Perceptive musicians of the early nineteenth century, like many listeners today, admired the originality of Beethoven's musical ideas and his imaginative ways of developing them. For example, in an 1813 review of the Piano Trio in D major op. 70 no. 1, the writer, composer, and music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote that the finale begins with “a short, original theme, that appears again and again throughout the movement in many changes and ingenious allusions, in alternation with various figures.” Hoffmann also singled out the way in which Beethoven's openings create tension and expectation. In a 1812 review of the Coriolan Overture, he observed that the “principal theme of the Allegro has a character of irresistible restlessness, of unquenchable longing … the transposition of this theme a tone lower is unexpected and increases the tension which was already felt in the opening measures … Everything combines … [to create] the highest pitch of expectation for that which the rise of the mysterious curtain will reveal.” Later in the nineteenth century, Beethoven's themes became models for students of composition. In the early 1890s, for example, Brahms advised his student Gustav Jenner “to make a diligent study of Beethoven's sonata themes and to observe their influence on the structure of the movement …”

To provide a background for my discussion of Beethoven's themes, I begin with a brief introduction to Classical phrase rhythm, a term referring both to phrase structure and the metrical grouping of measures. I discuss some of the ways in which phrases are paired to form periods, and how phrases are connected and expanded, using passages from Beethoven’s works as examples.

In his chamber music for strings, Beethoven made incredibly rich contributions to an entire family of genres: trio, quartet, and quintet. This music comprises the sort of metagenre that Walter Benjamin had in mind when, writing about Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, he maintained that all great works of art either “found a genre or dissolve one.” One could make that claim for Beethoven's string chamber music in general and of his quartets in particular, even if it is not easy to pinpoint the precise means through which the composer either founded or dissolved a genre.

On at least one point there can be no doubt: Beethoven viewed his chamber music for strings as a privileged repertory. Consider his attitude toward the common practice of arranging chamber works for other media. One special case aside, Beethoven did not recast his string chamber music for other instruments, though there are several examples of the reverse procedure in arrangements either made by Beethoven himself or completed under his supervision, for instance, the reincarnation of the Wind Octet op. 103 as a string quintet (op. 4), or the arrangement of the Piano Trio op. 1 no. 3 for string quintet (op. 104). Furthermore, his recasting of the E major Piano Sonata op. 14 no. 1 for string quartet – a task that Beethoven felt only he could have accomplished satisfactorily – amounts to a wholesale transformation of the original.

Restoration theatre was a visual as well as a verbal medium, complementing its dialogue with a range of sensational effects. Although composing a neat history of the development of spectacle in the later seventeenth century would be reductive, it is possible to construct a rough chronology of its changing role in Restoration drama. Theatrical spectacle, particularly in the form of gruesome killings, had long been characteristic of the English stage; Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies often featured multiple suicides or homicides, leaving the stage littered with dead bodies. In their fondness for spectacle, especially lurid scenes of rape and murder, English playwrights participated in a dramatic tradition distinctly different from that of their French contemporaries. French neoclassical theory dictated that scenes of violence occur offstage, and some French critics condemned the English stage for its “barbarism.” English dramatic practice, however, never adhered to such rules; although many English playwrights, such as John Dryden and later John Dennis, respected the French theorists, most English writers attacked the decorum and orderliness of French drama for its blandness and insipidity. By contrast, English drama, with its battles, violence, and elaborate spectacle, was seen as “manly” and “lively,” a testament to the vigor of the nation and its people.

In the late 1670s, political crisis in the nation had a profound effect upon the theatres. Intense political engagement in the drama radically transformed dramatic form and content. The relationship between politics and culture is complex. It is certainly not a simple case of (political) cause and (dramatic) effect. Yet it can scarcely be a coincidence that the crisis coincided with three important dramatic shifts: a change in comedy, the development of tragedy, and the rise of the sentimental.

The mid-Restoration crisis is often called the Exclusion Crisis, due to the Whigs' desire to exclude Charles II's Catholic brother and heir, James Stuart, from the succession. Yet the term hardly seems strong enough for what many thought would become another civil war. It is hardly surprising that there should have been a marked effect on the drama at this time when political divisions became deep enough to give rise to rival parties, Whigs and Tories, and to the beginnings of party politics.

The essential problem in writing music for strings or winds with piano is immediately apparent: the sonorities do not readily mix. Stringed and wind instruments naturally produce sustained sounds, whereas a piano note decays from the moment it is struck – and decayed even more rapidly on eighteenth-century pianos than on today's. Hence, the expressive possibilities of the instruments are different and often contradictory; and as increases in virtuosity made their capabilities more specific, these differences become more pronounced. Despite this problem, chamber music with piano had a well-established and important role in eighteenth-century musical life, and the greatest composers were able to find ways for contrasting instruments to occupy the same musical space happily. Beethoven's role in this process was unique, because his years of creative genius coincided with a period of rapid development, both in instrumental design and instrumental technique. He was therefore a pivotal figure in the development of chamber music with piano – especially the still-young genres which will be the focus of this essay: duo sonatas with violin or cello, and trios with both instruments.

