beethoven maps out the emotions of the human soul as it interacts with the natural world.

Pastoral Symphony: no picture but something in which the emotions are expressed which are aroused in men by the pleasure of the country, in which some feelings of country-life are set forth.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven was not the first composer to be inspired by nature. His teacher Haydn had written symphonies called Morning, Noon, and Night, not to mention his more recent and successful Seasons oratorio. And Vivaldi, of course, had written The Four Seasons a century before. But the most direct precedent appears to be a little known symphony by Justin Heinrich Knecht, Le Portrait musical de la Nature (Pastoralsymphonie).  Although there is no direct evidence that Beethoven knew this work, he was aware of Knecht generally and the similarities of the works is telling. Both are entitled “Pastoral”. Both consist of, unusually for the period, five movements. And both introduce each movement, not with a description of the tempo, but rather with a description of the subject. Knecht’s symphony tells the story of a idyll, interrupted by a storm, after which nature gives gratitude to the Creator. Beethoven’s would be decidedly more introspective, although the idea of using a storm to introduce drama into the symphony was retained.

To the music. Like he did in the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven resorts to simplicity, a limited harmonic vocabulary, and complex rhythms to create his sonic landscape. Repitition and lack of variation–so common in the early history of Western music–comes back here to express the constancy of nature, and of our emotional response to it. Gone are the secondary dominants, diminished sevenths, augmented sixths, and other chords that Mozart and other Classacists used to create color and harmonic texture to their compositions. But despite the superficial simplicity of the composition, more is going on beneath the surface.

The first movement (“The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country”) opens in F Major, which will dominate the score to a greater extent than any key had in any symphony composed to date. There is a reason for this: F Major was long associated with the natural world. Most famously, Bach had composed a Pastorale in F Major for organ, a work that Beethoven may have known. Outside of brief and expected detours to C Major (the dominant key) and B-Flat Major (the subdominant key), the entire exposition (as we are in sonata form) is written in F Major.

The opening, much like the Fifth Symphony opens with a series of motives that, when strung together, create an elongated theme. These motives are as brief as the four note motifs of the Violin Concerto or the fate chords of the Fifth, but here Beethoven is playing with three discrete motivic elements. Here they are:

Nearly every note of the first movement will use at least part of these motivic elements–at one point at the start, Beethoven repeates motive b several times in immediate succession. Absent any harmonic movement in the score, Beethoven uses only dymamics to convey texture. This is simplistic composition, but the dynamics awaken something in us. I suggest that the emotion Beethoven is tugging at is innocent wonderment. When we arrive in the country from the grime of the city, we experience a childlike sense of wonderment. And that emotion must be scored simply, right? And that feeling builds as we experience more of the countryside, arriving at the second theme in C Major. This theme is, if anything, even more simplistic: G-C-B-C. The orchestration provides the texture here, but the overwhelming impact of the music is calmness and relief. Notably, Beethoven changes the music only by changing the rhythms. This conveys a sense of harmonic permanence, while providing the necessary momentum to carry the score forward. Just like nature, right?

This repetitiveness compounds in the development. Just listen for those motives, especially b, which will be repeated over and over again. Perhaps minimalists like Philip Glass learned a thing or two from Beethoven, who uses repetition and the lack of harmonic development to create a hypnotic sensualism in the music. And then the harmonic change comes, suddenly–followed by yet more repetition. More than a few have claimed this passage creates the emotions experienced when looking at a vista from a mountaintop, only to turn around and be astounded by an even better view. And yet it is all motive b. Over and over again. The senerity of the music is ever so briefly interrupted by a quick detour to F Minor, bringing just the faintest of hints of danger (and, oh, there will be danger ahead), before returning back to the sunshine of F Major and the recapitulation. In the coda of the first movement, Beethoven moves from F to the subdominant B-Flat, a IV-I progression that is, not coincidentally, the so-called “Amen” cadence. Not a particularly religious person, Beethoven is nonethless giving thanks for the beauty and peace of the countryside. And, perhaps prefiguring one of his greatest compositions yet to come, the emotional string Beethoven pulls on here is, quite clearly, overwhelming joy.

For those who dismiss the Sixth Symphony as kitsch, their arguments rest primarily on the second movment (“Scene by the brook”), in which muted second violins, violas, and two cellos play an ostinato line that gives the impression of a softly babbling brook, while woodwinds play something like birdsong above. This is not reading into the score–Beethoven labels a famous passage late in the movement to identify nightingales, quails and a cuckoo. Some have called this birdsong passage a joke, but I disagree. It is best understood as a cadenza, as if Beethoven has taken us inside the birds to experience their joy of nature as well. Regardless, my interest in this movement is in its meter, or, to be precise, its apparent lack thereof. Again, Beethoven uses rhytmic, rather than harmonic motion, to propel the music forward. But the rhythm becomes so repetitive that all sense of time starts to become lost in what is an overwhelming sense of stillness. Wagner, among others, took great note of this bit of compositional magic when he composed his greatest opera, Parisfal, in which time seems to disappear for the entire first act. Incidentally, these are the moments by which a performance of the Pastoral Symphony or Parsifal should be judged. Do the musicians make time disappear into an ethereal stillness, or is it just plain monotonous. If the latter, don’t blame Beethoven or Wagner–it’s the guy waving the stick in front of the orchestra who is at fault. One final note about this movement. Just before the recapitulation, and just as he did in the first movement, Beethoven switches to a minor key. In the first movement, it was a more gentle transition from F Major to it parallel F Minor. Here, however, it is B-Flat Major to B Minor, a much more stark change, and the brief darkness that ensues is that much greater. Clearly, there is something wrong. That brief premonition in the first movement is now even stronger and, for the first time in the symphony, Beethoven introduces drama and anticipation.

Which leads to . . . absolutley nothing. The third movement (“Merry gathering of the country folk”) finds Beethoven in a particularly playful mood. Perhaps, as his student claimed, Beethoven is evoking his emotions (and, indeed our own emotions) associated with a favorite country pub (his, incidentally, was called The Three Ravens). It’s hard not to feel the building excitement, created by the quickly rising and falling arpeggios, which lead to that moment when you walk in the door and your senses immediately take in the familiar sounds, smells, and sights of your friends and neighbors eating, drinking and generally making merry. Beethoven moves into a peasant dance (whether this is a riff on one of his lost dances written for the band of The Three Ravens, we will never know). The dances meander, always joyful, seemingly without a care in the world. But just as the dance rises to a crecendo and an expected F Major cadence, the music breaks.

Suddenly, shockingly, we are thrust into F Minor and, without break (for the second time, Beethoven omits the traditional pause between symphonies) and with a profound nervousness from the lower strings, all hell breaks loose. That premonition Beethoven scores in the first two movements is realized. The fourth movement (“Storm, Tempest”) lets loose a fury unrivaled in all of music history. Much copied, but never bettered, this is among the most influential and best music Beethoven ever wrote.

