Guest post:
KEVIN MCBRIEN, PhD Candidate in Musicology, University of California, Santa Barbara
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It is rare to see the words “frivolous” and “Beethoven” appear together in the same sentence. By their very nature, pieces such as the Ninth Symphony and Grosse Fugue seem to exude a profound weightiness and automatically warrant descriptors like “monumental,” “pillar,” or “masterwork.” However, it can be easy to forget that Beethoven repeatedly showcased a lighter, even playful side in his music. The importance of his more serious musical expressions cannot be overstated or ignored, but considering the dashes of frivolity present throughout Beethoven’s output can paint a much richer picture. 

The lighter side of Beethoven’s compositional voice is particularly evident in his Third and Fifth Cello Sonatas. The Third (op. 69), which was composed in 1808 and premiered the following year, opens with a broad and stoic sonata-form movement, often considered to be the most “serious” of musical structures. What follows, though, is a startling shift—a mischievous Scherzo set in A minor (the parallel to the Sonata’s home key of A major) and a springy 3/4 meter. This boisterous movement is riddled with rhythmic trickery; random accents pepper both the piano and cello lines, and seem poised to derail the proceedings at any moment. The music here does little overall to reflect the handwritten dedication Beethoven allegedly penned on the Sonata’s now-lost manuscript—Inter lacrimas et luctum (“amid tears and grief”), perhaps a reference to the arrival of French troops outside Vienna in 1809. In fact, the Sonata as a whole rarely mirrors the anxiety of these events and is a delight from start to finish. 

Similarly, the Fifth Sonata (op. 102, no. 2) also spotlights a rather surprising moment of lightheartedness. Dedicated to Beethoven’s patroness and friend Maria von Erdödy, many scholars pinpoint this 1815 work as one of the earliest signs of Beethoven’s late period. The music of these final years is characterized by boundary-breaking experiments in form, harmony, and rhythm that would become a crucial jumping-off point for countless composers after Beethoven. Sharp juxtapositions in mood are also common throughout his late-period music, and this Sonata is no exception. After the second movement—a solemn, time-suspending Adagio—the cello segues directly into the finale via an inquisitive D-major scale (disguised as an altered A-major scale). After this is quietly echoed by the piano, the cello reiterates the scale once again, but this time it has suddenly become the subject of a spirited fugue. With a few exceptions, fugal finales were still quite unusual at the time of the Sonata’s premiere, and some audience members were puzzled. One less-than-stellar review from 1824 reads: 

“The subject is too cheerful for such a serious execution and for that reason contrasts in too shrill a manner with the two previous movements. How much we would have rather preferred hearing a different movement, a Beethoven finale, instead of this fugue! We wish that Beethoven did not exploit the fugue in such a willful manner, since his great genius is raised well enough above every form.” 

As is so often the case, the joke was on the reviewer and this work—along with Beethoven’s other four Cello Sonatas—have since become cornerstones of the cello repertory. 

While wonderful on their own, these two examples only scratch the surface. Frivolity is present throughout Beethoven’s output. Take the bubbling Scherzo of the “Eroica” Symphony, the celebratory finale of the “Lebewohl” Sonata, the bucolic folk song arrangements. These moments help lift the veil on a composer who is all-too-frequently thought of as a curmudgeonly artist angrily shaking his fist at the world. Of course, frivolity should not be mistaken for haphazardness—Beethoven’s lighthearted music is just as meticulously thought out and crafted as his serious music. Rather, it is in these lighter moments that Beethoven reminds us that to be human is to experience the gamut of emotions, whether it be quiet despondency or unbridled joy. Frivolity is just another part of the richness of life and for Beethoven, that is serious business.

Kevin McBrien is a Southern California-based musicologist, writer, editor, and speaker who has a passion for connecting others with classical music. A PhD candidate in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his current research explores connections between émigré composers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1930s & 1940s. Kevin is also an avid program and liner note annotator, and his writings have appeared at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Salida Aspen Concerts, and Music Academy of the West, and in album releases by Chavdar Parashkevov, Natasha Kislenko (Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler: Works for Violin and Piano, 2018), and Sung Chang (forthcoming). Additionally, he has curated a classical music blog since 2017.  

