Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 2
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music is generally considered the bridge between the world of classical formalism and the budding romantic movement – between the time when music was typically composed in response to a request from a secular or spiritual power and the time when a composer’s personal experience was considered the most important inspiration. And although Beethoven’s first two symphonies are fundamentally of the earlier, classical period, typified by the works of Haydn and Mozart, the second symphony in particular looks toward the future, and in many ways betrays the most anguished of personal motivations.
For Beethoven completed the work between 1801 and 1802, when he faced the fact that he was going deaf. He had been aware since the previous year of a buzzing in his ears, an inability to hear very soft sounds or to distinguish between a jumble of loud ones. He had shunned company, fearful that others would learn his secret, and felt chastised by family and friends for his seeming misanthropy. In 1802 his doctor sent him to Heiligenstadt, a village near Vienna, to get away from the noise of the city. There he wrestled with despair, writing (but never sending) a will and letter to his brothers Carl and Johann in which he explained:
“But, think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady … What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing … such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.”
He concluded his ‘testament’ with thanks to his friend and patron Prince Karl von Lichnowsky, who had earlier befriended Mozart, and to whom Beethoven later dedicated the first published edition of his Symphony No. 2.
Beethoven’s notebooks reveal that the groundwork for the symphony had been laid several years earlier, before his personal crisis. The work is solidly classical in form, with more classical ornamentation than in Beethoven’s later works. Some even hear an echo of the opening of Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 (“Prague”) in the harmonic ambiguities at the start of Beethoven’s symphony. Yet it was clear at the piece’s premiere, in April of 1803, that it was something new. Though the work was generally well-received, some critics chided the composer for “an exaggerated striving for effect” and “straining for that which is new and remarkable.”
The symphony’s themes are basically sunny and energetic, no doubt from his earlier sketches. Yet tragic overtones, perhaps from his personal crisis, do intrude, notably in the portentous slow opening of the Adagio. The expansive opening, heralding the broadening scale of Beethoven’s works, juxtaposes major and minor modes, showing how far the composer had already come from his first symphony. One can even hear a precursor to a theme from his ninth symphony, and this section anticipates the Symphony No. 9 in its D-minor climax. The Allegro con brio is vivacious and confident, repeatedly stressing the clash of contrary forces with triumphal brass and percussion. Drums and brass are then silenced in the Larghetto, a graceful series of Ländler-like themes. Yet even in this calm movement a straining ostinato rises ominously, with building chords that threaten briefly to resolve into the minor rather than major. The sunny Scherzo that follows – the first of Beethoven’s symphonic Scherzi so labeled – passes a simple figure throughout the orchestra with the surprising dynamic contrasts typical of the composer. The trio features a stately woodwind melody that segues rather quickly back into a reprise of the scherzo. The final movement, Allegro molto, begins with a pickup note and emphasizes the off-beat. It builds inexorably on a repeated dominant seventh, finally resolving in a coda that extends for 150 bars.
The overall effect of the symphony is bright and positive – perhaps a musical expression of Beethoven’s determination to triumph with art over his deafness. His triumph was already apparent to a contemporary critic, who declared this symphony would “remain as the work of a fiery spirit … when a thousand fashionable pieces now celebrated will have long been consigned to their graves.”
September 23, 2001