Beethoven's Concertos: History, Style, Performance
528
Beethoven's Concertos: History, Style, Performance
528Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393333459 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/11/1998 |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Form in Beethoven's Concertos
* * *
A music student recently asked a puzzling question: "Does this piece have a form?" "Form," a name and notion that gained currency in music during Beethoven's lifetime and is now ubiquitous in our everyday talk about music, still has about it a certain penumbra of ambiguity. Do we construe "form" so broadly as to allow that every composition has it (or one), or does musical form rather emerge only from the presence of certain kinds of properties in certain kinds of music? For most of us, the notion probably implies a degree of differentiation, the presence of some number of distinguishable events (distinguished by any number of stylistic elements: melody, rhythmic properties, key—or, as it will be argued here, instrumentation) that allows one to recount "what happens" in a piece. If a composition is without noticeable articulation from beginning to end—let us think, for the sake of argument, of a stretch of music from a movie soundtrack consisting of the continuous alternation of two chords played in a uniform rhythm—we might, with that student, question whether it "has a form." For if such an arrangement constitutes form, the term seemingly describes nothing more than "what a piece is like" and is so drained of specificity as to become virtually useless.
If, rather, some "series of events," is essential to the emergence of form, we can contemplate such a series in more than one way: as an abstraction, a model or patternto be taken in at a glance, or as something more like a narrative whose nature and relationships are revealed moment by moment as we listen—during which we cultivate an illusion, at least, that we can be surprised. Both kinds of perception are essential, surely, to the apprehension of form (indeed to the larger enterprise of understanding music): the latter as we follow the formal progress of a composition, the former when the music is "recollected in tranquility."
If the idea of musical form is beset with a certain ambiguity, it is also subject, in the present climate, to a certain suspicion. An interest in form easily attracts imputations of formalism, a belief that what is important about a composition are its internal relationships, what happens within its own skin, to the exclusion of things like value, social function, participation in a culture, and the like. The origins of the narrower view, it is often thought, are entangled with the roots of Beethoven scholarship in the work of that coryphaeus of formal theory in music and explicator of the music of Beethoven, Adolph Bernard Marx. His two- and three-part lied form, five varieties of rondo form, and sonata form in those familiar three parts, together with their schematic diagrams, are what remain in the minds of students of musical form these days, to the near exclusion of the expansive idealistic theories that underlay Marx's thought. A musical composition for Marx was founded upon a "basic idea" (Idee, or Grundgedanke) that controlled all aspects of the music, most particularly its form.
While such a notion, with its sonorous echoes of Schelling and Hegel, may fall largely on deaf ears at the turn of the twenty-first century, Marx may not in fact be irreparably removed from our ways of thinking. A characteristic rondo theme, for example (the opening of the finale of Beethoven's Violin Concerto will serve), creates some rather distinct expectations as to form. A spritely tune in the "familiar" style with perfectly regular periodization and transparently simple harmony gives a signal: it alerts the experienced listener that a salient "point" of the movement at hand will likely be a series of prominent returns of this ingenuous music. Anticipation of these returns (after intervals of distraction, and, often, teasing anticipation) becomes something of a "controlling idea" of the piece. And that much awaited theme always arrives with a cargo of associations: it calls to mind things such as a sanguine outlook, an uncomplicated (perhaps rustic) mode of life, and maybe a certain ironic distance from all this on the part of the present company.
If we can be convinced that Marx's basic notion—and by extension our own—that "form" grows out of "idea" is not hopelessly opaque and idle, we may also see here something of the intersection of musical form with that other slippery concept, "genre." Genre is of course a much broader notion that may include form—certainly it does so in the case of the rondo—while carrying other implications as well: the mere size of a composition may be involved, for example, and the forces needed to perform it, as are its customary venue of performance, and sometimes an implied social function and status. Of the prominent generic properties of the instrumental concerto up to Beethoven's time (among them an association with virtuoso solo playing, for example, and an increasingly firm identification with the public concert), two, namely a particular deployment of performing forces and characteristic elements of musical form, are peculiarly intermingled.
