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Beethoven Perspectives

Kristóf Baráti, violin; Klára Würtz, pianoBeethoven Sonatas, Part I

Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 8 in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3 (1801-02)(1770-1827) Allegro assai

Tempo di Minuetto, ma molto moderato e graziosoAllegro vivace

Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 2 in A Major, Op. 12, No. 2 (1797-98)Allegro vivaceAndante, più tosto allegrettoAllegro piacevole

INTERMISSION

Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 9 in A Major, “Kreutzer,” Op. 47 (1802-04)

Adagio sostenuto - PrestoAndante con variazioniPresto

The Menil Series is underwritten by Louisa Stude Sarofim.

This performance are sponsored by The Roff Foundation.

The Menil CollectionMonday, April 25, 2016; 7:30 pm

Da CameraSarah Rothenberg,

artistic and

general director

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The Menil Series is underwritten by Louisa Stude Sarofim.

This performance are sponsored by The Roff Foundation.

Beethoven Perspectives

Kristóf Baráti, violin; Klára Würtz, pianoBeethoven Sonatas, Part II

Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 12, No. 3 (1797-98)(1770-1827) Allegro con spirito

Adagio con molta espressioneRondo. Allegro molto

Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 5 in F Major, “Spring,” Op. 24 (1800-01)AllegroAdagio molto espressivoScherzo. Allegro moltoRondo. Allegro ma non troppo

INTERMISSION

Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 10 in G Major, “The Cockcrow,” Op. 96 (1812)

Allegro moderatoAdagio espressivoScherzo. AllegroPoco Allegretto

The Menil CollectionTuesday, April 26, 2016; 7:30 pm

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Sonata in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3The three Op. 30 sonatas, completed in 1802, were dedicated to Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Unluckily for Beethoven, the Tsar overlooked the small matter of offering him any financial reward, and more than a decade later the com-poser took advantage of his visit to the Congress of Vienna together with his wife, Elisabeth Alexiewna, and of-fered the pair a gentle reminder. He put together a hastily-composed Po-lonaise for piano and presented it to the Tsarina. The ploy worked: when she received the new piece, Elisabeth Alexiewna gave Beethoven 50 ducats, and asked if he had ever received any-thing for the violin sonatas. On being informed in the negative, she threw in a further 100 ducats. Beethoven seems not to have been put off by the inci-dent, and at one stage he intended to dedicate his Ninth Symphony to Al-exander I. However, the Tsar died in 1825, the year before the symphony appeared in print, and the work’s title-page bore instead the name of Fried-rich Wilhelm III of Prussia.

The last portion of the Op. 30 sonatas to be composed was the fi-nale of the A Major opening work. Beethoven had originally written a wholly different finale, but he subse-quently pressed it into service for the Kreutzer Sonata Op. 47, and replaced it with a set of variations on a gentle Allegretto theme. According to his pupil and early biographer Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven removed the original piece from Op. 30 No.1 because it was too brilliant to accord with the mood of the remainder of the work. Ries’s assertion has been widely accepted, though Beethoven is more likely to have worried that in its scope the orig-inal finale overwhelmed the preced-ing movements.

The centrepiece of the Op. 30 so-natas is a dramatic piece in the key of C Minor, but the last of the series is among Beethoven’s most sparkling chamber works. Despite the vivacity of its outer movements, he did not feel

the need to provide a true slow move-ment of the type to be found in the first two sonatas of the series. Instead, the middle movement has the charac-ter of a minuet and trio, and since the music never strays far from its home key, the piece provides an oasis of se-renity between the energetic outer movements.

If the middle movement is ton-ally as static as could be imagined, the opening Allegro derives much of its nervous energy from an unusual de-gree of harmonic instability. The main theme is itself curiously laconic, with sudden dynamic contrasts imparting a disquieting feeling of abruptness, and the middle section of the piece is un-usually brief – a mere 25 measures, all of them in the minor, taking their cue from the agitated closing moments of the movement’s first stage. As for the finale, it begins with the piano on its own, playing what sounds for all the world like the accompaniment to a theme that has not yet been heard – except that when the violin enters,its line is scarcely more thematic. To-wards the end, Beethoven compounds the joke by having the piano enter in a distant key, and with what is in ef-fect an accompaniment to its original accompaniment: a series of strummed chords – or what in less polite musi-cal circles would be designated as ‘till ready.’

