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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 4 in
C Major, Op. 102, No. 1
Beethoven was deaf. As the silence grew inside him, his mind expanded beyond what the world around him heard, or was capable of hearing. What he heard was the future. Music out of time. A world closer to Schoenberg than to Mozart.
It was only around a hundred years to Stravinsky’s The Rite
of Spring. But Beethoven already knew the Verklärte Nacht
of Schoenberg, if you listen closely to his “Hammerklavier” Sonata. (Or to certain versions of it, such as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s, which makes the connections apparent.)
This sonata has two movements; both start slowly, followed by a fast section. (This itself is an homage to Handel, but I don’t want to give away its secrets quite yet.) In a way the first movement in its entirety is an introduction to the short Adagio.
Beethoven had given up introductions, modulations. If he wanted to go somewhere, he just went there, without pre- amble, or politeness. He was a man in a hurry. And yet the long sweetness of the beginning Andante takes its time, with trills left over from the Bach Sonata in G we have just heard, and an anticipatory arpeggio leads Beethoven to where he wants to be: a melody sprung from the introduction pushed so insistently by the piano that it combines sforzando octaves repeatedly, at the beginning of a triplet. It is as if Beethoven is writing shorthand: a Schenkerian melody stripped of its decorations and frills to make it palatable. You search for clues in the gentler cello part as to what Beethoven means. The piano is too unforgiving, but the cello part is softly accessible, providing tempting windows into the darker recesses. As with much of Beethoven’s evolving world of blind and blinding insight, many of the clues give no answer. A brief, almost Schubertian Sehnsucht transfixes the begin- ning of the second movement, before a brief pause leads to the bullying incidental triplets repeated from the end of the first movement, which in the last section become playful.
Those three notes are from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus, which was being performed at the time in
the Berlin court of Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, Elector of Brandenburg, and nephew of Frederick the Great. He was not only Beethoven’s patron, but he had also commissioned pieces from Mozart and Boccheriniso so Beethoven was aware that this was a great moment in musical history. Its double-dotted skipping rhythms are an homage to the French overture that begins Handel’s oratorio.
Suddenly the placement of Beethoven’s Maccabeus Variations at the beginning of the weekend makes sense. As Beethoven makes an entire sonata out of the first few notes that come to his mind, so Handel would similar-
ly convey immense tragedy with a few notes. Beethoven modeled his enormous structures on this facility which Handel had to compress history into shorthand, to remove the extraneous notes.
Judas was always interpreted by the British as an homage to their martial prowess in the French Revolutionary Wars, and Beethoven here borrows that sense of glory to com- mend the Rhine Campaign, the War of the First Coalition, and the Partition of Poland, in which Friedrich Wilhelm, with 189,000 infantry and 48,000 cavalry at his command, had revealed himself to be a better cellist than military strategist. So the king needed to be seen as Handel’s con- quering hero in his own highly cultured court, if nowhere else. Courts gossip, and Beethoven must have known of the low esteem in which Frederick the Great held his nephew. Napoleon was to capture Berlin in a decade. This Judas trip- let lies at the heart of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4, which is a final Judas variation disguised as a sonata, played in that extraordinary week of a Handel oratorio and mul- tiple Beethoven cello sonatas premiered by the king’s own teacher, the great cellist Jean-Pierre Duport. Being a fine cellist and a great lover of Handel’s Judas, the king would appreciate the Judas pun Beethoven was making.
2018 Summer Season 221