A century before Beethoven, Corelli's Concerti grossi, Op. 6, differed from his trio sonatas only as to instrumentation. At certain points, especially as cadences approached, the four instruments of the trio-sonata setting were reinforced by others, creating a systematic alternation of texture, the familiar tutti-soil contrast of the concerto. A generation later, with the concertos of Vivaldi, and by extension those of J. S. Bach, this alternation coincided with a differentiation in musical style. The tuttis were now proper ritornellos; "presentational" in Schoenberg's sense, they tended toward harmonic stability and thematic consistency from one occurrence to the next. The solo sections, by contrast, were figurative and harmonically mobile. A coordination of thematic and harmonic design with alternation of performing forces became the defining trait of the genre; deployment of instruments had become an integral factor in the unfolding of "events," in the creation of form.
In the later eighteenth century, music theorists who wrote about larger structural issues (Riepel, Koch, Galeazzi, Kollmann) directed their attention almost exclusively to two variables, harmony and melody (or theme). In Beethoven's lifetime writers on musical form (Reicha, Momigny, Marx, Czerny) gradually shifted their focus, especially in discussion of first movements, from the one, harmonic events, to the other, the nature and disposition of themes. And in the mid-twentieth century, beginning in the United States, recognition of this shift instigated something of a reverse motion—roughly from the nineteenth- to the eighteenth-century view—in our way of thinking about form in Classical music. But these elements, harmony and theme, even taken together, as we have seen, hardly suffice to permit a narrative of the major events, an explanation of "what happens" in a concerto. For here the main thing that happens—and this was attested before the mid-eighteenth century—is still what is most obvious: the soloist and large group interact, alternating in their claims on our attention. What is special about the classical concerto is a particular kind of coordination of this first organizing principle, alternation of texture, with a second one that has to do with both theme and key. A collision of two quite opposed formal principles, the stark alternation of the old ritornello form and the "goal-oriented" forward momentum of the newer sonata form achieve a generally amicable, if at times uneasy, reconciliation.
This primary alternation of forces is played out in different ways in each of the piece's three movements (that there should be just three seemingly had been settled in the Italian repertory as far back as Torelli and Vivaldi and was overwhelmingly the rule for concertos everywhere by the later eighteenth century). The pattern occurs on both a local and long-term level. Sometimes, of course, the two groups answer each other in quick succession, creating an effect familiar in European music at least from the time of the Venetian polychoral compositions of the early seventeenth century. But the pattern is also played out on a larger, profoundly form-creating level, wherein long stretches of music are primarily the province of the solo or nearly exclusively the province of the orchestra. Solo sections usually have some orchestral accompaniment and permit occasional short interjections by the orchestra; roles are approximately reversed in the tuttis, where the solo part may simply merge into the larger ensemble, or, in a keyboard concerto, provide a continuo-like accompaniment. The single case in which the solo makes its presence forcefully felt during these sections is the intrusion of the cadenza in the final tutti section. In concertos of Mozart's and Beethoven's time, this larger organization is seen mainly in first movements, where there is a fairly predictable and orderly alternation of this larger sort.
FIRST MOVEMENTS
So the first movements of Beethoven's concertos, for all their marvelous diversity of expression, are formally rather alike. They all follow, in a general way, a common late eighteenth-century paradigm: an alternation of four tuttis (labeled T in Table 1-1) with three solo sections (labeled S) as shown, in its bare bones, in Table 1-1.