Sonata in A Major, Op. 12, No. 2 Beethoven’s first three violin sonatas, Op. 12, appeared early in 1799 with a dedication to the Viennese court Ka-pellmeister, Antonio Salieri. In the same year, Salieri gave Beethoven in-struction in the Italian vocal style, and at least one of his Italianate composi-tions of the period, the aria No, non turbarti, has corrections that appear to be in his teacher’s hand. Beethoven further ingratiated himself with Sal-ieri at this time by composing a set of piano variations on the aria, La stessa, la stessima from the Italian compos-er’s Falstaff.

Of the Op. 12 sonatas it is the A Major middle work that finds Beethoven at his wittiest. The piece even begins by reversing the idiomat-ic roles of the two instruments, giving an accompaniment in waltz-rhythm to the violin in imitation of a typical left-hand keyboard part, and a violin-like tune to the piano. The almost na-ïve simplicity of the theme itself is al-ready very much tongue-in-cheek; and so, too, is the sudden switch of key at the movement’s mid-point, and the manner in which the theme’s sighing two-note phrases are extended at the end to form a conclusion in comically hesitant style.

Beethoven qualifies the middle movement’s ‘Andante’ marking by suggesting that it should be treated more like an Allegretto, and the mu-sic is unusually simple and symmetri-cal for him. No doubt, he felt that the relaxed, lyrical character of the finale was adequate compensation for the lack of any serene slow movement in the work. The finale’s theme is curiously dislocated, with each of its three phrases left hanging in mid-air before the next enters in a new key. The theme is rounded off with a tiny phrase which Beethoven uses much later in the piece, as an accompani-ment to the expansive melody of the central episode. Like the opening movement, the piece comes to an end in a spirit of pure farce, with the vio-linist playing an emphatic closing ca-dence, only to hear his partner contin-ue for a further bar-and-a-half.

Sonata in A, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”On 24 May 1803 Beethoven took part in the first performance of a new and hastily written sonata for piano and violin. His partner was the imposing-ly-named George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, whom he had met short-ly before, and who was by all accounts a remarkable player. He had been a child prodigy, and made his debut in 1789 at the Concert spirituel in Paris. The playing of the 9-year-old black

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violinist was greeted with enthusiasm by the Mercure de France, in a review whose sentiments still resonate today:

His talent, as genuine as it is pre-cocious, is one of the best answers that one can give those philoso-phers who want to deprive those of his nation and of his colour of the right to distinguish them-selves in the arts.

The two new movements of Beethoven’s sonata were, it seems, ready only just in time for the concert (the finale, as we have seen, had been composed earlier, for the A major So-nata Op. 30 No. 1), and Bridgetower had to play the slow movement from the composer’s autograph, as it was too late to arrange for a copy to be made. However, the two men subse-quently fell out, and Beethoven even-tually inscribed the sonata to Rodol-phe Kreutzer. There’s some irony in the fact that Beethoven’s most famous violin sonata has become one of his few works known under the name of its dedicatee: not only did the decision to dedicate the work to Kreutzer rep-resent a last-minute change of heart on Beethoven’s part, but it seems that the famous French violinist never ac-tually deigned to perform it. (Accord-ing to a sarcastic comment in Berlioz’s Mémoires, Kreutzer found the piece “outrageously unintelligible.”)

For all the mystique attached to it, the “Kreutzer” Op. 47 is scarcely typical of Beethoven’s violin sona-tas as a whole. It is the grandest and most extrovert among them, and, as the composer himself put it, scritto in un[o] stilo molto concertante, quasi come d’un concerto (“written in a very concertante style, almost like that of a concerto”). If the elegantly ornate variations that form its centrepiece can seem disappointingly conven-tional in comparison with the turbu-lent outer movements, they provide a much-needed interlude of order and symmetry.

The “Kreutzer” is alone among Beethoven’s violin sonatas in having a slow introduction, and the four ma-

jestic bars with which it begins form one of his most strikingly original con-ceptions. With the exception of the reappearance of the short chorale-like second subject during the latter stages of the piece, those initial bars provide the only A Major music in the opening movement: not only is the remainder of the introduction unstable, but the main body of the movement itself is in the minor. This is perhaps the most forceful piece of its kind Beethoven had written thus far, and it owes its driving energy largely to elemental repetition.

The peremptory chord of A Major that prefaces the tarantella-like finale was inserted on Beethoven’s instruc-tions when the piece was transferred from the Sonata Op. 30 No. 1 to the Kreutzer. Since in its new context the finale follows a slow movement that is in a more distant key than that of the earlier work, the chord serves to re-establish the home key. In the coda, the music’s whirlwind speed slows to Adagio, and the frequent alternations of opposing tempi in this passage seem to echo a curious interpolation – a sort of joker in the pack -- that hadappeared on two earlier occasions, fea-turing a jarring change in meter.

