APPROACHING BEETHOVEN

An essential truth in discussing Ludwig van Beethoven’s music is that biography explains a great deal, both in terms of the pieces he wrote and when he wrote them. Following the brilliant work of Maynard Solomon, scholars have convincingly demonstrated that psychological crises and their positive or negative outcomes stimulated Beethoven’s musical evolution at several key moments. These crises help articulate the standard divisions of his activity in three period: Early (1790-1802); Middle (1802-1810); and Late (1818-1827). While generally useful, the scheme’s most egregious flaw is its inability to come to terms with the years 1810-1818. Recent studies have shown that Beethoven was hardly idle during these years. He sketched, revised, imagined, re-imagined, discarded, and began anew on many compositions. We can, if we look and listen deeply, discover much continuity between the Middle period and the Late style. Evidence lies in the works of transition, precisely those few masterpieces and false starts produced around 1815.

TWO CELLO SONATAS, Op. 102

Work on the Opus 102 cello sonatas occupied Beethoven during the summer of 1815, though portions of the first sonata appear alongside sketches for the Ninth Symphony made earlier in the year. By this time, Beethoven was no stranger to the accompanied sonata genre, having already written three cello sonatas and ten for violin and piano. Thus one finds a curious mixture here between comfort with the medium and a restless desire to explore new principles of counterpoint, dialogue between instruments, and especially form. Beethoven himself referred to Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 102 No. 1, as a “Free Sonata for Piano and Violoncello,” but that designation was not retained for publication. Each of the two movements begins with an expansive slow introduction followed by a fast sonata-allegro form. This arrangement recalls the slow-fast-slow-fast structure of the Baroque Italian sonata, as in Corelli, Vivaldi, and others.

The C-major Sonata opens with a serene melody played by solo cello.  In the following moments Beethoven develops a meditative mood through slow tempo and his fixation on a single idea. That melody, shaped like an inverted arch, is passed back and forth in close imitation between cello and piano.  (Later we will see how such imitation between the parts, sometimes verging on overlap, functions as a key principle for the entire sonata.) Further adding to the unhurried allure of this opening section is the tonal stasis.  Despite occasional chromatic inflections, Beethoven seems reticent to leave C major. Eventually he signals the end of the reverie with a scene-changing glissando across the keyboard, and we dive headfirst into the minor-mode Allegro vivace. The new theme comes on like gangbusters, presented in unison by both instruments. Beethoven draws on rhythm, rhetoric, and key change to heighten the dramatic shift out of the previous tranquility.  Most of the Allegro exhibits touches of the 18th-century’s Sturm und Drang style, indicated by the minor key, dotted or agitated rhythms, skipwise melodic motion, and chromaticism.  A dense development section builds upon the rhythmic character of the Allegro’s first theme.  The movement’s final wrinkle comes in the coda, where a brief deflection toward the subdominant key and slower chord rhythm promise a relatively lengthy digression to come.  Yet the end comes upon us surprisingly quickly; the entire coda is nothing more than one large cadential progression.  Less can be more, of course, and Beethoven retains the upper hand by hinting at and then denying an elaborate coda. Much ado about nothing, as it were.

The Adagio uses relaxed tempo, close imitation, and broad harmonic rhythm to create serene expansiveness. The first real theme emerges after seven measures.  But for all its lyricism, Beethoven trumps this theme’s expressive impact by an even more striking gesture, resurrecting the first movement’s inverted-arch theme. On our way to the concluding Allegro Vivace, we experience Beethoven’s late-period interest in rhythmic crescendo (gradually increasing rhythmic activity), which culminates in simultaneous trills spread across the parts.  This energy spills over into a tripping snippet of theme, hesitant and searching.  At first it seems like nothing more than a marginal comment. But if we know how Beethoven’s mind works, we will not be surprised when this “throw-away” gesture becomes the seminal idea for the entire final section.

The Allegro Vivace projects the same clear sonata-allegro form as the fast portion of the first movement. But following the G-major cadence that closes the exposition, Beethoven cleverly negates the preceding energy with a gesture of stark open-fifth intervals in the cello, thrice repeated. An open-fifth interval (for instance, C-G or G-D) offers a bare harmonic skeleton in search of distinguishing musical content; in other words, they lack a major or minor third to give the chord any color. Such fifths are famously used to evoke a primordial void at the outset of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Rather than following any grandiose cosmography here, Beethoven glibly sends in the piano with a skipping dactylic motive.  He heightens the comic deflection by giving an additional three-note echoing tag to the cello that, we think, must surely have been played incorrectly.  The irony is that such comedy requires perfect timing and coordination between the players, so that what “sounds wrong” is actually spot-on.

