Beethoven was a supremely gifted improvisor – From the testimony of his contemporaries [the past isn't what you thought it was]

My own encounter with improvisation was indirect, fitful, indirect, and almost accidental. I started taking trumpet lessons in the fourth grade. Initially I was in a group lesson with two clarinetists, my friends Billy Cover and Jackie Barto. We were grouped together because each of us played an instrument pitched in B-flat. I remember that before long I was starting to fall behind the other two.

Then I started taking individual lessons. My teacher was blind. He’d come to the house once a week. That went on, I don’t exactly recall, for a year, when I switched to Mr. Dysert. I stayed with him until my senior year in high school. Somewhere along the line I started making up my own tunes. Thus when I joined the marching band, I made up march tunes. I’m pretty sure I didn’t think of this as improvisation.

I know, I know, hold your jets. I’m getting to Beethoven.

I supposed learned the term “improvise” when I became interested in jazz at about the same time. Improvisation is what jazz musicians did. What I did, read music, was right HERE. What they did, improvise, was over THERE, in alien territory. What I was doing when I was making up those march tunes, that didn’t fit into this scheme at all. It’s just something I did. I also made-up bluesy lines and tunes, like what I heard on some of my jazz records. But NO, I wasn’t improvising, because, remember? improvising is over THERE.

As far as I can recall the first time I was both improvising and (subsequently) thought of it as improvising was in a rehearsal of a rock and roll band I’d just joined, The Saint Matthew Passion. We were rehearsing “For What It’s Worth” and were riffing at the end. I decided to add some more elaborate riffs. Once I started the band liked it. From that moment on I had a solo at the end of that tune. I took solos in other tunes as well. From that time on I was an improvisor.

The point is simple. I lived in a culture where regular music was music you read from written notes. Improvisation was this mysterious process done by these other people. It was also special, special, mysterious, and OVER THERE. 

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That’s not how it was in Beethoven’s musical culture. He lived in a milieu where advanced keyboard players were expected to improvise, where, indeed, the last slot on a concert program was often left open for improvisation, which was expected to be the best music on the program. It’s only recently – yesterday if you must know – that I knew that. Oh, I’ve known that Beethoven was an improvisor for a long time, like Mozart and Bach before him. But that improvisation was so highly regarded, I hadn’t known that. Given that, one would like to know: Why’d they stop improvising? I’m reading about that and want to read some more before I blog about it.

Right now I want to tell you about what Beethoven’s contemporaries thought about his improvising. I’ve taken these examples from, O. G. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries (1926, 1954).

Mozart, 1787

Mozart was a renowned improvisor and toured Europe as a six-year old, dazzling the powdered wig set.

Beethoven, who as a youth of great promise came to Vienna in 1786 [really in 1787], but was obliged to return to Bonn after a brief sojourn, was taken to Mozart and at that musician’s request played something for him which he, taking it for granted that it was a show-piece prepared for the occasion, praised in a rather cool manner. Beethoven observing this, begged Mozart to give him a theme for improvisation. He always played admirably when excited and now he was inspired, too, by the presence of the master whom he reverenced greatly; he played in such a style that Mozart, whose attention and interest grew more and more, finally went silently to some friends who were sitting in an adjoining room, and said, vivaciously, “Keep your eyes on him; some day he will give the world something to talk about.”

Johann Schenk (1792)

He was Beethoven’s teacher in counterpoint.

In 1792, His Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian, Elector of Cologne, was pleased to send his charge Louis van Beethoven to Vienna to study musical composition with Haydn. Towards the end of July, Abbé Gelinek informed me that he had made the acquaintance of a young man who displayed extraordinary virtuosity on the pianoforte, such, indeed, as he had not observed since Mozart. [...]