Essential to the second organizational principle in such a movement is the motion in [S.sub.1] to the secondary key, as in the exposition of a usual sonata form, and the restatement of much the same music in [T.sub.3] and [S.sub.3] together, now all in the tonic, as in a recapitulation. These central events, while creating the essential harmonic trajectory of the piece, typically account for just about all of its thematic matter as well. One more predictable element occurs toward the ends of [S.sub.1] and [S.sub.3] ("d" in Table 1-1): the closing parts of these solos are regularly given over to ebulient virtuoso solo playing—Hans Engel named these sections "display episodes." Here, thematic matter yields to brilliant passagework that drives inexorably to the end of the section; this takes place in the secondary key in [S.sub.1], of course, and in [S.sub.2], back in the original tonic. The second solo offers a diversion between those two central operations of the movement, that is, between the departure from and return to the tonic in [S.sub.1] and [T.sub.3]/[S.sub.3]. [S.sub.2] is typically restless and often wide ranging as to harmony; yet (as in the splendid pastoral sojourn in F# minor in the first movement of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto), it often quiets down and lingers for a time in a distant tonality as if to view the proceedings from afar.
The opening tutti offers a parade of the main ideas of the movement. Sometimes (as in the Third Piano Concerto) it has them all; but usually Beethoven, following Mozart's example, saves one distinctive tune for the soloist. [T.sub.1] begins and ends in the principal key; in between it may be more or less modulatory—more in Beethoven's early concertos, less in the later ones. This section, as in most Mozart concertos, includes certain "summing up" ideas, typically emphatic cadential gestures, earmarked in advance for those ritual incursions of the orchestra at the entrance of a tutti ([T.sub.2] or [T.sub.4], as [T.sub.1] and [T.sub.3] normally start with the first theme), or upon those occasional orchestral interjections that punctuate solo sections. In Beethoven's early concertos, as in most of Mozart's, the soloist breaks into the final tutti in a "surprise" last appearance to play the cadenza. That ostensibly improvisatory solo excursion is obligingly set up by the orchestra's pause on a grand cadential 6 4 sonority that fairly begs for resolution; the cadenza complies with fine discursive flair, after which the orchestra obediantly resumes where it had left off and finishes the movement. The closing sections are the only part of the eighteenth-century paradigm in which Beethoven unleashed his restless yen for formal innovation: starting with the Third Piano Concerto, the area of [T.sub.4] was to become the arena for far-reaching experiment and expansion.
A first movement of the sort we have just described, of course, shows essential features of the ubiquitous pattern (or procedure) in later eighteenth-century music that we call sonata form. And there are good historical grounds for making the comparison. Several theorists of the time called attention to similarities between first movements of sonatas and concertos. Usually, the idea was that the big solos of the concerto movement were seen to correspond with the main formal sections of a sonata's first movement. The first to make the comparison explicit was probably the Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler, polymath composer, writer on musical subjects, and virtuoso keyboard player who reportedly once competed with Beethoven in a test of improvisatory playing. Vogler wrote in 1779,
Whoever wishes to compose a concerto does well if he first makes for himself an ordinary sonata. The first part of it becomes the first solo, the other part the second solo. Before the first, after the second, and between the first and second parts, the instruments play a Vor-, Nach-, and Zwischenspiel.
Then, too, we know of a few examples from real musical practice in which composers more or less followed Vogler's recommendations. The child Mozart produced his earliest keyboard concertos by arranging sonata movements of J. C. Bach, Leonzi Honauer, J. G. Eckard, Johann Schobert, and H. F. Raupach; what he did in first movements, essentially, was to add tuttis at the appropriate structural junctures of the original sonata movements. Some three decades later, Muzio Clementi did the same in reverse. His Sonata Op. 33, No. 1 (published in 1794), had had an earlier life as a piano concerto; to change it into a (more saleable) sonata he simply removed all the principal tuttis and transcribed the internal orchestral interjections for piano.
