Op. 2, No. 1: 2nd Mvt.: Borrowing from Haydn, and Himself

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Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

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Curtis Institute of Music

Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

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Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit. This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself. This season's Curtis courses are sponsored by Linda Richardson in loving memory of her husband, Dr. Paul Richardson. The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis's lifelong learning initiatives.

From the lesson

Op. 2, No. 1, and Op. 10, No. 2

This lecture delves into two of the early sonatas: the F minor, Op. 2, No. 1 (the first of the 32), and the F Major, Op. 10, No. 2. Unlike “The First Thirteen” lecture, which was nominally about the Sonata Op. 7 but sought to address the early period in general, this lecture focuses on the specific characteristics that make each of these works unique; one is predominantly a dramatic piece, whereas the other is highly comic. The lecture is also about Beethoven’s complex relationship with the musical past—how he used it as an inspiration even as he tried to leave it behind.

Re-introduction2:02

Beethoven at 24: Style and Priorities4:47

Op. 2, No. 1: Wrestling with the Past6:13

Op. 2, No. 1: 1st Mvt.: Mining his Materials5:19

Op. 2, No. 1: 1st Mvt.: Sonata Form in the Minor Mode4:41

Op. 2, No. 1: 2nd Mvt.: Borrowing from Haydn, and Himself8:53

Op. 2, No. 1: 3rd Mvt.: Adding Ambiguity to an Old Form5:56

Op. 2, No. 1: 4th mvt.: Releasing the Shackles8:05

Meet the Instructors

Jonathan Biss
Neubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty

[music]

So, onto the second movement. If this work is a constant back and forth

between past and future, this is probably the movement that most leans towards the past.

To that end, let me step away from Beethoven for a moment, and play for you the opening

of the slow movement of Haydn’s wonderful C major Sonata:

[music]

And now, with that in your ears, the opening of the Beethoven:

[music]

Beyond just the shared tonality, F major, they are remarkably similar in character.

One thing that strikes me about both movements is that even though the style is very florid

and vocal, they both have a devout, even spiritual aspect – that’s a very hard balance to strike.

This sort of spirituality becomes ever more

apparent in Beethoven’s slow movements as time goes on, and on the evidence of those

two examples, it seems clear that this is an aspect of Beethoven’s music which owes

much to Haydn. I can’t think of any area of such broad

similarity between Mozart and Beethoven. Beethoven will sometimes use a specific work

of Mozart as a model: for example, Mozart’s A major Quartet was the source for the Beethoven

Quintet Opus 18, Number 5, and Beethoven’s piano/wind quintet is clearly inspired by

Mozart’s own piano/wind quintet. But these are cases of Beethoven borrowing

a specific idea, a specific structure from Mozart – he never really used him as a model

in terms of character or sonority.

Even the choice of this movement’s tempo – adagio – betrays the connection to Haydn,

as Haydn was far more likely to write adagio slow movements than was Mozart, who favored

more flowing andantes and andantinos. Still, I’m not sure “adagio” means quite the

same thing to Haydn as it does to Beethoven. The Italian “ad agio” means “at ease,”

which does not necessarily mean slow – it could, conceivably, be more an indication

of character than an indication of speed. And accordingly, I sometimes think Haydn’s

adagios are meant to be calm, to be sure, but also reasonably flowing. For Beethoven,

though, it seems clear that “adagio” is properly slow, very distinct from his “andantes”

– andante being the Italian for “walking.” Late in life, Beethoven started to occasionally

mark his music with his native German, sometimes in addition to the standard Italian, sometimes

in its stead. The slow movement of the Sonata Opus 101 is marked “Langsam,” the German

for slow; underneath, he writes “Adagio non troppo.” So “Langsam,” slow, equates

to “not TOO adagio,” implying that a true adagio is a deeply slow tempo. Still, the

adagio marking is yet more evidence that Haydn was a reference point here.

However, I don’t think the relationship to Haydn is conscious in this case: it’s

simply a matter of a certain constitutional similarity between the two composers. And

what I can say for certain is that Beethoven’s slow movement is not specifically inspired

by the Haydn slow movement I played the beginning of, however much it may resemble it. I say

this with confidence because the theme of Beethoven’s sonata is actually lifted from

his own C major Piano Quartet – a work without opus that he wrote a full decade earlier,

when he was 14, long before Haydn wrote the C major Piano Sonata. It’s only the first

four measures that are the same in the quartet and the sonata, but they are literally identical,

except for a bit of window dressing provided by the three string players in the quartet.

It’s interesting that Beethoven recognized that the piano quartet was worth revisiting

because, forgive me, aside from that beautiful theme, the quartet’s slow movement has little

to recommend it. Again, Beethoven is one of the greatest artists of all time, but he was

no prodigy, and while at 14 he may have had the germ of a great idea, it is no more than

a germ: he doesn’t know how to end the theme, which trails off awkwardly, and the movement

altogether is numbingly repetitive. But 10 years later, Beethoven has developed all the

skill he needs to incorporate this melodic kernel into a structure that is natural and seamless.

It IS a slightly unusual structure, though. Musicologists sometimes say that this movement

is in ternary – three-part – form, but I don’t think that’s quite right. To me,

it sounds more like a four-part form – ABAB, which is often used for slow movements – but

with the intrusion of an unrelated episode between the first A and the first B,

which then never returns.

[music]

This excursion into D minor is significant, because the fact that the slow movement is

in F major means that all four movements of this sonata have the same tonality –

F, major or minor. Therefore, this brief foray into D minor provides a respite from the F

“color” which we experience throughout the piece, more-or-less nonstop. This monochromatic

thing is somewhat unusual for Beethoven: Beethoven wrote 13 sonatas with four movements, and

this is only one of 4 in which no movement moves away from the home tonality. This is

limiting, in a sense, since Beethoven was a great master of creating character through

the sonority of a given key – he did this by locating slow movements in remote key areas,

and also by inserting passages in surprising keys in the middle of a movement. In case

you want to review, I discussed this in the lecture on Opus 7. I think it was Lecture

number 2. This, incidentally, is another quality that comes from Haydn, who was much more daring

in his choice of keys than Mozart was. Mozart almost invariably sticks to the dominant,

subdominant or the relative major for his slow movements.

At any rate, because the key is not at all exotic, and therefore not a significant

source of character in this slow movement, Beethoven has to draw character from other

sources. And this is where the slowness of the music becomes significant: there is no

material in the first movement that provided any serenity – everything was driving and

restless. The second movement, in total contrast, is all about serenity, and has an almost total

absence of drama, which is unusual for Beethoven. Even early in life, Beethoven was deeply attuned

to the way the movements of a large-scale work were in dialogue with one another, and

the way in which they balanced each other out.

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