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A new edition of Beethoven’s composition exercises has recently appeared, inviting a reappraisal of them. He wrote a large number of such exercises between late 1792 and early 1795 while studying harmony and counterpoint with Haydn and later Albrechtsberger, and he followed these up with further exercises under Salieri, in which he concentrated on the task of setting Italian words. Nearly all these exercises survived the various vicissitudes of his later life, including his frequent changes of residence, and since his death they have continued to be well preserved, the large majority ending up in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna. Their existence is well known and they often receive a mention in biographical studies; but since these exercises are neither fully-fledged compositions nor sketches associated with popular works, they have tended to attract little musical comment or assessment, and are often disregarded in accounts of his output. Moreover, the daunting size and complexity of the collection must have discouraged any scholars unwilling to wade through hundreds of dry academic exercises. The tendency has been, therefore to rely on the few studies of them that have been made – studies that may have seemed more than adequate at the time.
The first of these studies appeared a mere five years after Beethoven’s death, when his friend Ignaz Seyfried published a rather garbled account of them, in which Beethoven’s own studies and his copies of excerpts from theoretical works were insufficiently differentiated.Footnote 1 Some decades later the deficiencies of Seyfried’s edition became apparent to Gustav Nottebohm when he examined the original source material. His investigations led to a much more thorough and systematic assessment of the exercises, many of which were published in 1873 in his Beethoven’s Studien. Erster Band.Footnote 2 A projected second volume, containing the material Beethoven used for instruction of Archduke Rudolph, never appeared. As with Nottebohm’s study of Beethoven’s sketches, his work on these exercises was so detailed and extensive that for many years no scholars felt much incentive to expand significantly on it. In Georg Kinsky’s 1955 thematic catalogue of Beethoven’s works, the exercises for Salieri were included, most lumped together as WoO 99,Footnote 3 but those for Haydn and Albrechtsberger were deemed not to be complete works and were omitted. Two years later Willy Hess published a catalogue of all Beethoven’s works that had not been included in the nineteenth-century collected edition, and the pieces from WoO 99 were numbered 208–32 in his catalogue, but the exercises for Haydn were just given the collective number 233 and a one-paragraph description, while those for Albrechtsberger were numbered 234–46, again with brief descriptions.Footnote 4
Further investigation followed in 1970, when Alfred Mann published what amounts to little more than a general introduction to Beethoven’s studies with Haydn, illustrated by three facsimiles.Footnote 5 Douglas Johnson then made a detailed bibliographical study of every leaf of the Haydn and Albrechtsberger exercises, as part of his overview of all Beethoven’s surviving manuscripts from before 1798,Footnote 6 and further bibliographical description of all the leaves preserved in Vienna has been provided by Ingrid Fuchs.Footnote 7 Wider dissemination of the exercises has been achieved through the Unheard Beethoven website,Footnote 8 which includes recordings of 67 of the Haydn exercises and many more of the Albrechtsberger ones; but the site owners were apparently refused permission to record the unpublished ones, which thus remained unavailable to the general public.
The work of these scholars therefore left much scope for further investigation. This has been impressively accomplished in a series of studies by Julia Ronge. Her first major contribution was a 35-page introduction to a facsimile of Nottebohm’s book,Footnote 9 which she followed with her own fresh account of the material.Footnote 10 Now, at last, the full extent of Beethoven’s exercises has been revealed, with the publication of her above-mentioned edition of all those that survive, making the complete set available for the first time, some 220 years after they were written. The edition, which forms section XIII/1 of the ongoing Beethoven Gesamtausgabe, comprises three volumes: transcriptions, critical report and a selection of facsimiles, although for financial reasons it was not possible to include facsimiles of every page, as Bernhard Appel regretfully explains in his preface.