Thus I saw the composer, now so famous, for the first time and heard him play. After the customary courtesies he offered to improvise on the pianoforte. He asked me to sit beside him. Having struck a few chords and tossed off a few figures as if they were of no significance, the creative genius gradually unveiled his profound psychological pictures. My ear was continually charmed by the beauty of the many and varied motives which he wove with wonderful clarity and loveliness into each other, and I surrendered my heart to the impressions made upon it while he gave himself wholly up to his creative imagination, and anon, leaving the field of mere tonal charm, boldly stormed the most distant keys in order to give expression to violent passions....

Johann Wenzel Tomaschek (1798)

A Bohemian organist, teacher and composer.

In the year 1798, in which I continued my juridical studies, Beethoven, the giant among pianoforte players, came to Prague. He gave a largely attended concert in the Konviktssaal, at which he played his Concerto in C major, Op. 15, and the Adagio and graceful Rondo in A major from Op. 2, and concluded with an improvisation on a theme given him by Countess Sch... [Schlick?], “Ah tu fosti il primo oggetto,” from Mozart’s “Titus” (duet No. 7). Beethoven’s magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days....

I heard Beethoven at his second concert, which neither in performance nor in composition renewed again the first powerful impression. This time he played the Concerto in B-flat which he had just composed in Prague. Then I heard him a third time at the home of Count C., where he played, besides the graceful Rondo from the A major Sonata, an improvisation on the theme: “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman.”* This time I listened to Beethoven’s artistic work with more composure. I admired his powerful and brilliant playing, but his frequent daring deviations from one motive to another, whereby the organic connection, the gradual development of idea was put aside, did not escape me.

Evils of this nature frequently weaken his greatest compositions, those which sprang from a too exuberant conception. It is not seldom that the unbiased listener is rudely awakened from his transport. The singular and original seemed to be his chief aim in composition, as is confirmed by the answer which he made to a lady who asked him if he often attended Mozart’s operas. “I do not know them,” he replied, “and do not care to hear the music of others lest I forfeit some of my originality.”

*Known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Mozart composed a very famous set of variations on this unassuming little tune.

Carl Czerny (about 1800)

Beethoven’s student, teacher of Liszt, and a composer. He also wrote a treatise on improvisation, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829).

His improvisation was brilliant and astonishing in the extreme; and no matter in what company he might be, he knew how to make such an impression on every listener that frequently there was not a single dry eye, while many broke out into loud sobs, for there was a certain magic in his expression, aside from the beauty and originality of his ideas and his genial way of presenting them. When he had concluded an improvisation of this kind, he was capable of breaking out into boisterous laughter and of mocking his listeners for yielding to the emotion he had called forth in them. He would even say to them: “You are fools!” At times he felt himself insulted by such manifestations of sympathy. “Who can continue to live among such spoiled children?” he would cry, and for that reason alone (so he told me), he declined to accept the invitation sent him by the King of Prussia after an improvisation of this kind.

Ignaz Von Seyfried (1799-1806)

He was a conductor. He tells of a 1799 meeting between Beethoven and Josef Wölffl, his rival, in which they engaged in what jazz musicians would call a cutting contest. This was routine in salons where two virtuosi were present.

Beethoven had already attracted attention to himself by several compositions and was rated a first-class pianist in Vienna when he was confronted by a rival in the closing years of the last century. Thereupon there was, in a way, a revival of the old Parisian feud of the Gluckists and Piccinists, and the many friends of art in the Imperial City arrayed themselves in two parties. At the head of Beethoven’s admirers stood the amiable Prince Lichnowsky; among the most zealous patrons of Wölfll was the broadly cultured Baron Raymond von Wetzlar, whose delightful villa (on the Grünberg near the Emperor’s recreation-castle) offered to all artists, native and foreign, an asylum in the summer months, as pleasing as it was desirable, with true British loyalty.

There the interesting combats of the two athletes not infrequently offered an indescribable artistic treat to the numerous and thoroughly select gathering. Each brought forward the latest product of his mind. Now one and anon the other gave free rein to its glowing fancy; sometimes they would seat themselves at two pianofortes and improvise alternately on themes which they gave each other, and thus created many a four-hand Capriccio which if it could have been put upon paper at the moment would surely have bidden defiance to time. It would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to award the palm of victory to either one of the gladiators in respect of technical skill.

