Fac-simile autograph musical manuscript written by Beethoven. Opening measures of Pianoforte Sonata in A flat, Op. 26.

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BEETHOVEN AS COMPOSER.

HE greatest of all instrumental composers began his career as a pianoforte virtuoso, and his earlier compositions are chiefly for that instrument. During the first years of Beethoven in Vienna, he was more conspicuous as a virtuoso than as a composer, and it is said that Haydn prophesied greater things of him as a performer than a creator of music. The older master could not foresee that Beethoven's influence was destined to live in his epoch-making concertos, trios and sonatas, rather than in his wonderful piano playing. His superiority at Bonn as at Vienna was not so much in display of technical proficiency as in the power and originality of improvisation. When he was only eleven years of age Carl Ludwig Junker heard the boy play, and wrote in most enthusiastic terms of the inexhaustible wealth of his ideas; he also compared him with older players of distinction and preferred Beethoven on account of his more expressive, passionate performance, that spoke directly to the heart. And so Czerny described his improvisation as "most brilliant and striking; in whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer, that frequently not an eye remained dry, and listeners would break out into loud sobs; for in addition to the beauty and the originality of his ideas, and his spirited style of rendering them, there was something in his expression wonderfully impressive." Ries and many others bear similar testimony. There were other pianists of great parts who lived in Vienna or were heard there: Steibelt, Wölffl, and especially Hummel. But whenever Beethoven met them in friendly or fierce rivalry, he conquered by richness of ideas, by variety of treatment and by intense musical individuality, although he extemporized in regular "form." Hummel excelled him undoubtedly in purity and elegance, and Wölffl had extraordinary mechanism. They excited lively admiration, but Beethoven moved the hearts of his hearers. This power was greater than even his feats of transposing, his skill in reading scores, or such tricks as turning the 'cello part of a quintet upside down and then extemporizing from the curious theme formed thereby. We are told that he was very particular as to the mode of holding the hands and placing the fingers, in which he followed Emanuel Bach; his attitude at the pianoforte was quiet and dignified, but as his deafness increased he bent more and more toward the keys. He was, when he played, first of all a composer, and in his maturity, the "composer's touch," distinguished his playing. Czerny said that he produced wonderful effects by the use of the legato cantabile. He was, as a rule, persuaded easily to improvise—at least in his younger days—but he did not like to play his own compositions, and only yielded to an expressed wish when they were unpublished. It is also said that he interpreted his own compositions with freedom, although he observed rigorously the beat. And he made often a profound impression in a crescendo by retarding the movement and not accelerating it.

The compositions of Beethoven have been divided by many writers into three periods, and this division has been followed with absurd precision and has been as unjustly ridiculed. There were three periods, however, but they are not to be sharply defined; they correspond in general to the life-periods of youth, maturity, and old age. In his earlier works, he followed in some degree the path laid out by Haydn and Mozart; in his middle period, he appeared in the full strength and maturity of his wonderful originality; finally, in his last period, he revealed himself as a prophet and dreamer of unearthly things. But it is not strange that the style of a man of genius is modified by his age and his experience; that he thinks otherwise at forty than he thought at twenty; that his ideas are not rigid, immovable from youth to old age. In his earlier period, and in the first of his symphonies, he shows the influence of his predecessors, and yet in his sixteenth work, three trios, known as Op. 1, striking originality and independence are asserted on every page.

It was his independence of character as much as his great musical gift that impelled him on the path of progress. He was five years old when at Concord

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