Ludwig van Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, premiered at the Royal Imperial Court Theatre in Vienna on April 2, 1800. The concert started at 6:30 p.m. and also included Beethoven’s First Symphony, a symphony by Mozart, an aria and a duet from The Creation by Joseph Haydn, a piano concerto by Beethoven, and his own improvisations at the piano.
Despite the stunning array of musical invention on display that night, the audience emerged from the concert hall with a favorite: the septet, written for violin, viola, cello, bass, bassoon, clarinet, and French horn, an uncommon combination of instruments for a piece of chamber music.
This Friday, Aug. 15 at the First Congregational Church of Wellfleet, in a concert titled “Music for 6 and 7: Many Instruments, Extraordinary Sounds,” Beethoven’s Septet is first on the program, followed by Hungarian composer Ernst Von Dohnanyí’s Sextet in C Major, Op. 37, for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and horn.
The musicians are violinist Jennifer Frautschi, violist Danielle Farina, cellist Inbal Segev, bassist Pawel Knapik, horn player Kevin Newton, bassoonist Cynde Iverson, pianist Steven Beck, and clarinetist Jon Manasse, who is also one of the artistic directors of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival.
The success of Beethoven’s septet after the concert in 1800 irritated the composer, who was notoriously easy to anger.
Alexander Wheelock Thayer writes in his exhaustive biography, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, that, after the concert, a correspondent for the German periodical Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised the “taste and feeling” exhibited in the septet. As for Beethoven’s first symphony — a much more serious work in a genre the composer would come to dominate — the correspondent enjoyed its “art and novelty.” But, he wrote, “unfortunately there was too much use of the wind-instruments, so that the music sounded more as if written for a military band than an orchestra.” Beethoven could not have been pleased.
The septet is “one of the most joyous works Beethoven ever wrote,” says Manasse. But as the great composer’s pupil Carl Czerny later recorded in a letter to Otto Jahn, “He could not endure his Septet and grew angry because of the universal applause with which it was received.”
An apocryphal story goes that years after the premiere, Beethoven exploded at an English visitor who told him how his septet was admired in London. “That damned thing!” said Beethoven, who was loath to mince words. “I wish it were burned!”
The septet is written in the serenade form: a genre of music generally composed as background music to please the aristocrats on whom Beethoven depended for commissions for much of his life. But the piece, with its vivid world of development, thematic innovation, and violin part that Manasse calls “a tour de force,” feels made for the stage. “It’s one of those pieces that holds your attention from the beginning to the end,” says Manasse.
High-spirited and elegantly enunciated, “It’s very friendly melodically,” he says. The first movement begins with an Adagio that is essentially Beethovenian, with a gestural motif emphasized by the whole ensemble. The second part of the first movement, Allegro con brio, sounds like Mozart, with “a buoyant, carefree, joyful theme,” says Manasse, that sweeps through the ensemble like a summer breeze.
The five movements that follow are a journey through sunny variations and energetic dances, ending with a triumphant chordal cadence. The piece seems to represent a young Beethoven in a good mood.
Some have arranged the piece with different instrumentation, including Beethoven, who in 1803 created a version for piano, cello, and clarinet, and Czerny, who, at age 14, arranged the piece for wind sextet — an arrangement never published. But the original septet, with its warmth of sonority, couldn’t be much improved upon. It remains “a crowd-pleaser,” says Manasse.
Dohnanyí’s sextet, which he wrote in 1935, on the cusp of postmodernism, is similar to the septet in winning favor from audiences: in James Grymes’s Ernst von Dohnányi: A Bio-Bibliography, the author writes that at the premiere of the piece on June 17, 1935, a reviewer for the Budapesti Hírlap wrote that the sextet was strikingly original: “Every tune is invented, not borrowed, and not based on a quotation.”
The first movement, sweeping and lush — the cellist plays growling arpeggios, the horn calls as if from within a deep forest, the violin and clarinet sing sweetly, but ominously — reminds Manasse of Mahler. The whole uneasy movement feels like the setting for some dark play.
Where Beethoven rejoices in his masterful manipulation of and within the rules of form, Dohnanyí casts aside classical regulations in the style of the time. Beethoven’s septet is many things but not weird; Dohnanyí’s sextet is undeniably strange.
The last movement, Finale: Allegro vivace, giocoso, is “almost a silly dance,” says Manasse — the type of music that remains an “ear worm” after the audience leaves the hall, inspired by European jazz of the 1930s but blended with other genres — a collage of frenzied activity.
The Chamber Music Journal puts it this way: “Incredibly, right in the middle of the jazzy theme, a lopsided Viennese waltz is interjected, as if the musicians had suddenly become confused and lost their way, but continued nonetheless in a desperate attempt to save face.”
Perhaps for different reasons, the Dohnanyí, too, is a “crowd-pleaser,” says Manasse.
The music pleases the musicians as well. As a chamber ensemble, says Manasse, the performers in Friday’s concert think of themselves as “equal collaborators,” reveling in the sonorous interplay of their disparate instruments.
“It represents how everything should be,” he says. “Listening to others, giving them space, and at the appropriate time, emerging to say what you have to say.”
Large chamber ensembles like sextets and septets offer particularly fertile ground for such deliberate communication. Perhaps that is the reason for the enduring appreciation for Dohnanyí’s weird invention and the continued popularity of Beethoven’s only septet.
According to the Sydney Mozart Society, at an auction of Beethoven’s possessions after his death in 1827, the autographed score of his Fifth Symphony, whose celebrated motif is maybe the best known in classical music, sold for 6 florins, or around $94 today. The septet score sold for 18 florins, or almost $300.
Sixes and Sevens
The event: Beethoven Septet and Dohnanyi Sextet
The time: Friday, Aug. 15, 5:30 p.m.
The place: First Congregational Church of Wellfleet, 200 Main St.
The cost: $40 at capecodchambermusic.org