The difficulties of assembling, deciphering and presenting all this material in a coherent order were immense, and Ronge has done a superb job in making it all available in such a readily comprehensible form. The material itself is hugely complex, for although most of the exercises are preserved in Vienna, the pages are in a very jumbled order, while a few additional pages are scattered in various other libraries in Berlin, Bonn, London, Paris and Stockholm. Nottebohm managed to work out the order of most of the material, but Ronge was still left with major problems in this area, reassessing Nottebohm and slotting all the leaves in non-Viennese locations into their correct places in the sequence. Some individual leaves are clearly missing, as with Beethoven’s sketchbooks, but at least their contents can now be conjectured with some confidence.
The handwriting of every entry also needed assessment, for even something as simple as a crossing out of a note could have been done by either Beethoven or his teacher. Fortunately, Haydn normally used a darker ink or pencil, and Salieri also used pencil, but Albrechtsberger’s corrections are in a similar ink to Beethoven’s own, and in some cases one cannot be absolutely certain who made the mark. In the printed edition the two different hands – pupil and teacher – have been distinguished through printing in red everything that has been established as having been written by any of the teachers (where there is doubt the signs are printed in black). This greatly facilitates study of both Beethoven’s initial efforts and the guidance provided by each teacher. There are also a few entries by Albrechtsberger on the exercises done for Haydn, and these have been carefully distinguished. Presumably Beethoven showed his early exercises to Albrechtsberger, on Haydn’s departure for England in early 1794, and received some additional advice at that stage.
Ronge’s introduction repeats and summarizes some of the main points of her earlier work on this material. She mentions that Haydn, Albrechtsberger and Salieri were not just any old teachers but the most sought-after in Vienna, who had many pupils, some of whom, like Beethoven, were taught by all three. She points out that Beethoven’s exercises offer no support for any rumours of disputes with Haydn, impatience with Albrechtsberger or any other kind of dissatisfaction from either pupil or teacher. She also emphasizes that, unlike the rest of the Beethoven Gesamtausgabe, this is an edition of sources rather than of works, and in this respect is closer to editions of his sketchbooks than the rest of the Gesamtausgabe.
The sources, which are described in some detail, are transcribed individually, with no attempt at collating different versions of a piece into a single, ideal version. Many of the exercises survive in more than one stage, and Ronge distinguishes and describes six types of material: sketches, incomplete rough drafts, working copies, submitted versions, fair copies and mixed forms. Each entry has been identified as belonging to one or other of these stages. Since the paper types, watermarks and gathering structure have been discussed previously, Ronge’s commentary concentrates on other features such as chronology, provenance, writing implements, stitch holes, layout of exercises, annotations and the relationship between content and gathering structure, with any anomalies duly noted. General musical commentary is largely avoided since this is available elsewhere, including in Nottebohm’s work. Thus, the theoretical bases for Haydn’s and Albrechtsberger’s corrections are rarely touched on. Where there is textual confusion, however, as a result of Beethoven’s more complex alterations, the different layers have been deciphered and unpicked. They can be difficult to make out, and the explanations of how the changes were made are worked out most convincingly.
The transcription is beautifully laid out: each page and each stave correspond to a page and stave of the source, and conventional editorial apparatus such as square brackets and angle brackets has been utilized. Each of the exercises has been numbered, making it easier to find one’s way around the edition and to compare the transcription with the facsimiles. There are useful cross-references between related pages and between the volumes, though there could have been more. For example, each facsimile has a reference to the relevant pages of transcription and commentary, but the transcription and commentary refer only to the page in the original source, not to each other and not to the relevant printed pages in the facsimile volume. In particular, it would have been helpful to have a page reference from the commentary to the transcription, and vice versa, since the two are so closely related and the relevant pages of the source are not always easy to find since they are not in numerical order. Apart from this omission, however, the presentation is admirable.