I despair of being able to convey an idea of this prodigious piece. It has to be heard to understand how realistic and sublime imitative music can become in the hands of someone like Beethoven. Listen to the gusts of wind gorged with rain, the dull growl of the basses, the shrill hissing of piccolos announcing the fearful storm that is about the break out. The hurricane approaches and increases in intensity. A huge chromatic scale, starting in the upper instruments, plunges to the depths of the orchestra, picks up the basses on the way, drags them upwards, like a surging whirlwind that sweeps everything in its way. The trombones then burst out, the thunder of the timpani intensifies in violence; this is no longer rain and wind but a terrifying cataclysm, a universal deluge and the end of the world. In truth the piece induces dizziness, and there are many who on hearing this storm are not sure whether the emotion they experience is one of pleasure or of pain. 

Hector Berlioz

Beethoven is not simply orchestrating nature here, he is scoring our emotional response to a storm: fear, unknowing, lack of control. And the way he does this is particularly brilliant. After three movements of relative harmonic stasis, we suddenly hear all of them–the keys change frequently (often after only two movements), produing supremely dissonant chords. Fear–nerves combined with a jagged heartbeat–resound in the strings. Relief and anticipation come during breaks in the storm, but the storm returns with even more fury, bringing a sense of helplessness–best symbolized by a piercing cry from the piccolo. (Incidentally, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were the first to use a piccolo. I suspect that Beethoven used on here first and, then, realizing its potential, brought it back into the Fifth.). Disjointed rhythms. Dissonant chords. Frantic and frequent harmonic changes. Beethoven’s score shatters just like the world during the worst storms. And then, just like that, order is restored. Silence, punctuated by the last gasps of the storm, leads us out and back into the sunshine. The music shifts to C Major, the first hint that everthing is going to turn out fine, and then it stops, takes a breath, and moves on (again, without a break).

The final movement (“Shepherds’ song. Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.”) finds us back in F Major and the peace of the opening two movements. This celebratory finale is a welcome respite from the agitation of the titantic fourth. Meter again disappears and we, and Beethoven, are again at peace with the world.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F Major, “Pastoral”, Op. 68:

Far from being Beethoven-lite, as critics are oft to assert, this is Beethoven at his absolute best.

Hide your faces, poor great poets of antiquity, poor immortals. Your conventional language, so pure and harmonious, cannot compete with the art of sound. You are vanquished, no doubt with glory, but vanquished all the same! You have not experienced what nowadays we call melody, harmony, the combination of different timbres, instrumental colour, modulations, the skilful clashes of conflicting sounds which fight and then embrace, the sounds that surprise the ear, the strange tones which stir the innermost recesses of the soul. The stammering of the childish art which you referred to as music could not give you any idea of this. For cultured minds you alone were the great melodists, the masters of harmony, rhythm, and expression. But these words had a very different meaning in your vocabulary from what we give them now. The art of sound in its true meaning, independent of anything else, was only born yesterday. It has scarcely reached manhood, and is barely twenty years old. It is beautiful and all-powerful: it is the Pythian Apollo of modern times. We owe to it a world of emotion and feeling which was closed to you. Yes, great venerated poets, you are vanquished: Inclyti sed victi.

Hector Berlioz on Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony

The Friday Symposium: Fifteen Albums

I’ve been a fan of the BBC’s Desert Island Disc series for as long as I can remember. The original premise was that if you were cast away on a desert island (presumably one with a working electrical power grid), which eight recordings would you choose to bring with you? Across the entirety of musical history, eight is just too restrictive a number. I find it hard to limit just jazz to even 20, let alone “classical” music with more than 500 years worth of compositions to choose from. So here I propose 15–five from each of the three major genres (“classical”, jazz and popular). I’ve limited myself to one album/composition per artist to enforce some diversity.

Popular

  • The Beatles, Rubber Soul
  • The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
  • The Kinks, We Are the Village Green Preservation Society
  • The Velvet Underground and Nico
  • David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Jazz

  • Miles Davis, The Birth of the Cool
  • John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
  • Charles Mingus, Ah Um
  • Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners
  • Lenny Tristano, Tristano

Classical

  • J.S. Bach, Mass in B Minor (Herreweghe/Collegium Vocale Gent)
  • Gregorio Allegri, Miserere (Tallis Scholars)
  • Ludwig van Beethoven, Late String Quartets (Hagen Quartett)
  • Claude Debussy, Preludes (Pierre-Laurent Aimard)
  • Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection” (Bernstein/NY Philharmonic)

Those are my 15. Lou Reed makes the cut; Mozart does not. I’m sure he would find that endlessly hilarious. And despite my deep love of 20th century music, the first omission on the classical list was Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers (Gardiner). Then Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. And then Dimitri Shostakovich and a symphony never to be named later. No Wagner; no Liszt. Interestingly, it was Hendrix who was first out from the popular list (Electric Ladyland), then Genesis (Selling England by the Pound). And then a Radiohead album, maybe. Jazz was particularly brutal for me–no room for Bill Evans, Art Blakey, Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Wes Montgomery, Art Tatum, Horace Silver, Eric Dolphy, Lee Morgan, Bud Powell, Chet Baker, the Modern Jazz Quartet — and the list goes on and on.

Which got me thinking about a Desert Island Bar. Going back to the original definition of eight albums, which eight bottles would I want in endless supply on my desert island. And since the BBC always assumed sufficient electricity to power a stereo, I will assume sufficient refrigeration and the like here. To keep things sporting, I’ve put a notional cap of about $100 on each bottle, although most are far less expensive.

Desert Island Bar

  • Gin: Plymouth
  • Scotch: Ardbeg Uigeadail
  • Rum: Kirk & Sweeney Gran Reserva
  • Bitter: Campari
  • Vermouth: Dolin Dry
  • White Wine: Château Pape Clément Blanc
  • Red Wine: Williams Selyem Sonoma Coast
  • Champage: Louis Roederer Vintage Blanc de Blanc

WIll I regret leaving off sweet vermouth? Yes, but not more than Mozart or Monteverdi. Ultimately, music feeds the soul much more than any wine or spirit can.

The Making of an Icon: Symphony No. 5

Art is most known for its iconic images. There are many in fine art:

Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa
Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night

In sculpture too.

Michelangelo, David
Auguste Rodin, The Thinker

But there are also iconic images from film:

Casablanca
North by Northwest

The performing arts too are notable for many iconic moments:

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1: To be or not to be

Music too has its icons and the greatest of these–the one that has endured for more than 200 years, recognized across every corner of the globe–is unquestionable the opening salvo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. However you interpret that truly iconic four note motif–many consider it to be “fate knocking at the door”, but the Allies in WWII used it as a symbol of victory–there is no escaping from it. If alien life ever finds Voyager and can play its Golden Record, they too will hear the famous first movement, billions of miles from the source of its creation. Overplayed, overexposed, omnipresent. It is the Mona Lisa of music.

Beethoven began composing his Fifth Symphony in 1804, which explains why the famous “fate chords” were first heard in his Appassionata Sonata, as discussed previously. In fact, Beethoven was working on several compositions at once during this period, which included not only the Appassionata, but also his Fourth and Sixth Symphonies (the Sixth would be premiered along with the Fifth on the same night), the Violin Concerto, the Mass in C, and his lone opera, Fidelio.

