Beethoven's music

Given the relatively small number of compositions by Beethoven – compared to the output of his two great contemporaries Haydn and Mozart – I would argue that piece by piece, note by note, they stand as the greatest body of music ever composed.

What is it that sets Beethoven’s music apart? Every Beethoven lover will have their own answer. For me it is this: Beethoven broke the rules. That alone makes his music the most exciting I can listen to. However well I know a piece, Beethoven still manages to catch me unawares, take me by surprise.

Here is a brief look at Beethoven’s music, by genre. What follows is not a musicological analysis, but a friendly guide. Explore the music yourself.

The Symphonies

The former British Prime Minister James Callaghan was asked late in his long life whether there was anything he regretted not achieving. He replied that he wished he could have written Beethoven’s nine symphonies. For a conductor they are a rite of passage: Herbert von Karajan recorded the complete cycle three times. No year goes by without dozens of performances of one or more of the nine; barely a year goes by without one or more performances of the complete cycle somewhere in the world.

It is customary to dismiss the first two symphonies – they owe too much to Mozart, Beethoven had not yet found his style – then say of the remaining seven that the odd numbers are important, the even ones less so.

Well there is one element of truth only in that: the odd numbers certainly are important. The others all are too.

Beethoven was nearly 30 years of age before he completed his First Symphony. He clearly thought about it long and hard; he knew he would be judged on it. It was, if you like, a statement of intent. Sure enough, from the very first note, it is pure Beethoven. He begins it in a totally unconventional way – three sets of rising chords. Hello? I’m here. Already he is breaking the rules.

He breaks them still further in the Second Symphony. He calls the third movement a Scherzo (literally, a Joke), the first time any movement of any symphony had been thus labelled. The normal title was Minuet, clearly an old-fashioned concept for Beethoven. The opening of the final movement, like a succession of coiled springs, must have stunned his first audience, and still brings us up short today.

And so we come to the Third Symphony, the Eroica. It begins with two massive chords, a call to attention. Beethoven grabs you in bar one, and does not let you go. Already in the third bar the violins descend to a totally wrong note – wrong key, wrong everything, it shouldn’t be there – but almost in the nature of a crime writer laying clues, it is resolved much later in the work.

Halfway through the first movement the first horn comes in a bar early. At rehearsal Ferdinand Ries, hearing this, called the player a dolt and told Beethoven he would deal with him afterwards; Beethoven, to Ries’s mortification, told him that was how it was meant to be. The first movement is the longest movement of any symphony to date.

The second movement is a funeral march. When, years later, Beethoven was told Napoleon Bonaparte had died on St Helena and it was suggested he might like to compose a funeral march, Beethoven replied he already had. He was referring to this movement. Go to a performance of this Symphony, and in the middle of the third movement watch the three horn players grow visibly pale as their great solo passage looms – then imagine what it must have been like to horn players in Beethoven’s day, playing natural horns with no valves, just their lips and right fist in the bell allowing them to change pitch.

The huge fourth movement begins with a flourish, then resorts almost to a joke, single notes plucked on the strings, fragmented, varied, before the glorious main theme finally comes in. In performance, check that the first violins play the two unexpected grace notes at the beginning of the first bar. They are often dropped. Black mark to any conductor who discards them. 

This was the symphony Beethoven – recognising its sheer size and quality – originally intended dedicating to Napoleon, angrily scratching his name off the title page when Napoleon declared himself Emperor.

The Eroica, written in 1803, was the single most important work Beethoven had composed to date. It revolutionised not just the symphony, but music itself, moving it into a new century. It is like a novel in the form of notes. Years later Beethoven was asked which of his symphonies was his favourite: Eh! Eh! the Eroica. And yes, it is my favourite of the nine.

The Fourth has suffered from being wedged, as it were, between the monumental Third and the mighty Fifth. It is perhaps the least heard of the nine. So treat yourself, enjoy the gallop of the first movement, wonder at the harsh chords of descent into despair in the second movement, the syncopated rhythms of the third movement, and try to keep your hands and feet still in the impossibly lively fourth movement.

The Fifth Symphony – someone really said to me once: I know Beethoven. Didn’t he write Beethoven’s Fifth? – is the most famous symphony in the history of music, with the best known opening bars in all music. Yet try humming them and the bars that follow. Impossible. A motif rather than a theme, and so compressed and full of such energy that they are universally known. Used by the BBC to tap out of the theme of radio broadcasts to the Free French during the Second World War. Dot-dot-dot-dash. Morse code for V. V for Victory.

For the first time in any symphony by any composer, the three-note theme is carried through the whole work. At the opening of the final movement, after a mysterious passage of ghostliness, an orchestral sound so rousing that at the first performance in Paris, an old soldier in uniform rose to his feet and cried out Vive l’Empereur!

The Sixth, the Pastoral, Beethoven’s evocation of the countryside, and the only time Beethoven ever wrote down on paper exactly what it was he was trying to represent. Joyful feelings on being in the countryside. Bird calls, a running stream, a peasant dance, a storm, the shepherds’ hymn of thanks after the storm has passed.

Check out the second bassoon in the middle of the country dance section. Three isolated notes, then four. Repeated. Why? Because Beethoven had seen a bassoonist playing like that in a band in a tavern in one of the villages dotting the Vienna Woods, seeming to fall asleep between the notes, then waking up just in time to play them. And the country dance itself? Again, Beethoven had witnessed country folk swirling round to infectious rhythms, and he recreated them in this symphony. Beethoven loved nature: this is his homage to it.

