Beethoven Quintet for Piano and Woodwinds
Boulez Ensemble & Daniel Barenboim
Musical Performance Quintet & Chamber Ensemble 0Beethoven wrote his Quintet for Piano and Winds in the early summer of 1796, on a concert tour that took him from Vienna to Berlin via Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig. Compositions for wind instruments, known in German as Harmoniemusiken, or “music for harmony instruments,” were highly popular during the time of the First Viennese School. In this case, parallels to one of Mozart’s works are obvious as well: written 12 years earlier, Mozart’s Quintet K. 452 not only shares the key of E-flat major with Beethoven’s Quintet, it also mirrors its sequence of movements and the combination of piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. The easy-going, friendly character of the music is reminiscent of the model that Beethoven admired as well. When the 22-year-old set out for Vienna in 1792 to study composition, his patron, Count Waldstein, expressed a wish that he might receive “Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.” As his Quintet demonstrates, he also received it directly from Mozart’s works.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Quintet for Piano and Woodwinds in E-flat major Op. 16 (1796)
I. Grave – Allegro ma non troppo
II. Andante cantabile
III. Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo
Daniel Barenboim, Piano
Cristina Gómez Godoy, Oboe
Matthias Glander, Clarinet
Radek Baborák, French Horn
Sophie Dervaux, Bassoon
One shortcoming of taxonomies such as “Viennese Classicism” is that they tend to give an impression of homogeneity—or, worse, of a set of academic “rules” that composers so pigeonholed felt obliged to follow. Yet the cliché of Beethoven as the defiant rule-breaker obscures the frequency and importance of unconventional choices in the music of Mozart and Haydn alike, not to mention of their less-canonical contemporaries who similarly played with expectations. And this sort of categorizing smooths over the marked differences in style of each of the triumvirate that the standard narrative has singled out as the leading figures of so-called Viennese Classicism.
In fact, it is revealing to distinguish in Beethoven’s early works—when he was establishing his “brand” during his first decade in Vienna—the relative pull of Haydn and Mozart, and, beyond them, of other figures, as for example of C.P.E. Bach, with whose idiosyncratic imagination young Beethoven felt a keen sympathy. Indeed, he would continue to turn to models from the past throughout his life. His Op. 16 Quintet deliberately takes as its model Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat major for Piano and Winds K. 452, composed in 1784, which stands apart in his predecessor’s catalogue by bridging the divide between chamber music with piano and the wind band scoring known as Harmoniemusik. Mozart himself boasted to his father that he considered the Quintet to be “the best work I have ever composed” (at least as of the spring of 1784). Though the score remained unpublished when Beethoven wrote his Op. 16, there is some speculation he may have encountered the piece while in Prague, where Mozart’s memory was held in particularly high regard.
Beethoven also turned to a Mozartean model in his Op. 11 Trio for piano, clarinet (or violin), and cello, whose instrumentation echoes that of the great “Kegelstatt” Trio (K. 498), substituting cello for Mozart’s viola. In these scores, Beethoven is not aggressively competitive—let alone Oedipal—vis-à-vis his forerunner. As the biographer Lewis Lockwood observes, Beethoven’s Trio and Quintet were likely “designed for popularity”; the later, serenade-like Septet for a combination of winds and strings became one of his most popular works in his lifetime.
The Op. 16 Quintet replicates the instrumentation and choice of key of K. 452, and it even parallels Mozart in the general structuring of the outer movements: the first preceded by a slow introduction, the finale cast as a cheery rondo. But it would be shortsighted to dismiss Beethoven’s achievement as a merely clever imitation (as many commentators have done). The scholar William Kinderman offers a more nuanced reading of how Beethoven infuses his own “energetic style” by transforming motivic ideas he found in Mozart into more pervasive entities—in particular, the descending contour of the first movement’s main theme, which recurs in the slow movement’s principal melody. In Beethoven’s Quintet overall, concludes Kinderman, “we encounter a situation in which resemblances to Mozart have been diminished in a thorough process of transformation,” so that “the differences weigh more heavily than the similarities.”
—Thomas May
Notes originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the concert of the Boulez Ensemble on October 7, 2020.
Piano
Daniel Barenboim
Oboe
Cristina Gómez Godoy
Clarinet
Matthias Glander
Horn
Radek Baborák
Basoon
Sophia Dervaux
Audio Producer
Friedemann Engelbrecht
Sound engineer
Julian Schwenkner
Camera
Michael Boomers (DOP)
Eric Lahmann
Hans Peter Eckardt
Anna Bechtle
Video Director
Friedrich Gatz
Producer
Oliver Becker, otbmedien
A production of the Pierre Boulez Saal.