Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

In the technique of his art, Beethoven was largely self-taught. It is true that he had the privilege of some lessons with Haydn and with the famous theoretician Albrechtsberger; but he was too restive under strict surveillance, and too intolerant of hard-and-fast rules, to take kindly to their instruction, and Albrechtsberger flatly said of him: “He will never do anything according to rule; he has learnt nothing.” The truth is, Beethoven was too busy with his own problems, the problems of structure and expression, to pay the requisite attention to the intricacies of counterpoint, which he never really mastered. What he tried to do, however, he did thoroughly. All the works of his first period, of which the most important are the pianoforte sonatas up to the “Waldstein,” the first three pianoforte concertos, the String Quartets, Opus 18, and the First and Second Symphonies, show him in the 'prentice stage, learning to treat competently the sonata form and the secular style inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The First Symphony, in spite of its dignified proportions, is essentially an exercise in acquisition. The Second, which is the most important single work of the entire period, is, as Grove says, an advance rather “in dimensions and style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced.” It is in the four movements prescribed by tradition, except that a Scherzo is substituted for the minuet. Its phraseology and harmony recall the older manner. The themes of the opening Allegro are built up out of short, precise phrases, exactly balancing one another, as will be vividly realized by anyone who will compare the first theme with the corresponding subject in the Third Symphony, so much freer and more ingenious in contour. The transitions are somewhat perfunctory. The second subject appears regularly in the dominant key. The development, in comparison with that of Beethoven’s later work, is mechanical, obvious, trite. In every way he is still, in the Second Symphony, sitting at the feet of his predecessors, learning patiently, minutely, what they have to teach him. As Grove well says: “This symphony is the culminating point of the old, pre-Revolution world, the world of Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man before had penetrated.”[39]

The indebtedness of the early Beethoven to his immediate forerunners, and the untiring pains he took to learn his lesson thoroughly, call for especial emphasis because so much has been said and written of his originality, his disregard for conventions, his non-conforming, revolutionary tendencies. He was indeed an anarch of outworn conventions, but he was anything but an anarch of art. No man ever recognized more cordially his inherited resources; no man was ever less misled by a petty ideal of mere oddness, by a confusion of idiosyncrasy with originality. Beethoven was a great individual because he assimilated the strength of all humanity. His originality, like all originality that has value, consisted in a fresh, sincere expression of universal truths through the best technical means which were available in his day. If any reader has a lingering doubt of Beethoven’s faithfulness as a student, he needs but examine the Sketchbooks edited by Nottebohm from the original manuscript note-books in which Beethoven laboriously worked out his conceptions. Quite tireless was he in the manipulation of a theme, over and over again, until it suited his rigorous taste; truly wonderful is the ever-sensitive discrimination with which he excised redundancies, softened crudities, enhanced beauties, and refined texture, until at last the melody was as perfect, as inevitable, as organic, as a sentence by Flaubert, Sir Thomas Browne, or Cardinal Newman.

It was indeed precisely by these qualities of the conscientious artist that Beethoven was chiefly enabled to push his work to a higher stage of interest than his forerunners had attained. He went obediently as far as they could lead him before attempting to push further alone. We find, even in this Second Symphony, conceptions that Haydn and Mozart could not have imagined; but these are worked out with a skill and ingenuity like theirs in kind, if greater in degree. The most striking and pervasive difference lies in the immensely increased closeness of texture, intensity of meaning, logic, vigor, poignancy. All the strings are tightened, and flabbiness, diffuseness, meaningless ornament and filling are swept away. As Beethoven’s self-assurance, habit of examining all conventions for himself, and relentless discrimination of the essence from the accident, already noted, made him in society a brief but pregnant talker, an eccentric but true man, so they made him a forcible, concise, and logical musician. How ruthlessly he discards the merely pretty, the sensuously tickling, the amiably vapid and pointless! He wastes no energy in preamble, interlude, or peroration. He puts in his outline in a few bold, right strokes, leaving much to the intelligence of his hearers. Concentrating his whole mind on a single thought, he follows it out relentlessly to the end, will not be distracted or seduced into side-issues. He tolerates no superfluous tones in his fabric, but makes it compact, close, rigorously thematic. The expanses of the music stretch out broad and sequential, the climaxes unfold deliberately, gather force and body like a rising sea. Look through the long, complex development section of the Allegro of the Second Symphony, and note its fine economy of means, its surprising grandeur of effect; see how two or three motifs are made to flower out into the most luxuriant forms, and how a page can be educed from a measure. This is what is meant by thematic development, which no man thoroughly understood before Beethoven.

