Program and Form in Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture (Op. 84)

Chris Black
blackc@reed.edu
Music 258: Beethoven
Leila Falk
Reed College, Fall 2006

Abstract:
Arguments for and against the legitimacy of programmatic music often seem to begin from the assumption that once a piece of music had been burdened with program, it runs the inherent danger of becoming incoherent if the program is lost. Beethoven's overture for Egmont (op. 84) can be seen to refute this claim by containing a recognizable program whose cues are also musically valid within a well-defined formal structure that is tractable, if perhaps not obvious, to absolutist analyses.


Can music carry meaning? If so, does the meaning inhere in the music itself or can it be externally supplied? May the meaning of music be about anything other than music? These questions form the heart of a long-running debate over the validity of program in music. If music is absolute, then it may not--cannot--carry any extra-musical baggage and a given piece may be enjoyed and judged without reference to context. If external meanings are possible, then a musical performance is an incomplete communication and may be incomprehensible without additional information.

I consider these programmatic issues here in respect to Beethoven's "Egmont" overture (Op. 84). Egmont has often been cited as a classic program work thanks to its dramatic associations and unorthodox formal structure, but most authors have stopped short of claiming that its program is an inseparable part of its meaning. James Hepokoski has recently gone further by presenting a careful analysis which purports to resolve many of Egmont's structural issues without resorting to programmatic justifications, but which does not deny the validity of the implied tonal analogies to the Egmont story. 

In order to effectively discuss program in music, it is necessary to have a clear idea of what program is; Considering the disagreements among critics, this may be more difficult than it sounds. Crudely, program is some meaning that a piece of music is asked to carry but which is not inherent in the music itself. R.W.S Mendl defined absolute music as "that which gives us pleasure by the sheer delight in sound patterns", while program music was "an attempt to represent scenes, objects, or events which exist apart from music" (Mendl, 172). Mendl demanded that this representation be highly precise both in intention (representing a very specific thing) and in execution (representing that thing very clearly), going so far as to exclude Beethoven's Eroica entirely from the programmatic camp and to subdivide the Pastorale into parts which were truly programmatic (movements 3, 4, and the brook and birds in movement 2) and those which were merely evocative (movements 1, most of 2, and 5) (Mendl 172-174). This view is considerably more restrictive than most others have endorsed. In Dusan Plavsa's 1981 essay "Intentionality in Music", Plavsa distinguished between "intentional" (programmatic) and "non-intentional" (absolute) music, accepting a  broad range of approaches as intentional and saying that "intentionality need not (although it may) coincide with the author's conscious intentions or with the social purposes of the music." (One wonders why Plavsa chose to call it "intentional" if intent was not required). 

Ralph W. Wood, in his 1934 essay "The Meaning of Beethoven", stakes out a hard-line absolutist position when he asserts that programmatic meanings, at least any that come from intentions created before composing the piece, are essentially impossible, or at least irrelevant, because any extra-musical ideas present at the start of composition cannot possibly affect the outcome of a piece. He bases this bold claim on what he takes to be two "fundamentally true and important" facts: First, that a piece's germinal idea, whatever its source, is inescapably overshadowed by "purely musical" material which quickly takes over determining the shape and direction of the piece, and second that the musical value of the finished piece is independent of the "nature or quality" of any extra-musical idea from which it came. In order to support this first "fact", Wood resorts to a definition of "purely musical material" as "something which is notatable", and further admits that this definition encompasses all possible elements of a piece of music. The second claim is essentially that where you start will never affect where you end up, and relies either on the complete removal of the originating idea (perhaps by "fact" one) or on a strangely limited idea of how many possible outcomes a composition can have. In both cases, Wood seems to miss the point; an extra-musical idea is not "unmusical", but rather is an idea which originates elsewhere and must become musical in order to enter the piece. (Meaning of Beethoven, 211-212)

