Striking Out on New Paths

Striking Out on New Paths

Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

Richard Wigmore

When the 21-year-old Beethoven arrived in Vienna from his native Bonn in November 1792, the omens could hardly have been more favorable. Haydn, whom he had met in Bonn, had taken him on as a pupil, with all the cachet that implied; and with the recommendation of Count Waldstein, and Haydn’s own contacts, he quickly gained access to Vienna’s most exclusive salons, dazzling the (mainly) aristocratic cognoscenti with his brilliant keyboard improvisations.

In these Viennese early years, as the fiery sansculotte consolidated his pre-eminence in the city Mozart had dubbed “the land of the piano,” commentators eulogized the “tremendous power, character, unprecedented bravura and agility” of Beethoven’s playing, his “great finger velocity combined with extreme delicacy of touch and intensity of feeling.” According to his pupil Carl Czerny, “his bearing while playing was masterfully quiet, noble and beautiful, without the slightest grimace… In teaching he laid great stress on the correct positioning of the fingers (after the school of Emanuel Bach).” Yet Czerny rather contradicted himself when he continued: “Beethoven’s playing, like his compositions, was far ahead of its time; the pianofortes of the period (until 1810), still extremely weak and imperfect, could not endure his gigantic style of performance.” Smashed hammers and strings were a regular hazard when Beethoven was at the keyboard.

In 1795 Beethoven made an acclaimed public debut in Vienna with his First Piano Concerto, published his three Piano Trios Op. 1, and completed a triptych of keyboard sonatas published as Op. 2, with a diplomatic dedication to his former teacher Haydn. These sonatas are the work of a young man determined to cause a stir among the Viennese elite. Passages here and there may have reminded people of Haydn, Mozart and, especially, the more flamboyant, up-to-date keyboard style of Muzio Clementi. Yet like the composer’s own playing, much of this music seems more extreme than any previous sonatas: more forceful, more soul-searching (above all in the Largo of Op. 2 No. 2), sometimes, as in the opening Allegro of the F-minor Sonata, No. 1, more violently compressed. In these works, each in four movements, Beethoven seeks to give the piano sonata a status to rival the symphony and string quartet. They initiated a cycle of 32 sonatas that would become the bedrock of the keyboard repertoire, the pianistic “New Testament” to the “Old Testament” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Yet it is worth remembering that during Beethoven’s lifetime his sonatas remained essentially the preserve of the salon rather than the concert hall: music to be played alone, or to a select band of connoisseurs (In this respect Vienna lagged behind London and other northern European capitals.)

In the sonatas that followed Op. 2, beginning with the E flat–major work Op. 7 of 1797, Beethoven pushed the bounds of the genre still further. These were the years when he was riding high as a composer-virtuoso in Vienna, surrounded by enlightened patrons and publishers eager to issue his latest works. With the “Pathétique” of 1799, in his most trenchant and “heroic” key of C minor, he created the earliest of his sonatas (the “Moonlight” and “Appassionata” were others) to become a cultural icon in the 19th century. Pushing Sturm und Drang turbulence to new levels, this music reveals a composer hell-bent on confronting his listeners and imposing his will on them.

As the new century dawned, Beethoven’s glittering career as a composer-virtuoso was already shadowed by a marked deterioration in his hearing. In 1802 he would pour out his despair in the cathartic “Heiligenstadt Testament.” Yet his creativity continued unabated.

The two sonatas quasi una fantasia, Op. 27, of 1801 proclaimed a new inspired eccentricity that would carry through to the final sonata triptych of 1820–22. The following winter, shortly after completing the beautiful D-major Sonata Op. 28, Beethoven informed his friend Wenzel Krumpholz: “I am only partly satisfied with my works up to now. From today I will strike out on a new path.” The three Op. 31 sonatas of 1802 already proclaim that “new path.” The second one in particular, known as the “Tempest,” has a mingled tautness and tragic power that align it with the great minor-keyed works of Beethoven’s middle period.

After the crisis of the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” Beethoven plunged into the Third Symphony, followed in 1804–5 by two sonatas that share something of the symphony’s expansion of scale and ethically charged sense of struggle: the “Waldstein” and the “Appassionata.” Until 1803 Beethoven had owned a Walter fortepiano, essentially the same kind of instrument Mozart had played on. That year, while embroiled in the “Eroica,” he received the gift of a new piano from the manufacturer Érard of Paris, whose features included an extra fifth at the top of its compass, pedals rather than knee levers to raise the dampers, and a richer bass sonority (the instrument can been seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna). Both the “Waldstein” and the “Appassionata” sonatas duly exploit the increased range and sonorous power of the new instrument— and would in turn influence the development of the Viennese piano over the next decade. To give just one example, the stark opening of the Appassionata would have been inconceivable without the clear, strong bass notes of the new six-octave instruments. In these two works the sonata became a heroic symphony for keyboard, mingling concerto-like virtuosity, rhetorical power, unprecedented colors (including extreme contrasts of register and novel use of the pedals), and a new breadth and boldness of conception. But whereas the Waldstein is essentially triumphant, the Appassionata (whose nickname was coined by the publisher, not the composer) is perhaps the grimmest tragedy Beethoven ever wrote.

