Music for a Diplomat

Beethoven’s treatments of the Russian folksongs in the “Razumovsky” String Quartets, Op. 59, nos. 1 and 2, have long elicited sharp criticism. A closer look at these treatments allows for a reappraisal of the quartets and the circumstances of their commission. The settings seem especially designed to appeal to the quartets’ dedicatee, Count Andrey Razumovsky, a European Russian whose intense interest in serious music has been understated. These conclusions are brought to bear on Opus 59, no. 3, the only quartet in the opus lacking a labeled thème russe. Rather than returning to the Lvov-Pratsch Collection (1790/1806) for material, Beethoven appears to have incorporated a Russian folksong from a German source in the Andante’s main theme. The movement fulfills in an unexpected way his pledge to weave Russian melodies into all three quartets.

Music for a French Piano

In late 1803, Beethoven acquired a new piano from the French firm of Sébastien Erard. This piano differed from the one built by Anton Walter that he owned in the late 1790s, most notably in its heavier construction, English-style action rather than the lighter Viennese action, triple stringing, four pedal stops (lute, dampers, buff, una corda), and five-and-a-half octave range from FF to c4. The piano’s influence on Beethoven’s compositional process is apparent in his Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme, WoO 80 (1806), a quasi-systematic exploration of piano techniques, textures, and sonorities that exploits both the capacities and limitations of the Erard.

Music for a Culture Hero

Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony has often been described as “Haydnesque.” But neither the extent of Haydn’s influence nor Beethoven’s motivations for emulating him has been carefully explored. In early 1806, publisher Breitkopf & Härtel began issuing the “London” Symphonies in full score, allowing many connoisseurs to study the works for the first time. Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, composed that summer, bears numerous compositional affinities to these works (especially Nos. 99, 102, and 103). By turning to the “London” Symphonies for inspiration, Beethoven memorialized his former mentor while capitalizing on the Haydn mania that was sweeping theaters, concert halls, and the pages of journals like the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

Music for a Virtuoso

In both his Fourth Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto, Beethoven inverts the standard formula of the concerto by foregrounding lyricism and introspection rather than bravura and brilliance. In so doing, he responds to contemporary conceptions of virtuosity that privileged expressiveness over technical proficiency, proffering a new kind of relationship between virtuoso and public that centered on Innigkeit—the spectacle of the self—as the hallmark of the true virtuoso. But concertos are mutable texts; Beethoven’s revisions to the solo part of the Fourth Piano Concerto reveal a desire to further exploit the disjunction between the brilliant and lyrical styles in performance.

After Leonore

Beethoven turned with renewed focus to writing large-scale instrumental music in early 1806. By year’s end, he had completed his Fourth Piano Concerto, Fourth Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Three “Razumovsky” Quartets, among other works. These works seem to represent a departure from the “heroic” topics and traits that characterize Beethoven’s music of 1803–5, suggesting a stylistic turn. The nature of and motivations for this turn are explored, with a focus on Beethoven’s reactions to critics in the wake of Leonore, his expanding social network, and changes in the political climate following the French occupation of Vienna in late 1805.

Conclusion

The ideas outlined in Beethoven 1806 offer a more nuanced way of thinking about Beethoven’s compositional development. While it is challenging to move beyond longstanding teleological narratives about Beethoven (with their emphasis on phases, styles, periods, and the like), focusing on his relationships and the ways in which they mediated his creative process opens a path forward. Combined with a microhistorical perspective (“a fascination with the particular”), such an approach offers to restore the sense of Beethoven as a historical actor while prompting us to reconsider how we understand his music. It also allows us to better appreciate the full measure of his creative life.

Music for a Playwright

Critics from E. T. A. Hoffmann forward have struggled to reconcile the suspensefulness of Beethoven’s Coriolan overture with the more “reflective” tone of the tragedy that inspired it, Heinrich von Collin’s Coriolan. In response, many critics have attempted to argue that the overture owes more to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus than to Collin’s play. But Beethoven had compelling reasons to engage with Collin’s tragedy. The Coriolanus story was also known to Beethoven and his contemporaries in multiple versions, across several different media, complicating attempts to interpret the overture in light of one source alone. The relationship between Beethoven and Collin is probed, opening up a host of literary, visual, and political associations surrounding Coriolan.

Introduction

Critics have long sought to uncover underlying narratives in Beethoven’s instrumental music, whether through formal analysis or programmatic interpretation. These approaches, while often illuminating, are also limited. Meaning in Beethoven’s music needs to be understood in a broader sense, encompassing the many relationships that this music creates and reflects (with patrons, publics, performers, and technologies, among other things). The concept of mediation offers a useful tool for thinking about the aesthetic and the social in tandem. Coupled with a microhistorical focus, this perspective provides a new way of thinking about Beethoven’s instrumental music of 1806–7 and the historiographical problems it has posed.