Beethoven and the Romantic spirit

The composer’s Third Cello Sonata, an underrated masterwork, cuts up the musical form and reassembles it anew.

Illustration by Lebrecht Music Arts / Bridgeman Images

Every summer (if that is what we are calling this), I programme a small chamber music concert. A few days ago, I was asked by a friend if I might be able to put on a favourite non-vocal piece for two instruments. Music-lovers among you will instantly attest that this a completely impossible decision. I would struggle to pick my top ten from 200 works, let alone select a single piece. However, in the end, I settled on Beethoven’s Third Cello Sonata – Op 69 – because my friend had not heard it and because, for me, this piece has everything.

Indeed, the minute I returned to the sonata, I realised that if I had to push one chamber music piece as a gateway drug for the Beethoven-curious, then this would be it. If you’ve not heard it before, promise me you will listen to it today. If you have heard it before, revisit it. Play it through headphones, loud. Because this is pure, distilled Ludwig, at his sublime and unsurpassable best. Twenty-six minutes of intense musical pleasure. So much invention and virtuosity and involvement and drama and soaring beauty. The attack. The variation. The originality. The lyricism. The sheer innovation.

Beethoven was in his late thirties, his so-called middle period and living in Vienna when he completed the work in 1808. The enchanted woods of the late string quartets and the mighty summits of the late piano sonatas were still a way off, but his life’s great expedition was already beginning to darken. His developing deafness would mean that he had to give up public performance on the piano later that year. He faced never-ending financial worries – he dedicated Op 69 to Ignaz von Gleichenstein, an amateur-cellist friend who had recently arranged an annuity for him. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic Wars ravaged Europe.

We sometimes forget how much the terror and immediacy of the European wars affected composers. Beethoven autographed the manuscript “Inter lacrymas et luctus” – amidst tears and sorrows. Later, in 1809, in a letter to his publisher, he wrote, “I have barely managed to produce anything coherent, hardly anything but a shred here and there. The entire affair has affected me in both body and mind… What a destructive and savage life is raging around me! Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of every kind!”

But the sonata transcends the circumstances of its composition, and evades even its own composer’s efforts to tag or define it. Not least because it is so formally inventive. We forget how revolutionary it must have sounded to the contemporary audience in 1809, when it was first performed. A reviewer writing in the German music publication Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1814 exclaimed that the sonata was “full of tender loveliness, like few others, and at the same time genuinely romantic, showing genuine depth of soul!”

You can hear Beethoven personally transposing the classical era into the romantic. Gone the just-so sound world of his mentor Joseph Haydn, whom he studied under in the early 1790s. Instead, Beethoven cuts up the sonata form and reassembles it as he pleases – themes develop and cycle; motifs disappear and reappear in later movements; everything evolves and connects unexpectedly.

The piece begins with that cello alone: allegro ma non troppo – fast, but not too fast. And, straight away, we are aware that Beethoven has decided on a new approach that leaves behind the two-cello sonatas of his youth: he will treat the cello and the piano as absolute equals throughout. There follows a striking dialogue between the two – sometimes antiphonal, sometimes intimate and entwined, sometimes urgent, sometimes reflective, sometimes in disagreement, sometimes in harmony.

The music moves through so many moods (and so seamlessly) that we soon lose ourselves in the journey – at times elegant and refined, at times full of yearning, urgent, intense, haunting, serene. One of my favourite passages in all of music occurs about six minutes and 45 seconds in, where the cello breaks out and soars. But everywhere in this piece, there are moments of transition. More than with any other composer, we’re left to wonder: how does Beethoven get us from that to this?

The second movement, the Scherzo, has one of the best off-beat musical openings in all classical music. You can hear how Beethoven is so ahead of his time. There’s so much surprise here: staccato then legato; buoyancy and hidden depth. This movement must be one of the clearest examples of Beethoven’s unveiled spirit: the dynamism of his scoring, his originality, his command of drama, rhythm, the way his music is so moment-to-moment interesting.

The third movement, the Cantabile, begins so lyrically that you cannot fathom where the allegro vivace comes from about two minutes in – so hasty and pressing. What mind would see and feel all these connections, would reveal all these musical relationships? I love the way motifs appear and disappear and reappear. I love the harmonic snakes and ladders. The modulations. The way Beethoven writes tension and release. The way the key wanders, as if momentarily lost. The way the finale is so full of technical ingenuity and exuberance. Not “tears and sorrows” – but a rare Beethovenian form of joy.

I always think the greatest privilege of our times (over all the previous centuries, be they Sumatran, Viking or Victorian) is that we can call up any music we would like to listen to, at any time, in less than three seconds. So take advantage. Give yourself a treat. Listen to Beethoven’s Third Cello Sonata.

[See also: Discovering the real Modest Mussorgsky]