[MUSIC]

Now having gone on this lengthy tangent

about what we're not going to talk about,
I would like to slowly make my way to what
we are going to talk about-which is, in large part, the Sonatas Opus
78 and 81a, as well as the Fantasy Opus 77.
So, the first thing to know about these
pieces is that they were written
just as Beethoven was beginning to enter
what was, by his standards, a fallow
period.
Beethoven was never as insanely prolific
as Bach, who wrote over 1,000 works
in his 65 years, or Mozart, who wrote 625
pieces in 36 years.
Or Schubert, the most unfathomable of them
all,
with nearly 1,000 works in his 31 years.
But, from the time Beethoven began
publishing in the
mid-1790s, he did write at a pretty
impressive pace.
Particularly given how much revising he
did and how unwilling
he was to follow any established rubric in
his compositions.
But around 1809 the pace begins to slow,
first slightly, then dramatically.
There are a number of reasons for this,
and I'd like to go into them a bit here
because they tell a story which is deeply
bound
up with the story of the development of
Beethoven's music.
Take the year 1806, for example.
He completed the Appasionata sonata.
He wrote the three massive groundbreaking Razumovsky
quartets,
the violin concerto, the G-major piano concerto, and the fourth
symphony.
Now that's seven behemoth works, most of
them 35 minutes
or longer, all of which have firmly
entered the canon.
In 1809, he wrote, in addition to the
piano sonatas we'll discuss shortly,
the Emperor Concerto and the Harp String
Quartet.
Not a bad year, by any means. But less than half of the
quantity of great music that 1806
produced.
In 1813, the only work he wrote is
Wellington's Victory,
an occasional piece which is unique among
Beethoven's output in
that I'm not ashamed to say that it is
actually bad.
Health was one factor in this, but there
are three other issues

which played a role in this

temporary block to Beethoven's normally
unstoppable imagination.
The first issue is Beethoven's family life.
As I mentioned in the first lecture, in
addition
to it being the expedient move for his
musical career,
one of the likely reasons Beethoven left
Bonn for
Vienna in his early 20s was to escape his
family.
Now, different historians tell different
stories about
the relationship with his father, with
some
painting the picture of an abusive parent
and others dismissing this as a kind of
facile legend, but some things are
certain:
that Beethoven's mother died when he was a teenager,
that his father was an
alcoholic, and that he himself
was the primary carer for his younger brothers,
Carl and Johann.
I said in the first lecture that Beethoven
tried
to escape this, but the fact is, he was
too
controlling a person--or to put a more
positive spin on it,
a person with too strong a moral center--to
simply disown the problem.
This is no small matter.
Look at the whole rigamarole of the Eroica
Symphony,
with Beethoven first naming it for
Napoleon
and then rescinding the dedication when
Napoleon acted in a way he disapproved of.
Clearly, Beethoven did not buy into the
notion, popular later, that art isn't
political.
He was what he wrote, and he wrote how he
was.
At any rate, when Carl became ill in 1813
or so, Beethoven took
charge, both financially and, in his own
mind, as surrogate head of the household.
And when Carl finally died, Beethoven
decided that he should have
custody of his son even though the mother
was alive and well.
Again, different historians can come to
different conclusions about who
was in the right and who was in the wrong
here.
Beethoven's sister-in-law was certainly no
angel.
But the fact is, Beethoven took her to

court for,
and ultimately won custody of, his nephew,
also named Carl.
And unsurprisingly he proved
to be as controlling a guardian as he was
a brother-in-law and everything else.
I won't go into the sad details of their
relationship, but suffice to say
that Carl tried very hard to escape his
uncle's clutches, even attempting suicide
at one point.
He failed, thank God, but the story,
beginning to end, took a
huge toll on Beethoven, who, one can
only assume, meant well.
The years of his brother's illness and the
subsequent
custody battle are precisely the years
when he composed the least.
The second issue, which may have played a
role in
his slight output at this time, is his
personal life.
Beethoven's romantic life altogether is a
story of frustrations.
He had a tendency to fall in love with
aristocratic women who,
much as they may have cared for him, would
never have married him.
There was a series of at least four of
these, beginning with
Julie Guicciardi, in 1802, and it was in 1812 that he wrote
the famous letter to the so-called
Immortal Beloved, which
was, in fact, only one in a long series
of mostly desperately unhappy love letters
that Beethoven wrote.
There is no particularly compelling
evidence
that Beethoven ever had a physical relationship with a woman,
and he was certainly never anywhere close to
marriage.
I feel reluctant to assume too much about
what sort of
effect this may have had on his music.
But it is worth noting that Beethoven is
not
only the first great composer not to have
permanent employment.
He is also the first one without any
proper family.
Mozart had six children, though only two of them
lived to adulthood.
Bach had about 600 of them, and while
Haydn was childless, he was married.
When you put these two factors together,
it's easy to imagine that by 1810
when he was nearing 40, his sense of being
shut in was becoming overwhelming.
This leads us to the third, and, by a

