The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance.

Kramer, Elizabeth

The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance. Edited by Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. [164 p. ISBN0-252-02932-1. $45.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

Previous scholarly inquiries into Beethoven's ten sonatas for piano and violin have been dwarfed by the breadth and depth of literature about the composer's symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas. For the most part, they have been neglected for what they are not. The violin sonatas generated relatively little press in their day. As chamber music, they were not grand works of the public concert. There are no "late" Beethoven violin sonatas that "need to be explained" in light of compositions from the "early" and "middle" periods. In short, they have been largely overlooked because they are seemingly unrelated to the central priorities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Beethoven research.

The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance initiates a long-overdue critical appraisal of these works, providing an impressive argument for their significance within Beethoven scholarship. The essays comprising the collection originated in a conference at Boston University in 2000, directed by the collection's editors, Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll, and present a variety of approaches to the sonatas. Its contributors draw on perspectives from source studies, reception history, literary theory, and performance practice as they examine the sonatas in their historical contexts.

The volume suggests an overarching concern with the coherence marking Beethoven's violin sonatas as a group by presenting essays on the works in chronological order. Guided by a new reading of a negative review of the sonatas published in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1799, Sieghard Brandenburg argues for a more sympathetic understanding of the op. 12 sonatas as located "on the path" (pp. 6, 20) to Beethoven's personal style. Acknowledging the indebtedness of the op. 12 sonatas to Mozart's late violin sonatas and to Beethoven's own earlier attempts at the genre, Brandenburg focuses on expressions of originality and maturity in these early works. The expansive expositions, individualized middle movements and sonata rondo final movements corroborate a dating of the works to 1797 and 1798. Extant sketches support this compositional window and help refute speculation that the sonatas were simply reworked at this time for publication.

In his account of opus 24, Lewis Lockwood argues that in the early nineteenth century Beethoven "set about composing a small group of works in which he aimed to minimize those elements within his style that listeners could readily construe as 'bizarre,' 'ungracious,' 'dismal,' and 'opaque'" (p. 41). The Violin Sonata in F Major, op. 24, exemplifies a lyricism found in several of Beethoven's compositions of the time, including the Piano Sonata in B-flat, op. 22 and the Second Symphony. Lockwood adds the identification of an allusion to the melodic design of Pamina and Tamino's reconciliation duet in The Magic Flute to previous commentators' notes on the violin sonata's lyricisim. In focusing on lyricism in op. 24, Lockwood sees himself and earlier scholars acknowledging the intense interest in the beautiful that surfaced in philosophical and critical writings around 1800.

Richard Kramer situates the three violin sonatas from op. 30 in relation to three of their companions in the Kessler sketch-book, the op. 31 piano sonatas. Drawing on Harold Bloom's theories of poetic influence, Kramer sees Beethoven misreading himself and "clearing ... imaginative space" (p. 49) in opus 30 and opus 31. The almost one hundred pages of sketches for opus 30 show virtually every stage of Beethoven's close interaction with the generic conventions of the accompanied sonata. The opus 31 sonatas, in contrast, explore anxieties of crafting the opening bars of a solo sonata. In both opus 30 and opus 31, the piano "establishes the tone" (p. 57), a dynamic dramatically reversed in Beethoven's next violin sonata, op. 47 in A, the "Kreutzer" sonata.

The contributions of Suhnne Ahn and William Drabkin engage the seminal Sonata in A, op. 47. Ahn focuses on qualities of balance and virtuosity in the work, noting, in particular, symmetries between the outer movements of op. 47: Beethoven matched the first movement presto with a presto finale of a similar length that he had originally written for the Sonata in A Major, op. 30, no. 1. Ahn views the leading role of the violin in the sonata as another manifestation of balance: the violin becomes an equal partner with the piano. The virtuosity entailed in the violin part's double stops, rapid string crossings, and relatively high tessitura is analogous to the string writing in early sketches for Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

Drabkin confronts the question of the "Kreutzer" Sonata's modality--is it in A major or in A minor?--already alluded to by Kramer and Ahn. With clear documentation in the form of tables and score examples, Drabkin presents an array of interactions of major and minor mode in the chamber music and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, arguing that op. 47 exhibits a mediation of the modes that surpasses the interactions found in models for the work. The first movement, for example, "modulates away from A-major early on, establishing a position from which a sonata-allegro in A minor is the only possible outcome" (p. 97). Drabkin rounds out his historical perspective on the "Kreutzer" Sonata by examining the possible influence of opus 47 on two later works of chamber music, Mendelssohn's String Quartet, op. 13 and Dvorak's Quintet for Piano and Strings, op. 81.

