How Beethoven Copied and Stole from Haydn

Composition as imitation

Composers in the time of Bach and Beethoven copied each other everywhere as a matter of course. Imitating models was how music was both taught and created. The famous Neapolitan conservatories of the 18th century are known for having used such methods to give orphan boys a life by turning them into professional musicians, many of whom gained success in churches and courts not only in Italy but throughout Europe in a widespread Italian diaspora. The prestige and high-brow associations of Classical music conservatories today are far removed from these modest and socially minded origins. The very first conservatories conserved children—they were orphanages that made musicians. The cultural construction and imitation of models is what made them, and with an ask-no-questions approach. The teacher considered the finest in all of Naples, Giovanni Furno (1748–1837), is said to have told his students: “Do it, and do it as I say, because this is what my master Cotumacci taught me.” It produced great results, but there are problems with imitation pure and simple.

The problem with imitation

The 18th-century music historian Charles Burney visited the Neapolitan conservatories in the fall of 1770 as part of his European musical tour. On his sojourn he met one Rinaldo di Capua, a now forgotten but according to Burney “old and excellent Neapolitan composer” whose music gave him “great pleasure.” His music is now lost, as Capua’s “graceless son,” when faced with hardship, sold his father’s collected works for “waste paper!” But Capua left us something profound nonetheless. He complained to Burney that all music had become repetitive and lacked originality because composers did nothing but copy from one another.

He thinks composers have nothing to do now but to write themselves and others over again, and the only chance they have for obtaining the reputation of novelty and invention must arise either from the ignorance or want of memory in the public—as every thing both in melody and modulation that is worth doing has already been done over and over again.

In his original journal Burney added: “We … agreed in the above sentiments.” But by 1805, when Burney revised his memoirs for intended publication, three composers had changed his mind. In the margin of the above passage, which summarizes his conversation with Capua on the aesthetic problem of imitation, Burney wrote: “Let Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven answer this assertion.”

When Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven copied—and copy they certainly did, perhaps no more overtly than in Mozart’s extensive use of Handel in his Requiem—they did it differently. These differences, the exceptional nature of their music, was fully recognized in their own day, as this powerful annotation from Burney’s memoirs captures.

Like J. S. Bach before them, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were among the few who not only copied but knew how to steal.

Stealing and originality in imitation

Like J. S. Bach before them, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were among the few who not only copied but knew how to steal. The 18th century is also the period in Western history that originated the concept of authorship as we understand it today—originality of voice, and so forth. It also witnessed the birth of aesthetics and music criticism, particularly in German-speaking Europe. The modern dictum “Good artists copy, Great artists steal” is of course widely attributed to Picasso by many today, including, famously, by Apple’s Steve Jobs, for whom it became a creative philosophy. But Beethoven himself spoke on the same terms. In an early sketchbook known as the Kafka Miscellany (1786–99) he copied an unspecified passage from a Mozart symphony (probably the “Linz,” and probably from memory), and above it wrote: “this entire passage has been stolen from the Mozart symphony in c [minor?].”

He then rewrote the passage with a few changes and underscored his revision with these words: “Beethoven ipse,” which means “Beethoven himself” or “the very Beethoven.”

With a few changes Beethoven claimed to have made Mozart’s passage his own.

Copying is both easy and powerful. It can make capable and even influential musicians of those who literally came from nothing. But for ambitions of originality and finding one’s own voice, copying becomes a liability, while stealing is everything. The pages of the Kafka Miscellany show that even for Beethoven finding an original voice was a struggle.

By the time of the third Piano Concerto in C minor, Op. 37 (1800), however, we can see the copying morphing into a stealing, and hear a distinctly Beethovenian voice. Its opening theme opens a small window onto the large world of 18th-century musical creativity as a classic example of both copying and stealing.

Its first nine measures copy the structure of the first five measures from the opening movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in D minor, Op. 42 (1785) with its proportions doubled. Beethoven’s concerto movement is in alla breve or cut time, so its opening theme corresponds to that of his teacher as follows: 1 = 1, 3 = 2, 5 = 3, 7 = 4, 9 = 5, 11 = 6, 13 = 7, 15 = 8.

Haydn, String Quartet in D minor, Op. 42, Andante ed innocentemente (1785)

(All musical examples may be opened in a new window by right-clicking.)

Haydn’s theme begins with an upward arpeggiation of the tonic triad in the melody that highlights the tonic and dominant as the lowest and highest voices of a polyphonic melody. This opening statement is repeated in the context of dominant harmony with the melody transposed up a step: the tonic moves to scale degree two while scale degree five moves to the submediant, scale degree six.