The Haydn Exercises
Beethoven’s studies with Haydn have sometimes been described as ‘unsuccessful’ or even as complete ‘failures’,Footnote 11 but Ronge has already argued convincingly that this was not the case, and her arguments are fully supported by the publication of the exercises themselves. They show Beethoven painstakingly working through 247 exercises (plus over 30 now lost)Footnote 12 in strict species counterpoint, each one five or six bars long and derived partly from Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum. Occasionally Beethoven provided two alternative versions of a passage, both acceptable. This is an indication of the diligence with which he worked: he certainly did not attempt to rush through these exercises as quickly as possible, but rather to learn as much as he could from them. In his determination to reach the very top of his profession, he evidently wanted to leave no stone unturned, and methodically worked through the entire course that Haydn had given him. Mostly he had no difficulty following Fux’s rules, even though these were slightly abstruse and not entirely congruent with what happened in actual practice at the time. There are, however, places where he apparently lost concentration: in no. 70 he wrote two wrong figures (4 instead of 2, 5 instead of 3), and in no. 81 he wrote 4 instead of 3, as noted by Ronge. There are also a few cases of blatant parallel fifths or octaves (nos. 71, 150, 166, 171, 223, 233, 237) that he must simply have overlooked.
One might assume that the exercises Beethoven did for Haydn were spread through the 14 months or so that he studied with him; but the uniformity of paper type and especially the consistency of ink type, in contrast to the wide variety of inks in other Beethoven documents from 1793, suggest that all the exercises were completed within a comparatively short space of time – probably as little as a month or two – most likely at an early stage in the course. Ten exercises a day would surely not have been beyond him, yielding 280 exercises in less than a month. After this, the rest of Haydn’s instruction would have consisted of studying scores, discussing sketching processes, and perhaps issues of instrumentation. The surviving exercises are the clean, submitted versions, and so it is not impossible that Johann Schenk helped Beethoven beforehand in rough drafts, as Schenk claimed. Ronge draws attention to clear evidence of copying errors (some corrected immediately, some not), such as one might expect if the music had been copied mindlessly from Schenk’s draft. But there are not many of these, and there are several compositional corrections, where Beethoven is clearly thinking out the part-writing on paper. Thus Schenk’s claims, already doubted by many scholars, are certainly suspect.
Haydn’s response was generally systematic and meticulous, and he corrected several types of common faults by annotating Beethoven’s manuscript. One of the main types was the use of hidden fifths or octaves, such as two consecutive fifths between an upper voice and bass, separated only by a fourth. Another is the simultaneous appearance of a suspension and its resolution in upper voices. This is particularly liable to occur in 4th-species counterpoint in four parts, and there are several instances in the early part of this section (nos. 202–11), all corrected by Haydn. Beethoven seems to have learnt from this, for there are no further cases in the rest of this section, nos. 212–23 (though there are some more in the Albrechtsberger studies). His willingness here to learn undermines previous suggestions that he was a difficult pupil who would not listen to instruction. Haydn also corrected what looks like a copying error in no. 186, changing a discordant F to G, but he corrected only about half the cases of parallel fifths or octaves. It may be, as claimed by Nottebohm and repeated by others, that he was somewhat slapdash and not at all thorough. On the other hand, the purpose of this work was surely to give Beethoven practice at manipulating part-writing in a restricted context, and it was scarcely necessary for Haydn to mark every pair of consecutive fifths when Beethoven was already familiar with the rule. Some errors not corrected by Haydn on paper may well have been pointed out verbally.
