Beethoven’s Second Movement

You’ve heard the old joke, right? What’s brown and sits on the piano bench? Beethoven’s second movement.

So what is it about Beethoven’s second movements? Even people with no exposure to classical music know at least one of Beethoven’s first movements—or at least the first four notes of it. Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Opening like the hand of destiny. Or (to steal a phrase from Verdi) like la forza del destino. But his second movements tend to go unnoticed—a bit like younger siblings—less prominently placed, but no less worthy. So I thought I’d conduct a survey of some of Beethoven’s more notable second movements.

The first on my list is the second movement of the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, which was first performed in Vienna on April 7, 1805. The story goes that Beethoven had originally dedicated the work to Napoleon Bonaparte, but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven was so pissed off that he scratched out his name until there was a hole through the manuscript. I’ve excerpted 2 + minutes from the middle of the movement. This is the funeral march theme. And more significantly, this little snippet signals an unequivocal shift from classicism to romantic ideals. We hear a departure from the formal constraints of structured classicism and in its place the poetry and passion of what? a solitary man railing against the inevitable? Two hundred years later we stand in our jaded world and snicker a bit when people actually name the romantic ideals, but at the time, people viewed this stuff as deadly serious.

Beethoven covers much the same emotional ground in the second movement of his 7th symphony which he completed in 1812. Imagine yourself walking to your destiny (whatever that means).

These two pieces verge on the programmatic (i.e. painting pictures or imagining dramas) and prepare the way for the Symphonie Fantastique, by Hector Berlioz (1830) which, in its fourth movement (Marche au supplice) explicitly invites us to imagine a young man climbing the steps of a scaffold while enduring the taunts of his lover which you can hear as the bassoon swirling around him as he trudges with the basses and cellos.

And yet not everything Beethoven wrote is filled with high tragedy. It has been said that the great composer couldn’t write a melody to save his life, but the second movement of his 5th symphony says otherwise. Listen to the gentle lilt of the cellos which then gives over to the woodwinds in the opening 30 seconds.

We can hear the same lyricism in the second movement of his Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathetique) written in 1799.

And as with the funeral marches, so with the lyricism. Beethoven’s music ushers in the possibility of a more fully realized romantic melody. So, for example, Un bal, again from the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz, this time, the second movement, a waltz:

If you’ve been listening closely to Berlioz, then you’ve probably recognized scoring that has accompanied Bugs Bunny cartoons, none of which would have been possible without Beethoven. But Beethoven appears elsewhere in pop culture. After all, what would Schroeder do with his time if he didn’t have Beethoven to play? And without Ludwig van, what could Alex play to get himself ready for a night out with his droogs for a bit of the old ultraviolence?

But again, Alex is mistaken to believe that Beethoven is good only for exciting the passions. In fact, there is much in Beethoven that is calming—almost spiritual, as we hear in selections from the second movements of the 5th piano concerto (Emperor) and the 6th Symphony (Pastoral).

And let’s round out the survey with something bright, a theme and variations, from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 (Appassionata).

DISCLAIMER: my apologies to those who hold copyright in these recordings, but I couldn’t give a—er—movement.