The main thing the young Mozart had to add were the three tuttis of which Vogler spoke, one at the beginning, one after the sonata's exposition, and one at the end (other orchestral interjections are usually too fleeting to count as tuttis proper). But what Clementi removed were four tuttis, now including one after what was to be the "development," that section of the sonata form now steadily gaining in recognition as a third main division of such a movement. This corresponded with what Heinrich Christoph Koch, that magisterial explicator of compositional practice in the later eighteenth century, had to say about the matter in 1793. He compared first movements of concertos specifically with those of symphonies (always his principal exemplar for compositions of the sonata type). For him the second of two large divisions of the symphony movement is subdivided into two "principal periods" (what we have come to call development and recapitulation), necessitating, thus, the addition of four framing tuttis:
The first allegro of the concerto contains three principal periods, performed by the soloist, which alternate with four secondary periods played by the orchestra as ritornellos.... As to the three principal periods of the solo part [of the first movement of a concerto], there remains nothing more for us to say here; for they have the same outward organization, and the same course of modulation as the three principal periods in the first allegro of the symphony.
Immediately at issue, of course, is that additional tutti, the one coincident with the end of the development and the beginning of the recapitulation. This was an unstable point in the concerto movement, subject to experiment throughout the second half of the eighteenth century; and here Beethoven and Mozart part company with their predecessors. What Koch had in mind was a second solo (or development) that ends at a certain tonal remove, most often in the relative minor. The ensuing tutti is a short connective passage that steers the music back to tonic, whereupon the third solo begins the recapitulation. This is precisely the plan followed in many concertos of J. C. Bach and of the composers of the Mannheim school; it appears in the first movement of Haydn's early Klavier Concerto in F, Hob. XVIII:3, and in of several of Dittersdorf's concertos. In his mature concertos of the 1780s, Mozart almost always brought [S.sub.2] back around to the tonic, where the entrance of [T.sub.3] marks the beginning of the recapitulation. But it almost always does so unobtrusively, without fanfare, and only for a moment—the first theme then passes quickly to the solo instrument, and [S.sub.3] is underway. But for Beethoven, however the details of his procedure at this juncture may vary, this is always a moment of high drama, elaborately prepared and brought off with great exclamatory force. Even if the first theme itself is on the gentle side, as in the Violin Concerto and the Second and Fourth Piano Concertos, here it comes back fortissimo.
The shout of this homecoming creates one more point of rhetorical emphasis within the first movement of the concerto. Mozart always had just two such: the endings of [S.sub.1] and [S.sub.3] (i.e., of the exposition and recapitulation), each marked with the ritual trilled dominant-tonic close. Beethoven's addition of a third at the beginning of the recapitulation (which in every case except that of the Fourth Piano Concerto coincides with the entrance of the third tutti) invests the opening music with a heightened insistence and urgency, driving home its function as an emblem, as the identifying badge of the movement. Here we experience a happy marriage of an older idea and a newer one: the ritornello, that venerable cornerstone of the eighteenth-century concerto and aria, proves happily compatible with the much younger dramatic recapitulation.
While in the eighteenth century the concerto was often compared to the sonata, it did not seem to lose its identity in the process. Writers from Scheibe to Koch and Vogler saw the alternation of tutti and solo as the peculiarly defining property of the genre, as its first principle of organization. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in the descriptions of Czerny and Marx, the concerto became only a particular kind of sonata. What counted most was the presentation and development of themes; the special distribution of music among instruments in the concerto was only a matter of orchestration, of instrumental timbre. Czerny describes the piano concerto as "a combination of the Pianoforte with the full orchestra, in which however the latter, for the most part, merely accompanies, and is consequently subordinate." For Marx, the two forces simply combine in various ways to carry out the plan of a sonata ("Its form is that of the sonata in three movements"). The first movement adheres to "sonata form," the musical design to which he himself, in his previous volume, has given this name and devoted 100-odd pages of painstaking description that served to fix the dominant view of this sort of movement for a whole century. The second and third tuttis of the movement virtually disappeared in Marx's formulation; just who may be playing at any point in the execution of the formal plan seemed largely a matter of indifference.