This insistent coherence and sequaciousness is kept from becoming tiresome or monotonous by the variety of the themes themselves and of the modes adopted for developing them. Indeed, so consummately is the fundamental progressiveness hidden under a variegated and ever-changing surface that the casual observer is apt to be impressed chiefly by the sudden novelties of effect, the unexpected alternations of loud and soft, the collocation of contrasted rhythms, the prominence given to distant tonalities by modulation, in Beethoven’s work, and to realize its solidity and balance only after a more careful study. Rhythmical variety alone in Beethoven is so perpetual and so ingenious that a large treatise would hardly suffice to describe it. Short, nervous phrases of half-a-measure length alternate with wide expanses where for four or more measures there is not so much as a comma.[40] Motifs longer or shorter than the measure are so adjusted as to make up considerable passages in which the accent constantly changes.[41] Diminutions and augmentations of motifs are deftly used.[42] In ways too numerous to mention Beethoven introduces life into his work by constant variation of rhythmic grouping.

As for harmonic variety, his daring was such as to scandalize all the conservatives of his generation. The First Symphony opens with a passage of which Grove writes: “That a composition professing to be in the key of C should begin with a discord in the key of F, and by the third bar be in that of G, was surely startling enough to ears accustomed to the regular processes of that time.” The passage did in fact meet with strong opposition from such critics as Preindl, Abbé Stadler, and Dionys Weber. In the Second Symphony there are many foretastes of the radical harmonic methods Beethoven later developed. Returning to his Restatement section, for instance, in the first movement, the key of which is D, he reaches the very remote key of C-sharp major, which he emphasizes by a long reiteration of its tonic chord, forte, lasting six full measures. Then, with a diminuendo, a long C-sharp, in unison, is held until, by the addition of an A, we are made to feel that this C-sharp has become a leading-note in the original key of D, and so we are home again.[43] The coda of the same movement contains one of those rapid, kaleidoscopic modulations through many keys which Beethoven knows how to use so excitingly. In eleven measures we are bundled through G, B-flat, A-minor, B-flat again, C-minor, E-flat minor, F-sharp minor, and E, and after it all find ourselves quite breathless, but safely home again in D. Many similar passages of harmonic virtuosity are to be found in the Second Symphony; and they show Beethoven feeling his way toward the wonderful flexibility of his later harmonic style.

In his early thirties, then, at the close of his apprenticeship or period of acquisition of resources and establishment of technique, Beethoven had in the first place thoroughly assimilated the sonata-form developed by his forerunners as the most convenient and natural medium for the expression of the free, direct, and widely eclectic secular spirit in music. He had, in the second place, raised this form to higher potencies of beauty and expressiveness, by rigorous exclusion of what was superfluous and inorganic in it, by purification of its texture and strengthening of its essential structural features, and by introduction into it, through the power of his genius for composition, of more subtle and more thoroughgoing contrasts of rhythm, harmony, and general expressive character. Still he was not content. His soaring idealism demanded a still greater flexibility of form, as well as a more intense and intimate utterance of feeling. “I am not satisfied,” he wrote in 1802, “with my works up to the present time. From to-day I mean to take a new road.” What that road was, what superstructure he proceeded to build on so solid a foundation, we must now try to determine.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] “Beethoven et Wagner. Essais d’Histoire et de Critique Musicales.” Teodor de Wyzewa. Paris, 1898.

[38] For a full discussion of these “periods,” see Lenz’s “Beethoven et ses trois styles.”