Our relationship to Beethoven is a deep and paradoxical one. For many musicians, he represents a kind of holy grail: His music has an intensity, rigor, and profundity which keep us in its thrall, and it is perhaps unequalled in the interpretive, technical, and even spiritual challenges it poses to performers. At the same time, Beethoven’s music is casually familiar to millions of people who do not attend concerts or consider themselves musically inclined. Two hundred years after his death, he is everywhere in the culture, yet still represents its summit. This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself. This season's Curtis courses are sponsored by Linda Richardson in loving memory of her husband, Dr. Paul Richardson. The Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation supports Curtis's lifelong learning initiatives.
Music in the Time of Haydn and Mozart
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From the course by Curtis Institute of Music
Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas
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From the lesson
How Things Were
To examine the relationship Beethoven had with the piano sonata, we begin by looking at its origins. In this lecture, we will discuss the role of music generally, and of the sonata specifically, in the time of Haydn and Mozart. This lecture will also provide an introduction to the form of the sonata—to the psychological effect sonata structure has on the listener. This background will be necessary to appreciate the innovations Beethoven introduces.
Meet the Instructors
Jonathan BissNeubauer Family Chair in Piano Studies
Performance Faculty
[MUSIC]
While Bach has been an inspiration and reference point
point for practically every composer, he really does represent the end of an era.
So Haydn, the next unarguably great composer, chronologically, marks a
new beginning.
And not only because he's the father of so
many of the forms that came to dominate the classical
era but because with him, we see the place of
a composer in society begin to undergo a serious evolution.
Not to say revolution, that comes later.
Haydn was born in 1732 which means that he
was 18 years old at the time of Bach's death.
From 1761 when Haydn was age
29 he was employed as Kapellmeister by the Esterhazys,
one of the wealthiest and most prominent Austro Hungarian families.
The chief conductors of German opera houses
with active symphony orchestras today are often called
Generalmusikdirector.
Kapellmeister is a bit like an antecedent to this in that the title implied that the
person ran the musical life of the court and had many and various responsibilities.
But while Meister may have been in the title, at the
outset, Haydn was under absolute obligation to do as told by the
Esterhazy
family.
He wrote what he was told to write,
performed what he was told to perform, and he
played chamber music with the members of aristocracy,
presumably terrible, that he was told to play with.
This state of affairs continued more or less unchanged for 18 long years.
In 1779 finally a significant change took place.
Haydn was given permission by the Esterhazys to write and publish music
of his own choice and out of his own desire. In essence, he
was given a measure of creative freedom
and ownership of his own professional career.
It's difficult in 2013 to convey what a dramatic shift this represents.
But as you can see, no one to this
point had considered creative fulfillment to be a significant
reason for Haydn's writing music, to say nothing of
Bach's. Obviously this is the time of the lead
up to the French Revolution and relations between the classes were evolving rapidly.
Whether this is the principal cause of the change
in Haydn's status or whether it was primarily a matter
of the respect he had earned in two decades of
writing great music, that's a subject for a historian to investigate.
But, what is significant for us is that while Haydn had already demonstrated
great genius, from the moment he was given a measure of musical
independence, his expressive palette broadened substantially.
I will return to this point, and to Haydn generally, in a moment.
But we're at 1779 now, and this is the
moment in which Mozart's story becomes interesting as well, historically.
Mozart was only 23.
Beethoven, for those of you keeping score, is only 8 years
old at this point, a talented kid living in remote Bonn.
But unlike Haydn, Mozart was an extraordinary prodigy, and
at the age of 23, he was fully mature.
He had already, two years earlier, written the so-called
Jeunehomme Concerto, K. 271, which many call his first fully mature work.
The writer Alfred Einstein actually believed that he never surpassed it.
Whether or not one agrees with that statement, it
is indisputable that at this point Mozart is not "promising."
He is, alongside Haydn, the greatest active composer in the world.
And they knew and liked each other, which is interesting.
According to Mozart's father--who was, in fairness, not always the most
reliable reporter--Haydn said, "I tell you before God and as an honest
man, your son is the greatest composer known to me in person and
repute. He has taste, what is more the greatest skill in composition."
It was high praise.
In 1785, Mozart published a series of six quartets which he dedicated to
Haydn and which are clearly significantly influenced by Haydn's Opus 33 quartets--
quartets which, interestingly, are the first works
Haydn wrote after his quasi liberation from Esterhazy.
Like Haydn, Mozart began his career as a
court composer, although at a much younger age, obviously.
Unlike Haydn,
he quickly began to chafe against the system.
It could have stemmed from Mozart's beginnings as
an--exploited--child prodigy, or differing circumstances within
their respective courts, or simply from the generational
gap, 23 years, between the two of them.
But whereas Haydn accepted his lot as a musical servant, albeit a
well-treated one, for most of his career,
Mozart was instantly unhappy under similar circumstances.
From the age of 16, he was employed by
the Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg, who not only dictated
what music he could or couldn't write, but which
engagements outside of his court he was allowed to accept.
Mozart first resigned from his position, without
the security of another one, in 1777,
which is before Haydn even achieved the
elevated status within court as we discussed.
After a year and a half of wandering, as far as Paris even, he came back to
Salzburg for an improved salary, but continued, unsuccessfully,
to try to establish more freedom within his position.