It is from these formulations that we inherit the rather facile transfer to the concerto of those names coined for sonata form: exposition, development, and recapitulation. This terminology, of course, ignores what had always been special about the concerto, the large-scale alternation between the soloist and orchestra. Nor can we point to consistently reliable correspondences between the concerto's succession of solos and tuttis and the parts of sonata form. The problems begin at the beginning: which is the "real" exposition, or are there two? The first is harmonically wrong because it always stays in or returns to the tonic, and the second would seem redundant as an "exposition." The "recapitulation," in the later concertos of Mozart and those of Beethoven, is typically distributed over two of the concerto's textural divisions, [T.sub.3] and [S.sub.3]. In three of Beethoven's five piano concertos (the odd-numbered ones), the second tutti belongs exclusively neither to exposition nor development, but rather straddles the two, closing out the music in the secondary key and modulating to the the area where the second solo begins. And the final tutti would seem, in a sonata-like scheme of things, a rather useless appendage, an afterthought to a drama that has already run its course (while in the concerto of the earlier eighteenth century it had been the essential concluding member of the system of framing ritornellos). To be sure, some operations of the parts of sonata form are clearly present in the first movements of Beethoven's concertos—conspicuously so is the function of recapitulation. Because of this, and because these words and their referents are so solidly rooted in our understanding of the music of this period, such terminology will occasionally make an appearance here. But in the main we will call the sections of the first movements of Beethoven's concertos by the less prejudicial names first tutti, first solo, and the like.
Writers on the concerto from the eighteenth century to the present have used the terms ritornello and tutti more or less interchangeably for the sections played by the orchestra. Ritornello, probably the word more often used in this context, was the usual name for recurring instrumental refrains within vocal music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The eighteenth-century concerto seemingly borrowed the designation from the operatic aria—that other genre in which a professional performer, supported by a group of instruments, displayed uncommon technical and musical skills in a (semi-) public venue. That concertos were thought akin to arias is clear from the time of Scheibe, who advised those interested in the construction—of a concerto movement simply to read his section on the aria. Both genres in the earlier eighteenth century, the concerto movement and the aria, typically began and ended with essentially the same instrumental music, all in tonic—in the aria the da capo feature decreed that this music would be heard four times, before and after the "A" section in each of its two appearances. Shortened versions of these ritornellos showed up internally, transposed to the tonalities at hand. But by the time Mozart and Beethoven wrote concertos, these framing orchestral statements had been much modified: the close resemblance of the first and last, in particular, had disappeared, and the musical content of the internal ones had grown vastly less predictable. When a solo section comes to a conclusion, we cannot be sure what will be played next; all we really know is who will be playing it. So while vestiges of the venerable ritornello lingered on, in discussions of first movement it has seemed best here to abandon that word, together with all its old associations, in favor of the more neutral tutti —a term that reliably describes what happens in the music.
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix |
| Introduction | 3 |
| 1 Form in Beethoven's Concertos | 9 |
| 2 Bonn: The Court, the Composer, the Concerto | 22 |
| 3 The Virtuoso in Vienna | 42 |
| 5 Beyond the Lingua franca: Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, Op. 15 | 90 |
| 6 On the Origins of Piano Concerto No. 3 | 113 |
| 7 Toward the Middle-Period Style: Piano Concerto No | 3 in C |
| Minor, Op. 37 | 136 |
| 8 An Interlude in the French Manner: Triple Concerto in C, | |
| Op. 56 | 159 |
| 9 To Sing of Arms and Men: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, Op. 58 | 185 |
| 10 Of Purest Ray Serene: The Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61 | 217 |
| 12 On Performing Beethoven's Concertos | 279 |
| Appendix I. The Bonn Concertos and Their Sources | 305 |
| Appendix II. On Redating Piano Concerto No. 3: A Summary | 307 |
| Abbreviations in the Notes and Bibliography | 310 |
| Notes | 311 |
| Bibliography | 373 |
| Index | 385 |
| Music Examples | in pocket |
| Plates appear on pages 167 to 178 |