Those bird calls, by the way, represent the nightingale, the cuckoo, and … (the one you always forget) the quail. You can be forgiven for getting it wrong. Beethoven himself wasn’t so sure. Years later, walking along the brook with his helper Schindler, he pointed to the spot where he had sat and composed the Pastoral. He then pointed up to a tree and told Schindler that was where he had heard the yellowhammer, which inspired him to include it in the symphony. A yellowhammer’s song rises like a broken chord – nothing remotely similar is in the symphony. True, there is some doubt over the translation of the word Beethoven used, but still no possible interpretation of it accords with what he actually composed!

The Seventh, described by Wagner who used to play a piano version of it as the apotheosis of the dance, does not let up in its intensity. Another funeral march, and given that Beethoven composed this in 1812, I can never listen to it without imagining the dispirited and broken soldiers of Napoleon’s Grande Armée trudging home from Moscow in the snow. Beethoven conducted the first performance of this symphony, and an eye witness described him as crouching below the rostrum in the quiet passages, then leaping so high in the loud passages that his feet left the floor.

If the Eighth, like the Fourth, suffers from being wedged between two mighty works, listen to Toscanini’s 1939 recording of it, and you will hear in the build-up to the first movement climax music that catches fire. Marvel too at Beethoven’s audacity in the deliberate discords in the slow movement.

The Ninth, the Choral. Greatest Symphony ever written. Voices and music. New. Revolutionary. A theme adopted by the European Union as its anthem. The piece chosen by Leonard Bernstein to conduct after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy) in the final movement. (Beethoven would surely have approved.) A slow movement of such beauty time seems to stand still. And in an outrageously audacious passage, in the white heat of the final movement the music really does stand still, as Beethoven puts on the brake and literally stops everything. Whole chapters of books, whole books, have been written about this symphony. Just listen to it.

By the way, Beethoven carried a book of Schiller’s poetry with him from his student days, always intending one day to set the poem An die Freude to music. The edition he carried contained the line: Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder [Beggars will become the Brothers of Princes]. In 1803 Schiller published a new edition of his poetry, substituting the line Beethoven used in his Ninth Symphony: Alle Menschen werden Brüder [All Mankind Will Become Brothers].

The Nine. Interesting that Beethoven composed the first eight in around 13 years. There was then a gap of 12 years, before he composed the Ninth. He was working on sketches for the Tenth three years after that. It was not that after the Eighth he felt he had said it all, then changed his mind: he had had the idea for a Choral Symphony years before. Why the long gap between numbers Eight and Nine? More than likely just the sheer difficulty of raising an orchestra sufficiently accomplished to play his music (remember the disastrous concert on 22 December 1808 at which the Fifth and Sixth were premiered).

Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies. The most important such body of work in all music.

The Piano Concertos

Five completed Piano Concertos, spanning a period from when Beethoven was around 19 or 20 to when he was just 38. Then, full stop. Well, almost. He started a sixth six years later, but abandoned it. So, no completed piano concerto for the final 18 years of his life.

And this was a composer who, like Mozart, had stunned audiences and earned considerable amounts of money by composing fiendishly difficult piano concertos and performing them effortlessly in concert.

Almost effortlessly, in Beethoven’s case. At the first performance of the Third, he had not had time to write out the piano part in full. He asked Ignaz Seyfried to turn for him. The hapless Seyfried said later the markings on the manuscript, far from being musical notation, were more like Egyptian hieroglyphics, intelligible only to Beethoven himself. He was unable to read them, relying on Beethoven to dig him in the ribs when he wanted the page turned.

At the premier of the Fourth, two boys stood by the piano holding candles. Beethoven leapt up at one point, knocking the candles to the floor. (No wonder audiences locked to Beethoven’s concerts: they never knew what was going to happen next.)

So why did he suddenly stop writing piano concertos? We do not know for certain, but the answer is pretty obvious. His deafness took hold, and he could no longer trust himself to hear the orchestra properly. The dreadful realisation had dawned that he could no longer perform his own concertos in public.

One feature of the Piano Concertos no.1, 2 and 3 immediately strikes even the most casual listener. They all begin with a lengthy orchestral introduction, before the piano enters – and when it does it is always solo and with a new theme (in the Third, a set of scales). Beethoven has grabbed your attention from the start.

In Piano Concerto no.4 he turns this on its head. The piano begins alone! It is a gentle, turning theme of just five bars, and it sets the tone for the whole movement. The second movement, where piano and orchestra seem to inhabit different worlds, like a warring married couple – angry, sweet, petulant – is quite frankly 21^st century music. It is light years ahead of its time. The same is true of the whole work. My favourite.

Piano Concerto no.5, the Emperor, is by far the best known because of the sheer virtuosity it demands. Once again the opening is unique. Accompanied by chords from the orchestra, the soloist has to execute massive runs – before he or she has had time to hear the sound of the instrument, or the orchestra, or gauge the tempo the conductor has set, or, most importantly, gauge the mood of the audience.

The middle movement is ethereal, all the more so because Beethoven gives the beautiful theme almost entirely to the orchestra, with the piano accompanying – the reverse of what you would expect. The syncopations of the final movement are admired by jazz musicians and classical musicians alike.