The “Kreutzer” Sonata is the most brilliant among Beethoven’s works of the kind – a piece addressed above all to virtuoso performers. In the late 19th century it acquired a certain mystique – thanks in no small part to Tolstoy’sstory which borrowed its title. The story tells of a jealous husband who murders his wife when he suspects her of having an affair with the violin-ist with whom she plays duos at their house. One of the works they perform is the Kreutzer Sonata, whose opening ‘presto’ has a shattering effect on the jealous husband’s feelings. “I had the illusion,” he tells his fellow-traveller on the train at the start of the novella, “that I was discovering entirely new emotions, new possibilities I’d known nothing of before then.” In its turn, Tolstoy’s story of tragic love inspired Janacek to compose the first of his two string quartets.

Sonata in E Flat, Op. 12, No. 3 Beethoven composed all but the last of his 10 violin sonatas within the comparatively brief time-span of a half-dozen years, from 1798 to 1803. As a result, they do not show the same stylistic range and development as do his 16 string quartets, or even the five cello sonatas, but several of them nev-ertheless find Beethoven at important stylistic turning-points. The three so-natas of Op. 30 stand on the thresh-old of what is commonly defined as his middle period: in the year after he completed them he began work on his Eroica Symphony. The last Sonata, Op. 96, composed nearly a decade after its predecessor, the “Kreutzer” Op. 47, oc-cupies an isolated position. It is sure-ly the most beautiful and original of them all, and together with the Arch-duke Piano Trio it marks the end of a period of consolidation. Beethoven’s next chamber works, the two Cello So-natas Op. 102, followed after a gap of nearly three years. With them, his late style was firmly established.

Among Beethoven’s first triptych of violin sonatas, Op. 12, the grandest work is the last, in E flat. It calls for a virtuoso pianist, and Beethoven was to remember some of the sweeping keyboard figuration from its opening movement when he came to write his Piano Concerto No. 3. Perhaps the Alle-gro’s most memorable moment is pro-vided by a characteristically hushed approach to the recapitulation. Here, the music moves into a distant key, and appears momentarily to hang in suspension, as both instruments give out a broad, chorale-like melody over a rustling tremolando accompaniment, before the recapitulation brings the music down to earth with a bump.

The slow movement – a deeply ex-pressive Adagio in the comparatively remote key of C Major - consists of a single slowly evolving melody, and even the apparently new idea intro-duced in the coda derives from the same theme’s sharply dotted rhythm. As for the rondo finale, its theme is sur-

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prisingly four-square for Beethoven, but he has a trick or two up his sleeve for the coda, where it provides the springboard for a closely-worked epi-sode in fugal style, before the piece is brought to a grandiose conclusion.

Sonata in F, Op. 24, “Spring”The “Spring” Sonata was originally designed as a companion-piece to an austere sonata in the key of A Minor. Beethoven worked on the two pieces simultaneously, and they appeared to-gether in October 1801 under the sin-gle opus number of 23. Only a quirk of publishing led to their separation in a new edition the following year: the violin parts of the two sonatas had clearly been assign to separate engrav-ers, and through an oversight they had been prepared in different page layouts – one vertical, the other hori-zontal. In order to spare the expense of reengraving one of the parts, the works were reissued individually with consecutive opus numbers. Both bore a dedication to the banker and art collector Moritz von Fries, to whom Beethoven was later to inscribe his Seventh Symphony.

The two violin sonatas offer a vivid illustration of the remarkable degree to which Beethoven was able to reinvent his creative persona with each new work, and the terse Op. 23 Sonata could scarcely offer a stronger contrast to the relaxation of its famous successor. For all its apparent sponta-neity, the “Spring” Sonata’s opening melody cost Beethoven a good deal of effort, and his sketches bear witness to the gradual way in which it evolved. The melody’s expansive lyricism was something new to his style, particular-ly at the start of a work rather than in the traditionally more relaxed second subject. The second subject is, in fact, much more taut and incisive than the first – almost as though Beethoven’s intention were to reverse the custom-ary roles of the exposition’s two stag-es.

The slow movement begins with a full bar of piano accompaniment played on its own. The idea is one

that Mozart had used in the middle movement of what is perhaps the greatest of all his violin sonatas, K. 526; and when Beethoven’s accom-paniment is given out by the pianist in octaves while the melody is trans-ferred to the violin, the texture of Mo-zart’s piece is reproduced even more closely. Beethoven’s accompaniment is of utmost simplicity: no Clementi, Kuhlau, Diabelli or other contempo-rary purveyor of pedagogic piano sonatinas could have dreamed that the expedient of the so-called ‘Alberti’ bass which they exploited so relent-lessly could ever have been raised to such expressive heights. Of particular beauty is the intricately ornamented first reprise of the main theme, where the rapid repeated notes with which the piano fills out the melody seem to strive towards vocal vibrato.

