Surely, no composer ever made a greater contribution to our genre than did Beethoven. In the rest of our course, we are going to feel many different influences that Beethoven exerted on the generations of composers who followed after him. Let's begin by considering the environment and the kinds of influences that shaped his musical world. It is only in Beethoven's time that a piano sonata had started to become a concert piece. That is, father of the virtuoso pianist, rather than for the ordinary hobbyist in the home. Accordingly, around this time there arose the genre of the Grand Sonata, a big and demanding piece written by a composer pianist, such as Hummel, Dussek, or Clementi, for example, or Beethoven himself. You should realize that at this time, highly capable virtuoso pianists were in short supply. They were only a small portion of the music printing market. In this sense, Beethoven was in a very different situation for most of his contemporaries. His reputation was so strong from early in his life, that he regularly received handsome commissions. Generally speaking, he did not need to tailor his music so accurately to the amateur market as did CPE Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. Beethoven's intended performer would have been a verified class of highly competent keyboard players. In fact, the same goes for his intended listener. He was not tailoring for consumption by the ordinary masses. By breaking free of the usual constraints of marketing, Beethoven was able to write for his own ears and to satisfy his own aesthetic demands. His piano sonatas therefore are a personal laboratory in musical composition. We will see he's fascinated by the structural possibilities offered by the piano sonata. He's constantly bending them and tinkering with them as his own artistic venture, to test out what he's able to do as a composer. No two sonatas end up being quite the same or even resemble one another very closely. Since Beethoven as a performer was most comfortable at the piano, it's in piano music where he felt most at ease in exploring compositional possibilities. That's especially true early on in his career. Developments in the piano itself, musical instruments and their evolution are also going to play an important role in the development of Beethoven's compositional style. We will explore those in tandem with the music. All these general remarks are fair enough in reflecting overall trends, and they are representative of the way our story is traditionally told. However, in order to be as accurate as I can, I want to offer a few cautionary points. One is that only a few of Beethoven's sonatas are actually grand sonatas. That is the bigger ones that were published under a single opus number, like Opus 7 in E Flat, or the Pathetique. The other is that, although Beethoven gave little regard to the amateur market in general, he did not neglect it entirely. He still wrote a number of sonatas that were meant to be less demanding, notably Opus 49, and also Opus 14, even later in his career, Opus 79. Also, the first piano sonata that was played in a public recital was his Opus 101 in A major. That's a piece dated in 1816. The whole idea of being a piece written for public consumption in a recital is much later in the picture. Who are the composers who were most influential in the development of Beethoven's style? There were quite a number, some in greater degree than others. The first important influence to consider is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He's easily overlooked by us nowadays because people don't play CPE's solo music so often. But he was the major composer in his day, influential, as we discussed for his treatise on how to perform keyboard instruments, and also a great believer in communicating emotion through musical means. I think that was a powerful influence on Beethoven, and very direct. CPE also liked to combine, for instance, different genres such as the fantasy in the rondo, in the context of a single composition. That is something that Beethoven loved to do, was to tinker between combining elements of the sonata and elements of the fantasy within the same piece. I think that really derived from CPE Bach. Also CPE, tried in some of his sonatas to link the movements together directly. He was one of the ones who had done that before Beethoven. The major, major influence on Beethoven surely was Haydn. Haydn took an experimental attitude towards his compositions because he wrote so many symphonies and so many sonatas. It was just interesting for him to see what he could do as a composer. Then he loved tinkering with his formal attitudes in these different pieces, definitely something that carried over to Beethoven. Haydn was very economical in his musical material, and took a developmental approach to spending out a composition with a small amount of material. That is definitely something that Beethoven took over and made his own. There's certain dramatic devices that you find in Haydn also that he used to enliven his music and keep his audience's attention. He could be very humorous, such as putting false recapitulations into his sonatas. He also liked to put these awkward, dramatic, pregnant pauses in his music. That is something that Beethoven made very much his own signature. Now, Beethoven did study for a brief time with Haydn early in his life, and he liked to downplay what he learned from him. But I think if you look at the two composers music, there's no mistaking that Haydn was a very important influence on Beethoven's style. Maybe a more obvious influence on Beethoven, but I think not as profound a one is the music of Mozart. Mozart in his piano sonatas especially, is tailoring more towards the market of amateurs. Now, there are some pieces of Mozart that Beethoven admired tremendously. Notably his C minor concerto where he famously remarked to his student that, we'll never be able to do anything quite like that. Beethoven wrote so many pieces in this key of C minor. In those pieces especially, you can really hear the earmarks of Mozart, such as the opening of his fantasy, or the way he uses cross handed techniques. Even certain themes such as the one in the middle of the second movement of Mozart's C minor sonata is then echoed by Beethoven in his Pathetique Sonata. Again, a more direct influence I think on Beethoven's keyboard writing style, especially more than is Mozart, is the style of the English composer pianist, especially Clementi, Dussek and Cramer. Now, Beethoven knew the music of all three of these composers and especially Clementi, he regarded very highly. These composers, as we discussed with the English piano, developed more singing and more cantabile legato style of performance. That shows up quite a great deal in Beethoven's sonatas, and certainly distinguish them from the style of Mozart.
