Beethoven: "Coriolan" Overture, Opus 62 | Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, then an independent electorate of Germany, probably on December 16, 1770 (he was baptized on the 17th), and died March 26, 1827 in Vienna. He composed the Coriolan Overture in the opening months of 1807. It was premiered the first week of March 1807 at the Vienna home of “Prince L,” according to a contemporary newspaper report; this probably refers to Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz, but might possibly mean Prince Lichnowsky, another of his supporters. The first San Francisco Symphony performances were given in February 1912 with Henry Hadley conducting; David Zinman conducted the most recent performances in June 1992, during the Symphony’s Beethoven Festival. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Beethoven composed his Eighth Symphony in 1811-12, mostly during the summer of 1812, while spending time at the Bohemian spas of Teplitz (now Teplice in the Czech Republic), Carlsbad (Carlovy Vary), and Eger (Cheb). He dated his corrected manuscript October 1812 and conducted the first performance on February 27, 1814, at the Great Redoutensaal in Vienna. The first San Francisco Symphony performances were given in February 1913 with Henry Hadley conducting; Itzhak Perlman conducted the most recent performances in February 2001. This work is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Coriolan Overture
Beethoven’s career was littered with fervent expressions of desire, and even a few fragmentary attempts, to compose an opera worthy of his genius, but in the end he managed to complete only one, Fidelio; and, as if to underscore his unease with the genre, he actually “completed” that work three times (under the original title Leonore) before it reached the state in which it is usually performed today, as Fidelio. But there was more to the stage than opera, and in other theatrical genres Beethoven seemed less given to self-censoring. He wrote music for ballets (the Ritterballet and The Creatures of Prometheus) as well as incidental music, ranging from a single number to complete multi-movement collections, for a half-dozen stage plays: Egmont, Coriolan, King Stephen, The Ruins of Athens, Tarpeja, and Leonore Prohaska. Except for Goethe’s Egmont, all of these plays would be profoundly forgotten but for Beethoven’s contributions to their productions. Even that has not been enough to keep most of them alive, with the result that these scores contain some of Beethoven’s least known pages.
Coriolan came early in this succession of works. The Coriolan in question is not Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, but rather a tragedy by the Court Secretary Heinrich Joseph von Collin that was premiered in Vienna on November 24, 1802. Beethoven is known to have attended that performance, where he heard the accompanying score that had been arranged from bits and pieces of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo. It’s easy to see why Beethoven liked the play, which considered the dilemma of a heroic political leader torn among the conflicting forces of patriotic impulse, family devotion, and personal pride. In this case, Coriolan, a Roman general banished from Rome despite long and valiant service to his people, seeks vengeance by leading an opposing army against his native city; when the Romans send his own mother and wife to persuade him to withdraw, he consents to place his fate in the hands of the Roman mob, effectively choosing suicide as the only acceptable solution to his situation. Richard Wagner, in an essay about this overture, characterized the Coriolan to which Beethoven was drawn as “the man of force untamable, unfitted for a hypocrite’s humility.”
Beethoven completed his Coriolan Overture in early 1807 and it received its first performance in March that year. On that occasion, however, it did not introduce the play that inspired it; instead, it formed part of the mammoth program of a subscription concert that also included the first four of his symphonies, his Fourth Piano Concerto, and excerpts from his opera Leonore (an early version of what would evolve into Fidelio). It seems likely that Beethoven’s Overture was played at a one-night revival of Collin’s play on April 24, 1807; in fact, that theatrical performance may have been arranged expressly to present Beethoven’s work together with the play that had inspired it. The piece became quite popular early on. On October 19, 1808, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig reported on several new works that had graced the concert stage, including “Beethoven’s most recent grand overture to Collin’s Coriolan (in C minor), full of inner, powerful life, original harmonic twists and turns, and with a truly tragic effect (but difficult to perform well).” Four years later the same publication printed an essay by the author and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, who devoted eight pages to an insightful analytical consideration of the Coriolan Overture, whose terrifying character he felt somewhat overwhelmed the “predominantly reflective poetry” of Collin’s play. “Nevertheless,” he wrote, “apart from those expectations that will be aroused only in a few connoisseurs who truly comprehend Beethoven’s music, the composition is completely suited to awaken the specific idea that a great, tragic event will be the content of the play that follows…. No common tragedy can be performed after this overture, but specifically an elevated one, in which heroes rise up and are defeated.” Nearly four decades later, when Beethoven’s posthumous fame had already escalated into near-idolatry, the Coriolan Overture would also have the distinction of opening the official concert that followed the unveiling of the Beethoven memorial monument in Bonn on August 12, 1845.