Just as Beethoven’s early set of pia-no trios Op. 1 had broken new ground by introducing a scherzo or minuet movement into the domain of cham-ber music with piano, so the “Spring” Sonata is the composer’s first work of its kind similarly to follow a four-movement pattern. From his sketches it is clear that Beethoven had decided to include the additional movement before he decided on its character: his first thought was to cast the piece in the form of an old-fashioned minuet. No doubt realising that a stronger foil to the rhythmically relaxed style of the surrounding movements was needed, Beethoven speeded up his ini-tial sketch, and transformed it to as-tonishing effect into a genuine scher-zo – one that makes its joke out of the manner in which the violinist appears constantly to be lagging behind his partner. Perhaps in view of the scher-zo’s deliberate lapses of ensemble, the trio begins in a spirit of exaggerated togetherness, with both players un-folding a rapid stream of 8th-notes.

The finale returns to the lyri-cal atmosphere of the sonata’s open-ing movement, though that does not prevent it from including a dramatic, syncopated minor-mode episode at its centre. Towards the end, Beethoven

calmly introduces a new chorale-like idea, before the music gathers strength again for a forceful conclusion.

Sonata in G, Op. 96 Like the “Kreutzer” Op. 47, Beethoven’s last violin sonata was written for a celebrated French player; and once again, Beethoven was to be disap-pointed with the outcome – though at least in this instance he could take comfort in the fact that Pierre Rode did venture to perform the piece. He had almost certainly composed its first three movements in advance of the well known violinist’s arrival in Vienna, but he hesitated for some time over the style of its finale. As he explained to his foremost patron, Archduke Rudolph, who was the pia-nist in the work’s premiere:

I did not hurry over the last movement merely for the sake of punctuality, the more so as I had to write it with greater consid-eration in respect of the playing of Rode. In our finales we like to have more boisterous passages, but this is not to R’s taste, and it did hinder me somewhat.

Beethoven’s eventual compro-mise between Rode’s intimate style of playing and the Viennese taste for more extrovert fare was to confine the ‘more boisterous’ passages to the fina-le’s coda. But Rode’s career was clearly in decline, and as things turned out Beethoven was dissatisfied with his playing.

The Op. 96 Sonata is a work that finds Beethoven’s style at its most serene and expansive. It begins with one of his most magical and original inspirations: a quietly rustling violin trill. The trill, and the theme it engen-ders, is followed by a series of arching arpeggios on both instruments whose expansiveness seems to open up in-finite vistas. Towards the end of the movement the music reaches a mo-ment of stasis, with a long-sustained trill, before the arpeggios return - this time moving downwards, and draw-ing the piece inexorably towards its conclusion.

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The slow movement is a wonder-ful example of Beethoven’s ability to create an atmosphere of rapt intensity. Its distant cousin is the Adagio of the Pathétique piano sonata, which also spins a serene melody above a smooth accompaniment in 16th-notes; but Beethoven’s stroke of genius in the Op. 96 Sonata is to prolong the theme’s dy-ing phrase at the point where the vio-lin enters, fusing it with a reiteration of the accompaniment’s innervoice ‘rocking’ figure, until a moment of complete stillness is reached. No less masterly and original is the transition to the scherzo – the only occasion on which Beethoven fused the two inner movements of a four-movement work

together in this manner. As the slow movement reaches a long drawn-out conclusion of infinite calm, the violin-ist adds a single dissonant note to its dying strains. That dissonance forms the springboard for the theme of the scherzo, which – unusually – is in the minor. Following the Ländler-like trio section, Beethoven adds a coda which transforms the scherzo’s theme into the major, as if in acknowledgement of the fact that this was the form it might have taken in the first place, had the harmonic inspiration of the join between the two middle move-ments not dictated otherwise.

The finale is a set of variations on

a theme of almost folk-like cheerful-ness. Its simplicity does not, however, prevent Beethoven from allowing the variations themselves to reach an ex-pressive climax with an ornate Adagio in which the piano’s intricate chro-matic cadenzas seem to leave the mu-sic hanging in timeless suspension. Even the boisterous final Allegro vari-ation is not allowed to run its course unimpeded: it is interrupted first by a mysterious fugato in the minor whose subject traces the variations theme’s outline while at the same time de-priving its characteristic rhythm; and then, immediately before the close, by a nostalgic reminiscence of the origi-nal theme.

Misha Donat