[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 âBonaparte 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 clichéd, 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]