In many respects, the Fifth Symphony is a purely Classical composition. It’s structure is as follows:

1st Movement:

  • Exposition:
  • Theme 1
  • Theme 2
  • Development
  • Recapitulation:
  • Theme 1
  • Theme 2
  • Coda

2nd Movement:

  • Theme A
  • Theme B
  • Variation 1 (A)
  • Variation 1 (B)
  • Variation 2 (A)
  • Variation 3 (A)
  • Variation 2 (B)
  • Variation 4 (A)
  • Variation 5 (A)
  • Variation 6 (A)
  • Coda

Third Movement:

  • Scherzo
  • Trio
  • Trio A
  • Trio B
  • Scherzo Return
  • Transition to last movement

Fourth Movement:

  • Exposition:
  • Theme 1
  • Theme 2
  • Theme 3
  • Theme 4
  • Development
  • Recapitulation:
  • Theme 1
  • Theme 2
  • Theme 3
  • Theme 4
  • Coda

Other than the extended transitions and codas, nothing about the structure of the work is particularly revolutionary. Beethoven, as ever, seems loathe to tear down the architecture of music, choosing instead to build his new world from the inside out.

But the Fifth Symphony is revolutionary. But its not for reasons that are immediately apparent. Yes, the tone is dark, but Mozart got there first, in his Jupiter Symphony, his Requiem, and parts of Don Giovanni. And the idea of a four note motif was also hardly new–Haydn in particular was fond of using them to conclude a musical phrase. What was new was that Beethoven nearly dispenses with melody in the first movement entirely, obsessively chasing that four note motif so much so that nearly all of the music in that movement is derived from it. The four note motif is a unifying thread that connects every movement in the symphony–something no one had done before, rhythmically unify an entire symphony.

Beethoven’s concept of a symphony as a unitary work really takes flight here: In additon to the omnipresent rhythmic device of the four note motif, Beethoven takes us on a musical journey that stretches across the entire work where the main idea doesn’t emerge until the finale. Themes from earlier movements return later on, and, combined with these other unifying elements, allow Beethoven to knit the entire symphony together as a unified whole. Unlike every symphony written previously, the Fifth builds to a conclusion, not the other way around. Others would seize and expand on this concept of “motivic development”, one of the main features of Romantic Period music, making Beethoven’s Fifth a landmark in music history like none other.

Let’s start at the top, with that famous four note motif. While it is tempting to call it a four note motif, it is, like the four note motif of the Violin Concerto, really five beats as the symphony opens with a quarter note rest.

As noted earlier, rests are vitally important in Beethoven. No composer is better at depicting emotion in music and the silences are vitally important to a performers ability to serve as the medium between Beethoven and the audience. Indeed, it is these silences that make the opening so dramatic. But what else makes this four note motif, repeated twice, so iconic? Likely a comnbination of things. First is the rhythm. Beethoven opens his Violin Concerto with another four note motif–but this one is rhythmically superior. Then there is the silence between the repeated motifs. And it is those silences that are the strongest clue to what Beethoven is doing here. We know from the title that the symphony is in the key of C Minor–thus, as good Classicists, we expect to hear a C Minor tonic chord at the start. And Beethoven obliges, sort of. The four note motif creates ambiguity, since it can resolve in E-Flat Major, just as naturally as it actually does in C Minor. And that potential subversion of expectation, by allowing the audience to question which way the music will go, creates a profound sense of drama (even if those hearing the music are unaware of these finer points of music theory). Classicism was all about taking the audience from point A to point B in an expected way. Beethoven, right at the jump, is subverting that, teasing the audience. He’s not breaking any of the rules; he’s just finding loopholes to exploit.

And that ambiguous opening salvo signals that the real revolution in this symphony is going to be harmonic. Beethoven’s journey will, for the first time in music, stretch across four movements, taking the audience from the bleakness of C Minor to the sunshine of the C Major.

Many assert that every minor piece must end in the minor. Nego! On the contrary, I find that … the major has a glorious effect. Joy follows sorrow, sunshine—rain.

Ludwig van Beethoven

In many respects, Mozart got there first again by opening works in a minor key and ending in a major key. But, unlike in Mozart, the keys of the Fifth Symphony are related and present in all four movements, yet another example of Beethoven creating unity throughout his entire composition. In the first movement, Beethoven modulates from the opening C Minor to the relative E-Flat Major, which was common enough, before moving to F Minor (a wholly unrelated key!) to open the development section. This discordant transition is shocking, even if you now expect it after so many listenings. There is no easy modulation to get there–Beethoven just does it, with horns blaring. It’s as if he’s daring you to question his compositional choice.

The dark development moves from F Minor to C Minor to G Minor before finding its way back to C Minor. I might have missed a step or two there, but you get the idea–the music is inevitably pulled back to the darkness of C Minor. When we get to the recapitulation section, Beethoven pulls a neat trick. Our ears are now fully attuned to C Minor and, because this is sonata form, we expect to go back to C MInor. And that is exactly what Beethoven hints at–it sounds like we are staying in C Minor. But with a wave of his quill (was there ever a composer so skilled at modulation as Beethoven?) we are all of a sudden in C Major heading straight on to an expected conclusion. But this is where Beethoven’s famous coda–hilariously lampooned by PDQ Bach–kicks in, sending us back to C Minor and the darkness therein.

The first movement is also notable in that Beethoven singles out his four note motif–fundamentally a rhythmic device–as the central idea of the movement, displacing melody. Indeed, the four note motif is played in virtually every bar. Beethoven’s primary reliance on rhythm creates drama and excitement in the development section, as the motif is passed around the orchestra like a baton. The motif will reappear in succeeding movements and underpins the entire symphony. Taking his idea of pure music one step further, Beethoven is unifying the entire symphony, harmonically and rhythmically.

The second movement is, more or less, a standard theme and variation structure, albeit with some extended transitions, as seen in the first movement. Harmonically, Beethoven continues the overall idea of the symphony, the triumph of C Major. The movement opens in A-Flat Major, which modulates at times, beginning in the first transition, to C Major. To underscore the importance of his modulation to C Major, Beethoven brings back the same opening rhthym (three fast notes, one held note) here. Incidentally, you can tell when the music is in C Major because these are the only sections where the timpani (tuned to C and G for the first movement) can be heard. But, just as in the first movement, C Major is fighting a losing battle. The A theme returns in A-Flat Minor (listen for the march like staccato towards the end), the darkest and bleakest of keys, before returning, permanently to A-Flat Major.

The third movement opens with a C Minor arpeggio bristling with anticipation–and Beethoven rewards our leaning into the music with the entry of the brass, followed by the violins. Note that, once again, it is a four note motif–short, short, short, long–further evidence of Beethoven’s rhythmic unification of the entire symphony. Once you start listening for the motif, it is everywhere, in every section. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the cellos lead the orchestra to jubillent C Major in the first part of the trio. But C Major cannot survive and the movement concludes in C Minor again, ever more softly and disappearing into fragments.

But Beethoven, as always, is about showing light through the darkeness. Even in the dark days where Beethoven felt trapped between reactionary monarchs in Vienna fighting for survival against the French imperial troops, Beethoven’s music is full of hope. As the third movement appears to melt away into nothingness, the lower strings play an A-Flat Major chord, which Beethoven will use both to transition to the finale without break and modulate to a new key. The timpani sounds the four note motif and the final movement opens in joyous C Major, with trombones and piccolos used for the first time together in a symphony, from which there is no retreat. Other than a second theme in G Major, the dominant and consistent key, right to the end is C Major, triumphant after all. Listen for the four note motif–it reappears again, but in a lighter and more jubillent sound, propelling the music forward to its inescapable conclusion (listen, for example, for how the motif returns in the coda). The Allies were right after all: This–the glorious finale–is the feeling of victory expressed in sound.