There is a false entry for the piano to the second movement of the Emperor (similar to the false horn entry in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony) – an extra (grace) note that you do not expect to be there. At a concert in London featuring the virtuoso Alfred Brendel, the critic of the Times wrote that Brendel had fluffed the entry, playing one note too many. Brendel wrote to the paper, pointing out that he had played it exactly as Beethoven had written it.

The String Quartets

Beethoven’s String Quartets. Frightening words. When I was in my 30s I decided I would leave Beethoven’s String Quartets and the music of Wagner until I was in my 50s. Mistake. Big mistake (on both counts).

If Haydn is today called the ‘father’ of the String Quartet, and Mozart took the form to new heights, then Beethoven – characteristically – took hold of it and completely transformed it. The five Late Quartets, written in the final years of his life, transcend anything he or anyone else had ever composed. Listening to the notes we see deep into the soul of this difficult, irascible man by now profoundly deaf. He has bared himself, exposed his emotions to us in a more profound way than words could ever express.

He composed the 16 String Quartets in three fairly distinct blocks – nos. 1-6 when he was around 27-30 years of age, nos. 7-11 when he was 35-40, nos. 12-16 in the final three years of his life – leading to them being conveniently referred to in concert and on recordings as the Early, Middle and Late Quartets.

As with the Symphony, therefore, he came to the String Quartet comparatively late in life – hardly surprising given Haydn and Mozart’s earlier achievements. But when he began – again characteristically – he threw himself at it, producing a set of no fewer than six separate Quartets. We think of the Early Quartets as a huge achievement: he was not so impressed, at least not initially. He sent the first of the set to a friend, and then wrote to him:

Be sure not to pass on your quartet  to anyone else, because I have substantially altered it. For only now have I learned to write quartets properly – as you will surely see when you receive them.

It is certain that he went on to revise fully at least one, possibly two or more of the remaining set. The completed versions are stunning, displaying a whole panoply of emotions. Do not make the mistake of considering these Early Quartets to be ‘lightweight’ Beethoven. There are light moments – the whole of no.3 (in fact the first to be composed) is lighter than the other five – but listen to the fourth movement of no.6. Beethoven named it La Malinconia [Melancholy]. We are in a dark world.

Forming the bulk of the Middle Quartets are the three Razumovskys, so called because they were commissioned by the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count (later Prince) Razumovsky, himself an accomplished musician who played second violin in his own quartet. For his benefit Beethoven includes Russian themes in the first two of the set.

I find no.1 instantly accessible. The first movement begins with a wonderfully lively and memorable melody, and the second movement begins with a single note repeated so often on the cello that cellists of the day thought Beethoven was playing a joke on them and refused to play it!

The respected musical journal of the time, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, got it spectacularly wrong when it wrote:

[The Razumovsky s are] long and difficult … profound and excellently wrought but not easily intelligible – except perhaps for the third, whose originality, melody and harmonic power will surely win over every educated music lover.

The third, from the very first bar of the first movement, is without doubt the least easily accessible.

Count Razumovsky led an ultimately unhappy life. A great patron of the arts, he spent huge amounts of his own, and Russian government, money on rebuilding the Russian embassy, filling it with art and Canova sculptures. He threw a sumptuous party in it on New Year’s Eve 1814, to celebrate the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna. The Tsar and Tsarina were amount the guests.

          To accommodate all the guests a wooden extension had been built onto the embassy. In the middle of the night, after everyone had retired to bed, a heating flue from the main building into the extension caught fire, set fire to the extension and the flames spread to the main building.

          The building was destroyed. The next morning Razumovsky was found wandering among the ruins, his eyes irreparably damaged by the smoke. He retired from the diplomatic service and lived out his days as a recluse. His descendants still live in Vienna His name, of course, will live for ever thanks to his foresight in commissioning the Quartets from Beethoven.

The other two of the Middle Quartets are nicknamed, respectively, the Harp and the Serioso, the first because of the plucked strings in the first movement, the second because Beethoven himself named it thus on the manuscript. The Harp is the lighter of the two, but no less characteristic of Beethoven for that. Its final movement is a theme and variations, a form much loved by Beethoven and one he usually reserved for the piano. The Serioso is indeed that, serious, a masterpiece in compression from the first bar onwards, and certainly a foretaste of what is to come in the final set of Quartets.

The Late Quartets. The ultimate in Quartet writing, the ultimate in Beethoven. Aware that his life was running out, his deafness total, at odds with his nephew, drained physically and emotionally, his health alternating between bad and worse …

And five utter masterpieces. They have no names, they are simply opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 135 (or, in order of composition, 127, 132, 130, 131, 135). Simply? In sheer scale, length, and complexity they stand alone. Countless books have been written about these Quartets. I will just draw your attention to a few details.

Listen to the third movement of op.132. Beethoven wrote at the top of the manuscript page: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart [Sacred Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode].

The opening chords, played without vibrato, are like chords played on an organ. Beethoven tells us exactly what he has written (though not in the pictorial terms of the Pastoral Symphony). In April 1925 he fell seriously ill with an abdominal complaint. His doctor – who had earlier been the target of his anger – refused to attend. The doctor who did come told him he was seriously ill and risked inflammation of the bowels which could prove fatal.