The dominant becomes a dominant ninth-chord when the melody reaches the submediant as its high point in m. 4. It resolves by returning the sixth and second scale degrees to the dominant and tonic they respectively came from. This resolution happens quickly in m. 5, with a compression of the first two measures into one, and also with the polyphonic melody inverted: the dominant falls on the strong beat while the tonic is delayed to the second half of the measure. This melodic inversion accentuates the theme’s opening mirror structure, with the 5–6–5 progression occupying its middle and the 1–2–1 serving as its frame.

Beethoven, Piano Concerto in C minor, Op. 37, Allegro con brio, mm. 1–9 (1800)

The same mirror schema underlies the first 9 measures of Beethoven’s concerto.

It shares the same two scale degree progressions merged in a polyphonic melody, the same tonic–dominant-9th statement-response, the same melodic inversion when the dominant resolves back to the tonic, and the same overall mirror-like design, with the 5–6–5 progression nested within the 1–2–1 frame. Structurally, Beethoven’s theme is a (nearly) note-for-note copy of Haydn’s—that is, until m. 10, where a world of change opens up between them, and between Beethoven and his teacher, when the inverted fifth G–C of mm. 9–10 reaches its end.

Beethoven’s deviation from the Haydn model

Beethoven exploits a detail from Haydn’s theme to deviate from the model and make it his own, and in ways that go well beyond the two themes’ surface differences of figuration, style, meter, and orchestration. The second half of Haydn’s theme is a long cadence (cadenza lunga, as Italians called it in the 18th century) that is structured in a sentential manner, but it lacks the forward-driving momentum and development characteristic of the sentence schema.

The sentence’s repetition structure in the second half of Haydn’s theme occurs as part of a harmonic end, the cadence, which includes literal stops along the way to the final stop. Haydn sequences the compressed fifth-descent A–D up a step once again to B-flat–E (also compressed), but now as part of a subdominant-function harmony within the long cadence. Though it certainly revisits the ideas of the first four measures in fragmented form and grows out of them, the second half of the phrase doesn’t itself grow but rather dissolves in a somewhat anticlimactic manner because of the three accented stops. There is a sense of winding down, of gradual stopping, rather than growth and build up to the cadence. The inactive return of the 5–6–5 progression in this second cadential half of the phrase also partly contributes to this. It never descends further from scale degree five, even though it’s been highlighted metrically to function as a new frame through the inversion in m. 5. It’s the lower voice, the scale degree progression 3–2–1, that (melodically) brings the cadence to a close. The same voice that frames mm. 1–5 also brings closure to the entire theme.

The second half of Beethoven’s theme, on the other hand, is where the growth really begins. It takes over precisely where Haydn’s smaller gestures end, to dramatize and fill in the stops. Beethoven’s fifth-descent in mm. 9–10 is decorated at its end with an accented passing tone that is articulated as a sigh-figure (Seufzer), which is further marked with a sforzando at its syncopated resolution.

These surface details loudly call attention to an even more profound change in the structure. By the time the melody descends to the tonic, the bass and harmony change to the submediant, with the bass A-flat also marked with a sforzando.

There is movement both in the melody and harmony where Haydn’s theme went largely unmoving. When the opening mirror structure resolves in Beethoven’s theme, we are not in the process of ending, as in the Haydn, but in the middle of something new: Beethoven nests a bona fide new sentence within the continuation and cadential stages of the larger sentence, first by sequencing the resolution of mm. 9–10 into a harmonic falling thirds sequence.

This sequence is heard more directly as a growing-out of the opening for two reasons.

The first is the highly developed motivic connections between mm. 1–4 and 9–10. Measures 9–10 vertically combine the motives of mm. 1–2 and 2–3.

The opening arpeggiation is placed in the bass beneath the stepwise fifth-descent in mm. 9–10. And the fifth-descent itself is already in mm. 2–3. The opening ascent to scale degree five occurs early compared to the Haydn, already by the downbeat of measure two, and is followed by a stepwise return to the tonic in mm. 2–3. Measures 9–10 are heard as a variation of this earlier fifth-descent, which is itself already an inversion of mm. 1–2.

A second reason is Beethoven’s sequencing of the fifth-descent G–C not up a step, as in Haydn, but by a fourth, C–F, to produce an ascending fourths sequence in the melody while the harmonic sequence overall descends by thirds.