In several places that Haydn has altered, Beethoven’s version is actually satisfactory in terms of common practice, even if it contravenes one of Fux’s minor rules, and Haydn’s version is scarcely any better. Thus Haydn was adept at suggesting refinements or revision of subtle errors such as hidden fifths, rather than merely limiting himself to the correction of conspicuous ones – a clear indication of his abilities as a teacher. Sometimes, however, Haydn’s correction introduces fresh problems that result in a version that is arguably no better than before. For example, at the end of no. 82 Beethoven’s version contains hidden octaves between alto and bass: both parts move to E octave from the same direction. Haydn corrects this fault but creates fifths by contrary motion between alto and bass in the last two notes, plus two consecutive chords that lack thirds. His application of the ‘rules’, then, is somewhat inconsistent, as Nottebohm pointed out.Footnote 13
In quite a few exercises one note in the published transcription creates a seriously faulty discord that Haydn has not corrected. These harmonic infelicities are so conspicuous and improbable that an inaccurate transcription must be suspected. This applies in nos. 41, 69, 79, 81, 83, 100, 123, 149, 170, 178, 181, 203, 204, 213, 225, 230, 232, 236 (2 notes), 239, 244, 246. The offending note-head is nearly always on a line, where the adjacent space above or below would fit perfectly. The facsimiles are very helpful for examining such cases, for where the relevant page has been reproduced the facsimile often confirms that the printed note is one out from the one Beethoven wrote. In the other cases it shows a note with ambiguous pitch, where the correct harmony was obviously intended and has been read as such by Haydn, but the transcription gives incorrect harmony. For example, in no. 225 the fifth bass note looks more like D than C, but C was clearly intended and D creates an unprepared discord. There are many such notational ambiguities in the manuscript, and most have been transcribed to make harmonic sense, using the note obviously intended; but in no. 225 and similar cases the wrong pitch (in this case, D) has been printed. The same doubtless applies to exercises containing a faulty discord where no facsimile is provided. Another incorrect pitch in the transcription is in no. 78, where a note from the cantus firmus is given as E instead of G (though harmonized as a G); but without the facsimile one cannot be sure whether this is Beethoven’s error or the editor’s.
In two cases where the transcription shows incorrect harmony (nos. 149 and 203), what Beethoven wrote was slightly unsatisfactory (though much less so than the transcribed version) and was amended by Haydn; but none of the others has been. Thus the casual reader consulting only the transcription will find 20 places where a serious harmonic error has remained uncorrected by Haydn. Such apparent inattentiveness will tend to reinforce outdated assumptions (which Ronge has done so much to discredit) that Haydn was a less than assiduous teacher who frequently overlooked Beethoven’s errors. In actual fact Beethoven simply did not make basic harmonic errors of this kind; all the errors that Haydn corrects are relatively subtle, and generally more to do with part-writing than vertical harmony.
The clefs also provide a few problems. Beethoven used any of five different clefs – treble, soprano, alto, tenor and bass – in different exercises, and it is easy to confuse them if concentration lapses. Thus he wrote several wrong clefs in the course of the exercises. Some he corrected himself (e.g. no. 113); some were corrected by Haydn (e.g. no. 127 and 218); some have been corrected editorially in the transcription (e.g. no. 98). In nos. 93, 129 and 140, however, the top part should be in the alto clef, but the transcription shows soprano, tenor and soprano clefs respectively. The first two are not shown in facsimile, and so it is unclear whether these are misprints or Beethoven’s errors; the third is a simple misprint, for the facsimile confirms the alto clef.
One notable feature about Beethoven’s part-writing errors in these exercises is that similar ones occasionally recur in much later compositions of his. In no. 58 he copied the cantus firmus inaccurately, but then proceeded to write harmony that fits the miscopied note. A similar situation arises with his folksong setting ‘Auld lang syne’ of 1818, where he miscopied one note of the popular melody (perhaps it was unclear in his source) and then fitted his harmony to this note, creating problems for those who wish to sing the usual form of the melody.Footnote 14 The use of a suspension and resolution simultaneously in upper voices was something he learnt to avoid in his counterpoint exercises (see above), but he saw no objection to exploiting it occasionally in his compositions, such as bar 80 of the finale of his sonata Op. 110. In no. 237 there are rather conspicuous consecutive fifths in outer parts, duly corrected by Haydn, but this did not prevent Beethoven years later from writing equally conspicuous consecutive fifths in outer parts in one of his strictest fugues, in bar 20 of the first movement of his Quartet Op. 131. This movement also contains examples of a suspension and its resolution in upper parts, in bars 80–81.
