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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Sonata for Horn and Piano in F Major, Op. 17
Vienna must have tantalized the young Beethoven, who was born and raised in Bonn, a relatively sleepy city far to the northwest. Meanwhile Vienna was a musical capital where
a young composer-virtuoso could make a splash in the wake of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven tested the waters with a visit in 1787, but was called back to Bonn upon the death of his mother and had to remain there to protect his brothers from their abusive, alcoholic father. But by 1792 his family obligations lifted and he moved to Vienna “in fulfillment of . . . long-frustrated wishes,” as his patron Count Waldstein described it.
Beethoven wrote the Sonata for Horn and Piano eight years into his Viennese career, on the tail end of his exuberant youth. His hearing had declined, but he was still performing as a pianist, and the piece sprung from a collaboration with Johann Wenzel Stitch, a virtuoso horn player he admired.
Stitch, who preferred to be called Signor Punto, had perfected the technique of hand-stopping, which allowed him to play more notes on the horn than could normally be produced before the invention of valves around 1814. Without valves, the natural horn is acoustically limited to the notes in the overtone series, which gives hunting horn calls their distinc- tive character. But some players found they could fill out the notes in-between by manipulating their hand in the bell, making the horn a truly melodic instrument. Punto was a pioneer of this art.
Beethoven and Punto premiered the Sonata on April 18, 1800 during a recital at Vienna’s Burgtheater. Beethoven claimed
to have written the horn part only the night before and to have improvised the piano accompaniment live at the concert. The audience demanded to hear it a second time, and so they repeated it with Beethoven improvising again. He may have exaggerated the story, but it points to the spontaneity and
musical daring of the time. (Performers today would call this being unprepared, nothing to brag about.)
The duo took the Sonata to Budapest the following month but had a falling out and called off the rest of their tour. In March 1801, Beethoven released the Sonata as his Op. 17 with the publisher Tranquillo Mollo. Because the piece was written with Punto’s exceptional ability in mind and faced a small market of equally proficient horn players, Beethoven included an alternate cello part to improve its commercial prospects. As a horn piece, it is the only sonata for a wind or brass instrument Beethoven ever wrote.
All three movements include prominent parts for both horn and piano—Beethoven was clearly showing off his piano playing, too. The first movement, Allegro moderato, is built around simple horn calls, but elaborates with the chromatics Punto specialized in. The Poco Adagio lies lyrically in F minor, a key which has a particularly veiled color on the natural horn. The slow movement’s brevity is a bit suspicious—perhaps the result of Beethoven’s rush to finish the piece—but he disguises its abrupt ending with a blink-and-you-miss-it transition to the Rondo finale.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D Minor, BWV 1004
Like the cello suites, Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin date from his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though they too may have earlier origins. While the cello suites are immaculately organized, all following the same six-movement plan, the solo violin works vary in four, five, or six movements. The cello sonatas are a tighter set; the violin pieces are more individually conceived.
The Partita No. 2 in D Minor especially stands out: the first four movements could reasonably be complete on their
2018 Summer Season 119