How does Beethoven mould the opening thematic material in the slow movement

of his Piano Trio Opus. 70 no.1 throughout the piece, and what in his writing led
to the piece’s nickname - the ‘Ghost’?

Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D Major ‘Ghost’, Op. 70, no. 1, is one of his most recognisable and
powerful pieces of chamber music for piano and strings. Published in 18091, a year after the
completion of his fifth and sixth symphonies, this composition sits in a time in his life when
Beethoven was really cementing himself as a composer of ‘romantic’ style by developing new
ways of approaching form and harmonic and motivic development. At the time of composition,
Beethoven was really pushing the boundaries of the term ‘development’ in music, constructing
whole movements from just a few notes of inspiration and seeing how far he could stretch this
material. In the second movement of his ‘Ghost’ trio, which I will be analysing, he uses a very
small amount of material in order to construct a larger form, resulting in a piece that is
constantly moving and evolving, using the simplicity of the foundations to take the listener on a
journey full of unexpected turns. By delving into Beethoven’s method of variation and
development in his composition, I hope to understand how he manages to draw so much from
such a limited amount of inspiration and how he used this to create the effect on the listener that
led to the piece’s nickname.
Much like the opening movement of his fifth symphony for example, this movement is
constructed almost completely from the thematic material presented at the very start of the
piece. E.T.A Hoffmann, in a review of the the Opus 70 Trios from 1813, argues that the first two
bars and the cello theme in bar 9 ‘contain the material from which the whole movement is
fashioned2’ and implies that the ‘harmonic fertility’ of this material allows it to be used in that
way. The painfully slow octave unison opening on the violin and cello followed by the piano
melody (fig.13) allows a lot of room for manipulation, and, with the exception of the passing Bb
and G, only uses notes from the tonic D minor triad. This allows Beethoven, not only to use this
simple melody as transition material, for example in bars 19-22 when he is modulating to C
major, but also, as it so strongly implies the key in which it’s written, to use it in order to tonicise
the C major chord when he arrives at his destination in bar 23, combining the motif of the falling
fourth in the bass with the original piano melody in the second bar. The fact that the material is
so simple and mouldable, almost blurs the fact that the modulation is to the completely
unrelated key of C major, a modulation that would sound out of place normally, allowing
Beethoven to really explore the boundaries of the D minor tonality he began in. Another
example of Beethoven using this material to support unexpected changes in harmony is in bars
63-69, where he is moving away from the key of D major, the key of the other movements of the
trio, back to the D minor that he begun in by again superimposing the falling fourth, this time a
jarring tritone, with the melody in the violin, accompanied by passing chromatic chords in the

1 “Piano Trios, Op. 70 (Beethoven),” Wikipedia, last edited on 1 February 2019,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Trios,_Op._70_(Beethoven).
2 E.T.A Hoffmann. “Review of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, Op. 70 Nos. 1 and 2” in E.T.A Hoffmann’s
Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 300-325.
3 Ludwig van Beethoven, Trios für Klavier, Violine, und Violoncello, vol. 2. (Munich: G. Henle Verlag,
1984)
piano. The false hope of a new beginning in bar 63 in a major key is quickly cruelly taken away
as Beethoven passes the opening melodic material between the strings, building towards an
expected climax in bar 76, but again he subverts expectation, dropping the dynamic and texture
right down, starting again from nothing. Finally, in the last four bars, he uses the very bare,
falling fourth motif in the cello and left hand of the piano as a way of rising from the tonic
towards the subdominant step by step, again using the opening material to build up tension and
expectation, but this time fulfilling that expectation, ending the movement falling back down to

the tonic key with an almost deadpan perfect cadence in D minor.

The other piece of thematic material that Hoffmann mentions in his review is the cello
melody in bar 9, a simple descending figure that then gets passed to the violin and piano in the
following bar (fig.2.3).
However, I would argue that this motif is in fact just an augmentation of the piano melody in bar
2, a more melodic take on the static and very sombre opening theme, supporting the theory that
in fact the movement is based on just the first two bars alone. Alan Tyson, in his article ‘Stages
in the Composition of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op.70, No.1’, even describes each movement of
the trio as ‘monothematic’. A passage that backs this up is a reworking of the opening motif in
bars 31-32 where the violin and cello introduce a melody that is repeated later in the movement.
Whilst it feels like completely new material, accompanied by an eerie semitone tremolo in the
piano, with a different rhythm and emotion surrounding the line, it follows the exact contour of
the original piano melody, and is repeated again in bar 77 just after a sudden drop in dynamic to
piano, making it crucial to the piece’s structure and the way in which Beethoven subverts
expectation during this movement. For different situations and purposes, Beethoven adapts the
opening two bars in different ways, resulting in a piece that is constantly morphing, but always
relating back to the simple way in which it begun.
The nickname of this trio, the ‘Ghost’, was supposedly coined by one of Beethoven’s
students, Carl Czerny, who said that the minor key slow movement reminded him of the scene
in Hamlet where he encounters the ghost of his father4. However, the name’s origins and
relevance are disputed amongst scholars, with connections also being made to Beethoven’s
unfinished opera, Macbeth, and his ninth symphony5. It’s clear to see, when listening to the
piece, where Czerny’s comparisons came from, whether it’s the agonisingly slow pulse, the
unexpected and unconventional modulations or the chilling textures that Beethoven constructs
throughout the movement. In The Beethoven Compendium: A Guide to Beethoven's Life and
Music, Barry Cooper draws comparisons between this movement and the scherzo from
Beethoven’s later ninth symphony, finished fifteen years after this trio, which also contains the
unrelated modulation of D minor to C major, saying ‘in this respect, at least, the Trio movement
seems to have raised a ‘ghost’ of sorts’. This unconventional shift of key seemingly comes out
of nowhere in the early stages of the movement and, aided by Beethoven’s adaptation of the