The Albrechtsberger Exercises
When Haydn left for England in January 1794, Beethoven turned to Albrechtsberger for instruction, meeting him three times a week, at least initially, according to a note in his Jugendtagebuch.Footnote 15 Albrechtsberger’s teaching was based mainly on his own treatise Gründliche Anweisung in der Komposition (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1790). Unlike the Haydn studies, the Albrechtsberger ones, which are much more numerous and cover much more ground, do not appear consecutively in a single manuscript but are dispersed over several fascicles and loose leaves and are now in no particular order. Bifolios that originally formed a gathering have sometimes become separated or folded back to front, or more extensively rearranged. Thus Ronge has had to work out the best and most logical order for presenting them, which is sometimes different from Nottebohm’s; but it seems to make good sense. For example, there is a separate batch of 47 exercises in species counterpoint – 21 in strict style and 26 in freer style – which seem much more elementary than the complete fugues, and Nottebohm therefore placed them at a much earlier stage in his account.Footnote 16 Ronge, however, demonstrates that on grounds of handwriting and paper type they must belong at the end.
As in the Haydn studies, Beethoven began with strict species counterpoint in two, three, then four parts; but this time there are only 81 such exercises. They also differ from the Haydn batch in that Albrechtsberger frequently wrote down some initial guidance or an explanatory rule about some subtle feature of contrapuntal writing, indicating in what contexts certain features are allowed or not allowed. These exercises raise many of the same kinds of issues as the Haydn ones. Albrechtsberger corrects such faults as hidden fifths, suspension with its resolution in an upper voice, missing third in a chord, and doubled leading-notes. These all suggest a certain carelessness or impatience from Beethoven, as do some inaccurate figures that were left uncorrected; yet he also shows much diligence, providing two versions of certain bars, and several amendments to his initial ideas. Albrechtsberger appears much more rigorous than Haydn in marking errors, yet even he ignores some (such as a 6–4 chord and then parallel fifths in no. 70).
These species exercises are followed by numerous more advanced ones, including many complete fugues on a set of subjects provided by Albrechtsberger, and fugal pieces built around a cantus firmus provided by him. There are also a few pieces with original subjects, which have already been regarded as complete compositions, such as Hess 29, a prelude and fugue for string trio. In some of the more complex works (including the prelude in Hess 29) up to three versions survive: a rough draft with various amendments and perhaps a few additional sketches; a fair copy presented to Albrechtsberger and where necessary amended by him; and a final version incorporating these amendments and fit for publication, although Beethoven never arranged for them to be published. All three versions are transcribed here. The final section of exercises includes invertible counterpoint and some double fugues, before the additional batch of species counterpoint.
Not surprisingly, Beethoven’s fugal writing in general is extremely good, with much imagination and fluency within the strict style required. One cannot help admiring the diligence of Albrechtsberger in scrutinizing all these pieces, looking for and occasionally finding a passage that could beneficially be modified, and then devising a suitable revision rather than just pointing out the fault. He also offers an explanation for more obscure corrections and improvements. In what is called here ‘Doppelfuge 1’, Beethoven’s alto part moved from E up to B in a C major context in bars 20–21, and Albrechtsberger altered the E to an upper C, noting: ‘NB One does not leap from the 3rd to the 7th note [of the scale], namely from Mi to Mi, because of the harsh melody’ (transcription, page 211). It is noteworthy that here and elsewhere Albrechtsberger is thinking in terms of degrees of the scale, rather than purely intervallic relationships between two notes. These fugal exercises would make perfectly good recital pieces for an organist, even though they have rarely been treated in this manner and are not regarded as ‘works’ in this edition or in the new Beethoven thematic catalogue, which offers only a general description of his exercises for Haydn and Albrechtsberger.Footnote 17
Unfortunately, the transcription of the Albrechtsberger exercises suffers from dozens of wrong notes, although in such a large body of work these actually seem few and far-between. As with the Haydn exercises, in some cases the correct note is fairly clear in the facsimile; in others it is badly written but what is intended is obvious from the context; and in some cases no facsimile has been provided but the note in question does not make harmonic sense whereas an adjacent one above or below does. There is even a passage where a phrase on the tenor stave has been printed on the alto stave, thus with the wrong clef (transcription, page 240). It is scarcely fair to blame the editor for these inaccuracies. As indicated above, there was insufficient financial support for a complete set of facsimiles, and the same must have applied to proof-reading. The Beethoven-Haus would have had to prioritize between paying for a few more facsimiles or paying for an additional proof-reader who could spot and correct harmonic inaccuracies in five clefs. Most people would probably agree that extra facsimiles were more worthwhile, since the harmonic errors are mere details that can readily be noticed by most readers interested in this aspect.
