[MUSIC]

Welcome back to Field Concert Hall at the

Curtis Institute of Music
and to Exploring the Beethoven Piano
Sonatas,
week two now.
After the long preamble that was last
week's lecture, it's time to
let Beethoven take center stage, a place
that he was certainly very comfortable.
We have four classes to cover 32
sonatas, many of them of enormous
proportions so that's, that's some tough
math.
So rather than try and touch briefly on
each and
every one of them and risk saying nothing
at all,
I prefer to focus on a few sonatas, which
for
one reason or another are really special
favorites of mine
and which I find to be emblematic of a
particular moment of Beethoven's life.
In this way, I will try, in spite of doing
a lot of picking and choosing, to convey
something of the incredible journey,
the incredible evolution that took place
over the course of these 32 works.
So today, we will look at the Piano Sonata
Opus 7, a remarkable work that in a
just
world would be as well-known as the sonatas
which have
nicknames--mostly unfortunate ones like the
"Moonlight" and the "Appassionata."
Written in 1797, when Beethoven was 26,
it is very much a
work of what is commonly known as the
early period.
This idea of Beethoven's music falling
into three
distinct periods dates back to the mid
19th century,
and it has proved surprisingly durable,
even though it's certainly a flawed--or at
least a limited--way of looking at
Beethoven's music.
The idea comes from Wilhelm von Lenz, who
in
1855, wrote one of the first-ever
biographies of Beethoven.
Now, this is obviously a gross
oversimplification.
But since the idea of periodizing
Beethoven's music is really all
about simplifying --I would say
oversimplifying--I don't mind too much.
In essence the move from the early period
to the middle

to the late is a move from brilliance, to

monumentality, to spirituality.
The word "brilliance" is sometimes used in
connection to the early pieces
in a way that demeans it or, or at least
minimizes it.
But the word itself isn't inappropriate.
Beethoven was young, and a new arrival in
Vienna, which
was at the time, the unquestioned center
of the musical world,
and the first published pieces were meant
to be, among
other things, calling cards. And so,
appropriately, they are dazzling.
This brilliance is coupled with a certain
traditionalism but least compared to Beethoven's
later music anyway. Or maybe it will be
better to say
that it reveals an internal war waging
within Beethoven.
Between wanting to hew to existing models
and wanting to break new ground.
The breaking new ground side ultimately
always wins with Beethoven, but you can see a certain
conservatism even in his choice of forms.
Early
in life, he was perpetually writing piano sonatas.
And there are a number of early string quartets
and piano trios as well.
And these, these are Haydn's forms.
And it's worth
remembering that Beethoven initially
traveled to Vienna in hopes
of studying with Mozart but ultimately ended up
studying with Haydn.The relationship
wasn't always smooth.
But not only did Beethoven pay a kind
of homage to Haydn with his choices of
genre, he dedicated his first published
works, those are the Opus 1 piano trios to him.
It's, it's good to remember that Beethoven
did not, in fact emerge fully formed
from the head of Zeus.
The second and third periods
are not really the subject
of this lecture but just briefly
the works of the middle period,
diverse as they are, do tend to be heroic.
There are many examples of this such as the
Waldstein Sonata and the Appassionata Sonata
but the most obvious one is the 3rd Symphony,
the Eroica, which actually was orginally titled
Bonaparte Symphony".
Beethoven crossed the word "Bonaparte"
violently off of the title page
after Napoleon declared himself Emperor,
which is worth mentioning as it reveals a great deal
about what Beethoven thought did
and did not constitute heroism.

But in fairness, he may have also crossed the title out because
he was very very queazy about suggesting
that his music was programmatic.
At least until much later in his life,
but more on that to come later.
Whereas these ideas of the first two periods
feel somewhat banal,
or at the very least clichd, there really is no arguing
with the notion that spirituality is a major concern
in the late works.
What is most magnificent in the late works
is the way
in which they manage to look simultaneously
all the way outward,
to the universe, and all the way inward,
into his own soul.
In another words, they are both superhuman
and utterly human.
Unsurprisingly, the other most salient feature of the late works
is their refusal to be restricted by any sort of convention,
to fall back on rhetoric.
So, that is the three-period idea in a
nutshell.
Some musicologists will say that the
better division would be
a four-period one, maybe yes, maybe no, I'm
not sure.
In my view, the whole idea really is a bit
of a fallacy.
First of all, the signature qualities of
each of
the three periods can be found throughout
Beethoven's life.
One of the most fascinating things
about Beethoven's output is that while his
musical
language underwent a massive evolution,
his principle concerns,
his fundamental musical personality, is
largely consistent from
the very first works to the very last.
The other problem with dividing
Beethoven's work into periods, of course,
is that his treatment of sonata form was
really always in flux.
There are virtually no works where you see
him resting
on his laurels, falling back on a paradigm
that was already in place.
Inventive as Haydn and Mozart were,
they were not above doing this.
You know the need to move forward is a distinctly
Beethoven value, which is part
of why he seems like an odd choice of
composer to divide into chunks.
But while the three-period model is pretty
reductive, and
it is certainly difficult to draw a line
between the early sonatas, which are quite
heroic, and the middle ones, which can be

extremely brilliant, there is a sense in

which the thirteen first sonatas, all
written between 1795 and 1800, form a unit.
They have a common language and while they
are impressively varied in certain ways,
many of the same formal, formal principles
unite them.
By the way, when I say the first 13
sonatas, this is a bit confusing.
The two little sonatas Opus 49 are
typically known as
Numbers 19 and 20 on account of their
publication date.
But in fact, they were written much, much
earlier--before Opus 7 even.
So when I refer to the first 13 sonatas, I
mean the first 11 published ones,
plus those two.
The sonata which is commonly known as
number 12, Sonata
Opus 26, is no longer a part of this
group.
I'm, I'm sorry, another example of bad
math intruding on this lecture.
So the early period finds Beethoven
already fully mature, but still
aspirational.
One can hear it in the desire to, to
impress with brilliance-both compositional and instrumental
brilliance-that is occassionally just slightly show-offy.
Maybe ultimately this is the major
stylistic issue that
separates the early period from the middle
and late ones.
The brilliance--and again, I'm talking
about compositional and instrumental
brilliance both-in later works is often impressive, as
impressive.
Indeed in middle and late Beethoven his
solutions
to the built in problems of sonata form can
really take your breath away.
But the brilliance is usually subordinated
to a musical purpose.
It is only early on, principally in the
1790s, that we occasionally
sense that Beethoven is eager to show us
what he can do.
Still, the personality is fully formed by
Opus 1.
In fact, the designation "Opus 1"
is somewhat misleading
in that Beethoven had written a lot of
music before he gave a work an opus
number.
There are, in fact, more than 200 works
without opus numbers--

enough that there is a separate catalog

devoted to them.
Many of these works were written later on
and were not assigned an opus number for
this reason or for that.
But many of them do date from the pre-"opus"
era.
By the time Beethoven considered a work
worthy of an opus
number, he had made a number of very adult, life-altering decisions.
He'd left Bonn on his own for Vienna,
where he would spend the rest of his life.
And in the process he had broken free of his
family,
his father in particular, who was wildly
ambitious
on his son's behalf and really aggressive
to the point of being an abusive parent.
So, the Beethoven who published first
opuses was no child.
He'd already lived a fair bit, and he knew
his own mind.
So, unlike early catalog Mozart, these are
definitely not prodigy pieces.
[INAUDIBLE]
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Let's take a short break for a review question.
[BLANK_AUDIO]