Much of this music was composed early in his career, from the mid 1790s until 1803, after which the seven remaining masterpieces (1808–15) integrated his earlier technical breakthroughs with later stylistic advances. Beethoven's choice of piano trios for his debut opus was a natural one: as a student he had experimented with both piano trios and piano quartets, and his teacher Haydn was the composer of several remarkable piano trios. The three op. 1 trios are not at all modeled on Haydn’s trios in the way that they combine string and piano sonorities; Beethoven was already seeking his own answers to such textural problems.

When the poet Ludwig Tieck sought to distinguish the styles and methods of instrumental music from vocal music in 1798, he set a precedent for championing the freedom and independence of instrumental music to express the inexpressible and sounded one of the principal themes of German early Romanticism. E. T. A. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is perhaps the most famous example of the enthusiasm for this newly heightened appreciation of the power of instrumental music. The consequences of this new perspective for vocal music were, however, less immediately exciting. Music for the voice was confirmed as being in subordination to language and related to everyday experience, for, according to Tieck, “it is, and always will be, elevated declamation and speech.” Romantic poets might still strive for the expression of the ineffable in their language, but their aspiring to the potential of instrumental music was essentially a yearning for what they could never claim in their own sphere. In his novella Musical Joys and Sorrows, Tieck's characters discussed whether an ideal singing voice might not bring poetic expression nearer to the ineffable. In the words of the fictional singing teacher Hortensio:

In 1918, Paul Bekker argued that the symphonies of Beethoven had been revolutionary and still captured the imagination of listeners in a unique way. It was not the color and variety of Beethoven's instrumental sound or his ingenuity as an orchestrator that set his symphonic works apart, but rather his exploitation of the sheer volume and presence of sound; Beethoven opened up the sonic power implicit in the orchestral forces of Mozart and Haydn, and the symphony now became more than a sonata for orchestra. Bekker suggested that Beethoven composed with a new “idealized picture of the space and listening public” in mind; his goal was to reach a “mass” public with the symphony, and to create a “community” through the act of shared listening. That community was far reaching, representing humankind, a spectrum of listeners that extended beyond the aristocracy and embraced those liberated from the shackles of the past by the ideas and events surrounding the French Revolution. Beethoven's orchestral music, through its implied extra-musical narratives and its impact on listeners, became associated not only with Romanticism but also pre-1848 political liberalism.

Bekker construed Beethoven's political and social ambition as a causal element in the act of symphonic composition. Beethoven sought a clear break with an older tradition of symphonic writing that had been directed at a circumscribed public consisting of the elite connoisseur and patron in favor of a strategy that could reach beyond and forge solidarity within a wider audience.

Sometime at the end of the seventeenth century, George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, wrote a play which he called The Restauration: Or, Right will take Place. A Tragicomedy (February 1683). Since the beheading of the English monarch Charles I in 1649, the idea of “Restoration” had obsessed English playwrights – the theme permeates Restoration drama. Not coincidentally, Buckingham's title includes the designation “A Tragicomedy.” To an experienced reader of seventeenth-century drama, the plot of The Restauration sounds very familiar. A usurping king harasses a dispossessed prince, Philander, whose countrymen are waiting to take arms in his defense. A foreign prince has just arrived to marry the princess and thus becomes heir to the throne.

The history of performing Beethoven is in essence the history of our entire Western culture of musical performance as it has evolved since the end of the eighteenth century. One is even tempted to write “Western culture” tout court. The ways in which we have kept alive the creations of one of the most potent icons of our civilization, the written instructions of the printed scores mediated by individual performers and by changing performance conventions, speak eloquently of deeper issues – of cultural value, tradition, authority, the individual and society, written versus oral communication, intuition versus reason. At a more concrete level, Beethoven's music underpinned the formation both of the fundamental performance institutions of modern musical life, including the character and makeup of our public concerts and recitals, and of the very idea of a mass culture of “serious” music that elevates edification over mere entertainment. And from Franz Liszt's use of selected sonatas in the nascent modern piano recital, through to the adoption of Beethoven by the “authentic” performance movement in the 1980s, Beethoven's music has assumed a variety of contrasting symbolic meanings – Romantic rebel, disciplined Classicist, proto-Modernist – all of them heavy with prestige and authority, whether covertly or openly invoked. The attempt to project these meanings has shaped specific decisions about performance practice – the size of performing forces, details of tempo and articulation, the structure of concert programs – and these in turn have influenced the changing images of Beethoven's art.

Why does a piece of music end? Or rather, why does it end where it does? Webern, during the composition of his Six Bagatelles for string quartet op. 9, felt driven to a particularly uncompromising answer: “Here I had the feeling, ‘When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over.’” He was, admittedly, recalling his path to twelve-note composition; yet Heinrich Schenker, concerned exclusively with the structure of tonal music – to him, Webern's was a “path” that led away from music altogether – was equally clear about endings. In Free Composition he claimed that “with the arrival of Î the work is at an end. Whatever follows this can only be a reinforcement of the close – a coda – no matter what its extent or purpose may be.” There will be more to say about codas in due course; but we need immediately to distinguish Schenker's construal of “coda” from the conventional one whereby, for example, the section of music that follows the end of a sonata-form recapitulation is denominated the “coda.” A particularly clear Beethoven example is the coda to the finale of the “Appassionata” Sonata, beginning at m. 308: the double bar and new tempo indication articulate this coda especially strongly.

