John Sichel's Program Notes January 6, 2001 Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio |
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Trio in Bb,
op. 97 (the Archduke)
Beethoven wrote this work in 1811, and dedicated it to the
Archduke Rudolph, brother of the emperor Franz, Beethoven’s pupil, benefactor
and-- as much as could be between a member of the royal family and a badly
shaven commoner almost completely devoid of social graces-- friend.
Rudolph was, by all accounts, a gentle and cultivated man, a good pianist and a
fair composer. A measure of Beethoven’s feelings for his illustrious
pupil (or, perhaps for the money and prestige he brought Beethoven) can be taken
by looking at some of the other works Beethoven dedicated to him: the 4th and
5th Piano Concerti, the “Farewell,” “Hammerklavier” and Opus 111 piano
sonatas and, upon Rudolph’s instillation as Archbishop of somewhere or other,
the great Missa Solemnis. These works all represent the ‘serene’ or
‘majestic’ sides of Beethoven’s complex musical personality, and are also,
of course, among his very finest.
The archduke trio was written towards the end of Beethovens ‘heroic’
period, the decade in which he wrote his 3rd through 8th symphonies, his violin
concerto, and most of his other masterpieces. By 1811 the heroic aspect of
Beethoven’s style was beginning to play itself out, and his life was sliding
towards the series of crises from which he would forge his late style. His
deafness was progressing; after 1814 when he took part in performances of the
Archduke, he could no longer play in public. Indeed, descriptions of his
public performances at this time are pathetic, in the true sense of the word:
when playing softly he would miss whole passages, when playing loudly he would
pound so hard he broke strings, and so on. By 1811 he was possibly
embroiled in the final of his many love affairs with married noblewomen (the
affair whose end is marked by his famous letter, one year later, to the
“immortal beloved,” probably Antonie Brentano), the affair which marked the
end of his romantic illusion. And a couple of years ahead lay the death of
his younger brother and Beethoven’s bizarre and destructive attempt to adopt
his nephew out of the clutches of his hated sister-in-law.
Out of this moment of impending crisis comes one of the all-time great
chamber works. And don’t be deceived by the majestic and serene opening:
It’s also a profoundly strange work, as are many of Beethoven’s great works.
We hear them so often that we tend to forget how weird they are.
That profound strangeness is, perhaps, the result of Beethoven’s wild and
unconventional personality being combined with the depths of his compositional
technique and his committent-- and flawless ability-- to represent his feelings
in music.
Contributing to this particular work’s strangeness, perhaps, are his
feelings towards the work’s dedicatee, the Archduke, as reflected in the wild
and weird contrasts of the music. Beethoven was notoriously ambivalent
about the nobility, given on the one hand to indiscreet republican tongue
lashings which often attracted the attention of the Austrian secret police and,
on the other, hobnobbing whenever he could with the rich and famous, amorously
pursuing noble wives and even tacitly encouraging the then-prevalent misbelief
that he himself was of the noble class. Given his unhappy childhood, some
of this can be seen as a search for parent figures and the Archduke was the
ultimate (or, perhaps, penultimate) father figure in the land. At the same
time, as a pupil he was a filial figure, perhaps the son Beethoven never
had. The desire for a son would soon take a more unpleasant turn with the
above-mentioned custody battle.
So what makes the music so strange? As with other of Beethoven’s
works, notably the 1st Rasumovsky Quartet, the Ninth Symphony and the late
string Quartets, there is an incongruous mixture of styles: the calm
exalted mood of the first movement, and the hymn-like beauty of the slow
movement, rubbing elbows freely with the grotesque and the earthy as in the
scherzo and finale. It must have seemed even more incongruous in
Beethoven’s day, when the audience would have recognized the musical language
of Italin opera mixing with Renaissance church music, music hall comedy,
Handelian pomp and peasant merry making. This mixture of sacred and profane
creates an ambiguity of meaning an irony, and an iconic quality that
the music world would not hear again until the symphonies of Mahler 80 and 90
years later. Indeed the trio of the Archduke’s scherzo, a particularly
grotesque moment, is reminiscent of one of Mahler’s most macabre
ventures in that genre, that scherzo of the 6th symphony.
Another source of strangeness in Beethoven’s music is his love of
violent contrast and extremes. His fasts have to be fastest, his slows
slowest, louds loudest, softs softest, etc. He loved to contrast themes of
extreme diatonic simplicity (even for their day) with wild chromatic modulations
or overheated fugal developments-- to dress up the sentiments of nursery rhyme,
metaphorically speaking, in the rhetoric of Alan Ginsburg or T.S. Eliot.
This creates an effect of wild humor or demonic frenzy, bordering occasionally
on derangement. The process works with equal effect in reverse, as in the
Turkish episodes in the 9th symphony.
Textures in Beethoven’s music also have to be extreme: wide
spaces or thick chords in the low register, for example-- in fact his ability to
coax new sounds out of this by then already well-traveled ensemble was not
surpassed until the advent of extended performance techniques in the 20th
century.
Unearthly beauty and demented grotesqueness, majesty, melodrama, high
tragedy low laughs and philosophic contemplation, all wrapped up in one-- it is
this completeness, this all encompassing quality that makes Beethoven’s music
so endlessly fascinating. Three generations later, Mahler would say that
every symphony must be a world unto itself. So it is with each great work
of Beethoven’s.