4 Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004)
5 Barry Cooper, The Beethoven Compendium: A Guide to Beethoven's Life and Music. (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1991)
opening motif as I discussed earlier, certainly does have a feeling of almost the otherworldly
about it. It’s a sudden, slightly optimistic shift in emotion that starkly contrasts with the very
bleak opening, with the violin marked ‘sotto voce’, and seems to come from a different place to
the music that preceded it, an effect that perhaps wouldn’t have been created by the more
conventional modulation to the relative key of F major. As Alan Tyson explains in his article
‘Stages in the Composition of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op.70, No.1’, the ‘early plunge to F
major6’ is a technique utilised by Beethoven in the other two more conventional movements of
the trio and, although cleverly hinted at in bar 6, subverting the listener’s expectations yet again,
is a technique that he avoids in this middle movement, choosing instead to separate this
movement from the others through his selective use of tonality. Apart from this modulation of C
major, Beethoven really only implies other keys throughout the rest of the movement, with small
forays into D major in bar 63 and another hinting of F major in bars 49-51 before sharply
plunging back into D minor with the use of dominant pedals on A in the piano, not allowing any
of these glimpses into other keys to properly come into fruition. The hinting of D major is merely
a memory of the previous movement, and, like a ghost, you can sense its presence but isn’t
tangible to the listener. Throughout this piece, Beethoven gives the listener the impression of
trying to escape from this otherworldly setting that he creates, by building up expectation and
false hope, before cruelly dragging you back down and leaving you with an empty, unfulfilled
feeling by the end. This is also strengthened by Beethoven’s development of the first two bars.
The fact that you never really escape the motivic material that sets the whole movement up
means that, although you may feel like Beethoven is taking you somewhere new in the music,
you can never truly escape, as a listener, from the way in which the piece began.
Another way in which this movement links to his later ninth symphony is, as Tyson
explains, the use of a D minor movement in a piece that culminates in D major, with the scherzo
of the symphony also being in D minor. This unusual key structure segregates the middle
movement from the others - it shares the same tonic note but merely briefly hints at the D major
key that surrounds it before quickly moving back to its strongly rooted minor tonality. This leads
to the feeling that the music in this movement seems to come from a different place compared
to the writing in the others, hence Czerny singling it out as the inspiration for his nickname the
‘Ghost’, with the related key giving it an almost otherworldly feel as it’s recognisable but
somehow so different from the rest of the trio. Adding to this feeling is Beethoven’s exploration
into the limits of piano accompaniment and timbre. Throughout this movement he utilises
sextuplet demisemiquavers in the piano as a way of accompanying lines in the violin and cello.
The first example of this is in bar 18 where the piano accompanies the modulation to C major
with these sextuplets, marked in the score as pianissimo and leggiermente. E.T.A Hoffmann
says in his review of the piece, ‘If these sextuplets are played with a dexterous, light touch with
the soft pedal and dampers raised, a susurration is produced that recalls the aeolian harp and
glass harmonica and has quite a wonderful effect when combined with the bowed notes of the
other instruments’ and later describes the piano as creating ‘sounds that surrounded the soul
like hazy figures in a dream, enticing it into a magical world of curious presentiments’2. This use
of exploratory timbres adds to the ethereal nature of the movement, turning motifs and melodies
in the violin and cello that are quite static and simple into shimmering and unnerving textures

6 Alan Tyson, “Stages in the Composition of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op.70, No.1.” Proceedings of the
Royal Musical Association, Vol. 97 (1970 - 1971) pp 1-19.
with constant movement in the background, like something from a dream. Also, the fact that
Beethoven often, instead of oscillating between two notes of a chord in order to cement the
harmony, has the piano moving in sextuplets between the root of a chord and the semitone or
tone above or below it, for example in bars 31 and 76, adds to the unsettling nature of the
movement. When played well, the effect is as Hoffmann described it, ‘magical’, creating a dark
wash of colour that other the instruments can sit on, making their haunting melodies sound as if
played from a far away place. The movement culminates with the violin and cello eventually
joining in with this sextuplet rhythm accompanied by a tumbling chromatic scale in the piano,
before slowly drifting away into nothing - the dream is over.
As Cooper describes, Beethoven’s first pieces of chamber music for piano and
strings from 1785 were very much in the style and spirit of Mozart’s writing, all based on a
different one of his violin sonatas5 and set in very much a ‘classical’ style of composition.
Comparing these early works of Beethoven to his Opus 70 trios is like comparing works of two
different composers. Beethoven’s use of such a small amount of material in the slow movement
of the ‘Ghost’ trio as a way of creating a substantial and powerful piece leaves the listener with
such a connection with the music that he writes. From just a single thread Beethoven weaves a
whole rich tapestry full of colour and meaning that can be appreciated as a whole, but looking
closely, you are still able to see how and what it’s constructed from. Through explorative
techniques of developing timbre, texture, harmony and tonality, whilst constantly subverting the
expectations of the listener, he managed to create the unnerving, otherworldly atmosphere that
led to the piece’s nickname.

Bibliography

Beethoven, Ludwig van. Trios für Klavier, Violine, und Violoncello, vol. 2. Munich: G. Henle
Verlag, 1984.

Cooper, Barry. The Beethoven Compendium: A Guide to Beethoven's Life and Music. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Hatten, Robert. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Review of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, Op. 70 Nos. 1 and 2” In E.T.A
Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton, 300-325. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.

Tyson, Alan. “Stages in the Composition of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op.70, No.1.” Proceedings
of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 97 (1970 - 1971): 1-19.

Wikipedia. “Piano Trios, Op. 70 (Beethoven).” Last edited on 1 February 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Trios,_Op._70_(Beethoven).