With the three sonatas of 1809–10—the period of the Op. 74 and Op. 95 String Quartets and the “Emperor” Concerto—Beethoven turned his back on heroic rhetoric. Lyricism is now the watchword, mingled with a certain grandeur in the “Les Adieux” Sonata Op. 81a. The F sharp–major Sonata Op. 78 is music of exquisite intimacy that looks ahead to Beethoven’s final period, while the G-major “Sonatine,” as the composer dubbed Op. 79, is indeed easier to play than any Beethoven sonata of the decade.

Beethoven’s popularity soared to new heights in 1814. The final version of Fidelio was triumphantly produced at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater in May, while his Seventh Symphony and patriotic potboiler Wellingtons Sieg had proved sensationally successful at two lucrative benefit concerts. Amid these public triumphs Beethoven composed, after a gap of four years, one of his most personal piano sonatas, in E minor, Op. 90. As his deafness worsened, he played ever more rarely in aristocratic salons—indeed, he made his last recorded appearance, performing the “Archduke” Trio, that same year. Two years later, the A-major Sonata Op. 101 combines the lyrical intimacy of Op. 90 with an improvisatory waywardness that would influence the Romantic generation, Schumann especially. While Beethoven never suffered from what we would call composer’s block, the years between late 1814 and 1817 were the most fallow of his career. One explanation is the “inflammatory fever” (his own words) that afflicted him for the best part of a year, from the autumn of 1816. Another is Beethoven’s preoccupation with his nephew Karl, as a surrogate son, and the onset of the struggle for his guardianship that culminated in the acrimonious litigation of 1818–20. A third reason was surely that for the moment, at least, Beethoven felt that he had said all he could in traditional Classical structures. His few instrumental works of these years—the Sonatas Opp. 90 and 101 and the two Cello Sonatas Op. 102—were all inspired experiments with new forms and proportions.

Then, in late 1817, he plunged into the work he would title “Grosse Sonate für das Hammerklavier” (“Hammerklavier” was simply the generic term for pianoforte). In this gigantic effort of willpower, an Everest among keyboard sonatas, Beethoven reclaimed the quasi-symphonic four-movement structure of his earliest sonatas on radically new terms. Its vast, rebarbative final fugue—a pianistic counterpart to the “Grosse Fuge” in the String Quartet Op. 130—is the most technically challenging keyboard music he ever composed. The “Hammerklavier” opened the floodgates for the other monumental works of Beethoven’s final period: the Missa solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, and the “Diabelli” Variations, all begun within a year of the sonata’s completion in summer 1818.

In the Romantic imagination Beethoven wrote his last piano sonatas and string quartets for himself and posterity, in ivory-tower isolation from the world. The more prosaic truth is that they were all composed at the behest of either a friend, publisher, or patron. Early in 1820, shortly after Beethoven’s victory in the protracted egal battle for the guardianship of his nephew Karl, he was asked by a friend to contribute a “little piece” to a piano tutor. Beethoven responded with a short movement in E major, then received a request from the publisher Adolf Schlesinger for some new piano sonatas. Composer and publisher agreed on the substantial payment of 90 ducats for three sonatas (unlike Mozart, Beethoven was not one to compromise over fees!). Taking up a friend’s suggestion, he reused the “little piece” as the first movement of the Sonata Op. 109. Poor health, and intermittent work on the Missa solemnis, meant that Beethoven did not complete the trilogy until early 1822.

In these final sonatas Beethoven draws back from the gigantism and transcendent virtuosity of the “Hammerklavier” to return to the more modest dimensions and speaking intimacy of the Opp. 90 and 101 Sonatas. In Opp. 109 and 110, especially, there is little room for strenuous rhetoric—instead, Beethoven cultivates what the American musicologist Maynard Solomon has called an “etherealized, improvisatory tone.” Each of the three sonatas charts an intense spiritual experience and creates its own form. The finale of Op. 110 alternates a grieving operatic scena and a healing fugue. Op. 111 is in just two movements, one fast, one slow. Yet for all their unorthodoxies, these sublime works still depend on the sonata principle perfected by Haydn and Mozart which Beethoven had used with such far-seeing mastery all his life. And it is this, together with his magnificent sanity and control, even in extremis, that confirms Beethoven as an essentially Classical artist in an age of burgeoning subjective Romanticism.

Richard Wigmore is a writer, broadcaster, and lecturer specializing in Classical and Romantic chamber music and lieder. He writes for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and other journals, and has taught at Birkbeck College, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall. His publications include Schubert: The Complete Song Texts and The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.