large margin, the most crucial issue.

Beethoven was going deaf.
This is already, alongside the first four
notes of
the fifth symphony, the most well-known
thing about Beethoven.
So I don't want to dwell on it, but, at
the same
time, it would be foolish to pretend that
it is, somehow, insignificant.
Our imagination of the tragic, deaf
Beethoven is a late-in-life one,
but in fact, he had experienced bouts of
tinnitus as early as the 1790s.
And in 1802, the same year he wrote the
"new paths" letter we
discussed last time, he wrote another
momentous letter, this one to his brothers.
It's been known as the "Heiligenstadt Testament,"
because that is the name of the
town from which it was written.
Read it, if you can bear it.
It is in really any collection of
Beethoven's letters,
and I imagine it's probably easy to find
online.
It's a wrenching document, telling of his
increasing sense of isolation, misery,
and, worst of all, shame at being deficient
in an area where he felt he ought to excel.
He discloses that he already attempted to end his life,
and the ultimate thrust of the letter is that the only thing keeping him alive
was his need to create, to say what he needed say artistically.
The tragedy of this hardly needs to be
stated, much less explained.
It's also a reminder that by this point, in
sharp contrast to his predecessors,
self-expression had become not only a, but the
principal reason he wrote.
a, but the principal reason he wrote.
I say the following with considerable
reluctance, because its feels
so heartless to see an upside to a
person's misery.
But I have always wondered if, on a purely
artistic level,
Beethoven's loss of his hearing might not
have had a silver lining.
Beethoven's late works, to an absolutely
unprecedented extent, forced
him to rebuild his musical language from
the ground up.
The only possible parallels I can think of
are
Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
But, forgive me,
while both were geniuses, the twelve-tone
works of Schoenberg and the
later works of Stravinsky simply cannot
hold a candle to late Beethoven.

The Heiligenstadt Testament is virtually

contemporaneous with that "new paths" letter,
so, could he have produced the music that
followed it,
if he had easy access to the world of
sound?
Just as many people who lose one sense
have the others heightened,
is it possible that Beethoven's deafness
heightened his general atunement, his
general awareness,
that the less he heard, the more he heard?
It's a question I often ask myself while
playing the late
sonatas, which more than any other music I
know seem to abandon
convention, rhetoric, and, often, reality.
They are products of an imagined world.
Unsurprisingly, this imagined world was
not easy to create.
By 1810, Beethoven has largely renounced
the heroism which
is prevalent in so many of the most famous middle-period works,
and is clearly once again looking for a
new path, as he had eight years earlier.
But whereas Beethoven powered through
that earlier period
of doubt, this time he hits the pause
button.
Clearly those practical issues were a
factor as well, and it's
difficult to know what's the chicken and
what's the egg here.
Was he composing less because he was
struggling to find his way towards
a new style, or was it an enforced break that
gave him the time
and space he needed to create the style? Who knows.
The pieces Beethoven did write between 1810 and 1815 are often
masterpieces.
But many of them have a quality about them
which, to
me anyway, suggests a kind of insecurity
about his way forward.
The steps, anyway, are halting ones.
And as those years proceed, the pace of
composition gets slower and slower.
When he wrote the wonderful Sonata Opus 90 in 1814,
it was the first piano sonata
he had composed in five years.
Lord knows how he found his way out and in
the process reinvented,
well, everything.
Let's take a short break for a review
question.