Here, in the finale, we finally get the main idea of the symphony–it is what everything else has been building to. The triumph of C Major is the victory of light over dark . . . but is there something else, a deeper and more meaningful message buried in the music? As I noted early on in this blog, the finale is comprised entirely of I-IV-V chords, which are the tonic (C Major), the subdominant (F Major) and the dominant (G Major). And therein lies the message. In the darkest days for European progressives, as France (and increasingly much of Europe) had succumbed to Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, Beethoven literally paints the finale in the red, blue and white of the French Republican flag. In these dark days, Beethoven is drawing inspiration from revolutionary France and its ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité–composing a hymn to liberty that is both nostalgic and aspirational. Here’s a snapshot of the score with those three chords colored in (courtesy of the BBC and Howard Goodall):

Dismiss the Fifth at your peril. Bruckner and Dvorak each composed C Minor symphonies that closely reflect Beethoven’s harmonics. Mahler (in his Fifth) and Tchaikovsky (in his Fourth) both imitate Beethoven’s darkness to light theme. And, of course, dear Brahms’ First Symphony is so utterly derivative of Beethoven’s Fifth that it was commonly referred to as “Beethoven’s Tenth.” It is the most quoted and the most performed work of “classical” music. Iconic. Revolutionary. And utterly, inescapably, brilliant.

As for the recording, there can only be one. Search any list of the greatest recordings of alltime and you will inevitably find the Vienna Philharmonic’s 1974 performance under the baton of Carlos Kleiber at or near the very top of that list. An iconic recording if there ever was one.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67:

Well, sort of. I grew up with the Kleiber recording, which I eventually wore out to the point that it wouldn’t play anymore. And while I think it still holds up, the last movement in particular seems almost painfully slow. Music historians and period instrument performers have steadily moved Beethoven away from an overly Romantic ethic back to Classicism. In part, that means taking Beethoven at the pace he indicates in the score.

I love the Kleiber recording–you can feel the weight of those opening chords. And Vienna, characterically, is very sensitive to the rhythmic developments in the music. But I find his pacing far to slow and the coloration still too much on the Romantic scale. As he has with so many works, John Eliot Gardner stripped away the Romantic kitsch to great effect–playing Beethoven qua Beethoven.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67:

Beethoven premiered his Fifth Symphony at a now legendary concert on December 22, 1808. All of the music was entirely new, all premiering that night. The concert opened with the the Sixth Symphony (although whoever did the program notes that night mislabeled it as the Fifth and the Fifth as the Sixth). Then an intermezzo of sorts comprised of a concert aria and a section of the Mass in C. This was followed by the entirety of the Fourth Piano Concerto, with Beethoven at the piano. And then, after nearly two hours of brand new Beethoven . . . intermission! The second half of the concert was no less epic, feature more selections from the Mass in C, the Chorale Fantasy, a solo improvisation by Beethoven at the piano, and, of course the Fifth Symphony. Total running time? Four hours, give or take.

Even though the performance was reportedly a bit of a mess–characteristically, Beethoven had rehearsed only once with the orchestra–this is among those nights in music history I’d most like to have been present. What must it have been like to hear the most famous eight notes played for the first time in public? Well, to tell the truth, it didn’t send everyone into rapture as you might have expected. The concert received cool reviews and the Fifth was deemed a failure until the publication of a review by the critic E.T.A. Hoffmann, over a year later:

When music is discussed as an independent art, should it not be solely instrumental music that is intended, music that scorns every aid from and mixing with any other art (poetry), music that only expresses the distinctive and unique essence of this art? It is the most romantic of all arts, and we could almost say the only truly romantic one because its only subject is the infi nite. Just as Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld, music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm—a world with nothing in common with the surrounding outer world of the senses. Here we abandon definite feelings and surrender to an inexpressible longing. . . .

Thus Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen quickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world!

Romantic taste is rare, romantic talent even rarer, and perhaps for this reason there are so few who are able to sweep the lyre with tones that unveil the wonderful realm of the romantic. Haydn grasps romantically the human in human life; he is more accommodating, more comprehensible for the common man. Mozart laid claim more to the superhuman, to the marvelous that dwells in the inner spirit.

Beethoven’s music wields the lever of fear, awe, horror, and pain, and it awakens that eternal longing that is the essence of the romantic. Thus he is a purely romantic composer, and if he has had less success with vocal music, is this because vocal music excludes the character of indefinite longing and represents the emotions, which come from the realm of the infinite, only by the definite affects of words? . . .

What instrumental work by Beethoven confi rms this all to a higher degree than the profound Symphony in C Minor, a work that is splendid beyond all measure. How irresistibly does this wonderful composition transport the listener through ever growing climaxes into the spiritual realm of the infinite.

Nothing could be simpler than the two-measure main idea of the first Allegro, which, in unison at first, does not even define the key for the listener. The character of apprehensive, restless longing contained in this movement is made even plainer by the melodious subsidiary theme. The breast that is oppressed and alarmed by intimations of things monstrous, destructive, and threatening wheezes for air with wrenching gasps, but just then a friendly, luminous figure appears and brings light into the dark night (the lovely theme in G major that earlier had been intimated by the horn in Eb major). How simple is this theme—let that be said again—that the master places as the basis of the whole, but how wonderfully does he derive all the subsidiary and transitional passages from it through rhythmic interrelationships, such that these passages serve little by little to unfold the character of the Allegro, which its main theme only hints at. All these passages are short—almost all consist only of two or three measures—and these are constantly divided among the wind and string instruments. We might think that from such elements only something fragmented or incomprehensible could arise, but instead we receive from them a sense of the whole. So too the constant repetition of passages and single chords, one after the other, which increases the feeling of an unnamable longing that reaches to the highest degree. . . .

The inner structure of the movements, their working out, instrumentation, the way they are linked together—everything works toward a single point. But it is especially the inner interrelation among the main themes which produces that unity that alone allows the listener to achieve one single mood. Often this interrelationship becomes clear to the listener if he hears the connection of two movements, or if he discovers in different movements some common bass figure. But a deeper relationship that goes beyond such observations speaks often solely from one mind to another, and it is just this that exists in the two Allegros and the minuet and which splendidly proclaims the self-possessed genius of this master. . . .

E.T.A. Hoffmann

And that did it. Demand for performances skyrocketed and classical music has never been the same since.

In World War II, in the West, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony became a symbol of resistance to Nazi Germany. In Morse code, the letter V is broadcasted as (dot-dot-dot-dash). In Roman numerals, 5 is V. And on Jully 19, 1941, Winston Churchill proclaimed: “The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting Nazi tyranny.” From then on until the end of the war, the BBC began its broadcasts with Morse code for V. A French song, which was composed based on Beethoven’s Fifth, sought to prepare the nation for liberation. And a poem began circulating across the continent:

In ne faut pas desesperer on les aura.
N’oublier pas la letter V
Ecrivez las chantonnez la VVVV
Sur les murs et sur les pave faites des V

Inspired by French liberty, Beethoven had come full circle at last.