Guest Post:
SARAH CLEMMENS WALTZ, Associate Professor and Program Director for Music History, University of the Pacific

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What is chamber music for? Unlike our modern experience of music, it was the way most music was made in Beethoven’s time. Indeed, chamber music was often for making more than for listening: a sort of musical socializing in which musicians experienced music together and communicated to each other through the music that privileged witnesses could also hear. It can be surprising to realize that, in Beethoven’s time, even virtuosic piano works like the Hammerklavier Sonata (probably, in 1818, the most difficult piano work to that date) were meant for the gratification of the player and a private circle, with no public platform such as a piano recital to emerge until some years after Beethoven’s death. “Private” performances, however, might still impress a number of important listeners, such as if the work were played in an aristocratic home or salon.  

Beethoven, as a pianist, probably imagined himself performing the piano role of any music involving the instrument, but his own performances declined as his deafness increased. His final public performance in early 1815 was the last gasp of what had once been the career of a performing virtuoso pianist. Beethoven’s deafness, which he realized was incurable around 1802, became profound by 1816–17; to that and to his mercurial gastrointestinal illness he attributed his increasing isolation from others.  

Although we have often conceived of Beethoven’s middle and late years as a battle with deafness and illness, it is his battle with isolation which is perhaps most moving and with which we can all identify today. Beethoven’s need for human connection and simultaneous inability to fully achieve it—common to the human condition—is visible in almost every aspect of his biography: his family relationships, his fraught interactions with his teacher Haydn, his alternation between relying on patrons and fierce independence from them, his conflicts concerning his unmarried state, and of course the cri du coeur in the 1802 Heiligenstadt Testament—essentially a will in which Beethoven reveals the heartbreaking tension between his desire for companionship and need to avoid it: 

Though born with a fiery, lively temperament, susceptible to the diversions of society, I soon had to withdraw myself, to spend my life alone. And if I wished at times to ignore all this, oh how harshly was I pushed back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing; and yet it was impossible for me to say to people, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’

[F]or me there can be no relaxation in human company, no refined conversations, no mutual outpourings. I must live quite alone, like an outcast; I can enter society practically only as much as real necessity demands.

trans. Barry Cooper

Beethoven notes that period of uncertainty around his hearing stretches back six years to 1796, and thus includes many of his early-period works: the first 8 violin sonatas (such as the Opus 12 set and the popular Spring Sonata Opus 24), the Opus 18 string quartets, many wind chamber works, and piano sonatas such as Opus 27 No. 2 Sonata quasi una fantasia, known as the Moonlight Sonata.  

Beethoven’s enduring popularity is partly because listeners and performers relate to what they find to be expressed through his music. Beethoven himself claimed that he often had a “poetic idea” behind his works and sometimes complained that listeners were less perceptive than they had once been. Whatever he intended to communicate, it is certain that the most enduring popularity has attached to works that conveyed some poetic idea via a title, even if that title was not given by Beethoven. The Spring Sonata and Moonlight Sonata are titles inspired by the reception of listeners, rather than given by the composer, although stylistic hallmarks (such as from the “pastoral” or “nocturne/moonlight” styles respectively) are present in the music to support listeners’ ideas.  

Though Beethoven may not have intended to express it, today we cannot help but to identify with his isolation, and perhaps even with the dark thoughts that led him to write a will. It is worth remembering that he also wrote in that document:  

Such incidents brought me almost to despair; a little more and I would have ended my life. Only my art held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me[.]

Thus Beethoven’s answer to isolation was to continue to communicate with the art he made, until he could make it no more.

Sarah Clemmens Waltz holds both a BA in physics from Oberlin College and a BM in musicology from Oberlin Conservatory, where she also studied flute with Michel Debost and Kathleen Chastain. She received her PhD in Music History from Yale University in May 2007. Her dissertation, The Highland Muse in Romantic German Music, concerns the image of Scotland in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German composition and criticism. 

Dr. Waltz has published Beethoven-related articles in Beethoven Forum and the Beethoven Journal; an essay on “Mendelssohn and the Idea of the North” has just been published in the volume Rethinking Mendelssohn (Oxford, 2020). She also has published German Settings of Ossianic Texts 1770-1815 (A-R Editions, 2016). Current projects include the musical thought of astronomer William Herschel and continued work on northern inspiration in German romanticism.