The Mozart Beethoven Connection
The Mozart Beethoven Connection
The Mozart Beethoven Connection
Wolfgang Amade' Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Two of the greatest composers
in history. Two composers who mastered Viennese Classical Style. Two composers
who took Classicism to its apotheosis, and then, with Beethoven, opened the door to
Romanticism, the door that Mozart knocked on. Two composers inextricably linked
together, historically and stylistically.
Yet, Beethoven and Mozart most likely never met. Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen, in his
detailed commentary in Hermann Abert's magisterial 1921 biography of Mozart,
(edited and annotated in 2007), points out that the only time in which both
composers were even in the same place, were a few weeks in the spring of 1787,
when both were in Vienna. Beethoven arrived in the Habsburg capital some time in
the first week of April, at the behest of his patrons in Bonn, with the express purpose
of meeting and studying with Mozart. However, he had to leave abruptly only a few
weeks later, to attend to his severely ill mother back in Bonn.
In April, 1787, Beethoven was an unknown sixteen year-old piano prodigy. Mozart
was 31, well established in Vienna as a composer, pianist, violist, organist, conductor
and piano pedagogue.
In 1856, sixty-nine years after those April weeks in 1787, the Mozart biographer Otto
Jahn commented in his monumental Mozart biography that "it was communicated to
me in Vienna on good authority that Beethoven may have played piano at a recital at
which Mozart attended."
This second-hand anecdote is the only written comment we have about the putative
meeting of the two geniuses.
However, there is no contemporary document to corroborate the meeting. There is
no letter written by Beethoven to commemorate it. Mozart does not describe an
encounter with Beethoven in any of the copious correspondence that has been left
to posterity.
The authoritative Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians does not describe the
meeting.
Beethoven himself never mentioned or wrote that he had ever met Mozart or had
ever played for him. Someone of Beethoven's enormous self-confidence and ego
would likely have documented such a monumental event.
He never did.
Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries, two of Beethoven's piano students and among his
closest friends, disagreed as to whether Beethoven and Mozart had ever met.
Even if Beethoven never greeted Mozart in person, and even if Beethoven never
played in Mozart's presence, there is no doubt that Mozart's music had a profound
influence on Beethoven's creative process.
Mozart's influence on Beethoven was deep and long, and is evident in several of
Beethoven's compositions:
The 19th century musicologist Gustav Nottebohm was the first to observe that the
third movement theme in Beethoven's fifth symphony (c minor Op 67) has the same
sequence as the opening theme of the final movement of Mozart's 40th symphony (g
minor, KV 550). Nottebohm noticed that, in Beethoven's sketchbook for his fifth
symphony, Beethoven had copied out the first 29 bars of the finale of Mozart's 40th
symphony, making it unlikely this was simply a motivic coincidence.
The musicologist Charles Rosen noted that a theme from Mozart's Piano Concerto in
c minor, KV. 491, occurs within Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto and in the same
tonic.
Mozart's A major String Quartet, KV. 464, was a source for Beethoven's A
major String Quartet Op. 18 No. 5.
Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, KV. 457, was a model for Beethoven's
"Pathétique" Sonata, Op. 13, in the same key.
Beethoven wrote cadenzas (WoO 58) to the first and third movements of
Mozart's piano concerto in d minor, KV. 466.
We can hear Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" motif decades earlier, in Mozart's 1775 sacred
work, Misericordias Domini KV. 222 (listen particularly closely at 1:00 and
5:10) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBYufTXJQk
A motif from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony can be heard in the overture to Mozart's
1768 opera, Bastien and Bastienne, KV 50, written forty years earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad7WlYjxS3Y
Did Beethoven actually hear these last two Mozart's compositions, or was this an
example of what I have termed "convergent musical evolution"? Beethoven likely
never saw the manuscripts or heard performances of either the Misericordias
Domini nor Bastien und Bastienne. He independently conjured these simple and
enduring themes.
References:
1. Cooper, M. Beethoven: The Last Decade, 1817- 1827 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985), p. 118 and 127.