He put him on a strict diet, banning all wine, coffee, spirits, and spices of any kind, and warned Beethoven: I can promise you that if you drink any spirits, you will be lying weak and exhausted on your back within a few hours.

Beethoven went down to Baden when the weather warmed up, but wrote to the doctor that he was: still weak … belching, etc, … my catarrhal condition is as follows: I spit up rather a lot of blood, apparently only from the windpipe. But often it streams out of my nose, as happened frequently last winter as well. There is no doubt that my stomach has become terribly weak.

Beethoven recovered, but knew he had come close to death. That is what lies behind this extraordinary movement of op.132.

Even more remarkable, in my view, is the slow movement of Op.130, the Cavatina. It is utterly beautiful, even if you have no idea what is happening in Beethoven’s life. Over a gently pulsating rhythm from the three lower strings, the first violin sobs. In the fragmented notes there is anguish and despair.

What could have driven Beethoven to this? Why, his relationship with his nephew Karl, of course. The source of so much heartbreak, and again of his own doing. While recovering in Baden and having completed op.132, Beethoven began work immediately on the next , op.130. Karl was supposed to come and see his uncle on Sundays, but has clearly not done so. Beethoven is riven with self-pity:

I am getting thinner and thinner and more and more ill. I have no doctor, not a single sympathetic soul at hand. If you could manage to come on Sundays, please do … I must learn to give up everything … Oh! Where have I not been wounded, nay more, cut to the heart?!

To make matters worse Beethoven heard that Karl had been seeing his mother again. Despite everything, despite the court case, despite his appeals, his threats, his pleas, his cajoling, everything, the boy had been to see his mother. Had it all then come to nothing?

Beethoven – fearing Karl is still seeing that ne’er-do-well friend Niemetz – set one of his young acolytes, Karl Holz, to spy on Karl. Holz reports back that he has lured Karl into a beer-house to see whether he drinks a lot, and he does not seem to. He will now get him to play a game of billiards, to see whether he has been playing a lot.

Beethoven is worried Karl may have been seeing prostitutes. He tells him he would give him some money if he went to hear some classical drama at the Burgtheater once or twice a month.

One moment he berates the boy, the next he begs forgiveness: I dream only of getting completely away from you … God grant my wishes, for I can longer trust you – Unfortunately your father or, better still, not your father.

Not a word more. Only come to my arms, you won’t hear a single hard word. For God’s sake do not abandon yourself to misery. You will be welcomed here as affectionately as ever. We will lovingly discuss everything and what must be done for the future. On my word of honour you shall hear no reproaches, since in any case that would no longer do any good. All you may expect from me is the most loving care and help – only come, come to the faithful heart of – your father – Beethoven.

It is all pretty pathetic stuff – an ageing and ailing man trying to control every aspect of his 19 year old nephew’s life, and striving to take the place of the young man’s father.

Yet amidst it all, he produces a great work of art, the op.130 String Quartet. Small wonder that he wrote of the Cavatina that it had affected him more than anything he had ever written and he had shed tears writing it.

The original final movement of op.130 was the Grosse Fuge, a massive movement that is clearly too massive and unwieldy to sit at the end of the preceding five. Beethoven published it separately, and it remains a separate piece to this day (often performed by a string orchestra).

The Grosse Fuge is 21^st century music. It is way ahead of its time. It is the marathon of the String  Olympics. It exhausts the performers mentally and physically. It exhausts the listener. I once went to hear those great Beethoven players, The Lindsays, perform the Grosse Fuge at the Wigmore Hall in London. At the end, as they stood to take the applause, the first violinist Peter Cropper had to support himself on the chair; his face was a mask, his shirt soaking wet. As he walked off the stage, I thought he might fall.

If you are under the impression all Beethoven’s music is complicated, listen to the slow movement of the final String Quartet, op.135. Simply beautiful. Beautifully simple. The final movement of this String Quartet (composed to replace the Grosse Fuge) is the last complete piece of music Beethoven wrote. Over it Beethoven wrote: Must it be? It must be!

All manner of interpretations have been put on these enigmatic words, from the profound to the profoundly profound. All we know for sure is that when a certain official at the Imperial court, who was also a wealthy music lover, failed to attend the first performance of the op.130 Quartet, Beethoven insisted the man send Schuppanzigh the price of the subscription. The official wrote to Beethoven, asking Muss est sein? Beethoven sent him a humorous canon on the words Es muss sein. So there may be less to these words than meet the eye.

Op.135, my desert island Quartet.

The Piano Sonatas

The piano. Beethoven’s voice. I can imagine someone asking him a question, something simple like the meaning of life, whether there is a God, or what his music is trying to say. Instead of using words, he goes to the piano and plays, uninterrupted, for an hour. Listen to my music, and you will have all the answers you need.

Of all the musical genres (that word again), the Piano Sonata is the only one that he worked on more or less consistently throughout his life. No large gaps as with the Symphonies or String Quartets. There are 32 in all; there isn’t a weak one among them, and some are among the most important pieces he ever wrote. They contain every emotion Beethoven was capable of expressing.

To single out just a few. The most important of the early Sonatas is the Pathétique. For the first time Beethoven uses a slow introduction, and an introduction of such weight you know something truly significant is going on. The opening chord breaks once and for all with Haydn and Mozart. You are in Beethoven’s world now.