It stands up well as a concert piece, seeming a sort of early tone poem describing the serious, tortured state of the title character. Beethoven here chooses the key of C minor, to which he seems usually to have attached the sentiment of heroism wedded to tragedy. Three powerful unisons are uttered by the strings, and each is answered by a furious chord from the full orchestra. These launch an Allegro con brio movement that unrolls according to the general plan of a sonata form, with two principal themes of contrasting character: the first is a quiet but frantic theme laced with appoggiaturas; the second, in the relative major key of E-flat, achieves a spaciousness that may suggest the inner peace to which the hero is led by his decision. At the end, the Overture dies away, leaving the listener somewhat up in the air. We should remember, however, that Beethoven intended this movement not to serve as an ending at all, but rather as an introduction to the action that would come.
Symphony No. 8
On several occasions Beethoven sketched two symphonies concurrently or presented pairs of them together on a program, tacitly inviting listeners to hear one work in the context of the other. The fact that his Second Symphony (1801-02) was premiered on a concert that also included his First (1800) encouraged audiences and critics to consider them that way; the critics certainly did, generally to the disadvantage of the Second, which they found its modernity problematic. We might also view the Second as linked chronologically to the Third (the Sinfonia eroica), since Beethoven did much work on both during the summer and fall of 1802 (though he wouldn’t complete the Third until 1804). The Fifth Symphony was already in progress in 1804, but Beethoven set it aside to pen his Fourth (among other works) and therefore didn’t finish the Fifth until early 1808. In those same months—late 1807 and early 1808—he also completed his Sixth (the Pastoral); and the Fifth and Sixth were premiered on the same program, masquerading as one another, in fact, because the printed program flipped the numerals, calling the Pastoral No. 5 and the C minor No. 6.
Each of Beethoven’s symphonies addresses its own musical issues—posing specific conceptual problems and then solving them—but when we consider these works as successions of dyads we may come to believe that they were truly intended as specific studies in contrast. The symphonic pairs seem always to stand as yin and yang to each other, with the result that Beethoven’s symphonies alternate between two categories of artistic impulses. Later in the nineteenth century the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, would delve into the aesthetic details of these artistic impulses (or Kunsttrieben, as he called them), which he traced to ancient Greece and the fragile balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Dionysus and Apollo were sons of Zeus, though by different mothers, and they came to typify diametrically opposed aesthetic ideals. Apollonian standards focused on clarity, balance, control, logic, and classically accepted modes of beauty, while Dionysian inclinations lay in the direction of excess, chaos, even the orgiastic and the irrational. A great artwork may well incorporate aspects of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian, but very often it is one or the other that defines the prevailing ethos overall. As applied to Beethoven’s symphonies, Dionysian characteristics tend to dominate the Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9—the more obviously extroverted and even violent of the bunch—while the cooler forces of Apollonian ideals inspire the Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, 6, and 8. You can learn a lot about the person sitting next to you by asking one simple question: “Evens or odds?”
