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BEETHOVEN'S SONATAS

Beethoven; Sonate per Pianoforte. Nuova Edizione Critica riveduta e corretta da ALFREDO CASELLA. Three Vols. Ricordi. 1926.

EETHOVEN and Milton have much in common, but this

chiefly that both have been dragged into the baser parts of instruction and doled out by inches to unenchanted learners. Those are fortunate who come to "Paradise Lost" without associations of parsing, or to Beethoven's Sonatas without memories of reluctant digitation. Teachers seem unaware in their professional hours that Beethoven wrote his Sonatas as an expression of his spirit and not as penance for the young. In this notable year it is well to remind ourselves that they form a rich and significant chapter, both in the history of music and in the story of the composer's life. The first (Op. 2, No. 1) was written in 1795, when Mozart had been dead three years, and Beethoven himself was twenty-four; the last (Op. 111) was finished in 1822, when Schubert, whose twenty-five years had already flowered into unmatched fertility, offered in dumb and awkward reverence a set of Variations to the master whom he was to follow so swiftly to a neighbouring grave in the Währinger cemetery. The Sonata period, 1795-1822, has its striking parallels in other regions of human activity. It covers the career of Napoleon from its overture before the Tuileries on the 15th Vendémiaire to the last act of the tragedy at St. Helena. It coincides with the most productive years of Goethe, of Wordsworth, and of Scott. It saw the transformation of Turner from an accurate topographical draughtsman into the poet of light made visible. It covers the whole life of Shelley, who was born in the year of Beethoven's entry to Vienna, and died in the year of the last Sonata. It followed the course of Blake's visions from "The Song of Los " (who "sang to four harps at the tables of Eternity") to "The Ghost of Abel," with its lines that have a singular relevance to the composer who wrote of his Pastoral Symphony," Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung, als Mälerei":

Nature has no Outline,

But Imagination has. Nature has no Tune, but Imagination has.
Nature has no Supernatural, and dissolves: Imagination is
Eternity.

The period was, in fact, part of the great transit to the modern world of art in which form is no longer its own excuse for being, but is born again as a song of innocence or experience.

The pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven have suffered from his own fertility. He wrote nine Symphonies, seventeen string Quartets, and thirty-two pianoforte Sonatas. We are all familiar with the Symphonies—at least six of them—and have no doubt about the order of their movements; but how many amateurs of music can say that they know the whole of Beethoven's Sonatas, that they could at once identify any movement from any one of them? The delightful early Sonatas are taken for granted. Out of the first dozen, only two (Op. 13 and Op. 26) receive popular attention, the first because it has a fanciful name, and the second because it contains a funeral march, always a curiously attractive number in a composition.

This question of titles is not unimportant. Man naturally prefers names to numbers, and finds a piece called "The Moonlight Sonata" more attractive than a piece identified as Op. 27, No. 2. Only one Sonata was named by Beethoven himself, the beautiful"Les Adieux, l'Absence et le Retour," Op. 81a; and this, oddly enough, has never achieved the popularity of those with labels unauthorized and inappropriate. But, although musical amateurs could make it a delightful entertainment to find appropriate titles for the Sonatas, we must accept the fact that they are as nameless as the Fugues of Bach, and be content to know them by their opus numbers or keys.

The true life of Beethoven as composer may be said to have begun at Vienna with his first piano Sonatas. He was a prodigy of music, with an extraordinary power of improvisation; but he was slow in growth as a composer. Music was in the blood, for he was born at Bonn, in December, 1770, the son and grandson of musicians employed at the Court of the Elector of Cologne. The grandfather was an admirable person, whose memory was tenderly cherished by his great descendant; but the father was a drunken, disreputable fellow from whom, in all probability, Beethoven inherited the disease that destroyed his most precious faculties. The boy began his musical education at four, and was playing in public before he was eight. The "9 Variationen über einen Marsch von Dressler " (see Breitkopf's "Sämtliche Variationen ") still bears the inscription, "Componirt in 10 Lebensjahre," though the piece was not published till three years later,

1783. This Beethoven called his first composition-meaning, of course, his first composition considered fit for publication. To the year 1781 belong three little Sonatas for piano, in the last of which occurs a Menuetto with six Variations. Thus, in his earliest childish pieces we find Beethoven fascinated by the musical form which he was to make peculiarly his own, and which was to prove the vehicle of his sublimest utterances. The last movement of the last Sonata, and the great Diabelli Variations of 1823, stand as monuments of Beethoven's capacity to see eternity in a grain of sand, and, in a special sense, to hold infinity in the palm of his hand.

Three juvenile quartets of 1785, published posthumously, are interesting because the Adagio of the third was used in the Sonata Op. 2, No. 1. These and other compositions, unimportant as they are intrinsically, were proofs of high musical capacity, and it was felt that the boy ought to visit the metropolis of music, where Haydn and Mozart reigned as joint sovereigns. In 1787 the journey to Vienna was, somehow, contrived, and there Beethoven made the acquaintance of Mozart, who, hearing him improvise on a given theme, prophesied with humour and truth, that the boy would make a noise in the world. But the visit was cut short by the death of his mother, and in three months Beethoven was back again in Bonn at the Elector's Court, where, in a way characteristic of his whole life, he began to make friendships with people of rank and station, notably the von Breunings and the immortalised Count Waldstein.

The Elector, Maximilian Friedrich, to whom the three juvenile Sonatas were dedicated, had died in 1784, and was succeeded by Maximilian Franz, who resolved (after due promptings, we may be sure) that his remarkable young musician should be sent to study under Haydn. And so, in November, 1792, Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna, and found there his true home. He was within a few weeks of twenty-three, and still in his nonage. His compositions were numerous, but without real importance. At the age Beethoven had reached when he visited Vienna to continue his studies, Mozart and Mendelssohn had achieved European celebrity as performers and composers. Beethoven, the real Beethoven, was scarcely born.

Of one great spirit the Vienna of Beethoven's youth was bereft Mozart had lain in his pauper's grave for nearly a year;

Haydn still survived, and was to live on to the wonderful year in which the Emperor Concerto, the " Harp "Quartet, the F sharp Sonata and "Les Adieux, l'Absence et le Retour" were written, and the C minor, the Pastoral, the 'Cello Sonata (Op. 69) and the two Trios (Op. 70) were published. It had been arranged that Beethoven should receive lessons from the old master; but the project was doomed to failure. Haydn had grown indifferent and, moreover, found his uncouth pupil difficult. Beethoven, inexperienced though he was, soon divined that Haydn had nothing to teach him; but, as the dedication of Op. 2 indicates, friendly relations continued until the beginning of 1794, when Haydn's departure for England left Beethoven free to choose his own masters among the most rigid of musical purists. That he was a laborious learner (and a difficult pupil) is no less evident than that he mastered his learning and never let it master him. Beethoven and the pedants did not see eye to eye and do not see eye to eye now, for musical pedantry has many forms, and still exists, even though Albrechtsberger be dead. There is such a thing as a pedantry of modernity.

Haydn and Beethoven belonged to different worlds. Haydn was the last of the peruked musicians. The advent of Beethoven with his rebellious shock of hair was a symbol and a portent. He entered Vienna in the year of Valmy, when the French monarchy was gone and the September massacres had answered the Austrian invaders with blood for blood. But Vienna itself was still, in spirit, the city of Maria Theresa and Kaunitz, and the Holy Roman Empire had not ceased to be the sign of an ancient ideal. Inflexibly opposed to Liberalism in political ideas, the princes and nobles of Austria and Hungary were Liberalism itself in their patronage of the arts; and it was among the highborn amateurs of music that the stubbornly modern Beethoven found generous, admiring and long-suffering friends. The story is creditable to all concerned. Neither party conceded anything, but each gave of its best. Beethoven himself was as rigid in his own etiquette as the pettiest princeling of the empire. Servility and submission were not in his nature. He was incapable of paying deference to mere rank or wealth, or of understanding that he, as man and artist, was anyone's inferior. If right of birth had any meaning, then surely he, the creative artist, was as well-born as any. With the coming of Beethoven passed the

day when a Mozart could be counted among the lackeys of the Archbishop of Salzburg, and be kicked from the prelate's door. Beethoven stood in the chambers of princes, but he stood as a prince himself, and not otherwise would be found there at all.

His claim to equality was tacit, but evident; and it was not denied. Beethoven must have had singular and compelling charm. Short in stature, uncomely of feature, positive in speech and blunt in manner, he nevertheless found his way at once to the respect and affection of men and women alike. His personal success in Vienna was immediate and enduring. The Prince Karl von Lichnowsky and the Princess Christiane may almost be said to have adopted him, the princess, in particular, treating him with a mother's tenderness for a wayward and gifted son. A romantic history of Beethoven's life could be written from the dedications that are the sole titular distinction of most of his pieces. He had, of course, jealous enemies, but the young and beautiful, as well as the more elderly among his admirers, acknowledged his charm and submitted to his outbursts. Had not his morals been as strict as his politics, Beethoven's "affairs " might have outnumbered Goethe's.

If all the music written by Beethoven before his flight from Bonn to Vienna were destroyed the world would be no poorer. It was in Vienna that Beethoven's artistic life came to manhood. His Opus I (three Trios), dedicated to the Prince Lichnowsky, appeared in 1795. Op. 2, dedicated to Haydn, and belonging to the same year, contains the first three adult Sonatas. They are young, but they are not juvenile; they are reminiscent, but they are original. The first phrase of the first Sonata recalls the opening of the Finale to Mozart's G minor Symphony, and even the Minuets have something in common; but there is a general character that is new and underived. The Largo of the second Sonata has a moving power and richness of texture hard to parallel in earlier clavier music. What feelings, we wonder, were in the hearts of the elegant Viennese in Prince Lichnowsky's salon when first these searching strains rose up under the hands of the sturdy and disturbing young man at the piano! Look, too, at the Rondo where grazioso and A major give place to staccato and A minor. Is not the very outward shape of the phrases suggestive of something else familiar? Turn to the Chopin Etude, Op. 25, No. 11, and you will find what it came presently to be. The third Sonata,

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