Beethoven’s Fateful Fifth

One sneaky trick for a music history exam would be to play the opening of Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella to a group of unsuspecting students. Those without prior knowledge of the work would be hard pressed not only to “name that tune” but even to identify the century in which it was written. The melody sounds Classical, yet there seem to be “wrong notes” here and there, and the orchestra­tion sounds far too removed from the music of the Classical period.

Yet astute members of the class would probably guess from these very features that the author can be no one but Stravinsky. Creative appropriations from music history are central to Stravinsky’s so-called “neoclassical” period, which covers the three middle decades of his career, roughly from 1920 to 1950.

Although we may find occasional nods to the past in some works written before 1919, it is in his ballet Pulcinella that we first hear Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism in full swing. This ostensible return to tradition came as something of a shock from a composer who had earned a reputation as the most radical of all composers only a few years earlier. As the world was soon to learn, however, the essence of Stravinsky’s personality lay not so much in the musical idiom he used as in his uncanny ability to do the unexpected (and to make it work). Certainly, to go back 200 years and co-opt an earlier musical style was almost as unexpected as unleashing the fierce dissonances and wild rhythms of The Rite of Spring.

In his landmark study, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, musicologist Richard Taruskin notes that Pulcinella is not an independent composition but an arrangement and reorchestration of 18th-century originals. While it is true that Stravinsky followed his sources very closely, he differed from most arrangers in that he openly imposed his own personality on the borrowed material.

Just where was the material borrowed from? Although the score names Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36) as the author of the originals, most of the music is not actually by that com-poser. Recent scholarship has traced the original tunes to a handful of other 18th-century composers, including Domenico Gallo, Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer, and Carlo Ignazio Monza.

Stravinsky discovered this body of music, so remote from him in time and space, through the famous impresario of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev, who had commissioned Stravinsky’s three great ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring) in the years before World War I, was anxious to renew his collaboration with the composer. He had recently produced a ballet based on music by Scarlatti (The Good-Humored Ladies) and wanted to continue his exploration of Italian Baroque music. At first, this music seemed to hold little interest for Stravinsky, but he, too, was eager to work with Diaghilev again and happily accepted the great impresario’s proposal.

The plot of the one-act ballet — which also calls for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists — was adapted from an old manuscript containing humorous anecdotes about Pulcinella, a traditional commedia dell’arte character from 18th-century Italy. All the girls in the village are in love with Pulcinella, and their fiancés conspire to kill him. A light-hearted comedy of errors ensures that eventually ends without any bloodshed (a few fistfights, at most); in the end, everyone, including Pulcinella, marries their appropriate partner and all live happily ever after.

Pulcinella premiered at the Paris Opera in May 1920 — with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso — and was generally well received by the public. Though most critics praised Stravinsky’s ingenious reworking of 18th-century music, others were disappointed in the composer’s stylistic detour from the radicalism of The Rite of Spring. Two years later, Stravinsky arranged an instrumen­tal suite from the ballet, excising several movements and eliminating the need for vocal soloists.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

Times change, and musical instruments change with them. In the case of the trumpet, original instruments could only play notes of the natural overtone series. In the Baroque era, air speed and embouchure pressure were used to make the most of this situation, but in the Classical period, composers and performers sought to fill the gaps in the instrument’s range and provide it with a full chromatic scale.

Several methods were devised to accomplish this, but none were entirely satisfactory until the first valve trumpets were constructed in the early 19th century. A transitional stage in the instrument’s evolution was represented by the keyed trumpet, championed by the Austrian virtuoso Anton Weidinger (1767–1852). Musicologist Reine Dahlqvist explains: “The keys are brought together on one side of the instrument so as to be operated by one hand only; the other hand merely holds the instrument. … The keys cover soundholes, and when opened, raised the pitch: the key nearest the bell a semitone, the next by a tone, etc.” (See page 33 for a picture of a keyed trumpet.)

Weidinger had been a member of the court opera in Vienna since 1792. He probably met Franz Joseph Haydn when the latter returned from his second trip to London, by which time the first model of Weidinger’s keyed trumpet was ready. Haydn soon agreed to write a concerto for this instrument and produced a work that stands as a splendid example of his late style.

Trumpet players are certainly not oversupplied with concertos by major composers; it is therefore all the more curious that Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto remained virtually unknown until the 20th century. First published in 1931, it did not enter the repertoire until some years later, when English trumpeter George Eskdale recorded the second and third movements. It was only in the 1950s that the concerto attained the popularity it has enjoyed ever since.

Classical concertos usually start with an orchestral exposition during which the soloist is silent. In this case, however, the soloist plays a single loud note and two short fanfare motives during the tutti section. As composer and author Jonathan Kramer suggested, “Perhaps the composer is providing the soloist with an opportunity to warm up during the performance, so that the instrument is not cold (and hence out of tune) by the time of the thematic entry.”