The Friday Symposium: Music and Cocktails for the Last Days of Summer

The last days of summer don’t mean as much as they used to these days. While some, no doubt, will board their last train back to the City on Monday afternoon, or otherwise brave the traffic and the dreaded LIE, come Tuesday morning I will still find myself seated here, 100 miles from the office I’ve visted only a handful of times since March 2020.

Yet the pending finality of the silly season calls for music that its light, somewhat trivial, and rebellious all at once. Which got me to thinking about Cecilia Bartoli, unquestionably one of the great mezzos of her age, but whose fear of flying (and, perhaps, smaller voice) has too long kept her from singing in the US consistently. Her 2006 album, Opera Proibita, fits the bill in both respects.

Opera Proibita features music that had been banned in the 18th century in Rome by the Church, fearing (perhaps with just cause) that the opera houses were dens of corruption and immorality. The album features some of the best known hits of Baroque opera–just the perfect thing for a late summer’s evening.

The album also happens to be one of my wife’s favorite, so I thought I would pair it with her favorite cocktail–The Little Grey Lady. Vanishing few people have heard of this drink, but I can’t take credit for it–I found the recipe in a magazine several years ago. It is a lighter and altogether more refreshing riff on The Last Word, a classic cocktail built on four equal parts and which will no doubt feature later on in this blog. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like this drink.

Quick story. We used to go frequently to Nick and Toni’s, the famed East Hampton restaurant, when the great Kevin Grillo manned the bar. One night, I asked Kevin to make The Little Grey Lady for us, only to find that, of the four components of the cocktail, he only had one (the lemon juice) and he even lacked the bitters that give cocktail its distinctive grey/pink hue. Eventually we found some substitutes and renamed the cocktail The Maidstone Mist (as the cocktail is named for the pink/grey hue of the fog that sometimes settles over Martha’s Vineyard). In any event, here’s the recipie.

The Little Grey Lady

  • 1 oz Plymouth gin (do not substitute a London Dry gin, which throws the favors off)
  • 1 oz Cocchi Americano (you can substitute Lillet Blanc, although it is not as good)
  • 1 oz St. Germain (we now use St. Elder if you can find it)
  • 1 oz lemon juice
  • healthy dash of Peychaud’s Bitters

Shake well and serve in a coupe with a twist of lemon.

The Breath of Life: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto

I can’t recall if my father owned a copy of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Our resources were limited and he most concerned himself with collecting the recordings of great pianists performing the highlights of the late Classical and Romantic repertoire. So it is entirely possible that my first brush with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto came in 1983 when I went to hear Gidon Kremer perform it at Carnegie Hall. I was a kid, no older than my daughter is now, and so had no idea that I was walking into a hornet’s nest of controversy.

Why? Well, like most concertos, Beethoven’s features multiple cadenzas–periods where the soloist plays unaccompanied by the orchestra. While these cadenzas were originally composed, if not improvised, by the violinist, modern soloists generally use cadenzas that were written by another composer or a noted virtuoso from a previous age. Eugène Ysaÿe, the great violinist, wrote a set, as did Heifetz and Milstein. So did composer Camille Saint-Saëns. They are rarely performed. As he did with so many concertos, the violinist-composer Fritz Kreisler wrote what are probably the most-often performed set of Beethoven cadenzas. For this concert, however, Kremer had chosen to perform a set composed by contemporary Russian composer Alfred Schnittke on the heels of having recording them with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The conservative NYC audience was outraged, my father first and foremost among them.

I, on the other hand, loved it, much the consernation of the older gent sitting next to me. The music was so daring–contrasting modern harmonic language with Beethoven’s (and finding that they had plenty to say to each other). In my view these new cadenzas worked, even the infamous cadenza in the third movement that sounds like a swarm of bees. My reaction at the time was purely visceral, lacking in any real understanding of what Schnittke was doing.

On repeated listening, however, something deeper began to emerge. In his cadenzas, Schnittke quotes endlessly from centuries of great music–and, in particular, music written for the violin. The long candenza at the end of the long first movement is a prime example. Schnittke starts with a quote from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as if to say: “yes, let’s start here, with heroic Beethoven.” Then he moves on the Brahms, a natural succession. But then he jumps forward to Shostakovich (his first violin concerto) and Bartok (his great second violin concerto), before moving on to the Berg concerto. Far from the travesty these candenzas are often made out to be–Kremer retreated back to playing Kreisler’s if memory serves–Schnittke is paying homage to Beethoven. It’s as if he’s saying: “This is the source of everything.” Tonal and atonal music cooexist seemlessly here. This is one of the greatest examples of The Conversation in music.

Back to Beethoven. The score was dedicated to French violinist Franz Clement, who debuted the concerto. Characteristically, Beethoven was behind schedule, so Clement had to sight read a good chunk of the score (and likley improvised the cadenzas on the spot). This is not a good recipe for success under the best of cicrumstances, let alone at a time when Beethoven was attempting to push audiences away from the cozy, refined countours laid out by Haydn and Mozart. In the Classical tradition, the concerto was a polite conversation between soloist and orchestra, all pulling in the same direction: The soloist develops a theme; the orchestra repeats it later on. Beethoven shattered that expectation here. Just as the Kreutzer Sonata is really a duet for piano and violin, the orchestra is an equal partner to the violinist here.

A few notes on the score:

The concerto opens with a solo timpani, which plays four unaccompanied notes. Prefiguring his Fifth Symphony and reflecting parts of the Appassionata covered last week, Beethoven obsessively focuses on these four notes, which repeat in virtually every measure of the first movement. It is the central idea of the opening movmement, and as simple as you can get. The same note repeated in a basic 1-2-3-4 rhythm. Indeed, one of the only legitimate critiques of the Schnittke candenzas I can think of is that they abandon this otherwise omnipresent pulsing five note motif.

Now, it is tempting to say that it is a four-beat motif (which nearly everyone does), but it is actually five beats. The fifth beat coincides with the first beat of the next motif. Listen carefully to the opening–the timpani plays five notes, not four. This has a profound effect on the ear. To explain:

On beats 1-4 you inhale; on the 5th beat you exhale. And the tempo corresponds to a normal breath that one could call an ordinary, everyday sigh. So there is a feeling – a visceral physical experience – of a release of tension on that 5th beat, each and every time it occurs (which is most of the movement).

But that is also the beginning of a new inhaled breath. So you get an overlapping effect of a buildup of tension and a release of tension on the same beat – beat #1 of the measure. And it happens throughout the movement. There is this constant juxtaposition of inhaling and exhaling.

And so you may actually hear it and experience it differently every time, because on any given measure, sometimes you’re exhaling and sometimes you’re starting to inhale – buildup and release of tension – constantly and in ever-different sequences. Even that famous measure with the 3 beats of rests, when you think about it, is actually part of a 5-beat “motif” of silence. . . . It is, I believe, the breath of life that Beethoven captured, and this, more than anything else, is what gives this 1st movement an olympian sense of serenity.