Plavsa dismisses this "autonomism" as a kind of "Hegelian or Pythagorean idealism, looking for the ultimate cause of all things in music, which is an end in itself." The problem with the autonomist view, says Plavsa, is that it confuses aesthetic value, which is not affected by the composer's intentions, with artistic value, which is. Thus they reject programme music and claim that music cannot describe, represent, or express anything. (Intentionality in Music, 67-68)

Vera Micznik proceeded more cautiously in "The Absolute Limitations of Programme Music: the Case of Liszt's 'Die Ideale'". She recognized that external meanings could come from several sources, particularly acknowledging that a "receiver response" wherein the listener is free to interpret music as they listen is not the same as an interpretation handed down from the composer through an explicit program. Micznik further develops this idea of program as a violation of listener autonomy to demonstrate that the conflict is not rooted in a struggle between listener and composer, but again in the issue of intramusical or extramusical associations: 
	"The very proposition that musical ideas and their unfolding can be better understood by being matched on to some other -- more or less precise--verbal or visual underpinning remains theoretically problematic. Seen in the light of a semiotic theory of signification, the 'problem' can be summarized as follows: programme music collapses together two different systems of signs, which theoretically can lead to privileging one and suppressing the other instead of allowing both to participate in the process of signification. Each system struggles for supremacy, and each should be given its own space to exist."(215)

Program music, then, if I may hazard my own definition, is music which carries in its notes some significance that is not directly encoded in the notes themselves. Whether this significance was added before or after composition, by the composer or by an interloper, does not change its status as program music. What does change, however, is the nature of our analytic and aesthetic obligations to the program; e.g., if we care about the composer's intentions only, we need not concern ourselves with a program that makes no claim on the composer's blessing. Furthermore, I hold that a piece which has once been announced as programmatic does not lose the possibility of absolute analysis. In fact, since the "program" I have defined is capable an existence totally external to that of the piece itself, it is vitally important that program cannot serve as an excuse for structural defects in an absolute view of a piece of music. That is, /every/ successful piece of music, programmatic or not, /must/ be internally coherent or be rejected as a failure. I ultimately side with Vera Micznik when she concludes that "programme music becomes most interesting precisely where programme and music, while mutually informing each other, /do not/ coincide but, rather, challenge one another's semantic identity." (221)


Beethoven's overture for Egmont, perhaps more than any other of Beethoven's works, has been frequently held up as a straightforward, non-controversial example of programmatic music. As programs go, this one is not very problematic to find or to interpret: The moment of Egmont's death is inferred from the descending-fourth "execution" figure in m. 278 and the following short lamentation, while the immediate jump to allegro con brio for the closing coda provides the "victory march" which is explicitly specified at the close of the play's script and is commonly taken to represent the eventual triumph of the insurrection. Even Ralph Wood, the diehard absolutist, holds it up as an example of how Beethoven's defining quality (which he awkwardly called "all-throughness") could make a piece good while it "...even /explains/ features which otherwise are boring or irritating" (220). It seems odd for such a dedicated structuralist to accept a need for "irritating" elements within an otherwise successful piece of music`, suggesting a possible weakness in the absolutist perspective. We might ask, then, whether the structure of the overture is truly coherent when it is heard without reference to the play. 

To answer this question, I have relied heavily on the analysis given by James Hepokoski in his 2001 essay "Back and Forth from "Egmont": Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation". The expectation of a standard sonata form (Or more precisely of a standard rhetorical form within the sonata form; I consider these to be coextensive in Egmont and will not pursue the distinction) is critical to Hepokoski's analysis of the overture. In particular, he identifies two critical junctures in a sonata-form piece: The cadence which closes the secondary theme of the exposition, and its counterpart in the recapitulation. Both are expected to be perfect authentic cadences, and for Hepokoski both signal the achievement of a major harmonic goal by confirming a change of key. He calls the first of these the "essential expositional closure" or EEC, identifying it as the first perfect authentic cadence in a new key (usually V for a major opening key, or III or v if minor) which signals a successful shift away from the tonic and prepares for the introduction of new material. The "essential structural closure" or ESC comes at the end of the recapitulation's secondary theme and is expected to signal the achievement of tonal resolution by confirming the return of the tonic key. 

