If Beethoven’s best-known and most widely performed works are the nine
symphonies, his chamber music represents the most far-reaching,
diversified, profound, original, spiritualized, and at the same time the
most problematic manifestations of his genius. It is through his
quartets, when all’s said, that his influence has been most felt. In
these dwell the germs of more or less everything out of which subsequent
music has, in one way or another, developed. If Beethoven may be called
a “musician of the future” it is by reason of his sixteen string
quartets more than by anything else. More than all else he composed they
continue, in great measure, to be in advance not only of the master’s
own time but even of our own.
It may be said that his chamber music spanned his life. The earliest
specimens of it date from his Bonn days, from around his fifteenth year.
From then on they continued (intermittently, it is true) almost up to
the time of his death—indeed, the last composition he completed was a
new finale for the B-flat Quartet, opus 130, to replace the original
one, the Great Fugue, now opus 133, which early audiences could not
grasp and which, to this very day, is a stumbling block for most hearers
although one of the most extraordinary and transcendent pages Beethoven
ever produced. And though at his demise he left a quantity of sketches
(including studies for a tenth symphony) there is every reason to assume
that an even more copious quantity of chamber music might have come from
his pen had he lived five or ten years longer.
The mass of such chamber music as he did bequeath us includes sonatas
for piano and violin as well as for piano and cello; a Quintet in C
major, opus 29, for two violins, two violas, and cello, dating from
1801; a quintet fugue in D, written in 1817 but published as opus 137; a
number of trios for a variety of instrumental combinations, several
duets and serenades, and other miscellany for more or less intimate
performance. Lastly, the famous Septet in E flat, for clarinet, horn,
bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double-bass, opus 20. This septet was
composed about 1800 and was at one time so immeasurably popular that
Beethoven himself wearied of it. Despite the vogue it long enjoyed, it
is far from one of its creator’s most inspired flights.
The series of trios for piano and strings constitute something of a
counterpart to the great string quartets. Opus 1 consists of three such
trios, and the composer’s friend Ries wrote that “when the three were
first heard by the musical world at one of Prince Lichnowsky’s soirées
nearly all the foremost artists and amateurs of Vienna were invited,
among them Haydn, whose opinion was awaited with intense interest.” The
trios caused a sensation. Haydn, who was enthusiastic about them on the
whole, had reservations to make about the third, in C minor, and advised
the composer not to publish it. Beethoven took this advice in bad part,
the more so because he regarded this trio as the best, and imagined that
his famous contemporary was actuated by envy. The truth of the matter
was that Haydn, struck by the bold originality of the score, was
honestly afraid that the public might not understand it. But it is
precisely this quality that has lifted the C minor Trio far above the
other two of opus 1.
The other trios for piano and strings are the pair in D major and
E-flat, opus 70, and the supremely great one in B flat, opus 97, called
the “Archduke” Trio because it was dedicated to the composer’s friend
and pupil, the Archduke Rudolph. The Opus 70 creations are remarkable
for the somewhat restless, indeed forbidding, quality that fills some of
their pages. The first has been named the “Ghost” Trio on account of an
eerie figure that pervades the slow movement and lends it a strangely
weird and hollow sound. The “Archduke” Trio has a spaciousness and
elevation, particularly in its Largo, which is a series of five
variations on a theme in the character of a hymn. Wisely enough,
Beethoven placed the Scherzo before the profound slow movement, as he
was again to do in the “Hammerklavier” Sonata and the Ninth Symphony.
But this scherzo utilizes in its middle part a curious, winding
chromatic figure which ranks with the master’s most striking ideas at
this stage of his progress.
Between 1799 and 1802 Beethoven wrote eight of his ten sonatas for
violin and piano. The most famous of these eight are the fifth—the
so-called “Spring” Sonata in F, opus 24, which opens with a theme of
lovely grace and has an adorable serenity throughout its four
movements—and the set in A major, C minor, and G major, opus 30, which
was published with a dedication to Czar Alexander I of Russia. The C
minor Sonata reveals a heroic quality which lends it something of the
spirit of the “Eroica” Symphony, and the closing Presto of the finale
has about it an element of dramatic grandeur. However, none of these
sonatas quite reaches the level of the “Kreutzer” or the much later
Sonata in G major, opus 96. The A major, opus 47, derived its name from
the fact that it was dedicated to Rudolph Kreutzer. It was first played
by a mulatto violinist named Bridgetower, while the composer performed
the piano part. Despite the haste with which the work was composed
(Czerny spoke of “four days”), the sonata, “written in a very
concertante style,” has remained probably the best-known and most widely
popular of all Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano. The music has
an expansiveness and plenitude that surpass any other work Beethoven
designed for this instrumental combination. The finale, a whirlwind
Presto originally conceived for the first sonata of the opus 30 set,
influenced Schubert when he composed the last movement of his D minor
Quartet. Undoubtedly it is the most original, not to say the most
exciting, part of the work—more so, indeed, than the Andante, with its
series of variations so arranged that each artist is given his adroitly
balanced share.
The G major Sonata, composed in 1812 and first performed by the French
violinist Pierre Rode and the Archduke Rudolph, is unquestionably the
most intellectual and the subtlest of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. In any
case it has some of the unmistakable traits of the master’s later style
about it.
The sonatas for cello and piano, in F major and G minor, were composed
as early as 1796 and performed in Berlin before the King of Prussia by
Beethoven and the Court cellist, Duport. But the memorable cello sonatas
of Beethoven’s are the one in A major, opus 69, one of his most lavish
and magnificent works; and the C major and D major, opus 102. The first
named, like the “Kreutzer” Sonata or the “Appassionata” of the piano
series, is a creation that needs no defense and no far-fetched
explanations. On the other hand, the opus 102 pair, despite their
indisputable profundities, are among Beethoven’s more unapproachable and
recondite works. Indeed, they have about them a certain hard-shelled
quality which scarcely lends them an especially intimate or endearing
effect.