Sander Marcus, Violinist.com

This is the key to this work and fully in line with Beethoven’s knack of presenting something that appears very simple but is in fact something quite revolutionary–in his quest to knit his musical lines together, Beethoven is writing overlapping motifs. And if this sounds baroque, it is. Indeed, the music of past masters would increasingly inform his compositions as Beethoven aged. This is not to say that Beethoven retreated to earlier forms–to the contrary, Beethoven used techinques pioneered in earlier periods to better develop his revolutionary ideas.

And these revolutionary ideas are present here too. There are also the now-expected dissonances–the D# in the first movement, for example. The movement opens in D Major, which should allow the violin to play on their open strings, creating a lush sound. But when the violins actually enter, they play the four note motif on D#, immediately introducing harmonic tension and shattering that expectation. Following the transition, Beethoven introduces a second theme. Like he did in the Appassionata, this theme essentially summarizes everything we have heard so far, rather than a entirely new theme. This is yet another step in the Beethoven’s development away from formal structure. In fact, as the melody falls away, all that is left are those insistent four notes–echoes of the Fifth Symphony.

And then the soloist enters, playing one of the most difficult passages ever written for the instrument. For once with Beethoven, it isn’t the rhythm that gets you–it’s the octaves. While pianists (like Beethoven) don’t think twice about their perfectly tuned instruments, octaves played on the violin expose lapses in technique and intonation like nothing else. Even the slightest error leaves you totally exposed, especially since the violin enters solo. I note that Beethoven surely knew this to be the case. In addition to playing the piano, the young Beethoven played viola in his Bonn orchestra. (As always, viola sections are hard to fully staff.). Although he was not a great violist, Beethoven surely knew what posed the greatest challenges for a string instrument. Writing for the great Clement, therefore, Beethoven sought to pull out all the stops.

Yet Beethoven does something truly startling here–he doesn’t give the violinist the theme. In fact, the violin rarely gets to play the theme at all (this, incidentally, was Clement’s complaint about the work). Instead, the violin serves as a second conductor, jostling with the other sections, commenting on the themes, and providing accompanimet (!) for the woodwinds. Putting the soloist through dizzing runs of scales and arpeggios, the violin part reads more like an etude (a study piece used to develop technique) than a true concerto part. The harmonies produced between the violin and the warm strings are stunning–only together, as equals, does this section really work.

In the development, Beethoven shifts gears from D Major to A Minor. And it appears that Beethoven in simply restating the opening themes in a different key. Nothing remarkable to look at here, right? Well, Beethoven, as always, has something else up his sleeve. The arpeggios for the soloist tell the tale–this is something new. After an elongated cadence, and as he did in Eroica, Beethoven introduces a new theme in the development section–in G Minor. It is a stunning turn of events–for me, the signature “wow” moment of the piece. But the music starts to fade away, melody being replaced by that four note rhythmic motif that opened the movement. It is up to the soloist to bring the music back. And in a flourish, that’s what happens–with a subtle (and easily missed) modulation the orchestra returns, seemingly by magic, to the tonic D Major and the feeling of fulfillment is hard to deny.

Reaction to the Violin Concerto was decidedly mixed. Clement received much praise for his playing–if only to compensate how shabbily he had been treated by Beethoven. The concerto, however, was quickly forgotten. Even Clement (as noted above) had little good to say of it. And so, like so much music of the time, the concerto slipped to obscurity until it was given new life by Felix Mendelssohn some decades later (with Joseph Joachim on violin!). Today, however, Beethoven’s lone effort at this form stands at or very near the summit of any list of the greatest violin concertos.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (cadenzas, Alfred Schnittke):

The Friday Symposium: Thomas Tallis and White Châteauneuf-du-Pape

On this edition of the Friday Symposium, we go even further back in music history to motets composed by Thomas Tallis. One of my Desert Island Discs is certainly the Tallis Scholars’ recording of Spem in Alium, along with other Tallis compositions.

One of the most complex and ethereal compositions of its or any other age, there is one pairing that seems appropriate and just happens to be a fantastic late summer wine. While the red wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape are more plentiful, the few white wines the region produces are among the best in France (and, thus, the world). Like its red counterpart, white CDP is typically made from a blend of grapes, a combination of Grenache Blanc, Roussanne, Clairette Blanche, Bourboulenc, Clairette Rose, Grenache Gris, Picardan Blanc, Piquepoul Blanc and Piquepoul Gris. The actual blend and the proportions thereof are left entirely to the winemaker.

The La Fagotière Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc is one of my favorites. Fermented in stainless steel, it exhibits none of the secondary oak flavors that typically get in the way of white wines. It is a blend of Grenache Blanc, Roussanne and Picquepoul Blanc, bringing peach armoas and citrus flavors to the fore. Unlike many CDPs, this is made to drink on the younger side and the 2018s can be found fairly easily for about $40 a bottle. A bit on the expensive side, but just a perfect match for the Tallis.

Echoes of Fate: Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata

I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata; I would like to listen to it every day. It is marvellous, superhuman music. I always think with pride – perhaps it is naïve of me – what marvellous things humans can do.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to Maxim Gorky

Read The Tempest.

Ludwig van Beethoven, when asked to explain his new sonata

Beethoven’s second period began with his Eroica Symphony, but opus numbers are always deceptive with Beethoven. Research has uncovered that Beethoven worked on several compositions at once, which is why his themes crop up in multiple works that were being composed contemporaneously. He worked on multiple symphonies, piano sonatas and concertos together, making it impossible to know which actually came first and where certain musical ideas began. Perhaps it was how his mind worked, a symptom of his encroaching deafness, or otherwise due to his legendary lack of organization, but teasing out Beethoven’s musical timeline is simply impossible. So while Beethoven’s second period is often referred to as his “Heroic” Period, after his Third Symphony, his maturation from Mozart-clone to something else may have begun elsewhere.

A good candidate for that change is his 23rd piano sonata, the so-called “Appassionata.” For all the importance of his symphonies, Beethoven’s piano sonatas are where I feel most connected with Beethoven. The Appassionata was composed in that same burst of creativity that resulted in the Eroica symphony and the Kreutzer violin sonata, as well as the first stab at his opera, Fidelio. Here, as in its siblings of 1802-1804, Beethoven’s compositions are becoming more complex. For example, listen to how Beethoven introduces a secondary lyrical theme and interweaving it with the original as the first movement progresses. The Appassionata is also notable in that it anticipates the Fifth Symphony, still half a decade away. Listen carefully to the first movement—you can clearly hear the “fate chords” that introduce and dominate the first movement of the Fifth Symphony reoccur here.

In the Appassionata, Beethoven continues to undermine expectations of the Classical sonata form—failing to repeat the exposition, but repeating the development and the recapitulation, and shockingly introducing a new theme at the end.  And those are just the most obvious. In sonata form, the composer is expected to present two contrasting themes in the exposition, but Beethoven’s second theme is more or less a variation of the first. This creates a sense of unity throughout the movement, something Beethoven would do on a much grander scale in his Fifth Symphony. Like a great jazz musician, Beethoven needs only the briefest motif on which to create an entire sonic world, using harsh dissonances (often deployed in thunderous chords) to break the prevailing tonality of the piece, sending it new directions. Listen for those “sour chords” in the finale–still clearly identifiable to a modern ear; shocking to its contemporarires. Beethoven deploys these sonic bombs to disrupt our expectations, something that he has already done rhythmically and dynamically (moving from pianissimo to forte without crescendo) throughout. Indeed it is Beethoven’s elevation of rhythym to become an equal partner to melody and harmony is, at least in my view, the true secret to his enduring appeal. Take it from this middling musician–the most challenging aspect of playing Beethoven is rhythm.

