words: compared to the quintet, the trio sees all of Voss’ Dynamik and Aringer’s instrumental dramaturgy return. The trio arangement is worth considering on Szendy’s terms of “arranger as listener.” What do we encounter in Beethoven’s “listening” of Beethoven? A systematic exploration of Beethoven’s arrangements of his own works for other instrumental forces would be necessary for any conclusive statement on this topic; however, we may be sure of encountering an attention to details of instrumentation, and instrumentation in translation, like the attention we see demonstrated in the trio setting.
Arrangements, Listenings, Playings
Reading Beethoven’s earlier exchanges with Hoffmeister through the lens of Szendy’s “arranger as listener,” we encounter a cacophony: Beethoven hearing the septet
multiplied to a dizzying degree in all manner of sound combinations. In proposing to Hoffmeister so many different versions of the septet for various groupings of instruments, Beethoven seems to be imagining different “playings” of a work just as much as
different “listenings” of it: the septet in new musical forms, brought to sound by various members of the musical public, whether alone or in groups, in circles domestic,
dilettante, or professional. In grappling with the arrangement’s difficulties and
encountering its felicities, the players would hear the arranger’s “listening” of the work but would also create their own.232
232232 I changed my idea of “performings” of a work to “playings,” after reading Edward Klorman,
We see an intimation of this idea of “playings” in a review of the Trio op. 38. The arrangement had been published in January, 1805 by the Bureau des Arts et
d’Industrie233; the review appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of August 28 of that same year. After remarking on the French dedication, “noteworthy because of the odd phrase in which the composer states that he is giving precisely this work [sic] to his patron because it is easy to perform,” the reviewer praises the arrangement as an
excellent setting of the Septet, itself “known to be one of the most beautiful, or at least one of the most agreeable and amiable by this master.” Then the reviewer proceeds to discuss particulars:
As it goes without saying with this composer, the new arrangement is very good. The violin part, as can likewise be taken for granted, is a different one from that for clarinet. If one alternates the two instruments, one can enjoy the trio with satisfaction all the more often, for through the small alterations in both, this interesting painting is illuminated in several more pleasant colors. Nevertheless, the reviewer feels that the clarinet is the superior choice, presuming it is played very well. The whole work emerges like an original and almost as well as it does on the seven instruments. The performance of the keyboard part is, for
Beethoven’s music, really very easy.234
The praise of the music’s pleasing nature, the assumption that the purchasers could make their own instrumentation choices, and the remarks about the ease of the piano part give a vivid impression of the “playings” that would emerge from this arrangement. The
historical details behind the dedication, on which the reviewer remarks, add even more layers to this impression. Unlike the dedication of the Septet op. 20 to Empress Marie Thérèse, the Trio op. 38 is inscribed to a Dr. Johann Adam Schmidt. Beethoven had University Press, 2016). See especially chs. 1 and 3, “The Music of Friends,” and “Private, Public, and Playing in the Present Tense.”
233Werkverzeichnis 1, 224.
234 “Review,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 7 (28 August 1805): 769-72, translated in Critical
written his friend Wegeler, on November 16, 1801, asking about Schmidt’s dedication to medicine, his “experiments with galvanism,” and his chance of working a miracle cure for deafness.235 What work Schmidt did for Beethoven must have impressed, reassured, or at the very least comforted him, earning him the dedication. Additional details suggest that the dedication had Beethoven envisioning this trio being performed in Schmidt’s family circle. The first page of the piano part contains exactly that suggestion: that the trio be played within the family when the daughter’s piano abilities had improved.236 Thus we have a different playing envisioned in a dedication, a different social circle likewise, as well as picture of family intimacy and music learning inscribed in it, embodied in Mlle. Schmidt making progress at the piano while her father accompanies her on the violin.
Navigating all of Beethoven’s envisioned "playings," while enmeshed in this analysis and material history, we might be forgiven for losing sight of this chapter’s subject. We have found it nowhere in this entire assemblage of op. 20 material. Though one might expect to see it because of the piano’s importance in recreating the string texture of the original, or because of the piano’s importance to the Mlle Schimdt’s education, there is no reference to any sort of “obligato” on the title page of this
arrangement. There is no reference to “obligato” on the title page of the original Septet, either. When he was still corresponding with Hoffmeister, Beethoven wrote the titles for the works in his June 21, 1801 letter; the title he proposed for Op. 20 merely lists the instruments (“pour un violon, viole violoncelle, contrabasse, un cors, une clarinette, un
235 Anderson, Letters 1, 66-67 (Letter 54); Briefe 1, 89 (Letter 70).
236 Anderson, Letters 3, 1412 (Appendix D: Dedicatory Letters, “To Dr. Johann Adam Schmidt,” No. 5).
fagot”) and the dedication. “Much will still have to be altered or corrected in the titles,” Beethoven adds. “I leave that to you.”237 Obviously, “obligato” was not added. The frontispiece of Op. 38 lists the instruments as “le Pianoforte / avec l’accompagnement de la Clarinette ou Violon et Violoncelle concertans.”238
This brings us to a conundrum. There, at long last, is half of the terminology that we have been looking for: “accompagnement.” However, that same half is completed by “concertans” and not by any variant of “obligato.” We might ask: are the two adjectives interchangeable?239 If so, why has obligato even been used as a musical descriptor this long while? If not, what specific work does each term do?240
To ask these questions after interrogating the Septet (with its instruments called
tutti obligati only once) about its various aliases, its role in a complex network of patronage, its performance appeal in so many different locales, and its possibly having torpedoed Hoffmeister’s relationship with Beethoven … to ask all of these questions through all of these contexts is not conclusive, seeing as it is only one composition. We have held the Septet under a bright light for some time. Now, it is time to shift that light to certain practices of music publishing in the mid to late eighteenth century, widening
237 Anderson, Letters 1, 56-57 (Letter 50); Briefe 1, 76-77 (Letter 64). 238Werkverzeichnis 1, 224.
239 Of course, they are not. See Janet Levy, “The Quatuor Concertant in Paris in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1971). Levy surveys the
terminology in order to “[correct] the tendency of modern scholars to interpret the term as necessarily denoting virtuoso display, as in a concerto.” Citied in Klorman, Mozart’s Music of Friends, 37n44.
240 Consider as well the potential redundancy in the original title of the Kreutzer Sonata, Op. 47: “Sonata per il Pianoforte ed un Violino obligato, scritta in uno stile molto concertante, quasi come d'un concerto.” Beethoven finished composing the sonata in spring, 1802. The abundant language in the title will be discussed in the forthcoming expansion of this dissertation’s conclusion.
the types of material we peruse. Examining where “obligato” and its variants appear in music publishing catalogues explains the work it was doing in Beethoven’s letter of December 15, 1800. In this letter, Beethoven was marketing himself aggressively and with boundless confidence to a new publisher and a new friend. In that overflow of enthusiasm, while engaging in wordplay in the way he so liked to do, he switched to the inside “industry” language that he was sure that new friend, a “beloved and worthy brother in the art of music,” would appreciate.
After situating “obligato” in the context of music publishing practices, I will return to Adler’s formulation, and conclude with where, if anywhere, to take it. What I deduce from this examination, alongside concluding considerations about Adler’s ideas of the proper nature of obligate Akkompagnement, will contribute to an understanding of the different workings of obligato terminology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.