Among Beethoven’s few close friends in Vienna were the piano-building couple, Andreas and Nanette Streicher. The Pathétique demanded a wider keyboard than ever before, the sheer power of the chords demanded a stronger piano frame, and more resilient strings. The Streichers started building pianos to accommodate Beethoven’s needs. Thus we owe the beginning of the development of the modern concert grand to Beethoven.

If you are in any doubt of the sheer versatility of Beethoven’s music, listen to the beautiful simplicity of the second movement of the Pathétique – a theme so perfect it is as if it emerged from Beethoven fully formed; none of the struggle we usually associate with him. It impressed a modern musician too. Billy Joel put words to it, and it is one of the tracks on his best-selling album, An Innocent Man. The track is “This Night”, and on the sleeve it says Words by B. Joel, music by L. van Beethoven.

The most famous movement of any of the 32 Piano Sonatas is the opening movement of The Moonlight – the Sonata he composed for the woman he wanted to marry, Giulietta Guicciardi [see Chapter 6, Beethoven’s Women]. For the first time he put the slow movement first (something neither Haydn or Mozart ever did). Just like the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony, this movement is universally known. Yet – again as with the Fifth – try singing it. You can’t. That’s a trick of Beethoven’s: music instantly memorable, that lodges in your head, that you can play in your brain, but that is impossible to reproduce except on the piano. Plenty of amateur pianists can do that. Ask anyone who says they can play Beethoven to demonstrate it, and the opening movement of the Moonlight is what they’ll play (or Für Elise, more correctly a Bagatelle). Then ask them to play the third movement …

We already know the origin of the Waldstein from Chapter 3, The Spaniard. The gloriously spacious theme of the final movement is prefaced by a mysterious, fragmented middle movement, which presages it perfectly. That was not Beethoven’s original intention. The middle movement was a long complete piece with an instantly catchy tune. He realised it was misplaced, and published it separately.

It became an instant hit with the amateur pianists of Vienna. It was published under the title Andante grazioso, but was nicknamed Andante favori by Beethoven himself, who said: I wish I had never written the piece. I cannot walk down a street without hearing it coming through some window or other.

The Andante favori was at the centre of a dramatic sense of humour failure on Beethoven’s part. Ferdinand Ries recounts how, when Beethoven played the piece for the first time to him and a friend, they liked it so much they persuaded Beethoven to repeat it. On his way home Ries called in on Beethoven’s unswervingly loyal and generous patron Prince Lichnowsky to tell him of the new piece.

The Prince urged Ries to play it for him, and Ries did so, as best as he could from memory. He repeated it, remembering more of it each time. Then he helped Lichnowsky learn it too.

The next day Lichnowsky called on Beethoven and told him he had composed a piece of his own which he thought was rather good. Would Beethoven mind listening and giving his opinion? Beethoven said no. Despite this the Prince sat at the piano and played … the Andante favori. Beethoven was utterly furious, expelled Lichnowsky from his apartment and threatened to break with Ries totally.

Wagner’s favourite was the Appassionata. He loved playing it, and marvelled at the theme of the first movement rising from the depths. Once again, as with the Pathétique, the middle movement is simplicity itself, almost a theme on a single note. The entire work has such nobility and passion it is small wonder the publisher gave it the name by which it is known.

As with the Pastoral Symphony, the only Piano Sonata where Beethoven tells us what his music represents (though not as literally as with the Symphony) is Les Adieux. It has become known by its French name, since the publishers subtitled it in French, but the original (rather more cumbersome) German title was Das Lebewohl, Abwesenheit und Wiedersehn [The Farewell, Absence and Return].

Beethoven composed it in the most fraught year in recent Viennese history. On 9 May 1809 Austria (yet again) declared war on France. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had occupied Vienna three years before peacefully, this time decided to teach the recalcitrant Austrians a lesson once and for all. He led his Revolutionary Army into Austria and marched them north east to Vienna. Word travelled ahead. Anyone who could, fled from the city. Roads were choked with people, wagons piled high with furniture and belongings.

It was decided that the Imperial royal family, headed by the Emperor, should leave Vienna for their own safety. This included the Emperor’s youngest brother, Archduke Rudolph, friend and patron of Beethoven.

Beethoven told the Archduke he would compose a Piano Sonata to mark the occasion. He completed the first movement, Das Lebewohl, before the Archduke left with his family on 4 May, and said he would complete the other two when he was sure of the Archduke’s return. This he duly did. Above the three descending opening chords of the first movement he wrote on the manuscript page: Le-be-wohl.

It is a beautiful piece of music, and as always with Beethoven when you know what lies behind its composition, you listen to it with entirely different ears.

We come to the most monumental of all the Piano Sonatas, the Hammerklavier. This was the work that Beethoven composed at the height of the traumatic court case, when he was composing little else. What spurred him to do it? More than likely the thoroughly prosaic fact that at the beginning of the year he had received a remarkable gift. The famous London piano maker Broadwood & Sons shipped a specially built, specially robust six-octave grand piano to Beethoven, sending it by sea to Trieste and then overland to Vienna. This, combined with the fact that the Archduke’s name-day was on 17 April, persuaded Beethoven to compose a new Sonata.

Beethoven loved the piano, with its heavier English action which suited his music and playing style, and he was touched to see that Ferdinand Ries had signed his name on the board behind the keys. This most famous of Broadwood pianos – by the time of Beethoven’s death in poor state due to his pounding on the keys and numerous repairs – was sold at the auction of his effects to an antique dealer for 100 florins. He gave it to Franz Liszt in 1846, who treasured it but never played on it, saying he was not worthy to press the keys that Beethoven had pressed. In 1874 Liszt presented it to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, where it stands today.