Egmont, Hepokoski says, disrupts this expected structure with a nonresolving recapitulation: The exposition opens in F minor and proceeds to the EEC on III (Ab, m. 104) as expected, setting up the expectation of a return to F (either major or minor) at the closure of the recapitulation. Instead, Beethoven derails the secondary theme to an ESC not on any variety of F but on the submediant (Db, m. 247), thus formally closing the sonata structure in the "wrong" key and delaying tonal resolution until the target key of F major finally appears in the coda (m. 287). From a programmatic perspective, this rhetorical "failure" of the recapitulation merely helps to strengthen the program by increasing the suspense leading up to Egmont's execution. Formally, the disruption of sonata form seems problematic.  One could posit that the sonata form never had any corporeal existence in the piece; it was, as Hepokoski is at pains to point out, not the form that Beethoven has  broken from, but the expectation that the form will be present. Beethoven has performed a transgressive act, showing what Christopher Reynolds has called "a calculated disregard for the clarity of traditional formal schemes" and demonstrating that "form" can be viewed as merely another programmatic element which conveys significance in notes that do not actually contain it. 

But this answer is entirely too glib. If form is "merely program", and if as I have asserted above it is possible to remove the program from a piece without doing it any fatal harm, then presumably every other expectation shared between composer, player and concertgoer could be similarly subject to transgression and removal. Hepokoski cautions that since form is more of a set of conceptual tools than it is an absolute part of a piece, there must be sufficient evidence for the use of a given formal structure before we can seriously attempt to analyze it use. In other words, as long as we are persuaded that Beethoven was taking the sonata form seriously, then so to can we. In the case of Egmont, Beethoven is clearly not setting out to discredit the entire practice of sonata form; the piece does in fact follow a very clear sonata form with the sole variation that Beethoven has delayed its tonal resolution beyond the conventional degree. With this in mind, we can again confidently say that Beethoven did not "fail" to follow the sonata form, but instead he invited us to join him in adapting it to powerful effect. It is, from a formal perspective, immaterial whether the nonresolving recapitulation was a device to better frame the programmatic representation of an execution or merely an artistic maneuver to heighten the effect of the march when resolution was achieved. Christopher Reynolds has applied a similar absolutist analysis to the "Mus es sein" movement of Op. 135 and finds similar evidence for a coherent musical framework within which we can (but are not obligated to) discuss a complementary program. I will close with a cautionary note from that essay: 

"Representational analyses attempt to describe (in words) how a composer depicted (in music) a verbal idea or pictorial image. The analysis is neither the idea itself nor a representation of the idea, but an informed interpretation of the composer's representation." (Representational Impulse, p. 194)

Work Cited:

James Hepokoski: Back and Forth from "Egmont": Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation. 19th-Century Music, Vol. 25, No. 2/3 (Autumn 2001/Spring 2002), pp. 172-154.

R.W.S. Mendl: Beethoven as a Writer of Programme Music. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April, 1928), pp. 172-177.

Vera Micznik: The Absolute Limitations of Programme Music: The Case of Liszt's 'Die Ideale'. Music & Letters, Vol. 80, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 207-240.

Dusan Plavsa: Intentionality in Music. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 12m No. 1 (June, 1981), pp. 65-74.

Christopher Reynolds: The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven II: String Quarter in F Major, Op. 135. Acta Musicologica, Vol. 60, Fasc. 2 (May-Aug 1988), pp. 180-194.

Ralph W. Wood: The Meaning of Beethoven. Music & Letters, Vol. 15, No. 3 (July, 1934), pp. 209-221.