As with Beethoven’s earlier symphonic pairs, so is the Eighth connected as a dyad to the Seventh. The Seventh was sketched in late 1811, completed in April 1812, and premiered in December 1813, in a concert honoring Austrian and German soldiers who had been wounded while battling Napoleon’s forces; and we have little trouble hearing its public, extroverted, Dionysian ebullience as a reflection of the composer’s own joy as the tide turned against that French Emperor, for whom he had held such hope and with whose imperialistic machinations he grew so disenchanted. But before the Seventh was completed Beethoven was already sketching his Eight Symphony, which he finished in the summer and fall of 1812. Again the yin and yang: where the Seventh is expansive to the point of overflowing, the Eighth is compact. Each of its movements is significantly shorter than the corresponding movement of the Seventh, and in performance the Eighth, which typically runs about 25-30 minutes, is perhaps two-thirds as long overall as the Seventh, which runs about 40. It is as if Beethoven let his fantasy run free in the Seventh but then, turning to a new page of his sketchbook, applied the brakes and reined himself in as severely as possible when plotting his Eighth. Tautness was not a new idea to Beethoven, to be sure; the opening movement of his Fifth Symphony stands to this day as one of the most economical pieces ever penned. But there we are aware of it, thrillingly so. It is music of that sort that surely inspired the description in Colin Wilson’s book Brandy of the Damned (1964), “He reminds me of a man driving the car with the handbrake on, but stubbornly refusing to stop, even though there is a strong smell of burning rubber.” The fun-loving Eighth seems a joyride in comparison.
In its externals, the Eighth Symphony may seem to retreat to an earlier time, and we may be tempted to wonder if Beethoven is picking up where he left off in his Second. But our composer never really turned back in his music—at least not in important scores like symphonies—and we will probably get closer to the truth if we imagine him conceiving something as vast as the immediately preceding symphonies and then editing it down to its essentials, packaging it as tightly as possible, and ending up with what looks at first glance like a Classical symphony. Surely it is to be numbered among the composer’s Apollonian works thanks to its sense of control and the tightness of its logic. But that does mean that it’s in any way stodgy. In fact, the Eighth Symphony is one of the great monuments of musical humor—not throwaway silliness, but rather large-boned, bluff, down-to-the-roots humor, the sort we find in the Falstaff of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, or Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony was premiered on a program that also included his Sixth and Seventh. Sir George Grove, founder of the music dictionaries that still carry his name, related: “It was not well received, much more applause being given to the Seventh Symphony, the Allegretto of which was re-demanded. The non-success of his pet work greatly discomposed Beethoven, but he bore it philosophically; and . . . he remarked, ‘That’s because it’s so much better than the other.’” Audiences were indeed slow to embrace it. In June 1827, three years after the more perplexing Ninth Symphony had been unleashed, we find the critic of Harmonicon in London still scratching his head about the Eighth, voicing an opinion that would reign for years among English critics. “Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony,” he wrote, “depends wholly on its last movement for what applause it obtains; the rest is eccentric without being amusing, and laborious without effect.” Even the perspicacious Hector Berlioz, an inveterate admirer of Beethoven’s symphonies, occasionally found himself at a loss in this one. Of the Tempo di Menuetto portion he opined, “To speak truly, this movement is but ordinary; and the antiquity of the form seems somehow to have stifled the composer’s thought.” And although he thoroughly enjoyed the finale, he found himself baffled when trying to analyze some structural harmonic business in which the theme pops up not just in its original F major but also in C-sharp, the enharmonic D-flat, and, of all things, F-sharp minor. “All this is very curious,” Berlioz concluded.
Con brio is precisely the right marking for the opening movement, which begins with a peal of musical laughter in 3/4 meter. The indefatigable music appreciationist Sigmund Spaeth, who in 1936 published lyrics to serve as mnemonic devices for the classic symphonies, found an opportunity to leap to the composer’s defense with his rhyme for this opening theme: “Beethoven still is great, in the symphony he numbered eight.” Hardly has Beethoven sounded it out than he drops it, turning, without more preparation than a bit of thumping, to a second theme, a lyrical tune in A major. This, too, proves to be short-lived, and the exposition reaches its end—back in F major—not long after it had begun. The development section is similarly concentrated and briefly stormy; and when Beethoven reaches the moment when the recapitulation arrives, he re-voices his opening music utterly, burying the principal theme in the bassoons, cellos, and double basses while the rest of the orchestra shrieks fortississimo above. That would count as a musical joke, and a clever one, but not everyone was amused. One later eminence who protested was Gustav Mahler, who, preparing to lead it as a conductor, rewrote this passage (via one of his infamous retuchen—“retouchings”) to make sure everybody would hear the structural moment clearly. Beethoven’s intention, I am quite sure, was that they wouldn’t.