In the early 1990s the piano was restored – a major task which involved virtually rebuilding it. Ries’s signature was still clearly visible. Shortly after this it was transported briefly to England where the Malaysian-born English fortepianist Melvyn Tan performed on it. For this journey it was insured for five million pounds!

The opening sequence of chords, preceded by a fleeting note in the bass and a multi-octave leap by the left hand, is humanly impossible to play at the metronome speed marked by Beethoven. It sets the tone for the work. Massive, monumental, taking the Piano Sonata to totally new heights. Fugue, counterpoint, double trills … it is as if Beethoven is saying look at what I can do.

But as ever Beethoven is rarely satisfied. Around eight months after completing the Hammerklavier, and six months after sending it to Ferdinand Ries in London for publication, he wrote to Ries with an additional bar he wanted inserted at the start of the slow movement – just two notes, played in octaves. Ries protested that the work was about to be published, and to stop it now would cause unnecessary problems. In any case, just one bar of two notes? Beethoven insisted. Today’s musicologists will tell you those two notes, and the key they are in, are essential to what follows.

The Hammerklavier is often taken to signify the start of Beethoven’s Late Period. Certainly everything that now follows – Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, Piano Sonatas, String Quartets – are on an entirely different plane to what has gone before.

Profoundly deaf, deeply miserable, failing health – and the greatest works of all.

The final set of Piano Sonatas, opp.109, 110, 111, (no names, just opus numbers) stand alone too. Not so monumental as the Hammerklavier, but more intimate and more deeply personal. Intimacy pervades op.109, there is warmth and optimism in op.110, and if you want more proof that Beethoven was a composer ahead of his time, listen to the second and final movement of op.111. It is a set of variations. For a whole page Beethoven writes pure syncopated rhythm. It is a glimpse of the future; it is jazz.

One passage of one of the three Sonatas in particular grips me every time I hear it. It is the final two movements of op.110. Beethoven has composed one of his saddest themes, even writing on the manuscript page: Klagender Gesang [Doleful song]. Finally, he draws the theme to a close, then sounds a chord, which he repeats no fewer than nine times. It is as if he is saying:

No, no, I will not give in to my deafness. I will not give in. I will not.

He then launches into one of the most complicated, exciting, climactic fugues he ever composed for the piano. Each time I hear it, I think of this profoundly deaf man who has triumphed over the worst fate that can befall a musician, and this is his way of telling us, in the only way he knows: musical notes.

Is he also telling us that if he can overcome such a disaster, then we of future generations, in listening to his music, can overcome our own private troubles? I think so.

My favourite Piano Sonata, Opus 110. And yes, if you push me, (please don’t,) my single favourite piece in all Beethoven’s music, Piano Sonata Opus 110.

Listen to the recording made in 1967 by Jörg Demus in Beethoven’s birth house in Bonn on the last piano Beethoven owned (built by Conrad Graf). Close your eyes and imagine…

The Opera

Yes, just one. But what a gestation, what a struggle! It had begun life as the opera on which he agreed to collaborate with Schikaneder at the Theater an der Wien. That was abandoned after six months, though some elements survived. Even when Beethoven began work on the new opera that was to become Leonore, it took him longer to complete than any previous composition, and he filled the equivalent of over three sketchbooks (the Eroica, by contrast, occupying about half a single book).

In other words, it was a struggle. So were attempts to stage it. Everything was in place in the spring of 1804 when Beethoven’s contract with the Theater an der Wien was terminated, and plans were abandoned. Later in the year he was reinstated and the plans revived. The following year was taken up with the first performances of the Eroica and the composition of the Appassionata Piano Sonata, but a date was finally set for the first premiere of Beethoven’s opera, Leonore: 15 October 1805.

On 30 September the theatre censor banned the opera on the grounds that it was seditious. After an appeal, and a few changes made, the ban was lifted. But the opening date had to be postponed for five weeks because the rehearsals went so badly, and Beethoven insisted on making revisions.

At one of the rehearsals the third bassoon was absent. Beethoven fretted and fumed. Prince Lobkowitz made light of the matter, saying two bassoonists were enough. Beethoven was so angry that on the way home, as he passed the Lobkowitz Palace, he shouted at the main entrance: Lobkowitzian ass!

A new date was set for 20 November. One week before, the French army invaded and occupied Vienna. For the first three performances the theatre was practically empty, the people of Vienna preferring to remain in the safety of their homes. What audiences there were consisted largely of French officers, who immediately grasped the larger message of the work – freedom from tyranny – and ensured the opera failed. After three performances it closed.

There’s some suggestion Beethoven was not as upset as he might have been. He realised straight away the opera, in three acts, was long and unwieldy and lacking in dramatic tension. He allowed himself to be persuaded to revise it (putting up token resistance), his friend Stephan von Breuning provided a new libretto, and the revised Leonore, now in two acts, was staged on 29 March 1806, conducted by Seyfried. By all accounts the standard of playing and singing was abysmal. Beethoven wrote after the first night, with characteristic self-pity:

Tonight I will stand at a distance. If I am near the orchestra I will have to listen to my music being murdered! I really think they must be doing it on purpose. I shall not say anything about the wind instruments but – all the pianissimos and crescendos, all the decrescendos and all the fortes and fortissimos have been deleted from my opera! All desire to compose anything more ceases completely if I have to hear my work performed like that!