The eventual solo exposition gave Weidinger the opportunity to demon­strate what his new-fangled instrument could do. But Haydn was evidently concerned with more than demonstrat­ing. He used the chromatic notes of the keyed trumpet to shape melodies of great sensitivity that alternate with more typical, fanfare-like trumpet writing.

The second-movement Andante features a gentle lyrical tune that the solo trumpet takes over from the violins and flute. The chromatic notes of the trumpet, as well as its ability to play fast-moving ornaments, are put to good use in this brief but memorable movement.

The last movement is a typical Haydnesque finale, with buoyant themes woven into a brilliant rondo that displays the virtuosity of the soloist along with (one more time) the instrument’s sensational chromatic capacity.

— Peter Laki

How wonderful that such familiar pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth — the most famous of all symphonies — still “work” in performance. Audiences of all kinds, occasional and frequent attenders alike, still enjoy its wonders 200 years after its premiere in an unheated concert hall one cold night in Vienna in December 1808. Even those few who arrive with trepidation at hearing an old warhorse one more time are inevitably drawn to the music’s opening drama, rousing ending, and innumerable discoveries in between.

Beethoven began this symphony in 1804, soon after completing his Third, which had been nicknamed “Eroica” (Heroic). That 45-minute work, which contemporary audiences felt was much too long for a symphony, was composed just after one of the composer’s most anguishing life experiences, as he brought himself to terms with the growing affliction that would eventually rob him of all hearing.

After sketching the first two move­ments, Beethoven set it aside for more than two years while he wrote his opera Fidelio and the lively and untroubled Fourth Symphony. He then worked diligently on the Fifth throughout 1807, while simultaneously writing the Sixth, nicknamed “Pastoral.” This kind of multitasking — working on several compositions at once — was a normal practice for Beethoven throughout his life, with the ideas originally intended for one work slipping across into a different work entirely.

Throughout this middle period of Beethoven’s life, the composer was routinely strapped for funds and, in 1808, he developed plans for a special evening “Akademie” concert on December 22 to raise money for himself. He secured the Theater an der Wein and rehearsed with musicians in the days leading up to the concert. Beethoven, perhaps sensing the difficulty of scheduling future concerts, kept revising the evening’s program to include more and more music.

The concert lasted more than four hours and featured the world premieres of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist), and the Choral Fantasy as a grand finale, assembling all of the evening’s performing forces at once. Unfortunately, the weather that night was colder than usual and the building was unheated, so the conditions for comfortable listening and performing deteriorated as the hours passed.

From that chilly premiere, the Fifth Symphony’s reputation only increased, and by the end of the 19th century, it had attained its current status as a classical superstar. The association of the opening four-note motive, matching Morse code’s dot–dot–dot–dash for the letter “V,” came to be a shorthand to signify Allied victory during World War II, pushing it further into public consciousness.

The idea that those four notes represent the composer’s turbulent struggle with destiny was put into circulation by Beethoven himself, or at least by his fantasy-spinning amanuensis Anton Schindler, who reported the composer’s explanation of the opening motive as, “So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte” (Thus Fate knocks at the door).

Fate struck Beethoven most cruelly in 1802 when, still in his early 30s, he acknowledged his deafness and began the long process of coming to terms with a handicap that was both a musical disability and, perhaps moreso, a social one. His standing as a virtuoso pianist with excellent connections at court was seriously threatened, and his connec­tions with friends, and especially with women, were now forever circumscribed.

We might think that, as a composer, his reactions were far more violent than the situation warranted. The “Eroica” Symphony, the immediate product of that profound crisis, transformed the world of classical music forever. But he did not stop there. One colossal pathbreaking piece followed another, combining unearthly beauty of invention, technical virtuosity, vastness of concep­tion, and a radical freedom of expression and form.

Beethoven may have felt inordinately sorry for himself, but there is no self-pity in his music. Defiance, certainly, although the sense of triumph expressed in the conclusion of the Fifth Symphony is surely more than Beethoven thumbing his nose at Fate.

Whether you choose to listen to this work with the idea of “Fate knocking at the door,” as a path from darkness to light, mystery to certainty, ignorance to enlightenment; or merely a well-craft­ed symphony, this piece is sure to take you on an exhilarating journey.

The four movements are concise and focused. The first movement is built almost entirely around the four-note opening motive — stated again and again, as foreground then background, upside down and right side up again, in unison and harmonized.

The second movement takes a graceful line and works it through various guises, almost always with a sense of expectancy underneath, growing stronger and stronger.

The third movement alternates between quiet uncertainty and forthright declamations. Near the end, a section of quietly forbidding darkness leads directly into the bright C-major sunshine of the last movement. Beethoven revels in the major key, then develops a strong musical idea through to an unstoppable finish, repeated and extended, emphatic and triumphant.

— Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.