A two-measure melodic sequence (of fourths) is heard against a measure-to-measure harmonic sequence (of thirds). Whereas the second half of Haydn’s phrase is all about punctuation and end, Beethoven’s is all about movement embodied in sequential patterning. Measures 9–10 emerge from mm. 1–8 and themselves grow into something new: they are an end (a resolution of mm. 5–8), a middle (literally the middle of the entire theme as its continuation), and a beginning (of the new, nested sentence) all at the same time.

Their growth further continues when the falling thirds sequence merges with the cadence that follows it, in the same way that it was merged with the opening mirror schema that precedes it.

While the bass continues the pattern of falling thirds when the root of the Neapolitan chord D-flat falls to the leading tone, B-natural in the bass, the harmony deviates from the sequence with a dominant six-five chord, which changes inversion to resolve as a four-two at m. 15.

In Bach’s day this pattern was known as an alto clausula (clausula altizans) and also an evaded cadence (cadence evitée), so designated by Bach’s cousin and friend, Johann Gottfried Walther, a composer and author of an ambitious music dictionary. That evaded cadence (or alto clausula) in Beethoven’s theme is an extension of the descending third sequence and also where Haydn’s theme ends proportionally: the downbeat of m. 8 is equivalent to the downbeat of m. 15 in Beethoven. The lack of resolution in Beethoven’s theme necessitates another stronger cadence, which takes the form of a compound cadence (cadenza composta in the 18th-century Italian), which produces a perfect authentic cadence in present-day terms.

Finally, the framing voice changes for Beethoven’s second half of the phrase. It is the uppermost voice from the mirror schema, 5–6–5, which continues as its frame: a fifth descent also occurs across all of mm. 9–16, again beginning on scale degree five, whereas the framing voice in Haydn’s theme remained unchanged. In Beethoven’s concerto the voice oriented around the tonic becomes the middle scale degree progression in the polyphonic melody. And still, because the evaded cadence in Beethoven’s theme is the one with the registral high point and climax in the melody at mm. 14–15, there remains something unfinished that necessitates further growth and development. The expanse, growth, and grip of Beethoven’s theme set the tone for the ambition of the whole concerto.

Whether copying and stealing from a specific member of the culture or the culture writ large, we are dealing with the time-honored practice of exempla classica. Learning and creating through the imitation of models was the bedrock of creativity in the long 18th century.

Copy, learn, and steal from the best examples

So what does it mean to steal in creativity? To take and make something one’s own. The copying is not an end in itself but a starting point. This applies whether a composer copies a passage directly from a specific work of another composer or from a culturally shared convention. In the end, it amounts to the same difference, as every work is itself based in convention. And around and around we go. Whether copying and stealing from a specific member of the culture or the culture writ large, we are dealing with the time-honored practice of exempla classica. Learning and creating through the imitation of models was the bedrock of creativity in the long 18th century. But this practice is often misunderstood.

In 18th-century discussions it was aligned with the concept of inventio (invention in the sense of discovery) from Classical oratory. The imitation was meant to spur creativity through discovery. Another composer and theorist also contemporary with Bach, Johann Mattheson, spoke of this in terms of locus exemplorum (Der volkommene Capellmeister, 1739) .

Locus exemplorum is presumably to be interpreted as imitation of other composers. One must, however, choose only the best examples and change them so that they will not just be copied or stolen. When all has been said, it must be admitted that this source is used most frequently. As long as it is done modestly, it need not be condemned. Borrowing is permissible; the loan, however, must be returned with interest [my emphasis]; i.e. one must work out and dispose the borrowed material in such ways that it will gain a better and more beautiful appearance than it had in the composition from which it came.

Some returned with great interest. In Beethoven’s and J. S. Bach’s music is most evident the idea that patterns, conventions, and models are not ends in themselves but means for much more ambitious musical goals. Models become entirely assimilated to the particulars of the individual work. The pianist-musicologist Charles Rosen said it best: “Beethoven’s rethinking the major conventions … give the impression that they have been invented for the particular work.”

Much modern music theory is bogged down in rules, which are ultimately impediments to composition. On the title page of another treatise Mattheson wrote in 1719, Exemplarische Organisten-Probe, he quoted Seneca: “The journey is long by rules, but short and efficient by examples.” A great deal of learning how to compose involves watching others copy, steal, and return with interest, and in choosing whom to watch and whom to copy, do as Mattheson says, “choose only the best examples.”