But the newly revised work was, if anything, a success. Not by Beethoven’s standards. He was still not satisfied. He had a furious row with the theatre’s manager, accusing him of withholding receipts from him (he was on a percentage) – an argument he was to use nearly 20 years later after the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, and on neither occasion was it true. He demanded the return of his score, and forbade any further performances.

Leonore lay in a drawer untouched for a further eight years. In 1814, with Napoleon defeated and exiled to the island of Elba (Waterloo was still a year away), a new political climate, the great Congress of Vienna summoned to redraw the post-Napoleonic map of Europe, it struck the theatre directors as a good idea to get Beethoven to resurrect his opera.

A new librettist was brought in, Beethoven agreed on condition he could completely revise the work, and Fidelio – as the opera was now entitled – was a triumph and remains so to this day.

There are those who say Beethoven did not know how to write for the human voice. Well, they can point to Beethoven’s own words to back that up. Late in life he said: I am well aware of the value of my Fidelio; I know just as well that the symphony is my real element. When sounds ring in me I always hear the full orchestra. I can ask anything of instrumentalists, but when writing for the voice I must continually ask myself: Can that be sung?

They sometimes say too that if Fidelio had been composed by anyone but Beethoven, it would soon have been forgotten. Wrong!

The plot, admittedly, is one of those thoroughly believable operatic plots: Woman disguises herself as a man to get a job at the prison where her husband is held. Jailer’s daughter falls in love with the man/woman. Evil prison governor decides to murder husband. Jailer and man/woman dig grave for the husband. At the moment the governor raises his dagger to kill husband, man/woman steps between them with raised pistol, revealing herself as the prisoner’s wife. Trumpet sounds to signify arrival of Minister and guards. Evil governor arrested, husband and wife reunited, jailer’s daughter – disappointed the man she loves turns out to be a woman – succumbs to jailer’s assistant who’s been wooing her. Townsfolk rejoice. Freedom and love have triumphed over tyranny.

Who said opera plots have to be believable? Now treat yourself to the music. After the skittish wooing with which the opera opens, suddenly there comes a moment of utter beauty. Four characters, all expressing different hopes and emotions, sing a Quartet, Mir ist so wunderbar [It is so wonderful to me]. I find it difficult to breathe listening to this Quartet. It is quite simply heart-stopping. Beethoven knew how good it was – it survived all three versions of the opera.

Leonore’s main aria in Act I (she is the wife in disguise as a man), after she has heard the governor plotting to kill her husband, is a showpiece moment for the soprano. In it she is accompanied by solo horn, the ‘heroic’ instrument of the orchestra.

The Prisoners’ Chorus is universally known. Leonore has persuaded the jailer to allow the prisoners out into the daylight. The male chorus sing of the freedom they long for. (Not the occupying French officers’ favourite moment at the first performances.)

Act II opens with Florestan’s aria (he is the jailed husband) in the dungeon. It is his first appearance in the opera. He is on the brink of starving to death. He sings of his misfortune, but then in a passage of pure radiance he imagines his wife appearing before him like an angel.

After his dramatic rescue, and Pizarro’s arrest (the prison governor), there is a short passage of dialogue. On my favourite recording of this opera – arguably the greatest ever recording of it (Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, with Christa Ludwig and Jon Vickers as the principals, EMI 1962) – this is reduced to just two lines, but what lines:

O, meine Leonore, was hast du für mich getan? Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan! [Oh my Leonore, what have you done for me? Nothing, nothing, my Florestan!]

I cannot listen to these two lines without tears welling up in my eyes. Listen to them with the one you love, and you will understand what I mean.

Florestan and Leonore then sing a love duet of unsurpassed ecstasy, O namenlose Freude! [Oh joy beyond words]. Freedom has triumphed over tyranny, love over hate. Pure Beethoven.

Also not to be missed…

The Violin Concerto

Again, only one, and given its exceptional quality and the number of first-rate violinists Beethoven knew, it is surprising he did not write more. He composed it for Franz Clement, who gave it its first performance, but actually dedicated it to his old friend Stephan von Breuning. It is possible Beethoven simply went off Clement, whose playing was rather showy and whose talent declined rather than improved. For instance, Beethoven would not allow Clement to lead the orchestra at the first performance of his Ninth Symphony.

The Concerto – uniquely – makes a star of the timpanist. He has four solo beats right at the start. So popular was the Concerto, that Beethoven (at his publisher’s request) made a piano transcription of it, which he dedicated to Stephan’s wife Julie. (Mastermind question: What is Beethoven 6^th Piano Concerto? Answer: the piano transcription of his Violin Concerto.) 

In the cadenza of the piano transcription, the pianist is accompanied by the timpani alone. Most likely Beethoven knew and liked the timpanist involved!

Yehudi Menuhin wrote that he was once performing the Violin Concerto somewhere in the American Midwest. He knew from the opening four beats on the timpani that the performance would be a disaster.

