Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 36 (1802)
Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo: Allegro
Allegro molto
Artists are fiery by nature and do not ‘weep’, declared Beethoven around the time he composed the second of his nine symphonies. And there is much fire, and little weeping, in this remarkable work, which shows no dwindling of inspiration, no loss of nerve, after the impact made by the early Symphony No 1 in C. Indeed, for all the lyrical sweetness of its slow movement, it is music quite startlingly progressive and idiosyncratic, often volcanic in energy and humour, a true stepping-stone to the 'Eroica' and an absolutely assured, brilliantly devised masterpiece in its own right.
Yet the yes-saying quality of the Second Symphony, every note of which expresses the power of positive thinking, was quite at odds with the state of Beethoven’s mind at the time he wrote it. The quotation at the start of this programme-note was no idle statement but part of what has come to be known as Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, the famous and harrowing letter in which, at the age of 32, he admitted that he was going deaf. The music, for all its robustness of outlook, thus dates from the most troubled period in a troubled life, when the composer confessed himself to be contemplating suicide but produced this gloriously sunny and unbuttoned work instead.
Though often described as ‘early’ Beethoven, and though rooted unmistakably in Haydn and Mozart, the Second Symphony needs to be heard in the context of Beethoven’s own Third Piano Concerto and Moonlight sonata, two other works of the period by an avant-garde composer advancing into a new century. The scale of writing – conspicuously larger than that of the First Symphony – shows how aware the young Beethoven already was that symphonic form was capable of unprecedented expansion.
Yet there is also a terseness, particularly in the third movement, of a sort to which Beethoven was to return in some of his last string quartets and piano sonatas. The whole work, indeed, is dynamically forward-looking, even if it is content to employ the classical-sized orchestra of the First Symphony, and to make use of recognisably traditional structures – through which, however, thunderbolts are hurled. Again and again, Beethoven here used conventional procedures in a quite novel way, each fragment of the scherzo, for instance, being projected by different instruments in a manner prophetic of something Schoenberg later devised a name for – he called it Klangfarbenmelodie – and coloured, as Berlioz astutely observed, with a thousand different tints.
But the work’s originality of utterance is heard in its very opening notes, an orchestral call to attention initially suggestive of Haydn, though soon to prove grander and more emotional as it proceeds towards the rock-face of a hammered-out D minor arpeggio that anticipates the opening of the Ninth Symphony. Trills and triplets sustain the tension until, without a pause, the violins plunge into the seething energy of the main allegro con brio portion of the movement. The first subject would sound Mozartian were it not so explosive; the second subject is a quick march in Beethoven’s most pungently militaristic vein. The grand sonorous swell of the coda, with its fierce fortissimi and emphatically offbeat sforzandi, shows Beethoven pushing symphonic music into a new age.
To have attended the famous Beethoven benefit concert at the Theater an der Wien in 1803, when this work has its first performance alongside that of the oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the Third Piano Concerto, with the composer himself as soloist, would have been exhilarating, however scrappy it must have sounded. The First Symphony was also played, and Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s pupil and early biographer, has left details of a day that started when he was summoned at five o’clock in the morning to find Beethoven in bed busy with new brass parts. The rehearsal began three hours later. By 2.20 everyone had become cross and impatient, but Prince Lichnowsky, the composer’s benefactor, sent for hampers of bread and butter, cold meat and wine. Then the rehearsal resumed and the concert began at six.
The slow movement, to its first hearers, must have seemed dumbfoundingly large in scale. Edinburgh University's great essayist, Sir Donald Tovey, called it "one of the most luxurious slow movements in the world" and if it sometimes sounds Schubertian, that is because Schubert plundered it when he came to write his Grand Duo twenty years later. The music progresses unhurriedly, in sonata-form, through a lavish succession of themes and repetitions, but the slow, flowing, clarinet-soaked momentum never falters, and makes the scherzo, when finally unleashed, sound all the more concise. This, too, is a movement that later composers plundered (notably Brahms). The rondo finale – with a main theme that crackles like a jumping-jack beneath one’s feet – manages to cap everything that has gone before. Sir George Grove, in his study of Beethoven’s symphonies, exclaimed that No.2 was” not so safe as No.1”. As the finale careers to its close, via an array of tantalising false endings, one sees exactly what he meant.
© Conrad Wilson
