♫ Welcome, to yet another installment of Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas! It’s hard for me to believe, having started this course four years ago with just a handful of lectures offering a survey of the sonatas, that by now we have covered over half of them in great – not to say excruciating -- detail. For me, the work remains as rewarding as ever -- each time I start to prepare a lecture, I aim to focus on another aspect of Beethoven’s musical personality. This is not a challenge; the sonatas are so diverse, each one naturally lends itself to a different approach. So, the subject of today’s lecture is the sonata op. 2 no. 2, and this sonata leads me, inevitably, to Haydn, and his influence on Beethoven. Today, I’m going to break with the recent pattern that this course has followed: I will go into less moment-to-moment detail, and focus more on the deep connection Beethoven had with Haydn, which this sonata reveals. Haydn’s name has come up only rarely in this course; in a sense, that’s fitting, as this is after all a course on Beethoven. But it’s also a bit of a shame, because Haydn is both one of the greatest and one of the most important figures in the history of music. Those two things -- greatness and importance – are not one and the same. Mendelssohn is an example of a composer whose music is great, but not necessarily important, meaning that its influence was minimal: if he hadn’t existed, his music would be sorely missed, but the rest of musical history would probably be largely unchanged. On the other side of things, Schoenberg was unquestionably an important composer -- a pivotal figure in the 20th century – but the question of whether his music was “great” continues to be debated. Only a select few composers wrote music that is of the highest possible quality and that changed the course of history. Beethoven, of course, is one; Haydn is another. I cannot think of another composer who so clearly ushered in a new era as Haydn – the classical era, in his case. He was born in 1732 and his life overlapped with Bach’s by 18 whole years, but everything about his music belongs to a different world. Bach wrote cantatas, and dance suites, and preludes and fugues; Haydn wrote symphonies, and string quartets, and piano trios and piano sonatas – all forms that he virtually invented. Nearly 300 years after Haydn’s birth, composers are still writing in those forms; a sizable chunk of the music that we listen to, from 1770 and 1870 and 1970, is in those forms. And its not just the forms that are different: Haydn’s priorities, his rhetoric, and his sense of musical narrative are a world away from Bach’s, and paved the road for Mozart, and Beethoven, and so many others to follow. So that pretty much covers “important”. But again, that’s only half of it: Haydn was great. It is impressive enough that Haydn gave birth to the string quartet and the symphony; it is a whole different order of impressive that he wrote some of the greatest works to be written in those genres. Haydn was endlessly imaginative: he simply had more ideas than any other composer, before or since. Each one of his more than 70 string quartets, or more than 100 symphonies has its own twists and turns; its own means of surprising, its own storyline. Haydn’s music is full of humor, and he takes obvious delight in taking a piece to places his audience could not have anticipated. He loved games, and jokes, and hijinks: one movement from one of his string quartets has no key signature; one of his symphonies ends with all of the players cutting out, one by one, until there is total silence. These are two of literally hundreds of examples. But if Haydn’s music is earthy and playful, it is also profound. In piece after piece, when he isn’t making jokes or pulling faces, he is drawing the listener into a rapt, devout space. Put another way: he is as deep as he is imaginative, which, given his imagination, is really saying something. Look, this is a course on Beethoven, not Haydn, so I’ll stop here, but I do strongly encourage you to listen to those quartets and symphonies – they are a gift to us all.