Maynard Solomon places the Violin Sonata in G Major, op. 96 in the context of evocations of the pastoral in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and music, arguing that the sonata embraces both the "classical serenity and romantic turbulence" (p. 110) of the pastoral. He grounds his interpretation in a close musical reading. The opening movement recalls "venerable Arcadian poetic genres of the idyll or the eclogue" (p. 116) in its simulation of natural sounds, horn calls, and drone bass. The second movement "speaks the eloquent language of pastoral's most plangent genre, the elegy" (p. 117) in its "Lebewohl" (Farewell) motto. In the Scherzo, Solomon hears an exteriority that "may be a sign not for Arcadia regained but for Arcadia's transience" (p. 118). Likewise, the poco allegretto finale captures not "the ongoing uncertainty of the course but rather the necessity of melancholia, the impermanence of life's pleasures, the contingency of life itself" (p. 126) in its challenges to the symmetries of variations form.

Mark Kroll concludes the volume with a historically-informed examination of the technique of overlegato, the holding down of notes for longer than their notated values. The use of overlegato--also called legatissimo, superlegato, or finger pedaling--is particularly appropriate to Beethoven's violin sonatas, works based on dialogue between the piano and violin. Beethoven himself once described an ideal keyboard legato as sounding "'as if it were stroked with a bow'" (p. 130). Kroll surveys the idea of overlegato in writings from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, focusing on Beethoven's written responses to piano etudes by Johann Baptist Cramer, which the composer particularly admired. He concludes his essay with a discussion of specific passages from the Beethoven violin sonatas that benefit from overlegato.

As this short precis suggests, the essays in The Beethoven Violin Sonatas interact with conventional tropes of Beethoven scholarship, resulting in comparative interpretations of the sonatas. The groundedness of the essays in past scholarship, however, does not obscure the novelty of the collection. The application of perspectives from reception history, literary theory, source studies, and performance practice to the violin sonatas yields new insights about the compositions of this under-explored genre and their relationships to the rest of Beethoven's oeuvre. While not receiving the attention accorded other works during the composer's lifetime, the violin sonatas were shaped by their wider critical and intellectual context. The sonatas have had an influential afterlife, if not in the nineteenth-century institution of the public concert. The compositional processes reflected in the sonatas merit serious analysis, although of a somewhat different type than that appropriate to the "heroic" or "late" works. Additionally, the volume allows for reflection on our approaches to Beethoven's music. How might qualities of balance and beauty evidenced by the violin sonatas complement our search for more epic musical characteristics? How might Beethoven's own thoughts about performance inform our presentations of the music of his day? In underscoring the significance of the violin sonatas, the volume opens the door for further critical inquiries, which might experiment with newer methodological approaches toward these works.

In its comprehensive treatment of Beethoven's works in the genre. The Beethoven Violin Sonatas will provide a valuable guide and companion for musicians, historians, and theorists. The contributors apply their rich scholarly experience in a manner that remains approachable for the English-speaking non-specialist. Liberal use of musical examples and figures reproducing Beethoven's sketches clarifies references made to Beethoven's compositional processes. Charts and tables lay out structural issues in common analytical terminology. Foreign language references are translated in the text, and occasional notes, presented at the end of each essay, direct the reader to additional materials. The success with which the collection presents sophisticated perspectives in straightforward prose provides a strong argument for the continued importance of the history, criticism, and performance of Beethoven's violin sonatas today.

ELIZABETH KRAMER

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill