Conference Agenda

Though historically-informed performance (HIP) has been an important trend in performance practice since the mid-twentieth century (due to the pioneering efforts of Arnold Dolmetsch, Paul Sacher, Nadia Boulanger, and Wanda Landowska, among others), theoretically-informed performance, though potentially equally useful to performers, has has not received the same support or acclaim. (The work of Nicholas Cook in recent decades in this area is a notable exception.) The following study seeks to remedy this lacuna in the scholarly arena, showing how the insights of formal analysis, in particular the New Formenlehre of William Caplin, Janet Schmalfeldt, and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy can provide useful information to assist musicians in shaping their performances. This assertion is particularly relevant in dealing with works that pose formal challenges, as is often the case with Ludwig van Beethoven’s compositions. Beethoven infuses the Classical norms he inherited from Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Muzio Clementi with his own personality, along with an often-idiosyncratic use of form.

Among Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, many musicians have singled out his opus 10, no. 2 in F major, composed in 1798, for its wit and harmonic boldness, as well as its formal elusiveness. The opening movement in particular uses the conventions of sonata form in an unprecedented manner, as Charles Rosen asserts. As a result of Beethoven’s deliberately ambiguous formal decisions, the exact location of the subordinate theme’s beginning, and later, the start of the recapitulation, are a matter of debate, due to conflicting cadential, thematic, and tonal signals. On a first hearing, these conflicting formal signals, false musical leads, and tonal or thematic surprises influence a listener’s moment-by-moment experience of the movement. The arrival of new musical information as the movement unfolds forces continual rethinking of the work’s rhetorical and formal design, a rethinking that surely can be influenced by the musical decisions of the performer as they shape their interpretation of the movement.

Recalling James Webster’s analytical remarks (concerning the finale of Haydn’s String Quartet in C major, opus 54, no. 2), the opening movement of Beethoven’s opus 10, no. 2 deftly manipulates listener expectations—like Haydn’s finale, it is a commentary on Classical musical form, along with its conventions and unspoken expectations. Part of the challenge in such a movement, for performer and listener alike, is how the sequence of musical events confirms or denies these expectations.Touching upon prior analyses by Donald Francis Tovey, Charles Rosen, William Caplin, David Smyth, and Carl Wiens—in addition to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy—this study will examine this intriguing movement in light of Janet Schmalfeldt’s retroactive reinterpretation of formal units as part of a larger unity (a sense of “becoming”). Schmalfeldt’s “form as process” approach to analysis enables us to describe the richness and variety of formal situations with which Beethoven presents the listener in this fascinating and experimental work. Furthermore, this richness and variety provides the performer with a wealth of musical decisions, virtually none of them pro forma—as they strive to elucidate the movement’s formal design.

By incorporating Schiller’s ode, the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony reaches beyond the joyful and comic associations of the Classical contredanse finale to achieve a more profound and literal expression of joy—one that furthermore draws on poetry rather than dance. Yet the idea of dance was not absent from Beethoven’s mind as he formulated ideas for the Ninth over many years. His verbal sketch alluding to a “pious symphony in the old modes”, notated in 1818 in connection with a symphonic commission from the London Philharmonic Society, includes the phrase “in the Allegro, festival of Bacchus,” perhaps envisaged as a riotous depiction of Bacchanalian dancing. Early sketches for the Freude theme also include ideas in triple meter with the character of a German dance.

These allusions to dance in Beethoven’s sketches are quite different from those in earlier symphonic finales, where a sense of joyful culmination is evoked through the contredanse. He had explored the Classical ideal most fully in the Eroica Symphony, which appropriates an actual contredanse from his own Prometheus ballet. Beethoven’s apparent move away from this ideal by the time of his Ninth Symphony corresponds with broader shifts in the world of dance in the early nineteenth century, both on stage and in the ballroom. Of particular significance was a vogue ca. 1800 for evoking ancient Greek culture through dance practice, evident not only in ballets d’action, but also in the prefaces to contemporary social dance treatises, and perhaps most of all in Vienna’s most opulent ballroom, the Apollosaal, first opened in 1808, but decidedly out of fashion as a dance venue by the 1820s. While Beethoven’s engagement with Greco-Roman culture has received much scrutiny, most recently from Jos van der Zanden (2022), little attention has been given to the role of Greek ideals of dance in the musical culture of Beethoven’s day. This paper examines dance—both in practice and in the cultural imagination—as a backdrop to Beethoven’s symphonic works, and links broader shifts in the realm of dance with his search for a new type of finale ideal in the Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven's Op. 131/IV variations exemplify a cohesive narrative despite the contrasting temporal changes. While Winter (1978) has drawn attention to multi-movement structure and part-writing strategy, this study sheds light on Beethoven’s late style by examining the interaction between thematic and temporal processes.

A chronological examination of sketches, including the unpublished A 55 and A 56 sketches in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, demonstrates a nuanced balance between unity and dissociation, enriching our understanding of Beethoven’s late style.

This movement encompasses a main theme, six variations, and a coda. The sketch revisions illuminate Beethoven's intent to refine thematic coherence and temporal smoothness. The Artaria 210 and A 56 sketches reveal that variation 5, characterized by its slow, compressed-sonority technique and minimal thematic content, was initially designated as variation 2. Variation 5 contrasts with the faster and more thematic nature of the actual variation 2. The subsequent reordering, therefore, emphasizes Beethoven’s revised aim to maintain thematic coherence and temporal smoothness in the early part of the movement.

The temporal transition from variation 6 to the coda presents a challenge, shifting abruptly from a slow 9/4 Adagio to a lively 2/4 Allegretto. Initial sketches depict variation 6 in 9/4, later revised to 9/8, as evident in A 55 sketches. Beethoven ultimately maintains 9/4, intensifying temporal contrasts with the coda. Although the notion of a faster variation 6 is rejected, an accelerated temporal process emerges through the subdivision into triplets, tempo markings, and ornaments. This process facilitates the return to the original tempo, Andante, implied later in the coda.

Dissociation becomes integrated in the coda, as the Adagio-Allegretto-Andante passage rotates, while maintaining thematic continuation. Artaria 210 sketches reveal the later insertion of the returning Allegretto, showing Beethoven’s effort to enhance dissociation as integration. This phenomenon resonates with Adorno’s framework of middle-period rather than late style.

Examining the temporal and thematic interplay, Beethoven's revisions in Op. 131/IV illuminate his pursuit of balancing integration with dissociation. This analysis extends Swinkin's (2013) notion of middle-and-late-period dialectic, presenting a refined perspective that reconciles elements from both middle and late styles, unveiling new insights into this grand variation.