The companion D-major Cello Sonata, Op. 102 No. 2, is often cited as being a harbinger of the full-blown Late style. But apart from the lengthy fugue-cum-finale, I find more retrospection here than experimentation.  In contrast to the interesting formal advances of the Op. 101 Piano Sonata and even Op. 102 No. 1, the themes and clear three-movement structure of this D-major Sonata better reflect Beethoven’s Middle-period practice.  The opening theme is muscular and taut yet not without its subtle counterpoint between cello and piano. Despite frequent tampering with irregular phrase lengths, the larger markers of sonata form (for instance, arrival on the dominant of the dominant) remain audible throughout. The development is tonally adventurous, and Beethoven moves seamlessly into the recapitulation – nice touches, both, but not unprecedented. I do not mean to diminish the Sonata’s grandeur. But the two works in this opus demonstrate that Beethoven’s evolving Late style had not cut all ties with more classical tendencies.

The haunting slow movement reinforces that thesis, for its pathos-laden D minor looks back as far as the “Romeo and Juliet vault scene” slow movement of the String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 (1798). Beethoven dispenses with every artifice in the opening phrase, allowing faint fluctuations between light and shadow to emerge.  Soon the lines grow increasingly florid, mimicking the figuration of Baroque vocal writing. During the middle section the mood brightens con-siderably; new optimism inspires a delightful game of “tag” as the instruments continually find and lose one another.  The reprised D-minor material carries us to an incomplete final cadence, which in turn sets the stage for the finale’s fugue subject. Beethoven has been harshly criticized for his attempts at fugue. In this finale and the earlier Op. 101, Beethoven smartly handles his detractors. Fugue was to become a leading element in his late style, and in this regard the D-major Cello Sonata deserves greater attention.

INTERMISSION

CELLO SONATA IN A MAJOR, Op. 69

Of Beethoven’s five Sonatas for Cello and Piano, only the A-Major Sonata was written without a companion. In addition to the Sonatas Op. 102 (from 1815) heard earlier, there are two early Sonatas Op. 5 that Beethoven composed while on a concert tour to Berlin and Prague in 1796. That leaves the Cello Sonata in A Major, Op. 69, which took shape between 1807 and early 1808. Students of Beethoven will note that it is contemporaneous with several monumental works, including the three Razumovsky String Quartets, the D-Major Violin Concerto, and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Beethoven was writing at the pinnacle of his “heroic” Middle period, full of taut motivic development, lyrical effusions, and dramatic power that redefined the narrative arc of instrumental music.

The A-Major Sonata benefits from the effort expended by Beethoven on these famous large-scale works. It opens with a singing theme in solo cello – in itself a striking detail within the genre of duo sonatas.  Beethoven was making a point, pushing for a fairer power sharing relationship between the sustained string sound and the percussive, non-sustaining timbre of the piano. As Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood has shown, the composer’s autograph for this movement shows innumerable revisions that all help delineate the contrasting timbres. Within a moment, the solo cello theme is answered by the piano and just as quickly eschewed by a minor-mode transitional theme marked by the Fifth Symphony’s iconic “fate” rhythm.  The evolving process spills over into the second theme, which inverts the initial rising-fifth interval to a falling gesture. Against that falling arpeggio, first played in the piano, Beethoven counterpoints a nearly three-octave rising scale. Thus even before the development section itself, we have been treated to motivic linkage and transform-ation, change of mode, and textural contrasts – all basic developmental tactics.

The ensuing Scherzo takes its modus operandi from syncopation: the placement of accented notes on metrically weak beats.  After the syncopated main theme, Beethoven embeds a contrasting episode in A major. Here chordal sixths, the major mode, and pedal tones in the bass help suggest a bit of pastoral musings. For the next four minutes Beethoven plays back and forth between these moods – between action and reflection, between the stop-and-start allure of syncopation and the lilting charm of the swaying pastoral topic.

What appears to be a full-blown slow movement turns out to be simply an extended slow introduction to the Allegro finale. At first blush, of course, we cannot know this. And Beethoven plays on our lack of clairvoyance by setting out the Adagio in captivatingly broad phrases, with a true cantabile duet between cello and piano. In its second occurrence, the song hesitates for a moment, however, and a sustained dominant-seventh chord opens a door to the finale.

The finale projects boisterous good cheer. Set as a traditional sonata form (with exposition, development, and recapitulation), Beethoven appends a lengthy and important coda near the end. But first he takes great care to strike a balance between the singing cello and percussive, rhythmic piano textures.  There are numerous passages of sparkling sixteenth notes, primarily in the keyboard.  Through subtle thinning of the harmony, Beethoven never obscures the cello’s contribution.  The development rides the five-note main theme into various keys before emerging into a radiant, unexpected C major. Possibly more striking is what happens during the coda. With the rhythmic energy pushing toward an inexorable conclusion, Beethoven pulls back on the throttle. He hovers on a cadential “six-four” harmony, the traditional launching pad for a solo cadenza in the classical concerto. But this is no cadenza; the cello is not granted a lengthy soliloquy. Instead we step into a musical parenthesis, a momentary aside that serves only to amplify and comment upon what has been heard. Beethoven revisits the main theme one last time before reinitiating the final move toward closure. It’s a strategy he used to great effect in many Middle-period works. Even in an intimate chamber composition like this Cello Sonata, it yields little to its more grandiose symphonic cousins.

© Jason Stell, 2025