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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 -1827) Poco sostenuto - Vivace Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio Born in Bonn in 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven was the eldest son of a Singer in the musical establishment of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and, more important, grandson of the Archbishop’s former Kapellmeister, whose name he was given. The household was not a happy one. Beethoven’s father, described after his death as a considerable loss to the profits of the wine trade, became increasingly inadequate both as a singer and as a father and husband, with his wife always ready to draw invidious comparisons between him and his own father. Beethoven, however, was trained as a musician, however erratically, and duly entered the Service of the Archbishop, serving as an Organist and as a string-player in the archiepiscopal orchestra. He was already winning some distinction in Bonn, when, in 1787, he was first sent to Vienna, to study with Mozart. The illness of his mother forced an early return from this venture and her subsequent death left him with responsibility for his younger brothers, in view of his father’s domestic and Professional failures. In 1792 Beethoven was sent once more to Vienna, now to study with Haydn, whom he had met in Bonn. Beethoven’s early career in Vienna was helped very considerably by the circumstances of his move there. The Archbishop was a son of the Empress Maria Theresa and there were introductions to leading members of society in the imperial Capital. From Haydn he claimed to have learned nothing and his teacher must have been dismayed at times by his pupil’s duplicity, but he went on to take lessons also from Albrechtsberger, well known for his mastery of counterpoint, and from the Court Composer Antonio Salieri, and was able to establish an early position for himself as a pianist of remarkable ability, coupled with a clear genius in the necessarily related arts of Improvisation and composition. The onset of deafness at the turn of the Century seemed an irony of fate. It led Beethoven gradually away from a career as a virtuose performer and into an area of composition where he was able to make remarkable changes and extensions of existing practice. Deafness tended to accentuate his eccentricities and paranoia, which became extreme as time went on. At the same time it allowed him to develop an aspect of his music that some critics already regarded as academic or learned, that of counterpoint, an art in which he had acquired great mastery. He continued to develop forms inherited from his predecessors, notably Haydn and Mozart, but 24 expanded these almost to bursting-point, introducing innovation after innovation as he grew older. To following generations his music offered a challenge. For some he seemed to have brought the symphony, in particular, to a final climax, and Composers like Brahms, who drew on earlier tradition, were faced with the daunting task of continuing on a path that, for some, at least, seemed already to have reached its height. Beethoven died in 1827, leaving a body of work that has continued to provide subsequent generations with an essential heart to their repertoire, whether in concertos and symphonies or in sonatas and chamber music. Beethoven’s Sympbony No. 7 was completed in the spring of 1812, but Sketches for some of the material used occur as early as 1809, the year of Haydn’s death. In spite of his deafness, Beethoven, in his forties, was at the height of his powers, but the new symphony was greeted disparagingly by some Contemporary critics, who described it as the work of a drunkard, judging the composer ready for the mad-house. At the first performance in Vienna in December 1813, however, at a charity concert in aid of soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau, the audience responded with enthusiasm. The patriotic event, which included Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, was a collaboration with Mälzel, inventor of the metronome and, to be heard on this occasion, a mechanical trumpeter, as well as of the panharmonicon, the contraption for which Wellington’s Victory had originally been intended. The occasion brought together many of the leading musicians of Vienna to take part in the performance, of which the Violinist Spohr left an account, describing Beethoven’s curious methods of conducting and the difficulties his deafness now caused. The concert, however, was successful, and the symphony soon appeared in a variety of arrangements. The first movement Starts with a massive introduction, recalling that of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, leading to a Vivace with all the exuberance of a peasant dance. The slow movement, marked Allegretto, is dominated by the dactylic rhythm to be so favoured by Schubert, but here suggesting a sombre march. The ebullient F major scherzo has a contrasting trio section, repeated and seemingly about to return again, only to be interrupted by the final Allegro con brio. Here the whole movement proceeds to a great climax, a mighty conclusion to a symphony that had made astonishingly powerful use of relatively limited and conventional resources. Programme notes by Keith Anderson 25
