Beethoven: Septet in E-flat, Op. 20, for violin, viola, clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello, and double bass
Ames Town & Gown Performer: Czech Nonet
Ames City Auditorium October 16, 2004
Notes by Karl E. Gwiasda
Upon arriving in Vienna in late 1792, the 21-year-old Beethoven busily set out to make a name for himself. Over the next few years, he produced two piano concertos to showcase his talents as a performer while he also issued a spate of compositions meant to satisfy the domestic market—sonatas and shorter works for piano, songs, two cello sonatas, three string trios, three violin sonatas, three piano trios, and even pieces for mandolin. By 1799, his reputation growing, Beethoven was ready for more ambitious undertakings. He began work on the set of six string quartets he would publish as his Opus 18, and he made preparations to put on a concert to earn some money and to advance his claim to being the rightful successor to Mozart and Haydn.
The concert was held on April 2, 1800. For the occasion, Beethoven composed what he advertised as a “new grand symphony”—his first. In case that attraction was not enough to lure an audience, the program opened with a symphony by Mozart and included arias from Haydn’s Creation, along with Beethoven’s performing one of his piano concertos and also playing improvisations from the piano. One other work filled out the evening—Beethoven’s newly composed Septet in E-flat, which carried a dedication to the Empress Maria Theresa.
Where nowadays every national event inevitably has some Iowa connection, every musical event in early 19th-century Vienna seemed inescapably to hold a Czech connection. So it was, at least, with Beethoven’s benefit concert. The director for the premiere performance of the First symphony was Pavel Vranick, who led the orchestra from his position as concertmaster. The violinist in the Septet was Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who had been a pupil of Antonín Vranick. (Later, under the patronage of Count Razumovsky, Schuppanzigh would found the ensemble that became a leading advocate of Beethoven’s quartets.)
Though belated reviews carried a few complaints—the symphony was marred by “dissonances” and the winds were “overused”—the concert must have been a success, for Beethoven was soon negotiating with a publisher for the sale of the symphony, his B-flat concerto, a piano sonata, and the septet. From the payment he sought, Beethoven evidently valued the septet as highly as he did his symphony. The musical public agreed. The septet became the composer’s greatest hit, and it was issued in various arrangements, including one for piano trio by Beethoven himself.
That such an ingratiating piece so perfectly suited the popular taste is unsurprising, but that taste was not one that the composer’s musical thoughts would much longer continue to match. In time, Beethoven judged the septet’s celebrity to be less a blessing than a curse, serving as it did (he thought) to deflect attention from his more serious works. Carl Czerny (the composer’s pupil) reported that Beethoven came to despise the piece. When Beethoven’s British friend, Charles Neate, told the composer of the septet’s popularity in England after its introduction there in 1815, Beethoven replied, “That damned work. I wish it could be burned.” Fortunately, the work has survived—without, moreover, doing any damage to the esteem accorded the composer’s later and greater compositions. In fact, the septet preserves a Beethoven of more amiable and sunny disposition than fits his image as heaven-storming titan. Within, though, a year or two of the septet’s composition, Beethoven became acutely aware of his growing deafness. Amiability and sunniness would no longer find much place in his life
Cast in six movements, the septet might well have been called a “divertimento,” a term used by Mozart for several of his compositions in a similar vein. Some commentators, in fact, surmise that Beethoven modeled his septet on Mozart’s Divertimento No. 17, K.334—a work also in six movements, one of them set as a theme and variations. Although not conclusive, the comparison is suggestive.
Like the First symphony (and like several of Haydn’s symphonies), the septet begins with a slow introduction (Adagio). Following a passage of rhythmic throbbing that ends with a punctuating chord, the music shifts into a sprightly and buoyant Allegro con brio (“Fast, with energy”) in which the violin and clarinet play a starring part. The clarinet introduces the second movement, an Andante (“Walking pace”) that is justly labeled cantabile (“Songful”). The movement gently spins out some of the more tender and soothing music that Beethoven ever wrote. In the minuet that follows, Beethoven reworks material that he had used in an earlier piano sonata, eventually published as Op. 49, No. 2. The minuet is reported to have been the most popular of all the movements of the septet.
The fourth movement presents a theme and five variations, each scored to feature a particular instrument or grouping. Carl Czerny reported that Beethoven’s theme derived from a Rhenish folksong. Scholars, however, have been unable to track down any such song, and Czerny’s attribution is now considered mistaken. Where Mozart had supplied a second minuet for the fifth movement of his Divertimento in D, Beethoven—in what became one of his characteristic practices—substitutes a scherzo. The short, rollicking movement is marked Allegretto molto et vivace (“Very fast and lively”). The finale opens in a slow section that soon turns into a peppy Presto. Near the end, the music slows, and the violin takes off in a florid cadenza that Beethoven surely included with his friend, Schuppanzigh, expressly in mind. Then the romp resumes to propel the movement to its joyous conclusion.
Performances of Septet in E-flat, Op. 20, for violin, viola, clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello, and double bass (all freely available on YouTube)