Notes for: July 21, 2015
A composer’s “Opus 1” is rarely the first music he has written or had performed. Rather, it is the work that he has selected to introduce himself to the musical public and to support his claim to that public’s continuing attention.
This was particularly true in the case of Beethoven’s three piano trios, Op.1, the first of which we hear this evening. Before publishing the piano trios in 1795, Beethoven had completed a ballet, two cantatas, a piano concerto, nine quartets, four trios, four duos, a quintet, a wind octet, nine violin pieces, 15 piano pieces and some 30 songs. Thus, the three Op.1 piano trios were the work of an experienced craftsman, not an apprentice.
But Beethoven reached the decision to publish the three trios only after a considerable investment of time and effort. Actually, he had sketched them out more than two years earlier before coming to Vienna from Bonn, his home town. He continued working on them while studying composition with Haydn, and they were first played at the home of Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s patron, with Haydn in attendance. The older composer was less than enthusiastic about the third trio, putting a strain on the relations between the two men that was never fully resolved.
A friend and student of Beethoven, Ferdinand Ries, described the event as follows:
Most of the artists and music lovers were invited, especially Haydn, for whose opinion all were eager. The trios were played, and at once commanded extraordinary attention. Haydn also said many pretty things about them, but advised Beethoven not to publish the third, in C minor. This astonished Beethoven inasmuch as he considered the third the best of the trios. Consequently, Haydn’s remark left a bad impression on Beethoven, and led him to think that Haydn was envious, jealous, and ill-disposed toward him.
Surely, Beethoven was being unfair – Haydn, after all, was a composer of international reputation, and jealousy had never colored his earlier relations with Mozart. Haydn subsequently told Ries that he had doubted only whether the third trio “would so quickly and easily be understood and so favorably received by the public,” and there is no reason to question the old man’s honesty.
But the tension between the two composers over the trios continued. When Haydn suggested that Beethoven be identified on the printed score as “pupil of Haydn,” Beethoven refused. According to Ries, Beethoven told friends that “although he had had some instruction from Haydn, he had never learned anything from him.” Apparently, Beethoven had second thoughts: While he dedicated his Op.1 trios to Prince Lichnowsky, he dedicated his Op. 2, three piano sonatas, to Haydn.
During the two years between the first performance of the trios and their publication in 1795, Beethoven revised the trios and encouraged other private performances to create a market for the published sheet music. Equally important, he worked concurrently on the three piano sonatas, a string trio and a string quintet, all published in 1796. In other words, he selected the three trios for publication as the opening salvo in a carefully prepared and many-sided self-promotion.
Beethoven’s strategy proved sound. The plates for the three trios were made and the music printed by the leading Viennese firm of Artaria & Co., but Beethoven handled the sales personally through subscriptions. Beethoven ended up selling 245 copies – a large sale for a young composer in those days, and after paying Artaria, he earned enough of a profit to cover his basic living expenses for nearly a year. Further, the list of subscribers included a number of aristocrats who were to become future patrons.
To modern ears, the three piano trios seem cast in the classical mold that Beethoven inherited from Haydn and Mozart, but the tread of the rebellious Beethoven to come can also be heard. For one thing, Beethoven has cast off the balanced three-movement structure - fast-slow-fast - of his predecessors by adding a scherzo or minuet. For another, he has emancipated the cello from the limited accompanying role to which Haydn had assigned it, enriching the texture and providing more scope for thematic development.
Most important, Beethoven has expanded the expressive content of the trios. This is most pronounced in the first and third trios, the third being the one most likely to be encountered in today’s concert halls. The second of the group, which we hear this evening, has been likened to “a kind of gentle middle child,” with three attractive movements that might have been written by Haydn but also including a truly path-breaking slow movement.
Following Haydn’s model, the first movement opens with an Adagio introduction, followed by an Allegro vivace main section in sonata form with the conventional presentation, development and recapitulation of two main themes followed by a substantial coda.
The slow movement, however, is freer in form and content, and clearly anticipates the strong romantic Beethoven to come. In the words of Beethoven biographer Lewis Lockwood:
This Largo con espressione is unexcelled by the slow movement of any piano trio written up to this time, and for sheer lyrical beauty it outdoes those of his early piano sonatas. Here for the first time in Beethoven’s keyboard chamber music the strings achieve complete parity with the piano, sharing the leading role so fully that we can no longer speak of the work as a keyboard composition with an important violin part and a subordinated cello part (as in Haydn’s late trios). Instead, the strings emerge as leading voices in significant portions of the movement, one of the most poignant of his earlier slow movements.
The third and fourth movements return to the Haydn model. The third movement Scherzo is mild by Beethoven’s standards - no fierce tempo, jarring syncopations or cross-rhythms. The finale is a presto Rondo evoking Haydn’s sense of humor.