The Appassionata does not settle the argument of whether Beethoven was a Classicist or a Romantic, but lends support to both sides of the debate. This music shocked contemporary audiences: Classical Period art was all about proportion and Beethoven’s disjointed forms, dynamics and rhythms were undermining those very elegant proportions that Haydn and Mozart had so carefully constructed. Beethoven may have bought the house, but he was doing a full gut renovation on the insisde.

Beethoven made his name as a performer, the leading virtuoso of his day. And if his tempo markings are indicative of his skill (rumors abound as to Beethoven’s faulty metronome), he might just be the greatest pianist of all-time. Of course, Beethoven was still using a fortepiano, which was quite a different instrument from the 88-key, iron soundboard-based instrument we know today. So, to compare, here are two recordings. First, we turn again to Emil Gilels for what I think is a definitively sensitive recording. If you are interested in an alternative approach that is more virtuosic, Google Vladimir Horowitz’s recording. Much faster, more dynamic and bombastic.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 “Appassionata”:

But let’s also consider what this sonata would have sounded like on an instrument similar to what Beethoven was actually playing at the time. Here a more recent recording by Ronald Brautigam, playing the final movement on a modern recreation of a somewhat later fortepiano:

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 “Appassionata”:

While I appreciate much of what period instruments have to offer (my choice for the Eroica was on period instruments taken at Beethoven’s indicated pacing), my heart, at least here, belongs to Gilels.

The Friday Symposium: Bach and The Martini

Leave it to academia to turn something wonderful into something dreadful. When most people hear the world “symposium” today, they think of a bunch of talking heads sitting on a podium massaging their own egos. In the Ancient World, however, a symposium was decidedly more fun–after all, the word symposium is derived from the Greek “symposio”, which means “drinking together.” A symposium, in Ancient Rome, was therefore a drinking party where wine and music flowed together. So when Our Friend from Boston requested a paring of music and drinks in this blog, my mind turned to the original meaning of symposium. I will also note that this idea was in part stolen from The Friday Belt, which was one of the best features of what was probably my favorite blog ever.

The first drink, of course, has to be the Martini. It is one of the first and one of the best, an icon that is bracingly refreshing in summer as it is the literal representation of winter in a glass. No drink brings as much history and atmospherics to the table. And once you know how to make one, the riffs on the formula are nearly endless.

Let’s start with what a Martini is not. It is not made with vodka. It is not simply chilled gin in a glass. It is a cocktail and thus made from a combination of ingredients, one of which is dry vermouth. I love vermouth and take my “dry Martinis” quite wet by modern standards. Julia Child was fond of the Reverse Martini (two parts vermouth to one part gin). Audrey Saunders brought back the Fifty-Fifty Martini. But the classic is and will always be three parts gin to one part vermouth, which is what I drink. Finally, a Martini, like every cocktail that is made solely from spirits, should stirred, not shaken. There is little more depressing in life than ordering a Martini and getting ice chips floating at the top of the glass. In this regard, this classic scene from The Thin Man (first scene in the montage), was complely wrong. Incidentally, the glass used by Nick Charles in these films is now known as the Nick and Nora glass, which is as an ideal vessel for a Martini and nearly any other variation of it.

A Martini, like most cocktails, should be small, no more than four ounces total. Bars love these swimming pool masquerading as cocktail glasses, but really that is just a vehicle for a warm drink. A Martini should be silky smooth in texture, bracing in flavor, and icy cold in temperature. A perfectly made Martini is a thing of beauty; a poorly made Martini is the cocktail served in hell.

Today’s Martini drinker is faced with an endless set of gin and vermouth combinations. The classic, Beefeater and Martini & Rossi, is a classic for a reason. A more upscale version, The Botanist and Channing Daughters VerVino Variation 1, amps up the flavor considerably. For those who do not like juniper-flavored gins, Plymouth and Perucchi Bianco make for a nice pairing. As for the other more popular premium gins, I do not like Tanqueray in a Martini (a G&T is an entirely different story) and I do not like Bombay, either in its original or sapphire versions, altogether. My favorite is decidely middle of the road: Broker’s and Dolin Dry. Three to one, stirred, with a dash of orange bitters and olives thank you very much. Both will make less of a dent in your wallet than any of the others mentioned here.

Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin are similarly bracing, brilliant when perfectly executed and unlistenable when they are not. Today’s recording is Nathan Milstein’s. His performance is cold perfection of technique, the heat of which only emerges after you’ve had a few.

The classic “Dry” Martini is not, however, the original version. It is, in fact, a riff on the original recipie–The Martinez. The Martinez is made with equal parts Old Tom gin and sweet vermouth, to which a teaspon of maraschino liqueur and a few dashes of orange bitters are added before stirring into a coupe garnished with a twist of lemon. It is altogether a solid drink, even if the Dry version we know today was a clear improvement.

Just like the hipster bartenders who have resurrected the Martinez, period instrument performers have sought to improve on Milstein’s classic recording, bringing historically informed instruments, bows, and techniques to the table, all in an effort to get closer to Bach’s ideal. Like these recreated Old Tom gins, period instrument recordings of Bach’s sonatas and partitas are interesting but can’t really match Milstein’s peerless classic. But both the drink and these new recordings have their fans. Thomas Zehetmair, in his more recent recording of these works, gets closer to that ideal than most. Perhaps a Martinez for that one.

Beethoven Goes Boom: In Celebration of the Memory of a Great Man

You either die a hero of you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

The Dark Knight

Beethoven’s Symphonies are major events in music history.  And that really began in 1803 with his Third, the Eroica.  Settle in, this is going to be a long one.

To understand what Beethoven was doing in the Eroica, you need to understand what was going on in Beethoven’s life and in European history generally. As discussed last time, the teenaged Beethoven was a progressive, who welcomed the French Revolution as the first shot of what he and other idealists hoped would be a wave of popular uprisings across Europe, overthrowing the ancient and oppressive ruling aristocracies. But as Revolution gave way to Terror and dictatorship, those hopes appeared dashed. Until He emerged. Rising from the lowest levels of society (his father was a lawyer) by proving his military genius in the army, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the dictatorship and became First Consul of France, an echo back to the ancient Roman Republic. Napoleon set about reforming France as reflected in the revolutionary ideals of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Beethoven like so many idealists across Europe welcomed Napoleon’s emergence as nothing short of the Hero of the Revolution.

Beethoven in particular had cause to celebrate Napoleon, who appeared set to use French military might to bring French freedoms and rights to all of Europe. Joseph II, the progressive ruler of the Holy Roman Empire had died in 1790 and his successor, Leopold II had lasted barely two years on the throne. Francis II, destined to be the last Holy Roman Emperor, was decidedly reactionary, revsering many of Joseph II’s progressive policies and tamping down on popular sentiment across his empire. Many of Beethoven’s friends were caught up in the opposition to Francis’s rule–Beethoven was spared their fate only due to his many supporters among the aristocracy in Vienna.