Despite its familiarity, its secure place in the operatic canon, and the large body of literature that surrounds it, Beethoven's Fidelio continues to pose challenges to interpretation and understanding. Its complicated genesis, performance history, and transmission present troublesome philological questions that in certain cases may never be fully resolved. And its position as the sole opera of a composer known primarily for his instrumental music makes it a difficult work to place within the context of his artistic development. But if Fidelio is nearly as much a problem for critics and scholars as it was for the composer himself, it is also a central work, an understanding of which is crucial for any attempt to comprehend Beethoven's ambitions and accomplishments, his self-critical spirit, and his world-view.

Whose Fidelio ? the historical background and the textual problem

The complex text-critical issues that surround Fidelio are perhaps best approached through a review of the biographical circumstances that led to its creation and revisions. In 1803 Beethoven accepted a commission for a new opera from Emmanuel Schikaneder, the impresario of the Theater an der Wien, who himself provided the composer with a libretto entitled Vestas Feuer. Beethoven began to compose Schikaneder's text in the autumn of that year, but he quickly abandoned it; by early January 1804 he had decided to have an extant French libretto, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal, adapted into German by Joseph Sonnleithner.

Open any textbook in music history or music appreciation and the problem of Beethoven's relation to music historiography becomes immediately apparent: is he Classical or Romantic or both or neither? Is he part of the Canonical Three of the Viennese Classical Style – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – or is he a chapter unto himself, as the One destined to inherit and transform, even liberate, the achievements of the Classical Duo? As Charles Rosen astutely pointed out, “it would appear as if our modern conception of the great triumvirate had been planned in advance by history”: Count Waldstein's entry in Beethoven's album, written in 1792 as the young composer left Bonn for Vienna, famously assured him that “You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” This attractive phrase refers to the sense of lineage both conceptual and practical that places Beethoven in a musical culture already fully fledged in its genres and expressive possibilities. Mozart's premature death and the position of Haydn as Beethoven's teacher in Vienna left Beethoven perfectly placed to come into his inheritance. This chapter will examine some of the dominant elements in European music in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, and explore some of his methods of appropriating and personalizing the expressive language of Haydn and Mozart.

Oppositions

By 1790, observers of the musical scene could classify the genres and structures of music according to shared assumptions about their place in musical life and the level of sophistication of their audience. About Vienna we read of a broad division of the musical public into the more and less knowledgeable: audience members, including patrons, comprised “connoisseurs” and “amateurs,” while performers might be classed as “virtuosi” or “dilettanti” according to their skill. Music was performed in a range of venues from the grand and costly public theaters associated with courts (for example,Vienna’s Burgtheater) to the salons of the aristocracy and wealthier middle classes, from open-air gardens and coffee- [45] houses to private homes.

One of the best-known features of Beethoven's composing activity is his enormous efforts and struggle to produce his great masterpieces, in contrast to Mozart, who is reputed to have composed with great facility, working everything out in his head. Abundant evidence for Beethoven's struggles comes from his numerous sketchbooks, which were sufficiently prominent and unusual to draw forth comment from several eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of him. For example, Ignaz von Seyfried reported: “He was never found on the street without a small note-book in which he was wont to record his passing ideas.” Although Beethoven is not the only composer to have used sketchbooks, he seems to have been the first to have done so in any kind of systematic way, and almost no other composer has devoted such a large proportion of his time to refining his initial ideas through sketching processes.

Beethoven's propensity for making rough drafts and sketches for his works began almost as soon as he started composing as a boy. Moreover, one of his first published works – a set of three piano sonatas of 1783 (WoO 47) – contains a number of handwritten amendments in the printed score he owned, which are not merely corrections but subtle refinement of such things as articulation marks. Such close attention to detail, and an incessant desire to seek improvement on his existing ideas, were elements that remained with him throughout his life, and gave the impetus to increasingly elaborate methods of sketching.

A controversy which erupted in the final years of the seventeenth century threatened the survival of theatre in England. At its peak, the poet laureate, Nahum Tate, drew up “A Proposal for Regulating the Stage & Stage-Players,” describing it as “valuable only in case it is decided not to suppress the theatres entirely.” A character in George Farquhar's novel, Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698), similarly predicted that “in the Battel between the Church and the Stage” “the Theatre must down.” Such grim prophecies recalled the playhouses' mid-century fate, when a parliamentary edict in 1642 had heralded an eighteen-year ban on theatrical performances.

The attack which gave impetus to this new campaign – Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) – was the first book-length assault on the theatre by an English author to be published since William Prynne's infamous Histriomastix (1633). Pro-stage writers quickly dubbed Collier a “Younger Histrio- Mastix” and asserted that the drama's old enemies were once again venturing into the daylight.