Another problem occurs in places where the commentary, despite addressing revisions and irregularities in the text, could have gone further in this direction. Concerning part of the first draft of what is called ‘Choralfuge 3’ (transcription, pages 143–4; commentary, page 58), Ronge writes (my translation): ‘Bar 51: The last bar on f. 17.2r is not deleted, but is almost empty and repeated on the next page (f. 17.2v). Tenor: through lack of space Beethoven notates the last two quavers in bar 52’. This is perfectly accurate and helpful: Beethoven had begun writing bar 51 at the foot of f. 17.2r but turned over to allow more space and began the bar again. Here on f. 17.2v he initially wrote a semibreve in the tenor, but then substituted crotchets and quavers that could not all be accommodated before the bar-line, and so there appear to be only three beats in bar 51 and five in bar 52, which are rightly regularized as four plus four in the transcription. At this point, however, the notes on the bass stave are nonsensical if taken at face value, and there is no comment about them. The last four notes on this stave in bar 51, and all those in bars 52–53, should actually be read in the tenor clef, and are alternatives to the tenor part in bar 51; the second of these alternatives is duly incorporated into the revised version of the piece (transcription, page 151). Thus what has been presented in the bass clef in the transcription here is misleading.
The Salieri Exercises
The Salieri exercises of WoO 99 are for unaccompanied voices, and again there are problems of chronology. As a result they have recently been completely renumbered within WoO 99, both here and in the new Beethoven thematic catalogue,Footnote 18 with a concordance provided to older numberings. The new sequence seems logical, although in some cases the exact order in which the settings were written cannot be confirmed. There has also been much uncertainty about their date, but recent study of the paper types and Beethoven’s handwriting indicates 1801–02, and Ronge argues persuasively that the course could scarcely have lasted more than a year – probably much less. There could be earlier exercises, now lost, but this seems unlikely, since the first one surviving includes elementary mistakes such as setting the words ‘suo’ and ‘più’ as two syllables. Salieri promptly corrected these and they do not appear subsequently. Beethoven’s preliminary drafts as well as his final versions have been included in the edition, so that not only Salieri’s corrections but Beethoven’s own revisions can be seen, and his diligence is again much in evidence. Once more, however, the edition contains some transcription errors, as well as several places where Beethoven’s note-head is so badly placed that his intentions have had to be guessed.
Beethoven followed up his part-songs of WoO 99 with a full-scale scena and aria, ‘No, non turbarti’ (WoO 92a), which may have been his final exercise for Salieri. This is omitted here, however, since it appears elsewhere in the Gesamtausgabe. The same applies to two Italian settings from slightly later (WoO 93 and Op. 116), which Beethoven seems to have composed for further experience without showing them to Salieri for correction. Thus his composition studies did not terminate with his exercises for Salieri. Indeed he continued studying scores and treatises for the rest of his life. It has often been assumed that the extracts he later made from treatises were all copied around 1809 in connection with his teaching of Archduke Rudolph, but it now seems that many were made for his own benefit, and they have a wide range of dates. An edition of these is eagerly awaited. Meanwhile, however, the present edition offers vast opportunities for further research, and will surely form a fundamental resource for many types of investigation related to Beethoven’s education in music theory.