The second movement (Allegretto scherzando) is the closest this symphony gets to a slow movement, and it’s not very close. If the constantly repeated staccato sixteenth-notes start to sound like “tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock,” there’s a reason for it. While he was composing this symphony Beethoven took a few minutes off to write a canon (WoO 162) for his friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who had constructed several of the ear-trumpets the almost-deaf composer used, in addition to inventing the odd instrument called the panharmonicon for which the composer’s Wellington’s Victory was conceived and, most notably, the metronome. Beethoven began his little canon with the text “ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta”—not great poetry but indeed metronomic. He clearly took pleasure in the effect, and here he reuses the tune, now downright cheeky when inserted into a lofty symphony. The principal theme seems hardly even a theme; it’s more like musical “puttering about,” but Beethoven shows that even such an offhanded idea offers the possibility of development. A ponderous second theme seems to have wandered in from a beer hall. Here and there Beethoven enjoys punctuating his phrases with a fortissimo shudder of rapidly repeated notes in the strings. The effect is that of an unruly uncle entertaining an entourage of youngsters and scaring the daylights out of them by gruffly shaking his jowls.
A decade earlier Beethoven had famously ended the Classical tradition of casting the third movement of a symphony as a minuet, superseding that practice through his signature rapid-fire scherzos. So in this unpredictable work he writes a minuet. On the whole it strikes a grand posture, but in truth it’s full of naughtiness. This surfaces not least in the cadential passages where the horns, trumpets, and timpani get comically “out of sync,” just like the village musicians had in the “Merry Gathering of Country Folk” section of the Pastoral Symphony. This joke, too, has been amended by many a conductor of the Eighth Symphony.
On to the finale (Allegro vivace), which is worked out with magnificent imagination. Again the theme seems negligible—here it’s little more than a cast-off melodic turn—but ends up generating an impressive structure, rather as if the Transamerica Pyramid had grown out of the merest curlicue. Much harmonic legerdemain ensues, as we know from Berlioz, but at least the ending has its feet firmly in the tonic key. Beethoven here bursts with jovial good spirits, and he composes as if abetted by a pile-driver. With the end in sight the orchestra hammers (or in some cases just taps) out 29 iterations of the F major triad; and then after a bit of further tomfoolery Beethoven reaches his final page and pounds the tonic into the ground through all of the concluding thirteen measures. For an Apollonian piece, this is quite a Dionysian ending.
—James M. Keller
The Coriolan note originally appeared in the program books of the New York Philharmonic and is reprinted with permission. © New York Philharmonic
More About the Music
Recordings: For the Coriolan—Klaus Tennstedt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (EMI) | Kurt Masur conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Philips) | Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (EMI Classics reissue through ArkivMusic.com)
For the Symphony—Nicolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Warner Elatus or Teldec) | Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon; also on Euroarts DVD) | Bernard Haitink conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live) | Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (EMI Classics) | For listeners inclined towards historically informed performances, John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (Deutsche Grammophon) or Roger Norrington conducting the London Classical Players (Virgin Classics; also EMI, in a re-release through ArkivMusic.com).
Reading: Three commendable surveys of Beethoven’s life and works are Beethoven, by William Kinderman (Second Edition, Oxford University Press), Beethoven: The Music and the Life, by Lewis Lockwood (Norton), and Beethoven, by Barry Cooper (Oxford, Master Musicians Series). | Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, in its most recent revision by Elliott Forbes (Princeton University Press) | The Beethoven Compendium, edited by Barry Cooper (Thames and Hudson) | Beethoven and his World: A Biographical Dictionary, by Peter Clive (Oxford)