Archduke Trio

The most beautiful of all Beethoven’s Piano Trios, and one that holds a poignant place in his life. At its first public performance Beethoven insisted on playing the piano part, although his hearing was now (1814) seriously defective. The composer and violinist Louis Spohr reported:

It was not a good performance. In the first place the piano was badly out of tune, which was of little concern to Beethoven because he could not hear it. Secondly, on account of his deafness, there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys till the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible. I was deeply saddened at so harsh a fate. It is a great misfortune for anyone to be deaf, but how can a musician endure it without giving way to despair? From now on Beethoven’s continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.

Beethoven knew it too. Apart from one more performance a few weeks later, he never performed in public again. Listen to the glorious slow movement of the Archduke Trio knowing that, and it will carry a whole new meaning.

Diabelli Variations

In early 1819 the music publisher and dilettante composer Anton Diabelli wrote a waltz theme and invited all Vienna’s leading composers to compose a single variation on it, intending to publish the completed set.

Beethoven not only disliked collaborative ventures, he had certain other matters on his mind. In January, following the humiliation of being shown in court not to be of noble birth, the Magistrat forced him to relinquish his guardianship of Karl. The last thing he intended doing was work on a variation of a banal theme composed by someone else …

… And immediately began work on not just one, but a whole set of variations. But he then set it aside half-finished to begin work on the mighty Missa Solemnis [see below]. It is not clear whether he simply lost interest or ever intended to go back to it, but go back to it he did – nearly four years later. This time he did complete the set, producing no fewer than 33 variations, in a monumental work that stands alongside Bach’s Goldberg Variations as one of the two greatest sets of variations for piano ever composed.

The Diabelli Variations cover the whole range of human emotions. There is humour: in Variation 22 Beethoven quotes from the opening aria of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in which Leporello complains of having to work all night and all day. Variation 20 seems to take us down to the ghostly catacombs. The intricate double fugue of Variation 32 is thrilling; while the final Variation, a Minuet, is ethereally beautiful.

A glorious work by a deaf composer in failing health yet at the height of his powers.

At the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990, the young Polish-Hungarian pianist Piotr Anderszewski chose to play the Diabelli Variations – an unprecedentedly bold move, given that most competitors attempt to sparkle without taking risks. He gave a magnificent performance, then returned to play Webern’s tiny three-movement Op. 27 Variations. With just one movement he go, he froze, walked off stage, thus disqualifying himself from the competition. What can you follow the Diabellis with? Nothing.

Missa Solemnis

One of Beethoven’s most daunting works, described by a composer and critic more than a century ago as one of the greatest masterworks in the realm of music. Beethoven composed it for the enthronement of his great friend and pupil Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmütz – completing it three years after the enthronement ceremony.

Beethoven was not a religious man – there is no anecdotal evidence of his ever having chosen to attend a church service – but in his final years he did become deeply spiritual. This work – one of only three overtly religious works in his entire output, along with the oratorio Christus am Ölberge [Christ on the Mount of Olives] and an earlier setting of the Mass – is the most representative of that spirituality.

It is therefore a deeply personal expression. It was on the manuscript of this work that Beethoven wrote the words which I have used as a quotation at the front of this book: From the heart – may it return to the heart.

There is nevertheless a theatricality to the Missa Solemnis that has led many commentators to suggest that it is more appropriate to the concert hall than the church. With four soloists and a choir, some have even suggested it should be regarded more as a short opera than anything else.

The two moments that set it apart are the solo violin throughout the Benedictus, hovering above the orchestra in a way that turns the movement almost into a mini-concerto; and the sounds of war which Beethoven inserts into the prayer for divine peace in the Dona, trumpets and timpani playing for all they are worth.

Interestingly Beethoven wanted to premiere the Missa along with the newly completed Ninth Symphony at the concert in the Kärntnertor theatre on 7 May 1824, but the censor intervened, banning the performance of a religious work in a concert hall. A compromise was reached in which only three movements of the Missa were performed (along with the Ninth). Just shows how wrong the censor was.

The Missa Solemnis stands alone in Beethoven’s output. A modern critic wrote: To those for whom Beethoven’s music is an important reason for living, the Missa Solemnis belongs at the centre of their experience – a work to respect, certainly, but still more to love.

Egmont Overture

A personal favourite. A well known piece (even if the incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont which follows it is less well known) which can be enjoyed if you know nothing at all about its subject matter.

Brief history lesson. When the Spanish occupied the Netherlands in the 16^th century, a certain Count Egmont, member of one of the oldest and noblest families in Flanders, led resistance to the Inquisition and persecution of Protestants. For his troubles, he was arrested and executed.

Now you know this, listen again to the Egmont Overture. In the music you hear the arrest of the Count. You hear, in the deep strings, the Spanish judges prosecuting him. You hear, in the plaintive wind, his wife, mother of his 11 children, pleading for mercy for her husband. You hear, in the fortissimo staccato notes of the brass, the verdict of guilty being given. A final piano pleading in the first violins. The whole orchestra in unison on a single note is the sentence of death. A forte fall of a fourth in first and second violins is the executioner’s sword coming down.

But Beethoven has not finished. Triple piano, slowly building to a massive fortissimo, an exhilarating passage in the major key which tells us that Count Egmont’s spirit, and all he fought for, lives on; that the people of the Netherlands ultimately threw out the rapacious invader. That – as in so much of Beethoven’s work – darkness has given way to light, freedom has triumphed over oppression.

In this case he felt it particularly personally. He was writing about the land his beloved grandfather and forebears came from.

© John Suchet