Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:57:07.270Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WHAT BEETHOVEN LEARNED FROM K464

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2014

STEPHEN RUMPH
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Beethoven imitated Mozart's String Quartet in A major K464 more openly than any other work by a fellow composer. Yet critics have never explained his fascination with the fifth ‘Haydn’ quartet. This article argues that Beethoven responded to a rare and unexplored transformation of sonata form in which the primary theme returns at its original pitch in the secondary area. This preserves the melody of the theme, but reinterprets its harmonic and schematic function. Mozart explored this device with unusual rigour in k464, recalling the primary theme at pitch in both outer movements. The two primary themes share a common chromatic line whose invariant return wittily probes late eighteenth-century tonal conventions.

Beethoven emulated Mozart's harmonic design in his own Quartet in A major, Op. 18 No. 5, and even intensified its more problematic features. He imitated k464 most literally in the finale of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, which provided a model for similar harmonic experimentation in the Sonata in G major Op. 31 No. 1, the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and the first ‘Razumovsky’ quartet. k464 suggests an important source for Beethoven's use of chromatic elements to problematize tonal and thematic function, a practice most evident in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.

Type
Articles
Information
Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Czerny, Carl, ‘Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben’, as excerpted in Über den richtigen Vortrag der sämtlichen Beethovenschen Klavierwerke, ed. Badura-Skoda, Paul (Vienna: Universal, 1963), 14Google Scholar. My translation.

2 On the reception of k465 see Vertrees, Julie Anne, ‘Mozart's String Quartet, K. 465: The History of a Controversy’, Current Musicology 17 (1974), 96–114Google Scholar; Brown, Marshall, ‘Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness’, Critical Inquiry 7/4 (1981), 689–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeFotis, William, ‘Mozart, Quartet in C, K. 465’, Nineteenth-Century Music 6/1 (1982), 31–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Irving, John, Mozart: The ‘Haydn’ Quartets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74–78, 82–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Kerman, Joseph, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Norton, 1966), 54–64Google Scholar; Kerman, , ‘Beethoven Quartet Audiences: Actual, Potential, Ideal’, in The Beethoven Quartet Companion, ed. Winter, Robert and Martin, Robert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 13–14Google Scholar; Yudkin, Jeremy, ‘Beethoven's “Mozart” Quartet’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 45/1 (1992), 30–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Bonds, Mark Evan has pointed out the latter connection in Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 56–57Google Scholar.

5 See Kirkendale, Warren, Fugue and Fugato in Rococo and Classical Chamber Music, trans. Kirkendale, Warren and Bent, Margaret (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

6 See Jalowetz, Heinrich, ‘Twelve-Tone Writing in Mozart’, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony in G Minor, K. 550, ed. Broder, Nathan (New York: Norton, 1967), 99–100Google Scholar.

7 Sisman, Elaine, ‘Observations on the First Phase of Mozart's “Haydn” Quartets’, in Words about Mozart: Essays in Honour of Stanley Sadie, ed. Link, Dorothea with Nagley, Judith (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 55–56Google Scholar.

8 Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: Viking, 1971), 381Google Scholar.

9 Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 64. Yudkin detected a Bloomian ‘misprision’ in Op. 18 No. 5, designed to allay the anxiety of influence; ‘Beethoven's “Mozart” Quartet’, 30–36, 64–72.

10 See Brandenburg, Sieghard, ‘The Autograph of Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: The Structure of the Manuscript and Its Relevance for the Study of the Genesis of the Work’, in The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Studies of the Autograph Manuscripts, ed. Wolff, Christoph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 278–300Google Scholar.

11 As Kamien, Roger and Wagner, Naphtali noted, the cello reinstates the original spelling at the end of the secondary area, signalling ‘the victory of B♯ over C’: ‘Bridge Themes within a Chromaticized Voice Exchange in Mozart Expositions’, Music Theory Spectrum 19/1 (1997), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Memories of the flat sixth haunt the retransition, however, where the cello persistently injects an accented F♮ against the E pedal.

12 See Rosen, The Classical Style, 114–118, and also Webster, James, Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclical Integration in His Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127–130Google Scholar.

13 See Gjerdingen, Robert O., Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 258–260Google Scholar.

14 Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style, 181–195.

15 Hepokoski, James and Darcy, Warren discuss this passage in Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 140–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 McClary, Susan, ‘A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2’, Cultural Critique 4 (1986), 151Google Scholar.

17 Hatten, Robert, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 122Google Scholar.

18 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 25–36.

19 See Ahn, Suhnne, ‘Beethoven's Op. 47: Balance and Virtuosity’, in The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance, ed. Lockwood, Lewis and Kroll, Mark (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 67Google Scholar.

20 van Beethoven, Ludwig, Kesslersches Skizzenbuch I: Übertragung, ed. Brandenburg, Sieghard (Bonn: Beethovenhaus, 1978), 101–119, 193–202Google Scholar.

21 Czerny, ‘Erinnerungen’, 19. My translation.

22 Dahlhaus, Carl, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Whittall, Mary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 170Google Scholar.

23 Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 170–171. Dahlhaus's interpretation and its philosophical lineage have been studied by Schmalfeldt, Janet, ‘Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the “Tempest” Sonata’, in In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philiosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 23–57Google Scholar. See also the recent essays in Beethoven's ‘Tempest’ Sonata: Perspectives of Analysis and Performance, ed. Pieter Bergé with Jeroen D'hoe and William Caplin (Leuven: Peeters, 2009).

24 See, for example, Riezler, Walter, Beethoven, trans. Pidcock, G. D. H. (New York: Dutton, 1938), 129Google Scholar; Tovey, Donald Francis, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 39Google Scholar; Kerman, , The New Grove Beethoven (New York: Norton, 1983), 113Google Scholar; Kinderman, William, Beethoven (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 74–75Google Scholar; Rosen, , Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 180Google Scholar; and Lockwood, , Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York and London: Norton, 2003), 137Google Scholar.

25 Adorno, Theodor, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 55–56Google Scholar. See also Spitzer, Michael's commentary in Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 51–53Google Scholar.

26 Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 112.

27 Lockwood concluded from his sketch studies of Op. 59 No. 1 that ‘the work was generated from this finale-choice [that is, the thème russe], as in the Eroica’: Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 199.

28 Ferraguto, Mark, ‘Beethoven à la moujik: Russianness and Learned Style in the “Razumovsky” String Quartets’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/1 (2014), forthcomingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See Vasili Byros, ‘Memorizing Tonality: Beethoven's Eroica and the le–sol–fi–sol Archetype’, Society for Music Analysis Newsletter (July 2008), 3–7, and Byros, ‘Foundations of Tonality as Situated Cognition, 1730–1830: An Enquiry into the Culture and Cognition of Eighteenth-Century Tonality, with Beethoven's Eroica Symphony as a Case Study’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2009).

30 The coda of the Scherzo also reinstates the ––♭ line in inversion. See Kinderman, Beethoven, 94–95.

31 Lockwood, , ‘Beethoven before 1800: The Mozart Legacy’, Beethoven Forum 3/1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 52Google Scholar.