But when Colloredo refused to allow Mozart to accept an engagement playing for the
emperor in Vienna that would've paid particularly
well, Mozart resigned and for the final time.
His resignation was only accepted after initial refusal and legend
has it that it was accompanied by a "kick in the arse" from the Archbishop's steward.
By the way, Mozart is not the protagonist of these
lectures, but for those of you who are interested in this
topic, Mozart letters make highly entertaining reading, even though I find
that he never reveals himself in the way that Beethoven does.
The more I read about Beethoven, the more I
understand the relationship between the man and the music,
but even as I fall ever deeper in love
in with Mozart's music, the man himself remains opaque.
This "kick in the arse," honestly, is a watershed moment in the history of music.
Classical music's great civil rights moment.
It's the first time on record that a composer of note refused to
be treated as a servant, the first time a composer ever left permanent employment
without first achieving financial security.
It would be nice to be able to report that things
turned out well for Mozart, but the reality is more complicated.
Mozart's first years as a freelancer were in fact the most successful of his career.
The vast majority of Mozart's greatest piano concerti--which
is to say ten or so immortal masterworks--
these were written between 1781 and '87 and
performed by Mozart in extremely popular Viennese concerts.
In these years he also wrote Abduction from
the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni.
Each one of them was extremely well received and
really represented a fulfillment of his long held wish, which
Colloredo
had ignored, to write opera.
Mozart was, even for a time, financially secure or at least he
would have been had he and his wife not drastically overspent.
But, this all proved to be short lived.
And, the last four years of Mozart's life, from 1788 onward, they were a mess.
He fell out of fashion in Vienna where money was anyway generally scarcer
than it had been in Mozart's glory years.
Now, this is not a lecture on Mozart, so I
won't go into the various details of what went wrong.
Suffice to say that Mozart's final years were an unhappy mix of part-time
employment, poverty, ill health, and general humiliation.
Was this the result of his own bad choices, or was the
world just not ready for a
self-sufficient, self-made composer at this point?
Let's go back to Haydn.
Throughout the 1780s when Mozart was trying his luck as an
independent contractor, Haydn was working at
Esterhazy but enjoying his increased freedom.
Permitted to publish his music wherever he liked, he became
inordinately popular, and he was fantastically productive in those years.
He wrote no fewer than 30 string quartets in that decade.
And those are among his really finest and most influential
characteristic achievements. Haydn finally left Esterhazy in
1790 after 30 years, which is nearly the entire duration of Mozart's life.
And even then he kept a part-time position.
He spent much of the next 5 years in London where
his work was already known and where he became extremely popular.
To keep score again, when Haydn left Esterhazy for London the first time,
Beethoven was 19, and they did briefly meet while
Haydn was passing through Bonn on his way to London.
At any rate, London was an unambiguous triumph for Haydn.
And when he came back to Europe to stay in 1795, he was wealthy.
He continued to do some part-time work for the Esterhazys, but he lived in Vienna.
And when he was old and ill, he was carried into the hall on an
armchair to listen to a performance of his Creation.
And at home, he was attended to by his servants.
This world was very far away from the one Bach inhabited.
Many have suggested that the court system was good for music,
but I think the cases of Haydn and Mozart suggest otherwise.
It certainly worked for Bach but is Bach an example of anything?
It's not just his genius--his mastery, his professionalism, and
his work ethic work were positively freakish.
Haydn wrote fantastic music throughout his career, but the more
freedom he enjoyed at Esterhazy, the more inventive his music became.
The London years were very fertile as well.
The great London symphonies obviously were all composed there.
And even the last Vienna years, when he
was unwell and he was truly well off, are fertile.
The Creation, one of the greatest choral
works ever written, and the last ten string quartets are all from those years.
The only thing that changed is that he could spend less time
writing the symphonies, which were first required and then expected of him,
and devote his energy to writing chamber music in
oratorio, which evidently is where his creative urges lay.
And what of Mozart?
The years of freedom were decidedly mixed, financially and personally,
but they produced the vast majority of his greatest music.
He wrote literally hundreds of pieces, including most
of the ones on which his reputation rests.
And, even in those last four miserable years, he
wrote the final three symphonies, the last piano concerto,
the Requiem, obviously, the clarinet concerto, the clarinet quintet,
the last two string quintets, and Così fan tutte.
Amazing.
With Haydn, the circumstances of his final
years influenced at least the choice of genres.
Mozart, as ever, remains inscrutable.
Ironically, his unbelievable facility for expressing human
emotion in music makes him impossible to know.
He could do anything, did, and continued doing so even when the chips were down.
At any rate, in Haydn and Mozart
we have two examples of composers who struck
out on their own and, despite vastly different
practical outcomes, managed to produce timeless work without
the support--and the shackles--of their early years.
Whether or not one agrees with my theory that the
court system was of dubious or no benefit to composers,
the fact is that by the time Beethoven reaches maturity,
it was disappearing as the model for the great composers.
Beethoven moved to Vienna in 1792, at which point
Mozart was dead and had been out of the
Salzburg court for eleven years.
Haydn was a London-based celebrity and was about to become a Viennese celebrity.
This was the world that Beethoven emerged into.
Let's take a short break for a review question.
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