Nature had been a particularly kind mother to Wölffl in bestowing upon him a gigantic hand which could span a tenth as easily as other hands compass an octave, and permitted him to play passages of double notes in these intervals with the rapidity of lightning. In his improvisations even then Beethoven did not deny his tendency toward the mysterious and gloomy. When once he began to revel in the infinite world of tones, he was transported also above all earthly things;—his spirit had burst all restricting bonds, shaken off the yokes of servitude, and soared triumphantly and jubilantly into the luminous spaces of the higher æther.

Now his playing tore along like a wildly foaming cataract, and the conjurer constrained his instrument to an utterance so forceful that the stoutest structure was scarcely able to withstand it; and anon he sank down, exhausted, exhaling gentle plaints, dissolving in melancholy. Again the spirit would soar aloft, triumphing over transitory terrestrial sufferings, turn its glance upward in reverent sounds and find rest and comfort on the innocent bosom of holy nature. But who shall sound the depths of the sea? It was the mystical Sanscrit language whose hieroglyphs can be read only by the initiated.

Wölffl, on the contrary, trained in the school of Mozart, was always equable; never superficial but always clear and thus more accessible to the multitude. He used art only as a means to an end, never to exhibit his acquirements. He always enlisted the interest of his hearers and inevitably compelled them to follow the progression of his well-ordered ideas. Whoever has heard Hummel will know what is meant by this....

Joseph Fröhlich, 1828

These remarks are not informal comments about Beethoven’s piano playing. Rather they are from a formal review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Fröhlich published in Caecilia and edited and translated by Robin Wallace, The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, Op. 125, Center for Beethoven Research, Boston University (2017). I include them here to make that point that improvisation was considered a standard by which it was appropriate to judge completely notated music, as the Ninth Symphony certainly is.

Blessed by nature with an uncommon power of imagination, which he proclaimed already in his earliest works, written in his eleventh year, lord of all the means of his art as are few other composers, familiar with all the great things that had been accomplished before him, particularly in the field of instrumental music, this cannot have been hard for him. And already in his symphony in D major we perceive, for all the regularity of the thematic working out, such a novelty of ideas, such a soaring and bold flight of imagination, such a use of all the instruments toward the most gripping, most genuine effects as, in a similar manner, in this direction, was not to be found in any earlier work. Now the path had been broken, and one must be astounded at the power with which his genius conjured up new creations that surpassed one another in excellence. The most advanced practice of free improvisation and masterly, often hour-long working through of some theme, whereby his spirit constantly became lost in new regions, conquering undreamed-of standpoints and prospects in the impulsive outpouring, not only persuaded him of his uncommon creative power, but also granted him the ability and the skill to form every mood of his soul into a perfect soul picture. Thus, he had now brought things to the point where he could make use of every idea that sorrow and joy excited in him, indeed of the impression that every important event in his life made on him, along with the principles he developed thereby and fleshed out in his versatile soul into definite feeling pictures, as material for his works, and was thus able to elevate firmly delineated musical discourse into the freest poetic structure. Only music, which lives in the other- worldly ether, uses for its material the most spiritual element of the physical world, and has the human soul as the source of its endless creations—in which the worldly and the other- worldly are wondrously united—was capable of this.

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On the whole, I’ve come away from a day of tracking down remarks on Beethoven and improvising with the impression that the contemporary world of classical musicology is rethinking the role of improvisation in music. It’s not clear to me just where, if anywhere, this is leading. But it might be dangerous. That is to say, it might be fun.

Here's a website with information and resources about improvisation in the classical tradition: The Scroll Ensemble, https://www.thescrollensemble.com/en/. Here’s a video they’ve put together about Carl Czerny’s A systematic introduction to improvisation on the pianoforte: opus 200 (Systematische Anleitung zum Improvisieren, 1829). Much about what we know of Beethoven’s practice comes from this book.

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A post on styles of improvising.