During this time, Beethoven was also waging an inner struggle that was considerably more significant. By 1802, he could no longer deny the horror that fate had dealt him: He was going deaf and there was no cure. For someone who lived for music, this was a cruel torture indeed. Beethoven strongly considered suicide to save himself the pain, but resolved to soldier on, trusting that he could continue to serve his art through pure intellect, even if time would soon rob him of his ability to actually hear it.

Having taken that decision, he resolved to compose a massive symphony, unlike anything ever written to date. And he would dedicate it to his hero, Napoleon, relocate to France on the wings of its success and garner new patrons in a country that better reflected his political ideals. It was a good plan: France and Austria were at peace, his ideas for the new symphony were well-advanced, and there was a ready audience at home and abroad for new works. But as they say about the best laid plans of men . . .

In 1804, after he had completed the symphony, Beethoven learned from one of his students that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor. Flying into a rage, Beethoven (depending on which account you believe) tore up the title page of the score or otherwise scratched out his dedication to Bonaparte. And a good thing too: By the time of the symphony’s premiere in 1805, France and Austria were at war again.

Quite simply the most important symphony ever written by any composer in the history of the world. Ever. Beethoven, at the age of 32, had finally confronted his deafness, and determined to overcome it.

John Suchet, Classical FM

So what makes the Eroica so important, so revolutionary, as to deserve such praise? Let’s take a look at the music itself. Beethoven set out to create a Heroic story, a musical analogue to Homer’s epics. Keeping that in mind, let’s consider what he wrote.

The First Movement opens with two brash and loud E-Flat Major chords. This was unprecedented, completely unexpected, and totally shocking. They are the first true power chords in history. They grab your attention, while grounding your ear to the home key of E-Flat. It’s hard to find a good parallel in contemporary music, but if pressed, I’d say that Beethoven’s E-Flat Chords were imitated, if they did not directly inspire, the Beatles’ opening chord to A Hard Day’s Night.

The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night:

Like Beethoven, the Beatles were already quite famous, but this chord announced to the world that they, like Beethoven in 1803, were something entirely new. More on the Beatles’ chord here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hard_Day%27s_Night_(song)

Back to Beethoven: Almost immediately following those two thrashed chords, the cellos enter with the heroic theme. The theme itself echoes the opening chords by essentially breaking apart an E-Flat Major triad and presenting its constituent notes individually. The theme is cut short by a C#–one of the most famous dissonances in music history. This is also unexpected, since it introduces a musical conflict into the exposition–C# is not found in the key of E-Flat Major. The conflict is momentarily, if somewhat unsatisfactorily overcome by resolving to a D, but the initial conflict breaks the theme, which returns in fragments played by different sections of the orchestra (a bit like Pierre Rode’s sixth violin concerto, as discussed last time). This tonal struggle in the music is replicated in the rhythms, which move from a steady 3/4 time to a disjoined 2/4 time, made all the more complicated by placing the emphasis strangely on the second beat. This chaos is joined by new rhythms that resemble the beat of horses’ hoofs, as the key soars to B-Flat. The woodwinds enter, but present only pulsing harmonies–a frantic heartbeat. The heroic theme reappears (the theme in the exposition traditionally repeats in sonata form), leading to the development.

The horses reappar throughout the development, along with the fragmented heroic theme, giving the sense that the battle has been joined. Beethoven presents even more jarring harmonies and rhythms, heightening the sense of conflict in the music and leading to a series of very dissonant chords, representing the pain experienced by the hero. The hero seems to overcome his pain and conflict, as his theme reappears, but it collapses upon itself. The woodwinds present a new theme, which dissolves without resolution.

Then the horns sound the heroic theme and the recapitulation begins. The heroic theme opens the recapitulation (also standard sonata form to repeat the theme here), but the jarring C# of the exposition is resolved by a more satisfying C. The horn seemlessly transitions the theme to a flute, giving a sense of peace. Beethoven doubles down on his musical statement in a series of power chords: E-Flat Major; D-Flat Major; and, C Major, reinforcing the resolution of the the opening dissonance. The woodwind theme from the development (the only other theme in the movement) comes back, first in F but then resolving to E-Flat, thereby resolving all conflicts in favor of the hero’s home key. A great fanfare closes out the movement in truly glorious fashion.

And that’s just the first movement! Granted, it was as long as some of his predecessor’s symphonies, but we are starting to get the idea that something truly new is afoot.

The Second Movement opens in Beethoven’s signature key,, C Minor. The traditional slow movement here is presented as a funeral march, taking significant cues from French music. Here, Beethoven composes the soundtrack to the end of life itself. Fate, an ever constant companion in Beethoven’s music from this period, reveals itself: An oboe presents a new theme even as the music shifts to C Major and the woodwinds sound a hymn, before returning to the C-Minor funeral march. That about sums it all up, no? But there is still more to come. Beethoven presents a double fugue on his theme, but this more raw than Bach’s mathematical gems. Beethoven’s fugue is raw and filled with emotional power. A series of power chords sound; the funeral march returns in fragments and the movement ends.

The Third Movement opens with a country dance theme. Taken at a swift beat in Beethoven’s original manuscript (indeed, Beethoven’s stated beat is wickedly fast throughout leading most composers to adjust downward, much to the peril of the music in my view). The dance is wild, almost too fast to be a dance. And the rhythms shift again from 3/4 to 2/4, also strange for a dance.

The Final Movement opens with a grand fanfare which leads to, well, almost nothing. Beethoven unexpectedly dissolves to just a baseline devoid of melody. As many have noted, Beethoven took this baseline from his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, which tells the story of how the titan brought civilization and enlightenment to mankind. From this bass line, Beethoven constructs a melody—perhaps the melody that inspired the entire symphony. This theme becomes a fugue, which becomes a march, which becomes a hymn. This is Beethoven at his best—showing off like Mozart did before him. More and more instruments pile on–this is a victorious celebration. The music fades momentarily and the opening fanfare returns, leading to a glorious resolution and suitably grand conclusion.

So what does it all mean? There is little agreement here. Some say that this is where the Romantic Period began. Perhaps, but I cannot shake the fact that Beethoven is adhering to classical forms, even as he upends the details. But the Romantics have a point and it is this.

Beethoven said that his Third Symphony presents the struggle of a great man to overcome hardships. He thought, at the time, that he was writing about Napoleon, but he was really writing about himself. Here, in 1803, Beethoven changes music history forever by telling his own story, with all of his raw emotions fully on display. Eroica is nothing less than Beethoven’s victory over his creeping deafness. Beethoven’s full title: Sinfonia Eroica … composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo.

Hailed by his supporters and derided by nearly everyone else who heard it at the time, audiences took years to come to terms with Beethoven’s Eroica. But come to terms they did, for Beethoven had strode boldly through the doors that Mozart had opened at the end of his life, showing the world new possibilities for music. Beethoven stripped away the artifice. Music need not be clothed in religious vestments or the shallow emotions of fictional or historical characters. Music, like art and literature, was now free to reveal the innermost emotions of its creator, forging a bond between composer and audience that would endure throughout time.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat, Op. 55 “Eroica”: